Ritual

22

9 May

A day later, and Mossy's lying on the sofa with one foot dangling above the floor, his lower lip resting on his upturned thumb, watching the gate and waiting for Jonah to appear.

But day becomes night and night becomes day and nothing happens and no one comes. Sometimes he thinks the sun's got stuck in the sky because every time he opens his eyes, for what seems like years and years, daylight comes through the grille. Then other times he thinks he's in a time machine on fast-forward, with the sun crossing the sky rapidly like in a silent movie, because one minute he feels sure it's morning and the next he opens his eyes to see a sunset sending red fingers of light through the boarding, lighting up the filthy, dusty room that has become his torture chamber.

They live on sugary coffee and Cup-a-Soup and Skinny sneaks him a little scag every now and then. He gets it from 'Uncle', who always seems to be on the other side of the iron gate. Uncle must have a room out there, Mossy thinks, because whenever Skinny wants to speak to him, or leave the room, he goes to the gate and knocks on it three times. There's usually silence for a bit, then a shaft of light in the corridor, and a figure in silhouette fills the passageway, bringing with it keys and a whiff of cold. Mossy can never quite see Uncle properly, but he knows he must be wearing something on his face because his head always looks wrong on his body: too dark and too big.

Mossy spends hours studying that gate, trying to bore through it with his thoughts. There's a passageway beyond: he can see the walls and the woodchip paper on them that has been gouged and ripped and is hanging off in sheets. Somewhere he can hear a tap dripping. Most of the time it's dark in the corridor because there's no lightbulb, but he gets a sense of how long the corridor is when someone moves along it: Skinny or Uncle. Sometimes he can hear strange voices — electronic and very clipped — but these sounds come only in bursts and he's never quite sure if he's imagining it or not.

Skinny has become everything to Mossy: yes, his jailer, but more than that, his anchor, the person who brings relief in a needle. He's always there, a hot little bundle that fits round Mossy's torso: like an animal he digs in his dry hands. And, like an animal taking comfort in the presence of another, for a moment or two Mossy's fear dissolves. He feels like it's him who should be protecting Skinny, the one who brought him here and is planning to cut his hands off. Even though inside he wants to cry, something about this person makes Mossy feel like a man. He feels bigger when Skinny's around: he doesn't see him as a tormentor but as a victim, and he thinks it's because this little African child-man is being used too.

Skinny works for Uncle and that work is varied: sometimes it's taking blood out of people, sometimes it's selling drugs, and sometimes he has to go out on the street and sell his body. Nothing much to surprise Mossy there: Skinny is small — so small — and they both know there's a market for that sort of thing. There's one guy in particular, a fat guy in a scruffy car who sits outside the local supermarket, and sometimes when Skinny goes out he's wearing stupid things that make him look like a kid — little caps and schoolboyish blazers.

'It's for the fat man,' he says. 'He like me to wear it.'

Mossy can't understand why it should matter to him what Skinny does when he goes out of this place. He can't understand why he hates the idea of some fat bastard's cock up Skinny's arse, except that in all this horror he's somehow got fond of the guy. He can't say anything about it, of course, because that's the way it goes in this life: when it comes down to it he and Skinny are the same creature. Both of them have been scraped from the arsehole of the world. The only currency they've got is their own bodies and you don't question it when a friend has to turn to the trade.

Anyway, it's probably even worse for Skinny because he's an illegal in this country. Mossy's got a feeling there are other illegals too, living in this place: sometimes he sees shadows in the cage thing opposite and hears strange noises — like someone scuttling in there. When it's really dark sometimes and Skinny is out, Mossy can convince himself there's someone weird living in the place with them. Sometimes, on the rare occasions he can get to sleep in this hell-hole, he wakes up with the idea that whatever it is has slipped silently into the room from under the window grille and, without making a sound, has slid across it and into the cage.

Well, he thinks, if a long streak of piss like him can't fit through that window grille how the hell would anyone else get through? Unless, he thinks sometimes, late in the night when he's been on his own all day, unless it wasn't someone but something. Something inhuman.

But that thought makes him cold all over. So he turns away from the window whenever he can and tries his hardest not to think about it.