Interview Room H

(originally posted on myspace here)

I like having my own room.

The final bits of wall were nailed on half an hour before we opened, thin enough to hear our National Anthem in the re-education space next door. There was a working phone and camera, a bare bulb, desk, a stripped upright piano that nobody could move and a small portrait of our leader glued to a board. I also smuggled in two apples to give the place a bit of colour and, since there wasn't clock in the room, took a bite out of one and rammed it onto a stray nail where its slow browning could mark the passage of time. I was handed the key and a sheaf of blank papers at 6, and made myself comfortable. It felt good to have an office, and a cap. If they're not going to get round to building that front half of a tank next door I might even come here to write.

I'm not sure the interviews themselves went particularly well. All the questions Tom had asked in the cafe the week before: "What exactly are we trying to get out of them? What's in it for them?" turned out to be incredibly pertinent, and I don't know how he got on in Interview Room 8 next door, but as for me once somebody's correctly identified a picture as Mr. T. and told you they're from a show called the A Team there's nowhere really I can go. And there's no fun for anyone in pretending to be angry if you've no idea what you want, it's the naffest form of hoaxing. More is needed from me, more "stuff", although I did at one point pretend to choke.

I might also suggest to my assistant he cast his net a little wider in the search for interviewees. Last night he brought me nothing but drunk and glamorous women. Now while this policy has its virtues it is also PRECISELY this section of the community who are most likely to notice and then point out during interrogation that your National Anthem's been nicked from the film "Dirty Dancing"...

It's still stirring stuff to hear through a wall though. Sat at a desk. Wearing a cap.