To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

of the crap if you behaves like a good boy.” It was the same to some extent with the more dangerous fellow inmates. Unless they were ‘mental’. Then probably you had problems. You couldn’t predict, only stay neutral, merge with the dark.

Sej, equally jailor, criminal and mental, would have to be played on all three lines.

Some of our ‘talks’, macabrely, were actually quite fascinating. And as long as I did everything he told me to there was to be no resurgence of threat.

To return however to that first night, sitting up on the bed, I had no means of knowing he would be there through the rest of May, approximately three weeks. I had no apprehension I would have to maintain my life as a model prisoner so long.

But then, what else had I imagined could happen?

In some incoherent way, frankly, I must have known it might well go on. Or had I only, down in some dim recess that my swift, healthy, human talent for Denial instantly smothered, believed he would kill me? Regardless that was of my conforming and docility. I had no real notion of what other tests lay before me through the rest of May. If I had, would I have doubted my own ability to comply? Maybe not. Mortal things are generally programmed to attempt survival. Left with one plank in the sea, we cling to it. So much in life is destructive, is deadly, that without this built-in mechanism, less bravery than cowardice, less cowardice than resentment and rage, most of us would vanish long before my father’s touch of a Grim Reaper mowed us down. Sleepless there, I must have known this too. And finally I did fall asleep, near five in the morning. I hadn’t meant to, or thought I could. Sej woke me at 8 a.m. with a mug of tea, milk, no sugar, as I drink it. “Regardez,” he said, and drank two swallows of it, to demonstrate it wasn’t drugged.

By the third morning, my mobile phone was gone from the path. It had been possible to see it from my study window, which faced the front. I’d at no time thought I could get hold of it. No doubt it was more sensible for someone else to have the use of it, if it still worked. Nobody that I’d detected had called me since that first unanswered ringing. Duran, for example, would think I was now on my trip up north. As for Matt, swimming in his own ocean of depression he’d simply give up on me. What did I matter? Perhaps the woman he’d picked up had stayed on, and even if I’d arrived he would have put me off.

Sej’s mobile seemed to have unlimited credit, or was paid for via bills; he recharged it regularly in whatever room he happened to be, never letting it from his sight.

He had urbanely confiscated my house keys during the initial evening, BB, asking for them in a friendly, casual manner. That was both those to the front door and the key to the kitchen door. A spare key to the kitchen door had once existed but was years since lost, by me. Sej didn’t ask if there was one. Unless I wanted to try to break through either door – both of which opened inward and would be difficult – which means impossible for someone at my physical standard – my only chance was to climb from a window. But the windows, both upper and lower, refitted in the eighties and ‘modern’, opened only at the tops, a narrow strip that might be useable by a skinny infant or a cat. I could have broken them, if with a little effort, as the glazing was fairly tough. (I knew that because, some years before, one of the young footballers who replace each other in the Lane, and hold the World Cup there several times a month, managed to lob a ball square at my front window, which held.)

But again I’d need to put my back into it. And it would make one hell of a row.

And Sej was always there.

Despite his offhand comment on ‘shopping’, and my vague half-hopeful inner reaction, he never left the premises. Instead he would bring out his mobile and either he or I, on his instructions, order things in, paying with two or three of his credit cards.

Wine came, whisky, soda, dry ginger, bottled water for him, fruit juices, food and bathroom supplies, (including shaving equipment, toothbrush, and other things also for him -he’d brought nothing with him – even some jeans and shirts, socks, boxers, the whole kit. I was reminded, seeing these completely accurate stores and garments carried in by him, of my own future fears for myself as an old man, at the mercy of the careless deliveries of others. Seemingly everything Sej wanted was perfect).

At night we ate takeaways. Or he did. He never now forced me to join in, and frequently I settled for beans on toast, or a ham sandwich. Once a Chinese meal was delivered. We observed the same ritual as with the Indian, and then Sej served the food before me. There was hot and sour soup, duck with blackbean sauce, pancakes, noodles, sweetcorn and crab, Szechuan Prawns, squid with garlic. “So glad you were tempted to have some,” he said, in his ‘winning’ mode. I did eat a little. It was very good. There were also what the menu described as Two Free Bottles of Beef. He’d ordered desert too, pineapple, toffee bananas and ice cream.

The food alone was costing him a small fortune.

After our dinners we’d drink coffee, whisky if he told me I should have one, vodka for him, a double without mixer. I recollected that from when I first saw him in the pub in the Strand.

The anti-drugging procedure was always kept to.

I prepared my own food and ‘kept my eyes on it’, he did the same, but mostly had his food