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  We had parents’ evening that week. I had hoped his mother would come, but of course she did not. I decided to send a note to her, and ask her to come and see me to discuss Mihkel’s progress. The school secretary gave me the address, and told me that they were from Estonia. There was no previous address listed, which seemed strange. It seemed unlikely that he had come straight from Estonia since he clearly understood English. I stayed late at school that evening, marking the children’s work. Mihkel’s handwriting was understandably behind that of his peers, and I wondered where he had been before St Anselm’s.

  Leaving the school at six-thirty I decided to stretch my legs, and walk the long way home which, as it happened, took me past his house. It was already dark. The house was a brick terrace, with a bay window and two shallow steps up to a dark-coloured front door. As I approached I saw his mother leaving, slamming the door and walking quickly away. She glanced at me as she passed, but clearly had no idea who I was, which I thought was odd since she had seen me many times outside the school. Her expression was blank, and I wondered if she took drugs – perhaps she was an addict? Once she was out of sight the street was empty, and I stopped in front of the window and glanced in. The curtains were half-drawn, and through a gap I could see the back of Mihkel’s head, watching television. The room was chaotic, with unwashed plates and pizza boxes strewn around the floor – of course, that had been the squares and circles in his drawing. His mother did not return for some two hours, and when she did, there was a man with her. I pretended to fiddle with my shoe laces and watched from across the street as they entered the house. What had she been doing, to leave Mihkel alone at night? Was she a prostitute? Was he one of her customers?

  I worked late many nights after that. Then I would walk slowly, in the darkness, up one side of the terraces, and down the other. I found myself enjoying the street’s strange beauty, its rectangles of curtained windows like giant coloured lanterns, and the pooled yellow light of the streetlamps. I was a guardian angel, walking amongst the lights. I would always stop and look through the same gap in the curtains. They were clearly never opened, just left exactly as they were, day and night. Mihkel was always sitting there, in front of the flickering television. He always seemed to be alone; I had no idea if his mother was home or not, unless I saw her enter or leave.

  One night a man walked to the house and knocked at the door. He looked sideways and saw me watching, so I passed him and walked on down the street. It was the same man I had seen the week before. He knocked on the door and was admitted. I waited a few minutes before walking back, and when I stopped outside I could hear an argument. A woman was shouting so loudly it was almost screaming. I had no idea what they were saying, but she was clearly hysterical. I could hear Mihkel crying. I hesitated, then walked quickly to the front door and knocked. His mother opened the door herself.

  ‘Is everything all right’, I asked.

  She stood there staring at me, not speaking. I could see she had been crying. The man appeared behind her, then moved her aside, and looked at me more closely.

  ‘I saw you. Outside?’

  I explained that I was passing, and had heard a scream. Mihkel then ran to the door. He was about to speak, but the man shoved him back. He said something to him. Mihkel looked at me, then turned and walked away.

  He saw me glance down at Mihkel, and caught my eye.

  ‘Everything is OK,’ he said, ’it’s OK.’

  He closed the door and the house became silent.

  I barely noticed the walk home; my mind was racing. That night I could not sleep. What should I do? I could hardly go to the authorities – they’d want to know what I had been doing there. The next morning I went to see the headmistress. I said it was a matter of urgency, and told her of my concern - that Mihkel had said she was not his mother. I had to be careful of course in what I said – I could not give myself away and say I had gone to his home. She listened with an air of irritation. Mrs Briggs is young for a headmistress – too young, I think, for such a position of responsibility. She cut me off mid-speech to remind me that teachers must not involve themselves in the lives of the children they teach. It could lead to trouble for the school. Did I have any evidence, she asked, any sign that he was abused, any bruises? I had to admit that I had seen nothing.

  ‘Then I wouldn’t worry’, she said, ‘children often like to pretend their parents are someone else. Usually someone famous.’

  She ushered me out of her office, with

  ‘Now if you’ll excuse me Miss Bix, I have a meeting to attend’.

  And that was it.

  That evening – it was a Friday – we waited again in our usual place for Mihkel’s mother to arrive. We stood there together as the light faded. A fine drizzle began to fall. I pointed out how beautiful it was, a glittering circle in the glow of the sodium streetlights as they turned from pink to yellow. He stared at it and nodded, then began to shiver. I held his small hand more tightly in mine and we began to walk.

  Opening the door he saw the toy chest straight away, and looked at me. I told him to open it, and he ran over to it and knelt down. He ran his finger over the carved name on the lid.

  ‘Michael’, I said. ‘Just like your name. That was his toy box’. He looked up and smiled at me, and lifted the lid. He took out three books and turned them over in his small hands, one by one, and then held one out to me. I made toast and tea, with boiled eggs, and then he lay on the couch while I read to him by the firelight. I had covered him with a blue blanket from the box, and as I read I saw him smile - the smile of a child who is warm and contented, and secure. I read to him until he fell asleep, and then I watched him sleep deeply and quietly, the gentle rise and fall of his small chest, the flicker of his eyes under his dark lashes.

  We stayed home that weekend. The next day he took everything out of the box, and chose what he wanted to play with. He picked out a brightly-coloured jigsaw, and after we had completed it I showed him how to make his own. I still have it.. He painted a picture of me against a blue sky and green grass, and we glued it onto cardboard and cut it into pieces. We had a hard job with the sky - we’d cut the pieces far too small - and we laughed together over that. And not once did he ask for his mother, or ask to go home.

  But all good things must come to an end. Our happy time too came to an end. They have a certain kind of knock, the police, quite unmistakeable.

  I retired early. ‘Garden leave’ they called it, at first, while they decided what to do with me. A rather silly description, in my opinion. Modern, of course. And as I told them, I have no garden.

  They explained to me about the mother. She was the mother it seems, after all. She had dementia – unusual at her age, but it happens. She knew there was something wrong with her, but didn’t know what. The man I saw was her brother. He wanted her to get help but she would refuse in case they took Mihkel away, and so they would argue. They can get very angry, with dementia. And they took him away, after all. Back to Estonia.

  And Mihkel was correct of course, as I knew. It wasn’t his mother. It looked like her, but it wasn’t her. Not any more.

  I have to say, retirement quite agrees with me. My time is my own, and I’m able to visit Michael every day when the weather is dry. It’s a quiet spot, there by the woods. I take sandwiches, and a thermos flask of tea, and I sit and talk to him. He can’t answer, of course. I must look like I’m talking to myself. I remember his small hand in mine, and his beautiful dark eyes.

  The Warden - Ben O’Hara

  “Soon as you set eyes on the Warden I want you to stick him in the throat with this. Stick him like a pig. You got that, Mason?”

  I looked down at the shank Pietro passed over to me in his clammy palm, a toothbrush with a razor blade on the end. I wasn’t sure how I was meant to “stick” him with it, slicing his jugular to ribbons seemed more apt, but I got the gist. I thought of pigs and that made me think of Orwell’s Animal Farm, the only book we were permitted to read.

>   I remember when someone had smuggled in a bible and the grudging respect I had for them that, despite everything, they still had faith.

  “That got a hidden compartment with the key to your cell in it?” another inmate had asked.

  “No,” the other had replied, bewildered.

  “Then what’s the point in reading it?” the inmate had scoffed. “Use it for toilet paper.”

  That memory sums up this prison.

  I wrinkled my nose at the strong smell of disinfectant there was in the room, the same smell you get down hospital and school corridors. The stench of institution.

  “Got it,” I nodded, slipping the shank down my orange overalls.

  “Good.”

  Pietro leant back, wiping sweat off of his Basset Hound face and tightening the knot of his grey ponytail. He was half Italian and had lived (if you could describe it as that) in the prison for twenty years, yet there remained a blemish to his accent. It was his contacts on the outside, and his wily approach to business, that had seen the success of his cocaine racket surge and it was making the upper powers restless. The guards found baggies of the white stuff here and there but never on anyone’s person nor could they find out how it was getting in. They were a pack of wolves that could smell their prey but not find it. It was frustration beyond frustration and much of it was taken out on the inmates. They were used to it, the guards had always treated them like that. They didn’t like the beatings but if they were angry then the prisoners were happy. That was the simple equation.

  The Warden was stepping up his investigations though and Pietro was struggling to work out when and where the searches would take place.

  The Warden was an enigma. It was more than just a title, it was a title. It was the name we gave to the man with no name, with no face. Nobody had ever seen him or heard his voice. The guards were his mouthpiece and his hand. He was the invisible puppeteer, pulling all the strings, ruling over his establishment not with the silk glove of the politician but the iron fist of the dictator. The closest anyone had got to him were those who’d mopped the corridor outside his office whilst on the cleaning detail and had seen his shadow through the frosted glass of the door.

  We did not need to know his name or his face to know his character. Each guard was an extension of him, a different blend of malice and cruelty. Pietro’s muscle, the man sat next to me with charcoal skin called Rex, said he saw the same evil in the eyes of the head guard Crawley when he beat them with his truncheon, the one he lovingly called “Carmela”, as he’d seen in his own when he’d looked in the mirror after torturing his old boss for firing him.

  “I ain’t denying I’m the same but they shouldn’t be like that. Only difference between us and them is we’re wearing orange and they’re wearing black,” he’d once said to me.

  It was true. I’d seen “Carmela” in action many a time, “the only girl who can understand me” Crawley had once crooned, splitting noses open and cracking jawbones, apparently ones never deemed “serious enough” to require treatment in the infirmary. Crawley had once beaten the sickly youth sat across from me, known as Bread Boy because he ran Pietro’s errands, for staring at him.

  “What you’ve gotta understand, boy, is that we don’t run this place like we’re the shepherds and you’re the sheep. You’re the cesspool of humanity and you need to be treated accordingly. We’re the Alsatian and you’re the bitch. That’s the Warden’s philosophy,” he’d said.

  I’d recognised that maliciousness Rex had spoken of, knew that it had circled in my own pupils like a revolving abyss. I told myself that I had had that same darkness in my gaze as I’d driven that car into the crowd of people outside my old workplace, the place I’d been fired from before I’d joined the army.

  I’d only been here three months but already I’d climbed to the top of the tree. A mutual hatred of our old civilian lives, and breaking the bones of the two inmates who’d tried to rape Bread Boy in his cell one evening, had earned Rex’s respect and bought me a ticket straight into Pietro’s company. From then on it’d been easy to maintain my position and their trust. At the end of the day we were all the same.

  Now we’d reached this point. The two factions in the prison had been battling for so long that something was finally going to give. I glanced at the men around me once more: Pietro, Rex, Bread Boy and the last one, Alistair, locked up because he’d created a bomb for a protest group. I had to confess he was the most interesting out of us. Intelligent, urbane but definitely not out of place.

  He’d set the wheels in motion for our plan to murder the Warden. I’d been the one to give him the idea, telling him that I’d heard one of the guards, Donovan, discussing in hushed tones with another that the Warden had wronged him. Alistair had gotten close to him and found out that the Warden had been even crueller to one of his own than could’ve been believed. Donovan had simply wanted a few days off to spend with his ill and dying wife. He was a young man with a young spouse but that hadn’t stopped cancer ravaging her body. The Warden had refused and consequently Donovan was not there when his wife passed away.

  The men I was with now, the “inner-circle” as we’d come to term it, wondered over this at length. We all agreed that in Donovan’s shoes we would’ve taken the time off without permission, so did his staying here whilst his wife died in hospital demonstrate the sort of power the Warden had over his own? The guards may run the prison like slavers, but was the Warden the main slaver? Was he the overseer and they just the cattle drivers?

  It was with careful consideration that Alistair approached Donovan. He was clever and only inferred what he wanted to do. Donovan understood immediately what he was getting at, earning Alistair a sizeable lump on his head from his truncheon.

  They hadn’t expected Donovan to take the offer there and then, however. The seed had been planted and they’d waited. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, he’d approached Alistair by his cell.

  “You want to ice the Warden?”

  “Everybody wants to do that,” Alistair had said.

  “But you’re trying to work out a way of doing it?”

  He’d nodded and waited to see whether he was to be thrown in solitary confinement or if their plan had worked.

  “Be in recreational room A tomorrow night. I’ll leave the door unlocked to B wing, you should know the way from there.”

  During our recreational hour in the yard the next day the plan was formulated. I’d simply looked on as they’d discussed it, gazing at the bruised sky with its clotted clouds, heavy and awkwardly swirling masses looking down upon a deteriorating facility that withheld slowly deteriorating people, gradually losing their sense of society, of being and their selves. A morbid sight for a morbid place.

  Once again the cloying smell of the disinfectant filled my nostrils. I looked at the small window near the ceiling and saw how the bruised sky had now festered to a damning black. At this time of year I suspected that you’d only last a few hours out there before hypothermia got to you. I found it ironic how that meant the prison was the safest place to be, how there was just one thin wall separating us from the punishing elements. Yet at the same time, tonight, we were making the imprisoning arms that bore us as unsafe as the outside. These were condemning circumstances.

  I ran a finger along the shank I had down my overalls and delicately touched the blade, wondering how much blood it was going to taste tonight. You can clean a blade as many times as you like but it’ll always thirst for more because, every time you look at one, you imagine using it. This blade was already coated in red; it just wasn’t physically there yet.

  Rex nudged me and I looked up as a pair of eyes under a stiff black cap peered through the glass in the door. It was Donovan. He winked at us and then moved on.

  “Give him a little longer, then we move,” said Pietro, already out of breath.

  We waited in silence, thinking on what was about to happen, what its repercussions would be. We’d all been sentenced in this building, us
for our crimes, the guards to their set number of hours and their wage packet. Tonight another sentence would be passed down and the dynamic between the two would change. I commended myself for earning the trust of the men around me so quickly and getting this opportunity. Things would soon be over.

  “It’s time,” said Pietro eventually, getting to his feet.

  We followed him out of the room, walking with the calmness of experienced criminals, apart from Bread Boy, whose movements were fast and gaze erratic, like the petty criminal who has just robbed a shop.

  “Keep it cool Bread Boy,” said Rex to the pale youth. “You look like you’re gonna shit yourself.”

  We reached the door to the next wing. Pietro cast an eye around to check for company before he opened it without breaking stride.

  We’d all been in this part of the prison before but never without supervision. The laundry rooms were down a corridor to our right as well as the different cupboards jammed with cleaning equipment. I pondered that for a moment and thought that no matter how many times you tried to clean this place you could only gloss over the surface. The essence of it all would always remain dirty. The prisoners were dirty men and the guards were of the same ilk but on the other side of the bars. Perhaps that was why the disinfectant had smelt so strong, because its attempts to clean were ultimately futile.