Twenty-Second Day

When I woke up this morning, my diary was, once again, missing.

In its place, a pile of fresh white sheets and a new pencil. A new pencil! I was distraught. My writing equipment is one of the very few things I own here: there's my clothes, but they seem to disappear overnight on those rare occasions when I sleep deeply and return laundered - guess, sine I've not been charged, I have no right to official clothing from Her Majesty's Prison Service - and then there's my writing tools. These are things I can appropriate for myself, cover with my saliva and make marks in with my nails.

I can't even own my bedclothes here; as soon as they start to smell of me, as soon as they reach that golden period between overly-fresh and just plain dirty, as soon as they become mine, they too are removed and laundered.

In another way, though, I was ecstatic. What I write is being read! After the first installment, the reader wanted more.

Not that I think it will get me out of here. Not in the least. If I were in charge of someone I suspected of terrorism, I would read their writings with interest, but not believe a word of it. Writing offers the writer control, the ability to frame events and direct attention away from the truth. It even offers them the ability to just plain lie.

By that logic, of course, my situation is hopeless. Because if I wouldn't trust what I write, then I wouldn't trust what I say. So I can tell them until I'm blue in the face that I am innocent: it wouldn't necessarily convince me; why should it convince them?

So why I am happy that my scribblings are being read with interest?

Sheer vanity?

No. Probably because it proves to me that the outside world still exists.

I'd kill to be interrogated again. Just for that very same reason.