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MARCHING POWDER

to do. It had brought me nothing but trouble and the sight of the white lines revolted me. Why would anyone want to deliberately snort something so horrible up their nose?

'Are you sure?' he asked, unfolding the small packet he had brought along and tapping the paper so that some of it fell onto the CD case. I refused him again, but Roberto kept insisting, and I had to say something.

'I don't mind if you do coke, Roberto. But you didn't have to lie to me,' I said, raising my voice. 'That was the pact. How can I trust you now?'

Roberto apologised. He said he had been confused and that he hadn't told me because I wouldn't have understood, which made me even angrier.

'You don't need it, Roberto,' I told him. 'You think you do, but you don't.'

I hardly slept at all after the argument with Roberto. Rusty rang my mobile phone about ten times. I didn't want to answer. He phoned up other inmates to send me a message: don't go to court. I should pretend to be sick so that we could delay in order to try to get more money. I had already considered that option. I could have cut myself and gone to hospital, but I knew that would only have put things off by a week, or two at the most. Delay or no delay, I would still have to face the judges' verdict.

I stayed awake until dawn, thinking about what would happen if they found me guilty. It had been almost five years since I arrived at San Pedro. My mind raced over all the things that had happened to me during that time. There had been many good times and I tried to concentrate on thinking only about them, but my mind kept returning to the suffering. I thought about Samir and Aregon, and the little girl being raped, and about the gang rapist's brains spilling out onto the concrete. I remembered all the sleeping pills I had taken when Yasheeda left me. I couldn't live through another five or ten years like that. And even if I could, what future would I have if I got out of prison ten years older? Then I thought of what my friend Sylvia, from the Anglican Church, used to tell me, and I started praying to God to save me.