Bang (16 page)

‘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 slayings. 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.