Why? I interrupt him immediately.
He shrugs. Something to do innit. Wanted to hear his side of the story.
His side, I tell Carewith, is pure bullshit. They’re denying all knowledge of it. And blood, they ain’t fucking around with any teasing still.
I heard. Dusty Palestinian yoot, Carewith says, confirming the rumour. Said yoot bust a chuckle with said screw in good humour; said screw bust a knuckle on said yoot’s left femur. Yoot went down. The message? No jokes. The subject is serious.
Turns out we’re from the same ends, Carewith tells me.
It’s breeze. But sometimes a breeze contains dirt.
Big deal, I say.
Them’s bad boy ends, blood.
So?
So how does a man from our ends end up as a fucking screw of all things? Most mans’ ambition from our ends is not getting blazed with a nine-fucking-millimetre, cuz.
It’s no more than a mild coincidence, but what Carewith says next makes the skin on the top of my head chill and tingle; it’s as though I’ve torn the caul and been reborn once again.
Be it heard, cuz. The same ends as Meaney, as it happens.
The remark is throwaway; the irony is that Carewith accepts it as breeze but it’s this simple statement that puts the rat among the pigs.
I don’t know what root in the forest I’ve stumbled upon but I understand instinctively—or so I think—that it’s the root to a very big, gnarly old oak.
Roller’s from the south coast, I argue.
As the ignorant do when they are adamant about a fact, Carewith contends the point passionately: his brief argument back to me is almost hostile, in fact.
Grew up on the south coast. Spent five years in my ends.
Crime has neighbourhoods. It’s not the other way around. Crime is the landlord and a neighbourhood pays crime’s taxes and monthly protection. Crime replaces the lightbulbs in the streetlamps—but first crime smashes them out. Crime paints the fences a uniform council colour—but first crime slashes the metal with thickly penned graffiti. Crime closes down libraries. It was crime that chose me. I didn’t choose crime. Because I lived in crime’s neighbourhood; I lived in crime’s ends. The same ends as Roller.
When Association Time ends I am delighted and frightened to be returned to my pad. I wait for the stereos to start competing for decibelage and then I know that I am as safe from interruption for the night as it’s possible to be. The line of thought I follow is like a whip, like a heart line.
It can’t be a coincidence, can it? I’m starting to sweat.
I’ve heard in the past—much as I dislike referring to the past—about such phenomena as mass hysteria and mass misdirection. And I think, there at my table, with my hair gels and unnecessarily stockpiled toothpastes (the market’s dead for toiletries) that these phenomena are what we’re visiting. He’s planted something, has Dott; I simply don’t know what yet. Or why. And there are other concerns pertaining. History says it all. You can convince an entire nation to believe in a murderous campaign: that’s a fact. It’s been proven. You can ask a lifeline to believe that it’s okay to delve for riches through the vaults of the under-valued. Not one motherfucker will raise an eyebrow, and you know it. How do you persuade the innocent that left is right? By mass hypnosis, I reckon; by mass hysteria, mass compulsion. Irrespective of my feelings about having been manipulated, I am certain that there was something in the air that we responded to and applauded.
Thanking the Lord for the female menopause—the one that causes Miss Patterson to take such frequent toilet breaks—I use my computer and my few stolen minutes to research a portfolio of books on the subject. No longer do I flirt with Kate Thistle. She thinks she has done something to hurt me, but hey—you have to treat them mean to keep them keen. She wants to know what I’m doing but I refuse to tell her. By not forcing the issue, which she can certainly do, she makes me even more suspicious of her intentions. But I’m not scared of Miss Thistle anymore; it is strange that I ever was.
Six.
I’m approaching his cell in the Segregation Unit.
Thank you for coming to see me, darling! Dott shouts.
And I know that if I flip back his flap he’ll be there. Teeth or eyes to the meshed glass. I don’t even tell Dott to fuck off. Flanked on either side by my superstar minders, I continue to walk to my designated cell. I’m pulsing with anger and fear; but I have no intention of showing it to anyone. With good grace I will accept my Seg celclass="underline" its bucket, its mattress. And I will promise my advisers that I have learned my lessons and it won’t happen again. I will be a good boy. I will show anyone who wants to know that I’ve learned my lesson. And in secret I will plot my revenge.
But Dott isn’t finished. Fancy seeing you here! he calls. And: Do you fancy going out tonight? he calls.
Motherfucker, I whisper.
The screw to my right agrees. Shut the fuck up, Dott! he shouts, and the taunts cease immediately. But I can feel him laughing behind the steel. When my cell is unlocked I say to the officers: I’m sorry, sir. And then again, turning slightly: I’m sorry, sir.
For what?
For having to listen to that from Dott, I say. It was for my benefit.
The screw to my left—Peterson, I think his name is—regards my admission as a sign of something possible in the future.
You two cunts got beef? he asks me and squashes up his face. Beef will entail a rethinking of my sleeping arrangements.
I shake my head. Nothing serious, I tell him, hoping for it to be so.
Only the night, I think, or the following nights, will say for sure.
The door opens. I have seen inside a Segregation Unit cell on more than one occasion, on business, on my travels as a Library Redband. But viewing through a flap does not prepare you for the narrowness of the room, nor the low ceiling, the hum of the empty pot in the left far corner. Not since I arrived at Dellacotte have I experienced such a sensation of dread. I am wringing wet and starving and poor, let’s not forget. The sort of poverty that most people live with every day—I’m with you brothers.
My cell is two away from Dott’s. The previous inhabitant has made his escape by creating a noose from a pillowcase and getting transferred to the Psychiatric Wing of a prison forty miles away. His name is Henry. I won’t see him again, and I wonder if anyone is thinking in similar terms about me. The door closes. The chunky clunk of a heavy lock. I lie down on a mattress that smells of sweat and semen; I plump the pillow against the cold brick wall. There is nothing to do. That is why it’s called Seg.
Night brings a different collection of noises. I’m used to music, the blur of late-night TV, and hollered conversations from cell to cell. I am not used to the wailing and the moaning of the yoots on this Wing. The pain; the endeavour. Never in my life have I heard young men suffering so. I’m trying to ride it; I’m trying to blow ignorant. It’s not easy.
How has Dott done it? What he’s done is create a system of mass hypnosis and hallucination, so that at the beck and call of the bruv’s finger—or a signal of some kind—my cuzzes do what the fuck he wants them to. And I can live with that. I have heard more far-fetched: the yoot in the burka and the face- veil, pretending to be a Muslim matriarch and holding up the Post Office; the yoot whose dad works in an agency for security guards, getting a job and robbing a Woolworth’s depot of nine grand’s worth of kids’ clothing. It’s not the audacity that stymies me; it’s the not knowing that breaks my heart. I can’t wait any longer. In the middle of the night I call his name.
Dott refuses to answer. I call again and the night-screw (face unknown, name unknown) bangs on my door and tells me to can it immediately. I leave it an hour before calling Dott’s name again. It’s four a.m. He doesn’t answer in words but in an action that makes me jump. He has created a swing-line from his bed sheet, using a roll of toilet paper as a weight. Like a raven the package thumps at my window. I get up off the floor and open the slits. The night air is chilly, blood. Dressed in nothing more than boxers and perspiration, I await his second swing. It comes but I miss it; I cannot reach out far enough. Increasingly riskily, awaiting another thump on the door, it’s not till the fourteenth swing, my right arm by now raw from friction with the slits, that I manage to take hold of what Dott is sending me. Stuffed inside the toilet roll is a pillowcase. I pull it out.