Goatie 28

I woke up choking with terror, and felt like a good drink, or even a bad drink like Eldorado, the way a gourmet chef dreams of the perfect meal. Even a half-bottle of Pomagne to celebrate deadening the day and being to able to breathe properly. Knackered, I cocked my head to one side, listening for the sound of the panic alarm. Yet more running feet. It was wearing me out. Wearing the governor and assistant governor out. Wearing out the wardens, and most of all it was wearing out us prisoners in extended lockdown.

The kitchen hadn’t issued breakfasts or lunches and pre-packaged meals were the order of the day for dinner. Hit or miss. I pulled on a pair of socks and slinked over to the toilet and afterwards washed my face and drunk some of the water that had travelled through miles of leaded pipes. It could no longer do me much damage, but it tasted like putrid and a punishment.

There’d be a riot if anybody could find enough bodies lumped together, or if we had enough energy. The prison was sweltering and we stunk like galleon slaves. Droopy Eyes was back from holiday. But she seemed normal. Well, normal for Crystal. Her parents must have been hippies on the meths. No snakey interludes with her tongue flicking in and out. No looming over me like a meeting of the church bazaar. She’d reminded me my lawyer was here to see me and was waiting in the interview rooms.

My morning walk was through the debris of the night before. The wardens had taken to confiscating anything that was flammable. Which was pretty much everything. Books were banned like in the Southern states of America that were regarded as mildly inflammatory. Screws took a pro-active approach to anyone with lighters of fuel and beat the shit out of them. Prison trustees went on strike. There was no cleaning rota. No rota at all.

A squeaking noise made me look through the safety wire hung between floors to prevent suicides. An elderly prisoner pushing a cart. A strike-breaker or black leg, he’d have been called on the outside.  He stopped at the first landing, squatted on his haunches and tossed a few food cartons over his knobbly shoulders and into cart. Prisoners stuffed debris through the hatch when they’d finished eating. Some of them daubed with excrement. He got busy with a brush. A languid rhythm of stop and start and avoiding the guys that tried to spit on him. But it was more like dribbles raining down from the spyholes.

I scuttled behind the guard, picking my way through the litter. Ignoring the threats shouted at the warden or me, I wasn’t quite sure. It was every man for themselves and that included staff. There were rumours of bringing in the army.

I was glad to escape the clamour inside the relative silence of the interview room. The lawyer’s eyes followed me as I came into the room and sat across from her. Lesley of Roberson & Roberson was nothing special to look at, but when you’ve been in a while you tended to forget the great and the beautified. Notice things like the scent of expensive perfume. Mousy hair cut fashionably short. Her slender build and rigid posture added inches and gave her an assured bearing. Undertaker colours in matching jacket and skirt. These were offset by a creamy blouse and a thin silver chain with a crucifix hanging between her breasts. She’d been solicitous of my health when we’d first met. But it was no more than good manners. She was wary and closed-up as an ageing nun.

She took off her reading spectacles, holding them in her right hand as she thumbed through her file. A tangle of various coloured stickers pursing my case across the criminal court systems. Frowning, she examined a sheet of paper that had been misfiled. Her gaze turned inward. Licked her lips and carried on working. I wondered what she needed me for.

Squinting at me bug-eyed through her reading glasses, a watchful expression softened her face and made her almost seem human and not just another brief. She knew more about my case than me and could speak the language of legalese. ‘When I first took on this case,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t terribly pleased. I know you proclaimed your innocence.’

I cut in. ‘I’m ur innocent as the day aw was born.’

She waited for me to finish and began again. ‘I was not over hopeful we could convince and jury of your innocence. It seemed somehow too outlandish to believe that someone would deliberately set themselves alight.’

‘Spontaneous human combustion,’ I reminded her.

Her eyes skimmed over the top of my head. ‘Quite,’ she said. ‘As I was saying, the chain of corroborating evidence was partial to incomplete. We don’t often find spontaneous human combustion in Clydebank, a small Scottish town. We are not Americans. And we don’t live in places like Asia where setting fire to yourself, especially if you’re a monk, against some perceived temporal injustice comes with the territorial history.’ She fingered a place-spot page on her file marked pink. ‘But now we have the same thing happening, not just in prisons, but in London and Paris and Bonn and all the major cities.’

She turned the pages on her files, scanning from top to bottom.

‘So whit yer saying,’ I asked, ‘I’d next tae nae chance of winnin my case. Noo cause people are commitin suicide on an industrial scale, there’s a good chance I’ll get let aff?’

Holding her specs away from her, she nodded. ‘I wouldn’t quite put it like that.’ But she’d a question for me. ‘What does their common proclamation, “I believe in the coming apocalypse mean” exactly? That might help our case.’