"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

that could contain the damage his wife's letter threatened
to unleash.
The first step had been to rationalise what he was afraid
of, to disentangle the intimidating morass of fears and see
what its constituents amounted to. For a start, there was
the sentence itself. He wasn't being locked away forever,
just a few months, a period his more experienced fellow
inmates would look upon with defiant scorn. A Jakey
sentence,' someone called it, referring to the comparable
stretches winos and down-and-outs tended to get. It was
six months, likely to serve three. 'Six moon,' as they put it in here; or
more probably 'six moon canter', in predicting
the ease with which they intended to see it out.
'Fuckin' dae it staunin' on ma heid,' he'd regularly heard
them boast. Parlabane hoped they restricted such bravado
to the inside; there was no shortage of sheriffs out there
who might make that a stipulation if you caught them on
the wrong day.
Next was the danger of getting shagged in the showers,
which the general public's joke-jaundiced impression had
suggested was mandatory. It hadn't happened yet, but
what with all the overcrowding you read about, perhaps
there was a long rota. Parlabane's worst experience there
so far had been making a tit of himself, when on his first
visit he warned a warder that he'd make sure the media
knew all about it if anything bad happened to him.
'Oh, sorry, sir, I didn't realise we had a VIP in our
presence,' the screw replied. 'In that case, I'd better ask
everybody else in the showers just to concentrate on washin'
their hair for a wee change. I mean, normally it's wall-to-
wall buggery in there, and us stupit screws are powerless
to prevent it, but tell you what, we'll all make a special
effort on your behalf. How does that sound?'
However, while there were certain fears that it was
healthiest to put from one's mind, the overall threat of
physical harm was one Parlabane considered it wise not
to discount, especially with a mouth like his. So far he
had maintained a strict policy of keeping it shut, augmented by avoiding
eye contact with everyone but the
screws whenever he was outside his cell. His first trip
down to breakfast among the general population had consequently taken place
in something of a trance, as he
shut out everything but what was in his immediate line
of sight. That was until his attention was unavoidably
drawn to an incident taking place a few yards to his
left.
Thinking logistically, he had previously reckoned that the
potential for violence in such public areas must be tempered
by the time-limit the screws' intervention would place upon
it. What took place that first morning in the canteen taught