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  ‘That was the warden’s crime, was it?’ asked Delilah. ‘That he never did anyone any harm?’

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’

  ‘I won’t pretend I didn’t say it.’

  ‘Would you like to pay a visit to the place your fear assumed we were taking you?’

  ‘Let me handle this, JJ,’ interrupted Lawyer Poy Yack.

  ‘Very well, but let me nevertheless apologise on the prisoner’s behalf for the state of her undress. She threw off her towel, a lovely fluffy thing, in an earlier conniption, and insisted on rolling around the slimy floor. It is my view that she suffers excess sexual function. Look how those nipply things point about all over the place demanding attention. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ they say. Each one trying to outdo the other. She is something of throwback, I fear, to earlier less enlightened times. We even have surveillance of her – I cannot say the word. I left her in the bathroom, a woman you understand, and out of the bath she got. Then over she walked, nonchalant as you like, to the laid-on chair with the exquisite towel she has since shunned, and what did she do? She stopped, right there in the middle of the floor, and placed her hand between her – and, and – well you can imagine. Over her feet, if you please. We have all been poring over the footage trying to divine what might have been going through her mind. But the mind of a murderer – sometimes such a mind resists simple extrapolation. You understand.’

  ‘Oh I do, JJ, I do,’ said the lawyer. ‘You’ve got your work cut out with this one. What a terribly horrible case, don’t you think?’

  ‘You’re telling me. It’s a bad’n.’

  ‘What puzzles me is she thought she could get away with it.’

  ‘Think of it this way, my dear Poy Poy. She was willing to let her accomplice die, that must say something about her.’

  ‘We’re looking at a serious sentence here, I believe,’ said Lawyer Poy Yack, forgetting for the moment that he now worked defence.

  ‘Very serious. What did you have in mind, Lawyer Poy Yack?’

  ‘I’ll be recommending 222, with parole after ten years taking her to 111, with secondary parole after a further five years taking her up to the relative comfort of 101. I’d say that’s the very least we’re looking at. I’m tempted to pitch in at 242 or even 245 but let’s not aim too low. I say, who’s defending her?’

  Delilah spoke feebly. ‘You are. Apparently. But I think I’d like to swap you.’

  The lawyer’s face changed. ‘So I am, little one. I’d quite forgotten. I get onto autopilot, you see, my young friend. Just comes out. Prosecution. Line after line. She’s quite right, you know, JJ. Discount everything I just said, it has no legal standing.’

  ‘Not likely, Poy Yack. I believe I’ll call you for the prosecution.’

  ‘Try that and I’ll toast you. This case won’t even make court. It has more holes in it than a System shower unit. I’ll have her out of here by morning and you damn well know it. Don’t you worry about a thing, my child. Now, Officer, get my client some warm clothes, right away. And a cup of coffee, and an energy biscuit, and see about having this fork pulled out of her finger. No, on second thoughts, let me do it.’ He gave the fork a yank. ‘It’s stuck fast. I don’t know what to do. I’ll work it out. But now tell me, child, what is your name.’

  ‘Delilah,’ said Delilah. ‘And I’m innocent.’

  ‘Never mind about that for now, popkin. Let’s just concentrate on getting you into something warm and dry. You’re ruining my suit. Delilah, you say? What is going on with this fork? That’s a nice name. I don’t think I’ve ever defended a Delilah before. I don’t think I’ve ever defended anyone before. I’m doing it for a bet, you know. A bet I had with a fat man I put away a year ago for being so fat, but don’t worry about that, nobody liked him, a real burden on the Public Body of Health. Awful case. Fattest man I ever saw. Bigger than an elephant. Ever seen an elephant? Me neither. Whatever became of that fatso, I wonder. Christ, he was enormous. You know what, I can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘If it’s Jeremy, he’s dead. He’s the one I ‘murdered’.’

  ‘There,’ said JJ Jeffrey. ‘Another full and frank confession. This is an open-and-shut case if ever I saw one. Never mind these legal wranglings, Poy Yack, let’s just send her straight to 245. No, make that 250. Give her over to the care of the electric animals for a 25 stretch, a 30. They so rarely get their crackly paws on a female. Help restore some order down there. Maybe she makes it, maybe she doesn’t, but Upstairs has to acknowledge that we did our best. That’s how I see it.’

  ‘Get me a pair of secateurs, Officer, or a small saw, I can’t get this wretched fork off my client’s finger. More extreme measures are called for. Don’t just stand there. Do it!’ He turned to Delilah, soft-faced, saying, ‘My poor child,’ but Delilah hardly saw herself these days as a child, nor felt a ‘child’ should be treated as she was being treated, ‘there’s nothing for it, I’m going to have to cut your finger off.’ Which certainly did not endear Poy Yack to Delilah, who knew perfectly well that all this non-practically minded lawyer need do was pry apart the metal where the clamp met. His decision to amputate was hugely overdramatic. Needless to say, Officer JJ Jeffrey took no time at all in producing a saw, a large saw with coarse teeth that could have sawn the table in half. Delilah fancied he’d had it hidden in his inside-out uniform the whole time or had had it slung over the back of a chair, ready. Its teeth displayed the dark corrosion only blood could impart. That only a finger had been its prior conquest seem unlikely to Delilah. By now the Officer, pliant indeed to the lawyer’s insistence of aid, had rammed Delilah’s hand against the table so that the culprit finger lay on the surface. It shook both from Delilah’s fear and the Officer’s force. Lawyer Poy Yack, with one hand gripping the fork and his other gripping the saw’s handle, positioned the blade and readied it for the two or three strokes the finger’s severance would require. A sharp tooth resting on Delilah’s finger’s first knuckle drew a pinhead of bright blood. The lawyer did not appear to Delilah to be building up to the operation psychologically, more academically rehearsing its mechanics. This kind of man who put people to certain death through years of penal hard-living was not going to feel sympathy for a fingertip nor empathy for its owner, especially when he prepared what he prepared to do from the goodness of his heart, not as a punishment. Officer JJ Jeffrey saw it through his own transplanted eyes as quite another thing, and flicked them from Delilah’s knuckle to the lawyer and back and forth again with a bright eagerness to see the business done, and with his pith helmet bobbing, and dripping. No doubt there was also a keenness on his part, Delilah thought, to retrieve his prop fork.

  ‘Ooh,’ oohed Delilah, with utterly no idea what else she could do. ‘Ooh that feels good.’ A diversion, however degrading or punitively rewarded, was called for. All that mattered was giving these two men something else to think about. She’d thought: If the finger goes, what next? These people don’t think twice about an eye, a fat man – what’s a finger? She decided that to them it was nothing. So she took the finger from her other hand and played up to their preconceptions by placing it elsewhere on her body and going Ooh. She’d probably find that punishment for such behaviour was to lose the finger, but if this became an exchange of pawns, or fingers, so be it, it gave her time, and stopped this misguided nitwit lawyer from chopping off a fingertip that had done nothing wrong. Besides, the finger between her legs wasn’t actually doing anything – not that this fact would ever prove substantive in the mounting of any future finger-saving defence.

  ‘Whatever is she up to?’ asked Poy Yack, with a tremor, and a loss of concentration on the blade.

  ‘Oh no,’ exclaimed Officer JJ Jeffrey. ‘Please no. No, no, no.’ The officer was distraught, which mightily pleased Delilah, and she wished she had resorted to such resorts before. JJ Jeffrey spoke through the hand over his mouth when he said, ‘Somebody tell me this isn’t happening. I don’t believe I’m seeing this with my own
two eyes.’ Which, one might add, technically, he wasn’t.

  ‘Ooh oooh,’ went Delilah, ‘it feels so good.’ Of course it felt awful and demeaning – but somehow pleasurable to stick it to these two men in this way, whose children, if they ever had any, would be born far outside of woman and mixed and matched to suit their fatherly needs according to the order form.

  The lawyer said, turning away now, ‘I cannot defend this woman. This creature. She is undefendable. She is not human.’ The saw lay on its side now, as if in a defeat all of its own.

  ‘Come, Poy Poy, come with me,’ the officer said to the lawyer. And the two men helped each other away.

  ‘I wish we had known that we knew she would do that,’ Delilah heard Poy Yack say as they walked weakly off, ‘how terribly disappointing.’ ‘Yes, we should have known that we knew,’ agreed the other. And then they were gone. Cold, wet, a fork sticking out her finger, or at least the appearance of such a fork, Delilah was alone. With her thoughts. Which were about what would happen now.

  4 – A Rescue

  The man with no confidence – a promoted officer after his display of skills in Shower Unit 101 – entered the room against the moving air of the two departing men and said, ‘Remember me? I’m the one you laughed at. See this? I’ve been promoted.’ He flicked his knee, where evidence of his increased rank could be found in the form of a medal pinned to his (this time) yellow synthetic fur boots. ‘I’m an important person now. I have power. More power than ever. I have been instructed to misuse this power at will. What should I do with it, I wonder. There will be no comebacks, no ramifications – not for me. Carte blanche, that’s the word. You got it, you’re mine until they find you a new lawyer. Could take ten or twenty seconds. Or ten or twenty days. What’s chronology to you? You don’t know what time of day it is. You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. You keep thinking you’re going bananas. And you know what? You are.’ The officer rubbed his hands and clapped them in a manner identical to JJ Jeffrey. The senior officer’s tuition obviously rubbed off on many subordinates. ‘I’d tell you to take your clothes off but you’re already in the buff. So I’ll have you put some clothes on instead. Here, I brought this. It’s made of maggot skin. Put it on!’

  Here we go again, thought Delilah, and slipped into the slippery garment, a catsuit by design and strangely fishy by aroma.

  ‘Take off all your clothes, prisoner. Quick smart! You’re mine now.’

  Delilah did so, gladly – much of the maggot skin was not maggot skin at all but maggot itself, alive, writhing, and when she stepped from the garment it moved off across the floor. The officer produced a gun and shot holes through it, but this had little effect, and the catsuit kept going and appeared to be trying to find somewhere to hide under the table. This incensed the officer with no confidence, whose only real ambition in life was to tell people what to do and have them do it, and he chased after the catsuit. Observing, Delilah realised that such people gave authority a bad name – and the Authority itself. That he now sought revenge on some harmless sown-together maggots – he’d found the saw and sawn the garment into two pieces, and it had proceeded to squirm away in opposite directions – said all she needed to know about her latest foe. She raised her eyes, an old expression not in common usage, and thought, What a fucking idiot. In doing so she noticed her swearing was on the increase and reasoned that this was probably to do with her adverse living conditions. And, she added, that that was putting it fucking lightly. She washed her mouth out, metaphorically, felt around her gums for the closing hole of her now lost tooth, experimentally sucked some air into it, which hurt dramatically but released some trapped eggshell, and watched the officer stamp up and down on the lower half of the catsuit, trampling its legs. Delilah wondered how such people ever got such responsible jobs. Then realised these were exactly the sort of people that got responsible jobs.

  When the officer had incapacitated catsuit’s top half, he returned to Delilah and began saying, ‘A man with little confidence tends to be a keen observer of others. With less chance to speak, he listens. With less opportunity to perform, he watches. He waits, for tips, tips on confidence and popularity. And he thinks. Oh how he thinks. The prisoner cannot imagine. What does he think about, does the prisoner think? Can the prisoner think? Is the prisoner a thinker? Or does the prisoner claim to be someone who does not think? Perhaps the prisoner tells its friends that it gave up thinking ten years ago and no longer thinks. I do not think so. I think the prisoner thinks. I think the prisoner derives much of its own misfortune from the contents of its own head, whence its thoughts originate. Ha. I see such statements strike a chord with the prisoner, for its eyes betray a truth. The prisoner’s eyes are its enemy. The prisoner’s eyes give everything away. They speak, even when the mouth is closed. The prisoner did not bemoan the loss of the old warden’s eye. No, not one bit. I was watching. That’s right, I was watching very carefully. And what did this important promoted powerful officer see? Every time a drop of water dropped on its head, the prisoner winced, winced in its eyes. All it was was a little leak in the ceiling, dropping drips on the ugly prisoner’s head.’ Hey, thought Delilah, I’m not ugly. ‘That ceiling is really put through the mill with the launderette above it. But an incey-wincey little leak and the prisoner could not stand it. It drove the prisoner mad. The prisoner would have said anything to Officer JJ Jeffrey to stop the drips. The drip, drip, drip. Now, ten or twenty seconds have passed and still no lawyer arrived. Ten or twenty days instead it’s looking like. This way, prisoner, back to the leaky ceilinged room. Only it won’t be your head this time.’ And here came the man-with-no-confidence’s high-pitched laugh, which got Delilah right in her teeth, even the cracked one that had fallen out and wasn’t there any more. ‘We know what you like,’ he said, and prodded her where he thought she liked it.

  In Wet Room 102, Officer Gentle aimed the drip system at a Delilah he’d now attached to the floor, and when he’d done that he left her there. Then he came back in, kicking his heels together and wiggling his knees. The reason for his exit and return was not clear. Only that he came back more determined than ever, and moving oddly. These were, these systems of nastiness and domination meted out on Delilah, the twistings of an unconfident mind – exactly the twistings Delilah feared so much. Now she hoped for a reversion in the officer to his former meeker personage. She held little hope. Already the drips that drips on her every ten seconds, small as they were, contacted with such a bang that they sent signals through her whole body heaving it off the ground. She could not imagine this for another ten minutes, let alone another ten hours, another ten days. Then the officer left the room again, having done nothing while in there other than look determined and wiggle and brush his synthetic yellow boots with a brush that had a bright card hanging from it saying Happy Birthday, my dearest Gentle.

  When two days later Officer Gentle came back in, Delilah had gone insane. Thus disproving by own example her previous conviction that she wouldn’t – and additionally refuting that what she had to worry about was desperation, not going bonkers. But she truly was, bonkers. For now, anyway.

  Meanwhile the officer had been demoted, because when asked by his superiors what he’d done with the prisoner he claimed to have forgotten. They were keen to find her, they told him, because the man had come back into Authority Welcome offering to pay her bail, and now that she had become a murderer the Authority could charge a much higher price.

  ‘Wake up, fruitcake,’ said Gentle, and kicked Delilah with the fur of a new boot. ‘Look what I’m wearing! I went back to the boot shop and purchased the green after all. It does suit me, it does, oh do agree with me. The man in the shop said he’d never seen someone with a figure like mine. He said I should model. He made me twirl and he clapped his hands. He wants to Life me, he says, and get together over a meal, talk big figures, and knock heads together concerning my future. I am feeling very good about myself, now, despite my demotion. I think I might jack in all this
nonsense and go and get me some fame. I could do with some fame. It would do my confidence no end of good – people looking at me, children whispering to their guardians when I walk by ‘Look, there goes the famous Gentle!’ Yes, I think I might Life him. I’ll think it over. I’m a thinker, as you know. That’s what I’ll do, think it over for a month or so. Then Life him.’ But what he actually did was leave room, so taken with his own thoughts that he’d forgotten to do what he went in there for, which was to release Delilah and claim the reward the Authority had offered for her retrieval. Which was promotion – and would have reinserted him back into the level of his short-held higher rank.

  A plumber who’d come to repair Shower Unit 101 after bits of towel had jammed up a jet discovered Delilah. He’d been asked to look in, ‘whilst on the premises’, at the launderette and do something once and for all about ‘those leaky machines’.

  ‘All right, darling,’ he offered, when he came looking for the stopcock to shut off the water, ‘don’t mind me, I’ll be out of your way in no time. Just having a quick shufti round here. Gor, what a place. This yours, is it? You wanna think about decorating. Putting in a comfortable bed. You’ll do your back in, lying down there like that. Hold up, what’s this? You fastened yourself to the floor or somint? Here, my precious, are you all right? Wake up, darling, talk to me. Hey? Look at me like that? There’s no need to be rude, I’m just an honest plumber. Fine, so go and ignore me, see if I care.’ He located the stopcock and twisted it off with a grunt, killing a prisoner (prematurely) in Shower Unit 101 (the fountain he’d been perched upon for many hours dissolved instantly causing his fatal fall). ‘All right, one last try, my love, to get through to you. Here’s a joke, stop me if you’ve heard it, a geezer walks into a wall. That’s it. Here’s another. A geezer walks into another geezer. Strike a light, goes the first geezer, don’t I know you? No, says the second geezer, you don’t – now, if you don’t mind, little man, I’ve got to get to the shops. That’s it. They’re not very good, are they. Plumbing’s my strong point. Not jokes. Eh, eh, you nearly opened an eye there. We have life! You’re a nice looking bird, you know, just need to clean yourself up a bit, take a bit more pride in your appearance. What are you, nineteen, twenty? Well, seeing as I’m here, how about I loosen these spiky things on your ankles, and stop that drip up there, it must be driving you crazy.’ He got busy with his tools and worked quickly. ‘Now then,’ he said, slipping out of his overalls, ‘put these on or you’ll catch your death down here. Brhhh! No? You want me to do it for you? Not a problem, my darling. That’s right, one leg goes in there, and the other – that’s it – see, wasn’t too difficult, was it? Can you walk? Grab a hold of my – no, not there, gor, you’ll do me a mischief – that’s right, round my neck, like so. One, two, and up she comes. Steady. Right, one step at a time. Watch that fork, you’ll have someone’s eye out. You know, you really ain’t a bad-looking bird at all, not even if I say so myself. Okay, here we go, let’s get you out of this place. No, this way, door’s over here, my darling. What are you like!’