Sixteen

I have just refused for the third time to see any of the Holy men. I have nothing to say to them. I don’t feel like talking. I shall see them soon anyhow. They will still be sniveling around after I’m gone since they don’t do executions in public any more. The only thing that interests me now is the problem of getting around the procedures to see if there is a loophole in all that tight moral armoury of their precious law. They have moved me to a different cell. It’s more comfortable in this one, lying on my back; I can see more than a portion of the sky. Maybe that is the reason they move you here. To give you those last looks at what you are going to lose. Seeing the soft underbelly of the clouds sending the City pink and black in the last of the sunset is worth a lot to a condemned man. There is nothing much else to see but I can construct a whole world from those clutches of nimbus cloud. All my time is spent in watching the slowly moving colours of the day and even of the night. It would surprise you if you gaze up and wait. I do not care when I sleep or wake. The problem of a loophole obsesses me. I am always wondering if there have been cases of condemned prisoners escaping from the implacable machinery of justice. At the last moment they break through the police cordon and vanish to the jungle in a nick of time just before the noose is coiled. There would have been more chance if they held the hangings in public like they used to. I blame myself for not paying attention to executions. I used to read about them in the history books or scattered papers and that would be that; of prisoners jumping the scaffold and then being shot if they ran. That would be something. When you are on the move there is always a chance. It is like a thief running away down the dockside with a basket of fish, running for his life, looking ahead but waiting for the shot to gouge open his back; all of his life contained in that one moment.. You should always take account of such matters. I let them go missing. I suppose that if something doesn’t concern you, you don’t bother. I’d read descriptions of hangings but they hadn’t stayed with me long, but now facing my own, it is surprising what the mind stores up. What it brings together between your own circumstances and history.. Technical books that deal with the placing of the knot must certainly exist but I had never felt interested enough to look them up. If they were dealing with pirates or hanging them on a ship, of huge lashings or keel hauling and walking by lanyard in chains , there was always the chance of jumping over and taking your chance. This appealed to me more. ‘Hanging is the white man’s way, the civilized way;’ Iskra once told me. ‘Even the hood they use puts you at a distance. They don’t want to see your eyes’.