THEODORE DALRYMPLE

From time to time, our ward looks more like a police lock-up than a haven of healing. By every bed there are two policemen preventing the escape of the patient, and usually watching television at the same time. Sometimes they and their captives chat amicably; at other times there is a sullen silence between them.

Last week we had one of the jollier type of suspects in our ward. He was what is known in the trade as a body packer: a man (or woman) who transports heroin or cocaine by swallowing packets and recovering them from the other end of his digestive tract a few days later, in the privacy of a lavatory. This is the modern equivalent, I suppose, of the transport of nitroglycerine in The Wages of Fear: for one burst packet of cocaine means certain death. I am not sure whether the jolly body packer was unaware of the danger he was in, or merely set a low value on his own life.

The police, of course, were interested in his faeces. The law states, however, that an Englishman's poo is his property, and to search it without the owner's consent requires a search warrant. I had mistakenly supposed that, once shed, it was in the public domain, One learns these arcane things through experience.

I spoke in private to the body packer (of Jamaican descent, as most of them are) about his life. He prefaced his remarks by admitting that he was no angel, in case I was under any misapprehension on that score. If I had been, his gold front tooth alone would have disabused me. His body bore the scars of various fights: he had been 'cut' many times, though he had no bullet wounds as yet, and therefore wasn't a real man. I asked him whether he was violent.

'No,' he said. 'I'm peaceful. But I don't like parties where there a lot of bare niggers.' 'Bare niggers?'

`Niggers with attitude, had boys. Then I can get aggressive, and things happen.'

His latest knife-fight had been with an old adversary whom he'd known since childhood.

'The boy was a typical H— boy who acts bad, who comes on bad.'

'Who is he?'

'His nickname's Snake.'

'Why?'

"Cause he's like a python, he's got a deadly sting.'

'Pythons are not poisonous,' I said. Lack of precision in such matters brings out the pedant in me.

'Well, Snake is.'

One day they had a minor contretemps in the street. Snake, who was with some friends, drew away and immediately started calling people on his mobile phone.

'What was he saying?'

'He was getting people to come and get me kidnapped, or hole me up.'

'Hole you up?'

'Yes, shoot me, put holes in me.'

'Did he mean it'?'

'A boy was shot dead in my street last week.'

Next time he saw Snake, he took the precaution of stabbing him a few times. Snake had asked for it: he had taunted him by saying, 'Come here, pussy, come here. Bring it on; So he did.

And now? What's going to happen next?' 'I've had these phone calls from friends of Snake.'

'What do they say?'

'We know where you live, you're f—d wherever you are, you're f—d if you're in prison and you're f d if you're not.' No wonder he was so cheerful on the ward. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.