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  ‘Then,’ said JJ Jeffrey, now munching his egg, ‘you went to see the Whipping boy to score some drugs. This is unlawful. It is one thing for the Whipping Boy to take drugs, he is on the right side of the law. But you, you are on the wrong side. Drugs intensify matters. You wanted drugs to increase the sensation of criminality that criminals like you have running through their veins. You were high after your killing spree and wanted to get higher still. If we had not apprehended you when we did it is my conjecture that you would have gone on to murder many more. You’d just got started, you had the taste for it. You are a murderer. Murderers murder, that’s what they do. Thank the Authority for the System, I say. Justice will be done.’

  ‘Thank you, JJ,’ said the launderette superintendent, ‘very well said. I endorse your comments, weightily. Does the prisoner have anything to say, before it is taken down?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Delilah. ‘Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?’

  ‘What are you talking about, girly? We have the legal system we have now because that system was proven not to work. The System has no interest in systems that do not work. Why would it? What criminal can, anyway, truly be found innocent once accused of a crime? True acquittal never existed. Exoneration? Pull the other one. No, no, girly, the System is very happy with its system, thank you very much for asking. However, your card is marked. You do not seek justice but self-reward. What would a hairdresser like you know about justice, anyway? It does not help your cause, you know, to come from such an employment background. How can I, a judge, take a hairdresser seriously? You see my point, don’t you. That hair and the law do not mix.’

  Delilah said, ‘And that’s your defence, is it?’

  ‘My defence? My defence? It is you, not anybody else, that I must remind, because not anybody else has forgotten, that requires the defence. I do not like you and will therefore let you into a secret that a hairdresser is unlikely by its wit alone to grasp. You, a prisoner, are allowed a defence only to get your hopes up. This was agreed to at a dinner party a long time back by some eminent lawmakers. By getting the prisoner’s hopes up, by allowing it to defend itself, the System can then dash, is I believe the word, dash, those hopes. I say to you now, get your hopes up by all means. Defend away with your hopes for the best. But do not expect such actions to retail freedom. Sleep at night, if you can sleep, with you hopes. Convert them into dreams, covert them, run them through your mind while you’re in a chamber, as I’m sure you will be sooner or later. But do not bring them into your hearing. Because if you do I will take them away.’

  And he had. He had done exactly this. Delilah knew that in all her life she had never felt so deflated.

  She was led away. Dragged drooping would be more accurate. Next thing she became aware of was going down. Not left, not right, definitely not up. But down. Down, down.

  8 – A Cage

  ‘You have failed a drug test.’

  ‘I have not taken a drug test,’ an enervated Delilah managed to say on a puff of what she reckoned might be her last breath.

  ‘Don’t nitpick with me, prisoner. I’m the warden down here and what I say goes. Put her in with the drug users. If she’s not one yet, she will be soon. Welcome to Remand 111.’ The warden of Remand 111 – Warden 111, to give him his official title – had a deep voice. So deep it vibrated Delilah’s chest. Had his words been pleasing, her chest might have interpreted the vibrations as an agreeable, if not sought-after sensation, and she would have liked him – and perhaps thought about going to bed with him. Not that she had much of a taste for that sort of thing these days. As it was, Warden 111’s low-frequency voice served only to reinforce his words’ nastiness, their deep, and felt, cruelty. He said, connecting far inside Delilah, ‘These are the kindest words you will hear for a long, long time, so I will say them again, deep as they are: Welcome – to Remand 111. From now on you will be treated with nothing but unkindness. Get used to it. Become accustomed. Because it will get worse. Stop. What was that? Did those eyes of yours say something? I think they did. Take her to the chamber!’

  And so it began.

  In Remand 111 were moving floors. Remand 111 was open-plan. There was no privacy. It looked like a place that wasn't quite finished yet, or a place about to become something else. Delilah’s first mistake was to step onboard the moving floor next to the officer who’d grabbed her arm. Lots of people laughed meanly at her, knowingly: no, a remand prisoner had to walk on the unmoving floor next to the officer, or, in Delilah’s case, run to keep up with him. She fell once, and the officer stopped and bent and banged her knee. He took another look at the knee and said it was the worst knee he’d ever seen, told her he hated her and her knee, said he’d never liked her, not in all the time he’d known her, there was nothing about her to like, that her elbows weren’t up to much either. He liked every other single remand prisoner, he told her, but hated her intensely. He went purple-faced bursting with dislike. People agreed and called out that her they hated her too – ‘Me too. I hate you enormously’ – but said they liked each other a great deal. They made a great commotion attempting to outdo each other with their derision and detestation of Delilah, who had been popular in life, popular as a hairdresser, popular with her clients after giving them the latest style, and took this particularly badly. But now she was running along again next to the officer, towards the chamber, whatever the chamber was, fear and worry affecting her legs, her hairdressing days far, far behind her. Or a very long way above her anyway.

  Hand and Voice Chamber 111 comprised a small circular see-through door centred in a great see-through drum. The whole cylindrical contraption was constructed from transparent material. All that wasn’t transparent were the people inside it, of which there must have been 40 or 50 diametrically opposed like spokes around the inside of the rotating drum, their feet secured at the largest circumference, and their hands, secured by their wrists, stretched beyond their heads to form the Hand and Voice Chamber 111 itself. Into which Delilah was now inserted through its circular door. She landed on the hands, these hands that formed the inner chamber, and the hands began to push at her, poke her eyes, pick her nose, tickle her, fiddle with her, slap her, squeeze her, pinch her, grab at her plumber’s overalls. Hand and Voice Chamber 111 went slowly round and round and round. Sometimes it pretended with a judder (a judder that had the cadence of an unkind laugh) to be about to stop, but never actually did so.

  Many voices spoke, sometimes as one, sometimes in a vocal jumble, and sometimes shared words, even letters, in a feat of coordination that Delilah was in no state to admire.

  ‘You are nothing.’

  ‘You’ll never be liked.’

  ‘You won’t last long, not in a place like this.’

  ‘You haven’t a friend in the world.’

  ‘You’re the worst hairdresser there ever was.’

  ‘Customers pretended to like your style.’

  ‘They felt sorry for you.’

  ‘For being so ugly.’

  ‘And so unpopular.’

  ‘Having such bad knees.’

  ‘Those awful elbows.’

  ‘She’ll start crying soon.’

  ‘Diddums.’

  The hands kept pushing, pulling, twisting, slipping in, yanking out, and even caressing, and the voices talking.

  ‘She’s crying.’

  ‘Make that skirt cry forever, I couldn’t give a toss about her, like,’ said the plumber, sounding like he meant it. Which, for Delilah, who had seen him as an ally, a friend, really hurt. He twisted her ear. That hurt too. And poked his little finger in her ear hole then her mouth, spreading earwax around her gums. He wasn’t pretending to be nasty, was just being nasty. Delilah felt extra let down: she remembered his kind face, his words ‘You know, you really ain’t a bad-looking bird at all, not even if I say so myself’. She really started balling. She couldn’t help herself. The more she cried the meaner they were to her.

  ‘I’m going to pull out her eyelas
hes.’

  ‘I’ll do the hair under her arms, twist it out.’

  ‘Scratch her chest so the warden’s deep voice hurts her.’

  ‘She’s got nothing going for her.’

  ‘I’d hate her anyway.’

  ‘So would I, even I hadn’t been threatened with food-poisoning.’

  ‘Shsh. Tell her what she is.’

  ‘She’s alone.’

  ‘There’s no one here for Delilah. No one anywhere for you.’

  ‘You’re completely alone.’

  ‘Please,’ said Delilah, when she could take no more. ‘Please.’

  So they shouted and screamed and just got a whole lot worse.

  Hours this went on.

  Until they got bored. Then they said, ‘Everybody, ignore her.’

  And that’s what they did. For the next however many hours. With their voices at least. Their hands continued talking. Their hands said horrible stuff. Twisted her arm. Had her by the short and curlys. Poked fun. Hand and Voice Chamber 111 went round and round and round. Revolving Delilah and revolving her. Pretending to stop, never doing so, with its nasty laugh of a judder. Delilah couldn’t sleep. She got no rest. She didn’t know what to do, she really didn’t. There wasn’t anything she could do – except wonder what to do. The answer was nothing. As so often it was in the System. Nothing but wait. It would get worse. Worse would at least be different. Worse would be something else. Then she could wish for what had gone before. Even if it was this. That would give her something to do. It was what she did, it bided time. Time was the problem.

  Two similar-to-each-other-looking officers came to extract her, pulled her out by a fist of her hair. They dragged her away, her plumbers’ overalls bumping across the ground, grinding her backbone, missing the cushions thrown down for her that looked so stunningly comfortable. She was too dizzy to stretch for them, too tired, too disorientated, too depressed, too far gone, too Systemized. They stood her up and pushed her though two translucent-barred doors, saying, ‘Try breaking out of here and you’ll find yourself in a worse place than if you’d stayed. Live with the junkies. Become one. Misery is closer than you know.’

  ‘Get out of here!’ screamed one of the junkies, as the second translucent-barred door slammed shut behind her.

  ‘Go right back out the way you came in,’ shouted another.

  ‘Just cos we’re junkies doesn’t mean we’ll accept you. Just cos we do drugs doesn’t mean we’ve got no pride. We don’t want to hang out with you. Go away. Just go away.’

  On a blub of emotion, Delilah turned to check the door, and straightaway knew she shouldn’t have. They’d defeated her already, these hung-out junkies with the long drawn faces. But by now she’d tried the door, the second barred door she’d in come through, and it had opened. What was all this about? She knew she had to think clearly. Yet just when she needed her brain’s strength the most, it remained stubbornly at its weakest. The door slammed shut behind her and she turned to try it but the junkie had locked it. He waggled the transparent key in her face. He popped it in his mouth and swallowed. It got stuck and he writhed on the floor, hands to throat. Delilah tried the first door she’d come through but that was locked too. She was trapped now in a space between two locked translucent-barred doors, which had a see-through ceiling and a see-through floor, a space too narrow to sit down properly in. Hundreds of people, prisoners and officers and tour parties of pointing children, stared at her, laughing, wondering what she’d do next, and munched popcorn bought from a popcorn seller with a necklace of unpopped popcorn and an abnormally large head that had a yellow ticket stuck to it that read Fine: Head overdue for compression. Even the writhing junky laughed at Delilah’s predicament as he choked and a key shape moved down his neck. She slumped, or tried to. ‘I am a loser,’ she muttered sadly to herself. ‘I have no self-esteem.’ She could feel her nerves convey messages of her uselessness around her body. It wasn’t so much that it was painful – her body was pain anyway – as it was the deep, deep sadness. Something about this sadness cancelled out confidence, too, and siphoned away any remaining get-up-and-go she might have had. ‘I’m emptying,’ she thought. And they all looked on, stared. And they knew, too, crunching their popcorn, that she was a hopeless useless loser, emptying out, without a chance of getting a friend, of being liked, of getting out of here, of being anything ever again. She knew they knew. She knew they were right. She wondered what she had left for the System to take from her.

  The plumber came now swaggering over. Delilah’s heart gave a happy jolt. Everything was involuntary these days. She couldn’t help it. Like the flash of helpless love she knew her eyes gave him. She couldn’t help that either.

  ‘Don’t give me none of those flirty looks,’ he said, ‘you don’t mean nothing to us. Stupid moo. You ain’t worth tuppence. Bleedin totty!’

  He sparked up his weld torch.

  ‘Burn me, then,’ muttered Delilah. ‘See if I care.’ And she didn’t.

  ‘Give it a rest, love. Jesus. Birds like you, always overreacting.’ Avoiding her gaze as he worked, the plumber welded up the locks on both see-through doors, doing so with an opaque weld stick that glowed and went globular in the flame, then dripped and hardened clear in the keyholes, enclosing Delilah, permanently she guessed, in this clear-barred prison. Then the plumber set about cutting the whole section away from the junkie pen. The junkies made no move to escape when the plumber cut the last connection and cracked Delilah’s cage away. Two officers toppled it over and soon were pushing and shoving it along the floor, while another officer struggled over with a heavy-mover’s whistle and a barred door that slotted perfectly into the hole left behind, a door with Junkie Pen 111 – return after prisoner trapped in two door cage engraved on it, so Delilah knew that this door had been removed and the double-door arrangement installed specifically to ensnare her. When she last gave the plumber a fleeting glance, which included perhaps a final beg for help or at least a call for some friendly eye contact, she earned herself nothing but a rude finger. And then she let him go. And that got her. She had nobody. She wasn’t just alone. Nobody wanted her.

  The officers righted her cage, which left her uncomfortable. ‘You’d be more comfy if you knocked yourself over and got a chance to lie down, but then we’d have to punish you. That would be worse than the comfort gained. You would regret the decision. But it is your decision. We at least in Remand 111 leave you with decisions. Decisions, decisions, decisions. The choice is yours. There’s another option, of course. You must decide. Think about it.’

  Then the similar-looking officers marched off. They could have been, Delilah wasn’t sure, the same similar-looking officers from ten floors higher. If so, both had put on an equal amount of weight under their chins and on their buttocks, which hung like bags of water, making it impossible to tell them apart by body shape. Warden 111 sat on a clear wall and picked at his toenails, eyeing Delilah with a look that said something about her future, something she couldn’t decipher. Because he could speak with his eyes, Delilah worried he’d be able to read with them too, and she lowered her lids and decided that no one would see her thoughts. Which were: What will happen when I am found guilty of Gentle’s murder, as I surely will be, what then? Is this why prisoners kill themselves.

  And what is my other option? Think about what?

  All Remand 111 stared and hissed and booed and jeered and spat and moved by on moving floors looking genuinely hateful.

  ‘Sing,’ demanded the two officers. ‘Sing for your supper, disliked prisoner, with the bad knees and not-very-good elbows.’

  They gave her examples: ‘La da di da,’ sang one, or was it the other? ‘Di di da la,’ sang the other, or was it the same one?

  She’d do anything now, her hunger in charge, and elaborate. She knew that though she had a rough speaking voice, she had the voice of an angel when it came to singing. Or so she’d been told. She hoped she hadn’t been lied to. Her trust in even the long past was put to doub
t, here, in Remand 111, where your trust mechanisms were messed with. There was a song she liked to sing in the shower of her housing unit, not that she’d ever do that again. Food was top priority now, food and water. A meal went round and round on a strip of moving floor. One officer pointed at it, so did the other. Her meal? Must be. Delilah launched into the piece of popular music. She could hear with her own ears that despite her recent maltreatment she still could sing, was doing all right, more than all right – was doing well.

  ‘Scarecrow!’ cried a prisoner.

  ‘Squawk, squawk, squawk,’ shrieked a junkie.

  ‘Eeeech,’ screeched Warden 111, counting his fingers but looking dismayed as if their number didn’t tally with the number he’d expected.

  ‘What a racket,’ called somebody, yawning and pretending to wake up. ‘Can’t I get any sleep round here? Is someone killing a chicken?’ Remand 111 laughed. Delilah sang on, determined to be fed.

  One officer said, ‘Stand on one leg, while you’re about it.’ This was old, not a new form of humiliation. Delilah, lifting a knee, did so.