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MARCHING POWDER

He didn’t really understand things. He didn’t know why he was locked up or what he had to do to get out of it, or even where he would go if he did. But he wouldn’t sit still and wait for them to open the cage – he wanted to get away from the thunder. Every time it cracked around us, he went into long periods of silence, pacing up and down. These were followed by fits of screaming, when he kicked and punched at the door.

As the night wore on, Samir became louder and louder. It wasn’t long before he was drunk and yelling abuse through his window. And as he became noisier, the rest of us quietened down, worried that the guards would hear something. They hadn’t come for their midnight patrol yet.

‘Thomas, I need cocaine!’ Samir screamed. I pretended not to hear him, but he knew I was listening. ‘Throw it to me or I’m coming to get it!’

The major should have made Samir change cells that morning. His cell door had already been bent back once, so it was even easier for him to get out the second time. In a few seconds flat, he was at my door, pounding on it.

‘I haven’t got any,’ I told him. ‘Go back to your cell. They’ll kill you.’ The guards were due any minute. If they found Samir out of his cell, we would all be busted for sure. I knew that Chapako, who was in the cell closest to the guard post, was listening out for them, but there was no way that he would hear them coming with the wind howling so loudly through the cell block.

‘Come on, brother,’ Samir pleaded. ‘Look, I brought you some more beers. We’ll swap. Just a little bit.’

‘I don’t want any more beer,’ I said, grabbing hold of my window flap in case he tried to force them on me. I didn’t give him any cocaine either, because it would have made him worse. Samir didn’t give up. There was absolutely nothing I could do to make him go back to his cell. He was drunk and would have stayed there all night, arguing with me, so eventually, I closed the door flap and lay back down on my bed, hoping that if I ignored him, he would go away.

He didn’t, though. He stood at my door yelling at me to give him the cocaine. It was hard to know whether to stay quiet or try to reason with him, because the longer I didn’t answer him, the more violent he became. He began smashing my door with his fists, again and again,