Chapter 14 – Laughter

The feeling of celebration, the need to jump and kick my heels, is overwhelming. I can barely keep the smug smile from my lips as my court-appointed lawyer tells me that my appeal is coming up soon. I try not to get too excited, whispering conspiratorially with my bony friend, hoping against hope that this really is the end of my ordeal. It’s not fair, I tell him, it’s not fair for me to be in here, when I haven’t done anything wrong.

“Wrong. Wrong place, wrong time,” he tells me.

I look at him stupidly for a moment before I burst out in laughter, which brings the bulls’ eyes on me; never a good thing. They hone in on happiness like sharks to blood. And like sharks, they will circle until they can hone in on the splashing joy, and then tear into it with shark-shaming savagery.

I bite my lip and stare at my hands until he touches my arm, a motion of gentle comradery that has me near tears. I have never been this on edge. I know that I should not hope; I had seen enough inmates get excited and then watch them collapse into depression as their appeals came up, and were swatted away like so much flies around shit.
Is that what they think of me, the world out there? A fly around shit. Or maybe I am the shit.

And suddenly my happiness and excitement turns to dread. Could I handle another personal slaughter like the trial? Shouldn’t I just sit here and accept my twenty years with time off for good behaviour? How long had I been here anyway?

Time slid along like a Hershey-squirt in the trousers of some fat, sweaty guy on a bus – squished between hairy, smelly butt-cheeks until there was only a thin brown layer plastered through his underwear and into his thin trousers, working its way into the plastic covering of the seat itself. Time would do that with anything, turn it into sludge. And that was what was happening inside of me right now; I was turning to sludge.

I dreaded the day I would go in front of the judge and wait for his verdict. Would he set me free – unlikely – or would he send me back with an admonition to think on my crimes for my full term? I know what I would bet on. In fact, that was exactly what the bulls and dealers were betting on right now – every appeal brought up the gambler in every soul in the joint. Cigarettes and favours were changing hands faster than the eye could follow. I even saw some of the guards muscling in on the action. From what my skinny friend was telling me, the odds were not in my favour. But they rarely were. Appeals were few and far between, and when they did go through to presentation, the prisoner was even more rarely set free. It would be like winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning, and meeting Jesus, all rolled into one. It was safe to say that I didn’t fancy my chances.

Regardless of where my brain was going with all of this, I still had to keep my spirits up; it was no good going into present myself as an innocent man if I looked like I had given up on life. For we all know that innocent men don’t give up on life, don’t we?

The minutes slid by into hours, which bled into days, which grew into a tumorous week, and then another. The growth of my appeal in my head blinded me to all and everything around me. My conspiratorial whispers echoed in my own head even as I lay in bed, staring at the concrete ceiling, imagining what I would do first once I was set free.

I had run through it a million times in my head.

That first step out into fresh air, past the bars and gates, electronic buzzing and cruel gaze of the bulls and guards, dealers and lifters, the losers and the lost.

I would fight the urge to run, instead taking my time enjoying that first few moments of freedom.

I wouldn’t look back. That would be too much. I would look forward – forever forward, until all that I could see was the curvature of the earth off in the distance.

I would let myself breathe for the first time since that poor couple had died.

And that was when the dream crashed down around my shoulders.

I saw the beautiful woman and her man standing there, holding hands, side by side, innocent and erotic all at once, madly in love with each other, and yet hiding.

From what?

How did I know that they were hiding? If had learned anything from my time behind bars, it was the look of people hiding. Whether they hid from the outside world, or from the people they owed money to, or from the bulls, or, more often than not, from themselves, prison was a world of people hiding. I should know. I was one of them. What was I hiding from? Myself, mostly. But that world of self-indulgent history sieving was not for me, not right now. I had grasped something momentarily, a truth. And those are like gold dust in here, where the truth is twisted out of all recognition, if it exists at all.

They had been hiding, or running, from something or someone.

Was that who killed them? Whomever they were hiding from?

And then it hit me. I had been sitting in here, feeling sorry for myself, masturbating to my own misery, when what I should really be doing is figuring out what happened. If not for myself, then at least for the two innocent lives that were lost.

Everyone believed that I killed them, so no one was looking for the real murderer.

And that was when I knew what I had to do. I had to get out of this horrible hell hole that I now called home, and hunt down the real killers to bring them to justice.

If for nothing else than the fact that they were still out there, laughing at the death of those two innocent souls.

That is what drove me to start caring about my appeal. I had hoped, and hope was good. But now I cared. I had a reason to get out. I realised that, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I had a real mission in life, aside from self-gratification. I was going to win my appeal, get out of here, hunt down the killers, and bring them to justice. In my mind, I knew what kind of justice I wanted. None of this fanfare-shrouded self-aggrandisement court case noise. No. I wanted to watch them suffer, like they had made those poor lovers suffer. I wanted to watch them bleed.