His cousin’s high-pitched voice cuts through him like a knife while he lies there bent double on the bed, head buried in his arms. The throbbing pain in his ear makes him feel like he’s just been thumped by a stray cricket ball. “For me it was a game. Just a game,” Khalid whimpers, breathing in a whiff of bad breath on the back of his hand when he jams it in his left ear, which is badly damaged from being blasted by the relentless, pounding rock music in the isolation room. The pain spreads down the side of his face to his neck and is the reason why he can’t sit up to eat the pasta shells in cold tomato sauce, which is turning to solid red glue in front of his eyes. The tray smells of tin for some reason. Not plastic. Yesterday, after he was brought back to his cell, Lee-Andy gave him an aspirin. She told him the guy in the next cell is called Tariq and apologized for not coming before but she had to work someone else’s shift in another block because the timetable had been marked out wrongly.
