Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (6 page)

‘Just do it.’

Magnus saw a gun in the warder’s hand. His stomach gave a queasy flip. No, he realised, it was chunky and decorated with yellow flashes. Not a gun, but a Taser.

He leaned in and touched Pete on the shoulder. ‘Pete? Pete? Are you awake, mate?’
Are you alive?
he thought, but there was heat coming from the reeking body. Magnus looked up. ‘I think he might still be with us.’

‘I asked you to turn him over, not give me your medical opinion.’

Magnus took a tentative hold of the blanket Pete had cocooned himself in and rolled the man towards the edge of the bed. Pete groaned. He had been sick in the night and his face was soiled with vomit. Magnus tried not to gag.

‘How long has he been like that?’ The disgust Magnus felt was in the screw’s voice.

‘He might have been ill already when they put me in here on Friday. It got worse on Saturday and much worse last night.’

‘And you didn’t think to report it?’

‘I reported it.’ It was a struggle to keep his voice calm. ‘I was told he’d be moved, but nothing happened. I’ve been locked in with him all weekend, watching the quarantine alerts on TV. For all I know I’ve got it too.’

The hand that held the Taser twitched. Magnus flinched again, but nothing happened.

The screw said, ‘I wouldn’t worry. You look like the kind of selfish bastard that always survives. Half an hour later and you’d probably have been chowing down on the poor sod. Come on.’

He stepped out of the cell into the landing. Magnus followed him.

‘Am I going to court?’

The screw gave Pete a last glance and then locked the door on him.

‘Courts are suspended.’

The screw touched Magnus’s shoulder with the Taser, steering him to the left, along the landing, past rows of bolted doors. The air outside the cell was cleaner, but Magnus thought he could detect some taint beneath the usual prison odour of men, bleach and cheaply catered food. It was the kind of scent that might waft from a city three weeks into a refuse strike, bitter and sugar-cloying.

Magnus said, ‘It’s illegal to hold me in prison without a trial.’

‘Bring it up at your hearing.’

Netting was stretched across the higher landings, like safety nets in a circus big top, to deter ‘jumpers’. Discarded lunch wrappers and other detritus were cradled in it. Magnus wondered if it would be strong enough to hold a man. You would be taking a chance, unless you truly wanted to kill yourself. Either way, he guessed there would be a beating waiting when you got down.

Other men were being moved from their cells too. A warder accompanied each prisoner, as if the authorities had become nervous about being outnumbered.

‘How many people are ill?’

The screw ignored the question. He took the one-size-fits-all key on his chain and inserted it into a cell door.

Magnus said, ‘At least let me have a shower. I’ve not had a wash since I got here.’

‘You’re fucking lucky we’re shifting you. If it was up to me nonces would be left to rot.’ The screw’s tone was amiable, as if he had grown used to hating and made his peace with it. ‘The Home Office has told us to keep healthy prisoners together and that’s what we’re doing.’

He opened the door. A thin man was sitting on the top bunk staring down at his hands which were folded loosely in his lap. Magnus’s first thought was that the man was praying, but then the prisoner turned his face towards him and Magnus saw the sullen twist of his mouth. His head had been shaved some time ago and his hair was growing back, dark and thick, like suede.

‘I don’t share.’ The man’s body looked spare, but Magnus got an impression of broad shoulders beneath the prison-issue tracksuit. ‘Check with the governor. He’ll tell you why.’

‘I know why,’ the screw said. ‘But the governor’s indisposed, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Say hello to your new
cellmeat
, Mr McFall.’

Magnus hesitated on the threshold.

‘Come on.’ The screw gave him a grin and a shove in the small of his back. ‘Mr Soames won’t bite, will you, Jeb?’

Magnus would have liked to beg, but he stepped into the cell. The door slammed and he heard the jangle of keys, the sound of the barrels turning in the lock. The cell walls were the same rank yellow as the cell he had just left, the patch of blue beyond the window bars might have been the same scrap of sky he had been staring out at for the last three days. He slid into the bottom bunk. The mattress creaked above as the other man lay down, so close that Magnus could hear the rhythm of his breaths.

Six

It was seven in the evening. The time that Magnus should have been stepping up on stage to begin the warm-up to Johnny Dongo’s show. He wondered if the show had been cancelled and pictured the empty auditorium, the rows of seats and abandoned aisles. Johnny would be furious, if Johnny was still alive.

Magnus was lying on his mattress listening to the racket of bangs and chanting coming from the other cells and looking up at the wooden base of the upper bunk. Names, obscene drawings and mysterious tags were scrawled across its surface.
Danny takes it up the arse
 . . . 
RICKY B IS DEAD . . . there’s nowhere like home . . .
 There had been points when the hammering fists and raised voices had been so loud that his bunk had tingled with their vibration, but now it was possible to distinguish individual voices among the clamour.

‘They haven’t fed us.’

It was the first time Jeb had spoken since the screw had put them together. Magnus wondered if his new cellmate found the drop in volume as unnerving as he did. He waited a beat before replying.

‘No.’ There was a television propped on a shelf in the corner of the cell, a small flat-screen, not much bigger than the laptop he had at home. It had been blank-eyed and silent all afternoon. Magnus asked, ‘What about turning the TV on, Big Man?’

The question hung there, ignored.

Jeb said, ‘This your first time?’

Magnus had been held in police cells overnight once, on a drunk and disorderly charge, not long after he arrived in London, twenty-one and full of his own exoticness. The booking sergeant had been Scottish too, a big Aberdonian with more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend Ian Paisley. ‘Cool your jets, wee man,’ he had said as he poured Magnus into the police cell. ‘You’re in danger of getting your teuchter arse kicked.’

A disembodied pair of breasts stared down at Magnus from the base of the upper bunk, their nipples like eyes. He wished he had a pen to blot out their gaze.

‘First time in Pentonville,’ he said, hoping he sounded like a veteran. ‘You?’

‘I’m seasoned.’ Jeb’s voice had an accent to it, somewhere flat and northern Magnus could not place; one of those nowhere towns that used to have a mine or a factory. Jeb said, ‘They shouldn’t have put you in with me.’

Magnus kept his voice as expressionless as the other man’s. ‘Maybe not, but they did.’

Outside on the landings they had launched into a favourite in their repertoire:
Why are we waiting? Why are we fucking waiting . . . 
Magnus closed his eyes. There were definitely fewer voices than before. He thought about what the penalty for being billeted with Jeb might be: a pair of hands around the throat, a pillow to the face, a boot to the groin, or worse? He was growing tired of being afraid, but the fear persisted. Magnus took a few deep breaths, as if he were about to step on stage, and repeated his question. ‘Any chance of putting the TV on, Big Man? There might be some news.’

‘TV’s fucked.’

‘I have a knack with TVs.’ It was a lie. ‘I can have a go at it if you like.’

The body in the bed above shifted and then Jeb leaned down and stared at Magnus, his face large and too close; no smile, just the grim line of a mouth set in a blank face.

‘I lost my privileges.’ His eyes were brown with large irises and long lashes. Cow’s eyes, Magnus’s mother would call them. ‘They took the digi-box away.’

Magnus wondered if the man was on medication and if so what would happen if it ran out. He was not much of a fighter. A fast jab of wit had always been his most effective weapon.

‘Do you have a radio?’

The bunk creaked faintly as Jeb flopped back on to his mattress.

‘I told you, no privileges. Who gives a fuck what’s happening out there anyway?’

‘How long have you been without privileges?’

‘Haven’t you learned not to ask questions?’

Jeb’s voice was a slamming door, as final as the turn of a screw’s key but Magnus had been alone with his thoughts for too long to keep quiet now that the silence between them had been broken.

‘There’s stuff happening on the outside you want to know about.’

Jeb snorted. ‘You guys straight out of the van still believe outside matters. It doesn’t. Not in here.’

‘Maybe that used to be true, but the outside has found its way inside. What do you think that rammy’s about?’

‘The screws are on strike, or they’ve accidentally-on-purpose done some fucker in, or the government’s cut prison food in exchange for more votes. Whatever it is doesn’t matter, beyond the fact that they’re not feeding us and that racket’s beginning to mash my head.’

‘It’s more than that, it’s—’

‘I don’t give a fuck. Not unless Jesus Christ himself’s declared an amnesty and brought along a few beers to celebrate with the boys.’

Jeb’s voice was bitter, but Magnus had detected a note of curiosity in it.

‘There’s no beer, but things are getting a bit biblical.’

He sat up with his back against the wall of the cell, and began to tell the other man about the virus. Jeb listened in silence. Outside, in the hallways beyond, the shouts and chanting grew and swelled and fell, and still no one came to feed them.

Seven

Magnus had watched scores of jailbreaks on TV. He knew the options. You could dig yourself out, through the wall or floor, depending on the structure of the cell. Or you might squeeze through the gap left by an easily removed ceiling tile and travel the mysterious space between roof and ceiling, unseen above your jailers’ heads. Bars could be filed, windows forced, fences climbed, barbed wire negotiated, open fields traversed, the consoling shelter of a forest found.

Jeb said, ‘We need one of the screws to open the door.’

‘That’d be good.’ The words came out more sarcastically than Magnus had intended. ‘You believe me then?’

‘Something’s up.’ Jeb’s feet were dangling over the edge of the bed, his heels level with Magnus’s eye line. The rubber soles of his trainers were imprinted,
Size 11
. ‘Prison grub’s crap, but cons live for their food. There should be a fuck of a racket out there.’

The almighty chorus that had shaken the halls had dwindled to occasional calls and shouting. The sounds were too distant for Magnus to make out the substance of their words, but their tone had shifted from anger to desperation. Once or twice he had heard sobbing and felt tears rising in his own eyes. He would have liked to have battered against the door of the cell and added his voice to the protest, but the fear that it might annoy his cellmate had stopped him.

Jeb had kept silent, out of sight on the bunk above, while Magnus related what he knew of the virus. Magnus had wondered if the other man thought he was a fantasist and had paused to say, ‘I know all this sounds mad, but believe me, it’s true.’

Telling the story reminded him of other details: how pale and sweat-soaked the Dongolite had been before he toppled on to the railway track, Johnny Dongo’s oncoming cold, the grating cough of the rapist in the alleyway, the hollow eyes and sallow faces of the bin men who had beaten him up.

Jeb’s legs swung to and fro, to and fro; frustration and pent-up energy. ‘We need to be ready for them.’

Magnus slid along his bunk, out of reach of the large feet. ‘The screws?’

‘Screws, cons, whoever comes through the door.’

‘They’ve got Tasers.’

‘So we get ready for Tasers.’

‘And if no one comes?’

The legs stopped swinging. ‘We draw straws for who eats who.’

Magnus made an almost-but-not-quite-decent living from his wit, but all he could manage was a weak, ‘Very funny.’

‘Laugh a minute, me.’

The north of England accent was more present. Magnus wondered if it signified anything. Jeb letting his guard down, or maybe trying to get Magnus to let his own guard down, so he could take charge and use him as a human Taser-shield. His mind was spiralling towards panic. As long as Jeb had lain silent and calm on his bunk there had been the possibility that this was a prison crisis, unusual but not unprecedented. That the other man was taking it seriously, more than seriously, was spooked by it, made the virus real.

Magnus asked, ‘How do you feel?’

Metal returned to the flat voice and Jeb’s legs resumed their restless rocking. ‘You sound like a woman.’

Magnus said, ‘I don’t mean emotionally. How do you feel physically?’

‘Hungry.’

‘But otherwise all right?’