Bang

by Charles Kennedy Scott

  Obviously no one budged. Except Delilah, who pushed herself up and made to leave. ‘Not you! Stay where you are. How can we have a trial with no defendant? Are you stupid? Stupid enough, patently, to think you can walk out of your own trial, therefore stupid enough to think you could get away with murder. The two go hand in hand, getting caught for murder and stupidity. As we shall prove. Or the prosecution will, anyway. I am impartial, you understand. A-choo! When I speak of the outcome being preordained do not take this to mean that I know what it is, not at all, just that it is already decided. 1000 out. Come on, be off with you.’

  Still no one moved. ‘Ow,’ said the Superintendent and extracted a troublesome eyebrow hair. ‘I was on a moving floor, once,’ he began, in a tone that tipped-off that he now spoke by example, ‘up in the Central Shopping Plaza, and the floor refused to move, too many people were aboard it. An officer demanded that those nearest the edges alight. But, just as now, no one moved. Obviously, had I spoken out, with my judicial clout, I could have cleared the moving floor in no time, but I was interested in seeing what transpired. It is not for me sufficient in these my retirement years to observe behaviour in launderette customers alone – or in the odd special court case, such as this one, for which I have come out of retirement and left the laundrette in the trusty hands of the assistant superintendent. No, 45 minutes we were there, stuck on that floor. 45. Until I nudged the officer and advised that he start shooting. A scenario of direct equivalence to that which greets us now. If the thousand people nearest the door do not start leaving this instant I shall, one by one, find them in contempt of court and have them up before the Whipping Boy for immediate punishment by Voltaire.’

  ‘THAT’S RIGHT,’ said the Whipping Boy in his deep new bass voice, which startled the front row particularly, who still did not move, though some had pushed their buttocks off their seats and now wobbled on their hands in a state of limbo they could not reverse for fear of not only ignoring the Superintendent’s order but actually flagrantly contravening it by sitting back down.

  ‘Unholster your Voltaire,’ ordered the Superintendent. The hundred furthest from the door, who considered themselves safe, laughed and stamped their feet in a cattle-charge kind of way.

  Still the nearer 1000 did not leave. Instead Delilah read a lurid excitement on their faces. She quickly realised that the problem here was that secretly, or maybe not even secretly, the 999 who were in fact unlikely to be whipped wanted to see the one who was, who’d be made example of, and were prepared, with such good odds, to risk themselves. There was no denying it: a Voltairing represented required viewing.

  ‘Yes,’ the Superintendent enunciated clearly, ‘I believe the defendant is quite correct, as she sits there in the dock, wondering what will become of her. She has worked out exactly why you’re not moving. The insatiable urge of voyeurism. The very reason that you have come here, in the first place, to see what fate befalls her. Perhaps, on these grounds, I can make an exception and allow 999 of the 1000 to stay. Under one condition.’ He paused, as people habitually did when making such pronouncements. ‘That the 999 choose a thousandth person to receive the Voltaire. Quickly now, we must wrap this trial up in time for a party tonight to be attended by the special waitress, at which I will be greatly enjoying myself. This waitress cannot perform afternoon functions and never has been able to, for she becomes a senior scientist and conducts experiments on prisoners by rubbing eggshells on their teeth – it was she that invented the Rolling Rail, an inspired device. Who is it? Who will be whipped? Choose now.’

  They hummed and they mumbled.

  Perhaps they’d all walk out, unable to sacrifice one of their number, thought Delilah.

  But agreement was quickly reached. ‘The gimp.’

  ‘The who?’ asked the Superintendent.

  ‘Him. The cripple.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there: V-Bones.’

  The Superintendent demanded, ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr I-Haven’t-Got-Any-Hands!’

  ‘Cagee?’

  ‘Yes him,’ they all cried, gleefully excited, ‘Him. Yes him. Whip Cagee!’

  ‘Yes, well he isn’t much use, is he,’ agreed the Superintendent. ‘Without any hands. Would Officer JJ Jeffery sanction such action?’

  ‘Oh indeed, it is long overdue. What is the point of the man, I often ask myself. He has no hands, as you have said yourself. But not only does he have no hands, he has no wrists, which is why his bones splay in that grotesque manner when he tries swimming. His left foot, well the less said about that the better, other than remarking that he brought it upon himself. We can make amends for such a character, and in a forward society such as ours we do, but no matter how correct we attempt to be, there is no getting round the fact that a man of such little intelligence, such unintelligibility – did you hear him lecture? – and such physical impairment, can bring nothing to us, nothing but his weight upon our systems of support. Harsh though this may sound, it remains the truth. I sanction the action.’

  Cagee was jostled forward, distraught already that the school he’d been promised – or mislead into believing he’d head – had in fact metamorphosed into a courtroom. Now further distraught at this outburst of dislike, or hatred, toward him – only because he didn’t have any hands and had a funny walk, he thought. But this had happened before. Why didn’t people like him? The lady friend, she whom he’d cared so much for, he’d had his accident and never heard from her again. It hurt, caused tears. Yet still, as he was kicked to floor by the 999, he knew he couldn’t stop caring about her. 'Tell my lady friend that not a day went by when I didn't think about her and miss her,' he called out, choking on his tears, wiping them away with the feather-duster glove on the arm that Officer JJ Jeffrey had broken that day, and it had just rebroken when he'd been kicked to the floor. ‘Please don’t have me Voltaired. I beg you.’ His pitiful eyes attached themselves to Delilah’s. Their relationship, she thought, up till this moment had been one of uncertain exchanges; now across the baying crowd the two acquired a helpless unity. ‘Ho ho,’ hoed the Whipping Boy, drug-high, enjoying his new voice, taking centre stage with his trusty Voltaire deeply humming above his head. ‘One, two, eyes gone. Over here, Headmaster, it’s blindness time.’ He sniffed orange powder from the side of his fist and shook his head as it took effect. ‘I LOVE my Voltaire,’ he boomed and threw a swing that grabbed a standing up Cagee by the shoulder and pulled him down.

  ‘I thought you liked me,’ said Cagee to the Whipping Boy.

  ‘Like you? I can’t stand you.’

  ‘Help,’ said Cagee. This was for Delilah. But what could she do?

  ‘You are to blame for this,’ the Superintendent told her. ‘If by now you’d pleaded guilty, this wouldn’t be happening to your friend. But you don’t care. Loyalty to you is an other-worldly concept. Look how your fragile friend breaks to pieces under the Voltaire.’ It was true that a feather-duster glove that may or may not have contained part ulna or radius had just gone skidding across the floor, that the higher-heeled of the two shoes appeared severed from its leg, possibly with a foot still in it, and was being kicked about by the bailiffs, two of whom had stretched their stripes apart to form a goal, and had just this moment scored causing riotous cheering.

  ‘I will leave his eyes till last,’ called the Whipping Boy, ‘so that he sees the whole thing.’

  ‘This isn’t fair,’ said Delilah.

  ‘We’re one hundred and eleven floors underground,’ replied the Superintendent, still rising in rostrum higher and higher, and lowered his eyes at Delilah while simultaneously pulling a hair from each eyebrow that raised them high in the process. ‘And you’d do well to remember that.’

  ‘Tell my lady friend I miss her, please,’ said Cagee again – and then an eye was gone. It was quickly over from then on and left Delilah with a sick feeling. The crowd, who’d got what they wanted, now weren’t so sure they’d wanted it, and became subdued. The Whipping Boy gathered h
is breath, sniffed more orange, looked unperturbed, and felt inside his studded pants: it all seemed to make more sense down there now.

  While the Superintendent snarled, ‘Well, that’s calmed them down for you, girly, just what you wanted. Don’t tell me you didn’t plan the whole thing. Stupid you might be, selfless you’re not. Sacrifice your old friend Cagee – who went to such lengths to befriend you on your first day – that’s right, just to calm the crowd so they become less likely to goad me into delivering a harsh sentence. However, consider yourself thwarted by your own ruthless ambition, in that regard. You have said goodbye now to any leniency I might previously have had at my disposal. Lawyer Poy Yack, proceed, if you’d be so kind, and bring to its swift conclusion this torrid affair. My blood is boiling now, at the sight of her.’

  Poy Yack began.

  As he spoke – explaining to Delilah that she would not leave this courtroom an acquitted woman – the bailiffs dragged over a box with written on its side The Headmaster, tipped Cagee’s body into it and dragged it away, picking up his body parts as they passed, throwing them in.

  Poy Yack was saying, on the subject of there being no witnesses for the defence, ‘And, such a witness would, additionally, favour the case for the prosecution. How is one to refute evidence if none is put? Thus the prosecution has procured a witness for the defence. His name is Shane. Bring Shane on.’

  Shane was brought on, hissing at Delilah that he’d tried paying her bail and that she’d better not have said anything about him – or she’d be in for it, when this was all over. Which puzzled her. She did not recognise him.

  ‘Can you confirm that, of your own volition, you approached the prosecution, after we located you as the man who tried posting bail for the defendant, and offered to vouch for her good name?’

  ‘I can,’ grunted Shane. And huffed.

  ‘Describe your relationship with the witness, if you would be so kind, and remember this is a court.’

  ‘It’s not as though I know her too well myself, sir, but she has had a relationship with my friend.’

  You, thought Delilah. Now she recognised him, without his disguise, the man who’d put her here, the man with the tan – the Man With The Tan. She was furious. She wished she had told the Authority about him. But, now she came to think about it, the Authority hadn’t even asked about the man with the tan, the man who’d mugged her and started all this off.

  ‘Your friend?’ asked Poy Yack.

  Shane said, ‘Harry.’

  Delilah let out, more involuntarily than anything she’d let out of her body in her life, a roar.

  ‘My goodness,’ exclaimed the Superintendent. ‘Do I take that roar to mean that the defendant is acquainted with this Harry character, and angered by this information? I think I do.’

  ‘Harry says she’s a slut, Superintendent,’ said Shane.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Poy Yack. ‘Unbridled, wanton, wild.’

  ‘Words along those lines.’

  ‘No, witness, those words exactly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  It all made sense to Delilah now. The cool fortune of Lifes in Harry’s hands that day. The two of them, Harry and Shane, were in it together. But get her out of the System on bail so she wouldn’t talk? Get her out? These two had put her in here. Something stopped her, now, from telling the court this. She knew the System. She couldn’t trade a pickpocket for her freedom; she was a murderer, accused at least, though death did seem to follow her around. She couldn’t point the finger at the root of her misimprisonment, and hope to extricate herself. That was the System.

  ‘And the defendant’s behaviour is okay, do you think, Shane?’

  Shane huffed again and told Poy Yack, ‘I do not think that such behaviour is okay, no. Society’s sexual mores are a thing best kept in check. Carnal profligacy never did set a good example and certainly does not today. Intercourse, such as it is, is unnecessary now and was undoubtedly only fractionally less so back then. Reproduction did not require the repeated couplings men and women chose to pretend it did. They blamed instinct Nature had put in them but Nature was not to blame. They were. We have at last established this.’

  ‘We, witness?’

  ‘The Authority, sir.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘How, I struggle to imagine, did persons, famous or responsible, leaders of that period believe they could function successfully in their famous or responsible roles while also engaging willy-nilly in such sexual encounters. A powerful man caught in the vulnerability of nakedness was not a virtuous man, nor a man capable of producing a good decision, not with all that rudeness on his mind. What, for instance, did those licentious leaders–‘

  ‘You speak of leaders, do you consider Delilah a leader?’

  Shane gave another his huffs, which the crowd seemed to be rather enjoying and probably helped shake off what was their shock at Cagee’s treatment and their collective responsibility for it, and said, ‘She gives the impression of, in a manner of speaking … there is something about her that suggests such a propensity, yes, certainly, for …’

  ‘Leadership?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shane.

  ‘Leadership. She’s a leader?’

  ‘It is so. Without a doubt, sir.’

  ‘And there you have it, Superintendent. Shane vouches for the Defendant’s character and does so in glowing terms. What, after all, could be more laudatory than the endorsement upon your character of leader. Leader, Superintendent.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Superintendent, ‘positive testament indeed. I do see what you mean. It is rather worrying, isn’t it. Thank you, Shane.’ He resumed plucking his eyebrows, which he’d forgotten he was doing, and wasn’t quite sure why he’d started, so hadn’t realised that he’d stopped, or how long for. At this point Delilah finally realised, or finally accepted, that whatever happened here today, the outcome could not be good, could only be bad.

  ‘Any sign of that plumber, yet?’ called the Superintendent.

  Two bailiffs ran out of the court, in search of him.

  ‘Court adjourned,’ called the Superintendent.

  Officer JJ Jeffrey rushed out, too, quite obviously in need of a toilet, quite obviously in search of one, squirting egg yolk from his mouth, and shouting, ‘Ice, ice, I want some ice.’

  The popcorn seller with the unpopped-popcorn necklace and abnormally large head, to which another ticket fine had been stuck, did his rounds. He popped corn in a machine on his back and made a lot of money – especially off the party of schoolchildren, who looked very much like the bunch who’d laughed at Delilah in her cage not so long ago and in this very room back when it had been Remand 111. Perhaps they were System children. They probably were. They’d certainly enjoyed the whipping more than the adults. It was a fallacy that children didn’t like violence, or turned away from it. Then JJ Jeffrey rushed back in, looking refreshed, and walking very differently, and gave the Superintendent a nod, which woke him up at the exact moment that the popcorn seller’s head finally burst.

  18 – A Death Sentence

  For Delilah, strange, this feeling of heading towards a place she didn’t want to go, knowing there was nothing she could do about it, to halt it. I’m a brick, she thought, cracked bashed and fissured, sinking through water, plummeting, and I can’t even see the bottom yet. Where will I stop? The popcorn seller was stretchered out bouncing in stretchy stripes and the trial went on around her, and kept on getting worse.

  ‘Gentle,’ cried the Whipping Boy when the clear casket containing the skeleton with the uncertain smile was presented, marked up now as Evidence: Officer Gentle. The Whipping Boy ran over and flung himself on his dead friend. A single solitary bloodbottle crawled over the officer, through him, in and out of his skull’s upturned nostrils, seeking a last morsel, a last meal, a final resting place to lay its eggs. Gentle had been rejected by the Former Bottle Manufacturer on the basis of his being tainted by these flies. Now even the fly rejected him and sought escape f
rom the casket and crawled upside-down on the roof. ‘Oh Gentle,’ sobbed the Whipping Boy, chopping out lines of orange on the roof (frightening the fly) and sniffing it up. Then he beat his hands on the casket, much to the crowd’s consternation, who feared its clear walls would crack and the fly escape. Given this treatment, the casket fell off its trestles to the floor. The powdered orange went everywhere. After sniffing the floor clean the Whipping Boy noticed with more howling that though the casket had remained intact the officer’s skull had split cleanly in two – rather suggesting that the wrench had killed him, not the supposed drowning claimed by Officer JJ Jeffrey. That skeleton, Delilah would have liked to smash it into little pieces. But the bailiffs took it away, carried again in a cradle of their stretchy stripes.

  There was no plumber coming here today, Delilah knew this. There might be something else she didn’t know, in fact she knew there was, but there was no plumber. He had become a red herring. Perhaps he always had been. Saint the filmmaker had suggested so.

  Poy Yack asked the next witness, ‘You have a grievance with the defendant, is this correct?’

  ‘I own a hat, boot and glove shop, specialising in fur, fake and genuine, and do have a grievance with the defendant, yes.’

  ‘What is this grievance?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What is the grievance?’

  ‘Officer Gentle and Mr Cagee were my customers, then they came into contact with the defendant and the next thing I know they’re dead. I have lost two customers, that is my grievance.’

  ‘Your grievance has been heard and will be considered when it comes to sentencing. It is a good grievance.’ Poy Yack indicated that the witness may climb down.

  ‘Thank you. I am sorry I said I beg your pardon when you asked what was my grievance, I heard you perfectly well the first time, and sorry that I made you change your this to a the to help me understand, when it was not at all necessary. It was for me a moment of power. I must take such moments when I can, such is my humdrum life.’ The shop owner climbed down saying ‘Thank you’ also to the bailiff who offered him a slice of cake, which he walked smartly away eating, coughing on a big mouthful and in doing so spraying crumbs over his shop’s latest one-piece fur outfit, which today he modelled in a bid for business. The crumbs got caught in the outfit’s deep surface, which was many-coloured, and when he had been on the stand it had often crackled due to big discharges static electricity that had built up within it. Each time this happened the corner of his mouth had shot into his chin as if attached to a thread pulled by someone from much lower down in the audience: the witness stand was many metres high in the air. Only the Superintendent was at a higher elevation, and rising still, as the proceedings proceeded. Delilah thought the arrangement absurd.