Bright Stars

by Sophie Duffy

  The Assistant Director, Daniel Cooper, also shakes my hand, briefly, as if bad luck is contagious. He’s a southerner with a voice like Ken Livingstone’s, ‘Estuary English’, I believe they call it.

  ‘Take a seat, Cameron,’ he says. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’

  I shake my head. I don’t mean to appear rude, I just don’t trust my voice to come out in a manly fashion. And for some reason, I want to at least sound manly while I am being unmanned.

  ‘Right, well, thank you for coming.’

  We take our seats, a table between us, them on one side, me on the other.

  ‘This is how the meeting is going to be structured,’ Fiona McCabe says. ‘First I will read the letter from Mr Sanderson that states his version of events. Then you will be given the opportunity to give your version. Then we will discuss a way forward which may, if necessary, involve me outlining the range of possible sanctions available to us.’

  I wait.

  ‘Is that clear, Cameron?’

  ‘Clear as day.’

  Clear as the day when the haar creeps in from the North Sea and spreads through the town like the plague.

  Fiona McCabe reads out the letter. The letter is peppered with priggish language, accusatory in tone. I latch on to the words but can’t make sense of them. Words like ‘imprisoned’, ‘asthma’, ‘traumatic’, ‘claustrophobia’. Phrases like ‘I thought I was going to die’, ‘I thought I would go mad’. ‘I think I must be an English poof.’ (Not that last one. That is me reading between the lines.)

  It was only ten minutes for goodness sake.

  ‘Only ten minutes maybe, Cameron…’ (Did I say that out loud?) ‘…but when you are in total darkness, in the cold, in a place associated with paranormal activity, it seems like much, much longer. Ten seconds could be a minute. Ten minutes could be an hour. Especially if you have asthma. Can you see his point of view, Cameron?’ Daniel Cooper’s voice has taken on a belligerent tone.

  ‘Maybe now’s the time to hear Cameron’s statement,’ Fiona McCabe says.

  ‘Right, well…’ I cough.

  ‘Would you like that glass of water now, Cameron?’

  ‘Thank you, Fiona. That would be lovely.’

  Lovely, lovely, lovely.

  I picture both of them without their clothes. Daniel Cooper has a six pack and a hairy back. Fiona McCabe has pale skin like moonlight and breasts that need a sports bra, even when not doing any kind of sport.

  It doesn’t help.

  Fiona McCabe passes me the glass of water – Scotland’s finest – and I take a gulp that goes down the wrong way. I start wheezing and have to produce my inhaler and have two puffs.

  Asthma.

  ‘You have asthma, Cameron. Then you’ll know all about it,’ Daniel Cooper says, a sly smile twitching his lips.

  ‘Take your time, Cameron,’ Fiona McCabe says.

  I’d like to take my time elsewhere to be fair, but I take a deep breath instead, ignore the crackles, and plunge back into the darkness.

  _________________________

  *There are obvious links with the trial of ’86, I know that. Being a historian I make connections, I see parallels. I had a suit then. I have a suit now.

  *I’m not sure where I grappled this phrase from. But you get my drift.

  Preston, March 1986

  Trial

  I woke up that morning in the B&B, in a single bed, Edward an arm’s reach away in another. A twin room with a kettle and teabags and mugs. Dad with Gavin next door, Andy down the corridor. If this were a holiday it would have been exciting. But this was no holiday.

  I never really believed this day would actually come. I thought Tommo’s megalomaniac of a father would pull it out of the bag, Paul Daniels and a fluffy bunny.

  But no.

  Back when I was first charged, when I was given bail, I still trusted Tommo’s father. And when I’d returned to the family home in Edinburgh, seeing it once more with fresh eyes – the leaking roof, the rotten windows, the damp in my press, behind my bed, the whole place riddled with it; I felt it in my lungs, relied on my inhaler more than ever – I knew it would take a potful of money to put it right but the pot was empty. Then there were Andy’s debts. He’d got in with a bad lot. They were clamouring, making threats. We were out of our depth.

  But I could make it all right. I could save my family. I just had to get through this and then we’d be back to normal. I’d transfer my degree, go to a poly somewhere. And, as Tommo’s father reminded me, as if I needed reminding, I was of course doing this for Bex. To make her happy.

  (Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not selfish.)

  I had to believe that. I had to stick to the plan. I had to save the day.

  It was too late to save Christie. She was never going to be the same. But that was not my fault. That fault belonged to Tommo.

  Edward was first to get up, made us both a brew and we sat in our beds like bairns in our pyjamas, supping and slurping and blethering about nothing, everything except what we should be blethering about, waiting for Dad to call for us so we could go down together to a greasy breakfast that I knew my stomach would never manage.

  And now this day had come. And here I was in court. Preston Crown Court with my family who’d never come en masse to see me in anything before; no school concerts; no sports days; that was my mother’s job.

  They were all here now in their Sunday best, a rogues’ gallery. But it wasn’t the son that you would expect to see standing in the dock. It was the quiet one. The studious one. The university one. The guilty one.

  Be proud of who you are.

  ‘You look nice,’ I’d said earlier when I caught her briefly on the steps outside.

  ‘Me? Oh, I got this in Oxfam,’ Bex said.

  ‘This’ was a dark suit. She’d be able to use it in court for her clients in the future. She’d have to attend hearings and trials over her career as a social worker. She’d already transferred course, to Manchester, taking Tommo with her, a one-bedroom flat in Salford. He was odd-jobbing, aimless, in limbo till this was over.

  We were all in limbo till this was over.

  ‘You look nice too,’ she said.

  ‘Tommo’s dad bought the suit.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Right.’ And then she went on to tell me how she’d come with Tommo, in the back of his father’s car. His father sat up front in the passenger seat, she said. He had a driver, which was frankly ridiculous when there was so much poverty around, she said. At least the driver had a job, she said.

  She made her excuses soon after and I watched her walk away wondering if this might be the last time I saw her.

  As for Tommo, where was he? It wasn’t him in the dock, waiting for sentencing. It was me, Cameron Spark, who’d admitted to being the bad boy, to driving under the influence. Not my illustrious companion, Ptolemy Dulac.

  It was a terrible thing we were doing. Perjury. We could all get sent to prison for that. But we’d agreed; there was no going back. It would work out. I’d get away with a driving ban, a suspended sentence at the very most. I’d been given the best barrister there was. A QC. I was pleading guilty. I had a clean slate. I was a good lad from a good home. I was very sorry for what I had done.

  Only this wasn’t the straightforward swap of identity we thought it was going to be. In the hospital after Tommo’s father left, the policeman came in with his size elevens. And I, in my confusion, in my horror, in my bid to do something heroic, I knew I had to see this through, even though I knew the odds had changed.

  It was over all too quickly. The QC did his bit, said that Christie was recovering well in Canada, that she was adjusting to her new life. The Judge retired to read through the statements and the reports. Tommo and Bex had both written to say that without ‘my’ quick reactions, we could all have died. It was ‘me’ swerving in the nick of time that got us out of the path of the white van. But unfortunately the white van was never found. Unfortunately I was over the limit an
d driving a car without insurance. Unfortunately the Judge wanted to make an example of me. The drink drive campaign was being enforced by the mighty hand of the Law. They were clamping down. Justice would be done.

  Think you can drink and drive? Think again.

  I had to wait down below in the court cell. I had to wait to be called back up. And I had to wait and listen to this old man in red inform me that I had a six-month custodial sentence. I had to go back down to that cell and hear my QC tell me that I’d only have to serve three months if I kept my head down. I had to answer the questions of a probation officer who looked more scared than me. Her one piece of advice: If they offer you food, take it – you might have a long wait else.

  Then I was on my own, no idea what was happening, until they took me away in a windowless van to a hell I had no idea existed.

  There was nothing anyone could have done to avoid an accident. The van was driving right at us. We could have ploughed into it, or we could have swerved. Tommo swerved. Maybe if he’d been sober he would have controlled the swerve. Maybe if Christie had been driving she’d have done better. But it’s highly unlikely. Tommo probably saved our lives.

  Thanks to ‘my’ driving it was a miracle we had all walked away. With the exception of Christie of course. Who was carried away from that dark, wet field, the bottom half of her leg left in Hyper’s crushed Cortina where they’d had to amputate it in order to save her life.

  What had they done with it? What happens to a limb? I still feel sick at the thought of this. Don’t know how Christie could cope. Always wished I could go and see her but I wasn’t allowed. I’d accepted the money from Tommo’s father. I’d given it to Dad to pay off the debts, to stop the bad people from cutting off Andy’s legs. I had to roll with it.

  One act of recklessness, one ill-formed decision, can echo down the years. Boom. Boom. Boom. But how are you to know if that really was the wrong decision? Do you know at the time? Do you know with hindsight? Do you ever know?

  The oven is hot but you touch it anyway. And you get burnt.

  Oh what a tangled web we weave,

  When first we practise to deceive!

  Sir Walter Scott, Marmion

  C/o HM Prison Preston, March 1986

  Time

  I was taken to a holding prison. * I hoped I would be moved on to Scotland, but I wasn’t. It was a different system. I thought I might get taken to a Young Offenders, but I didn’t. There were no spaces. I had to work it out as I went along, watching carefully, listening discreetly, biding my time. I had to act like I knew what I was doing. This was one of the hardest parts to play, being a dyspraxic, nineteen-year-old in a big man’s world.

  I was put into a cell with Stephen, who used to be a vicar till he was unfrocked for robbing a bishop of his silver. He spent most of his time reading the Bible. He wasn’t interested in talking. He would stare at me with blank eyes so I wondered if I was really there or if this was all a nightmare I would wake up from.

  Jeremy says that going to prison is a traumatic ordeal that needs to be dealt with. He says I should write down my memories but believe me when I say I have suppressed most of them. What I do know is that I tried to treat prison like it was a school residential. There were good kids and bad kids. Victims and bullies. Dark and sometimes a glimmer of light.

  But within that structure and rhythm there was an unpredictability. Nothing was quite as you would expect.

  I didn’t expect there to be female officers. I didn’t expect there to be someone like Rose. She was Irish and buxom but you wouldn’t mess with her, the same way you wouldn’t mess with your mum. She worked nights and always made five minutes to check up on me, said I reminded her of her son and I wished I could swap places with him. But I had swapped places with Tommo.

  Rose encouraged me to read. She said I needed to spend my time learning something and you can always learn from books, be it biographies, history, fiction.

  ‘Have you read this, Cameron?’

  She handed me a book. The Diary of a Nobody. I wasn’t sure if she was being funny.

  ‘You remind me a bit of Pooter,’ she said.

  I read the book. Pooter is a prat. He has little self-awareness. Was I really like him?

  ‘Am I really like him?’ I asked her.

  ‘Don’t be offended,’ she said. ‘He’s the sort of bloke you want to gun for.’

  ‘A victim?’

  ‘No, just your average bloke, trying his best but somehow making a cock-up.’

  ‘Is that me?’

  ‘Partly, yes. You’re also part Adrian Mole.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You have a good heart. Love goes a long way to making things better.’

  I wanted her to hug me to her bosom but of course she didn’t. But she gave me a smile and I felt I could do this, one book at a time.

  Don’t get me wrong, prison is not a holiday camp. It is not the army. It is not a school residential. But there are elements the same. The structure, the routine, the sense of having no control over the course of the day. The rules. The rule-breaking. The good kids. The bad kids. Victims and bullies. Dark and sometimes a glimmer of light.

  Years later, I read that Rose had been stabbed by a prisoner. She survived but had to retire early. What sort of man would stab a woman in the back? I wanted to hunt him down. Hunt him down and rip out his heart with my bare hands and feed it to the neighbourhood dogs.

  My first visit was from my dad. He put on that big man brave smile of his and talked nine to the dozen about the outside, which might just as well have been the moon. It was very hard to imagine life going on out there without me but it obviously was.

  ‘You didn’t have to go through with this, son,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure Andy makes it up to you.’

  Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, I got a letter from Andy.

  Dear Cameron

  I hope you are doing okay. I feel awful bad for putting you through this. I’m pretty sure you’ve saved my life. Literally. There are some bad people out there. Which is stupid of me to say because there will be bad people where you are.

  Keep your head down, little brother. You’ll soon be back and I will show you how my life is on track now.

  I have a new job at the brewery. Dad is keeping an eye on me. Tougher than any prison guard!

  Keep smiling. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

  Your favourite brother

  Andy

  He wasn’t my favourite brother. That title goes to Edward despite having to put up with his bad habits in our shared bedroom over the years. I knew Edward the best. I told Dad I didn’t want Edward visiting because I couldn’t bear to see him go away again without me. I couldn’t bear to think that I had to spend night after night with the unfrocked vicar while Edward had to stare at my empty bed. *

  Then it was Tommo’s turn. He looked sheepish as he walked in, treading carefully past the other tables, the tattoos and the vests, the growling voices, the officers standing close by, rigid and vigilant.

  They’ll kill him in prison, Bex had said. And yes, they would certainly have given him a harder time than they gave me. I have the ability to disappear. I have an invisibility cloak as my disguise. I can slip between the cracks, walk through walls. Though I have a tendency to fall over and sprain my ankle, to bash my head against door frames. Half-man-half-ghost. Nurd-boy-turd-boy Cameron Spark.

  As he sat opposite me, a wretched look on his face, a depleted quiff, mascara-less, I felt sorry for him. I felt power course through me. This time I had won.

  And then Bex. She looked less scared than Tommo. More sad than anything else.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Cameron,’ she said.

  I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted to talk to her. But I sat there, arms folded, a man of few words. I made her do all the work, only giving her the odd glib comment. She asked me about a bruise. I said I fell over in the showers. I actually did fall over in the showers. I’m dyspraxic. It’s what I do. I fall over, I t
rip over, I walk into walls.

  I’m not sure she believed me. She knew a thing or two about prisons. But I assured her I was fine. I’d be out in no time. I told her to get on with her new course, to concentrate on her new life, and not worry about me.

  She smiled, relieved. She’d been let off the hook. She left quietly, without fuss, without looking back at me.

  And later, when I poured my heart out to Rose, she hugged me to her bosom.

  _________________________

  *Not Lancaster prison like the Jacobites in 1715, but down the road at Preston.

  *They were all still living at home, my brothers. Edward was just fourteen months older than me. Gavin two years older, and Andy another two. We all left eventually, only now I’m back.

  Edinburgh, December 2013

  Incident

  I was late for work on the day concerned. I’d had an argument with Amanda. The worst we’d ever had. To be fair, we didn’t usually argue. I’d keep quiet, Amanda would sulk and normally by the time we went to bed, we would have made up. Never go to sleep on an argument is what all the relationship advice says. Well, the night before the incident, we turned our backs on each other. Amanda was soon asleep. Either that or she was making a good pretence of being asleep. I lay there in the dark, wide awake, as if I’d had ten espressos with Red Bull chasers. By the time morning came we’d slept through the alarm clock and were grouchy with each other from the off.

  She stamped around the kitchen, banging cupboard doors and clashing plates. I hovered on the edge not sure whether to say anything or keep my silence.

  Finally she shouted at me: ‘WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SO BLOODY QUIET! SPEAK TO ME!’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘It’s not about what I want, is it Cameron. It’s about what you want. And you don’t want a baby, that much is clear.’

  ‘There’s still plenty of time for a baby.’

  ‘You’re forty-seven.’