by Will Self
‘Five hundred and forty, to be precise,’ Estes said with a limp smile, then he unlocked the door to the nonce wing.
Gerry Mahoney came by Danny’s cell to pick him up and take him to the prize giving. He already had Cracknell and Greenslade in tow. All three prisoners had done their best to spruce themselves up for the occasion, and Greenslade had, optimistically, starched creases into his prison-issue denims. The Wing was uncharacteristically busy today, knots of prisoners hung over the railings on the upper landings, and there was a large number of suited men milling around by the POs’ office.
‘Wass goin’ on?’ Danny asked Mahoney.
‘You’re going on – those are all AGs come for the prize giving. You see, the actual cheque will be handed over by Judge Tomy, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, and all the staff here are expecting him to make a speech that isn’t entirely focused on literature.’ The creative-writing class walked to the end of the wing, then began climbing the spiral stairs to the Education Room.
Upstairs the desks and equipment had been tidied away and about forty chairs had been crushed into the room. By the time the four of them had taken their seats, near to the back, the rest were fully occupied. As well as the twenty-odd assistant governors, in regulation middle-management suitings, there were about fifteen uniformed POs and the Governor himself, who was accompanied by a white-haired, elderly man sporting a loud bow tie and a cashmere overcoat.
‘Tomy,’ Mahoney whispered to Danny ‘don’t be fooled by his appearance – he’s one of the most outspoken critics of the Home Office there’s ever been. You wait – he’ll give this lot a lambasting.’
As if prompted by Mahoney, Judge Tomy now stood and took control of the proceedings. He welcomed them all to the Wing and then gave a fifteen-minute speech outlining every single thing that was wrong with the prison administration, from failure fully to end slopping out, to food lacking adequate nutrition. The Governor, the assistant governors and the prison officers all sat tight, sinister smiles on their thinned lips. They could do nothing – Tomy was the Inspector of Prisons, he was merely doing his job.
Cal Devenish, who was sitting beside Judge Tomy at the front of the room, was amazed by the elderly man’s combative vigour. This was an Inspector who took his remit seriously. But Cal was far more concerned about his role in things. It was easy to spot the three men who he’d shortlisted for the Wolfenden Prize – they were the only prisoners in the room, crushed in between the rows of their jailers. The young black prisoner was obviously the writer of the story about the crack dealers. He looked intelligent, but his expression was on the aggressive side of fierce. Cal felt threatened whenever this gaze fell on him.
Next to the black guy sat an amiable-looking, white-haired man in his late fifties. Cal knew better than to be taken in by such superficial considerations, but it was really very hard to conceive of this man as being a serious sex offender. He might have been a flasher of some sort, Cal hypothesised, but not a truly revolting nonce. Anyway, by contrast, the man who was sitting next to him was so obviously the real McCoy that he made everyone else in the room look like Peter Pan by comparison. This individual’s hideous countenance was the fleshly equivalent of a wall in a public urinal, the individual tiles grouted together with shit. He was terrifying. Cal pegged him as the science-fiction satirist.
Danny sat staring at Cal Devenish. So this was the man who was going to decide his fate? This lanky, bearded thing in a black suit, who so resembled a white equivalent of … the Fates. They were back. They lingered in the corners of the room. They hissed and cackled, updating Danny’s doom on this of all days. Danny was paralysed. He looked at the Governor, willing him to look up and see this model prisoner, this aspirant writer so worthy of transfer. The Governor remained staring abstractedly at a broken lampshade which dangled above his head.
Cal Devenish got up to make his speech. He voiced some platitudinous – but for all that heartfelt – observations on the liberating, empowering capabilities of writing, especially for those who’re in jail. Cal was going to analyse the three shortlisted stories in considerable detail, but the nonce revelations had put him off his stride. He confined himself to mentioning the strong points of all three, before concluding limply that ‘Little Pussy’ exhibited all the hallmarks of a compelling moral ironist. Cal had no hesitation therefore in awarding the Wolfenden Prize for Prison Writing to … Philip Greenslade.
Cal Devenish almost gagged when Philip Greenslade was within a few paces of him – the rot of the man’s corrupt soul was that strong-smelling. Cal felt even sicker when he had to shake Greenslade’s hand – it felt like the clamp of a laboratory retort stand, only thinly upholstered with flesh.
‘Thank you so very much.’ Greenslade’s tone was wheedling, despite there being nothing to wheedle. ‘I can’t tell you how much I value your judgement …’ He gripped Cal’s hand a little tighter, and Cal thought he might scream. ‘I so look forward to having a proper discussion with you about literature when all of this is over.’
Cal realised that he’d given the prize to the wrong man – there hadn’t been a particle of ironic distance in ‘Little Pussy’: the author was a psychopath.
The Governor turned to his deputy who was sitting beside him. ‘Is that the Greenslade who’s always petitioning for a transfer to a cat. C? The sickening nonce who did that murder?’
‘Yes, Governor, that’s the man.’
‘Well, since he’s won this bloody prize, let’s use it as an excuse to get shot of the tedious bugger. Prepare the papers for his transfer when we get back to the office.’
Danny was very nearly in tears – he simply couldn’t believe it. How could this twat Devenish have chosen Greenslade’s story over his own, it made no sense at all. The only way Danny could prevent himself from crying out was by staring straight ahead and gripping the back of the chair in front of him as tightly as he could.
Gerry Mahoney tried to bank down Danny’s distress. ‘I’ve no idea what got into Cal Devenish,’ he said. ‘I know him slightly and I’ve always respected his literary judgement. Mind you, if it’s any consolation I’ve heard it rumoured that he has a bit of a drug problem. Perhaps that’s what queered it – he couldn’t cope with the realism in your story …’
But Danny wasn’t in the mood for a post-mortem. He got up and began to shoulder his way to the front of the room. His cell was preferable to this shit hole full of screws. At the door, in his haste to get out, he collided with a tall suit, which turned to reveal that it was owned by the Governor. ‘Sorry, sir,’ Danny muttered.
‘That’s all right – ah! It’s O’Toole, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, well done, O’Toole, it seems you took my advice on committing yourself to a useful course of study. Mr Mahoney tells me you have a genuine talent – see that you cultivate it.’
‘I will, sir.’ The Governor turned to depart, but once he’d gone a couple of paces he turned back to face Danny.
‘And O’Toole.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Better luck next year.’
Conversations with Ord
I was down to one friend, Keith, a former bank robber. We never talked about his bank-robbing days, just as we never discussed the fact that, although he’d long since said he would, he never got round to decorating his flat. A bucket, ladder, roller, tray and drip-stained cans of emulsion had stood in the hall for years, for so long, in fact, that arguably they now constituted the decorative scheme.
There was a dark, unpalatable truth hunched behind the unused decorating gear. Keith’s flat was furnished with what had been the acme of modernity in 1973. An oval glass-topped dining table with steel legs like an inverted coat tree dominated the main room, the six matching high-backed chairs were too scary to sit on. A seating area had been contrived around a vinyl kidney of coffee table, and here a three-seater divan upholstered in vomit-coloured, oatmeal-textured fabric formed a right angle with a two-seater divan upholst
ered in fluffy electric-blue fabric. In the neglected portions of the poorly converted flat – its queered corridors and unnecessary half-landings – yuccas loitered, like the urban cousins of absentee triffids, willing to wound but afraid to strike. In the bathroom dusty, slatted cabinets harboured old liniment and when opened disgorged silvery tongues lumpy with aspirin. I never dared to enter the bedroom.
Keith, presumably, had thought his furniture, when he bought it in the early 1980s, to be amazingly futuristic, quite simply out of this world. And it was out of his world, because he had – as he quietly reminded me when I made some unthinking aside about glam rock, Camden Lock, or Pol Pot – missed the 1970s altogether.
Keith and I had a certain rapport – we were both formidable mnemonists. Keith was the first man I’ve ever been able to play mental Go-Chess with. Mental Go-Chess is a game of my own invention in which, at any point during an orthodox mental-chess game, either opponent can suddenly change the game to Go. Both players must then transform the sixty-four-square internalised chess board into a three-hundred-and-sixty-one-intersection Go board, substitute the appropriate number (ten for a queen, eight for a castle, etc, etc) of Go stones for each of his remaining chess pieces, and then congruently configure them. Obviously, if you were black in the chess game you remain so in the Go game.
Keith was dead good at mental Go-Chess, something I couldn’t help but put down to his many years of solitary confinement.
‘Did you do a lot of systematised abstract thinking and memory exercises when you were in solitary?’ I asked him after he’d beaten me at mental Go-Chess for the third time in succession.
‘No,’ he replied flatly and limped on along Battersea embankment – we invariably played while strolling – a great broken bear of a man, with a full beard and shoulder-length hair. I suspect that Keith thought his coif made him look like a rock star from the unnameable decade, but the truth was that he closely resembled a late-nineteenth-century patriarch, deranged by sexual repression and successful imperialism.
If we were tiring of mental Go-Chess we’d invent imaginary dialogues. One Keith and I particularly liked was entitled ‘Conversations with Ord’. Ord was a general, in his eighties, who had fought in every important campaign of the first fifty years of the twenty-first century. Flamboyant, openly homosexual, violent, brilliant, Ord had something to say about anything and everything. He had invented and then marketed his own range of militaristic skin-care products; he had synthesised all the Eastern martial arts into an exercise regime suitable for the fattest of Western veal calves, then sold millions of DVD manuals. During Ord’s most savage and protracted campaigns he’d hung a sign on the flap of his self-invented, self-erecting tent HQ, which read ‘I am ninety-nine per cent fit, are you?’ His staff officers entirely grasped the meaning of this, and just as they surrendered themselves to his aggressive sexual attentions, so they also recognised his profound asceticism and radical scholarly bent. Ord had translated the Upanishads into the street language of Los Angeles’s black ghettos. He saw himself standing in a long line of learned warriors, stretching back through Wilfred Thesiger, T.E. Lawrence and Count Tolstoy, to Frederick the Great, Akbar, King Alfred and even Marcus Aurelius.
I liked being Ord, but Keith was masterful. When he was being Ord and I played the role of Flambard – his reticent biographer and amanuensis – we could often stay in character as far upriver as Teddington Lock, or as far downriver as the site of the Millennium Dome.
But no matter how far we walked, these lateral journeys were the only relief we ever had from the suffocating confines of South London. Not for Keith and me were the cultured salons of the moneyed and the creative, where the high Regency ceilings opened out into an international atmosphere of sustained invention. Nor did we have access to the roof gardens of the beautiful people, where the platinum-plated pelvises of the rich paraded as purple parakeets trilled, each species mimicking the other.
No, we were confined to the horizontal. Keith and I inhabited a city of dusty parks, 1930s blocks built round scraps of park, 1950s blocks built behind oblong strips of park, and 1960s, ’70s and ’80s blocks built over-toppling, or actually within, parks. Degenerate parks with piddling water features and knock-kneed, demented loggias. Victorian parks, their faded imperial grandeur and once exotic plantations replicating the pattern of shoddy trade with former dominions. In Vauxhall Park – which was particularly favoured by street alcoholics – there was a crappy row of miniature buildings – house, church, cinema – done up crudely but durably with emulsion-slapped-on-concrete. Yet some way into our second season of walks I noticed that these had been subjected to miniature vandalism, the church’s spire bent, the house’s roof bashed in, the cinema’s façade sprayed with a giant graffiti tag. Of course, this was as nothing to Ord, who in 2033 (and again in 2047) had seen the mud flats of the Dhaleswari turn to lava as his jet-helicopter gunships took out the shanty towns of Dacca. Nothing at all.
As for so many others the pretext for our park life was a dog, Dinah, Keith’s shambolic Dalmatian. No one likes to admit that they like London parks pure and simple, so thousands have traditionally relied on a canine alibi. A few even go so far as to have children, in order to justify hanging out by the swings or feeding the ducks. Ord had trenchant things to say on the subject of dogs. His own genetically modified South African Ridgeback-Poodle cross had lived to the age of fifty-seven and reputedly killed as many men. Ord had doted on Robben, and after the hound died he became distinctly cynical about the species, viewing them as little more than effective parasites.
‘Isn’t it bizarre,’ Keith said, in character as Ord, ‘that you two – allegedly intelligent – grown men have gone even further than most dog owners of your era. With no significant livelihood, appreciable interests, or even viable relationships of your own, you’ve become the parasites of this parasitical creature. It would take a complete collapse in the social order to release you from your bondage.’
‘Maybe …’ I acknowledged, then donning Flambard’s mantle I continued, ‘Ord, presumably you’ve been in many war zones where dogs have reverted to their natural savagery, hunting in packs and so forth?’
But cruelly, Ord was not to be drawn. ‘Dog’s done a shit, Flambard,’ he snapped. ‘Best pick it up.’
I gloved my hand in a Salisbury’s bag and did the necessary, smearing runny faeces on the asphalt. What was Keith feeding her on?
‘Perhaps you two should become faggots and hang out at the Hoist,’ Ord sneered. ‘You couldn’t be more ensnared than you are already.’
Bondage of all kinds preoccupied Ord, although he professed to have no taste for it himself. Leaving Vauxhall Park we would pass by the Hoist, a club in the arched arse-end of the battered old railway viaduct. On a couple of occasions we did go in for a drink, and ended up sipping Red Bull and vodka, while watching the sado-masochists assess one another’s heft. Epicene opera critics stood with us at the bar, awaiting the arrival of Jean-Paul Gautier and discussing the novels of Théophile Gautier. But it hardly mattered whether we swung in the Hoist or not, for it was almost always constricted and dark in this city of ours. It made no difference if we trolled around Battersea Park, or ranged along the underside of the Power Station, and the badlands of the Thames littoral, there was no escaping the bondage of our own claustrophobia.
Even in high summer the clear sky seemed particulate, as half-visible droplets of heavy metals drizzled down on us. To walk the dry ski slopes of Lavender Hill was like struggling into unfamiliar underwear. Everything grated. Sometimes, stopping for a meat patty at an Afro-Caribbean takeaway, and feeding a few scraps of virulent yellow pastry to Dinah’s wet black maw, I would despair of myself. Why had I found it necessary to exile so many people I had once been intimate with, to the very periphery of my acquaintance?
To begin with the outer circle had been easy to abandon. A few unanswered phone calls, a flannelled date – not exactly a stand-up but almost – and these seedling friendships would sh
rivel then die. There were more established relationships which had required persistent neglect. It could take as long as nine months of evasions, unspoken intimacies, unshared items of gossip, and unattended parties for these to wither by the roadside of life. But they did, eventually. And then there was the tangle of close connections that had to be actively hacked away at. So it was that I insulted those I had formerly embraced, I traduced those I had once exalted, and I resolutely failed to recognise former lovers in the bakery aisle of Nine Elms Salisbury’s. This went on until the awful ullage had occurred, and all that remained was bitter salt.
It was arrogance, naturally, an arrogance that was so solid within me I could feel it. I actually felt superior to myself – let alone others. I would hunch on the corner of the tilting heap of old mattresses which served me as a bed and pinch the slack flesh on the insides of my knees, whilst muttering, ‘Not good enough … Not good enough …’ like a child who has yet to appreciate the raw vulnerability of his own anatomy. I scrunched up my ears, bending their cartilage until it creaked. I popped my eyelids inside out, and pulled my scrotum up and around until it encased my penis in its hairy basket. On an average morning, as I was actually performing this ritual of superiority, my landlady, Mrs Benson, would call me from downstairs. ‘It’s Keith on the phone for you! He’s wondering whether you’d fancy a walk.’
Ord had uncomfortable observations to make about my new living arrangements, for all that they amused him. ‘Once you had too much space, a large house and an accommodating wife. Now look at you, the lodger of another family!’
I deserved his contempt – when my marriage broke up I rented this attic at the Bensons’, a Tetra-pak of space, close in summer, distant in winter, in which the possessions salvaged from my former life looked like precisely that. As I lay on my springy, sleepy slab, fat-bellied planes wallowed in the muddy cloud overhead, threatening time after time to plop through the skylight. Even Keith was a relief.
