Protection (2 page)

Soon Owens was snoring, a long whistle followed by a double rattle. Gabriel hardly registered the sound. That was part of prison life, hearing things after dark, sometimes intimate, often crude. Gabriel’s mind was back on Joseph Cooper, tantalized by a new possibility and unable to banish it from his mind. Eventually, he began telling himself it would be a disciplinary action. He couldn’t allow a killer of helpless women and children to stroll into his territory, his Wentworth, without showing the little prick who was boss. Besides, Gabriel had earned the indulgence. Gabriel had entered Wentworth with two life sentences round his neck, determined to beat back any man who sought to dominate him and never to be buggered, even if it killed him. Five years later, he’d entered a few uneasy truces – as with Owens – but no inmate had ever cowed him. Nor had one buggered him. The only man to try, a squinty brute named Carl Werth, had forced his veiny, uncut cock between Gabriel’s lips. And Gabriel had snapped his jaws shut with all his strength, cracking a molar and biting off Werth’s manhood in the process.

Gabriel had been dragged to the infirmary, a grim cluster of black-tiled rooms not renovated since Victoria sat the throne. Werth, borne on a stretcher, was screaming and crying; Gabriel, spitting blood, was furiously denying he’d willingly fellated the other man. Homosexual conduct, though rampant inside Wentworth, was subject to unwritten bylaws, and an inmate ignored the nuances at his peril.

Known homosexuals incarcerated within the British penal system were in immediate and continual danger of their lives. Despised by guards, administrators and inmates alike, such individuals were friendless, shunned as perverts and creeps. Gabriel, who’d been inside only three weeks when Werth tried to rape him, would have slashed his own wrists before letting himself be branded homosexual. And yet Werth, sweating bullets on the stretcher with an open wound where his penis used to be, had been under no pressure to explain himself. Like most dominant men serving a long sentence, Werth had simply picked a presumably weaker male to be his “girl.” In Wentworth, being homosexual was an unpronounced death sentence. Yet being like Werth, a prison queer, was merely sinful, no more or less damning than masturbation.

In the bunk above Gabriel’s head, Owens let out an explosive fart. Gabriel pressed his face against his pillow’s rough ticking. He wondered how Dr. Joseph Cooper was enjoying his first night inside. Still pretending he was at the Ritz-Carlton?

When Werth and Gabriel were presented to him for treatment, Dr. Louis Royal had been new to Wentworth and the British penal system. Dr. Harper, always calm in a crisis, had started issuing orders, but Dr. Royal had just stood there, taking in Werth’s torn flesh and Gabriel’s bloodstained teeth with evident disgust. As Dr. Harper arranged Werth’s emergency transport to St. George’s Hospital, fastening leg irons around the trembling man’s ankles, Dr. Royal had examined Gabriel’s injured right hand.

In the struggle, Gabriel had dislocated his ring finger and broken his pinky. Dr. Royal assessed the injuries without speaking. Then he placed his hand atop Gabriel’s, scarcely allowing his elegant manicured fingers to touch the swollen flesh.

“Men like you make me want to vomit,” Dr. Royal had whispered. “Men like you should go directly to the gallows.”

Seizing Gabriel’s injured fingers, Dr. Royal had twisted them round, crushing the broken pinky and cracking the dislocated ring finger above the knuckle. Maddened by pain, Gabriel had launched himself at the doctor’s throat. Six guards were required to pull Gabriel off Dr. Royal, who’d pressed charges the very next day. But the testimony of those guards, including McCrory and Buckland, had tipped the scales in Gabriel’s favor. Dr. Royal had been censured for unprofessional conduct and Gabriel had received the lash – not for homosexuality, as he’d feared, but for grievous bodily injury of a fellow inmate. He’d lost his pinky finger, too – infection had settled in the crushed bone – but compared to the hell of thirty lashes, amputation of a minor digit went unnoticed.

Gabriel had borne up to the lash bravely. Not for nothing had he weathered his da’s beatings year after year, some deserved, some not. He hadn’t pissed himself, hadn’t wept, hadn’t begged. He still bore the scars across his back – he would until he died – but his silent endurance of the cat-o’-nine tails had made a lasting impression among his fellow convicts. During Gabriel’s recovery, Carl Werth had been transferred to Pentonville Men’s Prison. So nine-fingered Gabriel MacKenna had inherited Werth’s place inside Wentworth, and all had been right with the world.

Except now I’m a prison queer, just like Werth
, Gabriel thought, flopping onto his left side in hopes it would prove more conducive to sleep than his right.
Or as near as makes no difference. Why deny it? Why deny what I need?

Even after five long years of incarceration, Gabriel had never given himself over to the pleasures so many inmates took for granted. He’d entered Wentworth vowing not only to never be buggered but also to never stoop to buggery for his own relief. Yet five years with only rare glimpses of living women had taught him the meaning of blue balls. His ex-fiancée, Mattie, had married some other geezer after two years; the girl he’d seen on the side, Sheila, had marched down the aisle even quicker, but written to Gabriel anyway for a while. Then she, too, had found some better diversion, condemning Gabriel to endless, empty nights. Sometimes he got his hands on a bit of contraband, a French postcard or a dirty book, but mostly he was forced to rely on stale memories. Until finally, three months ago, Gabriel had turned to Lonnie Parker and made him his girl.

Lonnie had been sentenced to twenty years for running a grand larceny ring. A lovely young man with bright blond hair, green eyes, and only the faintest shadow of a beard, twenty-three-year-old Lonnie had protested his innocence from day one, swearing he’d fallen in with tricksters and been stitched up. He was too streetwise, too well versed in the lingo of the habitual thief, to be the literal innocent he claimed, but leader of a thieves’ network? Lonnie couldn’t have masterminded a child’s birthday party. Surely that had been obvious to both judge and jury, but His Majesty’s justice worked in mysterious ways.

Within days of his arrival, Lonnie had been buggered by his cellmate and raped by G-block’s gang of hypermasculine prison queers, the Lovelies. Hollow-eyed, off his food and widely expected to top himself, Lonnie had been too frightened to speak when Gabriel sat down beside him at supper one night. But he’d accepted the offered cigarette, a Pall Mall, and kept it between his lips as Gabriel lit it. After that, Lonnie had been under Gabriel’s protection. And Gabriel had been within his rights to ask any payment he wished.

It started with hand jobs. Gabriel, repulsed and aroused by Lonnie’s touch, had initially believed hand jobs would be enough. But Lonnie, brimming with gratitude and new life, soon offered to suck Gabriel off, and after the third time Gabriel agreed. Eventually, he’d started kissing Lonnie, surprised by how little the action stirred him. Trying to imagine Lonnie as a woman was impossible; Lonnie was low-voiced and narrow-hipped, with no tits and a point of entry Gabriel didn’t like to think about. Once while Gabriel was kissing Lonnie, eyes shut tight as he thought of Sheila, Lonnie pulled out his own cock and pressed it into Gabriel’s hand. Jerking away as if scalded, Gabriel had marshaled all his self-control not to slap Lonnie across the face. But Lonnie didn’t deserve such brutality. He was only trying to earn his protection by offering equipment Gabriel didn’t want.

What if it’s not the equipment?
Gabriel asked himself uncomfortably.
What if Lonnie’s the problem?
Gabriel had never liked stupid or passive women. Why should those qualities be any less off-putting in a man?

Gabriel let himself remember how Joseph Cooper’s uniform fit him, that snugness across the shoulders and rear. Not to mention the face. Cooper was beautiful, yet not feminine. As a free man, Gabriel’s appetite for sex had been prodigious. Now that he knew he couldn’t last another thirty, forty, or fifty years on the occasional hand job or suck off, perhaps it was time to accept masculine beauty? The cock, the balls and an asshole as the only route to satisfaction?

Up in the top bunk, Owens moaned in his sleep, releasing an especially pungent fart. Soon all of F-block would smell like Hell’s waiting room. Twenty-two more days, Gabriel told himself. He’d receive the lash for harming Owens or the noose for killing him, and just at the moment Gabriel wasn’t in the market for either. Best to bend his thoughts elsewhere, on something worthwhile. Like how to get Joseph Cooper alone.

* * *

J
udging from Old Wentworth’s design, Victorians viewed bathing as something to be done rarely, or only in small doses. The Roundabout’s lavatory had just one tub. The inmates of A, B, C and D block used it just twice a year, queuing up naked for the privilege and dunking themselves in the same increasingly gray water. Otherwise, each man depended on his cell’s washbasin and flannel to keep clean. A new cake of hard yellow soap was issued every January whether the old one was melted to a sliver or not.

Toilet facilities in both Old Wentworth and the new building were even more primitive. Flushing toilets were reserved for administrators, not inmates. In the yard there was a privy; otherwise they made do in their cells with plain metal buckets, swapping a full bucket for an empty one each morning. Prisoners and guards alike despised “slopping out,” as the daily ritual was called. Gabriel had never thought much about it; he’d grown up in a house with nine younger siblings and no indoor plumbing, just an outhouse and a well. But most of the prisoners considered slopping out an institutionalized form of humiliation, and Governor Sanderson agreed. But retrofitting Wentworth with a toilet per cell would be an incalculable expense, something the Home Office would never approve, even if the toilets were installed with 100 percent convict labor. So Governor Sanderson had compromised by giving the new building a communal shower.

The shower’s design was simple. A small towel room with cupboards and wooden benches opened into a square, white-tiled room. Showerheads protruded from the walls; the floor was fitted with grated drains. When the brand new inmates, still serving their month of what used to be called “New Convict Isolation” and was now called “Acclimation Time,” filed into the towel room, Gabriel was waiting inside.

As Cooper proceeded into the showers, Gabriel spoke quietly to the others. Luckily, Smyth had already returned to the general population, or he surely would have refused to play along. But the new men, eager to fit in and intimidated by Gabriel, each agreed to piss off in exchange for an extra half-ounce of tobacco and a few cigarette papers. Bathing wasn’t compulsory at Wentworth – the very first thing Gabriel would have changed, had he been governor – so declining a shower would raise no eyebrows. Only the big man, Benjamin Stiles, refused Gabriel’s tobacco, shaking his head until a chocolate bar was offered. Of the seven men whom Gabriel bribed, Stiles was the only one with no idea why he was being asked to leave, or what he was abandoning Cooper to face.

Once the towel room was empty, Gabriel stripped, wrapping a white towel around his waist. His cock already poked through the gap, thick and purple with rising excitement. Women had always reacted to it with nervous laughter, giggling at how huge and ugly it was. Gabriel never felt insulted. Those same women were soon gasping and spreading themselves wider, riding him with frantic rocking jolts as if afraid they’d never be so perfectly filled again.

Cooper stood beneath one of the far wall’s showerheads. The water beat down on his head and shoulders at full blast, steam rising as he soaped himself with the gusto of someone who considered cleanliness next to godliness …

Gabriel watched. Cooper’s ass was firm and perfect. His thighs and calves were surprisingly well muscled, as if he’d done real work in his life. And when Cooper turned around, rubbing his face and scalp beneath the water, Gabriel’s belly clenched at the sight of the other man’s cock. It was just the right length, all the same width, all the same color. Gabriel, who’d only had one cock in his mouth – the one he’d bitten off – had a sudden impulse to hold Cooper down. To kiss that soft, perfect member ’til it swelled, a luminous white teardrop forming on the head …

Gabriel stopped, surprised at himself. That wasn’t just prison queer nonsense. That was poetic Irish nonsense. Gabriel’s own mum had adored poetry, treating herself to a daily orgy of words, and everyone knew how that turned out.

“Oi. Doctor.” Gabriel stepped onto the white-tiled floor.

Cooper stepped away from the blast as Gabriel yanked off his towel, tossing it away.

“No women and children here. Only me.”

Cooper stared at Gabriel. Then his mouth hardened. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly threatening. “Piss off or I’ll knock your teeth out.”