Quite Honestly

by John Mortimer

  Of course, my Aunt Dot was used to people going away for a while seeing as she was married to my Uncle Arthur. He was good to me also. He was in a business way, out of anything I’ve ever attempted, robbing banks and building societies, threatening cashiers and customers with a shooter which he kept carefully cleaned and never even let me hold.

  As you can imagine, this paid Uncle Arthur very well when he was working, and we used to go out to posh restaurants and even holidays in Spain. The trouble was he went away for a long time when things started going wrong, so we stayed on in the building in the Kensal Rise area, where the rent was reasonable, and Aunt Dot went off to the West End to do bits of cleaning, and that was when I was at school and Uncle Arthur was away from home.

  It all started when I was about twelve. Something like that. This may surprise you, but I was quite a bright boy at school. For one thing I got the hang of the isosceles triangle long before anyone in the class understood it. It was at school I met Tiny McGrath. He wasn’t called Tiny because he was especially small but to distinguish him from his very much older stepbrother, known as Chippy, not because he was a sort of carpenter but because of his huge appetite, at that time, for chips. He and Tiny had the same father but different mothers.

  Chippy was always tall and in spite of what he ate he was quite skinny. He had a strange smile. I mean he only smiled with one side of his mouth. One side went up quite cheerfully while the other side stayed down as though it couldn’t see the joke.

  What I suppose he was was a natural leader; he had the gift of getting other people to work for him. He used to ask Tiny and me and some of our friends round to his place in Formosa Street and give us sweets or cigarettes, or a bit of money, to do little jobs for him. Such jobs, to be honest, usually consisted of stealing things, like pinching bottles of whisky and that from the off-licence while he kept the woman in charge amused with requests for crisps and sweets and other things she wasn’t meant to sell, and she was busy explaining that we weren’t entitled to be there anyway. All this led to us, but not Chippy, having to appear before the desk sergeant at the Paddington nick, where he told us that a life of crime would lead to misery and unhappiness. Looking back on it now, I’m still not sure that he was telling us the truth.

  We graduated from there to car radios and the opening of car doors with a wire coat hanger. It was when I got caught at this that the friendly warnings stopped and I got seriously beaten up by members of the Metropolitan Police with time on their hands. After that I went inside for the first time as a Youth Offender.

  It was after I left the Youth Offenders that Chippy and I got together seriously. We took to watching the smart houses in the Holland Park area, and noting when the milk and the papers were stopped because of the owners being away on holiday. We got skilled in the way of breaking and entering, and Chippy’s cousin Ozzy Desmond had made a study of disconnecting burglar alarms. As I say, we did well enough, and I was about to give my Aunt Dot some of life’s little luxuries when I got caught. I got four years from a judge who’d decided from the word go that I was a menace to society. Chippy, by the way, was in the getaway car near the house we got caught in, and he just drove off and left us to face the consequences.

  So, it was then, when I was in real prison, that I decided I wouldn’t get into no more trouble at all, and wouldn’t get into fights. I kept myself to myself all those years. I’d get my meals and take them back to the cell and eat them on the table, which was, let’s face it, the lid of the toilet. There was a lot of violence about at that time, from the London heavies, who the screws were afraid of. I saw one punch a screw in the chest during association, and the screw pretended not to notice it. He pretended it hadn’t happened at all, he was just too frightened to make a point of it.

  Well, you could quite often get into a fight in association, so I kept out of it. I stayed in my cell about twenty-three hours a day and I got used to it. I got so I didn’t really want to be with other people. The time near the end of my sentence, when I was allowed days out with close relatives, I went out with my Aunt Dot, who told me Uncle Arthur had gone away again for ten years. She was always nice to me, my Aunt Dot, but I couldn’t wait to get away from her. I wasn’t listening to her hardly at all. All I could think of was how nice it would be to get to my cell for a bit of peace and quiet. So I asked her to take me back to prison early.

  Of course, being alone so much, keeping out of everyone’s way, I had time to read a lot of books. Most of them were a load of rubbish, crime stories, so called, by people who didn’t know the first thing about crime.

  Then I got a prison visitor called Simon who gave me a crime book by some Russian who suffered with epileptic fits. It was about murder and, of course, I never did a murder. In fact, there’s no violence in my record whatsoever. But I got stuck into this book and I found it interesting. Then I kept on getting called away for education classes, which taught me that three and three make six, a fact I already knew, and I lost the thread of the Russian book from time to time. But I persisted with the book whenever I could get away from education or watching further rubbish on TV during those dangerous moments of association. Simon got arrested for downloading pornographic material or some such affair, so for all I know he’s somewhere inside the prison system, and I never saw him again.

  I was all right reading in my cell. I mean, I was quite all right but I wouldn’t have minded getting back into the fresh air, and by then I was able to work the system. We had ETS classes, which stood for Enhanced Thinking Studies. They asked you at the start what you were thinking and you had to say, ‘I was thinking how great it’d be to go out on Saturday night and get pissed and hit someone’s head with a hammer.’

  If you said something like that, you started from a low point and your thinking could only improve you. So the ETS person gave you a good report, which helped towards parole.

  Then I began to get visits from a woman who asked me to call her Gwenny and said she was from an outfit called SCRAP. One time she came, she told me the whole prison system was rotten and all prisons needed blowing up. This worried me and I began to wonder if this SCRAP was some sort of terrorist organization. But then she asked if I’d like SCRAP to fix up for some sort of person to look after me when I got out and help me to lead an honest life. Then I realized that SCRAP was another of those things, like ETS. It was better to go along with it if you wanted to leave the Scrubs as quick as possible.

  This got a bit delayed, however, by my probation officer, Mr Markby, who gave me an interview when the question of parole came up. He said that I was extremely intelligent (ha ha) and that I knew exactly the right answers to give (which I did) but that I didn’t seriously mean them (which perhaps I didn’t) so I should stay inside because I couldn’t be trusted. Which was why I didn’t get parole. It just shows that I wasn’t as good at working the system as I thought I was.

  Anyway, this incident made me very suspicious of probation officers and all suchlike who say they’re only trying to help you and support you, when what they’re really after is to keep you inside for quite a bit longer. All the same I felt relieved, because, quite honestly, I wasn’t ready to face the outside at that particular moment in time and I had to finish the Russian book, which I was able to do before my eventual release.

  One week before I got out, I got a visit from the chaplain, who said that SCRAP had found a praeceptor, whatever that might mean, Lucinda Purefoy. She was an excellent choice seeing that her father was a well-known bishop. I smiled at him, of course, and seemed to agree but I’d already decided, once I got out, not to have much more to do with probation officers and SCRAP women who could no doubt turn the way Mr Markby did. Being out of prison means that you’re free, doesn’t it? At least that’s the way I looked at it at the time.

  They were a bit slow at the office that morning. They gave me the clothes back I was wearing when I got arrested. The sweater I had was all moth-eaten but they said they could do nothing about it. I got £46.75 and
a travel warrant and then they opened the gate and I was out in the rain.

  I hadn’t taken more than a couple of gulps of fresh air when this girl came towards me, all smiling. She was wearing black trousers, a long overcoat and a white shirt. It looked as if she’d dressed up for the occasion. Now I’m not sure why that annoyed me so much.

  Which is where this story begins.

  3

  He had dark curly hair and what I think they call ‘prison pallor’. What he didn’t have was a cheerful grin. Quite honestly, when he caught sight of me he looked distinctly uncheerful. All the same I managed a big smile as I moved towards him. Probably I was breaking Mr Markby’s number one rule and looking too friendly. But what the hell, I had to form some sort of relationship, even if he was going to be my pupil.

  ‘Hi there!’ I said. ‘You must be Terry Keegan.’

  He stood looking at me in silence. To be truthful, he seemed astonished, as though he’d been unexpectedly approached by some sort of lunatic. Eventually, he spoke.

  ‘What if my name’s Terry Keegan? What do you want to make out of it, man?’ He spoke in a low gruff voice which came as an unpleasant surprise in the cheerful chap I’d been instructed to meet.

  ‘I don’t want to make anything of it. And I’m not a man, actually.’ I thought this was quite a funny thing to say, all things considered. Anyway I laughed, but Terry certainly didn’t. ‘I’m sure SCRAP have warned you about me, haven’t they? I’m your praeceptor. Probably you don’t know what that means.’

  ‘You needn’t bother to tell me.’

  ‘It means I’m your guide and philosopher.’ In deference to Mr Markby, I failed to say friend. ‘I’m here to help you find a job, a place to live and that sort of thing. Support you in any way I can. And I’m here to see you don’t ever go back inside that place again.’

  The going-to-work traffic had grown louder and heavier rain was splattering the pavement. I had to raise my voice to be heard as I said the last sentence very loudly, so a small party of girls on their way to school turned their heads to stare curiously at Terry. This caused him to look even more crossly at me.

  ‘I don’t need no help,’ he growled, ‘so fuck off, will you?’

  Well, I had to look on the bright side. At least he’d stopped calling me ‘man’.

  ‘My name’s Lucinda Purefoy,’ I told him, ‘but that’s a bit of a mouthful, so it’s perfectly all right if you call me Lucy.’

  ‘I don’t need to call you anything. In fact I don’t need you, full stop. So I’m fucking off, thank you very much.’

  ‘Don’t lose your temper with your client. Never give him that particular satisfaction.’ I was finding Mr Markby’s instructions particularly hard to follow. All I could think of doing was to look my client full in the eyes and say very deliberately, ‘Well then, fuck you!’

  The effect of this was surprising. First Terry looked at me and seemed deeply shocked and even silenced. Had I said that in front of my father, the tolerant bishop, he wouldn’t have batted a single eyelid. Terry Keegan, with a string of convictions as long as your arm, was far more easily shocked. In fact he said, ‘What do you mean?’ which seemed to me to be a completely pointless question.

  ‘I mean I’ve been training for a month listening to dull lectures. I’ve postponed a job with an almost decent salary in an advertising agency. I’m prepared to spend time away from my boyfriend, Tom, who’s good-looking, never swears at me, has a perfectly clean record and is going to end up with an important job in television. And I’ve done all that to help you.’

  ‘I don’t need no help!’ He was still angry.

  ‘Oh yes, you do. Don’t you understand? Eighty-five per cent of criminals reoffend within two years of their release from prison. If I take my eye off you you’ll be back pinching laptops on garage forecourts or whatever you used to do.’

  ‘Breaking and entering premises by night.’ It seemed I had insulted him by talking about the laptops and he had a more important crime to boast about.

  ‘All right then. Breaking and entering. Whatever. Now tell me what you want to do that’s free and legal and has nothing to do with sex and we’ll do it.’

  He stood there, looking at me in silent thought - I’m sure it wasn’t silent prayer - and then he said, rather improbably, ‘Burger King.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve had Scrubs food for nearly three years. I want to go to Burger King.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, and I waved, I’m afraid rather desperately, at a passing taxi. Talk about extravagance. I’d already broken practically every rule that Mr Markby had ever given us.

  In the Burger King, Terry’s behaviour improved slightly, which wasn’t hard considering it was starting from such a remarkably low level. I bought him a Whopper burger with fries and onion rings and a big milky coffee with five spoonfuls of sugar. After he’d finished that, he ordered another Whopper and I’m sorry, Mr Markby, but I paid for all this because I couldn’t stand any further argument. I know it was weak of me.

  As he finished the second Whopper I thought, poor sod, he’ll become disgustingly fat and lose any attractiveness he might have to women. I wondered if I should warn him of this, but then decided that I couldn’t be bothered. Instead I went on to more important business.

  ‘I have to make sure you’ve got a mobile phone.’

  ‘You want to give me a few minutes to pinch one?’ He gave me his first grin, but I decided it was high time to become strict and stand no more nonsense.

  ‘Of course not. I’ve bought you one to save you getting into trouble.’

  I gave him the phone I had paid for, although my instructions from Mr Markby were simply ‘to make sure the client had a mobile’. It might have been very thick of me, but I couldn’t think of any way I could be sure of that without buying the thing.

  ‘Does it take photographs?’ Terry was turning over the little machine and looking at it critically.

  ‘No, it doesn’t take photographs. And you’ve got to ring me on that every morning and at six o’clock every evening so I know how you’re getting on. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, man,’ he gave me a sort of mock salute, ‘if that’s your orders.’

  ‘Never mind about my orders. Now, your probation officer tells me he’s got you a place in a hostel.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t got you a place?’

  ‘No, I’m not going to no hostel.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m free now, aren’t I? I can live my own life. I don’t have to spend another night in no sort of prison place Mr Markby’s sent me to. Forget it, man.’

  The worst of it was that I could see his point. That’s my greatest weakness, being able to see other people’s points.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘where do you want to go?’

  ‘My Aunt Dot’s.’

  ‘Where’s your Aunt Dot live?’

  ‘Buildings up the end of Ladbroke Grove. Kensal Rise area. She’s always been pretty good to me, my Aunt Dot.’

  I looked at him. He seemed to mean what he said. Once again I disobeyed instructions. ‘OK then. But call me on your phone as soon as you settle in. I’ll try and smooth it out with Mr Markby.’

  Terry, it seemed, thought it over, wiped his mouth on the napkin provided and stood up. ‘I’ll be getting along then.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll say “thank you”.’

  ‘Thank you for what?’

  ‘Taxi here, two Whoppers with fries and onions, and letting you choose your accommodation.’

  ‘I never asked you to do any of that,’ he said, and he sounded serious. ‘It was you did all the asking.’

  4

  ‘You must be Terry Keegan.’

  That’s what she said to me. Right out. The first thing. All smiles she was as she crossed Du Cane Road to get to me just when I heard the small door in the gate shut behind me. Well, she was right. I had to be Terry Keegan, and I didn’t wa
nt her or anything about her.

  You know what I felt when she came up to me? Like I was being arrested all over again.

  All right. I’d done nearly three years. I’d had my parole delayed by one of her lot, Mr Markby, the probation officer. I’d kept my head down and read Crime and Punishment. I’d done my best to say the right things to the right people all that time. Now all I wanted was to be free of the whole lot of them.

  I wanted to breathe a bit of fresh, free air that didn’t smell of toilets and disinfectant and stale food and men’s bodies. I wanted to decide what I was going to do for a change and not leave it to other people. I wanted to be shot of all those concerned-looking individuals who thought they knew more about Terry Keegan than Terry Keegan knew about himself.

  And there was one of them waiting for me, on the other side of Du Cane Road, the very moment I got out.

  I’d worked out a way of dealing with her, of course. I remember how Chippy McGrath used to put off girls he thought were getting too friendly, or that he wanted to get rid of. He used the expression ‘Fuck you, man’ as almost his only way of communication with such people, and the result was that they didn’t hang about near him for very long.

  So when this one came on to me with all that bright ‘let’s be friends’ kind of chatter, I gave her the full McGrath, delivered with his special sort of grunt.

  What worried me was that it didn’t seem to have any effect on her whatever. Talk about persistent! What worried me even more was that she swore back at me. I don’t like to hear a woman swear. It reminds me of my mum and seems to go against the laws of nature, like women getting drunk. My Aunt Dot wouldn’t do either of those things and I didn’t see why this girl, who took it on herself to improve me, had to swear like Chippy McGrath.

  Well, I knew we’d never get on with each other after that event. But there was one thing she could do for me. I still felt the old prison hunger for a decent bit of food that could fill you right up, and I didn’t want to break into my £46.75. Not that soon anyway. So I expressed my need for a Whopper with fries and onions. I thought that might work with her. She could help a poor, hungry criminal without me ever having to see her again.