Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 by Louise Welsh Read Free Book Online Page A

the top bunk staring down at his hands which were folded loosely in his lap. Magnus’s first thought was that the man was praying, but then the prisoner turned his face towards him and Magnus saw the sullen twist of his mouth. His head had been shaved some time ago and his hair was growing back, dark and thick, like suede.
    ‘I don’t share.’ The man’s body looked spare, but Magnus got an impression of broad shoulders beneath the prison-issue tracksuit. ‘Check with the governor. He’ll tell you why.’
    ‘I know why,’ the screw said. ‘But the governor’s indisposed, so you’ll just have to put up with it. Say hello to your new cellmeat , Mr McFall.’
    Magnus hesitated on the threshold.
    ‘Come on.’ The screw gave him a grin and a shove in the small of his back. ‘Mr Soames won’t bite, will you, Jeb?’
    Magnus would have liked to beg, but he stepped into the cell. The door slammed and he heard the jangle of keys, the sound of the barrels turning in the lock. The cell walls were the same rank yellow as the cell he had just left, the patch of blue beyond the window bars might have been the same scrap of sky he had been staring out at for the last three days. He slid into the bottom bunk. The mattress creaked above as the other man lay down, so close that Magnus could hear the rhythm of his breaths.

Six
    It was seven in the evening. The time that Magnus should have been stepping up on stage to begin the warm-up to Johnny Dongo’s show. He wondered if the show had been cancelled and pictured the empty auditorium, the rows of seats and abandoned aisles. Johnny would be furious, if Johnny was still alive.
    Magnus was lying on his mattress listening to the racket of bangs and chanting coming from the other cells and looking up at the wooden base of the upper bunk. Names, obscene drawings and mysterious tags were scrawled across its surface. Danny takes it up the arse  . . .  RICKY B IS DEAD . . . there’s nowhere like home . . .  There had been points when the hammering fists and raised voices had been so loud that his bunk had tingled with their vibration, but now it was possible to distinguish individual voices among the clamour.
    ‘They haven’t fed us.’
    It was the first time Jeb had spoken since the screw had put them together. Magnus wondered if his new cellmate found the drop in volume as unnerving as he did. He waited a beat before replying.
    ‘No.’ There was a television propped on a shelf in the corner of the cell, a small flat-screen, not much bigger than the laptop he had at home. It had been blank-eyed and silent all afternoon. Magnus asked, ‘What about turning the TV on, Big Man?’
    The question hung there, ignored.
    Jeb said, ‘This your first time?’
    Magnus had been held in police cells overnight once, on a drunk and disorderly charge, not long after he arrived in London, twenty-one and full of his own exoticness. The booking sergeant had been Scottish too, a big Aberdonian with more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend Ian Paisley. ‘Cool your jets, wee man,’ he had said as he poured Magnus into the police cell. ‘You’re in danger of getting your teuchter arse kicked.’
    A disembodied pair of breasts stared down at Magnus from the base of the upper bunk, their nipples like eyes. He wished he had a pen to blot out their gaze.
    ‘First time in Pentonville,’ he said, hoping he sounded like a veteran. ‘You?’
    ‘I’m seasoned.’ Jeb’s voice had an accent to it, somewhere flat and northern Magnus could not place; one of those nowhere towns that used to have a mine or a factory. Jeb said, ‘They shouldn’t have put you in with me.’
    Magnus kept his voice as expressionless as the other man’s. ‘Maybe not, but they did.’
    Outside on the landings they had launched into a favourite in their repertoire: Why are we waiting? Why are we fucking waiting . . .  Magnus closed his eyes. There were definitely fewer voices than before. He thought