I

      Lurid rumours abound about life in the penal colony. There are the labour camps where they make you work naked under the sun; the jungle parasites that bore through your feet and crawl up to your brain; the island where they intern leper convicts; the silent punishment blocks where the guards wear felt-soled shoes; the botched escapes that end in cannibalism. As the stories move through the prison ship, they mutate at such a rate that it becomes impossible to gauge their truth.

      In Sabir’s cage, there’s only one man who’s already been out there and actually knows what it’s like. He’s a grizzled assassin called Bonifacio. Although not tall, he’s bulkily built, with the bulging, tattooed biceps of a Paris hoodlum. His cool menace unnerves most prisoners but doesn’t stop a few from pestering him for information. The questions obviously irritate him and he only bothers to reply when bribed with cigarettes, which are in short supply on board. Sabir asks nothing himself, but listens as he lies on his hammock, gazing through the tiny porthole into the punishing intensity of the blue outside. It’s from these overheard fragments that he gradually builds up a picture of what awaits him across the ocean. He now knows that they’ll disembark at Saint-Laurent, a small frontier town on the banks of a river called the Maroni, somewhere north of the Amazon, somewhere south of Venezuela. A splinter of France lost in the jungle.

      ‘That’s where the main penitentiary is. Where they do the selection,’ he hears Bonifacio explain one day in his thick Corsican accent, shot through with Montmartre. ‘If they think you’re dangerous, you go straight to the islands. There are three of them. Diable is for political prisoners. The main barracks are on Royale and the punishment cells on Saint-Joseph. If you end up on the islands, there’s no chance of escape. But you won’t have to do hard labour.

      ‘If you don’t have a trade, they’ll send you to one of the forest camps. Some are near Saint-Laurent, some are on the coast. Do anything to avoid them. They’re the worst. You’re out in the sun all day chopping trees. If you don’t fill your quota, you don’t get your rations. You end up with fever, dysentery. If you’re down for the camps, bribe the bookkeeper to get you a job at Saint-Laurent. If that doesn’t work, pay one of the Blacks or Arabs to chop your wood for you. Then buy your way out as quick as you can.

      ‘If you’ve got a trade they can use, you get to stay at Saint-Laurent. Or they send you up to the capital, Cayenne. You work for the Administration. There are cooks, butchers, bakers, mechanics, bookkeepers, porters … If you get a job, make sure it’s outside the penitentiary. That way, you’re out during the day, you’re unguarded. Best thing is to work for an official, as houseboy or cook. You get to sleep at their house. But you won’t score a job like that first off.

      ‘To