|
This sort of guy, the way he jangles his keys, you just know he’s sexually frustrated. This sort of guy, if this was in a bar, he picks at the corner of his beer label and peels it up till it rips. He flips cardboard mats off the edge of the table and tears them without thinking. This sort of guy, if this was in a bar, he eats complimentary peanuts when he’s not hungry and jiggles his left foot up and down like a street drill.
Today and here and now, this is not in a bar. Where this is, you’ve got to assume it’s underground. This place, with the guy and his keys, with the woman prodding me along from behind, the thing is: lack of windows. The thing is, strip lights, meaty walls. Cables and pipes on the inside.
This place, you’ve got to assume that thing with the air, that stillness, that heaviness, it means we’re buried. You’ve got to assume it’s rock and soil behind every breeze-block, worms and moles headbutting at concrete. You’ve got to assume, somewhere, there are stairs going up.
This place, when you shout out loud, eats up the echoes like soundproofing. This place, down here, everything is migraine-noisy.
So these two goons, this man and this woman, these two pinstriped nightmares in smart worksuits and polished shoes, these two fashion-corpses with name badges and matching socks, with jangling keys and shoving hands, they lead me to a door that says ‘Interview Room 2’.
Heavy-arsed hinges, hardcore locks. Opening, it groans like a whale.
The funny thing is, seriously, I have no idea how long I’ve been underground. Down here you’ve got to assume they turn lights on and off at the same time every day. You’ve got to assume they feed you three times during Lights On, and they’re not just messing with your head.
They could, you know. Disrupting diurnal rhythms. Fucking with your circadian cycles.
The funny thing is, underground, until these two robot-suits, these dead-faced smuganauts, these paid-to-be-grim authority machines, until they came and fetched me from my cell, I hadn’t seen another human being since I arrived.
Whenever that was.
Given why I’m here, you have to wonder what sort of sick bastard ends up in Interview Room 1.
Down here, underground, these clockwork thugs, these lawchimps, these smarm-monsters, they cluster round and do that shovein- the-small-of-the-back thing. This is like you’ve seen on American police shows. This is propelling me out of the corridor and through the door.
‘Sit,’ the guy says. The guy with perfect teeth, this sexually repressed gimp, this floppy-haired public-school disgrace to the gene pool, his name is Jason Durant. It says so on his badge. I recognise him from somewhere, and I think maybe he visited me in hospital. I can’t be sure. I don’t know how long ago that was.
He doesn’t look like a Jason.
He looks like a Paul, maybe. Or a Jim.
Or a Sam. He looks like a Sam.
Scratch that. What he looks like is an arsehole.
In Interview Room 2, if you want to know, there’s a smell. This smell, it’s from every school hallway you were ever in, every doctor’s waiting room, every public toilet, every terminal-patients-onlyeasywipe- walls-AIDS-zombie-in-the-corner hospital ward. This smell, it’s something to do with magnolia paint and breeze-blocks and linoleum floors. It’s something to do with cheap detergent and plastic chairs and forgotten urine and Confused Old People, et cetera et cetera.
Listen. That smell, seriously, what it’s mostly to do with, just so you know, is this: a complete, one hundred per cent lack of hope.
I’m sitting in a plastic chair. Not on it, you understand. It’s that kind of chair. Down here I’m sitting without any handcuffs, without a light in my face, without a packet of cigarettes and without a mirror. I expected a mirror. A big one.
‘You’re Michael Point?’ asks Jason a.k.a. Jack a.k.a. Jim a.k.a. Sam. This is from the other side of the table, with him and the woman facing me. This is him still fiddling with his keys in his jacket pocket.
I expected a mirror, a big unnatural one-way-glass mirror, because where else will the sergeant stand to watch? Or the little guy, you know the one, with wide-rimmed glasses and old-style recording gear? And a clipboard. In movies, he’s always got a clipboard, that little ratman.
There’s always a mirror. Only, look, not in Interview Room 2.
‘Call me Mike,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to record this?’
The thing with there being no mirror, also: there are no cameras. And Jason, all sexually frustrated, all hitching curtains of hair out of his face, he looks across at his colleague. Her name badge, it’s sort of hard to read on account of being right next to her boob. I keep getting distracted. Her name badge, I think it starts with an ‘A’.
Jason says, ‘Yeah. We’re recording this. We’re recording everything.’ And he waves a hand, like maybe I’m an idiot for not noticing the cameras and microphones poking from the walls. Like maybe only a complete fuckwit would ask a question like ‘Aren’t you going to record this?’ Like maybe out of all the pond slime that’s sat in my seat, across the table from him in Interview Room 2, no other stupid moron has ever voiced such a twat-brained query.
Only I still can’t see the cameras and microphones. ‘So, Mike,’ he says, and he smiles. I told you already he has perfect teeth. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you do for a living?’
And I figure: fuck it.
So I tell him.
|
