Читать книгу Subject 375 - Nikki Owen - Страница 8

We are taken through to something named The Booking-In Area.

The walls are white. Brown marks are smeared in the crevices between the brickwork and, when I squint, plastic splash panels glisten under the lights. Michaela remains at my side. I do not want her to touch me again.

The guards halt, turn and thrust something to us. It’s a forty-page booklet outlining the rules of Goldmouth Prison. It takes me less than a minute to read the whole thing— the TV privileges, the shower procedures, the full body searches, the library book lending guidelines. Timetables, regimes, endless regulations—a ticker tape of instructions. I remember every word, every comma, every picture on the page. Done, I close the file and look to my right. Michaela is stroking the studs on her tongue, pinching each one, wincing then smiling. Sweat pricks my neck. I want to go home.

‘You read fast, sweetheart,’ she says, leaning into me. ‘You remember all that? Shit, I can’t remember my own fucking name half the time.’

She pinches her studs again. They could cause problems, get infected. I should tell her. That’s what people do, isn’t it? Help each other?

‘Piercing can cause nerve damage to the tongue, leading to weakness, paralysis and loss of sensation,’ I say.

‘What the—’ The letter ‘f’ forms on her mouth, but before she can finish, a guard tears the booklet from my hand.

‘Hey!’

‘Strip,’ the guard says.

‘Strip what?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, you’re a funny one, Martinez. We need you to strip. It’s quite simple. We search all inmates on arrival.’

Michaela lets out a snort. The guard turns. ‘Enough out of you, Croft, you’re next.’

I tap the guard’s shoulder. Perhaps I have misunderstood. ‘You mean remove my clothes?’

The guard stares at me. ‘No, I mean keep them all on.’

‘Oh.’ I relax a little. ‘Okay.’

She shakes her head. ‘Of course I mean remove your clothes.’

‘But you said…‘ I stop, rub my forehead, look back at her. ‘But it is not routine. Stripping, now—it’s not part of my routine.’ My stomach starts to churn.

The guard sighs. ‘Okay, Martinez. Time for you to move. The last thing I need is you getting clever on me.’ She grabs my arm and I go rigid. ‘For crying out fucking loud.’

‘Please, get off me,’ I say.

But she doesn’t reply, instead she pushes me to move and I want to speak, shout, scream, but something tells me I shouldn’t, that if I did, that if I punched this guard hard, now, in the face, I may be in trouble.

We walk through two sets of double doors. These ones are metal. Heavy. My pulse quickens, my stomach squirms. All the while the guard stays close. There are two cleaners with buckets and mops up ahead, and when they see us they stop, their mops dripping on the tiles, water and cleaning suds trickling along the cracks, the bubbles wobbling first then popping, one by one, water melting into the grouting, gone forever.

One corner and two more doors, and we arrive at a new room. It is four metres by four metres and very warm. My jacket clings to my skin and my legs shake. I close my eyes. I have to. I need to think, to calm myself. I envision home, Spain. Orange groves, sunshine, mountains. Anything I can think of, anything that will take my mind away from where I am. From what I am.

A cough sounds and my eyes flicker open. There, ahead, is another guard sitting at a table. She coughs again, glances from under her spectacles and frowns. My leg itches from the sweat and heat. I bend down, hitch up my trousers and scratch.

‘Stand up.’

She snaps like my mother at the hired help. I stand.

‘You’re the priest killer,’ she says. ‘I recognise your face from the paper. Be needing the chapel, will you?’ She chuckles. The standing guard behind me joins in.

‘I do not go to church,’ I say, confused.

She stops laughing. ‘No, bet you don’t.’ She cocks her head. ‘You could do with a bit more weight on you. Skinny, pretty thing like you in here?’ She whistles and shakes her head. ‘Still, nice tan.’

She makes me nervous—her laughs, jeers. I know how those people can be. I pull at the end of my jacket, fingers slippery, my teeth clenched just enough so I can keep quiet, so my thoughts remain in my head. I want to flap my hands so much, but something about this place—this guard—tells me I should not.

The sitting guard opens a file. ‘Says here you’re Spanish.’

I reply in Castellano.

‘English, love. We speak English here.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am Spanish. Castilian. Can you not hear my accent?’

‘This one thinks she’s clever.’ I turn. The other guard.

‘Well, that’s all we fucking need,’ says sitting guard, ‘a bloody know-it-all.’ She spoons some sugar into a mug on the table. I suddenly realise I have had nothing to drink for hours.

‘I would like some water.’

But she ignores me. ‘Martinez, you need to do as we tell you,’ she says, stirring the mug.

She has heaped in four mounds of sugar. I look at her stomach. Rounded. This is not healthy. Before I can prevent it, a diagnosis drops out of my mouth, babbling like a torrent of water through a brook.

‘You have too much weight on your middle,’ I say, the words flowing, urgent. ‘This puts you at a higher than average risk of cardiac disease. If you continue to take sugar in your…‘ I pause. ‘I assume that is tea? Then you will increase your risk of heart disease, as well as that of type two diabetes.’ I pause, catch my breath.

The guard holds her spoon mid-air.

‘Told you,’ says standing guard.

‘Strip,’ says sitting guard after a moment. ‘We need you to strip, smart arse.’

But I cannot. I cannot strip. Not here. Not now. My heart picks up speed, my eyes dart around the room, frenzied, a primitive voice inside me swelling, urging me to curl up into a ball, protect myself.

‘You have to remove your clothes,’ sitting guard says nonchalantly. She blows on her tea. ‘It’s a requirement for all new arrivals at Goldmouth.’ She sips. ‘We need to search you. Now.’

Panic—I can feel it. My heartbeat. My pulse. Quickly, I search for a focus and settle on sitting guard’s face. Acne scars puncture her chin, there are dark circles under her eyes, and on her cheeks, eight thread lines criss-cross a ruddy complexion. ‘Do you consume alcoholic beverages?’ I blurt.

‘What?’

Perhaps she did not hear. Many people appear deaf to me when they are not. ‘Do you consume alcoholic beverages?’ I repeat.

She smiles at standing guard. ‘Is she for real?’

‘Of course I am real. See?’ I point to myself. ‘I am standing right here.’

Sitting guard shakes her head. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ She exhales. ‘Strip.’ Then she sips her drink again.

My chest tightens and my palms pool with sweat. ‘I cannot strip,’ I say after a moment, my voice quiet, the sound of it teetering on the edge of sanity. ‘It is not bedtime, not shower time or time for sex.’

Sitting guard spurts out a mouthful of tea. ‘Fuck.’ Taking a tissue from her pocket, she wipes her face. ‘Jesus. Look,’ she says, scrunching up the tissue, ‘I am going to tell you one more time, Martinez. You need to take your clothes off now so we can search you.’ She pauses. ‘After that, I will have no choice but to carry out the strip myself. Then you’ll be placed in the segregation unit as a penalty.’

She folds her arms and waits.

I wipe my cheek. ‘But…but it is not time to strip.’ I swivel to the other guard, begging. ‘Please, tell her. It is not time.’

But the guard simply rolls her eyes, presses a blue button by an intercom and waits. No one speaks, no one moves. A few more tears break out, trespassing across my face, down past my chin, stinging my skin, alien to me, unknown. I do not cry, not often. Not me, not with my brain wired as it is; I am strong, hardened, weathered. So why now, why here? Is it this place, this prison? One hour in and already it is changing me. I touch my scalp, feel my hair, fingertips absorbing the heat from my head. I am real, I exist, but I do not feel it. Do not feel anything of myself.

Shouts from somewhere drift in then out, their sound vibrating like a buzzer in my ears. I try to stay steady, to think of home, of my father, his open arms. The way he would pick me up if I was hurt. I inhale, try to recollect his scent: cigars, cologne, fountain pen ink. His chest, his wide chest where I would lay my head as his arms encircled me, the heat of his torso keeping me safe, safe from everything out there, from the world, from the merry-go-round of confusion, of social games, interactions, dos and don’ts. And then he was gone. My papa, my haven, he was gone—

Bang. The door slams open. We all look up. A third guard enters and nods to the other two. The three of them walk to my side.

‘No!’ I scream, shocked at my voice: wild and erratic.

They stop. My chest heaves, my mouth gulps in air. Sitting guard’s eyes are narrowed and she is tapping her foot.

She turns to her colleague. ‘We’re going to have to hold this one down.’

Time has passed, but I cannot be sure how much.

The room is dark, a single light flashing. I look down: I am sitting on a plastic chair. I gulp in air, touch my chest. The material, my clothes: they are different. Someone has put me in a grey polyester jumpsuit. I look around me, frantic. Where are my clothes? My blouse? My Armani trousers? I draw in a sharp breath and suddenly remember. The strip search. My stomach flips, churns, the vomit flying up so fast that I have to slap my palm to my mouth to keep it in. Their hands. Their hands were all over me. Cold, rubbery, damp. They touched me, the guards, probed me, invaded me. I said they could not do it, that it was not allowed, to cut my clothes off like that, but they did it anyway. Like I didn’t have a voice, like I didn’t matter. They told me to squat, naked, to cough. They crouched under me and watched for anything to come out…They…

A screech rips from my mouth. I stand, stumble back against the wall, the bricks damp and wet beneath my fingertips. This must be the segregation cell. They put me in segregation. But they can’t do this! Not to me. Do they not know? Do they not understand? I turn to the wall, smacking my forehead on it, once, twice, the impact of the pain jolting me into reality, calming me. Slowly, I start to steady myself when I feel something, something etched into the masonry. Turning, I peer down, squint in the blinking lights, feel with my fingers. There, scratched deep into the brickwork, is a cross.

A shout roars from outside. I jump. There is another shout followed by banging, ripping from the right, loud, like a constant thudding. Maybe someone is coming. I run to the door and try to see something, anything. The banging reaches a crescendo then dies.

I press my lips to the slit. ‘Hello?’ I wait. Nothing. ‘Hello?’

‘Go away!’ a voice screams. ‘Go away! Go away!’

The yelling smashes against my head like a hammer— slam, slam, slam. I want it to stop but it won’t, it simply carries on and on until I can’t take it any more. My hands rake through my hair, pull at it, claw it. I cannot do this, cannot be here. I need my routine. I want to go home, see my bare feet running through the grass along the hills back to my villa, the sun fat and low. I want to sprint the last leg to the courtyard where the paella stove is fired. Garlic, saffron, clams and mussels, the hot flesh melting in my mouth, bubbling, evaporating. That is what I want. Not this. Not here. Think. What would Papa tell me to do?

Numbers. That is it. Think of numbers. I shut my eyes, attempt to let digits, calculations, dates, mathematical theories—anything—run through my head. After a moment, it begins to work. My breathing slows, muscles soften, my brain resting a little, enough for something to walk into my head: an algorithm. I hesitate at first, keep my eyes shut. It seems familiar, the formula, yet strange all at once. I scan the algorithm, track it, try to understand why I should even think of it, but nothing. No clue. No sign. Which means it’s happened again. Unknown data. Data has come to me, data I do not recall ever learning, yet still it appears, like a familiar face in the window, a footprint in the snow. I have always written the calculations down when they emerge, these numbers, these codes and unusual patterns, have always recorded them obsessively, compulsively. But now what? I have no notepad, have no pen, and without inscribing them, without seeing the data in black and white, will it exist? Will it be real?

More shouting erupts and my eyes fly open. There are so many voices. So loud. Too loud for me, for someone like me. I clamp my hands to my ears. My head throbs. Images swirl around my mind. My mother, father, priests, churches, strangers. They all blur into one. And then, suddenly an illusion, just one, on its own, walks into my mind: my father in the attic. And then I see Papa getting into his Jaguar, waving to me as he accelerates off, my brother, Ramon, by my side, a wrench in his hand. There is no sound, just pictures, images. My breathing becomes quick, shallow. Am I remembering something or is it simply a fleeting dream? I close my eyes, try to will the image back into my brain, but it won’t come, stubborn, callous.

There is more banging—harder and louder this time. I tap my finger against my thigh over and over. Papa, where are you? What happened to you? If only I had stayed in Spain, then none of this would have happened. No murders. No blood.

I clutch my skull. The noise is drowning me, consuming me. The banging. Make the banging stop. Please, someone, make it stop. Papa? I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.

My breathing now is so fast that I cannot get enough oxygen. So I try cupping my hands around my mouth to steady the flow, yet the shouting outside rises, a tipping point, making me panic even more. I force myself to stand, to be still, but it does not work. I can hear guards. They are near. Footsteps. They are yelling for calm, but it makes no difference. The shouts still sound. My body still shakes.

And that is when I hear a voice say, ‘Help me,’ and I am shocked to realise it is mine. I scramble back, shoving myself into the wall, but it does no good.

The cell turns black.