Capital Punishment by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online

for Sharmila, which is why I’m always running, running, running.’
    ‘Call me tomorrow but about five hours earlier. Alyshia will be at mine by midday.’
    ‘Look at these bloody people.’
    ‘Chico?’
    She heard the volume come up on the TV.
    ‘These bloody, fucking people ... these slum dwellers in the middle of Bombay ... they’re on the BB bloody C.’
    ‘I think you’ve just had the answer to you premonition, Chico.’ ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Bloody fucking people.’
     
    The door opened. Two pairs of feet across the floor. The cuffs on wrists and ankles removed. Her feet swivelled off the bed. Large hands under each armpit. Men’s hands. They lifted her.
    ‘What’s happening?’
    No word from the men.
    ‘You’ve earned your right to pee,’ said the voice. ‘They’ll walk you to the bucket.’
    They took her four or five yards from the bed. Alyshia was unsteady on her legs. Dizzy. Something to do with the drug they’d given her. They turned her. Her heel hit the metal bucket. One of the men bent down, lifted a lid.
    ‘Squat,’ said the voice.
    ‘Do these men have to be here?’
    ‘Yes, they do. You can’t see. They have to guide you.’
    ‘I’ll take off the sleeping mask.’
    ‘You haven’t earned the right to remove the mask.’
    This new world tightened around her. Her bladder creaked under the pressure. She shuddered, steeling herself against the humiliation. She pulled her pants down to the tops of her thighs, squatted. The relief was ecstatic. Toilet paper was pressed into her hand. She wiped herself, dropped it in the bucket, yanked up her pants. They took her back to the bed while she thought about the last time she’d peed in front of anyone, which was her mother.
    ‘Please don’t handcuff me.’
    ‘Do you agree to leave the sleeping mask on until you’ve earned the right to remove it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    The feet retreated. The door opened and closed. She lay back down on her side, brought her knees up to her chest.
    ‘Be kinder to yourself, Alyshia,’ said the voice. ‘You can’t put yourself through that every time you want to have a pee.’
    Every time? She began thinking her way around this new regime, checking her instinct for rebellion because, for the first time in her life, she was up against a system of management that would not easily give way. Her teachers at St Paul’s in London had called her ‘opinionated’ to her face and ‘single-minded’ in their reports. Her psychology tutor at the Saïd Business School in Oxford had referred to her as ‘fiercely independent’, but that was because she didn’t like him, had smelt his vanity and sexual interest on the first day. A managing director of one of her father’s companies in Mumbai had been astonished by her immediate boldness. And ‘The Sacred Cow’ wasn’t in her league. But this? This was a force of total ruthlessness and the strange thing was that the only other time she’d come across a regime like this was when she was working for her father. He was a dictator and not always benevolent.
    That tapas bar, the kids from Bovingdon Recruitment, drunk, Toola on her bum on the pavement, all that mayhem in the Strand, seemed like a different era—a strangely innocent one by comparison. She played it all back to herself like news footage or CCTV product. Not quite real. Not as real as the images she didn’t want to see flickering behind her dark, velvet mask.
    ‘What are you thinking about, Alyshia?’ asked the voice.
    Silence. The two men had terrified her in their white smiling masks, but nothing had been as ghastly as their brutally engorged faces in death.
    ‘Alyshia?’
    ‘What are the rules?’ she asked.
     
    By ten o’clock that evening, Boxer was seated once again at a table for two in the Japanese restaurant in the Parque das Nações in Lisbon and was eating a set meal for one of sushi and sashimi.
    After playing poker until six o’clock in the morning, he’d slept late. At midday,