Goatie 33

I was getting good at getting beaten up. I curled into a ball on the bed and let them hit me. Bounced about and squealed. That way you didn’t get hit as much. The screws with their riot shields and protective gear were getting lax with their retribution. ‘Sticks and stones,’ I shouted through gritted teeth. ‘Standards ur slippin.’

They beat me with their batons concentrating on my knees and back. It was agony, but one of the bigger cops took a breather. They all stopped. He pulled up his face mask, sweat making his forehead shiny. The heat of so many bodies in the cell and beating up prisoners had worn him out. A square head so his helmet was a snug fit. His eyes slightly magnified by glasses and elongated nostrils on which a bushy moustache quivered on his upper lip.

He grabbed at my shoulder and helped pass me like a parcel, until I was standing between two guards. He was in charge. ‘Let’s get him out and forensics in.’

One of his cronies had already checked out my cellmate. He kept his facemask in place. ‘Deid as a doorknob,’ he said, shaking his head.

Square head sighed and corrected him. ‘You mean dormouse.’

‘Who gie’s a fuck,’ he replied. ‘He’s still fuckin deid.’   

‘No great loss,’ said the guy on my right. He gripped my elbow and towered above me like the wooden bars on a gym frame when I was a kid.

‘Fieldman, shut the fuck up,’ Square head told him. ‘Have some respect.’

‘I’m jist sayin,’ said Fieldman, grinning.

The guy on my left was equally as big and he shook me to make his point. ‘Every cunt we put this guy in wae ends up deid.’

‘So far,’ said Square Head, making a joke out of it. ‘Maybe it’s an accident. Maybe there ur a few prisoners we could stick him in beside and see whit happens. Maybe he’s jist a stupid cunt that’s a bit unlucky.’ He glared at me. ‘Whit yeh got tae say for yersel?’

I shook my head and didn’t return his gaze. Saying nothing and keeping a low profile was the best answer. I bit down on my bottom lip to try and keep from speaking, but speech bubbled up and out in a voice I recognised coming from me, but no longer my own. ‘Come the time no brick in a building will be left standing. Our clergy will stand around like dumb dogs they are that failed to bark. But when all men speak well of you, then you are surely doomed.’

The grip on my great tighter and then slackened like a breath had been let out of the room. Comfortable in their violence. Dissent made them uneasy, but vengeance had been replaced by the smell of fear.

‘Get him oot o’ here,’ Square Head growled. ‘We’ll put him in solitary til the DI comes to question him. They’ll take him tae the local nick and he’ll be oot o’er hair.’

His body shook beside me in his protective armour. ‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Fielding. He spun me around and poked my back to get me moving towards the door.

‘You’ll need tae bag his clothes and samples for forensic,’ Square Head reminded them.

‘No my problem,’ said Feildman. ‘Thank Fuck.’

When they took my through the gate to take me to the local police station, I was handcuffed to an officer. A strong wind was blowing holding rain. I turned my face up and let it blow through me, cleaning me and, after being inside for s long, I could taste the tang of the Clyde. Sky a mass of grey, banks of clouds shifting and changing and it was easy to see how our ancestors saw portents in their mass. A few sparse bits of grass poked through the tarmac. A nodding yellow dandelion was as exotic to me as Himalayan lilac.

Other wardens waiting gave me hard inquisitive stares, but I wasn’t for hurrying. My reputation had given me a bit of leeway. I hung back soaking in the roofless world. My view no longer framed by bars and tight window frames to dim our light. Gannets wheeled above us, buffeted by the winds with loud adult calls and high piercing cries. They swooped in to squabble over a fish and chip wrapper.   

Tugged into line, I was placed in the back of human horse box.  A jolted start before we moved into the flow of traffic taking us on the motorway and towards the Erskine Bridge. I stood and stared out of the window. Sun cut in and out of the clouds, lighting up the water below. I’d once been held up in my car as the Bridge was closed because there was a jumper up on the rails. I’d cursed him that day and told him to hurry up and jump. Now I was in no hurry and could happily have travelled across all day, every day. The bridge was an anchor to modernity, a landmark always being looked at and taking the place of the Dumbarton Rock. A castle ruins and hermitage on the rock laid siege and captured by Vikings. Herring gulls abandoned nests and no longer haunted the shores. They no longer harvested rock from the nearby quarry leaving behind piles of orange rusting machinery and broken walkways. The media no longer reported suicides on The Bridge—unless it was the most tragic, and newsworthy, like the two wee girls that were in care, and held hands, when they jumped—in case it encouraged others.

Not all suicides set themselves on fire and proclaimed themselves believers in the coming apocalypse. Most just got on with their bits of dying. I’d tried to remember that when my interrogators brought it up. Too soon we were over The Bridge. I’d paddled in the water along the shore of the Clyde when we were kids, but it was all gone. But I sat down swaying with the movements of the van and tried to hold onto it.