The New Neighbors

by Simon Lelic

My mother is dressed as though she is due to appear in court herself. My father looks smart enough, I suppose, but he looks the way he always does: like a reluctant model for the casuals section of the Marks & Spencer catalog. My mother, on the other hand, is wearing some kind of dark beige business suit, with gold and black leather accessories that in combination scream respectable. Maybe she’s hoping some of it will rub off on me, that the guards and the other prisoners will treat me better if they realize my family is—wait for it—middle class. If that’s the case, she needs to be strapped to a chair and forced to watch the entire DVD box set of Oz.

  She tsks when I don’t answer, for about the seventeenth time since she arrived, and takes another opportunity to survey the room. The visiting area isn’t all that dissimilar to an airport waiting lounge. The furniture is fixed and there are guards wandering between the rows—although they aren’t armed the way the security staff at airports are, and the chairs here are clustered around tables. A school canteen, then, rather than a departure lounge. Think Scum meets Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. My mother is doing her best not to touch any of the surfaces. She keeps her hands neatly bundled in her lap.

  “What have you been eating?” she asks me. “Will you answer me that at least?”

  “Just food, Mum.”

  “Are you getting enough? It doesn’t look to me like they’ve been feeding you enough.”

  “I get what they give me.” Which is slop and sliced bread, mainly. Probably it’s not so bad, if you’re hungry. I’ve barely eaten a thing since I was remanded in custody.

  “You should speak to someone if you’re going to bed hungry,” my mother tells me. “Explain that you’re a growing boy, that whoever’s in charge of portion size needs to take that into account.”

  I want to laugh at that. At my mother’s hopelessly flawed perception of me, but also the idea that somewhere within these walls there’s a Head of Portion Size.

  My father answers before I do. “He’s twenty-eight, Penelope. He’s not a boy.” He doesn’t look at either one of us when he speaks, though I get the sense from his tone, and from my mother’s nod of weary acceptance, that this is something else they’ve both opted to hold against me: the fact that I grew up. If I’d never had the temerity to turn eighteen, none of us would be in this mess, I imagine they’re thinking. Because that’s how they view it—like we’re all in this. Just not together.

  “Well,” says my mother. “Even so. You should talk to Henry if no one else can help.”

  “Who’s Henry?” I ask her.

  “Henry Graves. The governor here. Don’t tell me you haven’t met him yet.”

  “Of course he hasn’t met him, Penelope. He’s a prisoner.” I look for my father’s eyes, but they skip away. That word, though, lingers, together with the disgust my father attached to it.

  “Well, in my judgment he’s a very reasonable man. I’m sure he’d help if you asked him nicely enough.”

  “You know the governor?”

  My mother’s circle of friends extends to book-group buddies and ladies who lunch, with perhaps, at its wildest reaches, the odd organic farmer. How she can possibly have an acquaintanceship with the governor of a south London prison, I can’t begin to make a guess.

  “We met him,” she explains. “On our way in.”

  I should have realized. My mother has a way of ingratiating herself with people in authority. In any commercial encounter, for example, she is rarely more than two sentences away from demanding to talk to the Person in Charge—whereupon her tone will switch immediately to one of polite and reasonable deference. Still, we’re in a high-security prison, not the Dorchester branch of Specsavers. Even for her, given the time she would have had in which to operate, securing an audience with the governor was no mean feat.

  “Your mother caused a scene,” my father offers by way of explanation. He’s still not looking at me, but the fact that he’s addressed me has to count as progress of a kind.

  “And it’s a good job I did,” my mother puts in. She’s about to say something else, I think, when my father finally looks at me directly.

  “You know why this is happening, don’t you?” he says. His shoulders are drawn back, but he’s leaning in slightly, speaking to me under his breath. You don’t have to whisper, Dad, I want to say. No one here gives a toot who you are or where you’re from. But I hold my tongue.

  “Jack? Did you hear me? I said you know why this is happening. Don’t you?”

  I’ve told him—I’ve told them both—the outline of what’s gone on, how I’m being screwed by Syd’s lunatic old man. I didn’t put it quite as succinctly as that, of course, and maybe I wasn’t as forthright as I was in the account we presented to Inspector Leigh (in fact, I left out a few choice details: that I lost my job, for example, ridiculous as that sounds; that I stabbed my supposed victim no less than seventeen times), but I get the feeling that the precise sequence of events isn’t what my father is referring to.

  “That . . . girlfriend of yours,” he clarifies, making it sound like a swear word. “She’s the reason we’re all sitting where we are. It’s because of her that your mother had to get up at 4 A.M. so that she could come and visit her only son in prison!”

  People are looking. My father’s hissing probably carries farther than his more regular bass-heavy mumble.

  “It’s not Syd’s fault, Dad,” I say. “I explained to you about her father. It’s him who’s doing this.”

  My father’s head gives a furious little quiver, like if I don’t understand now I never will. “We all get the family we deserve, Jack. Most of us,” he adds, showing me his razor-raw cheek.

  “She’s not right for you, Jack,” my mother chips in. “She never was. She’s . . .” There are all sorts of words my mother would like to use here, but she’s self-aware enough—just—to recognize they’ll betray her social bigotry. So she’ll save them up and use them when she and my father are alone.

  “Your mother and I told you when you first brought her home,” my father says. Brought her home: like a cat dragging in something rotten. “We told you then that you’d regret it.”

  “I’ve heard her swearing, Jack,” my mother confides. “And I’ve seen those scars up and down her arms.” She shudders, a theatrical little tremor that almost prompts me to speak up in Syd’s defense. There are two things that stop me. I’ve heard it all before, is one of them. This, my parents’ lecturing—I was expecting it. It’s almost comforting, in fact. A little reminder of being at home. It’s like if I ever needed money when I was a teenager. My parents would put me through the same ordeal, except then the subject of the sermon would be responsibility, commitment, my failure to demonstrate first one and then the other. Listening to them outline their disappointment in me is the price they’ve always attached to offering me their support.

  The other thing—the real reason I’m sitting here and remaining so quiet—is that I don’t know if I’m starting to agree with them. There’s a voice inside my head, loudest after my cell door slams shut for the night, that tells me this is Syd’s fault. That I would never have got in this kind of trouble if it weren’t for her. It’s not as though my parents haven’t been proved right about other things. About me, for example. Their disappointment in me. Syd’s always tried to boost my self-confidence, encouraged me to forget what other people think and concentrate instead on the things I think are important, and I’ve done my best to follow her advice. But look at me. Look at what I’m wearing, where I’m sitting. Clearly something went wrong somewhere, just as my parents always said it would.

  The other thing is, she hasn’t even been to visit. Syd hasn’t. At first I was terrified it was because something had happened to her—something to do with her father—but I know she’s OK, because Bart’s told me he’s spoken to her on the phone. (Unlike Syd, Bart’s been to see me. We patched things up, which I suppose is something, though t
he fact that he was so ready to forgive me only makes me feel worse about how I treated him in the first place.) And I know it’s only been four days, and that Syd and I didn’t exactly part on the best of terms, but if our positions were reversed, I would have set up camp outside the gates on the very first night. I keep thinking about what I accused her of—of wanting me out of the way—and I can’t help but wonder whether I wasn’t right, whether she isn’t glad, on that level at least, about how things have turned out.

  “And what’s all this about your driver’s license?” my father asks me.

  It takes me a moment to adjust to the switch of subjects. But when I do, I experience that same lurch of despair I felt when I learned about the driver’s license myself.

  “They found it at the scene,” I say, suddenly uncomfortable in my seat. “In the alleyway. Near the . . .” Body, I stop myself saying. “Near where it happened.”

  Aside from what transpired at the Evening Star, that’s why the police were so interested in me from the beginning. It’s something I found out about only after I’d been arrested, however. It was DC Granger who led the interrogation when I was under caution, and in the middle of the session, that’s when he slapped it on the table like a trump card. It was in an evidence bag, the photo of me clearly visible beneath the splatters of what I was informed was Sean Payne’s blood. At first I didn’t know what to say. Apart from anything it set me wondering again about why, if they’d had such a damning piece of evidence all along, they hadn’t arrested me sooner. When I explained to DC Granger that Syd’s father must have left it in the alleyway for the police to find—that he must have swiped it one of the times he was in the house—the detective constable just started laughing. Even my solicitor—a man they’d brought in who’d been on call—struggled to mask his reaction. He’s been looking at me differently ever since.

  “Honestly, Jack. How could you have been so careless?”

  “I didn’t drop it, Mum! I wasn’t even there, remember?”

  “Yes, but to lose it in the first place. Haven’t we always taught you to look after your belongings?”

  For several seconds I’m lost for words. “Syd’s father stole it from me, Mum. He broke into our house and he found my wallet and he took my driving license from me. I didn’t lose anything.”

  I catch my mother slip a glance toward my father.

  “You do know I’m innocent, right?” I say, my eyes flitting between each of my parents and the desperation audible in my tone. “You do believe that, don’t you?”

  This time my mother checks the room again, as though worried I’m about to make a scene. “Of course we do, Jack,” she answers, the level of her voice an instruction to lower mine. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. Would we?”

  Once again I’m not sure how to respond. I think I should be reassured. On the other hand, wouldn’t most parents stand by their son or daughter irrespective of what crime they believed they’d committed?

  “It doesn’t matter what your mother and I think,” my father declares, sidestepping that little conundrum nicely. “You’re where you are and the situation is what it is.”

  My mother nods at this sage summation. She takes a quick look at my father, whose silence now seems to be a cue.

  “Your father has a proposition for you,” my mother announces. She glances again to check that she’s got the timing right.

  My father clears his throat. “We’ll help you,” he announces.

  With paying for a decent solicitor, I assume he means. Which obviously I’m grateful for, and relieved about. I’m also slightly alarmed, though, that the matter was evidently in doubt.

  “That’s great,” I say, “thank you. The duty solicitor, I don’t think he—”

  “On one condition.”

  I’m surprised I’m surprised. What, really, did I expect?

  “That girlfriend of yours,” my father goes on.

  “Syd? What about her?”

  “She’s no good for you, Jack. She—”

  My father cuts off my mother’s interruption with an upraised hand.

  “Dad? What about Syd?”

  “You need to grow up, Jack. You need to move on.”

  “Move on? What do you mean?”

  “I mean move on. Move past your silly infatuation.”

  I look at my mother. “I don’t understand,” I say. Except I do. They’re both too cowardly to spell it out, but what they’re saying couldn’t be clearer. “You want me to split up with Syd, is that what you’re saying? That’s the condition of your offer of help?”

  “Voice, Jack,” my mother hisses. “Please.”

  My father just sits there saying nothing.

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Sorry, but no. Syd and I, we’re . . .” A couple, I mean to tell them. We’re happy. But like a whisper in my ear I hear the ish Syd attached to that description before.

  And she hasn’t visited. Not once in four days has she come to visit.

  I shake my head again.

  “Your father knows someone through Rotary,” my mother says, attempting to sound appeasing. “A solicitor. Garrie . . .” She looks to my father.

  “Garrie Dalton,” my father proclaims, like a doorman announcing the guest of honor at some affair of state. Probably he has to restrain himself from adding the letters the esteemed Mr. Dalton no doubt has trailing from his name.

  “He’s very good, Jack. Very expensive. Your father and I will have to forgo Provence next year, but it will be worth it, I promise you.”

  A son cleared of murder, an ill-favored prospective daughter-in-law scrubbed from the family portrait—all for the price of an Easter break in the south of France. Worth it? It’s a small price to pay, surely.

  “Forget it,” I say. “There’s no way I’m leaving Syd. Not for you. Not for anyone.”

  I feel brave, like a grown-up—until my father leans in again and speaks to me in the same tone of voice I remember him using when I was five.

  “For pity’s sake,” he hisses at me. “For once in your life will you please start thinking of other people? This isn’t easy for us, you know. Coming here, seeing you here. It isn’t easy for your mother.”

  My mother dutifully bows her head.

  “And I assure you it wasn’t easy for me to convince Mr. Dalton to consider representing you,” my father goes on. “Can you imagine what that was like for me? How demeaning to have to ask a friend of mine for help? The easiest thing, I assure you, would have been for me to refuse to get involved. Unfortunately, however, you’re my son. And unlike some people, I feel a certain sense of responsibility.”

  That, right there—that’s the closest my father has ever come to telling me that he loves me.

  “So you have a choice, Jack. You either do as I ask, or you deal with this on your own terms. With your own money. And personally I’d like to see how far that gets you.”

  My father isn’t a big man. He’s slim for his age and only a few inches taller than my mother. I outgrew him when I reached seventeen, but I’ve never had a conversation with him where it didn’t still feel like he was looking down on me. Even now, I could climb up onto the table, instruct my father to sit cross-legged on the floor, and it would feel like he had the higher ground.

  “But Dad, I—”

  “Where is she?” my father cuts in. “Will you tell me that? This girl you’re so madly in love with. Where is she now you’re stuck behind bars?”

  “She hasn’t visited you, Jack. We know she hasn’t. Henry, the governor, he—”

  “She doesn’t care about you,” my father plows on, in no mood for one of my mother’s digressions. “If she did she’d be sitting in one of these chairs. Wouldn’t she? And you said it yourself. She’s the reason you’re in this mess in the first place.”

  This is the thing about my father. He has a ta
lent for pinpointing my insecurities. It’s frustrating, and disconcerting, but it also makes me wonder whether he doesn’t know me better than I give him credit for. Whether he doesn’t know what’s better for me, too.

  My parents are waiting for my response. When I fail to say anything my father rises from his chair.

  “Come on, Penelope. It looks to me as though he’s made his decision.”

  And it’s that, I think—the act of them getting to their feet, the knowledge that they’re about to turn their backs on me—that makes me panic. I just . . . I don’t think I can take it. Without them . . . without Syd . . . I don’t think I can face being entirely on my own.

  “Wait. Dad, please. Just . . . just wait a minute.”

  My father has moved out from behind his chair. He turns, but not fully.

  “Couldn’t I . . . I mean, if I promised that—”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, Jack. Do you want our help or don’t you?”

  “I do. Of course I do. It’s just—”

  “Come on, Penelope,” my father says, taking my mother by the elbow.

  “OK! Dad? Dad, please, wait! I said OK!”

  “I want your word, Jack. I want your word that if you accept our help, you’ll put an end to this foolish association. That after this is all over, your mother and I won’t have to see or hear from Sydney Baker ever again.”

  For a moment I manage to hold his eye. But it’s a blink, a final flash of willful defiance, and eventually my head bobs as I let it drop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  JACK

  I NEVER IMAGINED that prison would be so silent. Not so much during the day perhaps, but at night it’s even quieter here than it is at home. There’s no traffic noise, for one thing. No neighbors with their televisions blaring or teenagers playing music through the walls. And the biggest difference, I suppose, is that you’re alone. I am, I mean. And maybe that’s all it takes. Maybe the silence isn’t as complete as I’m imagining, and instead the thing I’m adjusting to is that I’m lying here trying to sleep without Syd.