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  The Whipping Boy groaned and removed his studded top. For a ten-year-old he was, Delilah noted with more of her worry, very strong. Where normally ten-year-olds had little muscle definition and still resembled girls in many respects the Whipping Boy showed off bulbous muscles and veiny arms. Alarmingly his eyes resembled these muscles, being also bulbous and veiny, which Delilah put down to his drug habit. Even now, rather than swallow it, with the edge of his Life he chopped an orange pill into a powder, so bright it glowed, and made a line of it across his calculus, which he took up a nostril in one almighty sniff. He slapped his face with both hands, shook his mouth about, flung his head back over his shoulders, let out a satisfied roar, which for a ten-year-old sounded unsettlingly impressive, and cried, ‘That’s better,’ and pushed his homework aside. He got up, Voltaire in hand, whipped at Delilah, taking her off the chair by her legs, and approached a control panel by the lift. Inside it he tapped out information, squinted at something that didn’t make sense, worked it out, tapped more information in, and slammed the panel closed.

  ‘I’m in a bad mood now,’ he said. ‘Nobody cares about me and I don’t like being alive. What is the point?’

  Delilah knew that to engage the Whipping Boy in such a conversation would inevitably lead to her saying things he didn’t like hearing. Leading to her being punished. Some conversations were like that. This was one. With Gentle came plain unpredictability. With the Whipping Boy came predictable unpredictability. His instrument was his Voltaire but his young mind delivered the pain.

  ‘I felt better, marginally,’ he said, ‘after whipping to death that old warden. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. What a whiner. Taking his eye out like that, so effortlessly, felt good. After you left to go and see the surgeon, I went for the other eye and I couldn’t get it. Ten attempts it took. What’s all that about?’ This was the same question Delilah had concerning the surgeon. What surgeon? ‘Until that day I could whip a Life out of a man’s hand from twenty feet without touching a hair on his head. Then suddenly I discover that I’ve lost it. I’m pissed off. It’s lucky you’re here for me to practice on with no one watching. If I lacerate your face, who’s going to know? I hate everything. Okay, bitch, take a pill and bend over. We’re gonna have some fun.’ He tossed Delilah one of those glowing pills. ‘Pop that. Get your kit off. Bend over. Put your head between them. I’m going to do you from behind, take your eyes out.’

  At this point, and unexpectedly, though when one thought back about it perhaps it made sense, the Whipping Boy started crying.

  ‘Oh what is happening to me?’ he blubbed. ‘Why am I feeling like this? Is it just growing up? Everybody hates me. I hate everybody. I bloody hate them, you know. I do. I do. There’s nobody my own age down here to play with. No one to talk to. At school I’m in with older pupils. They don’t associate with me because of my spots, and they’re frightened of me because of my Voltaire.’ He swung his whip above his head, it hummed deeply. ‘It’s no wonder I’ve turned to drugs. Take your pill.’

  The deeply humming whip approached Delilah. She put the pill in her mouth, then swallowed, then popped it in her pocket. A trick almost as old as the mugger’s Look.

  ‘You’ll come up fast off of that,’ said the Whipping Boy. ‘This is good batch of pills. Top quality. I’m not addicted to them. I just like them. If I wasn’t so unhappy I wouldn’t need them anyway. They don’t affect me like they affect other people. Some people they give mood swings to. Not me. I’m solid. I could stop tomorrow if I wanted. But what’s the point? Have fun while you’re young, I say. How old are you?’

  Delilah, keen to avoid removing her clothes and bending over and having her eyes whipped out, and extra worried having just spotted the warden’s other eye rolling about on the Whipping Boy’s homework and staring reproachfully at her, answered in her most appealing tone, ’19.’

  ‘Still a teenager, then. When’s the big two-oh?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Doing anything special?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Depends how busy I am. What will you do for your eleventh?’

  ‘Get off me head, probably. Go dancing with Gentle. Don’t know yet. Haven’t decided. I’ve got an exam the next day. It’s not fair. If I fail it for any reason, I will have to whip somebody for the sake of it, that’s just the way it is.’

  ‘Do you get nervous?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nervous, before exams?’

  ‘What? Used to, before I started doing the pills. Not any more. I can’t remember the last time I was nervous. Maybe when I went to the dentist. But my teeth were fine. I can’t believe they used to rot once upon a time. What about your teeth? One’s missing. How did that happen? Let me look in the hole. Open up. Come on, you stupid old woman, open up. Does that hurt? No. Does this hurt?’ The whipping boy prodded in Delilah’s mouth. As she winced, some information came though on the Whipping Boy’s Life, which diverted him.

  ‘You’re due at a hearing,’ he told Delilah, ‘and you’re late. They’re sending two officers for you. Looks like you get to keep your eyes another day. I wonder what your hearing’s about. No one has a hearing without dropping at least ten floors. But if I were you I’d expect more. A lot more. My voice will break soon, by the way, just you wait.’

  By her prisoner’s face, and the terror she couldn’t wipe off it, and the guilt the murder gave it, the two officers recognised Delilah for what she was, a prisoner not a plumber. They took her away in the lift that went left. The lift said nothing, and Delilah decided not to try to strike up a conversation. On the whole it was quite a friendly lift but it might treat her differently in the company of two officers. Or ignore her completely. Which would be upsetting, down here in the System, where she needed all the friends she could get. There was probably a law, anyway, about talking to lifts. She kept quiet. One of the officers said, ‘Got you. Found you.‘ And then they were there. In another place she didn’t want to be.

  7 – A Hearing

  Thousands of flies buzzed round this same room that had witnessed the near loss of her finger. A figure smeared by their swarming sat at the far end where previously had remained an empty seat, and gave by its hunched posture the impression of a judge or some other officiating personage, who now instructed, ‘Somebody do something about these flies. I will not have it. I just won’t. I hate flies. They are dirty. And I don’t like the way they fly, either.’ He or she, for their gender so far was unclear, as almost was their species, clattered a gavel down and a cloud of flies exploded into flight. These flies had red thoraxes and had been named, not necessarily very inventively but perhaps with acuity, by the genetics students who’d created them, as bloodbottles. Subsequent to facing and failing to reject assorted charges these students now survived, or tried to survive, some floors below. Interestingly, one of the charges related to the naming. Blood Bottles had been, in the form of actual bottles, a specialist line the Former Bottle Manufacturer had been about to release prior to his flipping one day at the office. He, with the Authority, was still pushing this unresolved part of the case against the students for copyright breach. A matter further complicated by virtue of the Authority taking measures to ensure such copyright wrangles did not come up in the first place, by assuming ownership of all words. The Authority owned the language, it was simpler that way. However, the students were claiming, unsuccessfully at this point, that the Authority had not put this remit in writing (with the words it owned), therefore its legal standing was doubtful. This was proving unprovable. But the students had to defend themselves, and prisoners, like they, like Delilah, were as such up against the System, and destined to lose. The Authority made sure of that.

  For now, though, the name stuck and the bloodbottles flew freely, apart from when they bumped into each other because there were so many of them. The judge broke though their collective buzz to demand of Delilah, ‘Where the hell have you been. We’ve been waiting. You’re late! We do not possess patience for this kind of behaviour. When a
prisoner is invited to attend a hearing, the prisoner is expected to turn up on time. A tardy arrival can only work against the prisoner. The prisoner must be made aware that a single unit of time is allotted per hearing. If the prisoner misses that whole unit of time the prisoner is assumed by the System, acting on behalf of the Authority, to be fully guilty and sentenced accordingly. Were the prisoner to arrive, say, halfway through the hearing, the prisoner would be assumed half guilty, though not necessarily half innocent, and would be sentenced on that basis. Were the prisoner to be found innocent, having arrived halfway through, the prisoner would still be half guilty and therefore required to serve a sentence proportionate to the charge, a half in this example. You are ten percent late and therefore already ten percent guilty. Do not get your hopes up about being ninety percent innocent, because you are not, and quite frankly we do not need a hearing a establish so. It is called a hearing because you will be hearing what we say to you. And then the next thing will happen, whatever that might be. At this stage it is too early to say. And when the time comes to say it, it will be too late for you. Bailiff! Kill those flies. And pass me the charges.’

  As the judge spoke, Delilah realised that it was the ugly superintendent from the launderette. With flies landing on his or her face and crawling across it, his or her ugliness was escalated and became offensive. Delilah thought that she perhaps found such abhorrent faces so distasteful because at the other end of the facial spectrum were beautiful faces that gave her, so unaccountably, these sexual urges considered today so detrimental. If so, ugliness served a purpose, and she was therefore all for it, though would never attest to this in court, or in a hearing.

  ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking,’ said the superintendent, which sent a shock through Delilah causing a judder that sent flies flying off her. ‘You’re thinking that were you to arrive at your hearing early, or an exact unit of time before your unit of time was due to commence, you would be innocent when the time came for your hearing. We toyed with this idea. But voted it out as too complicated to administer and too prone to miscarriages of justice, something we are keen to avoid, thus the onus must remain on conviction, not acquittal.’

  Busy with a noisy whistling apparatus that sucked air through a pipe, the bailiff worked at reducing the bloodbottle population. Some he trod on, leaving the floor bloodstained, for in these flies the usually pus-white haemolymph was haemoglobin-red. His face was bloodied too, or gave such an impression, because he’d splatted flies against his skin. He appeared to lick his lips, which Delilah did her best not to watch, but like many spectacles of the grotesque, found herself drawn to.

  ‘Now, your case,’ said the superintendent. ‘The fat man’s murder. We have good news for you. The fat man has been found to have died of natural causes. He passed away in his sleep. His hairy teeth cannot be explained. But natural causes is the word. You are more-or-less in the clear, Delilah, on that account.’ This was the first time Delilah had heard her name spoken for many days. It gave her hope, presaged a change of fortunes, she thought. But when things, fortunes or not, were presaged, they usually got worse. ‘Here it gets interesting,’ continued the ugly superintendent. ‘Because this fact of natural causes has come to light exceptionally early, you have not yet completed the statutory remand period required for a suspected murderer. You cannot therefore be released at this time, you understand, because it would be unfair on other prisoners who serve far more lengthy remand periods before being found guilty, or in exceptional circumstances innocent. To release you would quite possibly give rise to cries for judicial review from prisoners who, by happenstance in the most part, have been found innocent years later, by which time they want their years back. Obviously, for obvious reasons, this is in nobody’s interests. Clearly, therefore, on that basis, your incarceration must continue.’

  Then the superintendent said, ‘However.’ Whether this ‘however’ was intended to stand alone or to introduce a counterpoint, Delilah could not be sure. While it hung in the air, as words sometimes did, the bailiff vacuumed flies from the superintendent’s head of hair and hairy nostrils. The superintendent banged his gavel, exploding another red cloud, and said, ‘For lesser crimes you have committed, for which you cannot be tried, due to the vagaries of the law prohibiting a fair trial, you have already served the System and would be due for release tomorrow, or even yesterday – though if you had been released already you would have missed this hearing and therefore been found 100 percent guilty in your absence and arrested immediately. However, release for these pettier crimes is outweighed by your remand, which still stands, and, after this hearing, you will be transported to System Remand 111. There you will mix with other remand prisoners, and complete your remand, remand for a crime you have just been found not guilty of but are legally bound to serve. You future, in Remand 111, is by no means certain.’

  What a set-up, thought Delilah. Now, I’m glad I killed Gentle, even if it was an accident.

  ‘However, this is not all. And here we approach graver matters.’

  There was now a sudden silence. Even the flies stopped buzzing.

  ‘An officer by the name of Officer Gentle has been found murdered. Before he died, he claimed that you murdered him. This in itself presents problems because he was still alive at the time of his claim, and therefore could not make the accusation of murder, as he did, in the past tense. Unfortunately for you however, he then died, or, to put it another way, completed his being murdered. Associating forever your name with his death. Lawyer Poy Yack, recently freed up from prosecuting you in the fat-man case, will take this case instead and prosecute you. Because he is a betting man, though, and cannot resist the force of the bet he made with the fat man, he will also defend you. This is excellent as it removes from you the onerous task of procuring a defence lawyer – who anyway wouldn’t stand a chance against that demon brief Poy Yack. Nor probably would any lawyer you retained gain full possession of all the evidence until after the trial, by which time it would be too late, and too late for you also having spent such quantity of time in the System as to be rehabilitated upon release. Lawyer Poy Yack, who will make full disclosures of evidence to himself, whichever hat he at that time dons, will defend you in the mornings and prosecute you in the afternoons. A very satisfactory arrangement, we all feel. I trust you are happy with this. Do you have anything to say?’

  Delilah opened her mouth to object.

  ‘I do,’ said JJ Jeffrey, ‘Thank you, Superintendent. I would like to ask the prisoner how it felt to kill my friend and officer, the decorated officer Jonathon Gentle, may he rest in peace. And I would like the defendant to respond, in due course, to the Whipping Boy, who upon hearing the news, crashed, and can no longer revise, putting his exam and his eleventh birthday in peril. He and Officer Gentle had planned to go dancing. These are not small matters. It is to these questions that I would like the defendant to return answers.’

  ‘You may proceed.’

  ‘Prisoner, tell me why you decided to drown officer Gentle. Was it not obvious to you that a man who took such pride in mastering the controls of Shower Unit 101 did so because he had a fear of water and could not swim. Further, any man who could swim, would not by choice, at least I’d imagine what I am about to say to be the case – not go round dressed in synthetic fur boots and hats that would clearly, and I emphasise the word, prohibit him from swimming to safety. By such process of thought I contend that you murdered by drowning the officer, but left him just enough air in a pocket by the door of Wet Room 102 so that when the plumber came to switch on the stopcock, allowing him to take the ride in the aforementioned shower unit he was so looking forward to, he could discover the officer. You had been planning this for weeks probably, months. Such a murder required on the part of the murderer intricate knowledge of the inner workings of the System. And here you got cleverer still. By ensuring that the only witness, the plumber, was washed away when he opened the door – he still has not been found, Superintendent, but he is on
ly a plumber – you conveniently disposed of your insider, the said plumber. What do you have to say to this?’

  Delilah opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what the officer was talking about, but didn’t get a chance to speak.

  ‘Bring in the dead officer!’

  Officer Gentle, his face aghast, as Delilah had left it, the wrench in his hand, as she had left it, too, and dry, very dry, was wheeled in, and laid out on the table. There was a faint scent of death and the flies, with an excited swarming buzz, made immediately for his dead body, and soon Officer Gentle was a moving red mass.

  ‘Remove the officer!’ cried the superintendent. ‘Porter 102, take him away.’ Porter 102, a well-fed person, wheeled Gentle out, leaving the hearing room completely fly-free. ‘Bailiff, make a note to use Officer Gentle in future fly removals. I have never seen such an effective fly-removal tool as dead Officer Gentle. Such is his effectiveness that I am tempted to say that he his more useful in death than in life, but, at this legal juncture, I feel such comment would be insensitive, so I shall keep my thoughts to myself.’ The superintendent then chuckled to himself, at his thoughts. And JJ Jeffrey glowered at his, and picked the shell off a hardboiled egg, dropped it to the floor and popped the egg in his mouth. He did not chew it, he opened his lips around it, to reveal its bright white ovoid, and, as such, turned to face the gallery, which Delilah had not noticed before and appeared new, and looked up at the Whipping Boy, who now smiled briefly though his tears before waggling his Voltaire menacingly at Delilah. She had not expected, really, that moving the officer over to the stopcock and placing the wrench in his hand would make his death look like a terrible self-inflicted accident. It had been a long shot and it hadn’t worked. She entertained the possibility, though, that the officer had actually come back to life, turned the stopcock himself, and then drowned by his own stupidity, and had since been dried by someone else’s. You never knew. But that, of course, was the System: that you never knew.