Carmen listens, her arms wrapped around herself, like a parcel wrapped too tite, stood in the kitchenette of her flatlet, stood still on linoleum tiles.

. . . the execution of Queen Elizabeth II, the ascension to heaven of Bobby Sands, the millennium stripathon televised live to the nation, the brutal decimalisation of time with its consequences now so familiar to us all . . .

Dawn approaches. Slogans haunt the noise – words: LONG HAUL, FOREIGNERS OUT and HOTEL BINARY the words SUBLIMANALISSIMO!, a t-shirt with the slogan: LOVE IS THE DRUG, BEER IS THE CURE.

Carmen listens and listens (3 months) and when the pigs (cops) finally come round and throw her out the flat (for non-payment of rent and ignorance of the BRITISH LAW) she is still hooked into the phone, listening and whispering.

*

Carmen in court.

In a grip of a legal system more vicey and corrupt than anythin what Charles ‘Costume Drama’ Dickens could have even cooked up. West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in charge of her case, security more tite than in H block and the barristers defending her play a lot of word games to keep themselves amused when showing off their closing remarks. They are bored rich people waiting to go home to double barrel names.

One of them (a woman called ******) is stood up talking. The other banisters pass her a note – whatever words it says on that note she has to incorporate into her remarks to the jury. Ha ha. At first it is not too hard: she has to incorporate the words ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘responsibility’ and ‘chromoesome’ (sic) (this last slightly harder). But as the day wears on the demands of the game get harder and harder. (Each game pushes to its edges). Her colleagues pass a note which bears the words ‘guilty as scum’ and ‘congenital liar’. Hard to include these words without casting aspersions. The jury send Carmen down for a good long time.

*

Carmen in jail.

She misses her friend the ‘electronic device of some kind’, she dreams of him/it/her, like many persons do. Its thick voice calling in the ‘nite’.

Carmen whispers the same strange language – thick electrics, background sound. When she is lying in her bed, when she is working in the mail room. Other inmates tag her strange but a few tune-in to her oral history. Inmates/intimates. Carmen says there is medicine for people like her but she won’t take it.