Someone would come. First there would be the click of the hatch, the individual pack of cereal and portion of milk. Then a trip to court in a prison van and the chance to explain everything. If things went his way, he could be home in his flat by the end of the day. The thought brought warm tears to Magnus’s eyes.
There was a name for the virus now: V596. Naming the disease seemed to make its existence more real, but the television had also shown images of people around the country acting normally. London was not bowed, a jaunty TV presenter had said, standing in Oxford Street among the usual chaos of tourists, shoppers and slow-moving traffic. As far as the city centre was concerned it was ‘business as usual’. A couple of young Asian girls had bumped into the presenter in their haste to get to Topshop. The BBC had replayed the clip at intervals throughout the night and into the morning: the busy street, the reporter’s laugh as the girls knocked him off balance, the girls’ hands fluttering up to cover their mouths. Magnus had watched and re-watched it and thought he could see the reporter tensing in anticipation of the surprise collision.
‘Pete? Pete?’ Magnus’s voice sounded puny in the still brickness of the cell. ‘Are you all right, mate?’
He did not expect an answer and none came. Magnus tried to remember how the wing had sounded on previous days. He recalled slamming doors, the echo of footsteps, the shouts and laughter of men, but he had been caught up in his own misery and perhaps the prison always fell still in the early hours, at the intersection of early risers and the late to bed.
Magnus did an inventory of his body’s hurts. The bin men’s punches had buried the pain of Johnny Dongo’s fist-in-the-face beneath their own ache. His head was groggy from lack of sleep, and his belly felt empty and sick, but he had none of the symptoms Pete had been tormented by, no cough or sweating, no vomiting or diarrhoea. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Pete was a foul-smelling huddle on the bed below. Magnus remembered an ailing sheepdog his mother had nursed in her kitchen, the strangeness of seeing the dog in the house, his mother saying, ‘It’ll not be long now. He’s turned his face to the wall.’ Thinking about his mother made Magnus feel ashamed. She would never leave Pete to suffer alone, whatever his crime.
The Judas-flap scraped back. A second later Magnus heard a key turning in the lock and swung himself off his bunk. It was a different warder this time, a younger man with a broad, red face, cheeks like boiled ham and the beginnings of a beer belly.
‘Fuck.’ The screw’s hand went to his nose. ‘It stinks in here. Kildoran and McFall. Who’s who?’
The warder looked like he had been up all night, but his skin was healthy beneath the tiredness, his voice free of the rawness that had made Pete’s words sound as if they were being bled from him. The sight of the man, ugly and healthy in the doorway, made Magnus want to sob with relief.
‘I’m McFall.’ He held up a hand in a gesture that was part salute, part supplication.
The screw gave Magnus a sour look. ‘Kildoran?’ He squatted down and stared at Pete, keeping his distance from the bunk. There was no reply and the warder turned to look at Magnus. ‘Turn him over.’
‘What?’
‘Roll him on to his back.’
Magnus took a step backward; his spine touched the wall.
‘He might be infectious.’
‘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.