“You know what you did,” Grace said, putting on her no-bullshit voice. “Everybody else here knows it too, but say it anyway.”
Unlike her two favourite enforcers, Grace didn’t have a physical presence that was in any way frightening or intimidating. She looked like Santa Claus’s slightly slimmer sister, with a face that flushed easily and a habit of sighing after she moved, as though she was about to make some jokey reference to “these old bones”. What made her scary was her reputation for never forgetting a slight and never bothering to make a distinction between great things and small. If you pissed her off, you pissed her all the way. There were no stopping points along that road.
McBride was scared shitless, but she was on the spot and there was no running from it. She was surrounded – by unwilling witnesses who also served to kettle her in with her persecutor.
“I didn’t take that stuff, Grace,” she said in a shaky voice. “I just found it.”
Grace considered this pathetic defence for a moment, and perhaps that got McBride’s hopes up because she started to stammer out some story about how she saw a packet of biscuits thrown into the animal feed tub behind the prison farm and followed a trail to the pig stall, where behind a bale of straw, like the Wise Men finding the baby Jesus… McBride had a very big mouth and not much up on top of it, so she kept on adding twiddles to this pointless fantasy to see if they improved it. That was very much her way: she clung to her stories the way some people clung to more physical and tangible addictions. Finally Grace stopped her by putting a finger to her own lips. Hush.
McBride burst into tears and said yeah, okay, she ripped off the Q box. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she snuffled. “I just was weak, Grace. I thought I could sell some of it for a hit. Then I knew I couldn’t, because I’d get found out, so I was going to put everything back the way it was, but I couldn’t get into the room to—”
“Put it down there,” Grace said. She wasn’t talking to McBride: she was talking to Big Carol and Jilly Fish, who had just come into the ballroom with two big plastic bags full of stuff. They put the bags right in the middle of the big table that had been made by pushing all the little tables together.
There was a quickening of interest around the room, like a breath all the women there took turns to let out, because it was obvious what this stuff was: it was the stolen goods from the Q box, which Mr Devlin had taken back but had then clearly passed on to Grace.
Grace stood up. She walked right past McBride, who had to step aside for her, and on over to the bags, which she upended so all the little bits and pieces went sprawling across the table: jewellery, snack foods, comic books, home-recorded CDs, jokey little souvenir statues and framed photos and a hundred other things, most of them with their in-process labels still attached by elastic bands.
“Sit down here,” Grace said to McBride, pushing a chair in front of the table. And McBride, still crying a little, did as she was told. As she sat down, Liz Earnshaw stood up.
Liz was a big woman. Every bit as tall as Big Carol although not as broad: her body and face were gaunt, the bones of her elbows very visible (she cut the sleeves off all her prison-issue sweats as soon as they were issued). But one look was all it took to make you realise you shouldn’t mess with that, shouldn’t go any nearer to it than you had to. Earnshaw had no control at all, no limits, no off-switch. She was half crazy, full of fury and violence the whole time and one bad word away from burning up like a match. But she’d come to Grace’s attention at some point and Grace had given her an official role in the Fellside political economy, which was that she hurt the people who Grace told her to hurt.
So now, seeing Earnshaw come lumbering up to the table, McBride made a little noise that was halfway between a sob and a groan. She knew this was going to be bad.
Earnshaw squatted down next to the table, and another one of Grace’s little helpers handed her a hammer. It wasn’t a big sledgehammer or even a claw hammer that a carpenter or mason would use. It was a pin hammer with a slender shaft and a dainty little head. They were used in the ceramics workshops sometimes to break old pieces of clay down into brickbats so they could be recycled, but there was no way on Earth that one of them should be out here in gen pop. There were a lot of different safeguards in place to make sure that couldn’t ever happen. But when you’ve got a senior warder tucked into your knicker elastic, checks don’t always check and balances don’t have to balance.
“So this is the deal,” Grace told McBride. “You go ahead and try to swipe three things off the table. Whatever you think you can reach. Lizzie is going to stand by with the hammer and try to stop you by hitting you in the hand whenever you go for anything.”
A wave of rustles and murmurs went around the room, a gathering of tension. Grace was well aware that all of this – this very public spectacle of pain and humiliation – might constitute going too far. But she had decided that “too far” was the right distance to go.
“Have you got that?” she asked McBride, in a gentler voice.
McBride nodded to show that she understood. And the show commenced.
It might seem that a woman of Earnshaw’s size should be slow, but nobody who’d ever seen her move would think that.
The first time, McBride managed to fake her out. She twitched her right hand then drew it straight back again, while with her left she snagged a scarf whose trailing end was very close to her. Liz swung with the hammer and the Formica table rang like a gunshot. Its bright yellow surface now bore a perfectly circular indent. McBride’s hand didn’t, so that was one up to her. A cheer went around the room: as a spectator sport, this might not be so bad after all.
But McBride had caught a piece of beginner’s luck, and after that it evidently had other places to be. Liz had her eye in now.
There were no more cheers. A ragged chorus of gasps and sighs the first time McBride took a hit, a strained silence the second time. The silence persisted, punctuated by the sound of the hammer falling – not booming percussion but dull, meaty thwacks – and McBride’s yelping cries of shock and pain as she snatched her hand back.
For a while it looked as though McBride’s score was going to stay at one. Then she got lucky again, managing to snag a mug with her thumb (all of her fingers now being broken). It was a Happy Mother’s Day mug, and she only came away with the handle. The business end of the mug got shattered by the hammer. But Grace – the final arbiter – said that still counted.
McBride didn’t get lucky again. After ten minutes or so, it was clear that she never would, because you’ve got to have functional hands to pick things up.
But from Grace’s point of view, things were going swimmingly and the object lesson was all she’d wanted it to be. She was slow to register the changing atmosphere in the room – the way the tenor of the silence shifted and congealed. After a while, though, it was impossible to miss it. The set, stolid faces. The hands gripping knees, not moving. The eyes flicking away, each time, from the terrible moment of impact.
The ringside audience was not enjoying this. Whether or not they thought McBride had earned her punishment, they didn’t appreciate – as they should have done – her being called to account. Grace felt a surge of annoyance, but she suppressed it. These women were tough, some of them almost as tough as she was. They understood the judicious application of force, and whatever they felt about it now they would surely agree later that this was fair. Or if they didn’t, fuck them.