‘They put him in with that racist mother-fucker. He said he was going to do it and he did,’ mouthed a huge brown jaw that blocked out everything else from A’s thin gash of view. ‘I promised I’d look after him, I fucking promised his mum and I promised his baby-mother and he’s dead. The fucker said he was going to do it and he did. They might just as well have done it themselves.’
A murmured ‘Who?’, lisping it slightly, not used to talking without his front teeth. His swollen lips stuck together with congealing blood each time he closed them, and made a wet sucking sound when he parted them again to breathe. He had to breathe through his mouth; his smashed nose was caked shut.
‘Who? The fucking screws, that’s who. The screws who put my cousin, my fucking best friend, in with that murderous, white, fucking racist. They fucking knew it would happen, the skinhead fuck said it would happen. Just six fucking hours before my spar was going to be released.’
A’s throat contracted, making his breathing even more ragged.
‘Shut up man, just shut up and let me think.’
The speaker punched A in the windpipe. He rolled on to his side, doubled up, wheezing and gasping for air. With the effort of trying to breathe, he sucked down great lumps of dried blood from his nose, making him choke. He could feel his eyes bulging. Like a rabbit, he thought. Like the rabbits my dog used to catch. His mind was drifting. He wondered if that meant he was dying. If he was a rabbit he would be dead already. Their hearts give up beating when they face certain death. They don’t have to go through all this pain. God looks after the meek. God, who decided the meek should be preyed upon.
‘I don’t know what to do, kid,’ said the predator. ‘I look into your eyes and I don’t think you’re a bad person. I mean, no worse than the rest of us in here. I don’t hate you, man. I don’t have anything against you. But I told them I’d do it. I said don’t put no white boy in with me because I’m gonna do the same to him. I’ll fucking kill him. I told them, man, fucking yesterday; and they still put you in here. Just like he told them, and they still put my cousin in there. They killed my fucking cousin, and now they’re taking the piss out of me. They’re calling me a boy. I told them I’d do it.’ The sleeves were ripped off his borstal-blue T-shirt. His arms were huge, not swollen like a body-builder’s, naturally solid like a tree; thick with veins and dense muscle.
A was no longer a boy either; no weakling, and no coward. But this man was designed on a different scale. A Mastiff to A’s Jack Russell. He might just as well have tried to break through the cell door as attack him. But he’d tried both, and he’d tried shouting for help, and he’d tried pleading. So now he didn’t seem to have anything left to try, but bleeding and moaning softly.
‘What’s your name?’ said the man. His voice was deep, cavernous, but not unkind – almost gentle. ‘I don’t want to kill a stranger.’
A told him, told his true name, terror replaced by a kind of numb acceptance. The gallow-walker’s recognition that there is no escape. That it’s all too late.
The man put his long arms around A’s shoulders and sat him up on the bed. He drew their two bodies together, squeezing gently into a hug. A could feel the rasp of stubble against his cheek, and the cold salt of this sudden enemy’s tears biting into the cuts around his mouth. He felt beyond tears himself: bewildered, light-headed and almost relieved.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, quietly now, like all rage was spent. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault. But I have to do it. You see I told them. I fucking told them. It’s not for me. But I promised his mum and I promised his baby-mother. I said I’d look after him. I got him in here, and I said I’d look after him.’
He moved his arms so that his large, long-fingered hands were around A’s throat. This new nearness to death provoked a fresh wave of terror. A started to thrash uncontrollably. Yelling, screaming, he tried to pull the hands away from his throat. But they were too strong.
He felt himself weakening. A door opened and bright light came washing in. Was this death? Three figures poured in with the light. A knew that they were angels or devils, but not which. Didn’t they all start off the same? The pressure eased from around his throat. He laughed; they had come for his tormentor, not him. They were beating the tormentor with truncheons. Pulling him away. Guardian angels. The devil looks after his own. He laughed again.
‘Welcome to Feltham,’ said one of the angels.
E is for Elephant.
White Elephant.
Jack can’t get the washer-dryer to work. The dryer, anyway. The washer’s washed, but the clothes are stuck in there. The door won’t open and Jack’s whites languish like broken teeth in a thickly salivated mouth. In fact it’s still half-full of water; it hasn’t even drained yet. He should have done this last night while Kelly was here.
His hand is shaking when he pushes the ‘dryer’ button, frustration and nerves. This is the night: his first night out ever, if you don’t count with Terry; and it’s all going wrong already. The button doesn’t do anything, Jack didn’t expect it to, he’s tried it twenty times already. The machine’s big round mouth is laughing at him, laughing because it knows it’s got his only good shirt inside it. He wants to punch the mouth, but he’s bright enough to know that it won’t help. He needs that shirt. Two hours to go and it’s soaking wet and imprisoned beyond his reach.
He kneels down on the cold tile of the kitchen floor and examines the controls again, hoping against logic that something obvious is suddenly going to spring out at him. But all the buttons are the same, and he’s tried any that look relevant. He doesn’t want to set it all off again, or he’ll have to wait another forty minutes.
Then he sees it, a flap near the bottom of the machine. He pushes it and it springs open, like any self-respecting secret compartment should: as if it was just waiting to save the hero. Jack is puzzled as to why the panel should be put down there. But sure enough there’s a dial-like switch to twist, with the word ‘drainer’ written clearly above it. He turns it in the direction of the arrow, and notices a smoky smell in the room. For the first time Jack remembers the fish fingers he was grilling. He’ll just sort this out and then he can make his sandwich, thirty seconds isn’t going to make any difference. He twists the knob again, and then another half turn; might as well get this drainer on maximum.
The switch comes away in his hand, leaving a hole. Jack is staring at it when the water starts pouring out on to the floor. He tries to push the switch, which he sees is really a screw-plug, back into its slot. But he fumbles, and it jumps skittishly away, into the water already flowing behind his knees. As he turns to reclaim the plug, Jack sees the flames snaking out of the grill. They lick dark venom on to the clean white of Kelly’s oven. He’s caught for a moment, unsure which disaster to counter first. The fire makes his choice by grasping at the wallpaper. Still holding the plug, Jack leaps to his bare feet, nearly slipping in the water. He turns off the gas and thrusts the burning grill pan into the sink. The fat spits, hissing into his hand and cheek, but the flames quickly die. Although the water is barely trickling out now, and the floor is already flooded, he screws the plug back in, as tight as it will go.
He slumps down in the pool of water, covering the washing machine’s still-laughing mouth with his back, and holding his burned cheek with his burned hand.
He’s used to picking himself up. Pick up, put up, shut up – never give up. If you give up they find you hanging dead from a strip of sheet, or lying in the red of your own wrists.
Never give up, never give in. But the power to be able to is important. It gives a choice to the choiceless; it makes going on a decision. Your decision. Sometimes Jack believed that the option of suicide was all that kept him alive.
B made his choice too. Made his bed-sheet and hanged from it. His final felony. It’s a crime, suicide. ‘Felo-de-se’, Terry said, the felon of himself. Was B unrepentant even at the end? Did he want to feel the abandon one last time? Commit one last crime? In the olden da
ys they used to bury suicides inside prison, so that even death was no escape.
There was a prime minister once that Jack studied in history – GCSE, HMPS. It was either Canning or Castlereagh, he can’t remember, though he got a C. He’s not so stupid as some people suppose him. This prime minister, sick of being suspected and despised, threatened his own life. Those who believed in his worth tried to stop him. They kept watch on him constantly. No blade to shave with. Not even allowed to sleep or bathe alone. They took away his choice entirely, and probably forced his decision by doing so. While his guard was at the toilet, he gouged open his own throat with a paper knife.
Was he a coward, this man? They call it the coward’s way out. Don’t call him a coward till you’ve weighed a paper knife in your palm. Not till you’ve tried the frank, blunt brink against your windpipe.
After he picks himself up, Jack shaves with his new cutthroat razor. He holds the blade inwards, stroking it with his thumb, feeling the comforting sharpness, so honed it has to be restrained. The razor wants to sever his skin. That’s why it feels so good to shave with. Jack feels alive this close to the choice. He senses intensely the vertigo of possibility – the fear that he might go with the urge to slip into jugular. And, having made his decision, not dying makes him feel stronger.
He grins to himself while he mops the floor, satisfied with his discovery of the ‘crease guard’ button. Not knowing why this should have drained the remaining water, and set the machine to spin, but contented that it has.
His good white shirt waves a trunk-like sleeve at him, as it billows around in the heat of the dryer; the rest of his clothes sit in a damp pile on the counter. A fresh batch of fish fingers are wheezing gently in a cleaned-off oven; and there is still an hour to go.
He’s meeting Chris and Steve the mechanic, for a couple of drinks before they join the others. He’s pleased. He’s had enough of deep-ending. If Jack had ever been swimming he would be an ‘ease your way in from the shallows’ type of a swimmer. He doesn’t know many of the people coming out tonight, but he’s chatted to Steve the mechanic a couple of times. There are four Steves where they work, so Steve the mechanic is always given his full title.
Chris and Steve the mechanic are already in there when Jack pushes open the pub’s heavy, brass-handled door. Chris wolf-whistles, feigning surprise at Jack’s smart dress. The white shirt was a present from Terry. It used to belong to his son, who started body-building and can’t fit into it anymore. It’s Ralph Lauren; Jack knew its quality right away. The Chelsea Headhunter, who shared his cell for a while, had the polo horse tattooed on to his chest at just the same spot.
Jack gets a round in. He stumbles his words and fumbles his coins, when a barman eventually picks him from the pack, long after his natural turn has elapsed.
‘You should have brought a tray,’ says Steve the mechanic, at the inexpert way Jack handles the three pints.
‘He looks like he’s got enough to carry,’ laughs Chris. He smiles generously at Jack.
Chris has a fantastic smile, sort of conspiratorial – ‘you and me mate,’ it says, ‘against the fucking world; and it doesn’t matter if we lose, because there’ll still be you and me’. Birds love it too. They read their own versions. Actually he’s not a bad-looking bloke, Chris, but he slicks his thick black hair forwards with so much gel that it looks plastic; like a Lego man’s.
The drink is doing nothing so far to calm Jack’s nerves. And he’s nearly finished his pint, while the other two have barely started theirs. He knows he’s got to go slow. ‘Alcohol preserves everything except secrets,’ Terry told him. Jack’s stomach is churning, and even though sat down he feels strangely off-balance. He tries to take part in the conversation, but Steve the mechanic and Chris are discussing chat-up lines. The topic makes Jack feel his difference, keeps him silent.
‘I’m telling you,’ says Chris, ‘a chat-up line only works if the lass fancies you anyway, in which case it’s irrelevant. You might as well say “fancy a shag, love?”’
‘I heard they did a study that if you ask ten girls for a shag one of them would say yes,’ says Steve the mechanic.
‘Exactly, if they fancied you anyway. Which goes to prove that chat-up lines are pointless. Although you’re probably asking mingers anyway, by the time you get to number ten.’
‘But if you used a good chat-up line then maybe number two or number three would say yes.’
‘In which case, how would they know it was one in ten? If the second one said yes then that would be one in two, wouldn’t it? It must be the last one that says yes, or the study wouldn’t make sense.’ Chris grins widely, chuffed with the brilliance of his argument. ‘Where did you hear of this “study” anyway? I mean, who does a study on how many women put out? It’s not going to be some balding, speccy professor, is it, or else there’d be none in ten.’
‘It was on the radio,’ says Steve the mechanic, a bit sheepishly.
‘I reckon it was on that special radio in your head,’ says Chris, and messes up Steve the mechanic’s spiky blond hair.
Steve the mechanic looks annoyed for a moment, but then laughs.
‘Come on then, Chris,’ he says, ‘what’s your best chat-up?’
‘I just told you, I don’t believe in them.’ He takes a sip of his pint, and then wipes a blob of froth from his nose. ‘But if I did it would be: “you must have a mirror in your knickers”.’
‘Because I can see myself in them,’ Steve the mechanic finishes with a groan. ‘What about you, Jack? What’s yours?’
Words flounder about in Jack’s mind: half-remembered tales of ten pences and star thieves, labels and angels. But none of them come together to form anything repeatable. He feels flustered, and hoping it doesn’t show, decides to shoot somewhere near the truth.
‘I haven’t really used chat-up lines. I suppose I just try to seem genuine, seem interested in them.’ As he speaks he trails off, feeling the ridiculousness of his words.
Steve the mechanic shakes his head in wonder. Chris sucks in air between his teeth.
‘I told you, mate, didn’t I?’ Chris says to Steve the mechanic. ‘Our Dodger’s a sly one. You should have seen the way the White Whale was drooling into his pocket yesterday.’
Steve the mechanic laughs, still shaking his head. ‘That’s really dirty fighting, that, Jack. “Seem genuine, seem interested,” that’s low tactics. How’s anyone supposed to compete with that?’
‘Mind you,’ says Chris, ‘you want to stay away from that White Whale. I’m telling you, she’s got Penile Dementia, she’d swallow you up.’
‘We’d have to change your name from Dodger to Jonah,’ Steve the mechanic chips in.
Jack says nothing, he knows that he doesn’t ‘want to stay away’ from Michelle, he really doesn’t. In fact he wants to be just as close to her as it’s humanly possible to be.
He sees her in the next bar they visit. She’s wearing her ultra-blond hair in a long ponytail. When she moves it seems to curl around her neck, like an animal, like a white furred fox. Most of the people from work are meeting up here. Chris and Steve the mechanic are engulfed in an ambush of clasped hands and welcomes. Jack feels insignificant: a moon orbiting around Chris. But he is conscious of some reflected glow: a couple of people say hi, or pat him on the shoulder. Michelle doesn’t notice their entrance. She and her friend Claire are talking to two slightly older men in suits. Their money stinks, from right across the room.
The drinks are starting to have an effect on Jack. A little of his nervousness is leaving him, although he still feels distinctly uneasy in the crush of so many people. When it’s his round he gets himself a pint of low alcohol lager, careful to place it so the other two both take a real one.
Even though his bladder feels bloated from the beer, his stomach knots each time he glances across the sea of heads in Michelle’s direction. She is still apparently unaware of his presence, but laughs explosively whenever the taller of the two men speaks. Jack needs the
toilet, but he’s convinced that if he lets Michelle out of his sight she will fall for this suited stranger. Maybe she already has.
Conversations ebb and flow around him. Jack feels slightly dazed, catching no more than fragments. Nodding, trying to look as if he knows what’s going on.
‘The shark’s just a shark, right,’ he hears Chris say. ‘No one calls it Jaws. It doesn’t call itself Jaws. The film is called Jaws, the shark is just a fucking shark. So how can you say “I like the bit where Jaws bites the boat”?’
Jack is aware they’re talking about films. Even so the conversation strikes his slightly woozy brain as bizarre.
Jack has seen Jaws. Actually, he didn’t think much of it. When you’ve grown up in a shark tank you aren’t afraid of big fish. He is wary of them, but he knows where to stand, where to stroke, to avoid getting bitten.
‘Apocalypse Now,’ says someone, who may be one of the other Steves.
‘Pretty Woman,’ says a small dark-eyed girl hanging off his arm. Steve the mechanic makes gagging noises.
Jack laughs, but one eye is always on Michelle. He wishes he could just go over there and say hello, start talking to her. They’ve visibly divided up now. Claire is chatting to one of the men while Michelle is with the other. The tall one, the funny one. Maybe Michelle’s just helping Claire out, getting rid of the mate. Maybe she’s no real interest except in helping her friend. If only Jack’d been able to tell her that he liked her, or give her some sign. If only he wasn’t so unnerved by everything. Jack’s bladder is bursting.
There’s a long queue for the gents. Both the urinals are blocked. Jack has to wait, alone among strangers. His trainers, Terry’s gift, swim in half an inch of communal urine. The man behind keeps putting a hand on Jack’s arm to steady himself, just sober enough to realize that if he falls in here it’s all over.
‘You really have got the luck of the devil, Dodger,’ says Chris, when Jack gets back. ‘The White Whale was just over here looking for you.’
Boy A Page 4
