Rapture

The Governor was never much of a listener. He had the look of a successful bureaucrat, with a rash on his jowls from shaving twice a day, pin stripe suit and too tight shirt collar that squeezed his Adam’s apple. He talked earnestly at Connelly for a long time and scratched his balls. The two stiff-lipped Correctional Officers’(COs) that stood either side of him pretended not to notice. The drone of inmates’ voices echoing down the gallery, the sound of the two way radios, the rattle of gates opening and slamming shut, meant less than shit to Connelly than the drivel that was coming out the Governor’s mouth.

‘You do understand?’ said the Govenor.

He looked at Connelly. That was called assessment. When Connelly stared back at him, with that look in his eye, that was called insubordination and getting put on report. The Governor went through all the options again, like a man with all the time on the world, a man that liked the sound of his own voice. There were single bunk cells and double bunk cells. He worked it all out for Connelly, how sharing would be better. There was overcrowding in medium security A-Block and cutbacks in funding. Subsequently, there was overcrowding in Connelly’s block. It all sounded very reasonable. If they were having a committee meeting and putting it to the vote then the Governor and the two COs would have voted for cosy little bunk beds all round.

‘If you want to send me a cell mate pick him carefully, because I’ll be sending you back a corpse.’ Connelly wasn’t one of those prisoners that raised his voice, or made any dramatic lunges across the Governor’s desk. He just spoke matter- of -factly.

He wasn’t sure if the Governor believed him. He’d spent a lot to time on report and in the hole, a stone bed, for a stone head, but just didn’t care enough to get angry at the Governor’s splutter, or his purple face, or childish tantrums. He put it down to high blood pressure, bad diet and roosting in the same chair every day. The maximum-security prison held about 100 at any one time. There were 125 in his Block. It was quarried by prison labour and built stone, by granite stone, in the last century. It was proudly christened the Max, the hull of the prison, with steel bars and iron doors banging shut and open during the day. At night footfall in the Max, sneaked into inmates’ dreams, so that even then they couldn’t escape. Everything clanked, or rattled and smelt like a giant steaming latrine. During the day, and most of the night, radios played endlessly the same tinny voiced chart hits, over and over as inmates lay on thin mattresses and smoked even thinner cigarettes and thought of being somewhere, anywhere else. There was no softness to catch their ears.

‘You’ve got to try and be reasonable Gerry,’ said the CO.

He guided Connelly by a deft touch of his arm into his cell. The CO knew the prisoner didn’t like being touched, knew it was a mistake, but couldn’t let himself say anything.

‘Sure, I’ll be reasonable George.’ Connelly said. He could see in the CO’s eyes that he’d forgotten his needs. It was one of the minor and major calculations that he had to make at every moment of the day and night. He was prepared to let it ride, just another part of the sheep population being shown the way into his prison pen.

He could also see the CO’s prison officer’s scowl, issued with the mandatory stupid hat down over the eyes. George didn’t like being called George. They might have caught tadpoles in the canal together and beached them with their little nets; acting as if they were pin sized Moby Dicks, ready to eat up their world. They might have kicked the same ball up and down the same street all the way to school and back. They might even have climbed the same tree and carved the same initial of Molly Rean, the girl they loved, into the bark with shining eyes and hope that the tree magic would work, for at least one of them. But now George wanted him to call him ‘Sir’, or ‘Mr O’Brien’ and treat him with the respect that a CO was due.

Fuck you, Connelly might have said, when he was younger and followed his words with a blow, or an assault, as they liked to call it. Four of five or them would need to get kitted up, to beat the shit out of him, put him in the hospital wing, but there was no need for that now, the door clicked shut between them and his footsteps echoed away.

Connelly was trying to read a book on economics, when there was a rap on the door. Economics made a dull kind of sense of the world and he appreciated that. Everybody was selfish in the economic textbooks and blindly followed their own needs. He could understand the one big rat run world. But the bigger they got the more mouths they had to eat the small and the small ate the even smaller. That was his understanding of life. It wasn’t about fairness; it was about logic. The logic of the market place. A kind of rationality life did not possess.

He was surprised the CO had bothered knocking on the cell door. Usually, they just jangled their keys and banged in. O’Brien green eyes looked at him through the spy hole.

‘I don’t want you getting upset,’ said O’Brein.

Connelly jumped up and off his bunk. He stood with his back to the wall; his body wound up and coiled. A CO telling someone not to get upset was the equivalent of ‘this wont hurt a bit’ at the dentist, when he was a child.

The cell door squeaked open. They sent the biggest CO, Russell, in the jail to pacify him with O’Brein. Russell, at six foot six looked down on most inmates. His bulk helped him to look out of fat piggy eyes at inmates as if they were fishes in an aquarium that darted this way- and that- when he made his rounds. He thought himself a joker because he mouthed out even dirtier jokes than the inmates to anyone that would listen, but no one found him funny.

Connelly didn’t have a plan. But if he did have a plan it would have been to strike low at the stomach, groin or kneecaps. Most COs were, in some ways, prepared for an attack on the head and upper torso. Few were quick enough to prepare for a frontal attack lower down their bodies.

O’Brein sneaked in the cell door behind him, his hands up, palms in the air facing him, as if to show Connelly that there was, indeed, nothing to worry about. Behind him, dressed like a small boy in prison costume, with bed and bedding neatly folded, and all his kit, was another prisoner.

Connelly could have rushed them, fought them to a standstill and like a game of British Bulldog escaped out the prison door, but there was no escape after that, only reprisals, and he also knew that full well, as the door clanked shut behind him, with the other prisoner still inside his cell. Russell’s blue eyes peered at them through the spy hole. The other prisoner stood, unmoving, as if in a tableaux, until the spy hole swung shut.

‘Where do you want me to put my stuff?’ he said.

Connelly usually slept on the top bunk. But that wasn’t the point. He knew he was being tested. He knew all about his new cellmate. The crimes he’d committed and he knew he should be in the protective wings. This was a win-win situation for the administration. Whatever he did it was the wrong thing.

‘Don’t put your stuff anywhere because you aren’t staying,’ said Connelly. The pulse of tomorrow’s headache was kicking in, twisting and banging the shell of his head, the muscles of his shoulders and creeping down his back.

‘Ok,’ he said, closing his eyes, ‘let me pray a minute before you do what you think you have to do.’

‘Is that why they call you the prophet?’ snarled Connelly.

‘It is in your eyes and in your mouth and the way that you stand. Those that call me a prophet do so because it makes them feel better about themselves. As if somehow I’m different. A prophet is a man that sees injustice and speaks out, so that neither God nor man can stop him. I am not that man.’ He opened his eyes.

Connelly caught him a blow straight to the nose, breaking the cartilage, his nose spouting a fiery red bloom that gushed onto his blankets, in the way that he intended. But he made no move to protect himself. The grey slate of his eyes looked at him steadily.

‘I see the devil in you peeking out, he said.

Connelly’s next blow, a kick that caught him to the side of the head, and he heard the satisfying sound of teeth crumbling. But the old man did not fall.

‘God loves you,’ he said. ‘He is your Father. He is like those tattoos you wear that speak of your needs, only he is on the inside, tattooed to your heart.’

Connelly caught him low, bent him like a bow snapping some of his ribs like the sound of chicken wings.

‘With each breath,’ the old man gasped, ragged and retching out words, from his stomach, ‘He walks ahead, looks behind you. He knows you better than a mother, better than you know yourself.’

Connelly made a full drop kick to his head. He thought would finish it, for both of them.

‘He knows who you are,’ he whispered, but Connelly could hear every word as if it was shouted in his ear. He lifted his foot to stamp his head, but stopped. ‘He knows who you have been…And He knows who you will be. He asks you not to hate so much. Not to hate yourself…He waits for you.’