*

The second hunger strike begins in March. I speak to somebody in the cell across from me that had received a comm, a small roll of paper with tiny letters on it that he had secreted inside the eye of his penis and that he had recovered using the graphite shaft of a pencil, saying that Bobby Sands was to lead it and that he fully expected to die. You are talking to a dead man, Sands says, as his fellow prisoners greeted him at mass that Sunday.

We followed the story of the strike with these serial comms, with gossip shouted from cell to cell, with the echoes in the pipes of the place names and the tiny microscopic scripts secreted inside our own bodies. Bobby is coming and going, they says to us, Bobby is leading the lagging.

The no-wash protest comes to an end. The prisoners shaved their heads and their beards. They used soap, carbolic soap that smelt like home but that stung their eyes and matted in their hair.

There were other stories too. The prisoners of The Dead Zone would rewrite books on sheets of toilet paper or adapt books from memory and then read them out the door to the other cells at night. Interminable books, dreadful books filled with terrible words, words like Firepower In Angola and Revolutionary Suicide, so as everything became confused and the comms talked to the books and the books to the toilet paper and the toilet paper to the pipes and the pipes to the songs The Boys would sing, songs by Bobby Sands and Irish folk songs and Victory to the IRA and Victory to the Blanketmen and pop music and punk rock too, until it felt like an echoes of an echoes of an echoes.