‘He was kept for weeks,’ Barr said. ‘Before he went in, he was a big man, delivered coal in the city. Afterwards, he was afraid of his shadow, didn’t have any strength left. I remember he couldn’t lift us as grandkids, like we were too heavy for him. Even my cousin’s baby, he couldn’t hold, said his arms were shaking and he didn’t want to drop it. We’d an allotment that he worked in, was the only thing he wanted to do after he got out, and I used to help him pot the flowers. He’d give them out to all the neighbours. Didn’t keep any for himself; I think he just liked the idea of putting something into the earth and watching it grow, making the streets around where he lived brighter, better, knowing no one could stop him from doing it. He used to chat while he worked, almost like he didn’t realize I was there, like he was talking to himself. He had this old radio; a wireless he called it.’

He glanced at Tony to check that he was listening.

‘He used to tune it to between radio stations, so it would just play, what do you call it, white noise?

Tony nodded.

‘The first time I tried to change it to a proper channel, he went ballistic. He tuned it back, turned it up, listening to this fuzz of noise. ‘Listen carefully,’ he said, smiling, ‘and you can start to hear things. I thought it was rain at first; I thought they were playing the sound of rain, but it’s not rain. But if you listen you can hear a pattern to it. That’s how you survive it,’ he said. ‘You let it wash over you and look for the meaning in it. You can give it whatever you want, because it’s just for you.’’

He kicked a rock from the path they were treading between the trees. It skittered off through the ground cover.

‘I thought he was mental. But every day he listened to that noise, as if he was looking to find something in it he’d not been able to the whole time they’d played it into his cell, stopping him sleeping, him with a bag over his head the whole time so he couldn’t tell if it was day or night.’

‘What happened to him?’

Tony felt his own breath shorten, wiped a sheen of sweat from his face as he tried not to register what the youth was saying, tried not to imagine it too deeply lest it brought back his own memories, ones he’d tried hard to forget. But it was too late.

‘They made him confess to all kinds of things.’

‘Everyone confesses in the end,’ Tony remembered.

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-One