Baghlan Boy Page 4
‘Got any sugar?’ she asked, as if they had met before.
‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ He produced a sugar bowl and made to move from behind the counter.
‘It’s alright, wait there.’ She went back to her table and brought her cup over. ‘Just one for me, please.’
He spooned in some sugar, carefully.
‘It’s good coffee. What do you do here?’
‘I’m a waiter.’ He wasn’t; he washed dishes. ‘One day, I’m going to have a restaurant like this.’
It seemed to be the done-thing in England – to talk big, to possess aspirations. But he didn’t want to own a restaurant; he didn’t know what he wanted to do. It had taken him almost a year to get into a school in England, by which time it was almost time to leave. He had revered the school: the uniform, the classrooms, the teachers and the library. He was astonished it was totally free, but the rudeness and the lack of interest of other pupils dismayed him. He still liked to read, to learn about British history. He loved Elizabeth I – she was never off the television in England. He had learned that this was the third time the British had invaded Afghanistan. He had hopes of continuing his education, but he would have to check with Khalid first. He always had to check with Khalid first.
Farood knew this was not what a Pakistani girl was interested in, so he began to describe his plans to make money. She worked in an opticians, was older than him by two years, though he cut that in half with a recognisable lie. She asked him if he liked working there and he nodded. Then she began to make fun of her sister, who was performing what she said was her ‘accountant act’, in serious expressions and feigned interest in the man opposite – Khalid with his ‘businessman act’, with those hand gestures that flaunted his gold cufflinks. Why did people act their lives?
‘Why is your sister working on a Sunday?’ he asked her.
‘She’s not really working, is she? What’s Khalid like?’
‘He works hard.’ He could tell she wasn’t convinced.
‘This restaurant must be doing well.’
‘It’s busy.’
‘The car he drives, the house he lives in. It’s not that big a restaurant.’
He was flummoxed. ‘How have you seen his house?’ he asked.
Sabana looked across at her sister and Khalid, who was now holding his accountant’s hand. ‘He’s married, isn’t he?’ she said.
Farood felt forced to nod.
‘And I bet he’s got kids,’ she added.
She took out her phone to text her sister. There was a bleep across the room. Sabana looked straight at Farood, noticing how the pupil in his right eye had gone astray, and offered him her best smile. At that moment he sensed danger, for Khalid was watching him too.
That afternoon seemed much further away than it was. He wondered at Sabana’s face at that exact moment, the expression she was wearing. He tore himself away from the photo and considered that even though life in prison in the UK was better, was safer, than the life he had known in Afghanistan, he would never make a home in a cell. That was for others, with all their rivalries, their out-the-window screams and promises of death come tomorrow. Suddenly an envelope slid between the door and its frame – Scully was doing the mail round. Farood sprang towards the wafer-thin column of light.
‘Boss! Boss!’
It wasn’t easy to get Scully to open a door, but he did at least return to yell through them at prisoners. ‘What?!’
‘I need you to get me in education.’
Scully relented and unlocked the door. ‘To do what?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know yet.’
Farood had already opened the official-looking letter. It was the worst of news. He was sitting on his bed with it in his hand.
‘To do what?’ repeated Scully.
‘Oh no, boss.’
‘What?’
‘My appeal is going to be heard.’
‘That is a good thing, Farood.’
‘No, it’s not good. You got to help me, boss.’
The door slammed and Scully was gone. He looked at the letter again. ‘The Court of Appeal’, its coat of arms. Then he looked at the legal firm representing him. Except they were not representing him; they were representing the cousin of a senior partner, Khalid.
He took the letter down to evening association and sat opposite Barker, who had his back to the rest of the wing. He smiled at Farood; he had missed him.
‘You okay?’ Barker nodded. ‘What you been up to?’
Barker shrugged. ‘C-c-clean-n.’
Farood put his letter from the Court of Appeal under his nose. ‘Do you know anything about this?’
Barker did. Barker always put in an appeal. Barker always pleaded not guilty even when legally advised otherwise. He didn’t consider it his job to do the prosecution’s job for them. Barker took out a pen and wrote across the letter: Last chanse, dont fuck up. He could tell that Farood wasn’t optimistic. He also knew that for the prisoner with the longest sentence in the jail, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
‘I don’t want the appeal to go ahead.’ Barker looked confused. ‘Not yet,’ added Farood.
‘But the lawyer wan-wants the…’
Farood folded the letter just as Atherton swaggered over to their table.
‘What’s that?’ snapped Atherton, but Farood just shook his head. Atherton held out his fist for Farood to touch.
‘Roodie, come, sit with us.’
Atherton began swaggering back across the wing without glancing over his shoulder. Farood followed, if only to cement the end of the conflict, but also out of curiosity. It was time he learned more about the craft of being a prisoner.
Whilst Barker returned to his cell, Farood sat at a window table with Atherton and two of his boys: small, blank-faced, forgettable boys with hardened eyes. One of them asked him about his week in the block. ‘He soldiered it,’ Atherton told them. The three Manchester lads talked about how much time they had done in segregation and how to cope with the isolation and the slow passing of hours. One of them asked him, ‘Did you get thirty years, yeah? How long they saying you’re gonna have to serve?’
‘Fifteen years.’
Even they could not think of a consolatory reply.
Officers Scully and Robertson were supposed to be in the centre of the wing, surveying around forty prisoners. According to memorandums they should have been on watch for lads exerting ‘undue influence’ on other lads, or ‘evidence of gang activity’, which wasn’t hard to miss. Instead they stood with a group of Asian lads near the wing office. Senior Officer Robertson had recently taken to mingling with this group of lads to discuss Islam and religion in general; he was continually explaining how similar their faith was to his. Only the other day there was something said at church that reminded him of the Qur’an, except the congregation he was in discussion with on the wing weren’t that familiar with the text. For most Muslims in the jail, Friday prayers and Muslim study group on a Tuesday was down time out of pads and an opportunity to firm up the sense of unity with co-religionists. It bolstered protection and power as much as faith. Their top man was a heavyweight lad with the braided skullcap. His name was Atif and he was centre stage with strong arms and expansive gestures, pointing between Robertson and himself.
Atherton stared over at them, studying the group, the way that Robertson was supposed to. ‘Hey, Roodie, see that lot over there. They’re very cosy with the officers. Always wording them up, aren’t they? And they got all the wing jobs. They got ours.’
‘Who?’
‘That one pointing at the SO – Atif. He’s got your cleaning job, he has.’
Farood gazed across impassively as the stocky lad clapped his hands and pointed both index fingers at Robertson to explain something.
‘You know him, Roodie?’
‘Atif?’
‘Thinks he’s the main Muslim in this jail. Wants to tell everyone what to do,’ explained Farood.
Atherton could see hostility and the embryo of an allegiance. ‘I know for a fact they’ve got phones, Rood. And they’re getting stuff brought in. Loads of gear.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He offered to rent one out to this guy I know. For some stupid amount of money. So, the guy rents the dog off him. Two days later he has his pad spun. He’s a fucking grass as well.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
One of Atherton’s boys with a C-shaped scar on his cheek summarised. ‘He can afford to lose the phone and he keeps the screws looking the other way.’
Then Atherton turned to Farood and stated the objectives. ‘So, what I wanna know is, how’s he getting stuff in?’
‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’ replied Farood.
‘He only helps his own kind. You get me? You go to the mosque with him? And an extra shower on a Friday’s not enough for me to become a Muslim. Half the time they’re speaking to each other in another language – I bet you can speak bits and pieces of it.’
‘I speak four languages.’
Atherton grinned as this. ‘You learned a lot on the road, didn’t you?’
‘But I don’t want to be involved in trouble here,’ added Farood. ‘I’ve already been to the block.’
‘For a week, mate. You’re gonna be here a while, aren’t yer? You can do your time the hard way – no phone, no weed, no contact with anyone outside except a couple of visits a month – or you can have some comforts and a little bit of respect on the wing. People who’ll look after yer, Rood. Or do you wanna be like Barker. A victim?’
Farood wandered off slowly, heading for the stairs. Turning, he looked back at Atherton and his boys and made a detour to Barker’s pad.
Barker was sitting on his bed in a gloom of cigarette smoke next to a pile of documents. He held out a slip of prison-issue writing paper for Farood. On it was the phone and fax numbers of the Court of Appeal and the address of the legal ombudsman.
‘What’s this?’
‘Legal ombudsman. Where you… com… plain…’
‘About my lawyer?’
Barker nodded, smiled.
Five
English teacher Julian Burgess didn’t do tough with the lads. He was serious and kind, grammar school Lancashire, and he sniffed when his learners annoyed him. His clothes were an expression of his humility – he wasn’t the kind of forty-three-year-old that prisoners knew or wanted to be, or could ever be frightened of. Instead he found himself relying on their unpredictable curiosity, plus his ability to bend each lesson towards their lives. He didn’t try to persuade them to find jobs when they left the jail; neither was he offering advice on committing more lucrative offences more effectively – though after more than a decade in the industry he was capable of running a reoffending surgery. He believed that the worst kind of poverty was to be preoccupied with money and had embarked on a quest to free prisoners from their cultural deprivation – knowing in his bones that if he could equip only a handful, just one, even, they would be able to find their own way out of the mayhem that enveloped them. His subject was English and he taught it in whatever way he felt like on the day. Today’s text was Macbeth, a classic for any ambitious gang member with pretensions towards the arts.
The carpeted classroom hummed with the sound of the computer server standing in the corner and from each wall shiny, neonate faces of conjoined computer screens stared in on everyone. At the far end of the room two prisoners were plugged into black towers, nodding rhythmically between earphones whilst at the other, Julian stood impassioning about Act One Scene Six to Farood, Atherton, Atif and Kelly. Four lads out of six was good going. Atherton had claimed the role of Duncan since he had himself once received near-fatal stab wounds. Kelly played his sidekick Banquo, as he did on the wing. Farood and Atif were sharing the lead as a theatrical device and to lighten the load. Julian himself played Lady Macbeth. Julian had shown his cast Polanski’s film version up to Duncan’s murder. They knew that Macbeth’s beef with Duncan was universal in nature: having to take shit. Duncan strutted down the IT suite and into the castle courtyard, his eyes locked on to Farood. Behind him, Banquo did a convincing job of surveying a world that was completely new to him; nodding to his king he snarled, ‘This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.’
Kelly’s voice was as high as the ramparts and his rasping Scouse overspill accent a delight to Julian’s ears. ‘This guest of summer, the temple haunting martlet does approve, by his love’d mansionry, that the heaven’s breath smells wooingly here… Boss, what’s a martlet?’
‘It’s a bird.’
Kelly continued, ‘No jutty, frieze, buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird hath made his pendant bed…’
Kelly was all conviction, like he was reciting an alibi with certitude. He loved acting – knew it was what he should have done all along. He was the most distracted and explosive of repeat offenders but had recently declared himself a Buddhist, which had given him a certain amount of cache in the jail. He told other lads that he was sleeping much better since taking up meditation, not to mention the relaxed-looking woman he spent an afternoon a fortnight with.
Atherton asserted his authority over his subjects in the only way he knew – giving Macbeth the eye.
Atif, who was technically still offstage, could tell it was on. ‘Why are you staring at me like that, Atherton?’
‘Cos, I know what you’re fuckin’ up to, that’s why.’
‘No, you don’t, how do you? He doesn’t know, does he boss?’
‘I can fuckin’ tell you wanna be on top,’ explained Atherton.
‘You can’t tell nothing mate.’
Atif was equipped with all the violent recklessness of Macbeth and none of the prevarication.
‘Guys, let’s play that with irony, shall we? …Would you like to live in Macbeth’s castle as seen in the film?’
‘It’s a shithole boss,’ said Kelly.
‘Sooner live here.’
‘So, say it like—’
‘We’re taking the piss?’ said Atherton.
‘Exactly,’ confirmed Julian. ‘Shouldn’t find that too hard.’
‘Want me to walk up here again, boss?’
‘Yes, Atherton. Then I want to go to our two Macbeths on the next page and their struggle over his conscience. Atif, you’re the part that wants to kill Duncan; Farood, you’re the part that says no.’
Farood scanned the words. Where did it say that? He could see ‘pity’, ‘angels’, ‘knife’, ‘heaven’, even, but not ‘kill’. He knew how to work at language. Growing up as he did close by unheeded borders, by eleven he had made his way into three languages as well as the Arabic of the madrassa. Hiding, scavenging and travelling across two continents, he had absorbed some Greek and French, and lastly, he had learned to operate in English. But the words in front of him were a game that the writer was playing with him. The story though, felt familiar.
‘Boss, what happens to this Macbeth in the end? Does he get away with it?’
‘He gets killed, Farood.’
‘Who by?’
‘The man whose family he murders.’
‘What’s his name, this man?’
‘Macduff.’
The Afghan thumbed his way forward in search of a reckoning and then it was Atif’s moment. He squeezed his abdominals, flexed his pectorals, and plodded through and past the words as if they were his own creed. Atherton turned his back and Kelly adopted a more reflective pose with one foot upon a chair, his elbow on his knee. Julian let out a director’s sigh.
Atif closed his book. ‘Boss, I shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘Why?’
‘Boss, it’s forbidden to me. In my religion, it’s haram.’
Atherton began laughing whilst Kelly offered an opinion on direction. ‘Boss, I think you should let Atif go and get someone else in.’
Farood raised his hand. ‘Boss, when someone kills a person, they don’t do this much thinking about it. The other person, their life, is nothing to them.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’
‘They would kill you and never think about you again.’
A woman entered the room without knocking and an appraisal of her began before she had closed the door behind her. Whilst Kelly was engrossed by the sight of her thighs, Atif placed himself alongside her pearly skin; none were as thorough as Atherton. His gaze consumed the tied-back hair, the flushed neck, the stretched silk shoulders pushing apart her cardigan.
He was just at the small of her back when Kelly walked right across him. ‘Miss, is that Truth… Your perfume?’
She’d had years of it and knew how to survive this eternal turnover in boyish interrogation.
Kelly persisted. ‘No, hang on, it’s Jo Malone, isn’t it?’
Atherton laughed at the clever bastard. Kelly took a step in towards her. She swung a look at him and then coldly announced to Julian she had come for Farood. As she left the room with him, Julian gave way to a look himself.
Kelly put his hands down his jogging bottoms and whispered into his teacher’s ear, ‘Like a piece of that, would you, boss? You dirty bastard.’