The Prisoner - Robert Muchamore Page 0,2

get skinny, but he still had the solid jaw and vast fists of someone you wouldn’t pick a fight with.

‘Pen-pusher,’ Marcel added, as he squatted on to the bunk below Marc’s, peeling back his shirt to inspect skin scoured by the heavy sacks.

Marcel’s words were harsh, but the tone was warm. Marc’s cabin mates were envious that his ability to speak German had earned him an admin job, but none of them seemed to resent his good fortune.

Marc rolled on to his side, trying not to inhale a grey haze as four sweating lads stripped off clothes thick with cement dust.

‘There’s a couple of apples on the table,’ Marc said.

‘We’ll get fat on them tiny buggers,’ Marcel replied.

Marcel was a joker. Only fourteen, his crime was to lead cheers in a Rouen cinema when a newsreel showed the aftermath of a British air-raid in Cologne. The Gestapo officer two rows back didn’t see the funny side and Marcel found himself riding to Frankfurt, minus two front teeth.

‘Grub’s up,’ Richard – the last of Marc’s cabin mates to arrive – shouted, as he stepped in holding a battered roasting tin. It held two loaves of black bread1 and a tall metal jug, with steam rising off a thin, orangish soup.

Richard was a Belgian, fifteen but with tiny, sad eyes and a genteel shuffle that made him seem old. As he placed the roasting tin on the table, his roommates dived under their mattresses to grab spoons and mess tins.

‘If I divide this, you’d better not moan,’ Richard said.

‘I’ll divide if you don’t want to,’ Marcel said eagerly, lunging towards the loaves.

The food on the tray was dinner and breakfast for six hungry teenagers, and the lads would fight over every crumb. Marc was lucky to have roommates who’d played fair, even during the harshest winter rationing. There were plenty of other cabins where bullies ripped off weaker inmates’ food.

‘Marcel, you mess around with that bread and I’ll slam your head in the porthole,’ Laurent said, firmly. ‘Richard’s always fair, leave it to him.’

‘Yeah, Marcel,’ a lad called Vincent added. ‘Especially seeing as you’ve spent half the day picking bugs out of your crotch.’

There was some laughter, but it was also an uncomfortable reminder of the squalor they all lived in.

Prisoners weren’t allowed knives, so Richard broke the bread into six fairly even clumps with his filthy hands, then began ladling the soup into six differently shaped mess tins. Hungry eyes tracked every move of the ladle.

‘Give me more!’ Vincent said. ‘Marc’s is way deeper.’

‘His tin’s round, yours is square,’ Richard said. ‘You both got four spoonfuls.’

Vincent folded his arms and pouted. ‘I always get screwed.’

Laurent took a mildly intimidating step towards Vincent. ‘He’s spooning it all out the same.’

Out of his cabin mates, Vincent was the only one Marc didn’t care for. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he was always having digs about stuff, and that grinds you down when there’s six of you living on top of each other.

‘Have my tin if you think there’s more,’ Marc said irritably.

Before Vincent could answer, the tension was broken by a body thumping down hard on the main deck above their heads.

‘Fight,’ Marcel said, staring up at the ceiling as cheers and shouts echoed down from the cramped main deck.

As the ruckus continued, the six lads grabbed their mess tins, and settled on the wooden crates, or propped awkwardly on the edge of the lowest bunks. Marc eyed his soup and poked his spoon in, spotting a few identifiable chunks of vegetable and strings of horse meat, amidst thin gruel made from swede and potato.

The hungry boys dispensed with their soup in under a minute, then licked out the tins. Their black bread was days old and made slower eating. Marc stuffed a crusty end into his cheek and began softening it with his back teeth as he lay on his bunk.

‘I’ll cut each apple into six pieces,’ Richard said, as he pulled his identity disc over his head.

The metal ovals were stamped with each prisoner’s number and worn around the neck. Rubbing your disc against stone gave a sharp edge, which was no substitute for a proper knife but better than nothing at all.

‘Five pieces,’ Marc said. ‘I had mine earlier.’

‘And the rest,’ Vincent sneered. ‘I bet you scoff all kinds of shit over in that office.’

‘It’s easier cutting something into six,’ Richard complained.

‘Next time I’ll eat it myself and save the moaning,’ Marc said, as Richard cut into the first