Free Shape-Shifter by Pauline Melville Page B

newsman. ‘Let’s pack up now and take all the stuff down to the prison and then we can get that last shot – if that’s OK with you, Winsome.’
    Winsome rose awkwardly from the chair and began to collect a few bits and pieces for herself and the baby. Sonia was to stay behind with the other children.
    ‘God, I feel awful,’ giggled the production assistant behind her clip-board to the director. ‘I feel as if I’d captured a runaway slave or something.’
    The cameras trained on Winsome as she walked with the baby up to the main entrance of the modern jail building. She entered the door where the gate-man sat behind bullet-proof glass operating the electronic sliding doors. He grinned:
    ‘Hello, love. Come back to us, have you? I’ll ring up to the mother and baby unit and get someone to come down and fetch you.’
    Winsome sat silent on the bench just inside the entrance.
    Two minutes later a blue-uniformed screw appeared to collect her. She had badly permed blonde hair and the face of a retarded schoolgirl. She spoke with a northern accent:
    ‘Hello Winifred. Oh we are pleased to see you back safe and sound. You were a naughty girl to run off like that. We were all worried to death. Let me have a look at the baby. Ahhhhhh. Isn’t he gorgeous.’
    The news item appeared on the early evening news. By the late evening news it had already been replaced by bigger and more important stories.
    That night, Winsome slept, worn out, with Denzil by her side, in a cell as cheerless as a public lavatory which someone had made a feeble attempt to decorate with one or two pictures.
    The dream came back, but this time a little altered. She dreamt that she was in unfamiliar countryside. The execution must have taken place for she was already dead and being carried in a funeral procession. But she was not in a coffin. The hands of strangers were bearing her body along. Close to, the terrain was rocky and the path narrow, wending its way through bare, hilly landscape. The bearers moved carefully to avoid the big clumps of wild grass. All she could see ahead was the long, empty, winding path. Resting on her chest were some bright flowers. They seemed familiar. She tried hard to remember the names of them. But the names wouldn’t come.

Tuxedo
    EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT TUXEDO HAS GOOD ideas about as often as a hen has teeth. Which is why Tuxedo is on his own this particular night, crouching with his ear to the tumbrils of a small safe behind the counter of the video shop. The snag is that Tuxedo is not built for crouching lower than a pool table. His left foot has cramp and his blue satin boxer shorts are twisted in his crotch causing him aggravation. On top of all this, twiddling the knobs on the safe is getting him nowhere and he is overcome by a craving for sweet potato pie.
    Anybody, from the Frontline to the Backline, could tell you that Tuxedo is jinxed. Take one instance. Yesterday Tuxedo buys a second-hand car for three hundred and fifty, cash. This guy gives him all the documents but when he gets home the log book turns out to be an old parking summons and the car is clearly hotter than Tina Turner; if Tuxedo thinks he has just laid his hands on some pure Jamaican sensimilla, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will turn out to be homegrown from Kensal Rise; even the all-night Kentucky Fried Chicken runs out of corn on the cob as soon as Tuxedo steps through the portals. Anybody could tell you that the day Tuxedo gets lucky will be the day it snows ink. Which is why he has this near-permanent frowning glare on his face, a wicked screw that most people mistake for hostility when in fact it’s the anxious stare of one who knows that God has been up most of the night laying traps for him, sometimes in the shape of things, mostly in the shape of people.
    Tuxedo glares at the safe:
    ‘Come on, you bastard,’ he mutters, then adds: ‘It’s all right, God, it’s the safe I’m talking to, not you.’
    Of one thing, Tuxedo