The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  He collected his food and hurried back to the cell but was unable to bring himself to eat. Ten minutes later, Shlomo went out and returned with two plastic cartons.

  ‘It’s sent in from a kosher supplier in Oxford,’ he said. ‘For three weeks the governor refused to allow it. So I ate nothing, even in the infirmary. They asked if I was on hunger strike. “Yes,” I said, “for clean food”.’

  Next morning Shlomo went off to his course, leaving the cell to Clement. Just as he was making out a request to go to the library, Officer Henshaw brought a package from the governor, containing the first three of Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles. Clement appreciated the gesture more than the novels which, however sympathetically chosen, were redolent of Roxborough and Major Deedes. He nevertheless turned to The Warden, losing himself so completely in the intrigues of the cathedral town that he almost forgot to fetch his lunch and, still more remarkably, two hours later to prepare for a visit from his mother and Mike.

  He had considered putting them off until the wound healed, but he had been afraid that that would alarm them more. So he sauntered jauntily into the hall in a bid to defuse the shock and spent much of the first half hour trying to put a brave face on the bandaged one. He promised that he would be safe on the Unit, listing the former policemen, informers and gypsies among his fellows. His mother was reassured, especially by the policemen, whom she seemed to regard as there for his personal protection, but Mike’s grim features showed that he had identified the chief omission.

  ‘The thing that upsets me most is the painting,’ Clement said.

  ‘Did he attack that too?’ his mother asked.

  ‘No, but he might as well have done. I conceived it around him. I can’t just slot in someone else.’

  ‘He looked so harmless with that baby on his knee!’ Mike said.

  ‘It was my fault as much as his. I should have known that for someone like Stick an idea can be as painful as a fist.’

  ‘You’re dealing with it admirably, darling,’ his mother said. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  ‘Well he’d better keep out of my way,’ Mike said darkly.

  ‘Now, I want to hear all the gossip,’ Clement said, anxious to lift the mood.

  ‘I’ve racked my brains to think of some,’ Mike said, ‘but I’ve been up to my eyes, what with the beginning of term and the extra admin. On top of that I spend every spare minute with Brian and Blossom filling in grant applications for next year’s retreat.’

  ‘Wales again?’

  ‘Devon. A converted rectory, no less. My next job is to stop Blossom booking a signer before we know if we’re taking anyone deaf.’

  ‘It’s good to see some things don’t change,’ Clement said. ‘How about you, Ma?’

  ‘Oh, not much has changed here either. Still trying to adjust to life without your father. You expect the nights to be hard, but they’re nothing compared to the mornings. You’ve turned back the clock… you’ve returned to the people you loved, then you wake up to a world of loss.’ Clement tightened his grip on her hand. ‘But I must be mad! You don’t want to hear all this.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Well I don’t want you to. And I’m not on my own, so you needn’t worry. My friends have all been wonderful. Though if I’m invited to any more kitchen suppers where “It’ll be so much cosier, just the three of us,” I swear I shall scream. After a lifetime of making my own rules, I refuse to be turned into a social solecism.’

  ‘You could never be that,’ Clement said tenderly.

  ‘Shoana’s been very attentive. The Sabbath makes weekends difficult, but she drives down every other Sunday.’

  ‘What about Karen? Still the wild girl in the woods?’

  ‘Believe it or not, she’s turned up trumps. Nothing’s ever too much trouble for her. It’s a joy to see how she’s finally growing up. I give much of the credit to her new boyfriend.’

  ‘The busker?’ Clement asked, horrified by the hint of Aunt Helena creeping into his voice.

  ‘He’s a very mature young man. Battling to save the planet. Especially the dolphins. He recently organised a die-in at Tesco.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what it entailed, apart from Karen, dressed as a tuna, chaining herself to the fresh-fish counter.’

  Returning to his cell in the straggling line of VPU prisoners, Clement received a graphic illustration of his new status in the hisses, curses and shouts of ‘Beasties!’, ‘Wankers!’ and ‘Nonces!’ that reached him from the other wings. The basic human need for someone to love, as manifest in Wells and Beckley, had been replaced by an equivalent one for someone to loathe. Their righteous indignation might have carried more weight had it not been coupled with threats of ‘I’m gonna fuck your missus up the arse’ and ‘I’m getting out next week to rape your mother’. He wanted to break ranks and assure the hecklers that his presence there was an anomaly, that he was an Ordinary Decent Criminal just like them, but he knew that, if his faith were to be anything more than a Barchester convention, he had to stick with the group and accept their stigma as his own.

  The isolation of the Unit meant that time passed even more slowly than elsewhere in the prison. Like most of his fellows, Shlomo spent the day on various rehabilitation courses, leaving Clement in the company of the Proudies, the Pallisers, Lord Peter Wimsey and other handpicked characters from the governor’s shelves. Although he was loath to admit it, the ‘paedo pops’ incident had discouraged him from fraternising. Nevertheless, when Shlomo’s evening prayers, albeit quieter than Dwayne’s ‘sounds’ and less sinister than Parker’s Stanley knife, became oppressive, he escaped to Association. He was immediately accosted by George, the taciturn traveller who shared Joe’s cell.

  ‘Joe’s tried to top himself!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s shit-scared of the Muslims.’

  ‘But not in here! I thought he was safe.’

  ‘You’re safe nowhere. The priest thingummy… you know, the bomber?’

  ‘The imam.’

  ‘That’s your man. He put a fatima on him.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A fatima. So all the other Muslims would bump him off on account of how he snitched to the governor.’

  ‘But there aren’t any Muslims on the Unit.’

  ‘There is now. That new man, Mehmet. Twoed up with Dusty.’

  ‘I haven’t met him.’

  ‘You don’t want to, mate. Beast!’ George spat. ‘All last night Joe yacked on about how he’d been put here, special, to do the job. Then, this dinner, when I come back from my Assertiveness Course, I found him on the floor, bleeding. Cut both his wrists.’

  ‘So is he all right? Where is he?’

  ‘In the hospital. But they won’t keep him long. He’d be better off ghosted.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘No, mate! Sent to another nick. Course news travels quick. My cousin – ’

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to go. Thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘Remember what I say; you’re safe nowhere. I’m telling you this because you’re a gentleman and not a beast.’

  Shrinking from the compliment, Clement returned to the cell where, with less regard for Shlomo’s reading than for his prayers, he relayed the conversation, meeting with a marked lack of sympathy.

  ‘I already heard. It’s just attention-seeking. He slit across his veins when, as everyone knows, if you’re serious, you slice down.’

  ‘Really?’ Clement asked, instantly disproving Shlomo’s claim.

  ‘Not that I blame him. How else can he escape from all those maniacs?’

  ‘There are fanatics in every religion,’ Clement said pointedly. ‘People who take the letter for the law.’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying. But there’s one big difference that you and all your six-of-one-and-half-a-dozen-of-the-other friends seem intent on ignoring… one very big difference. Torah permits a Jew to stone anyone who stops him from practising his
faith. The Quran instructs the Muslims to make war on the infidels who live around them. Even if they’re decent, honourable, fair-playing infidels like you. And no matter how hard you try to dissuade them, there’ll always be Muslims ready to obey.’

  As Shlomo went back to his books, Clement switched on the news which, with its consecutive reports of atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the West Bank, made the religious conflicts appear more intractable than ever. Convinced that the only hope lay in dialogue, he resolved to make a start in his own cell.

  ‘May I ask what you did?’

  ‘What?’ Shlomo asked sharply.

  ‘Your job? Before you came here.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I was a shochet, a ritual slaughterer. No doubt you think that’s barbaric.’

  ‘I’ll admit I’m a typical Englishman when it comes to a love of animals.’

  ‘Yes, of course. The English speak of butchery as if it means violence or clumsiness. You just have to read the crime reports. “He butchered her,” in great big letters. To a Jew that would mean he killed her with the utmost delicacy, with a blade that was razor sharp and brought instant death.’

  ‘It’s a fine distinction.’

  ‘It’s far more than that. It shows respect both to the animal and to God. Torah says: “Be holy people to me and don’t eat treif.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything that’s not kosher. I’m proud of the part I’ve played in upholding that commandment.’

  Shlomo climbed off his bunk and used the lavatory, which Clement might have taken as a diversionary tactic had not the sounds emerging from behind the curtain betrayed a genuine need. He was keen to resume the conversation but Shlomo, as determined to protect himself from forbidden thoughts as from forbidden foods, rebuffed his attempts both for the rest of the evening and over subsequent weeks.

  October passed into November, and the chill in the cell intensified. With Shlomo remaining aloof, although the frequency of his prayers showed him to be in regular contact with God, Clement sought to make sense of his many inconsistencies: from his aversion to taking a shower, which seemed particularly perverse given Shoana’s account of Zvi’s daily attendance at the mikvah, to the lack of any letters or visits from members of his tight-knit community. The suspicions about the nature of his crime, which had been aroused on learning that the pig course he attended each day stood for the Price of Instant Gratification, were confirmed when, one Association, Ron handed him a newspaper report of his trial for abusing his ten-year-old son.

  Clement read it with growing revulsion, feeling as if the words were crawling over his skin. He crumpled the paper into a ball and flung it into a corner; then, still alert to its noxious effect, he picked it up, tore it into strips and flushed them down the lavatory, where they stuck to the bottom of the bowl. Although the offence remained the same whether it were his own son or somebody else’s, the betrayal of trust was far worse. Two contrasting images flashed through Clement’s mind. The first was of his father patiently teaching Mark and himself to fish one summer at Beckley. The second was of Shlomo, hefty, saturnine Shlomo, bearing down on a quaking ten-year-old boy… He rushed to the basin, sure that he was about to vomit, but all that emerged was a string of phlegm. He returned to his bunk and, lying very still, tried to summon up some sympathy for Shlomo’s plight: that of a learned man laid low, less by something within himself than by the exigencies of his culture; a man of powerful sexual needs who, forbidden to make love to his wife during the extended period of her menstruation, turned instead to his son, a boy who, in a very real sense, belonged to him, who was as much his flesh as his own penis and, arguably, not subject to as strong a taboo.

  After all, the Torah, in which his faith was absolute, commanded a man with a stubborn and a rebellious son to take him to the elders of the city to be stoned to death: a passage from Deuteronomy which even the most literal-minded chose to gloss over. Like an abusive priest he had not only relied on fear to buy silence but believed he was acting on the authority invested in him by God.

  Clement’s abhorrence of paedophilia – he struggled to substitute sin for sinner – had been coloured by Newsom’s account of his stepfather, who had married his mother in order to gain access to him. Even so, he refused to subscribe to a tabloid agenda. He could not dispel the suspicion that paedophiles were paying the price for the newfound acceptance of gay men. The language used by the judge who had sentenced Oscar Wilde was little different from that of a Daily Mail editorial on ‘the evils of internet grooming’. While he knew full well that the one was consensual and the other coercive, he was less sure that the general public, let alone their moral guardians, had drawn such a clear distinction. They needed an outlet for their outrage, which, as ever, was compounded by guilt. The demonisation of paedophiles was an admission, however tacit, of the way that society at large was abusing children, with many parents, either from lack of time and energy or from simple disinclination, dumping them in front of television and computer screens, where they were exposed to unsuitable material or, worse, targeted by unscrupulous men.

  Exhausted by the strain of reserving judgement, Clement left the cell one evening for Association. Standing in line at the pay phone behind a bullion-robber whose appearance on Crimewatch had made him a local celebrity, he found himself invited to join a poker game. ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ he said, aware that his emotions were too transparent even for bridge.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said a man who was rumoured to have used his daughter as a stake.

  Clement waited his turn, squirming as he listened to the robber’s marital endearments. Perplexed by his wish to broadcast them to the entire landing, he decided that it was a deliberate attempt to assert his normality, an impulse he recognised in himself. The revelation of Shlomo’s crime had plunged him into despair. He had almost half his sentence still to serve and was no longer sure that he could endure it. He was desperate to talk to Mike, and no sooner had the man put down the phone than he rushed to grab it. The sound of the familiar voice reassured him although, conscious of the crowd of eavesdroppers, he could only hint at his pain.

  After talking to Mike, he felt less inclined than ever to chat to his fellow prisoners, so he sat flipping idly through a boat-building magazine as if in a doctor’s waiting room. He looked up to see Dusty, who had returned to the Unit in a neck-brace after a violent clash with Ron on the Anger Management Course.

  ‘So it was nothing serious?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t you believe it! If you had open-heart surgery here, they’d have you back in your pad the next day. All the doc asked was was I allergic to anything. “Yes,” I said, “fists”.’ Dusty giggled, then grimaced at the pain. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘a sweet for a sweetie.’ As Clement held out his hand to accept, he pictured Dusty offering the bag to a child.

  ‘Better not. Bad for my teeth.’

  ‘Pity.’ He placed one in his mouth and sucked lubriciously. ‘Any time you change your mind, just knock on my door.’

  Seething with resentment that, through no fault of his own, he had been snatched away from the ODCs on his former wing and thrown into this snake pit, Clement asked for a transfer. Although he was confident that he faced no threat either from Stick, whose psychosis had been fuelled by the drugs, or from anyone else, the governor remained obdurate, informing him five days before Christmas that his request had been turned down.

  ‘But I reiterate my hope that you’ll go back to the painting.’

  ‘I appreciate that, sir,’ Clement replied, ‘but it’s quite impossible without my original model. To start again with somebody else wouldn’t just pose practical problems, it would undermine everything I’m trying to say. I’d be upholding the distinction both between the penitent and impenitent thieves and between them and Christ.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the governor said irritably, ‘let’s not get bogged down in metaphysics. In view of your refusal – somewhat precious to my mind – to accept a substitute, I’ve canvassed the officers an
d drug counsellors, all of whom have spoken of Dawson’s progress. On their recommendation, I’m prepared to let you resume work with him.’

  Clement wondered whether, having refused the transfer, the governor felt the need to make a concession or whether his change of heart were a direct result of the pressure that Mike had promised to bring to bear. He smiled at the thought of the governor’s office submerged in sacks of protest letters.

  ‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ the governor said, catching him unawares.

  ‘And Stick… Dawson, has he agreed to come back?’ Clement asked, finding to his surprise that he was almost as anxious to be reconciled with his model as to return to his painting.

  ‘So I’m given to understand. No doubt pecuniary considerations have played their part. My one stipulation is that there should be an officer in the room with you at all times.’

  Clement had not anticipated that the first of these would be Willis, who appeared to have volunteered in a bid to cause them all, himself included, maximum discomfort. After a jibe about Clement’s being more at home ‘on the rule’, he sat beneath the window, leaving Clement to face Stick, who was standing by the wall.

  ‘You’ve grown your hair,’ he said.

  ‘Not really. It grew itself. I see you got a scar.’

  ‘Yes, it’s faded, but I don’t expect it’ll ever completely disappear.’

  ‘It was me as did that to you!’

  ‘My boyfriend thinks it’s fetching. After all, lines are supposed to give a face character.’

  Stick chuckled. ‘Half the time I can’t make out what you’re saying. But I know it’s clever. Honest!’

  ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh! It’s cos of me that you’re in with them beasties.’

  ‘No one’s a beast, Stick. They’re men like you and I.’

  ‘I’m real sorry. I’ve prayed and prayed to say sorry, haven’t I, sir?’