Chapter 25: Booking
The intake corridor floor was sealed concrete, painted grey, waxed inside the week.
I noticed because my shoes were leather-soled and I had to shorten my stride on the turns.
That is what I notice. I have noticed it since I was twelve. It has never once helped me.
They brought me in at eleven forty on Christmas night, through a door at the back of the building.
Two officers. Rennick in front. Bui behind me and to the left.
He walked at my four o'clock the whole way, which is where you stand if you want to control a turn.
He was doing it without thinking about it. I wanted to tell him it was correct.
I did not tell him it was correct.
The cuffs were behind my back and the right one was tighter. Of course it was the right one.
Hands behind you puts both shoulders into internal rotation and leaves them there. Mine has not tolerated that since I was twenty-two.
Twelve minutes in the car. Forty on a bench. By the time they unlocked me the joint was talking.
I did not roll it. Rolling it in that room looks like something else.
The custody desk was grey laminate with scratched acrylic set into the top of it.
The man behind it asked my name.
“Volkov. V-O-L-K-O-V.”
“Yes.”
“Other names?”
“Ashford. Nadia Ashford. That's what's on the licence.”
He typed for a long time, and I stood there with my hands where he could see them.
I read the three notices taped inside the acrylic. All three were about the telephone system.
There was a camera in the ceiling corner at about nine feet. I looked at it once and made myself stop.
They photographed me against a wall with a height strip. Five foot ten. I have been five foot ten since sixteen.
“Look at the line,” he said. “Not the lens.”
I looked at the line, and somewhere behind me a door closed on a spring.
Prints were done on glass with a light under it. A technician rolled each finger across the plate with her own hand.
Her hands were cold and dry. She did not look at my face once.
She pressed my right thumb through three times. The scanner would not read the ridges.
“You do something to your hands?”
“I used to grip a lot.”
She did not ask me what it was that I gripped.
Nobody has ever asked me what I gripped.
My dress was dark green, three-quarter sleeve. The seam at the left shoulder had opened.
Not torn. Opened along the stitching, about an inch, which is the way good clothes fail when somebody pulls at them.
I kept touching it with my thumb without deciding to.
Every time I did, the man behind the counter tracked my hand.
So I put both palms flat on the counter and left them there.
Then came the screen questions. There were about forty and they were all asked in the same voice.
Was I injured. Was I taking medication. Had I thought about harming myself this month.
Was I pregnant. Any condition the facility should know about. I said I had a shoulder. He typed shoulder.
Then he said: “Any prior convictions?”
There was a floor drain set into the concrete behind me. I looked at the drain.
“One.”
“For?”
“Assault.”
He stopped typing. It was the only time that night that anybody in the building looked into my face.
“How long ago?”
“Twelve years. Two years probation. Completed. Nothing outstanding.”
He entered it. Nine seconds, maybe. In those nine seconds the rest of my life changed shape, and I felt it go.
Not because the information was new. It has been on a database since I was twenty-two.
It changed because it was now on the same screen as tonight. Four lines apart.
A woman who puts a man on the floor once is a bad night in her twenties.
A woman who does it twice is not a story. She is a category, and categories do not get explained. They get managed.
They walked me to a holding cell. A bench along the back wall, a steel toilet with no lid and no seat.
Eleven feet by seven and a half. I paced it heel to toe before I sat down, because I have never been able to be in a new room without measuring it.
There was a red mark across my right palm from the edge of the car doorframe. There was nothing at all on my knuckles.
I had not hit anybody. I would like that written down somewhere permanent.
What I did was take a wrist that was already committed, turn my hip in under his weight, and let him finish the movement himself.
It took less than a second. Sitting on that bench at ten past midnight, I understood it was going to take considerably longer than that to end.