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MARCHING POWDER

on the prison tour, he got himself through the gates on his own and turned up on my doorstep, just as Mark Johnson had.

‘You must be Thomas!’ he shook my hand warmly. ‘I’m Joe. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ I couldn’t just turn him away.

‘Joe. Hi. Come inside.’ I was used to people visiting me through recommendations, although I avoided asking who had recommended me. With so many visitors coming through my door, it was impossible to remember some guy called Alex or John I had met eighteen months before.

Fat Joe was really friendly and, although he had broken my favourite chair, I liked him a great deal. He asked a lot of questions, mainly about what conditions were like in the prison, whether I was happy, and so on. He was absolutely amazed that we had to pay for everything ourselves and wanted to know how prisoners without money survived and if there were any organisations that supported them.

‘No. Just their families,’ I told him. ‘And the other inmates sometimes. If they’re lucky.’

When he was leaving that first time, he gave me fifty dollars to cover the damage to my chair. Chairs certainly didn’t cost that much, but I didn’t argue because I saw how much money he had in his wallet.

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A couple of days later, Fat Joe arrived unannounced a second time.

‘You came back!’ I said, offering him the steel chair straight away before he got the chance to line up any more of my furniture.

I still wasn’t keen on taking him on a tour around the prison, but it seemed that he didn’t want to, anyway. He had just come to talk to me again. We chatted about the same things as before and this time he placed a hundred dollars on my dresser as he was leaving. I liked it when people left me something to help out, but a hundred dollars was a lot of money, so I was a bit suspicious of what strings might be attached.

‘No. There’s no charge,’ I told him. ‘You already paid more than the cost of a tour last time. This time you’re my visitor, so you just pay seven bolivianos to the man at the gate.’

‘I know, but it’s a present for you, Thomas. You need it. Don’t be ashamed if a man offers you something from the goodness of his heart.’

‘I can’t take it. It’s too much.’