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MARCHING POWDER

I finished cleaning up and returned to my seat at the table. Ricardo looked at me and smiled.

'Feeling better now?'

It was the happiest I had felt for weeks and I didn't know how to express my gratefulness, but I think he could see it in my eyes. He smiled and held out some freshly ironed pyjamas for me to change into. I suddenly remembered that I still must have smelled of sewage, but Ricardo kindly hadn't mentioned it.

'Hey, man, thanks a lot.' I smiled back at him. It was the first time I'd smiled properly in a long time; with all the misery I'd been through, I'd almost forgotten how.

Yeah, I was feeling better, all right. If you had asked me at the time, I probably would have said I'd never felt better in my life. It is impossible for anyone who has never been starved to understand the joy of having a full stomach and knowing you are no longer going to die. When you get the feeling that your life has just been saved, nothing else matters. Thirteen days in the police interrogation cells had almost killed me. So, for that moment at least, I didn't care that I was in prison or that I was still very sick.

'I'm glad. You should get some rest now,' advised Ricardo, in a fatherly voice, bending down to turn back my blankets for me.

With my body now working overtime to digest the sudden intake of food, a heavy tiredness came over my body. This time I didn't fight it. I was absolutely exhausted, but it was a happy tiredness. I swallowed three of the antibiotic pills that Sylvia had given me with a glass of water and then lay down on the bed Ricardo had made up for me. With his thick blanket, and Sylvia's blanket on top, comforting me, I instantly fell asleep.

When I woke up the following afternoon, I was still tired so I went back to sleep for a few hours more. However, each time I woke up, I still felt tired. In fact, it seemed the more I slept, the more tired I became. I had to spend the next few days in Ricardo's room, regaining my strength.

The first time I needed to go to the toilet, Ricardo showed me where they were. The toilets stank. They were cleaner than I had expected, but they were still horrible. Ricardo said they hadn't been fixed up since the prison had been built over a hundred years before. They were hosed out three or four times a day, but the sewerage system was so ancient that nothing could be done about the smell.