Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

‘Those?’ asks Mr Windsor, nodding at the shelves and openly laughing at the very idea. ‘Had a gander. Bloody gibberish. Can’t even read the names. Is that one about a hippo, or something?’

Cox doesn’t turn around. ‘St Augustine of Hippo, Mr Windsor. Saint Augustine, native of what we now call Algeria. His Confessions is an autobiographical tome detailing the sins of Augustine’s youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is considered the first western autobiography, and has now influenced religion and philosophy for more than one thousand five hundred years.’

‘Not about a hippo, then?’ asks Windsor, despondently. ‘You like all that, do you? Foreign languages, and stuff?’

‘Latin, Mr Windsor. The building blocks of our own language. Winston Churchill declared that to learn Latin should be considered an honour, and Greek a treat.’

Mr Windsor gives a polite smile. Glances around again at the meagre possessions in the monk-like cell. Unlike the other cells on the wing, there are no photographs. No posters. No letters from home. The only decoration to the room’s austere walls is the large wooden cross on the wall above the bed. It is an expensive piece: nineteenth-century and patterned with geometric parquetry: rectangles of overlapping inlaid rectangles of expensive wood. It is the only physical reminder of the life that was taken from him when the judge sent him down. There was a time when Griffin Cox was the very epitome of sophistication. Wealthy, by many people’s standards. His was the life of a true Epicurean. He indulged his senses in the cool, vaulted palaces and frescoed vaults of olive-skinned dealers in objects of desire. Ate well. Ate sumptuously. Lost great chunks of reality gazing into the immortalized brushstrokes of Old Masters long dead. The cross on the wall hangs as a reminder of both penance and contrition. He grieves what he has lost, and chastises himself daily for allowing himself to be caught.

‘I’ve got a Latin tattoo, actually,’ says Mr Windsor, still conversational. ‘Dulce periculum. You know that one?’

Cox pauses, sensing an opportunity. He runs the next three minutes through in his mind: a chess master playing fifteen moves ahead. Fights the urge to grin as he realizes what an opportunity he has been handed.

‘Oh, Mr Windsor …’

Cox does not yet admit it to himself, but he is losing his ability to rise above prison life. His mood is beginning to darken. There seem too many miles to traverse between now and his release date. He is not accustomed to a downturn in his spirits but if he does not find some source of entertainment, perhaps even of hope, he fears that he will soon be indistinguishable from the other, unimportant convicts within the great Victorian walls of HMP Holderness. And the writing course is the fulcrum where Cox will insert his lever; moving the earth, and his place within it, forever.

‘Oh goodness,’ continues Cox, looking momentarily shocked. ‘Why on earth would you allow that?’

Mr Windsor looks at him, surprised. ‘What? Means “danger is sweet”, mate.’

Cox shakes his head. ‘Mr Windsor, I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a terrible practical joke. Dulce periculum means, well, perhaps I shouldn’t say. The periculum refers to a part of the anatomy, Mr Windsor. An area one might refer to as intimate.’

‘What? Balls? Arse?’

‘I believe you would refer to it as the, ahem, bridge between those two locations.’

Mr Windsor’s eyebrows shoot halfway up his forehead. ‘Bastard!’ he says, with a hiss. ‘Are you sure, Cox? Are you winding me up? Because I paid nigh on two hundred quid for that and it’s right across my bloody shoulders …’

‘You’re most welcome to do your own investigations, Mr Windsor,’ says Cox, not letting his amusement show in his face. ‘But I do know my Latin, sir. My tutor was a remarkable man. Relative clauses, conditional clauses, the conjunctive and disjunctive. I can recite much of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria from memory, though there is a copy on my shelf if you wish to peruse it …’

‘Bastard,’ hisses Windsor, again. He slumps, crestfallen. ‘You think anybody will know? I mean, who speaks Latin?’

Cox feels a familiar despair settle upon him like snow. It has ever been thus. He has always been surrounded by cretins, halfwits and those for whom the accumulation of knowledge has always seemed less important than maintaining the continued bliss of their ignorance.

‘Your secret is safe with me, sir,’ says Cox, lowering his voice. ‘My mind is a repository of secrets and unspilled truths, sir. My word is my bond.’

He holds the younger man’s eyes for a moment. Waits for the moment of realization to penetrate the mush of his brain. Watches it happen – a rock thrown into a still pond.

‘I’ll know it was you, Cox,’ he says, attempting to threaten. ‘If people start shouting that I’ve got a sweet peri-fucking-neum or whatever you call it, I’ll know it was you.’

Cox looks hurt. ‘Sir. You are the officer I respect most on the wing. I’m hurt that you would even think I would betray a confidence. You can rely on me to say the right thing to anybody who even asks.’

Windsor eyeballs him for a moment. Searches his face for any sign of threat or duplicity. Sees none. Visibly relaxes. Cox watches the internal battle, and fights the urge to let his enjoyment show. By tomorrow, Windsor will have double-checked Cox’s translation and discovered that the prisoner had been lying. The words translate exactly as Windsor had requested. But everybody on the wing knows that Cox is a Latin scholar. Windsor’s protestations about the correct translation would count for nought when the men on the landings were whipping themselves into a frenzy of laughter and see who could outdo the others in coming up with the most stinging barbs about his ‘mistranslated’ body art.

‘The course, sir. You’re one hundred per cent sure that they can’t find the space this time around? Per cent, as you know, meaning “out of one hundred”.