Mouroir

Max Sec (Beverly Hills)

1. He gets up after a restless night. Brigadier-General Murphy. Slicks down his yellow hair. Looks in the mirror, into his red-rimmed eyes. Worms the moustache around. He has a secure establishment in his care. All gates mastered, guards posted in watchtowers. Dead areas locked at both ends and key-carrier cooped up within. But safe enough? Those minds, those hearts. What if. .? Bastards!

So he has a high wall built around the no-go terrain, with TV-controlled steel-plated double gates the only egress. Now it is truly a maximum security. (Young deer let loose to roam over green lawns between wall and fort. He has a weakness for life.)

2. He gets up after the nightmares of half-sleep. What if? One never knows with these traitors and terrorists, these rapists and assassins. HQ was adamant about that: “Let one, just one bandit get away and you might as well run with him!” The perspiration is chilly on his back. They are always scheming, these dogs; they have visions of freedom; turn away and they start digging, climbing, feinting, thinking, corrupting the boere.

He has the roof torn from the prison to be replaced by a grid of steel, a catwalk permitting the armed guardians to keep a constant eye on their charges. Now, ah, this boop is break-proof.

3. He surfaces gagging from the tortures of sleep. The yellow hair all tousled. Brigadier-General Murphy. Small blood vessels darken his vision. The trembling of his legs. Careful, you may nick yourself with the razor. This damn stubble. My God, what if? It takes just one suicidal escape, one only, to have this whole magnificent impregnable maximum-security possy crumble to ridicule.

He has an electronic eye installed in every cell. We shall have surveillance twenty-five hours a day. Snoop lenses sweep the corridors, eliminate the blind angles. Tape recorders are connected to the toilet bowls. From the ramparts he goes to the catwalk. Squints down at the vestiges of humanity below. There’s a rash around his neck, just inside the collar, itching terribly. “I want those courtyards covered by wire netting im-me-diate-ly! You think the sly sonsabitches can’t scale four metres of sheer wall? And if a helicopter were to — Jesus Christ!”

4. He orders, reviews, refines. Every prisoner must be escorted by a guard-with-dog at all times of the day or the night.

5. No more contact between inmates.

6. The warder-with-dog shall get into the bath with the prisoner. Yes, man, of course the State will issue you with overalls for the purpose!

7. All eating utensils shall henceforth be of plastic. No mirrors anywhere. No exercise outside. (Or inside.) No more smoking. Quiet there! And your grandmother’s cunt!

8. Listen. The dogboer-and-dog shall spend the nights in bed with the convict, man on man, a second warder with FN and baton and whistle and walkietalkie outside the locked, mastered, bolted, padlocked, padlocked, padlocked, steel-reinforced cell door and inside grill. Changing of the shift at midnight.

Ah, but it is good to run a rehabilitation centre fulfilling its first and foremost function: to keep the wards of the State in safe-keeping.

9. The night was an agony. Behind his eyelids, even with orbs staring into the dark, he visualized all the horrors. The headlines. The sanctions. The total breaking. Today, at noon, an escapee from Maxim um Security. . Oh sweet dear compassionate cruel merciless God. What if? What the fuckin’ hell if, for instance. .! He is an old wreck, crushed by responsibility, by the spectre of overthrow.

He has the prisoners, the blind worms, taken out into the central courtyard, stood against a wall, one by one, murmuring, shot.

Now the prisoners are in maximum security, sir.

10. He struggles up, suffocating through layer upon layer of not having slept at all.