The Blueprint

The Blueprint Page 4

by Marcus Bryan

SCENE XI

  ON THE LAM

  At first Charlie tried to refuse my help in getting home, but it wasn’t long before the effects of a probable concussion and twelve solid hours of alcohol abuse got the better of him and he staggered into my arms. A frankly embarrassingly long time later, I’m finally slouching on our doorstep with him draped over one shoulder, fumbling for the keys with my spare hand. After much scraping against the lock I eventually get the key into the hole, the door open, and Charlie deposited onto the sofa.

  ‘I’ll have a whiskey,’ he slurs as I head to the kitchen.

  ‘As long as you don’t throw it anywhere,’ I whisper back. Hoping that there’s some orange juice left in there for me, I open the fridge. It’s all champagne. Cheap, Tesco-brand champagne, but what Charlie neglected in quality he made up for in quantity. There’s not a single inch of shelf-space left. I would even go as far as to suspect that he threw out any food we had in there, to make room for more booze. This suspicion is compounded by the only non-alcoholic item in the fridge, a post-it note stuck to the inside of the door, which says:

  Dear Charlie,

  What the actual fuck?

  Johnny

  I go to the cupboard, hoping to find some squash, but the cupboard is full of whiskey. It’s not as jam-packed as the fridge, but – despite my lack of education in the language of liquor – I can tell that it’s here, and not on the contents of the fridge, that Charlie really splurged. Two of the eight bottles are near-enough empty. I pick up the unopened one with the Japanese label, peel the foil off the neck, and pull out the cork. Feeling vaguely classy, I waft the bottle under my nose. It wrinkles reflexively, so with a gleeful sense of abandon I put it to my lips and throw my head backwards. I immediately come to regret this decision. Through coughs, splutters, dry heaves and finally vomit, I ask the plughole:

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with rich people?!’

  Deciding then and there that I don’t want Charlie polishing off a third bottle of this repugnant shit, I pour the tiniest sliver into a glass, for flavour, and top it off from the tap. I pour myself a glass of pure, god-fearing tap water.

  As I turn the living room light on, it becomes clear exactly how much damage Charlie absorbed down that alleyway. His left eyelid is a deep purple and sags halfway down his cheek; the right half of his face is a mess of grazes and cuts, probably from where it scraped against the pavement each time they kicked him; his bottom lip is near-enough torn in two, and there are dark scabs clogging-up either nostril. I examine my own face in the window. By comparison, I don’t look half bad.

  ‘What a pair we make,’ I say, plonking the ‘whiskey’ down on the table in front of him. I sit down and take a sip of my water. I can’t quite work out if I’ve got our drinks the wrong way round or whether the aftertaste of the slug of whiskey is coming back to haunt me. Charlie knocks back half his glass, surveys the remaining liquid for a moment, then says:

  ‘You know, I think I prefer cheap vodka to this stuff.’

  I laugh. He doesn’t know how right he is. I stretch my neck out until it clicks and slide down into the armchair and play with Liz’ mobile, flipping it open and closed in my pocket, and a realisation suddenly strikes me.

  ‘Have you seen my phone?’ I ask Charlie. ‘I haven’t seen it in the last couple of days.’ He shakes his head. ‘Can you ring it for me?’

  ‘What did your last servant die of?’ he asks. His grin pulls the sides of his split lip open, and a trickle of blood slips down his chin. He doesn’t appear to notice. The grin makes me uneasy.

  ‘Some unfunny cunt called; he wants his joke back.’ I try to deliver this line with a wry smile, but I can’t quite manage to paint over the grimace that his frenzied glare and blood-tinged teeth provoke. ‘Seriously, though, I need to find it. I need to tell my mum I’ve added a lawyer to my Christmas list.’

  ‘Maybe I should’ve put you on my Find my iPhone, too,’ he remarks, digging the hand that isn’t holding his whiskey into his jeans.

  ‘It’ll be around here somewhere,’ I reply, dismissively. He throws over his phone; it sails through my outstretched hands and bounces off the arm of the chair, into my lap. As I pick it up and press the home button, I see that Charlie’s screensaver is a photo of the back of Phoebe’s head. ‘Is that the best picture you have of her?’ I ask.

  ‘She was never fond of photographs,’ he explains. I shrug.

  ‘Figures. What’s your PIN?’

  ‘Don’t have one. As was made so abundantly clear this evening, I don’t have a girlfriend, which means that, unlike you, I don’t have anyone to hide anything from.’

  ‘Except the police,’ I mutter back, barely audibly, fiddling with the phone as I do so. ‘Fuck. Straight to voicemail.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Charlie replies. ‘At least you can afford another one, now.’

  I throw the phone back at him, slump further down in the chair and stretch out my spine.

  ‘Look at the state of us. What a fucking pair,’ I say, being unable and even less inclined, by now, to muster up any original conversation. He smiles at me.

  ‘You shouldn’t have stepped-in, you know.’

  ‘What? I wasn’t going to let them do that to you.’

  Charlie stares airily at the ceiling.

  ‘Because Liz was there?’ I press, confused. ‘I think that bridge was well and truly burnt by the time they started going after you.’

  ‘Not because of Liz. You just should’ve let them finish the job.’

  I sigh.

  ‘Just because you’ve got a death-wish, mate, doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand there and watch it come true.’

  ‘You and your gun can’t protect me for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Maybe not, but-’ I start, but he interrupts.

  ‘Did I ever tell you I had a sister?’ he asks. The sudden change of subject takes me aback.

  ‘What’s with all the secret family members crawling out of the woodwork today?’ I wonder out-loud, but Charlie’s already begun to narrate his flashback.

  ‘She was fucking cool, Penny,’ he says. ‘Or, at least, she was whatever passed for cool in 2009. I always thought she was, anyway. I mean, there’s not much about me to be proud of, but I’d say I’m pretty good at shit-talking, aren’t I?’

  I’m forced to agree.

  ‘I got that from her. Gave no quarter, took no quarter. There was no fucker in high-school, and certainly not in fuckin’ university, who could say anything that will make me feel bad about myself, because I know it all already, and I’m ready with a fucking comeback. Having someone like Penny in your life; it feels like a curse when you’re twelve, but it’s not, it’s a blessing.’

  He puts the empty glass to his lips. Realising its emptiness, he holds it in front of his eyes for a couple of seconds and places it back down onto the table. With nothing left to imbibe, he leans back on the sofa, raises his busted face to the ceiling and takes another deep breath.

  ‘I’m a junky scumbag?’ he asks no-one in particular. ‘If you were forced to hang out with you, you’d need to be fucked-up, too. I’m a sleazy whore? At least I don’t find my own company so fucking dull that I have to stretch out every one night stand I have over two years.’

  His eyes are more focused than I’ve seen them since he started drinking yesterday.

  ‘You know, I used to think that I didn’t care what people thought of me because one day I was going to write a pop song so fucking good that nothing else I ever did in my life would matter, not in the long run. It turns out I don’t need it; I never gave a shit in the first place. I got that from Penny. I thought she was the same way.

  ‘I mean, I saw her friends taking shots at her every now and then, but I thought nothing of it. I mean, one time when our Nan was babysitting she tied me to my bed, and, my Nan being half-deaf, I was left up there for three hours calling for help. Don’t get mad, I thought, get even. And I did. You’d think that, after the shit we did to each other...’r />
  He takes a third deep breath.

  ‘I feel guilty for the stuff I did to her. The dumb, tit-for-tat shit, like swapping the sugar for the salt so she’d put it in her porridge.’

  ‘The salt-for-sugar gag never did anything worse than prove how fucking dreary you are when it comes to practical jokes,’ I assure him. The bleak, clawing desperation in his eyes tells me that the witticism hasn’t landed.

  ‘Can you get me another whiskey?’ he asks.

  ‘Maybe later,’ I reply. ‘So what happened to Penny?’

  Charlie sighs, from the tar-flooded bottoms of his lungs.

  ‘I don’t know, man. First thing any of us noticed was this time she came back from a night out with blood on her jeans. My dad spotted it and made her show him her leg, right in front of all of us. She was about sixteen; I must’ve been about twelve, thirteen, I guess. She had this gash on her leg, only about an inch long, but it was the way the skin had split apart that was worrying, y’know? Like a canoe. Showed that whoever did it really wanted to inflict some damage.

  ‘For the next few days I kept overhearing my parents trying to work out who’d done it to her: Angela; Pamela; Sandra; Rita; the only one they never accused was Penny herself. It wasn’t long until it became obvious who was doing it, though.

  ‘It was like my parents opened the box, that night. After that, the secret was out, so I guess she didn’t have to hold back anymore. It started out being every month my parents would find a new scar, then every week, then every fucking day. There was even this one time where she poured boiling water over herself; she got away from it without needing a skin graft, but the dry pus on the bandage stank the house up for weeks. So my mum and dad did what any parents would do; they stopped her going out, except to school, and when it turned out that there was a three-month waiting list to get counselling on the NHS, they spent all the money they didn’t have on getting her in with someone private. They just wanted her fixed, y’know? And when she didn’t get fixed even I could tell they were frustrated, maybe even angry, with her, so I’m fucking certain that she felt it.’ Suddenly he snarls, as though someone has just contradicted him. ‘And when she didn’t get better, what, were they supposed to just set her loose, knowing that she’d come home with more stubbed-out fags on her arms, and a stomach full of painkillers? And what was she supposed to do with that guilt; knowing that every bad thing she thought about herself only served to make the people she loved feel like failures? Both sides just got worse. Mum and Dad stopped her leaving the house for anything other than college or counselling, and told her teachers to keep an eye on her. Then, for her part, Penny did what any teenage rebel would do when Big Brother’s got them under his thumb; she just got smarter about it. Self-harm turned to starvation. For a while, mum and dad thought she was making progress.’

  Charlie plucks a cigarette out of the pack with his teeth, wearing a pensive expression.

  ‘Have you got a condom on you?’ I ask him.

  ‘Um, yeah, sure,’ he replies, the pensive expression giving way to a quizzical one. He fumbles around in his back pocket, wrenches out his wallet and removes a square, foil parcel from it. He hands it to me. I pull it open with my teeth and spit the foil out onto the coffee table. With a smirk, I say:

  ‘They’re going to wonder what we’ve been up to down here.’

  For the second time, my joke doesn’t land. I roll my eyes and, as Charlie is lighting his cigarette, peel the condom over the fire alarm. Through a cloud of smoke and vapour, he continues his tale. I jump down off the coffee table and flop back into my seat.

  ‘I think the anorexia was always there, you know, but she was able to keep a lid on it until the point where Mum and Dad had her under watch. Looking back, it’s obvious to see that she didn’t like her body; she’d always brush her teeth in front of the mirror, but her eyes would never be looking at her face; she would always save her dinner money at school instead of having lunch; she claimed she didn’t have a sweet-tooth, but every now and then a whole pack of biscuits would mysteriously go missing from the cupboard, then she’d mysteriously start running the shower at three in the afternoon. Until the self-harm came out, though, I guess it was under control. Maybe the self-harming and the not eating kind-of balanced each other out. Maybe I should’ve worked that out earlier. Maybe that could’ve saved her.

  ‘I caught her throwing up a few times, when my parents went out to the shop or somewhere like that. She made me promise not to tell them about it, so I didn’t. I couldn’t betray her like that, but I had to do something, so I – being a dumb fourteen-year-old – told her I thought she was cool.’

  He laughs.

  ‘That’s literally all I had to offer: “Hey, so I know you’re absolutely dead-set on slowly killing yourself, but your little brother thinks you’re cool.”’

  He pulls the cigarette out of his mouth to make room for the laughter, which has now become slightly manic. It bursts out in billows of fag-smoke and tar.

  ‘Not much, but I kept trying it. Even with all the shit we pulled on each other, even with all the arguments, I always felt as though me and Penny could talk about things. Even if we had to add “you cunt” to the end of every sentence - you know, to keep up appearances. Eventually, though, she just took to telling me to fuck off whenever I came near her room. It’s kind-of ironic, actually; right around the time I started masturbating was the most impotent I’ve ever felt in my life.’ He looks away from the ceiling and smirks at me. ‘Well, up until this week, anyway.’

  The smirk finally dies. He leans forward, and runs his hands through his hair.

  ‘She died in the summer holiday before she was supposed to go to university. Even with all the shit she was going through, she still got two A’s and a B at A-level,’ he utters, as though reporting the football scores. He doesn’t cry, but his fists clench at his scalp and he pulls his hair forward.

  ‘Charlie?’ I ask. ‘Do you want that whiskey now?’

  Charlie nods. After I get it, I put a shitty movie on, though I make sure it’s not one with any gunfire in it. We don’t converse any further. I can’t work out quite when it is that I fall asleep, and the hazy image of the television screen turns into a hazy dream of being told by Charlie to kill a girl who is, by turns, Liz and Phoebe. As opposed to yesterday, it’s a relief to be woken up by the phone in my back pocket vibrating. As I open my eyes, I find myself slumped over the arm of the chair. My hand goes searching for the pocket of my jeans, which by this point are somewhere around the back of my knees, and pulls out Liz’ phone. She’s got a new text from Sophia, one of those people I’ve never heard of who she mentioned going travelling with. I key in her password, and open the message:

  Peter, I don’t know what it is you’ve done, and I don’t want to know. Never contact me again.

  I could’ve worked that much out for myself. Whether it’s because I’m still a bit pissed from last night or because I’m beyond the point of giving a shit, I can’t resist the urge to send a response:

  ‘For the record, I fucking like statistics and data management,’ I type. I press ‘send’, then throw the phone in the general direction of the corridor. It clatters against the bannister and I glance upwards to check that this sudden noise hasn’t woken Charlie, but the glance turns into a stare when I see that he’s not only awake, but that he’s pointing a revolver at me. Stupidly, my hand scrabbles around in the side of my coat, searching for my gun as though it’s not the one in his hands.

  ‘There were two bullets left in this when we were up on the moor,’ he says. ‘There’s one in it, now. Forgive me for prying, but where did the other one go?’

  My hand stops scrabbling. I briefly debate pleading ignorance.

  ‘You know where it went, Charlie,’ I say, eventually.

  His eyes hint at the answer his lips and mind don’t want to provide. I nod.

  Charlie cocks the revolver.

  When we got back to the house the other morning, knackered, we
t and mud-covered, Charlie and Freddy went straight to their rooms and passed out. I didn’t. Instead, I put on the gloves, and hoody which I’d told the other two I’d put into the plastic crate along with theirs, checked the waistband of my jeans for the gun which I told them I’d buried along with theirs, clambered out of my bedroom window and dropped back down onto the street. I stacked the landing, but my body had been so battered in the preceding hours that the extra pain in my knees didn’t even cause me to yelp. After lurching back to my feet, I made my way towards Byker, trying to infer the time from the burgeoning light, since I had neither a watch nor a phone anymore.

  The lack of a phone was particularly irritating, since I had no idea how to get to Sid’s flat. With the sun threatening to poke its head over the horizon, and without Google Maps to lead my way, I was on the business end of a tantrum by the time I’d completed my third lap of Byker. Then, all of a sudden, the view of a block of flats in the distance aligned itself with a snapshot filed away somewhere in my memory, and the frustration turned to fear. Sid was somewhere up there.

  I passed someone on the stairs. I turned my head to the side, but he seemed too pissed-off that he had to get up for work at such an hour to be concerned about memorising my face. When I reached the third floor I pulled back my hood and rapped thrice on Sid’s door. It took a conspicuously short time for him to open it, almost as though he was expecting company.

  ‘You coming in?’ he asked.

  ‘Seeing as I’ve walked all this way, I guess it would be rude not to,’ I replied, pushing past him. By the time I’d finished my response I was already slouched on his sofa. It had been such a long time since I’d slept that I could’ve fallen asleep then and there. I also could’ve sworn that there was a black cat wandering around in his kitchen, but when I screwed-up my eyes it disappeared again.

  ‘So, what can I do for you?’ Sid asked. He remained standing, leaning against the kitchen cupboards and the counter. He was being oddly polite, as if he knew what was coming. Maybe I was just twitchy from the lack of sleep, maybe I just didn’t want to take any chances, but by the time I’d gotten halfway through this train of thought I’d already pulled the gun on him. Weirdly enough, Sid smiled.

  ‘So, did Charlie put you up to this?’ he asked.

  ‘You did this to yourself, Sid,’ I replied.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You brought a phone. I told you not to bring a phone.’

  ‘Then it’s a good thing you didn’t let me dial out,’ he replied. ‘So what’s the deal? Tell you who I was going to call or I get my head blown off?’

  I cocked the gun, even though I knew it doesn’t serve any real function.

  ‘Just the second part.’

  The self-satisfied smirk fell off of Sid’s face. For a moment, the only sounds I could hear were the tap, dripping, like a heartbeat, in the sink, and the music playing softly in his bedroom.

  ‘What?’ he said, finally.

  I leaned forward.

  ‘The fact that you brought the phone is what matters.’ I screwed my face up again, trying to keep a handle on what I was saying. The ends of each sentence, like little wisps of smoke, kept trying to flit through my tired fingers. ‘Who gives a fuck if you made a call? You didn’t have to make a call. For something bad to happen, I mean. If you had your phone on you, and your phone had signal, it was pinging your location straight back to them. To your network provider. They know you were there when the robbery was happening, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure out you weren’t one of the hostages. The police. When they pull the records.’

  Sid looked at me with his eyebrows bent.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I think I read it somewhere.’

  ‘And you’re going to murder me over, “I think I read it somewhere”?’ he exclaimed. ‘What if you’re wrong?’

  ‘Being wrong in the other direction costs me a lot more,’ I replied.

  ‘So murder’s no big deal, but the possibility of the police tracking me down, and of me - the only one of us who isn’t a middle-class, student pussy, by the way - being the one to spill everything to them, is a risk you can’t afford to take? What are you, a fucking psychopath?’

  ‘You were about to phone someone,’ I told him, ‘which suggests that you went into the job with a plan B in mind. And forgive me for not being naïve, but I can’t imagine that your plan involved getting the rest of us out with you. And, as you say, the rest of us student pussies would probably spill your name to the police, unless you knew someone who could take care of us first.’ I put my hand on my chin, feigning contemplation. ‘Hmmm, who do you know who would murder someone for a few hundred pounds?’

  Again, the dripping tap and the music provided a soundtrack to our shared silence.

  ‘Well?’ I demanded, getting more emotional than I’d planned to. ‘Am I right?’ I couldn’t quite recall what it was that I thought I was right about.

  Eventually, a sneer began to surface on Sid’s face. He looked dead into my eyes with the damning superiority of hatred, and replied:

  ‘Don’t play this like I struck first. If you want to kill me, at least be a fucking man abou-’

  Looking back, I can’t remember whether his hand twitched, or whether I just wanted it to. Either way, I suppose, it doesn’t matter now. I pulled the trigger. The back of his head exploded in a fountain of blood and brains. His expression didn’t change, exactly, but it froze in its place. Propped up by the kitchen counter, for a moment he almost looked like he was still standing up. Were it not for the small hole in his forehead, I might’ve wondered whether I’d missed. He stared at me for a moment with those horrible, bulbous, astounded eyes, then he slumped to the side, bounced against the kitchen counter and fell to the floor. His cheek hit the lino with an understated slap.

  The song continued to waft in from Sid’s bedroom. I didn’t recognise the melody from anywhere, and after a few moments it dawned on me that Sid himself was the one singing. It was, admittedly, a better tune than any of the many that Charlie has played me over the years. Catchy, but with a melancholic edge. Maybe not good enough to render everything else he ever did irrelevant, but enough, perhaps, to suggest that he could’ve got there, one day. I looked down at the corpse, and the pool of blood seeping outwards around his open skull. I didn’t even have the common courtesy to vomit, or scream. Maybe Sid was right, I thought. Maybe I am a psychopath. Maybe I really did want to kill him all along, just to see if I could. Maybe it’s better to hate yourself for being evil than for being weak.

  At a certain point, the echoes of the gunshot began to bleed into the music, and I realised that if I didn’t leave now, I’d get caught. The angel on one shoulder screamed in support of the latter. The devil on the other screamed back. I strode past Sid’s corpse, rolled the balaclava back down and clambered onto the kitchen counter. As I looked down at the grass, three stories below, the angel and devil broke off their argument and screamed out in unison not to jump. I ignored them.

  An amount of time I neither knew nor cared to know later, my lungs and teeth were burning, and I’d adopted a weird hybrid of skipping and sprinting because my left leg had taken the brunt of the fall, and this time the fall was heavy enough that no amount of exhaustion or adrenaline could mask the pain. I was so tired that I couldn’t help hallucinating blue flashing lights around every street corner. It doesn’t matter, I kept thinking, just get home, and you can sleep this all off.

  I could tell that I’d reached Jesmond because all of the wheelie-bins were out in the street. It was rubbish day in Jesmond. The sun was almost up, so I guessed I didn’t have much time until the bin-men finished clearing out the whole place and went home. After making sure that there were no CCTV cameras or windows with the curtains undrawn, I went to a bin, heaved off the blood-stained hoody and gloves, and threw them inside. Within half an hour, it will be in the back of garbage truck. Within two it will be at the tip, never to be seen of again.


  So why didn’t I put the gun in there with it?

  That’s the question I’m asking myself, as I stare down the barrel of the gun I should’ve thrown away twenty-four hours ago. But it’s too late for that.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, putting my hands up. ‘I killed him. I’m sorry, Charlie.’

  ‘What are you apologising to me for?’ Charlie replies.

  To my surprise, he laughs. Well, it would’ve been a surprise if it was anyone other than Charlie. He’s the type with whom nothing is a surprise.

  ‘So, are you going to kill me?’ I ask him.

  He laughs, again.

  ‘Did I not tell you last night that I don’t give a shit about anything?’ he replies. ‘We’re all impotent, Sundance.’ The laugh settles down into a smirk. ‘Six chambers, one bullet. There’s no God up there to reward or punish us, and no judge or jury down here whose opinion is worth caring about, so what’s say we give blind chance a go?’

  ‘Charlie…’ I begin, but he interrupts me.

  ‘You don’t have a choice in this, mate; just like Sid didn’t.’

  He takes a drink from his glass, which I notice is once again full of whiskey. A pissed-up nihilist with a gun in his hand. That’s all I need.

  ‘Fine, Charlie. Do it,’ I tell him.

  ‘As you wish,’ he replies.

  A bead of sweat runs down my cheek.

  Click.

  And with that, my life is spared. No fanfare, just a click. Charlie points the gun at his own head. It’s funny; even though I believe him when he says he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, the colour still drains from his face and his finger shivers on the trigger. Even against the mind, the dumb body will scrabble to the corner and cower in the face of death.

  ‘Don’t do it, Charlie,’ I tell him. ‘You haven’t done anything.’

  He doesn’t reply; he just fixes me with a thick, determined stare. The wrinkles in his forehead grow deeper and deeper until they force his eyes to close, and his jaw gets tighter and tighter until his lips peel back to the gums.

  Click.

  Simultaneously we exhale. I half-smile at him, in relief, but he looks at me with something approaching anti-climax in his eyes. The fear which put such crevasses in his expression turns into anger; the anger escalates; the knuckles wrapped around the gun turn whiter…

  Jason Statham appears on the TV screen, and something in Charlie seems to snap. He points the gun at the television and pulls the trigger. Click. The anger escalates further. Click. The anger escalates further.

  BOOM.

  Jason Statham - and the television containing him - explodes in a hail of sparks and that now-familiar lightning clap. The rush of sweat out of my armpits seems instantaneous. The muscles controlling my jaw go slack, and my mouth falls open. Three things occur in what I assume to be a short space of time, though I can’t tell in what order they happen: I notice that Charlie’s attention is focused on neither me, nor the television, but rather a spot exactly in the middle of me and it; a shard of glass from the television screen nicks a slight but stinging cut just beneath my eyelid, and a female voice lets out a scream. My nicked eye closes, but the open eye follows Charlie’s line of sight, out of the window. After leaning forward slightly, I catch a glimpse of the owner of the scream. And her friend. I quickly snap my head back, hoping they were too fixated on Charlie and the revolver to notice my face pop quickly in and out of frame. My body stiffens as the pair of witnesses scuttle off down the street, and their screams grow more and more distant. I can feel the searing clarity and purpose take hold of me, once more. I stand up, and the jeans fall down from my knees to my ankles.

  ‘We need to go,’ I tell Charlie. ‘Now!’

  No,’ he replies.

  ‘Charlie, the police will be here any fucking minute!’ I exclaim. ‘We need to get the fuck out of here!’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he reiterates.

  ‘This is your fucking freedom!’ I exclaim, again. ‘It’s years, decades, in prison we’re facing, here!’

  ‘It’s my choice to make,’ he says, firmly but quietly. For the first time in a long time, he appears stone-cold sober, and I know that there’s no point in further argument.

  ‘I need the gun,’ I say instead. He tosses it to me with the glaze of drunkenness back in his eyes. I fumblingly catch it and tuck it into the waistband of my jeans as I pull them back up. One last time, I look my best friend up and down as he’s lying sprawled on the couch, pissed.

  ‘Bye, Charlie.’

  ‘Bye, Peter.’

  If my life was a movie, this is the part where we’d jump-cut to a low-shot of me sprinting down the street and something heavy on the drums and bass guitar would erupt in the background. In reality, the only sound I can hear is my brain screaming ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

  My last-pick-in-PE fitness levels quickly bottom-out and I stagger into an alleyway and collapse down beside a dumpster, pulling some rubbish bags around me in a half-arsed attempt to prevent detection, to plan my next move. I try to view things at a distance, as a mathematical puzzle, rather than the ugly mess it actually is. My goal is to get out of the reach of the law; my parameter is that no-one can see me on the way – or, more accurately, that no-one can recognise me. The cover of darkness will make that recognition much easier to avoid, and until then it would be prudent not to move out in the open. But, then again, staying put until darkness falls means somehow staying out of sight for another five or six hours.

  I look up at the dumpster with a grimace. As if waiting for its cue, the stench of garbage emanating from it rushes up my nose. Sometimes lucky coincidences can be such a pain in the arse.

  I spent the summer before my first year at university working for a catering company. Not being the owner of a particularly infectious or charming personality, I found myself stuck in back-of-house, washing up, by myself. I hated it. Not because I hated being alone – I’d rather daydream whilst scrubbing plates than attempt to make chitchat whilst serving them up – but because the place seemed to have such a strange effect on the flow of time. I’d be in at 10AM and immediately get to work scrubbing at the yolk-stained china left over from breakfast. To pass the time, I played through the improved version of the Star Wars prequels I’d spent all summer writing in my head. I’d run it over, scene-by-scene, occasionally tracking back to edit a shot or a piece of dialogue, telling myself I’d reward myself with a peek at clock on my phone when I got to the end credits of Episode I. But then, when the John Williams came in, I’d think: ‘No; I’ll hold off until the end of the second movie.’ By that time, I figured I’d be able to toddle off for lunch, sit on the grass on my own and maybe Facebook-stalk whatever girl I happened to be in love with at the time. I’d redo scenes again and again and again, as much to pad out the running time of my daydream as from some Kubrickesque sense of perfectionism. Even when I was sure I’d accidentally worked through my lunch-break I waited until the last tea-boy’s credit rolled before I allowed myself my well-earned peek. Finally, with a flourish of self-satisfaction, I’d whip out my phone, and discover that it was ten-thirty-five.

  So why do I tell you this tedious anecdote? Because lying in a dumpster in the dark, hidden under bags of weeks’ old food and feeling cold garbage juice seeping into my clothes, with the only moments of excitement coming when the lid suddenly opens and I experience a trill of terror that the person opening it might spot the edge of my trainer poking out from my putrid duvet, followed by an oomph! of pain as yet another sack of rubbish lands heavily on top of me, is a lot like the experience of working on the pot-wash that summer. The six or seven hours until sundown unravel themselves into weeks. I lie there, contemplating phoning Freddy to warn him that the police would be coming for him, then remember that I don’t have my phone. I try to count up what evidence was left in the house, and how it could be used against me in court. I squeeze an arm up through the filth and lift the lid of the dumpster, just a crack. Still light. I wonder how t
o get out of her majesty’s reach with no money and no passport, and decide that I’ll have to go and dig up the stashed takings from the moor, because - fuck it - it’s each man for himself, now. I wonder how the fuck my life has come to this. I squeeze an arm up through the filth and lift the lid of the dumpster, just a crack. Still light. For what seems like hours, I think about how my fucking life has come to this. I lift the lid. It’s still light. Then I fantasise about lying with Liz on my sofa, watching a movie. Then an image of the look on Sid’s face when he realised I’d murdered him flashes in front of my eyes, like a crackle of lightning. I slam them shut, but the gory spectacle remains projected onto the back of my eyelids.

  The deeper I bury myself into the garbage bags, the more insane I turn, and the more looped and knotted time becomes. Memories begin to transform into presents. Images of Sid against closed eyes transform into the unshakeable sensation of his presence, lying twisted up in all the refuse beside me. The wafting scent of rotting food becomes his last, lukewarm, stinking breaths, seeping out of his now-quiet lungs. As if to prove to myself that he isn’t there, I wriggle a hand across my chest and attempt to feel where his head would, but shouldn’t, be. My fingers slip into something wet and sticky. With a jolt I snatch them back to my side. Something sharp jaggedly slices across my forearm. It’s one of those small but piercing pains that you’d probably let coax you into tears if only you were still young enough to get away with it.

  And with that I’m a child again. Curled-up in a dumpster just off the school field. The lid has just slammed shut, and I can hear a gaggle of my howling friends attempting to heft a breeze-block on top, because they know that I’m too weak to push the lid back open with a relatively heavy object holding it down. Desperate, feral, I pound my fists at the plastic, making obscene threats, which lose most of their potency due to the fact that I’m shouting them through tears.

  I soon realise that they’re no longer within earshot, and that I’m alone, shouting into nothing. I stop trying to push open the lid, and I stop trying to rock the dumpster until it falls onto its side. I do this because I no longer want to get out; I want to remain in the dark, and go back to solving the maths problem I’d been stuck on before the bell rang to signal lunch. I know that, sooner or later, conscience will get the better of one of them and they’ll come to rescue me; that I’ll probably have to go into my science lesson smelling faintly of yesterday’s school dinners; that the whole story will eventually unravel itself; that I’ll have to try to explain to the deputy headmistress that it isn’t through fear that I’m refusing to tell her the names of the people who did this to me; that this explanation will fall on deaf ears, and that I’ll be able to sense her frustration, bordering on anger, which makes me feel almost as though I’m the guilty party. Which I am, in a way, I suppose.

  I suddenly find that I’m not myself anymore. I’m Charlie, thinking Charlie’s thoughts. I don’t want to live as a person; I want to live as a pop-song. I want to be three minutes long, and last forever at the same time. I want to be a perfect artifice of rhythm and lyrics and melody, all coming together to form one perfect idea. I want to project that idea out into the world, as my replacement, and then I want to die, because I wasn’t built for real life.

  I thrust an arm up through the filth and lift the lid of the dumpster, just a crack. The sun has gone down. I peek out in a meerkat-fashion and search through the darkness for passers-by. The cold wind rushes over my face, reminding me of who I am, and what I’ve done. The coast looks clear, so I squeeze myself out of the bundle of garbage bags and flop over the side of the dumpster. The floor seems to jump up to greet me. Clutching a hand to the lump forming on my head and lurching up to my feet, I suddenly spot two dark figures at the end of the alley. It’s difficult make out their faces, but I could swear that they’re staring back at me. I perform a swift about-face and march away from them as fast as I can get away with, throwing in a drunken stumble in an attempt cover my tracks.

  I ram my hands in my pockets and my chin to my chest as I walk down the street, keeping my pupils strained upwards so I’ll be able to catch anyone approaching before they get close enough to recognise me. Though I’m sticking to the least well-lit areas, what with this being Newcastle I can’t help stumbling across a pub before too long. I go to hang a left down an adjacent street so the smokers can’t catch a glimpse of me, but something stops me in my tracks. Through the window, I can see that Sky News is playing on the TV in the pub, and plastered across the screen of that TV is my Facebook profile picture. Suddenly it hits me that my parents are probably looking at the same image right now. I wonder what the banner below it says; I’m too far away to make out the words properly, but one of them looks suspiciously like ‘manhunt’.

  There’s a scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt says, ‘It’s only when we have nothing, that we’re free to do anything.’ Yet here I am: no girlfriend, no friends who want to keep being friends, and parents who are at this very minute wondering whether it’s too late to get an abortion, and I don’t feel free. I feel lonely. I feel cold. My leg is hurting. Is this how Phoebe feels all the time? How the hell does she do it?

  You’d better work that out fast, or you’re going to prison for a long fucking time, my brain responds.

  I jog off down the adjacent street, towards the moor. One person looking out of their window and phoning the police could put an end to my freedom. Could someone recognise me from that photo, in this darkness? Even if they could, won’t the police be getting hundreds of calls from overeager Samaritans at this very minute, placing me in every corner of Newcastle? One call that happens to identify me correctly would surely be a drop of blood in the ocean.

  I try to talk myself out of my paranoia, insisting that if I’ve made it through without being spotted, my chances are good of escaping the outskirts and making it to the moor. Behind all of it, though, I’m internally writing my Christmas list, and all that’s on it is another year, another week, another day of freedom. I can’t shake the feeling that all Santa’s going to bring me is coal.

  As if to prove that my paranoia isn’t going to be discouraged so easily, a sudden change of lighting in the distance sends my body hurtling to the tarmac and rolls it under a parked car. When my mind has time to catch up to my eyes, I realise that the paranoia had a point. There’s a car approaching at a pace which I’d find curious even if there wasn’t a flashlight beam poking out of the passenger-side window, I tease my body closer to the kerb as the beam creeps towards me, wishing to God that I’d gotten rid of the gun when I had the chance, and praying that my shadow won’t betray me.

  The car goes by, and my desire to get rid of the revolver diminishes instantly. I roll back out from under the car and, despite the throbbing pain in my knee, I pick up my pace to a run. For some reason I’ve got it in my head that if I can reach the spot on the moor where we buried the loot, I’ll get out of this. I’m now chasing that feeling, like a smackhead chases the dragon or a lonely man chases a girl who showed him some small token of pity. It’s only now, when I’ve brought myself to the brink of losing it, that I understand the value of freedom. My picture is plastered across television screens all over the country; to the world, I’m no more than a criminal, but that’s not who I am, that’s not what I can be. In an instant, my petty, provincial concerns fall away, and for a snatch of a second I can understand Phoebe, or whatever her name is now. Then the understanding rolls back, and the fear crashes over it.

  Like a pirate at the X-marked spot of buried treasure or, better yet, a starving dog discovering some discarded scraps of food, I fall to my knees and scrape at the dirt with my hands. Great clumps of it come away in my fists, despite it being so cold that the soil should be frozen solid, like it was when we were digging the hole in the first place. My fingers hit plastic. I grope around through the dirt for the sides of the box, and, finding them, drag it out of the earth.

  I pop the top off and throw it aside.

  It�
��s my phone. I don’t know what my phone is doing there, but I know for damn sure what it’s been traded for, and by whom. I dig around inside the box. My phone; the shotgun; a hoody; my watch; another hoody; the pistol… and one five-pound note, probably left there to mock me. But why did she take my phone?

  Like the dumb kid at school waving his hand around, clamouring for the chance to finally answer a question, my mind throws me back to the morning after I met her:

  Drunk Charlie has such a prolific habit of hiding or losing Sober Charlie’s possessions that two phones ago I decided to add his number to my Find my iPhone app.

  Charlie had his phone on him when we buried the evidence.

  ‘What’s you PIN, again?’ he called after me.

  ‘Oh-two-seven-six!’ I hollered back.

  I thought she took losing out on the loot remarkably lightly.

  ‘Because she had a feeling that someone’s bedroom window would be unlocked…

  She knew the house would be empty, and that my phone would be there on my bedside table, ripe for the taking. So she took it. Then she was able to follow us here, without even having to follow us.

  I wouldn’t exactly call you a “hero”, but you guys were the most interesting group I’ve ever ripped-off.

  She saw exactly where we buried the money.

  ‘FREEZE!’

  Even with all my supposed nerdiness, I’ve been outfoxed by a girl who’s never even heard of Star Trek. Never used a computer. Doesn’t have a Facebook account.

  ‘HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!’

  You win some, you lose some, I guess.

  I can see the police officers emerging from shadows, now.

  Fuck Steve Jobs.

  He tells me to raise my hands again. I raise my hands.

  A sudden convulsion hits my chest, but it’s not a sob, it’s a laugh. It spreads up from my chest to my throat and my shoulders, and down to my stomach and knees. I fall down, paralysed by the spasms of psychotic mirth. Even after they’ve finished dragging me the back down the moor and they’re throwing me into the back of the waggon, the night still resounds with the sound of my laughter. As the HA’s echo back off the inside walls of the police van, it’s as though the whole world is laughing with me.

  EPILOGUE

  HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  Thankfully, it turned out that the prison rape rumours Hollywood insists on spreading are mostly bullshit. Less thankfully, the stuff about other forms of assault is most certainly not. Perhaps it says something about my looks that the men I share a jail with would rather kick the shit out of me than fuck the shit out of me, but I’d hate to think that Liz had less discerning tastes than a swarm of convicts.

  My case got a fair amount of play in the media - especially after I made a plea of diminished responsibility at trial, on the grounds of determinism – so I came into prison with an aura of infamy surrounding me like the stench of decay, attracting hyenas. I think it was the combination of the big aura and the small, weak body it surrounded that made me such a perfect target for inmates with rage issues. God knows those weren’t in short supply. There were two incidents in my first week alone. The first wasn’t too serious; I managed to scrabble free before they’d left anything worse than cuts and bruises on me. The following incident, however, caused me to spend my second week at her majesty’s pleasure in the hospital wing.

  The first month of my incarceration was quite similar in tone to my first month at university, if Tim and company had hunted me for sport instead of just shunning me at social functions. Much in the same way as at university, I didn’t help myself out by pathologically keeping myself to myself and then acting silent but creepy on the rare occasions where I did find myself in company. Rather than salvation coming from a girl, as it did in my first year, in prison my salvation came from confinement. After my second spell in the hospital wing I was transferred to a solitary cell and put on lockdown for 23 hours a day. I don’t know if this was a pity move on the guard’s part or an attempt to dodge the bad press that would come from me being murdered whilst my name still held some cultural currency.

  The period I spent in confinement gave me plenty of time alone with my thoughts. I wasn’t on speaking terms with my thoughts – it was them who got me into this mess in the first place – so I did push-ups to distract myself. Prison had been a new and scary environment, and I’d allowed myself to fall back into the old, scared skin I’d uncomfortably inhabited for twenty years prior to the whole armed robbery thing. I hated that dude. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of East London tough-guys turn me back into him.

  An entirely press-up and prison food-based regimen takes a few months to kick in; I was only on lockdown for a few weeks – pesky human rights legislation puts a cap on that sort of thing – so I didn’t come out with any more dangerous tools than I went in with. I did, however, come out with a far more dangerous mindset. When the bell for the second round sounded, I came out swinging.

  This isn’t to say that many swings landed. At least not to begin with. And it was most definitely not as though I was winning any – or, indeed, any – of my fights in the time after I got out of solitary. It was interesting, however, to see how many of my would-be bullies found better ways to entertain themselves once I began standing up for myself. I soon found out that it isn’t about winning; it’s about causing enough damage, and not showing enough fear, that in future your opponent will decide you’re not worth the effort.

  For the more tenacious characters who decided that I was worth the effort, I made sure that every time they went after me I’d be stronger, I’d fight dirtier, I’d be more creative in my use of weaponry, and my general outlook on life would be just that little bit more psychotic. Towards the end of my first year inside I was put back on lockdown, but this time it wasn’t for my protection, it was for biting a chunk out of a fellow inmate’s ear. I’d become quite the little savage.

  I’m now five years into my sentence. I’m not sure whether it’s because my infamy has faded or because I’ve proven myself willing and occasionally capable of inflicting damage, but it’s been a long time since I felt uneasy in the lunch queue. I choose to believe it’s for the latter reason. It feels like a victory that way. Since such victories are the closest one gets to controlling one’s destiny in a place like this, I’ve found myself almost missing those five-minute windows of terror and mayhem. Without them, there’s nothing to distract me from the fifteen hours and fifty-five minutes-a-day of lining-up for sub-school-dinner grade food, sitting in my cell in silence, communal showers and shitting in front of my cellmate. As for the eight hours I spend sleeping, the last nine months have been an endless repeat of the same nightmare. That’s the thing about prison; your waking life is so regimented, so mundane, that before long even your subconscious follows suit. The nightmare in question consists of me sharing a sofa with Liz, watching one of those police-chase reality TV shows. More often than not, my head’s in her lap. Lately I’ve noticed a bassinette in the corner of the room, but every time I get up and go to look inside, I wake up.

  I once overheard a guy whose incarceration had forced him to go cold-turkey off heroin describing to another inmate how every night he dreamt about holding a spoon between a lighter and a lump of brown, sucking it up into a syringe, tying off his arm and plunging the needle into his vein, then, at the exact moment he was about to press down on the plunger, he’d wake up. Every night, without fail, he’d get to the precipice of smack-addled nirvana, then find himself suddenly dragged back into the world of the living – into a dank, prison cell, sweating and yearning for something he’d never find again. If I hadn’t built up a reputation for silence, I might’ve put a hand on his shoulder and assured him that he wasn’t alone.

  I’ll be in my mid-forties by the time I’m eligible for parole, so it’s not like the domesticated nightmare-fantasy is entirely outside the realm of the possible. Even if I made parole the first time around, though, it still wouldn’t leave much of a window in which to
re-civilise myself, build a life from scratch and find a wife. And, given the inclination towards violence that I’ve shown over my time here, making parole on my first attempt is an unlikely scenario.

  It’s thoughts like this which make me wish I hadn’t been such a pretentious dickhead in court. If I’d played the game and pled guilty, like Charlie, there would’ve been less use of adjectives such as ‘unrepentant’ in the press, and there might’ve been some incentive for the judge to serve me the sort of justice that would’ve seen me stepping into free air again when I was in my early thirties. Instead of grabbing one of life’s better decades back like a scrap from the master’s table, I chose to represent myself at trial. My defence, in essence, was a reiteration of the ‘if we’re made of atoms, we’re being toe-punted towards the heat-death of the universe’ school of determinism preached to me by Charlie all those years and months ago. Every time the prosecution tried to ruin my flow by bringing up the pertinent facts of the case, I’d plead the Fifth. When the prosecution pointed out that the Fifth Amendment wasn’t something that held any relevance in a British courtroom, I would point out that I couldn’t be held responsible for the stupidity of my remarks if I was predestined to give them, and the whole cycle would repeat itself. Eventually I think the judge sentenced me to 25 years just to get me to shut the fuck up.

  Well, I think it was partly that, and partly because of the overwhelming physical evidence against me. Perhaps the evidence even weighed slightly more heavily. The gun found on me at the time of my arrest matched the bullets dug out of both the ceiling of Marks & Spencer and Sid’s kitchen cupboards. The phone records placed Sid at the scene of the robbery. I was apprehended whilst digging up a box containing a map of Marks & Spencer with the entire robbery scrawled across it. They even found traces of my DNA at the scene, from when I scraped my hand on the Christmas tree. Lionel Hutz could’ve scored a conviction. So why didn’t I play the game? Why did I save the silent tears for the nights in the cell, rather than the days in court?

  I ask myself those questions every night, when the lights go off and I count off in my head the days left until I’m eligible for parole, the days left until I’m likely to get it, and the days left until I’m likely to die.

  I wonder if Freddy gets the questions, too. I know Charlie does. This is not merely because the latter went to prison and the former escaped it. If anything, I’d think that a more draconian punishment would quiet down the voices trashing hotel rooms up in Charlie’s head. He was the only one to plead guilty to the charges levelled at us. The only problem was that there weren’t all that many charges for him to be found guilty of: He never took a hostage; he never even set foot in the building Freddy claimed we didn’t rob; as it turned out he hadn’t even broken into a car, like he was supposed to. For all I know, he stayed at home and watched movies on the day of the robbery itself. He played a significant part in the conspiracy, of course, and he spent a significant part of the gains, and he did a significant amount of shoplifting in the run-up to the job, but those things – again - turned out to be somewhat difficult to prove.

  The powers that be offered Charlie a reduced sentence if he would add his testimony against the rest of us to the confession he made against himself. Had it not been for the overabundance of other evidence I still had to weasel my way out of, I might’ve seen that as my deliverance. Even if Charlie was tempted to rat me out, he wanted the punishment far more. Shit, he might’ve asked for the death penalty if they still offered it.

  It’s somewhat ironic that the only one of the three of us involved who actually wanted to go to prison was the one who would’ve had the easiest time drilling a reasonable doubt into the heads of the jury. Freddy, on the other hand, must’ve breathed a gargantuan sigh of relief when he found out that Charlie wouldn’t be testifying. Despite playing against the parallel justice system for rich white men and their sons, I doubt that even Freddy’s lawyer – or, more precisely, Freddy’s father’s lawyer – could’ve jury-tampered his way out that one.

  Johnny was probably justified in proclaiming his innocence, seeing as how he had nothing to do with any part of the enterprise. Perversely, and maliciously, I found myself half-hoping that he’d be found guilty. Why? Lingering resentment over his feelings for Liz? No. Not having the balls to do anything about that was its own punishment. A desire to see an innocent man punished, to prove that the system which put me away was just as corrupt and malignant as myself? No again. I could just as easily play that card with Charlie, since – morally if not strictly legally speaking – he didn’t do anything wrong either.

  My abject certainty of Charlie’s innocence makes it much harder to understand why he would plead guilty. I understand why I should feel guilty; I murdered Sid in cold blood. The more time I’ve spent in here, surrounded by the only people in the civilised world who wouldn’t judge me too harshly for such a thing, the sicker I’ve felt at the memory of it. The facial expression I recall wearing at the moment I pulled the trigger. Knowing how futile it turned out to be. Seeing the poorly-repressed disgust etched into the creases of my father’s face when he came to visit. Would I still feel guilty if that one murder had kept me out of prison, or if my father had never found out what he spawned? Is it a selfish guilt, in that I didn’t regret what I did to him, but rather what it did to me?

  Perhaps the most pathetic thing is that I keep asking these questions, in an attempt to convince myself that I don’t have the answers. At the bottom of the whirlpool lies the obvious, inexorable truth: Out of my entire life, I spent about a week of it free, and, in that week, I murdered someone. I don’t deserve freedom. I deserve punishment. The conclusion follows, inevitably, from the premise.

  In that answer must also be contained the reason I claimed determinism at trial. A part of me wanted it to be true, wanted that week of liberty to have been nothing more than a lucid dream. Again, I try to make myself believe it, but the belief never quite comes.

  Movies and television have taught me three things about prison: that it turns even civilised men into savages, or else it drives them to suicide, or else they get shanked in the shower; that it carves routine and discipline so deeply into you that even after your release you can’t piss without say-so; and that the identity you brought in with you will be checked-in at the gate along with the lighter you had in your pocket, and will be misplaced just the same, as the grey walls and fluorescent lights grind you down into nothing more than a number.

  I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case only the first two of these are true. I may be a savage, and I might not be able to take a shit without permission, but I’m certainly not a number. If anything, incarceration has only served to freeze my half-formed character in carbonite. My descent into savagery has shown me what I’m really capable of doing when my surroundings call for it. The enforced discipline has only served to prove that discipline can’t quiet what goes on in my head, nor impose order upon it. My isolation from family and friends, both the fictitious friends and the factual, has turned me even further inwards than I was before. No longer do I have to moderate my thoughts to fit the mould they’d have me fill – and, indeed, nor could I, even if I wanted to. I haven’t read an argument about politics on Facebook in half a decade. I couldn’t tell you who the president of the United States of America is, nor what bands the kids are listening to nowadays, but God damn it, I know what sort of creature I am.

  Much as the knowledge of my own guilt has rendered Charlie more and more incomprehensible to me as time has gone on, so the knowledge of the solid, unchanging ‘me’ at the centre of my existence has made Phoebe ever more alien, more inscrutable the more that I think about her. You might’ve noticed that Phoebe didn’t feature in my recollection of the court cases, and that’s for the simple reason that, what with me pleading the Fifth, Charlie forgoing his chance to testify, Freddy feigning ignorance and Johnny actually being in possession of said ignorance, she didn’t feature in the court cases themselves. She flitted
out of our lives just as quickly as she’d flitted into them, like a spectre whose name we were all afraid to mention, in case it summoned her back.

  These are the questions I will never have the answers to, no matter how deep down in my psyche I burrow: Is she really that spectre, taking on a new form with every new group of people she falls in with? Is it just the veneer that changes, or does she look upon those discarded personalities in the same way that I do the old friends and enemies I’ve left by the wayside over the years? Is there really no anchor at the centre of her: no love, guilt nor shame, holding it all together? Do the old memories come back to haunt her at night, or is she like a Buddhist tree, or a sub-atomic particle, only existing when observed? When the acid rain has finished washing all the letters off my grave, in what sense can it be said that I ever existed at all, and, in that case, in what sense can it be said that ‘Phoebe’ ever existed, either?

  A thought like that could break your brain. Or maybe it’s a stupid thought, to be dismissed after a moment’s consideration, and ‘Phoebe’ was nothing more than your garden-variety psychopath. It’s hard for me to tell, cut off as I am from the outside world – and the Internet - where there are always people on hand to let you know how dumb your ideas are.

  The door to that outside would was slammed definitively shut when my parents stopped visiting. For the first year that I was in here, on the third Sunday of every month, their names would appear on the visitor’s list. The fact that their appearances were so rigidly scheduled suggested to me that they were done more out a misplaced sense of duty than any lingering sense of affection. It certainly wasn’t for the conversation, which would usually centre around whatever injuries I’d picked-up over the previous month, or my father’s incomprehension of why I hadn’t let him assist with my legal representation. My mother would inevitably begin crying right at the beginning of each visit, as she tried to choke out a ‘hello’, and I would almost never be able to tease anything further out of her until it was time for my father to lead her back to her life, and the guard to lead me back to my cell, whereupon she’d manage to choke out a ‘goodbye’. The one exception to this pattern was when she, in fits and starts, informed me that she didn’t feel as though there was any of ‘my baby’ left in there. The choked ‘goodbye’ which followed that pronouncement was the one that stuck. When the next third-Sunday rolled around, I refused to leave my cell. Two third-Sundays after that, their names stopped appearing on the list of visitors.

  That was four years ago. Only once since then has a name appeared adjacent to my own on the list of visitors. It wasn’t either of my parents; it wasn’t Liz; it wasn’t an old friend or acquaintance; it wasn’t anyone, in fact, who I could recall having encountered before. Had this been during the first six months of my sentence, this might not have struck me as odd; during that period, when my dubious celebrity had not yet waned, there were rumblings of journalists trying to secure an interview with me, but being barred by the authorities. Presumably they thought I’d use an interview, and the corresponding opportunity to publish a picture of my many injuries, as propaganda against the prison system. They needn’t have bothered; I had no desire to keep my face in the papers for any longer than I could avoid. This student, though – I found out that she was a Masters student from the letter asking for the interview, which I abandoned a few lines into reading – managed to seek me at the moment when the boredom and the loneliness of life at Her Majesty’s pleasure were beginning to get the better of me, and the opportunity was too much to turn down.

  Somehow, even amongst the crowd of people filing into the visiting hall, and despite having never met her before, I recognised her immediately. She was beautiful in exact proportion to my loneliness, and meek in exact proportion to my scarred savagery. As she walked towards me with fast, short steps I tried to scrutinise her, but it soon devolved into a leer. She had dark patches beneath her eyelids, as though she hadn’t slept too well the previous night, and the chair trembled slightly as she tried to pull it out. She was wearing an engagement ring on one finger. She didn’t shuffle the chair back up to the table after sitting on it; it took me a few moments to realise that this was probably because I was leaning almost the entire way across to her side. I forced myself backwards into my seat.

  When she finally spoke, her words were lost in the scent. After five years, the sickly-stale funk of male sweat, the fetid stench of male breath, the oppressive, oily blandness of the prison food and the acidic twinge of the urine which hung permanently in my cell had beaten my sense of smell into a coma. Now, as her scent wafted across them, my nostrils jolted back into furious life. I had to dig my nails into my thigh to suppress the urge to jerk hungrily forward once more.

  ‘I… I believe -’ she began, in a fidgety voice. ‘Did you receive my letter?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, still more interested in looking at her than in talking to her. ‘But I’m afraid I haven’t got around to finishing it yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was an awkward silence. ‘So are you willing to be interviewed as part of my dissertation? I had to make a lot of inquiries in order to…’

  ‘We’ll see how things go from here,’ I said, with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘Was that an essay you’d attached to it?’

  ‘Yes… I take it that means you didn’t read it?’

  ‘Honestly? I was making an attempt at sarcasm.’

  She threw out a chuckle.

  ‘I can have a flick through it now, if you’ve got a copy with you,’ I told her, in a conciliatory tone.

  She gave murmuring assent, and went rifling through her bag. The folded pieces of paper she extracted came sliding across the table, and I was suddenly reminded of the scene in The Silence of the Lambs, where Jodie Foster delivers Hannibal Lecter a document through the clanking feeding tray. I put the tip of one of my fingers to my tongue and skimmed past the cover page, on which was written the name Jennifer Green, followed by one of those unwieldy, thirty-word titles that academics use through fear of their work being mistaken as entertaining. Without looking up at her, I began to read:

  For two hours on December 18th 2012, a headline on the BBC News website spoke of a suspected terror attack in Newcastle upon Tyne1. As more facts relating to the incident which took place in the Marks & Spencer mini-market on that Sunday morning came to light, the phrase ‘terrorist attack’ was rescinded, and replaced by the phrase ‘armed robbery’2. However, given the subsequent testimony of the two convicted perpetrators, as well as the available information concerning their characters and socio-economic backgrounds, I would contend that the original term was, in fact, the correct one. It is indisputable, given the facts of the case and the relevant background information, that robbery was not the primary motive for the perpetrators’ actions, and it is only by viewing the incident through the framework of the psychology of terrorism that these actions can be satisfactorily understood. Moreover, an understanding of the Newcastle 2012 incident shows that the impulse which leads certain individuals – usually young males – into fanaticism and terrorism does not emanate from a strict adherence to a defective ideology, such as radical Islam or Marxism, but instead emerges from social and psychological pressures which can be found across all levels of society. Though terrorism may appeal to those in a very specific position within society, this appeal operates across a far wider spectrum than is traditionally assumed. Ideology is not the inciting influence for terrorist actions; it is the final step, the moral justification for a course of action which the perpetrator may well have committed without recourse to an ideological framework. Indeed, the very label of ‘terrorism’ has been applied inconsistently in order to differentiate near-identical behaviours, most often to serve ends which are political or ideological in themselves.

  I looked up from the table and caught her scruntising me.

  ‘You shouldn’t use the first person in an academic essay,’ I told her. ‘You should use “the evidence suggests that…” or “this would indicate
that…” instead of “I would contend…” Gives the impression of scholarly detachment.’ She raised her eyebrows and smiled in a very over-the-top fashion, as if to cover the involuntary furrow and snarl which preceded it. Had I not been so suspicious of her motives in coming here, I might have dismissed the darkening of her features, which only lasted for a snatch of a second, as paranoia, or even missed it entirely. Allowing my eyes to fall back downwards, I thumbed through the pages on the table, reading only the titles of each section:

  I.Arriving at a Definition of ‘Terrorism’

  II.The appeal of Terrorism to the Young

  III.The Relationship Between Terrorism and Minority-Group Allegiance

  IV.The Appeal of Terrorism to the Middle-Class

  V.The Appeal of Terrorism to the Proto-Intelligentsia

  VI.Differentiating Between ‘Terrorism’ and ‘Mass Killing’

  VII.Ideology as Justification, Not Motivation

  I skip forward, to a point around halfway through the final section.

  …Soldiers are far easier to recruit than suicide bombers. In the insurrectionary stage of a revolutionary movement, when adherents to an ideology have yet to overthrow an existing regime, the vast majority of its sympathisers cannot be swayed into violent ‘extremism’, even if this is preached by the leaders of the movement. In terms of the use of revolutionary violence, the delineation between the Bolsheviki and the less militant socialist groups within Russia, for example, was not especially pronounced until the breakdown of the provincial government17. Furthermore, once a successful insurrection has consolidated itself into a bonified regime, the ideological impulse ceases to be a necessary means of coercing individuals into acts of violence against those whom they have no personal motive. This fact was best demonstrated during the Milgram experiments of the 1960s18.

  An ‘underdog’ ideology, therefore, is insufficient to produce acts of terrorism, and within a ruling ideology, simple self-interest and even self-preservation are more important than adherence. However, though I hope I have shown that the precedence of ideology as a motivating factor for acts commonly labelled as terrorism is a political narrative unsubstantiated by the available evidence, we have not yet seen whether it is a necessary factor; that is, can an act of terrorism be committed in the absence of an ideology?

  Though one could argue that the ‘terror-ish’ actions described in section VI above could be categorised as such, my examination of the perpetrators’ testimonies heavily implies that their motives were primarily personal ones, which contradicts the definition of ‘terrorism’ we arrived at earlier. The testimony of Peter Thompson following the Newcastle 2012 incident provides a far more clear-cut example of terrorism in an ideological vacuum. Indeed, his defence, in which he argued that a strictly materialist conception of reality proved that he had no control over – and therefore no responsibility for – his actions, a viewpoint which ironically allowed him complete liberty to do as he pleased, seemed to some to be a deliberate satire of the notion of an ideological justification for impersonal violence19. We saw in section III that numerous proponents of revolutionary violence have told themselves, ‘I have the authority to change the world’; Thompson distilled this down to its essential meaning: ‘I have the authority to break the rules’. Likewise, in place of the grand ideological narrative that most individuals guilty of similar acts have constructed, placing themselves and their victims in a comrade-enemy dynamic and thereby justifying their violence against them, Thompson, in effect, reduced all of these arguments down to their logical derivation: ‘They don’t care if I live or die, and the feeling is mutual.’

  I slowly lifted my eyes up from the table again. At the same time, a malevolent smirk crept up my cheek. Very deliberately, I turned over the pages I skipped past and placed them back on top of the pages I no longer needed to read.

  ‘So who exactly is it you’re psychoanalysing here?’ I asked. ‘Because as far as I can recall, it was you who – what was it?’ I lifted up the corner of the stack of pages and peeked at her words, for effect, ‘“killed without any personal motivation”, not me.’

  I could tell she was tensing-up in preparation for this, but the preparation could not protect her from the involuntary, almost Pavlovian spasm that my remark provoked. She gripped the side of her chair, perhaps to suppress the urge to turn tail and run. Her pupils bounced around in their sockets for a few seconds, checking to see if the guard was approaching, before she finally got them under control.

  ‘For a minute there I thought you were going to miss the reference,’ she muttered. ‘No such luck, I guess.’

  ‘If you didn’t want me to get it, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place,’ I countered.

  ‘True, but we both know that, sometimes, you can only spot a bad idea after you’ve drop-kicked it into reality.’ She tried to force a laugh, but couldn’t quite get it past her gullet.

  ‘Also true,’ I replied. I leaned back on my chair and examined her features, trying to compare them with the old, faded memories of the girl I met at university, and the girl I met in the store room at Marks and Spencer on December the Eighteenth, Two-Thousand and Twelve. I squinted, searching for some kind of distinguishing feature that would bind the three guises together, but couldn’t find one. The three instances of her looked alike, of course, in a generically attractive kind of a way, but there was nothing to hang a tag on except maybe the smell.

  ‘So, I guess I’ll have to rephrase my first question: What can I do for you, Phoebe?’

  Her hand again clutched the chair and her eyes again went shooting off in every direction. I was tempted to say it again, just a bit louder, but I put the impulse to one side. The conversation – at that point at least – seemed more intriguing than the opportunity to exert some power over her. Phoebe, likewise, put away the expression her face had tried to spring into, which was that of a leashed pit-bull terrier being teased. She shrugged as best she could, but her whitening knuckles were still clamped around the underside of her seat.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ she admitted. ‘I just knew I had to talk to you before all this drives me insane.’

  ‘So you not only posed as a university student, but you also wrote a fake ten-thousand-word essay so that you had a plausible excuse to come and see me? I’m touched that you went to so much effort, Phoebes, but there are easier ways.’

  ‘No, I am a sociology student,’ she replied. ‘That’s my actual dissertation. I hope you don’t mind, but I made up your quotes in advance, so we’d have more time to talk properly.’

  ‘You?’ I asked, my head askance. ‘Sociology?’

  She indulged herself in a very long and unnecessary pause. Then she shrugged again.

  ‘I find it interesting.’ There was a hint of grumble in her voice as she said it.

  ‘I suppose I’m hardly one to talk,’ I conceded. ‘I used to find data management interesting.’

  A very slight ripple in the air behind me told me that the guard had just walked past, at the one moment where we were discussing something innocuous. Though the mischievous impulse rose back to the surface, I held it in check and gestured towards her notepad.

  ‘Next question, if you don’t mind.’ Without so much as a crack appearing in her performance, she asked:

  ‘How affluent do you remember being, growing up? Would you say you ever wanted for anything? Erm, and – err - if so, were those things necessities, like, such as food, or luxuries, such as – I don’t know – a videogame console?’

  I watched the guard getting smaller in my peripheral vision. When I was sure that he was out of the range of my whispers, I replied:

  ‘I was affluent for a couple of days, back when I was at university, but then someone robbed it all from me.’ The smile crept up my cheek once again. ‘Is that what brought you here, Phoebe? Did come to pay me back my share?’

  ‘I’ve been staying in one place lately. The longer I stay put, the more I get scared of the past catchi
ng up with me. That’s what brought me here.’

  ‘It has a habit of doing that,’ I agreed, with grim humour. ‘Out of curiosity, did the decision to stay put come before or after that?’ I gestured towards her gleaming, diamond-ringed finger. She cocked her head sideways, in the way a cat does when it walks in on you masturbating and you can tell that it’s thinking, what is that stupid human doing now?

  ‘He wouldn’t have decided to marry me if I hadn’t been around for a while, would he?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you’d decided to stay there, long-term,’ I returned. ‘You might’ve just been waiting to pawn off the engagement ring.’

  Her neck snapped back into the upright position.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she spat at me. I clapped my hands together and grinned broadly.

  ‘That’s the spirit! For a minute there, I thought you’d gone fucking soft on me.’ She didn’t grin back. ‘So who’s the lucky fellow? Charlie?’ She shook her head, and I sighed theatrically. ‘Poor guy; he deserved a chance of domestic bliss.’

  ‘And what about me?’ she asked, colour suddenly leaking into her pale cheeks. ‘Do I deserve it?’ I reapplied the mocking grin, but this time there was no streak of humour behind it.

  ‘No. No you fucking don’t. But that never seemed to bother you before.’

  The crimson flush in her cheeks turned a shade darker. Were such a thing possible, I would’ve thought she was indignant. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, as though daring herself to say something, but that something never managed to force its way out.

  ‘So is that all you came here for?’ I asked. ‘To show me an essay and to invite me to your wedding? Because unless you’re planning on a twenty-five-year-long engagement, I’d imagine I’ll be busy that weekend.’

  She shook her head, and then - very suddenly, as though she was trying to slip it past a blockade – blurted out:

  ‘Don’t rat me out.’

  No sooner had she said it than the hand had gripped the chair and the eyes gone darting around her face. Even her neck, this time, forced itself free of composure. The guard noticed. He didn’t come over, but the slight and momentary angling of his eyebrows told me that from that moment on he would be trying to mentally filter out all of the other white noise in the room and hone in on our conversation. It struck me once more that what I chose as my next sentence could determine whether ‘Jennifer Green’ left this building in custody or as a free woman. Judging by her eyes, she knew it too.

  The innocent have nothing to fear from the truth, I thought to myself. But, then again, neither do those who’ve already been found guilty.

  I raised the volume of my voice just a fraction, and said:

  ‘You’re not very good with prisons, are you, Ms. Green?’

  I held her gaze very deliberately, so that she wouldn’t succumb to the urge to turn and look at the guard. She shook her head. As though disconnected from her thoughts, her hand grabbed her pen and scribbled something down in her notebook. I let my eyes fall down to the pages, and saw that they were plastered with tight, neat handwriting. Had she been writing the entire time? Or, more accurately, was she transcribing a different conversation, a fictitious interview with a convicted murderer, conducted by an innocent student? Even then, when she was finally giving into emotion, had she managed to confine it to her face and the hand gripping the chair? Was her writing hand still keeping up the act?

  ‘I would’ve thought the answer to that question was obvious,’ I continued, making sure not to let my pupils flick towards the guard I knew to be watching us, even for an instant. ‘I’ve been in this prison for far longer than I knew any of the people who were part of the robbery. If I haven’t grassed any of them up by now, the conclusion is clear; I’m not going to. It doesn’t matter if that’s because I don’t know their identities or because I want to protect them.’

  In my peripheries, I watched the blurred figure of the guard reluctantly moving out of earshot. She watched me watching him go, and when my facial expression indicated that he was on the far side of the room, she asked:

  ‘Was that answer for his benefit or mine?’

  ‘I haven’t decided, yet,’ I replied. ‘But, like I said, that type of thing never seemed to worry you before.’

  ‘It worries me now. Fucking hell, Sundance, look at my eyes!’ she hissed. I did. There was a wild, uncaged desperation gleaming out from her irises, accentuated by the black circles on the lids and the inflamed capillaries crawling over the orbs that encased them. ‘I haven’t slept since he asked me to marry him, because I know that one day you’re going to come along and take away everything that I’ve spent the last year building up. My fiancée thinks I’m about to call the wedding off!’

  ‘And why shouldn’t I?’ I contested, at the same time trying to figure out what exactly it was that she thought I had on her. ‘I took away everything Sid had spent his life building, and I’m damn sure you didn’t give a second thought to the guy you killed, whatever his name was.’

  ‘Simon something,’ she answered, dully.

  ‘Why do you get a chance, and not him?’ I probed. ‘Why not me, for that matter? I might’ve escaped if you hadn’t pulled that shit with my phone.’ I was still racking my brains, trying to uncover what evidence I could’ve used against her. She wouldn’t have lured me into police custody if she knew I could prove who she was. It must be something she’d overlooked until later. It has to be something only I could know, and not Freddy or Charlie. Then again, maybe she’s just getting paranoid in her old age.

  ‘I figured you’d appreciate the irony,’ she shrugged.

  ‘I figured you’d just kill me, instead of waiting five years to come back and play on my heartstrings. If you wanted to bury the past so badly, I doubt throwing one more body in the hole would’ve made that much of an impression on you.’

  The malevolent shadow slipped back down over her features. For just a moment, I could see Phoebe staring back at me.

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about my past,’ she hissed, through gritted teeth. ‘At least I’ve got good reason for wanting to bury mine; you’re just a poor little rich boy whose mummy told him he was special, who then threw a tantrum when he found out the world didn’t agree. If you knew half of what I’ve…’ She seemed to lose the thread of the point she was making. She stopped and regathered her thoughts, and then muttered: ‘I was never given a chance, until now. Do I not at least deserve that?’

  ‘Fuck deserve,’ I spat back at her. ‘Maybe you were just a product of your environment. Maybe someone else wrote the blueprint for what you grew up to be. But maybe that’s the case for me, too. Maybe we’re all just helpless clusters of atoms being drop-kicked towards the heat-death of the universe.’

  ‘So you’re going to rat on me?’ she asked, with feeble acceptance in her voice.

  ‘Even if I say “no” now, what’s to say I won’t wake up tomorrow and feel different?’

  ‘I guess I’ll never know,’ she conceded.

  ‘Unless I’ve read this wrong, and what you’re really asking me is to kill myself to put your mind at rest?’

  I examined her features, looking for the answer that I knew her lips would never let past, but couldn’t find it. Eventually, she lifted her face up to meet my own, and I saw that tears had begun to swell up in her eyes.

  ‘I just don’t want you to hate me, that’s all,’ she whispered. I couldn’t prevent a snort of laughter from leaping out of my nose. This mocking snort only served to squeeze the tears out onto her cheeks. Then it didn’t seem very funny. We fell into silence.

  ‘I never hated you,’ I told her, eventually. ‘I actually quite liked you - that was what always concerned me.’

  Another silence fell down over us. This time it was her who broke it.

  ‘Sorry I called you a poor little rich boy.’

  ‘It’s hardly the worst thing you’ve ever done.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘So you
’ve finally found a life worth keeping?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  And she did. For the first time since she sat down, she spoke without falter or script. The pen even fell onto the table. She told me of how she struck up a conversation with a classically handsome, bespectacled man with the idea of making him her next stooge; how when he asked what she did for a living and where she was from she was struck by a strange compulsion to tell him the truth, or at least a small part of it; how when he asked what she wanted to do for a living and where she wanted to go, she couldn’t find an answer; how she’d confessed on her first date that she didn’t have anywhere to stay the night, and she couldn’t work out whether it was a ploy or a plea; how he’d still asked her to move in with him, despite the fact that she’d been sleeping on his apartment sofa for the previous month; how she’d woken up beside him in the early hours of the morning after one of the increasingly frequent nightmares in which I played the role of the bad guy, and tried to sneak away, never to see him again; how the downstairs light has sprung on as she turned the key in the back door; how he wasn’t angry, but understanding; how she’d confessed that she’d spent the best part of the previous decade moving from place to place, subsisting on whatever she could con or steal; how he’d asked her what he life was like before that decade, and what she had fled that made such a life preferable; how he’d asked her again what she wanted to do with her life, and how he’d helped her work out the answer.

  After too long anger caused my attention to waver, little bubbles of it effervescing in my sinuses, sending prickling pains into the bone behind my brow. Initially, I wondered if these were the symptoms of jealousy; that, after enduring months of teasing dreams of domestication, to have this stranger come to boast at me about her happy life was like watching a sibling eat an ice cream after I’ve just dropped my own. And yet as I sank down, involuntarily, into my chair and the pain began to recede, I realised that it wasn't anger or jealousy, it was sadness. Or perhaps it was disappointment; I'd been running on hate for so long that it was becoming difficult to recognise the other emotions when they hit me. I was telling the truth when I said that, despite everything, I liked Phoebe. Now all that was left of her was that wistful, nostalgic scent, and the rest had been replaced by that perfectly amiable creature, who I had nothing against, but whose company, even after five years of isolation, couldn’t keep the loneliness out for more than ten minutes.

  When her monologue was cut short by the striking of the clock, we parted ways; her back to her life and me back to my cell. I noticed that the guard’s eyes flickered over her as she passed, and I wondered whether he would pursue that moment of suspicion to its conclusion. The classic trope: the criminal who can’t resist going back to the scene of the crime. It’s been the undoing of many a fictitious character. I hoped it wouldn’t be hers.

  Perhaps I should’ve ended this story a few paragraphs earlier, when I asked her to tell me about her new, happy life; It might’ve even made me look noble, in a strange kind of way, as though I’d sacrificed my own freedom, my own happiness, for hers. I could even have slipped in a witty aside about how ironic it was that she’d been rehabilitated, while the yocorrective system had turned me into a monster. However, I think I’ve given enough evidence over the course of this tale to counter any accusations of nobility.

  I began that course by asking for your sympathy, but, now that I’ve reached its end, I’m not sure that I want it. I’m not a victim. My past didn’t make me do the things I did. I chose to do them. Because of those choices, I no longer have a family, and I no longer have friends, and I no longer have a girlfriend. But can I still have a future?

  That night, as I lay there staring up at the underside of my cellmate’s bunk, I played through the old jailbreak movies I used to watch with my dad, back in my teens. Slowly but surely, a plan began to form inside my head.

 

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