Periphery Read Free Page B

visits, other people were doing it. I didn’t know how to make myself known, so I just knocked.
    The door slid open. She stared at me, and began to back away.
    “Do you mind if I come in?”
    She gestured consent, zombie-slow, and embarked on the difficult task of clambering back onto her bunk. There was nowhere else so I sat there too, at the foot of her bed. She fumbled with the room controls, the door closed, we were alone together. It felt perilous, uncertain; but not in a nightmare way.
    “I just wanted to say, the sessions are obviously a strain. Is there anything I can do? Nothing’s compulsory, you know.” Her braids were fuzzed all over, after days without any attention. I wanted to ask if she had a comb.
    “I…am… Not like this…willingly… Captain.”
    Beads of sweat stood on her brow by the end of that momentous effort. Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and curling. Her mouth was very full, almost too much for her narrow face to bear. She would have been pretty—a misfit, awkward prettiness—if there had been any life in her expression.
    “Oh no!” I cried, consternated by her struggle. “I’m not the boss, please. The system did that to me, I’m not checking up on you. I meant—”
    What did I mean? I could not explain myself.
    “Do you have a comb?”
    “Ye’uh… Ma’am.”
    She clambered slowly down again, groped inside the dry shower stall and brought out a dingy ceramic fibre comb, Panhandle issue. Her hand flailed piteously as she tried to hand it over; and yet the same thought flashed on me as had come when I first saw her. Somehow she was untouched. She was not only the youngest member of my “team,” she was nothing like the rest of us: weary criminals, outlaws fallen from high places. She had been cared for, loved and treasured; and become a zombie on Death Row without ever losing that bloom. It was a mystery. What the hell had she done? Was she a psycho? What had made this gentle nineteen-year-old so dangerous?
    “Turn around.”
    I loosened her braids, combed out her willful mass of hair and set it in order again, as if I were her mother. It was the sweetest thing. I was glad she was turned away, so she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.
    “There. That’ll do for a while.”
    She faced me again, another painful, laborious shift. “Th…an’…you.”
    I had run out of excuses to touch her. “Shall I come again?”
    She struggled fiercely. “Yes… I like… that .”
iv
    The fourth session was a practical. We had been warned on our room screens, but it came as a shock. The dayroom chairs and the booth where Big Nurse sat had gone: as soon as the fourteen of us had arrived the doors closed and we were plunged into a simulation. A grassy plain, scattered trees, and a herd of large animals coming over the horizon… Disoriented, bewildered, we cooperated like castaways. The consensus decision was that we should treat these furred, pawed, sabre-toothed bison-things as potential transport. We tried to catch a young one, so we could tame it. My God, it was a disaster, but it was fun. I had to set a broken bone. Koffi, tough guy, got through it without any pain relief; we discussed bottom-up pharmacology and bull-riding.
    Sista and Angie (who had announced that she no longer wanted to be called Servalan) started bunking together, and no retribution descended. Gee hustled me for a simulated childbirth drama: thankfully I had no control over what the system chose to throw at us. I found out I’d been wrong about Bimbam the addict. She was not addicted to any recreational drug. She was a former school teacher, amateur mule. Her problem was a little girl of seven, and a little boy of five, from whom she’d been separated for two years. In prison on earth she’d had visiting rights, on screen. Now she would never see them again. She crawled back towards life, carrying the wounds that would never heal. Drummer, too, crawled back to life. He asked us to call him Achmed, his