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.