Bang

  ‘Here here,’ rejoined the Whipping Boy, dressed as a choirboy over his sharpened-studded leather, and within Voltaire range of Delilah. ‘Is it time for my ode yet?’

  ‘Not yet, Whipping Boy, thank you. My eulogy must go on far longer, it is what the dead expect, they have no wish to be skimped on. No, Jonathon was an inspiration to me and to us all. A larger than life character at times, with a bold streak of the like one rarely sees. He wore extravagant clothes, fantastic fur. He was a master at cleaning prisoners in Shower Unit 101, how they loved him, how they will miss him and be all the dirtier for it. Then his dancing. Yes, he danced, danced all day long, for those of you who didn’t know.’ The minister peered over his half-spectacles at Delilah and pursed his lips briefly, dabbing the handkerchief to his dry face. She had never seen Gentle dance and doubted he had the coordination to waggle his toes without falling over. The minister drank something that resembled wine and ate something that might have imitated pretend bread. ‘Decorated too, many-times decorated, he was an officer of the Authority who carried out his duties in the fairest manner. In truth, he would never have harmed a fly. Which brings me neatly to a very funny story. A story about flies, and about what has happened to the funeral feast. What would a eulogy be without some light relief? Ha ha. Silly me! I’m a silly bugger. Poor Porter 102 – and you’ll understand why I call him poor in a moment – was charged with the responsibly of removing Jonathon from a hearing he’d been attending while dead. Now, it just so happens that Porter 102 job-shares as Chef 102 and had been very merrily carting the dead Officer Gentle, fly-ridden it has to be said, towards the kitchen, when officers at a lift called him to their aid. Not thinking, Porter 102 propelled Gentle’s trolley through his kitchen’s flappy doors and rushed over to aid officers, who were struggling with a particularly errant lift designer they’d just arrested. Can you believe that this fool lift designer was ordering the lift – I repeat, ordering the lift, the elevator itself, my gentle flock – not to take him to Shower Unit 101: “I designed you,” I’m told he was shouting at it. “You are my baby, my child. How can you do this to your father? Don’t listen to the officers, don’t do it. I love you. Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut? Why tell the plumber the Authority didn’t have its head screwed on properly. She wasn’t even a real plumber!” Needless to say, as this fracas proceeded, resulting in the lift designer being sedated with a blunt instrument – has anyone seen my silver staff? I’m joking, of course! I am a very funny man – the flies in the kitchen leapt off Jonathon’s body and onto food that, rather unfortunately, was being prepared for his funeral feast. That food that has since been reallocated, though I would not like to be the one eating it – hee-weee! Consequently we have no food. For this you must blame poor Porter 102 – who is currently in his capacity as Chef 102 being severely punished, which is deserved, I’m sure you’ll agree, for the hunger we must now endure, leaving us unable to use delicious funeral food to lessen our grief at Officer Gentle’s death. While, on a happier note, Porter 102 was decorated only this morning in his capacity as porter for coming to the aid of the officers so quickly and effectively – deserved commendation, I’m sure you’ll all agree, also.’ The congregation simultaneously booed and applauded, something inhabitants of this world had become accustomed to. ‘Jonathon Gentle was a great man, with more greatness to come. A sad loss. No, I’ve said that. Cherished, that too. What else? Yes, he shone brightly. A shiny star. Twinkle twinkle. May he rest in peace. Let us pray. Please kneel, the floor was dusted specially this morning.’ The minister finished quickly, with the aid of a sneeze, ‘On your knees!’

  ‘What about my ode, Minister?’ demanded the Whipping Boy.

  ‘Let us pray!’

  ‘Would you like a taste of my Voltaire? My ode!’

  ‘Let us pray. Then we shall hear your ode, Whipping Boy. Praise be.’

  After prayers, the ode came, a shrilly affair that had Delilah cringing in her cage, and nearly cracked its bars, but unfortunately did not. Then Gentle was sent to eternity in the lowest three floors by some longstanding arrangement the Former Bottle Manufacturer had with the Authority’s top people. He did body disposal. Or something like it. Revival.

  Next came long hours of slow singing. The service dragged.

  At the foodless funeral feast, which followed much later, Lawyer Poy Yack came over and said, ‘Why, hello there,’ and blinked himself awake while absentmindedly brushing prayer dust from his knees. ‘How splendid bumping into each other like this. Are you keeping well? You look terrific. Love the outfit.’ He slapped Delilah’s cage in a friendly manner. ‘Been giving your case a good mull over. Can’t put my finger on it but there’s some sort of glitch. Don’t you worry about that, though, I’ll get to the bottom of it, you see if I don’t. Can’t wait to take this case before the superintendent. I mean, the Superintendent. That’s right, he’s the judge on this one, a Superintendent with a big esse in such a capacity. Bit irregular, I know, but better to be up before someone you know than someone you don’t. That’s what I always say. I say, you’re finger’s grown back. Isn’t that a thing! I thought I cut it off. Oh, popkin, it really is so lovely to see you.’ He broke off. He said, ‘My. Is that the time?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Delilah, for inevitably it was whatever time Lawyer Poy Yack found it was. A clock struck noon, confirming that it was the time he thought it was, and Poy Yack’s face changed. He said, grizzled, ‘You’re going down, prisoner, you’re in big trouble. Walk free? Walk? You won’t even be able to stand by the time I’ve finished with you. I’m throwing the book at you. Just wait till you see how big the book is. You don’t know what’s about to hit you. Boy o boy. You’ll see. You’ll see. And it won’t be a book!’

  ‘All right, Del?’ said the administrator from the Office of Color Coding walking past, touching a lilac chart to his forehead.

  ‘No problems, son,’ said Delilah without meaning to, giving him a nod.

  Poy Yack was saying, ‘You wait till court, you miserable murdering low-down lowlife piece of work. I’m going to work you over good and proper up there on the stand. The stand? You’ll have to sit down to hear what I have to say to you. Who’ve you got to challenge me? Hey? They better be good. Very good. Know why? Because I’m sharp, sharp as they come. I’m so sharp I could cut you in two with my tongue. Your defender comes along with his old-school legal twaddle and I’ll cut right through it. You see if I don’t. I could have cut your finger off with my tongue, if I’d wanted. But I didn’t. You wanna hear why? Because I’m the greatest. I’ll see you in court. Just you see if I don’t.’ Poy Yack rubbed his hands and clapped them, and walked away, leaving Delilah in her wobbly cage. All she could think about was what time the trial would be. AM and she’d go free, with Lawyer Poy Yack defending her; PM she wouldn’t stand a chance. But that was just justice. And that was the System.

  Officer JJ Jeffrey appeared through some multicoloured light, which lit his pith jungle hat like an ice cream, and said, taking it off and pouring water from it, ‘I wonder how long you’ll last in 249, 250 after you’ve been found guilty. Not long, I shouldn’t think. Your funeral won’t be anything like this. No, they’ll bury you before your dead, probably. If in doubt, bury, that’s what they say down there. Course, you might be sent down – especially a recidivist like you – to the Former Bottle Manufacturer for life-lengthening treatment. What is the point of punishing a prisoner by imprisonment – which of course is where the words prisoner and imprisonment come from – if the prisoner can sidestep his, or in your case her, imprisonment simply by killing themselves or getting someone else to do it? What kind of a deterrent is prison with a gaping get-out clause like that? What does a murderer care about his own life when he has already proved he doesn’t care about any life by taking another’s. No, quite unsatisfactory, prison. Didn’t work with you, did it. You were in prison, you murdered. One we know of, who knows how many we don’t, and undoubtedly had in your head blueprints for many more slay
ings. No, far better that a potential murderer be deterred from committing crime by the terrible spectre of infinite life in jail. He really is quite a chap, the Former Bottle Manufacturer, not that I have ever met him, few have, but I do have a bottle he made for me when he was younger. What a bottle. Its hole is at its base. Perhaps you’ll meet him. He won’t give you a bottle, I can tell you that. I am being promoted, I can tell you that too, thanks to that little film I made. Upstairs said I excelled myself. I can’t put a foot wrong these days. Right, this way,’ and he wobbled Delilah’s cage away and immediately crashed it into the empty table. ‘Who put that empty table there. Heads will roll. Follow me, prisoner, this way. Look smart.’ And he walked abruptly away, calling to Delilah, ‘This instant!

  ‘Like your cage, mate,’ said the office administrator, back, running his rolled up colour chart across its bars. ‘Very stylish. Was it expensive?’

  ‘Ah, you know,’ said Delilah, ‘you can’t put a price on fashion.’

  ‘Too right, Del. Here, have you seen a pair of slippers knocking about? Bit like yours but in better condition. Lost mine and can’t for the life of me recollect where I put them. Last saw them just after saying goodbye to you. It’s a mystery. I love lilac. It’s gorgeous. Oh, that’s right, I remember what I had to say to you. We should go on holiday again. The way you fixed those pipes in that half-built holiday unit – I’m mean, without you, Del, that break would have been a complete write-off.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Delilah.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ said the administrator, and tapped the lilac colour chart to his head again.

  ‘Ta-ta, son.’

  Officer JJ Jeffery circled the table and now returned to Delilah. ‘I won’t have it,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried to be nice. But you refuse to move. You’re a, what do they call them? A mule? Never mind. No, no. Yes. Have it your own way then. I’ll just have you returned to Remand 111 by force. If Officer Gentle were still alive I’d let him loose you. I expect he’d relish the opportunity to take vengeance on you for killing him whilst he was about it.’ And JJ Jeffrey was off again.

  The Whipping Boy came over and whipped at Delilah’s bars, and whipped and whipped. When he had done that, leaving her unscathed because to his fury the bars protected her and his aim was off due to his mourning and his depression, he handed her a package. ‘You’re working for me now, cow,’ he said, with the Voltaire deeply humming above his head. ‘Sell these. Then I’m coming for you. The only way you’ll evade me is if you escape or something equally spectacular. Not much chance of that. Any day now I’ll come through those lift doors, and when I do–’

  ‘Quiet for the reading of the will, Whipping Boy,’ called the Minister, patting his white, dry forehead. ‘Gather round, everybody, see what you’ve won. Hee-weee!’

  10 – A Consequence of Child Abuse

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ the lift designer told Delilah, returned to Remand 111. ‘The prisoner encouraged it. If I get my hands on that prisoner ... Faultless, my lift had been up till then, hadn’t put a foot wrong. Then some prisoner disguised as a plumber gets in and my lift runs its mouth off. I’ll throttle that plumber. I lived out in the ten-lane suburbs, you know, lovely home unit, beautiful view, the skies: amazing. An hour after lightdim, one night, I’m in my bedroom, I’m naked, I’m minding my own business, with a small inflatable b– never mind, when Bang! the door’s off its hinges, they’re in my bedroom, they jump on me and pop my small inflatable b– ‘You’re under arrest, lift designer,’ they cry. Then I’m being escorted here. I’m bathed, showered, you can’t imagine. They treat you all right, I bet, a woman. They don’t blow water up your’ – here he gave cuckoo whistle – ‘no way. Not a broad. You get off light. You–‘

  In her cage, Delilah raised a hand to stop him, ‘Look, lift designer, never mind all that. I’ve been through it, believe me. There are more important matters to attend to. Whilst I was away at a funeral, everyone down here bar my old teacher and you, who must have arrived after the feast, died from food poisoning. We need to get out of here, we’ll be next. What I want to know is, if I can get us to the lift can you make it take us to zero? It wouldn’t er,’ Delilah broke off.

  ‘Er? Er what? Don’t you er me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take my friend. But would it take us?’

  ‘Of course it would. It is my baby. My child. I am its father.’

  ‘The child brought its father down here. Maybe the lift doesn’t like you. Did you fall out?’

  ‘What cheek. I can override it. I can talk to it in a special way. When it tries to go right, I tell it that I love it and tickle it and it goes up. I was just about to do this before, and was making practice tickles on my own neck, which had me in rather a rapture, when I was hit on the head with a silver staff by a man in a silver tracksuit.’

  ‘I’ll work out a way of getting us there. You do the rest. Okay?’

  ‘My lift will do as it’s t–!‘

  ‘Shsh!’

  Warden 111 waltzed over, with his deep, nasty voice. ‘I see our resident drug dealer has decided to again grace us with her presence. To what do we owe this pleasure? I thought you’d gone to your funeral.’

  ‘Somebody else’s,’ said Delilah quietly.

  ‘She’s a murderer, lift designer, you do know that, don’t you. I’d watch my back if I were you. Wherever she is, there’s a killing. Ask her about Dormitory Warden 100, my friend, once, whom I was related to, genetically; ask about the fat man with the hairy teeth; about the Officer whose funeral she’s just attended; about how she had her Life stolen up there and reported it and next thing you know the poor officer chasing the man with a tan goes down, killed by a piece of falling roof he wouldn’t have anywhere near had it not been for her.’ He pointed at caged Delilah. ‘You’ll be next, lift designer. If she doesn’t do you herself somebody else will.’ Warden 111 sat on the ground, lifted a foot, began biting a toenail. ‘Can’t have scissors down here,’ he said, ‘case you lags get your hands on them and go round cutting each other’s hair in contravention of System hairstyle guidelines. Moreover, you wouldn’t look after them and they’d blunt in no time. How’s your cage, anyway, prisoner? Getting used to it yet? We kept someone down here in one of them for, let me see, how long was it now? Many a month. Two years, nigh on. A spitting image of yours, it was. Upright we kept him, the whole time. Imagine that. Then what happened to him? Let me think about that now.’ The warden nibbled on his big toe in thought, counted his toes, gave an unsure look, said, ‘So he did, he went and got himself a job in the Center of Disinformation. Incredible transition. Never quite worked out how he managed that. One day he was over there’ – the warden pointed nowhere in particular – ‘relaxing in his cage in the withered manner he’d so perfected, when in came two officers from the Center of Disinformation, which is rare in itself, direct contact between the Center and the Authority being frowned upon – though of course contravention must exist in order to highlight law, perhaps this being an example of that in action – and insisted the man’s locks be unwelded so they could take him away. His cage didn’t have wheels, you see. He went on to deliver lectures on cage detention and design, in a bid to keep the young on the straight and narrow. What happened to him next I have no idea. You know what it’s like trying to get a direct answer out the Center of Disinformation. You might as well try escaping from the System, it’s not going to happen. Oh look, there go your eyes again. No, prisoner, the Center won’t come and take you away, you’re a murderer, you killed a man; this other guy, Cagee we called him, he was only in for a traffic offence, falling asleep on an escalator if I remember correctly, very irresponsible. That’s how tragedies happen. Ask Officer JJ Jeffrey.’

  ‘Still,’ said the lift designer, ‘I’m safe from her whilst she’s in that cage. She can’t get me from in there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure. She probably already has. She’s probably already done the damage that will get you killed.’

  ‘You have a
very negative attitude, warden.’

  ‘Pah, lift designer.’

  Delilah risked a question, one whose sheer asking, she thought, might alter the answer, alter it for the worse. But the pressure was just too great not to ask. ‘How long will I stay in here?’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Warden 111 and moved to a new toe. ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘Yes?’ urged the lift designer.

  ‘Very interesting indeed.’

  The junkie teacher cupped her hands to her ears, which looked like cabbage leaves.

  ‘You can forget that wax key for a start, prisoner. The locks are welded up. But there is a formula, one that Cagee didn’t know about, yet later went on to lecture about, rather intriguingly. That’s right, I attended a lecture of his once, in translation obviously, because as you’re well aware the Authority owns the language and to get round that all public broadcasts must be translated into another language not owned by the Authority. Consequently it is not always so easy to understand such lectures.’ Delilah raised her eyebrows and shook her head, muttering to herself something contemptuous that reflected her views on the Authority. ‘However,’ continued the warden, ‘and I think I’m safe in saying this, the formula is complicated, to say the least. You could, though, if you cracked it be out of your cage by the time I’ve finished my chiropody. Or it could be years, a lifetime. Longer still. The Whipping Boy understands it, I believe, but he’s very hot on calculus. Or was at least. He’s really gone downhill since Gentle was slaughtered. Hit those drugs, he has, like nobody’s business. Snort snort, bang bang. Personally I never much cared for Officer Gentle, though don’t tell him I said that. There was a time, not long back, when he couldn’t put one foot in front of the other without asking permission. Then he got in with the Whipping Boy – what a strange pair they made, you should have seen them dance together – and he was almost overnight a changed man. I say almost. And that’s what I mean. His cruelty is of course to be commended. It’s his dress sense I had the problem with. I mean, who in their right mind goes round in crotch-high synthetic fur boots and matching hats? Lunacy. Did you know he had waistcoats on order too? Anyway, where were we? The formula. Bit of a twister. And even if I did understand it I wouldn’t tell you. But I do know, as you would have worked out for yourself were you not a hopelessly dizzy hairdresser, that by asking how long you are to remain caged you have just lengthened your captivity.’