It meant needing to change my life every few years—completely change my life… I could murder a gin and tonic.
Allow it.
Would you like one? she asks me.
You’re getting it twisted. You’ll get fired, Miss.
You’re right. I’m not supposed to know where it’s hidden anyway.
This takes a second to filter through. You mean it’s the Librarian’s gin?
Oh yes. Quite the Liz Taylor, she is. Little bar behind the DVD Returns trolley. I found it by accident, says Kate. She sometimes has a little evening party with the guards—sorry, officers—on B Wing. She exhales.
Angela?
Kate laughs. Well, she probably won’t thank you for using her first name, she tells me, but yes—Angela.
So much has rattled around in my head for the last little while that I cannot tell anymore when someone is lying to me. Surely Kate Thistle isn’t being serious. Or has she had one already?
All right, I’ll have one. I call her bluff.
No, you’re right. Too risky. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.
She has smoked less than half of her burn. She doesn’t want it. Making a sort of yech sound that you might more commonly associate with a child refusing its dinner, she crushes out the butt. Let’s sit down over there.
I don’t care how she intends to dispose of the remains of these smokes—my head is ringing. My voice is whiney when I say: Please make me make sense of all of this. Don’t help me. Make me.
Okay. But she takes bare time to breathe in deeply through her nose—like she’s sniffing the bouquet of a well buff burgundy, blood.
And then we’re interrupted. The door is opened and in walks an officer, his face the physical equivalent of a fart. Everything okay, Miss, he asks.
Fine, officer.
But he doesn’t leave us alone immediately. The smell of smoke must be in the air, as much a giveaway as dirt on your boots. I can see his frown pose the question that his mouth fails to release.
Anything wrong? Kate Thistle calls.
We’re left alone—but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that he’ll be back, doing his rounds, much sooner from now on than he is required to do. Why? Because he’ll want to catch us. Because that’s what screws are like.
Could you give me a job to do, please? I ask.
Why’s that?
For a prop. For when he comes back.
Kate gives a brisk little nod of the head. I think that pile of books there need new issuing stickers inside them, she says. And could you report any damage to the pages on the slip at the back.
It feels good to be given something to do. Despite everything—or maybe because of it—I do not feel comfortable looking at Kate’s face while she speaks. It is as though I have developed some sort of phobia. I start working as Kate starts speaking.
I had Usher’s Syndrome, right from when I was a girl, she says. It’s a condition that meant my eyes were getting worse—getting worse quickly. It was frightening. Imagine: there I was, still in school, and some days it was darker than others, even at the height of summer. I was a miserable child.
I’m not surprised.
It got worse. By the time I was entering puberty it was starting to affect my hearing as well—sometimes my balance. There were good days and bad days but the darkness—the internal darkness—really scared me. On a good day I could go to school and do maybe half the timetabled lessons. Then the page might start to darken, the words swim. Or I wouldn’t be able to hear my name being called and I’d be accused of being naughty. So it was easier to say nothing at all. On a really bad day I couldn’t hear my own voice.
You ain’t been diagnosed, Miss, not at this point?
No. That didn’t happen until I was nearly sixteen, says Kate.
And the air is charged dry—not only as a result of the extractor fans. There is promise in the air, I think—something that is about to be said. It can’t be any longer than a second that I close my eyes, but man, it feels like a whole bunch of hours. It feels like I’ve gone to sleep. Because I dream. Burning as with a fever, I am skimming over broken, bony land—cracked and parched. My feet are not touching the ground. I have no feet. I am mind and consciousness only; my one point of view is what I should by rights be treading on. But I am six feet up, and moving at a remarkable speed towards what? Towards water. I can smell it. Not the fresh, salty smell of the sea—or at least not what I can remember from my one and only visit to the shore, when I was a boy. Or more of a boy, anyway. No. This is ripe with repugnance; the stench is that of an animal’s body torn open and left to rot. There is fear on the wind. Decay and rotted promises. My motion slows. And now I am swimming through the air, doing breaststroke: surge and glide, surge and glide, I top a rise crowned with coffee-coloured sand and the small bleached bones of the unfortunate, and there it is, down at the far, far bowl of this particular dune: the Oasis. Waves of stinking oxygen. The water gently lapping in its riparian way, leaving curves of dark grey oil with every tonguing. I want to bathe. In order to get closer I need to scratch my way through an invisible membrane barrier. I am swimming as hard as I can, my limbs pumping. I am running out of air, and I know that I cannot sink to the hot dry desert floor. It feels like drowning and I am panicking. There is nothing to breathe. For the first time I am aware of a terrible sun on my back; I’ve become flesh. Proximity to the Oasis has watered me whole: from desiccation to solidity. Dusty ash to skin and bone, like the process of death in reverse. Living backwards. Like Dott.
Kate is shaking me back to the living.
Billy!
Cool air floods my lungs and I cringe with a sudden graze of heartburn. I clutch my chest. The bellyache I never had—the one that I fabricated in order to get a meeting with Kate Wollington—strikes up its big band now. Still seated, I bend over so that my elbows are on my knees. My piece has shrivelled back into my pubic bone, a frightened rodent.
Fuck that, I’m saying to no one at all. What happened? I say to Kate.
You stopped breathing, Kate tells me. You were going blue.
Catching my breath, I look up—at Kate’s breasts—but keep looking up until I find the underside of her chin; she is leaning over me, her left hand still on my right shoulder from where she’s been pulling and pushing me back to consciousness. I focus on a tiny birthmark on the right side of her jaw. I don’t want to meet her eyes—not directly, not so soon.
You do that? I ask.
Do what? she wants to know. Nicotine breath: reassuring. But I can still smell the brackish stench of the Oasis—the water, the oil in it, or maybe it’s the smell of the animals I haven’t seen, or of the dead I haven’t seen.
Take me there, I clarify.
Take you where? she asks, now backing away from me, sitting down.
To the Oasis.
No. Is that what happened? She sounds excited.
Fuck. Man feel like man run a sprint, blood.
You were there.
Yes, Kate. Miss. I was there.
My breathing has returned to normal; if anything, in the silence that ensues, it sounds too quiet in the no-chat. I picture the scene again. I rummage through my memory. It’s like putting on costumes, or fancy dress plucked from a trunk. There they are: some filthy ducks on the water, some ducking their heads for polluted fare; a lady duck grooming her guy. Babies—chicks—in the murk, black tennis balls. More than ever I want a slug of Angela’s gin. I was there: Kate has told me so—as if I don’t know it. What’s she waiting for? Why the moon-eyes? Why the thin- lipped smile? You were there. The idea is enough to knock me sideways if I let it. She must see something on my face—that eureka! moment—because now she nods her head.