The sound on the landings had changed now, no longer a meaningless jangle but the slapping against the cell doors after the slop-out bell. Charlie swivelled from the desk and groped for his boots, wincing as he manoeuvred his feet into them. He didn’t try to lace them but left them undone. He buttoned his trousers and secured the belt and finally put on his tunic jacket. He was ready before the key chain rattled against the door.
As it began to open, Charlie reached down for the pot. When he could smell it, the ritual had offended him; now it was automatic, just as it was automatic to shuffle forward and be by the door as it opened out on to the landing.
Charlie decided he would probably have been more disgusted if he’d had to share a cell. Not solitary, the governor had explained: apart from the cell, he was just an ordinary prisoner. It was just that there was no one else inside serving a sentence for a similar offence and it was sometimes difficult to gauge the reaction of the other inmates. Better to be safe in the cell, where he could sleep unprotected and safe from attack. But apart from that he would be treated no differently from anyone else. Charlie had thought it was bullshit at the time, like so much else; he didn’t think it now.
He blinked against the brighter lighting on the landing and went flat-footed out to join the line towards the sluices. To Charlie’s left, hung like spiders’ webs between the landings, were the protection meshes to prevent from self-destruction a prisoner who could no longer fight the despair, or the death of those who had infringed an unwritten law and might be heaved over, to avoid the irritating forensic enquiry which might have disclosed the clandestine activity in the engineering shops. To his right the cell doors gaped, like the beaks of hungry, unfed birds. He couldn’t miss the smell now: no one could, not even if they’d served twenty years and become accustomed to everything. Debris in a slowly moving stream of piss, thought Charlie. It was a fitting analogy.
Charlie had developed the prison walk, shoulders hunched and insular, his eyes away from any direct gaze and therefore possible challenge. He missed nothing, though. Never had. It was the beginning of the week and the shifts of the landing warders had changed; as soon as he rounded the bend, on the last run towards the sluices, Charlie saw Hickley and Butterworth.
They were two of the worst: bloody sadists. But clever sadists more obviously aware than the others that the prison was run by consent of the inmates and anxious to be friends with those who mattered, to the discomfort of those who didn’t. Hickley, the one who’d told him there was no possibility of parole, was at the sluice entrance, so that he could control the approach and Butterworth was inside the lavatory, supervising the actual cleaning. Charlie’s eyes avoided theirs; it was a precaution he had learned.
The challenge came, from Hickley, an arm thrust out across his chest, halting him and the line beyond.
‘Got another one of you bastards,’ said the prison officer.
Charlie knew he’d have to say something. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Know what we did with spies in the war?’ Hickley was ex-Guards.
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, Mr Hickley.’
‘We used to shoot them.’
Bollocks, thought Charlie. Hickley had never seen a spy in his life; probably hadn’t even seen combat. Hickley was a base camp type, a coal whitewasher and latrine scrubber.
‘I think we still should,’ said Hickley.
Providing his didn’t have to be the guilty finger on the trigger. Christ, how he’d like to have kicked the bullying bugger right in the crotch, thought Charlie.
‘What’s wrong with your boots?’ demanded the officer.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing what?’
‘Nothing, Mr Hickley.’
‘They’re unlaced.’
‘There isn’t a regulation,’ said Charlie, who’d checked.
‘I like a tidy landing.’ Hickley was shaven-headed and hardbodied from exercise and had a sergeant’s voice that echoed, so that everyone along the corridor could hear. ‘Undone boots aren’t tidy.’
Charlie said nothing.
‘So lace them up.’
Charlie allowed the look, too brief for him to be accused of insolence but sufficient for the man who’d faced hostility on a hundred parade grounds to know he meant it. Then he knelt, cautious against upsetting either his pot or that of the man directly behind him, and secured his boots. He did it carefully, tugging each loop through its socket and taking his time over the knots; the murmuring and shuffling grew behind him and at last he was aware of Hickley’s shift of impatience. Charlie went slowly on, adjusting and tightening the laces.
‘Get up!’
‘I haven’t tied them yet.’
‘I said get up.’
Charlie stood, as slowly as he had descended, to confront the officer. Hickley’s face burned red, except for the white patches of anger on his cheeks.
‘Be careful,’ said the man.
Charlie didn’t respond.
‘Very, very careful,’ insisted Hickley. He stood back, to let Charlie pass.
There had been an audience inside the sluices, as well as out, grouped around the centre runway to see what was happening. Two, both long timers, smiled just briefly in appreciation. Butterworth, controlling the main gangway, recognised his colleague’s defeat.
‘Move on!’ he said. ‘Everyone move on!’
There was jostling and further delay, while the slowly moving line became organised again. Instinctively Charlie stopped by the main sluice, where it was widest and where there were most people, rather than go into one of the side drains where he would have been in a cul de sac.
‘Move on,’ insisted Butterworth.
Doggedly Charlie remained where he was, letting other prisoners swirl and spill about him. He’d been backed into more blank alleys than this poxy lot put together and he didn’t intend the last day of the third month of his second year to start with some officially inspired thumping because he’d made some prison officer look a bloody fool. He was aware of Butterworth’s apologetic look to his friend beyond the doorway.
He realised that Prudell, who occupied the adjoining cell, had kept dutifully close to him. A Hickley man, Charlie knew; had to be because Hickley sanctioned the cell changes when Prudell got fed up with whatever prisoner he was screwing and felt like a change. And Prudell had sufficient muscle to keep the landing running smoothly.
‘Shaken but not stirred, is it?’ said Prudell, indicating the pot. He was a squat compact man serving eight years for grievous bodily harm: he’d nailed to his own desk the hand of a man who refused to pay protection money for a bingo hall in Haringay. The victim was sixty-eight years old.
‘Something like that,’ said Charlie. He was ready for the push when it came, not just from Prudell but from someone passing behind so he was able to avoid most of the urine from his pot and that of Prudell’s. Some still splashed on his trousers.
‘Told you to move along, stop causing a jam,’ said Butterworth.
Charlie put his pot under the rinse, scouring it out.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Prudell.
‘Why not lend me some perfume?’ said Charlie.
‘Any time, if you’re interested.’
Charlie picked up the line, going out past Hickley and back along the corridor. Inside his cell he looked down, disgustedly, at his stained trousers. Maybe it wouldn’t last long, he thought hopefully. Then again, it might. Hickley had lost face and in a place as miniscule and insular as a prison that was something that grew out of all proportion.