Page 60 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

She smiled. She could envisage a moment when knowing two sort-of-friendly prisoners might be a good thing. ‘I really don’t think you’d kill me, either of you.’ She set two cigarettes on the ledge of the barred part of the door, at arm’s length, so neither of them could grab her, but neither of them tried. The cigarettes disappeared inside.

‘Thank you, miss,’ the second voice said, with feeling.

‘Hey! Is that a girl?’ someone called from further up.

Takiko started with the brush while the wave of catcalls wore themselves out. She decided before long that the edges of the corridor would have to stay dusty. Someone put a part of himself he shouldn’t have through the bars, so she hit it with the broom and carried on on the other side, and smiled as a shout of laughter went around the cells. The guard from the office came running. She inclined her head, because it seemed like a very specific kind of policy, to come when the prisoners were laughing rather than yelling. She explained, but he ignored her and unlocked the cell, and disappeared inside. She stood up slowly after a minute or so.

‘Excuse me,’ she said over the noise. ‘Excuse me,’ she said more loudly when he didn’t hear. It had gone quiet on the rest of the wing. A slim shadow and a big one had come to the bars of the cell behind her, the one belonging the de Sade enthusiast. Both of them were holding the bars hard. She could see enough of them to make out that their knuckles were tight.

‘What?’ Some of the rage was in the guard’s voice and it came out snappish.

‘Suppose I make you a cup of tea? It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ Takiko said.

He came out unrolling his sleeves. ‘Oh. That’s kind.’

‘Do you have cups of your own or shall I go on a thieving mission to the kitchens?’ she smiled. It was amazing what a protection it could be, being little and a bit stupid-looking.

‘Oh, no, no, we’ve got our own. I’ll show you.’

More than anything, going into the guards’ office, which had a small set of creaking steps down to its sunken floor, felt like being a miniature thing going inside a warm tree trunk. When the kettle was half boiled on its own little heater, she poured some water out into a bowl and gave it to him.

‘Hm?’ he said.

‘You’ve got blood on your face,’ she explained, and pattered her fingertips over her own cheekbone to show him where.

‘Oh, right. Thanks.’

When she tucked herself under the table, the heat from the stove underneath washed round her legs and made her feet prickle as the feeling came back. Once she had made the tea, she held her cup to warm up her hands and then pressed one palm flat to her nose. It was absolutely glorious.

‘You make tea very beautifully,’ the guard said. And then, obliquely, ‘Accomplished sort of thing for a cleaning girl?’

She smiled and pretended not to have understood what he was really asking. ‘Cleaning girls who would like not to be cleaning girls one day ought to cultivate useful skills, don’t you think? One must have ambitions. One might even work at a proper restaurant one day, should anybody ever build one here.’

He laughed, because she had said it in her princess voice. ‘That’s a thing! Can you teach me?’

‘Of course, darling, you must pretend you’re half Chinese and half English, it’s the most fabulously easy thing.’

‘Stop, I’m going to spit tea everywhere.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Normal voice.’

‘Can I ask how old you are?’ he said.

She was the only woman she’d seen here. She had a depressing vision of being raped behind the solitary confinement shed.

‘Forty-two,’ she lied.

‘What! You look much younger.’

‘Thank you. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one,’ he said shyly.

She patted him on the head as she got up. He had soft hair, too thin. ‘Lie to the next person, will you? It isn’t polite to make ladies feel old. Dear me. Well, I’d better get on, hadn’t I.’

She soon found that the best part of the day was cleaning the warden’s office. It was beautifully warm, with a fire burning in a real Western-style grate and lamps everywhere, even in the gloomy daytime. He had glass in the windows and furs on the floor. There was a big desk, full of good pens and paperwork, but at the other end of the room was a littler desk and a young man with glasses and a typewriter, and a telegraph machine whose wire came in through a tiny hole in the wall behind him. He typed all the time, but only numbers, which he was reading from graph axes drawn onto dozens and dozens of peculiar photographs. They were all the same, more or less; two pale, fluctuating patterns, traced out on a dark background. There was nothing more to them that, but they were unpleasant anyway, in a way which scratched at a nerve in the back of her mind, like a razor blade just catching on your knee.

So they had an electrograph. Mori might be here somewhere. She had an uneasy stir. If he thought she’d feel guilty and break him out once she actually saw the place, he’d miscalculated. A prison was where he belonged.