by Derek Beaven
Vic laughed.
‘Not up here, I mean.’ The storeman removed the hand and tapped his own head with it. The smells of boot black and turpentine, mothballs and disinfectant grew sharp and distinct in Vic’s nostrils.
The other inmates lacked colour, or shine. They consisted largely of habitual criminals to whom a stretch was just an occupational hazard. It was a holding job, tacitly agreed to by both sides. As a rule, inmates professed to be unmoved by what they’d done.
Hemmings, Vic’s cell mate, had lived a life of cons and fiddles. He’d gambled away the life savings of a score of old ladies on the dogs and horses. He’d had three wives at once. Hemmings had no regrets.
But on hearing the story of his own robbery read out in court, Vic had been struck to the core. The name of the householder, Perlmutter, felt like a millstone about his neck. Mr Perlmutter had been unable to testify in person, owing to internment regulations relating to enemy aliens. Vic’s unwitting contribution to the Reichsführer’s racial effort came all too readily before his eyes and he hated it.
Pentonville had been purpose-built to reform sinners who would previously have been hanged or transported. The original occupants had lived in enlightened solitary. Sensory deprivation would cause their crimes to rise up before their eyes and horrify them into penitence. Their exercise was a speechless trudge in the yard, their association stifled by a full browncloth face mask, to be worn at all times except when actually in the cell or at religious observance. The pews in the chapel were sectioned off, so that each lost soul might hear only the word of God in the preacher’s mouth, and never see his fellow.
That regime had long ago fallen into disuse. Vic was given another gas mask, and occasionally made to wear it; but the old Benthamite rationale, the full-blown Christianity of producing model prisoners – that vision was long gone. Lags doing time were generally law-abiding and well enough behaved, and if they weren’t they got six of the cat. Hardly any of them screamed in the night.
Only the hard shell of the original design remained. There were four radiating wings, great brick blades of the old psychological turbine, jointed into the main block, itself the size of a mill. Around the whole, there ran a curtain wall. On the other side of this was Islington, right up close. The tops of buses slid by amid audible street noise, and, in the upper windows of shops, citizens dressed or dusted, enacting the fragments of their ordinary lives.
The inmates learnt not to look. When they were in the yards each concentrated on his sentence. But Vic found the outdoor exercise as soul-destroying as his labour was heartbreaking. By day until teatime he sewed mailbags, sitting on the communal benches. He did his turn – until his hands became as blistered and raw as the next man’s.
A nagging infection in his index finger led to his transfer to different work. He was moved to a little shop down in D Wing where they made the cats and birches ordered by the prison service as a whole; for it was Pentonville that supplied the nation’s deterrence. Clinks, cop shops, and other establishments were all equipped from the single source. Vic learnt the packing of twigs for effective scarring, and the tight knotting of ropes.
Occasionally, in the early months, the craftsmanship of making whips took his mind from despair. Sometimes it was almost soothing to handle the materials, to see, in a shaft of sunlight, ends neatly trimmed, handles turned off and sanded down. It reminded him of the boatyard. That routine and somewhat despised part of his life came often to mind, when it had been up to him to make good the damage to a swim bow, to reset the sprung timbers of a flat bilge, to judge by eye the set of a sternpost – once upon a time. He’d been a man to choose just the right piece of seasoned elm for the crook of a knee. He would rough-saw the piece across the scarred trestles and then clamp it up in the vice to be planed and shaved. There’d be an apprentice with him, looking on, learning his trade down to the smallest detail.
It was an old, unlettered tradition. Vic had once presumed to think of grander vessels; now a host of circumstances cried fool to that. He wondered what it was that had cut him off from his class. He’d sought to replace the manual world he came from with the intellectual – and with Clarice.
Vic was permitted one visit per month, and one letter. In July, his parents came. It was a shock to see them. The last time had been in court, where they’d sat next to Tony and Phyllis. There, the faces had been only partially distinct, up in the public gallery. The little group were remote signifiers of all he’d once known and held dear. Opposite him now, across the table in the prison’s visiting hall, his mum and dad seemed closer up than they’d ever been. But their nearness rendered them unfamiliar. His mother’s dusted skin was lined, beginning to bag under the eyes. She wore a hat he’d never seen, fastened with pins. Her brown jacket had a hole in the lapel. There was disapproval in her features – in her mouth and folded lips. Her nose jutted, reddening, from a bony ridge between her hazel eyes. Her face seemed to accuse him.
It was his father who spoke, however. ‘Yes. Well. You’ve done it now, haven’t you.’
Vic turned to him. Grey had taken his old man. The temples had greyed, the brow had fallen back, greying, the flesh, the moustache, the breath, the collarless shirt, the nondescript jacket, all told not so much of getting on a bit, but of a grey, violated lung that seemed finally to have risen up and declared itself. His father was a ghost. Only the eyes struck out at him. They were wide, pale blue, and panic-stricken.
‘It’s all right, Dad. I know it’s a mess. But it’s my mess. I’ll clear it up.’
‘Clear it up, will you? What about your wife? Your child? You’re a grown-up. You’ve got responsibilities.’
‘I said. I’ll deal with it.’
‘How will you? Eh? How do you propose to do that, in here? What’s Phyllis supposed to do, I’d like to know.’ He gestured with his hands.
Vic was rattled. ‘Dad. Let me do the worrying, will you? I did something stupid and wrong. Now let me try to make up for it. You’re angry. All right, you’re furious. That’s fair enough. I deserve it. And I’ve let everyone down. But what I can’t understand is that you should be frightened.’
‘Who are you calling frightened? Me? Is he looking at me?’ He turned to his wife.
‘No one’s looking at you, Perce.’ She glared at her son. ‘Now listen, Vic. I don’t want you making your father ill. Do you understand me? I should think you’ve done enough, haven’t you? I should think you’re proud of yourself, this time.’
‘This time,’ said his father, the gas voice bubbling at the back of his throat. ‘It’s been the same all along, hasn’t it? Look where he’s ended up. It’s gone too far, this.’ He gestured once more, around at the prison. ‘Too far, I say. D’you hear me, son? Eh? You want to get some backbone in you … you know? Before you … before …’
Vic stared at the spectacle of his father’s distress. ‘Before what, Dad?’
‘Before it’s too damn late. That’s all. That’s all I’ve got to say to you, Victor.’
‘I shouldn’t think it could get much later than this, Dad.’
His mother cut in. ‘I think we’ve had quite sufficient of smart answers.’
‘Now you listen, boy. There’s nothing the matter with you even now that a damn good hiding wouldn’t put right. You’ve brought disgrace …’ The words grated, dried. Percy was breathless and beside himself.
Vic’s mother lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Look what you’ve done! Now look! We can’t stay.’ Immediately she stood up and began to lead her husband away, as he hawked and struggled for air. His father turned back, gesticulating, but his lungs overcame him.
As Vic had grown up in the sooty terraced house in East Ham, not far from the old Jews’ cemetery and within smelling distance of the Beckton Levels, two great things about his father had struck him – that the man hadn’t got killed on the Western Front, and that he hadn’t cracked up. Back then, if his hero father had grown increasingly hard to admire, Vic had felt sorry, and a littl
e ashamed. Now, he was saddened by the scale of his parents’ outrage. It seemed he’d brought them nothing but anxiety.
Everyone in the room watched them leave. In paroxysms of coughing his father was shuffled out through the barred door between uniformed guards; and that was the last he saw of them.
Back at his workbench he regretted locking horns. He thought again of the little house out at Laindon, which, if it came to it, would still offer his wife and child a refuge from dive-bombers or phosgene; the crazy little house he’d been building like his father before him with his sweat and strong arms these last years. And Clarice? Within the scrubbed and Brassoed galleries, with their stinks and slops and bad food, he tried to hold on to her.
MY FATHER’S MADNESS was only waiting to show itself. Imagine the hermit crab caught naked on the seabed, stalk-eyed for predators. That was Vic. Madness is a soft fool on the look-out for a hard home.
A sea shell ossifies its own history. That’s character. The poor little crab scuttles into its new-old container and is amazed every time at the idea of inner houses, chamber after chamber. Here’s a labyrinth that winds in on itself, a tantalising, mathematical design – and that’s the danger. For Vic, prison was character. Gritting his teeth, he tried so hard to make himself at home in it. And who’d begrudge the refuge – if the invader comes?
Vic’s cell mate, Hemmings, spent his spare time masturbating, or telling music-hall jokes. The man fancied himself a comedian, and was going to tread the boards, when he got out. ‘A lot of opportunities, moving about like that. Different towns, a lot of different suckers, women.’
Another prisoner, Sevenbanks, appeared like a poisonous bêche-de-mer dredged up from the river and dumped on the wharfside. Sevenbanks kept his back bent, and may have been weeping, much of the time, for whenever he did look up water oozed from his face. A former steam-crane operator, Sevenbanks spoke in short breathy statements, of drink, of tobacco, of weapons. There’d been a woman he’d pursued jealously in a stolen van. ‘I fucking loved that bitch.’ He hit the back of his free hand against an edge of bricks, and examined it. Blood started to seep from the cuts. He looked up. His other hand sheltered the butt-end of his cigarette. Between thumb and forefinger he fed it to his lips, sucked, and exhaled. ‘Understand what I’m saying? She deserved all she got.’ His pocked, murderer’s face was the mask of madness and grief. Vic persisted with him – in recoil from the barrenness of Hemmings.
He was so lonely that the friendship lasted several weeks. Sevenbanks in the yard craved neat spirit. Over again in a voice choked with intensity, he spoke of the hunting knife he’d owned. How he’d fucking loved that bitch. Vic, too, waited for a visit from Phyllis that never came. But the man’s mind was impenetrable; all their dialogue was confusion. It was suddenly Vic’s task to keep violence from bursting out. ‘See that screw over there?’ Sevenbanks pointed towards the officer on duty. ‘Look out for me, will you? That’s the one who’s trying to wind me up. I can’t guarantee that fucker’s safety.’
‘Look out for you?’
‘He’s mine. You’re mine. If you open your mouth you’re fucking Smithfield, mate. I fucking loved her.’
Eventually, Vic broke away. But of all the shells he’d tried crawling into Pentonville was his hardest yet. The trusty had been right – he wasn’t built for it. Soon he plunged like a burning soul in the darkness, and any link with Clarice was stretched to breaking point. He felt as though some parachute had failed to open, as though a vortex had caught him in its winds and the beauty of the entire night sky was squeezed into a retreating circle high above. Pentonville drove him in on himself, which was just what it had been designed to do. Among all that criminal congregation Vic’s past alone rose up guiltily before his eyes, until he became walled off and quite blank to other people. But the more the crab huddles into its perfect form, the more perfect, and heartbreaking, the craziness.
My poor father grew quite certain that all his science had come true, and had turned against the world. Only nature’s laws were being enacted – simple thermodynamics. The human body was a mere heat engine to be driven and then scrapped; a Nazi victory was guaranteed by the same equations he’d studied on his way to marine engineering. No atom could subsist; even the laws of motion had unravelled. It was inside him, this legend of disaster. He’d embraced it just as he’d embraced Phyllis, and both had seized on him, turned him robber and looter. They’d shipped him here to Pentonville, and were preparing to destroy him. He longed to pre-empt them. The flesh itself, the strength of his own body, was a prison.
Vic’s spiritual collapse was a physical sensation, literally crushing. As he exercised with his fellow gaolbirds in the wedge-shaped yard, the weight of the whole building, part cathedral, part warehouse, part factory, seemed to tower over him, and he longed for it to fall. He became a prey to extreme gravity, whose force bore him downwards, ever downwards, and a voice whispered, ‘Find a way, think of a way. Then you’ll be free of me. It’s what you want. If you won’t do it, I will’ – as if prison weren’t sufficient payment, as if the governor, with his whips and chains, could not lay on tyrannically enough.
Though he was suicidal my father hung on. In the inmost chambers of the shell, the borderland, character turns madness into dreams. One night Vic dreamt he and Clarice walked beside a river. The scene was oppressed and monochromatic, the path overgrown. Then, in the far distance appeared a green field, unreachable, smaller than a postage stamp. Its colour was startling, its mood was joy. He was aware of her closeness, her naked breast just resting in the palm of his hand.
After that he followed his dreams in a knowing trance. He’d stalk and catch them. With the stub of a pencil in a schoolroom exercise book he scribbled his dreams down; and began to uncover the mechanics of illusion, the recurring motifs, the coy puns and tricks, the symbols and displacements by which coincidence meets design. In the midst of despair he became fascinated with despair’s by-products.
Immediately, time vanished. The war didn’t matter; there were always planes overhead. The attacks on the airfields – what were they to him? He held the key. His own mind grew so absorbing that he spoke only when he had to, and spurned even the dangerous Sevenbanks.
He learnt to write in the dark. An extraordinary corpus began to accumulate in his notebooks. That is how I know him. There were visions in which he flew high and effortless over the exploding cities of Europe. He saw encrusted flowers, and glittering, transcendent souls. Trees and animals told him their languages. Polish prisoners confessed their torture, spoke of suffocation and of the fires he’d started, of meals with his parents in which his own poor dad returned full of bullet holes and spoke too calmly of the trenches. There were prophetic dreams, so that Vic set down moment for moment some trivial episode which would come to pass in the yard the following day. There was his wife, in various shapes, and Clarice. Clarice alone could save him, if he could prove his worth. Savages danced. They were sacrificing animals and she was not Clarice at all, never had been, but Phyllis and all women were the same. His morale failed. For behind her was always Jack, calling out. And Vic could never reach him. No one in the prison knew or guessed what inward visitings Vic’s firm-set, good-natured features concealed.
Nightmares began. The earth split and roared under his feet. He was pursued with flames by hooded figures, by secret police. Now it was him with a stick beating her and the boy to death. A body was buried; his grandmother was hanging.
Still he continued, dashing himself into the abyss. Ever further behind his own frontal bones, he was gripped by the shadow play inside his skull that made the faces of his fellow prisoners disappear. Some great revelation was on the point of bursting through. The antidote to suicide, a kind of satisfaction – of madness intermixed with one spark of grace – preoccupied him. Nothing could touch him. He lay where he belonged, beyond bombs or morality, winding his wit and intelligence into the terrible freedom of the night. Once, he dreamt of the stigmata: Christ’s blood strea
med from his palm. It was a triumph, of sorts.
THE SUMMER FLOWERED around Clarice. Suspended, it pollinated and burst. The streaked grass bleached to straw; empty seed heads rattled. There were giant thunderstorms, and then the corn leapt, and hedgerows rioted; but there were also mornings overcast and shorn as the hayfields, and the pinprick raids lulled folk to believe the enemy was a familiar.
Clarice heard the attack on Ipswich. The Harwich guns opened up at last. But every time she took Martin out with Bea and the mare, clouds of moths and butterflies wafted up in front of her, the ground chirred, the sky chattered and sang. She hardly dared breathe; only she must continue doing exactly what she was, not varying the least detail, keeping vigil with insouciance, lest the motion jar.
Her father’s pledge held, too, despite his tremors, and July slipped away – a month, a whole month. There was even a peace offer from Berlin. No one cared, no one noticed, so rapt the mood, so fast the resolution. The charm, it seemed, was universal.
In the second week of August, Bea Bligh discovered she was pregnant. She was forbidden categorically to ride. Clarice was distraught.
‘Why not? Why not? It’s nothing yet. No bigger than a bug.’ The tension broke and she was quick with emotion. ‘He has no right. Don’t you see? No right at all.’ She saw herself strewn on the Pin Mill road, neatly punctured with a small red hole in the centre of her chest. She wore a white blouse and her wrap-around grey skirt. In her hand was the four-ten, its one shot discharged too late into the face of the stormtrooper. On her feet were tennis shoes.
Bea was angry with her. ‘Actually, it was my doctor. He says it would be a risk. It makes a difference, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, of course it does. It changes everything. I was being selfish, that’s all. I really am sorry, Bea.’
‘You can still go out.’
‘What?’
