coloured cinder blocks – they all seemed to seep into each other like an over-exposed photograph. An electric generator and a fuel tank stood next to each other, locked in a cage. They were bright yellow. There was nothing else to catch the eye.
“This way!”
The guard led him to a door set in a wall, which opened as they approached. Jamie noticed a camera, mounted high above. It swivelled to follow him when he moved. The door led into a large, shabby room with a second officer sitting behind a desk with a computer. There were a couple of holding cells, some chairs – none of them matching – and a shower with a plastic curtain drawn half across. There were no windows. The room was lit by strip lighting. Mercifully, after the furnace of the courtyard, it was air-conditioned.
“Sit down!” It was the second guard who had spoken. He was casually dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Jamie saw that he carried no weapon. He was a man in his forties, with black hair tied behind his neck. He obviously had Native American blood and Jamie wondered if that might make him more sympathetic. But his manner was brisk and formal.
“My name is Joe Feather,” the man said. “But you call me Mr Feather or sir. I’m the Intake Officer and I’m going to process you and then show you into Orientation. Do you understand?”
Jamie nodded.
“You’re going to find it tough here. You’ve had a spell in juvie – is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then you know the basics. Keep your head down. Do as you’re told. It’ll make it easier on you.” He nodded at the other guard. “You can take off the shackles.”
Jamie’s hands and feet were unfastened and gratefully he moved his legs apart. There were red marks across his wrists and he rubbed them. In the next twenty minutes, his details were entered into the computer
… or at least, the details of Jeremy Rabb, the boy he was supposed to be. He had been up half the previous night with Alicia, memorizing them before he had been handed over to the police.
“Go into the shower and strip,” the Intake Officer told him. “I want all your clothes, including your shorts. You have any piercings?”
Jamie shook his head.
“OK. I’ll pass you your new kit…”
Jamie went into the shower and drew the curtain. But it seemed he wasn’t going to be given any privacy. The side wall of the shower contained a window looking into a storeroom and, as Jamie stood under the running water, he was aware of Joe Feather examining him from the other side. Jamie had been through strip searches when he was in juvenile hall, but even so he was embarrassed and turned away. That was when the officer saw the tattoo on his shoulder.
“Mr Rabb…” Joe Feather spoke the words softly. “Turn off the shower.”
Jamie did as he was told. He stood with drops of water trickling down his shoulders and back.
“Where did you get that tattoo?” the Intake Officer demanded.
“I’ve always had it. It was done when I was born.”
“You have a brother?”
Jamie froze. Had he been recognized already? “I don’t have a brother,” he said.
“No brother?”
“No, sir.”
Joe Feather handed him a bundle of prison-issue clothes. It fitted through a slot beneath the window. “Put these on,” he said. “I’ll take you in.”
Jamie was the ninety-sixth boy to arrive at Silent Creek. The prison could hold one hundred in total with ten full-time guards – or supervisors, as they called themselves – to watch over them. There were four living units – North, South, East and West – and life was arranged so that the inmates were kept apart as much as possible. That way, rival gang members barely saw each other and never spoke. Each unit ate at a different time – there were four sittings for every meal – and there were four exercise times in the prison gym. The age range went from thirteen to eighteen.
There were rules for everything. The boys had to walk with their hands clasped behind their backs. They weren’t allowed to talk while they moved and they couldn’t go anywhere, not even the toilet, without adult supervision. They were watched constantly, either by supervisors or security cameras. They were patted down after every meal and if a single plastic fork went missing, they were all strip-searched. There were six hours of school every morning, two hours of recreation (in the gym – it was too hot outside) and two hours of TV. Only sport was allowed – never movies or news. The prison uniform consisted of blue tracksuit trousers, grey T-shirts and trainers. All the colours had been chosen carefully. Nothing was black or bright red. Those were gang colours and might be enough to provoke a fight.
Life at the prison was not brutal, but it was boring. There were library books for the boys who could read, but otherwise every day was the same, the hours measured out with deadly precision, stretching out endlessly in the desert sun. There was solitary confinement or loss of privileges for anyone who stepped out of line and even an untied shoelace could bring instant punishment if the supervisors were in a bad mood.
And there was the medicine wing. Boys who were violent or unco-operative went to see the doctor in a small compound set right against the cinder-block wall. They were given pills and when they came back they were quiet and empty-eyed. One way or another, the prison would control you. The boys accepted that. They didn’t even hate Silent Creek. They simply suffered it as if it were a long illness that had happened to them and that wasn’t their fault.
It didn’t take Jamie long to find out what he needed to know. None of the other boys had met Scott. There was no record of his ever having been here. But he knew that what he had so far seen of Silent Creek was only half the story. There were two parts to the prison: he had seen that much for himself when he arrived on the bus. There was a whole area of the prison, on the other side of the wall, which stood quite alone. Nobody communicated with it. It had its own gymnasium, its own classrooms, kitchens and cells, as if it were a slightly smaller reflection of the main compound. And there were rumours.
On the other side of the wall. That, it was said, was where the specials were kept.
“They’re the real hard acts. The killers. The psychos.”
“They’re sick. That’s what I heard. They’ve got something wrong with their heads.”
“Yeah. They’re vegetables. Cretins. They just sit in their cells and stare at the walls…”
Jamie was having lunch with four other boys. The chair he was sitting on was made of metal, welded into the table, which was in turn bolted to the floor. The canteen was a small, square room with bare white walls. No decoration was allowed anywhere in Silent Creek, not even in the cells. The food wasn’t too bad though – even if it was served up in a compartmentalized plastic tray. Jamie had been surprised by most of the boys he had met. Nobody had given him a hard time – in fact they’d been glad to see a new face. Perhaps his experience at juvenile hall had helped. From the start he was one of them. So far, he hadn’t needed to use his false name. The other boys at the table called him Indian. He knew them as Green Eyes, Baltimore, DV and Tunes.
“The story I heard is that nobody wants them,” DV said. He was seventeen, Latino, arrested following a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. The boys weren’t meant to ask one another about their crimes but of course they did. DV was a member of the Playboy Gansta Crips. He had tattoos on both arms and planned to go back to the gang as soon as he got out. He had never known his father and his mother ignored him. The gang was the only family he had. “They got no parents,” he went on, “so now they’re using them for experiments. Testing stuff on them. That sort of thing.”
“How many of them are there?” Jamie asked.
“I heard twenty,” Green Eyes said. Jamie wasn’t sure how he’d got his nickname. He was fifteen years old, arrested for possession of a deadly weapon – meaning a gun. His eyes were blue.
“There are fifty at least,” Tunes growled. He was the youngest boy in the prison, barely fourteen. He turned to Jamie and lowered his voice. “You don’t want to ask too many questions about them, Indian. Not unless you want to join them.”
Jamie wondered where all these rumours began. But that was the thing about prisons. There were never any secrets. Somehow the whispers would travel from cell to cell and you had as much chance of keeping them out as you had of stopping the desert breeze.
As usual, they were being supervised while they ate. This was one of the few times when they were allowed
