Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

“What’s happening, Jo?”

She’s pretending to be nice, but I’m not falling for it. I know I got her in trouble at the last landing meeting because I complained that she was smoking where we weren’t allowed to. It doesn’t matter that it was outside. If the staff can smoke anywhere then we should be able to as well. I didn’t want them to stop the big SO from smoking outside, like. It would have been fine with me if we could all smoke in the same place at the same time. The principal officer agreed with me and said it was double standards.

“Jo!”

The SO’s getting closer to me and Helen’s sort of smiling like something bad is going to happen.

I won’t turn around. They can’t make me. Nobody can. Not even—

A hand on my shoulder.

I shrug it off like I don’t care. The SO shouldn’t touch me if I haven’t done anything wrong. That’s not fair. That might be a double standard too. I do fucking care , but you can’t ever let on. That gets you in trouble. Blondes get you in trouble too. I remember my daddy said that once and I didn’t understand it then. It makes a bit of sense now.

“She’s nuts,” Helen spoke first. I should be okay now. If she started it, I can’t get in trouble.

I’m going to point at her and say: You can’t let her talk to me like —

The SO’s holding my wrist.

“Ow. That’s my sore arm.”

I peel back my sleeve and the SO flinches.

A wee part of me cheers, but only on the inside.

“Ach, Jo, you didn’t? Not again, love.”

“I told you she was nuts. Didn’t I tell you?” Helen says, and looks at all the loud girls for confirmation. They’re quiet now, though. Keeping their heads down. Another wee win for me. I’m clocking them up today, so I am.

“You look like a pigeon on the footpath, Blondie.”

She doesn’t understand what I mean, but she does look like that. Her head’s all bobbing about like she’s looking for a dropped pasty that an oul’ drunk eejit couldn’t hold onto. God, I’d kill for a pasty bap from our chippie. Anything from the outside, from Belfast.

Somebody’s sniggering now. I hate that kind of laugh. It’s sneaky and mean and for bullies. Best way to take care of bullies is to slap them. They’re never expecting that. I spin around like Mickey Marley’s Roundabout on Royal Avenue. If I catch the bully sniggering at me they’re dead.

As soon as I know who I’m supposed to hurt I’ll hurt them and then I can stop hurting myself. Easy.

But it’s just the SO there, and mean as she is, she never sniggers. I hold up my hands to show her I’m sorry. The SO knocks them to the side.

“Don’t touch me!”

“Settle down, Jo.”

“I wasn’t doing nothing.”

The sniggering’s behind me again. It was Helen. She threw her voice over my head the first time. Fucking bitch. I never liked playing piggy-in-the-middle. They made me be the pig every time. My eyes are hurting and it’s like crying in the playground again. Somebody sniggered that day too.

God, I’m so sick of it. So sick of all this bullshit.

I’m done with it.

Helen. That fucking blonde bitch!

Now she’s crying. Blondie’s crying. No, worse . . . she’s screaming.

Everybody’s screaming now, except for me. But even though all of this is hurting my arms it’s the good kind of hurt. Like when a blister gets ready to pop and you feel the sting and the nice at the same time.

I don’t even care anymore that my nails are too long.

I feel them tearing something.

Clothes, skin, mine, hers, theirs . . . it doesn’t matter.

More hands clamp my arms and legs. They heave me up into the air. More blisters pop and old scars split. I’m lighter than a feather now. That’s another good feeling. It never lasts, though. I remember one time when my da let me stay home from school even though I wasn’t really sick. I had to lie in bed because he thought I might be faking. That was okay with me. Bored in bed was better than bored in school. And he changed the blankets when I was still laying there, his mouth all straight because he was pretending to be hard, but his eyes were soft like the sheet floating down on me. Nice to have that feeling back again. I never feel like that anymore.

They throw me into the cell and I hear that clunk-click that makes me want to pee. You can’t pee in the cell, but I can get out for a toilet break in an hour, I think. I’m not sure what time it is now. I don’t want to look. That way I can pretend that it’s not really a whole hour. And they’ll maybe let me have a light for my fags then as well. If I’m really good, like. I’ll try to be good. It can be hard when you’re in the cell. Even if you have magazines and you can lie down and be bored in bed. It’s not like it used to be. You can’t catch that floaty-down sheet feeling.

Where’s my blade?

I think there’s still one left. One that I snuck in from the kitchen and hid very safe. There’s not many places to hide things in these cells and they check them sometimes and you can get in trouble when they find stuff, but I’m sure they haven’t got . . .

Sweet. It’s there. But I’m not going to use it. Not yet. I put it back. They’ll probably check on me soon.

I’ll spend a bit of time at the window.

My cell looks out onto the road and I can see lorries and cars going to Purdysburn one way and down to Lisburn the other. They never speed, though. It’s boring to watch cars drive slow, but what else am I going to do? I lost my TV privileges. Sometimes it’s fun to think about me out there in the car. I go faster than them all. Whip up the handbrake and get the dizzy feeling with my heart in my mouth and my throat tightens to keep the food down and I’m free as fuck and flying off my head and I’m okay. Aye, I’m okay. The last time, the time I had to take some poor bastard’s car to get away from the bad thoughts, the stinking cops ran me off the road. The bad thoughts came back.

It was one of those weekends: smoking, drinking, pill-popping. House parties all over Belfast, in streets I didn’t really know. Areas I shouldn’t have been. Started off with a gang of friends. That’s the big rule for a party girl: never go anywhere alone. But I dozed off when it was dark and woke up when it was bright. On my own. Which is a funny way to feel. There were other people there, just no one I knew.

It was near the river. New. Small. Not much bigger than this cell. Somebody had called it an apartment. Most of the others laughed.

“It’s a fuckin’ flat, mate. Where do you think you’re from?”

Even the guy who’d said apartment laughed at that.

When I figured out how to get out of the building I couldn’t even tell if I’d ended up in a Catholic or Protestant area. No flags or painted kerbs. No murals. Not even the graffiti gave you a clue. The writing on the wall was about things called regeneration and fracking . I didn’t know what those words meant, but somebody with a spray can thought they were bad.

For a while I thought maybe I’d ended up in South Belfast—it’s all a bit different where the money is—but I was only a five-minute shuffle from the city centre. Passed a wee dark-skinned man playing a weird-looking thing like a violin. He smiled at me, but I’d no money for his hat. Only thing in my pocket was a phone with no credit and a flat battery. I wondered if the wee violin-trumpet player had thought of taking some of his teeth to the Cash for Gold across the street.

“Watch out for the pink buses, mate. They don’t slow down,” I said.

He laughed at me, just. Fine. Let him find out the hard way, then.

With gold on my mind, I checked to see if my Claddagh pendant was on show. Almost tucked it under my T-shirt but thought, Fuck it . Once upon a time you’d get shot here for wearing the wrong football jersey. According to my uncles, anyway. But here, the way I was feeling, getting shot might have been an improvement.