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SAMIR

‘Do you want one?’ he asked me, coming back to my door and tipping some coke onto the skin between his thumb and index finger and holding his hand up to me, Brazilian-style.

‘No. What if the guards come, Samir?’ He was making too much noise. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Yes.’ He sniffed it himself before disappearing again.

Samir spent the next few hours out of his cell, running riot in the solitary confinement section. At first, the others thought it was funny, but then they started to worry. There would be hell to pay if the guards found that we had stolen and drunk their alcohol. Samir became worse. He yelled. He spilled beer everywhere. He banged on our doors to offer us more cocaine. He threw pots and pans against the walls in the kitchen and smashed whatever he could find. Then he broke into the seventh cell again to steal more rum.

We pleaded and pleaded with him to get back in his cell. But he wouldn’t go. There was no way of telling Samir what to do when he was drunk. It just made him more determined to do the opposite. I hid the empty beer cans, pushed the remaining bag of cocaine through a tiny crack in the roof and pretended to be asleep like the others. No one could possibly have slept, though; apart from all the cocaine we had taken, everyone was worried about the guards.

As soon as the sergeant opened our doors in the morning, we ran straight for the bathroom to dispose of the empty cans. In the toilet block, there was a concrete slab you could lift up with a shaft underneath leading down to the sewerage pipe. There was already a pile of cans at the bottom that we’d deposited after the human rights party, but the drain stank so much there was little chance of anyone wanting to search there.

‘What a night!’ said Chino, sighing with relief. We had got away with it. Everyone looked at each other and smiled. Everyone, that is, except one person.

‘Where is he?’ Chapako asked suddenly. We all knew who he meant. We had been so worried about getting busted ourselves that we had forgotten about Samir.

‘Quick! Let’s find him before the police do.’

We raced out and looked in the exercise yard and in all the shower