young. The cop looked at Farren without expression and held up his hand – Halt, his hand seemed to say. But his hand said far more than that, because the open palm struck Farren hard on the socket of his left eye, and I watched him reel back, his hand on his face, the shock and the pain of the blow robbing him of breath.
He got back into line.
Because there had been no mistake.
We were kept in a giant cell where most of the prisoners wore nothing but shorts and a bandana around their mouths, like the villains in an old western. It was crowded with bodies, a great mass of stinking frightened flesh, and there were other foreign faces in here, it was not just the people from Wild Palm. The foreigners all had the same look, as if they had woken up and found that the nightmare they were having was real.
When the smell of the open toilets reached me, the bandanas made sense, and as I felt the heat in here, I could understand why men wore only shorts or pants. But I kept my shirt on, and kept my jeans on, no matter how hot it got, as if removing them was some kind of admission that I belonged here, and that I would stay here forever.
Jesse came and sat next to me. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
Then he covered his face with his hands and I put my arm around his shoulders and I did not look at him.
Farren sat apart from the rest of us, saying nothing, as if he did not know us. He kept his hand over his wounded eye.
With my free hand I looked at my phone and when I saw that there was no signal I got up and moved through the bodies to where Farren was sitting.
‘I should punch your lights out,’ I said.
He looked up at me.
‘You wanted a new life,’ he said, his voice flat and cold. ‘The good life. The soft life. I gave it to you. Stop whining.’
That wasn’t true.
All I wanted was a better life.
I flew at him, wanting to rip his face off for whatever Tess would have to suffer now, but Pirin was on me at once, far stronger than me, and knowing exactly what he was doing, wrestling me away and down, the space opening up around us to make room for the violence, his thick arms tied in a complicated knot around my arms and neck, pushing my face into the ground, and I felt my nose and mouth and upper teeth being smashed hard into the concrete, slamming into it, banged into it again and again, trying to stop me struggling.
But my wife filled my heart and she choked it tight shut and no matter how much he hurt me, I would not stop struggling.
9
‘Thomas Arthur Finn,’ said the young cop, and I didn’t get it at first, partly because my name sounded so strange in his mouth, and partly because of that middle name, hated and never used but there in my passport, and there on the computer printout the young policeman read from, the name of my father. About the only thing the bastard ever gave me, apart from eczema.
‘Here,’ I said.
Jesse’s sleeping head was resting on my shoulder. I edged away without waking him and got up, every limb stiff and aching. I suppose I must have slept at some point because the day had drifted by, the sun shifting across the small high windows at the top of the communal cell, and it was fading fast now as the island prepared for another spectacular sunset.
I picked my way through the bodies, most of them stuck somewhere between sleeping and waking, and I thought of the last time I had seen my dad. I was eleven, and he was leaving us for his new life with a woman a few doors down. She was leaving her home too. ‘You’ll understand one day,’ my father had told me, but by now I couldn’t even remember his face, and I still didn’t understand, and I knew I never would, and I knew I would never want to.
I followed the cop down a corridor to a small, clean room with a desk and a policeman sitting behind it. The cop behind the desk was the one who I had first seen standing alone on the balcony, staring at the infinity pool. I had thought he was just some young kid, but now I saw there were the three stripes of a sergeant on the grey sleeve of his uniform. He ran his pen down the list of names in front of him and yawned. There were other papers on the desk, many of them with the Wild Palm logo.
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