Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
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25
26
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33
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FELIX CULPA
Jeremy Gavron is the author of six books, including the novels The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award, and An Acre of Barren Ground; and A Woman on the Edge of Time, a memoir about his mother’s suicide. He lives in London, and teaches on the MFA at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
Scribe Publications
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Published by Scribe 2018
Copyright © Jeremy Gavron 2018
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
9781925322620 (Australian edition)
9781911344766 (UK edition)
9781925548426 (e-book)
CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.
This book is largely composed of phrases and sentences from one hundred other books, carefully selected and arranged in order to deliver a cumulative new meaning under the fair creative use rules.
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For Judy, Leah and Mima,
the oldest song of all,
and for Clare Alexander,
steadfast and true.
1
Never open a book with weather. Never use the word ‘suddenly’. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
But what if a story begins with weather? What if a writer goes to work in a prison in a long gypsy summer and the world turns? Suddenly turns.
A modern prison. Redbrick buildings. Lawns, flower beds.
Even a pond in the middle, in which it is said there were once fish until they were caught and fried up on the wings.
A former military airfield — you can still see the shape of the runway cutting across the prison grounds and into the neighbouring cornfield like the ghost of some ancient ley line.
Writer in residence.
Though he does not reside here and does not appear to be much of a writer. He comes into the prison three days a week, wanders the wings, sits with the men in their cells, looking at their writing, but mostly listening to their talk.
Listener in residence, then.
Privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
The world turning all the while, really, though he is not aware of it, does not hear its creakings, the songs of the air.
Not that much of a listener, either.
Thinking his own thoughts while the prisoners tell their stories.
Taking a man outside to sit on a hump of grass and closing his eyes to the warm sun.
Gypsy summer, old wives’ summer, all-hallown summer, little summer of the quince.
The sun shining bright before the storm blast.
And then there came both mist and snow and it grew wondrous cold.
Or at least mist and snow in the north of the country and rain in the south, where the prison is, where the city is where he lives.
Rain against my window.
Lying on the sofa of the kitchenette apartment he had rented on 17th Street.
The malodorous sofa.
A pile of half-read books beside him.
Though the worst of the weather is soon over and he drives in to the prison through the tail end of the storm.
The windswept grounds empty.
The windows on the wings closed against the cold.
Smells of sweat, sperm and blood.
Fug of tobacco.
Prisoners loitering on the spurs, the landings.
Three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder.
Seen this?
The paper thrust at him.
The prisoners growing used to him now, this writer fellow who walks among them in civvies, comes into their cells without deadlocking the doors, drinks the tea they offer without worrying they have put bleach in it, urinated in it.
Wrote letters for the men.
At least until the prison scribes took him aside to explain that he was undercutting the wing economy.
Looks down at the newspaper. Takes in a headline about a body found in the snow, the blurry mugshot of an adolescent boy.
That’s Felix, isn’t it.
He was in here until not so long ago.
A hiker, the newspaper calls him, caught out in the storms. In the hills in the north.
What was he doing up there?
Most of the residents of the prison young men from the city who had hardly been out of their neighbourhoods until they were sent away.
That’s the question.
Not hiking, not dressed like that.
Probably drugs.
Nonces.
Lucre.
He nods, hands back the newspaper. He is growing used to the prisoners, too, their ways, their stories. This writer who does not write among these men who are here because they have lost the plot, lost the thread of their own lives.
2
There, beyond the bamboos, begins the path.
Though he does not see it.
Continues on around the wings, walks over to the stores to talk to a man about a poem, to the segregation unit to see a prisoner who sent a message that he has a tale to tell.
Set himself alight on his wife’s doorstep and when she opened the door clasped her to him.
Lifts his shirt to show the scars.
To the workshops, too, perhaps, in the old airplane hangar, or the gardens, or the kitchens, to return a piece of writing with which he has been entrusted, read an appeal, hear a confession.
Until, at the day’s end, the men banged up for the night, he collects his coat from the education office, hands in his keys at the gate, passes out through the set of doors they call the airlock.
Soft black asphalt road and the tall hibiscus.
String of scattered suburbs.
Back into the city.
A shambling second-floor back which overhung the railway and rocked to the passing trains.
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall.
His days off he sleeps, leafs through books, the writings the prisoners give him.
The smell of the wings still on the paper.
Walks through the city.
Losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in whi
ch direction he was going.
The manuscript he had been working on abandoned to the dust.
Other things, too.
For whom would he set himself alight?
Though it is not quite true that he is not writing.
In his pocket an old half-used notebook he has turned round and begun scrawling in from the back frontwards.
Spidery handwriting full of crossings-out and corrections.
Fragments, nonsense syllables, exclamations.
Observations which he found scribbled on the walls of subway washrooms.
Overhears in the streets.
In the cafe where he sometimes takes his meals.
Eavesdropping, if necessary, and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me.
Foraging in used bookstores.
Picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him.
Pieces, it seems to him, of other stories, yet to be told.
Hears in the prison, too.
The talk, for a day or two more, of the boy in the snow.
Smallish, frail figure.
Always had paint in his hair and on his hands.
Killed and dropped here.
The body, it turns out, found in a t-shirt and trousers, without socks or shoes.
Some way from the nearest road or trail.
Probably off his head in some country shebeen, went out to paint the snow yellow and got lost.
This one of the old lags. Old wisdom. Old humour, too.
Wanted a relief map, the joke went.
Is so life is.
Here in the shadow of the walls.
3
Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
But which parts are these exactly? And which readers? And what if these are the parts that prevail on a writer?
The haze in the beerhall.
The mutterings of drunks and crazy people.
The old jailbird’s song.
Tottered about the streets.
Collecting stories about the divided city.
Divided stories.
Might mean anything and nothing, allusive, blurred as the back of a piece of embroidery, a tangle of knots and threads.
Lingering on the wings beyond his hours.
Played dominoes with the prisoners in the evenings.
Gradually being drawn in.
What they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes.
The singularity of thievery.
Safe-breakers, cat-men.
Specialist who picked locks with his celluloid shirt collar.
The extraordinary calmness one feels at the moment of performing the theft.
Listens like a three years’ child.
Inhaled the odours of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants, felt the presence of a current of urgency.
The strength necessary for departing from conventional morality.
Occurred to me that, if I wished, I could, at that moment, run out into the street, and, with vulgar expletives of lust, embrace any woman I chose; or shoot the first person I met.
Return to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves.
Hand over my shoelaces, belt, wallet.
Penal code’s all wrong.
Lists everything you mustn’t do in life, stealing, murdering, receiving stolen goods, but it doesn’t say a word about what you should do.
What remedy can there be.
Day melted into another.
Lived to himself in his little room.
Speaking only to order his food in the cafe where he sometimes takes his meals.
As one autumn cockcrow.
A kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver.
Having neglected to bring a book or a prisoner’s writings to read, he reaches for a newspaper left on the table and turning the pages comes to a report of the inquest of the boy in the snow.
The same blurry mugshot.
Twenty-two years of age. Last known address a hostel in the east of the city. In breach of his licence.
Died from exposure.
No trace of alcohol or drugs in his blood.
No injuries except for some scratches on his lower limbs.
Not uncommon in the advanced stages of hypothermia for the sufferer to remove his clothes.
Paradoxical undressing.
Muscles directing energy to the vital organs fail, blood surges to the extremities, fooling the brain into thinking the body is hot.
Expect to find his garments and footwear when the snow melts.
Held the paper up to better light.
Looking for clues in the camera’s description.
Biographies in the line of a face.
Too young for the prison when it was taken, with all that suggests, but otherwise nothing to remark on.
Could look at him then look away and not remember what you’d seen.
Puts down the paper, turns back to his food.
Is not as if this fellar is his brother or cousin or even friend; he don’t know the man from Adam.
4
But we cannot choose what speaks to us from the page of a newspaper, the grain of a photograph.
Fishermen fishing from bridges, the painters who paint them.
Young jailkid shrouded in mystery.
Died in this strange place.
Nothing made it my business except curiosity.
Walks to his local library to look up the original news reports.
Shepherd came on the corpse.
Bare, rugged country.
No sign of any other human presence.
Accounts of the affair came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually come.
Stowaway spilled from the undercarriage of a descending airplane.
Victim of a big cat farmers claim has been taking sheep.
Beast escaped from a travelling circus.
Wash pants torn.
Excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Though a different truth once the boy was named.
A killer himself, it turns out.
Terrible case of an old woman who lived by herself and because she resisted some young men who broke in they took her life.
Regular gang of young ruffians.
Ladronés muy famosos.
Though the boy the only one apprehended or even identified.
Ain’t a fizgig.
Won’t shop no one.
Won’t reveal anything else now.
Took his dreadful secrets to the grave.
Though it occurs to our writer that he has access to information the newspapers did not.
Asks for permission to consult the prison archives.
File I’d like to peruse.
Tomb world.
Shelving installed from ceiling to floor.
Runs his fingers over the dusty folders.
How many bewildering secrets are contained within.
Raw materials for the characterisation.
Finding the boy’s, he carries it to the table, unties the string, spreads out the papers.
Reports, applications, memorandums, sheets, files, copies of pages from wing occurrence books.
On this day the prisoner was admitted.
Transferred.
Employed in the laundry.
Found bleeding after a commotion on the 2s landing on C wing.
Starts at the beginning with his pre-sentence report.
Accounts of his early relations with police.
&n
bsp; Broke into a newsagent with two other juveniles and stole confectionary and cigarettes.
Age of eleven or twelve.
Living with his mother.
Never was too smart at formal schooling.
A day-dreamer, his teachers wrote on report cards — standoffish and shy and withdrawn.
Further arrests at fourteen and fifteen for trespass, breaking and entering.
Loose notions concerning the rights of property.
Seventeen when, with accomplices unknown, he committed the offences for which he was sent away.
Broke in at the pantry window.
Commission of the burglary when the victim walked in through her front door.
Took a couple of crazy steps and fell full length and lay still.
Trial by a jury of his peers.
Never see such an out-and-out young wagabond, your worship.
Preached a long sermon at him.
Goes to a house with the intention to break in and steal.
Embarks upon a crime he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.
Law says you be old enough.
Take him away.
Began a passage through many hands.
Straight to reform school.
Empty your pockets.
Blanket and a pannikin and spoon.
Night in the dorm.
Suppose yer the new boy, ain’t yer?
Blood flowing from nose and mouth and ears.
Sooner take a blow than give one.
Spell in the seg.
Like the room of a Russian saint.
Hours to commune with his own thoughts.
Learned your place.
Good dog and all’ll go well and the goose hang high.
Transferred eventually to the adult system.
Spent his days uneventfully going along with prison routine.
Admitted into the paint crew.
Certificate of competence in the use of a brush, kettle, cutting in, sugar soaping.
Cell of his own.
Notice of illness of member of immediate family.
Eres huerfano.
Chaplaincy memorandum.
Good chat with him and gave him a copy of the good book.
Let not the lad go astray in the darkness.
Licence granted after four years and three months.
Signed for his clothes, his discharge grant.
Goodly sum of personal cash.
Passed through several strong gates.
Felix Culpa Page 1
