Information about the book
The cell reeked of piss. Like the hard light they never turned off, there was no
escape from the smell. The crude graffiti on the walls was a reminder of those
who had been there before. He wondered what had happened to them. All that was
left were their defiant scrawls.
From one of the cells a voice shouted. ‘Hey policeman. You come here you fucking
little bitch. I want my BlackBerry you fucking bitch. I want it now!’
The answer came back. ‘Suka wena! Shut up you fucking whore.’
‘Hey little bitch, I make more money in one night than you do in your whole
fucking wages. I want my BlackBerry now!’
There was no way he would get any sleep. Not that the odds were that good to
begin with. He was lying on a stack of inch-thick blue mats. The only luxury was
the sheet he had brought from home and his pillow. The smell of its familiarity
clashed with the noxious odour of the place.
A dull ache throbbed in his gall bladder, and he turned restlessly. ‘How did he let it
get to this?’ he thought. ‘What happened? I’m a hustler. A survivor.’
He had everything going for him. A lucrative career and connections with some of
the most powerful men in the country. Yet now he faced the possibility of spending
the rest of his life in prison.
The Nigerian prostitute in the other cell, the one shouting for her BlackBerry,
stopped baying. He fell into a fitful sleep.
The next day she got bail. He watched her saunter down the concrete corridor with
exaggerated confidence.
He sat there wondering about bail. Would he get it? When would he get it? He
watched the police bring in a teenage girl. They shoved her into the opposite cell.
She looked devastated. She sat on the floor with her legs drawn to her chest. Her
arms about her quivering limbs. She reminded him of his daughter, Chiara. They
were about the same age.
A mewling escaped from the girl and then the sobbing started.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.
She looked up.
‘Are you okay?’
She told him she had been at Sandton City shopping mall with some friends and
they had dared her to shoplift an item. She’d been caught.
‘Let that be a lesson,’ he said to her. ‘Don’t always be dared or try to impress your
buddy. Look where you are and look where they are.’
But she wasn’t worried about her friends. What worried her was that her father
would find out.
He rolled his bottle of mineral water across the corridor to her. Tried to comfort
her. Shouted for the cops to give her some of his food, and tissues.
They talked all through the afternoon, the man and the girl. He told her to be
honest with her father.
The next day someone came to fetch her. As she left she turned to him. ‘God bless
you,’ she said. ‘You’re a wonderful man.’
He considered that. If he was so wonderful why was he in jail on a murder charge?
He pondered too whether her father had left her in jail overnight to scare her. Some
fathers would do that.
He was in that cell for twenty-eight days waiting for his bail application. Each
day he went through a routine. Get up. Fix the bed. Do his ablutions. Before, in
the outside world, he’d never had much time for reading, but now he read two
books by the cyclist Lance Armstrong. When he wasn’t reading, he thought of his
prospects. He sighed.
The man’s name: Glenn Agliotti.
