@humanschallenge, day 15: enemies to friends
getting this in under a year since the prompt was issued, whaaat! skills!
•••
Of all the places she ever thought she’d be meeting Neha for lunch... well, actually, the prison canteen probably isn’t right at the bottom of the list, had probably crept a few places up once fears surrounding the synth effort started getting more real, but it’s certainly not what Laura had envisioned when she’d met the woman for the first time. When the formidable QC had been weighing Niska’s life in the balance and staring them down from one end of a long, narrow table, she had been only an obstacle, an opposer. An enemy, even.
Not an ally or a coconspirator and certainly not a friend.
But here they are. Crammed together, knees almost touching under the narrow metal of the lunch table which is considerably smaller than anything you’d find in a court room, even an impromptu one set up for a trial in a holding compound.
“How’s things?” Laura asks, and it’s mostly a joke because ‘things’ have been at a uniform low since they got here and don’t tend to vary, but it’s a ritual both are grateful for, this pretence at a normal, human conversation. It’s a touchstone.
“Same old,” Neha replies. Her hair is cropped close to her head and it sharpens her features, had at first made Laura feel like she was mates with the prison’s hardest axe-murderer, not a lawyer sent down for dolly-coddling. “You?”
“Oh, yeah. Thriving, me.” Laura nods at Neha’s bowl. “How’s your soggy brown thing?”
“Living up to its promise. What about your bowl of... grey?”
“About the same.” Prison food is nothing to write home about, as they say. When Laura gets the chance to contact the outside world, she leaves it out. “Do you realise this is day one hundred? They’ll be letting us in the clubs soon.”
“You mean you’re not in a gang already?” Neha quips. “I’m in five. No, I hadn’t noticed. What, have you been scratching a tally into your bedpost?”
“No.” Laura grins. “The wall behind it. Although between you and me, I might have missed a couple.”
“Fat lot of good you are as a calendrist.”
“That a word, is it?”
“I think so.” Neha wrinkles her nose. “Maybe I made it up. It’s hard to get intelligent conversation round here, which is why I make do with you.”
“Mmm. Likewise.”
For a few moments they eat, and Laura can’t believe that one hundred days in she’s actually scraping the last bit of the grey off the side of the bowl instead of pushing it aside half-emptied. Funny how your expectations can shrink. “You’re not bad, though, Ney. A hundred or so days with you is better than a hundred or so days with just a wall for company. Less notches on you, for a start.”
“Only just.” Neha smiles. “Happy day one hundred, then. Here’s to a swift appeal.”
They tap plastic spoons and hope.
