Page 5 of Claim

Bang. Bang. Bang.

I came up hard on the top bunk, heart moving before my head caught up. I’d learnt quickly in here. Wake fast, orient faster. Pretending to sleep was how you got tested.

Or worse.

I dragged a hand down my face, gritty with the remains of a night that hadn’t counted as sleep. Be a fucking fool to sleep properly in here, even with the doors locked. The silence never stayed silent long enough for that. Somewhere down the wing someone shouted, the vibration bouncing off concrete and steel until it meant nothing and everything at once.

Below me, Harris grunted and rolled onto his side, turning his back. Bottom bunk privilege. He didn’t look at me. He never did.

We didn’t speak. At all.

Twenty hours a day locked in a box with another man without exchanging a word did strange things to your head, but it was safer that way. I didn’t know whose side Harris was on. If he even had one. But in here, not knowing was reason enough to keep my mouth shut. Silence was a language everyone understood. And mistrust kept me breathing.

The key scraped in the lock. The door swung open.

I dangled my legs off the bunk, joints stiff, muscles tight from too much stillness and not enough space. Dent stood in the doorway, one hand braced on the door, eyes doing a sweep of the cell as if half-expecting it to have transformed overnight into a drug den. To be fair, night was when most of the contraband made it in via the drones.

Not in this cell, though.

I didn’t have those outside forces delivering for me anymore.

My cell was bog-standard. Designed for one man and quietly crammed with two. No photos taped up. No towels pretending to be curtains. No signs anyone planned to stay. We were both stopovers. Remand. Temporary. That lie we told ourselves to keep from splintering.

The mattress was thin enough for my back to remember every night in here. My shoulders ached in a way they never used to. I’d slept on worse, sure. On floors. Sofas reeking of old smoke and damp. And on paper-thin things in my mum’s flat, letting Keeley have the bed because she needed it more than I did.

But this was different.

This pressed into me. Stayed with me. Reminded me every morning exactly where I was.

Maybe I’d just got used to luxury.

Knew I shouldn’t have let myself.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Dent said.

Dent was one of the easier screws to deal with. He wasn’t soft. Fuck no. None of them were that. But he was predictable, and in a place like this, predictability worked in an inmate’s favour. Late forties, early fifties. A weathered face, lines cut deep around his mouth and eyes from years of squinting down corridors and through reinforced glass. He didn’t posture. Nor savour the small humiliations the younger screws collected like trophies. He was solid. Sound. A decent man who went home to his wife at the end of a shift and left the prison at the gate. He didn’t take shit, though. But he also didn’t go looking for it. He worked the wing with a kind of blunt respect. Not for us, exactly, but for the job. Order only held if it was consistent. I valued that. He ran his wing the way I had my line on the outside. I preferred it when he was on shift. Even knowing full well that he hated criminals. Drug dealers most of all.

Men like me, in other words.

I stretched, feeling the pull along my spine, then hopped down and slid my feet into the plastic sliders by the bed. Cold bit into my soles. I raked a hand through my hair. Too long now. Untidy. Another small thing slipping out of my control.

“Who’s visiting me?” I asked, knowing better.

I hadn’t had a single visitor in eight weeks. I didn’t want them. Couldn’t risk it. No way was I sitting across from my mum or Keeley in the visits hall with Ghost and his lot scattered around the place, watching, counting, cataloguing. People thought visits were about comfort. They weren’t. They were leverage. Proof I had shit to lose on the outside.

I needed to look as if I had nothing.

Even when the ache sat heavy in my chest. Even when my mouth went dry with the wanting of it. Conversation. Familiarity. A voice that knew mine. I daren’t show it. Wouldn’t ever show it.

Dent stepped aside and let me out. I kept my head down. Did what he asked. Obedient. Resistance was a performance that got people looking.

And the best thing I could be in here was invisible.

Even if I had a huge fuck-off target on my back.

“No idea.” Dent then led me out.

The door slammed shut behind us, the bang vibrating through bone. The corridors were already alive. Boots on concrete. Keys rattling. Voices ricocheting off walls stained with years of fingerprints and rage. Men pressed up against doors, faces at windows, eyes wasted or threatening.