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I shook my head defensibly, realising I had let my guard down and I was supposed to be here doing a job. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Cupcake laughed and looked away. ‘You’re not like them. I can see it. I can feel it.’
A wave of nausea swept through my body. I didn’t like the way I was suddenly being watched by all the men as though I were the one in a cage.
Yet there was something undeniably intriguing about this man. Despite the situation he found himself in, he had a twinkle in his eye. A glimmer of a past personality that he hadn’t shaken. He was emitting something that resembled ... I wanted to say lustfulness. He was looking longingly at me, as though I was the first female he had seen in a long time.
‘And so back to you, you’re here because?’ he asked.
‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here first?’ I retorted and eyed his ribs, the way they protruded from out of his torso.
‘Let’s start with your name, shall we?’
I knew there was no harm in telling him my name. How could he use it against me when he was trapped behind bars and I was on the other side?
‘Sadie,’ I said after a beat.
The man crouched down and relaxed his legs so they fell across one another. He leaned his arms back behind him.
‘Sadie. That is a very nice name. I can’t say I’ve ever met a Sadie before.’
I felt as though he were enticing me into a conversation, but I didn’t have anywhere else to be and I had been sent here to find out what the hullabaloo was. Avril had assigned me the role of her right-hand woman and I guess that was what she thought I was now. Even if none of this sat right with me.
‘Do you have a cigarette, Sadie?’ he asked. There was a pained tone in his voice, as though he were trying very hard to speak. He didn’t want to sound as though he were begging, I realised. It was beneath him. This was a man who was in a position of power once. I looked around at the other men, and wondered what it was they did before they had arrived here.
‘I don’t.’
‘That’s a shame. I didn’t actually smoke much. Well, you can’t maintain many habits under these circumstances. Hey, I don’t suppose you fancy getting me out of here today do you? Be a gal! I won’t tell a soul. I’ll be gone before you know it.’ His voice had a forced hope, as though he had said this a few times before I came along.
‘I wouldn’t know how to do that.’ I looked at the cage’s complex locking system and wondered how deep it went into the ground. It must be pretty far or these men would have dug themselves out with their bare hands by now.
‘Besides, I don’t know anything about your situation, why you’re here, what you did. I discovered you just now trying to hurt a small boy.’
‘I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was ... it doesn’t matter anyway. It was pure fluke I managed to get him that close to me. He won’t come within ten metres of me ever again. That’s a fact.’
I sat down. ‘Do you want to tell me why you’re here then?’
Cupcake shook his head.
I took in a deep breath, feeling the presence of the other men around us – a few were calling, whistling and whooping louder now. I would get to them all eventually. But the task felt monumental as I saw how they were all looking and waiting.
‘Avril asked me to come here and sort out what was going on.’ I looked to the edge of the forest to check that Adi had definitely gone. That he hadn’t just crept back in when I wasn’t looking. ‘I’ve done that now,’ I said quietly. Cupcake edged himself closer so he was holding onto the bars of the cage.
‘How old are you?’
I paused again, always wondering how much information to give away. I thought of Bruno, how much of myself I gave to him and where that left me. I thought of men like Tony on the mainland who I knew thrived on information they could extract from you. Was this what was happening here?
‘I’m twenty-nine,’ I said.
‘I’m thirty-five. I think,’ he said straight away and I felt relief that he offered some information about himself straight back, that a fair and equal exchange was happening between us.
‘You think?’ I quizzed.
‘Yeah. I’ve been here a while. Can’t you tell?’
Was he the one who had been here for five years?
‘Were you the first inmate?’