I shout to Noor: Run!
Not one heroic bone in his body does Dott contain, it seems, for he doesn’t wait for me to offer the chance of escape a second time. Bewilderingly light on his feet, he makes a sprint for the stern. The three jailers set to: on me. Nobody has taken the chance to overcome the powers that be. For all the lack of noise from below deck, I might be travelling on a ghost ship’s maiden voyage. Trying to keep hold of my wooden shank, I lash out, fearing a bullet might pierce my skin and a major organ. I fight with relish, but the hullabaloo is concluded, almost before it begins. No show of concern is shown for Ayaan, bleeding away his life, downstairs. Nor does any one of the three go in pursuit of Noor, smugly comfortable in the notion that he has no place to run to. Though I’ve managed to scrape and poke with my shank, I am forced at gunpoint to relinquish my hold on it now. Weapon-free, I am now taught the error of my ways. The beating, still at gunpoint, is savage and enthusiastic. I have heard no splash; no sound of Noor’s entry into the water. What can he be doing, the ingrate? I am taking this beating in order to liberate him, and he doesn’t have the common decency to flee when he has the chance! Will they beat me and then put a bullet in my head?
They are certainly making sport of the first half of the retribution for my actions. I am rolled up into a ball, the kicks landing thick and fast. The blood in which I wriggled—Ayaan’s blood—I smear on the deck, smudging it around like paint. Finally I hear the splash of a body striking water: Noor has jumped for it. Between blows to my system I have a crack at informing my attackers I’ve given up. Gladly I will take Noor’s place on the chain-gang, working his shift after my own. Little by little the assault wanes. I try to imagine him swimming. Oily as a seabird, his arms already weakened from rowing, pumping hard and painfully through the muck.
I am left alone to examine my injuries—or for them to examine me—leaning against a mast that feels cool to my forehead’s touch. For the moment I can’t remember Noor’s voice; it’s an effort to remember his face. But what is clear enough, moments later, is the manner in which the prisoner spent his last moments on the ship. The follow-up kicking is as equally severe. I am told it will happen after dinner, so that’s a nice dessert to look forward to. Not that I receive any dinner. The upper echelon of the ship’s hierarchy dines and rests. When the meals have gone down and the food has been digested, it is time for me to have my chain unlocked so I can cease hugging the mast. And the reason for this second onslaught? On his way to freedom, before he crash-landed into the oasis, he stole more water. He stole a bottle from Ayaan’s own supply. In a surrogate fashion, I received the brunt of the jailers’ bad tidings.
Dott tells me I helped him escape, and I did. What he omits is the part where I nearly lose my eyesight to do so. Where my testicles are cramped by kicks, pushed up into my torso; where my scrotum is scratched open. But after half an hour, the viciousness desists; the attackers have grown bored. Again, I am chained to the mast, there to stay—whatever the weather; weather come what may—for the next seventy-two hours.
What’s in it for me? I can’t help wondering as I wake up.
Nine.
The days following the aborted Cookery Class are like torture—like a slow-acting poison against my will and resolution. I am crabby. I am jumpy. Repeatedly I turn down Jarvis’s offers of an X-Box games competition, or Sarson’s attempts to get me chatting during Sosh. As the cliché goes, I’m a shadow of my former self. Perhaps I’m in love, ho ho. Sure as hell, I’m not eating anything much more than the bare essentials to keep alive. On the other hand, I’m drinking water as if the supply’s being turned off any day now. Since dreaming of the desert, the Oasis and the ship, I have a thirst on me that’s as dry as a camel’s hoof. Leaning over my sink, every five or so minutes when I’m in my cell, I scoop up water, eschewing the uses of my plastic mug, and gulp in water and air in equal measures, so that I’m bloated and gassy—the eructations you won’t believe—and then, a short time later, I am doing precisely the same thing over again. I can’t wait for Friday. Dott is not picking up the psychic phone. Not listening to me. Nor has he ordered any reading matter that will necessitate my visiting his cell. I can’t even count on that for a chat—for a resumption of what he has to say. In fact, generally speaking, there’s been a marked reduction in yoots ordering much of anything to read in their cells. The only thing to say is, it’s in keeping with the air of weirdness circulating around Dellacotte of late. Even the ducks are acting peculiar. Yet knowing what’s to blame doesn’t help me, does it? Doesn’t help me get to DottThe days drag like songs on a melted LP. There’s no better way of putting it. In the meantime, on my arrival in the Library, Kate Thistle shows me she’s trying to be cute by saying Wogwun at more or less every opportunity, until it starts to become a pain in the hole. Miss Patterson weaves her way through the day, setting me tasks and no doubt (now I’m aware of her fondness for the spirits) fantasising about her first glass of Gordon’s Gin when she gets home. Or before. Until she’s of pensionable age, she’s killing time. There is nothing unpredictable in the days, this Wednesday to this Friday. Now I’ve established that the weary pessimism that’s infected the YOI is here to stay, it’s something like observing an army, four hundred strong, of harmless zombies. Shared thoughts? Perhaps. I don’t know. All that’s clear is, when Movements started before Dott was around, it would take the screws on both landings of the Education Block fifteen minutes to get the motherfuckers settled. And it’s piss-easy to sympathise with the disruptions. Give me a job to do or be a six-wanks-a-day man, decomposing spiritually in my pad, I choose the former, on every account. But for others—not Redbands, and without Enhanced status—the choice is simply not there. They wait and rot; they rot and wait. An excursion to Computer Literacy or Maths is like a Greek holiday. Hardly anyone speaks as they enter the Education Block. Murmurs, mumbles—if anything at all. I’m no different. I take my place in the holding area, climb the stairs to the twos landing, enter the Library, where I spend the remainder of the morning, before setting off on my bored expedition back to the pad for lunch, before returning again in the p.m. Cups of tea and snatched moments of dialogue with Kate Thistle—these are the punctuation marks to these slow, slow days. For me, one who thinks he conjectures slowness quite nicely, quite thank you. Slow has a new meaning now. Kate Thistle listens patiently. Aware our time alone is limited, she neither interrupts nor interrogates. She holds her mug of tea with both hands and lets me babble and spurt. Simultaneously I find myself both liking and disliking her, day by day. She looks older than when we met. An actual conversation—as opposed to a gobbet of reportage—has become a rare-ish beast, but it shows its pretty head, late in the day during Second Movements on the Thursday afternoon. Miss Patterson has ventured out on the scrounge for a rubber. It’s good to know, despite everything, old habits die hard and that someone’s lifted her eraser like this. So we’re not all brain dead, after all! It will be some time later that evening before, while reaching into my trackies for a lighter, I find the self-same tool. I have stolen it without even being aware of the theft: a habit I don’t want to get into.