Alphabet (11 page)

She has Tasmin's letter on her lap, a briefcase to her side, his file on the floor by her feet. Her voice as she greets him is at any rate the same: low, strong, blurred here and there, elsewhere oddly precise.

He stands there, looking: from her neck hangs a heavy silver pendant in a shape like a smoothly melted O; the rings are still on her fingers. She doesn't bother with how he is and so on but he can see her checking him out. ‘Take a seat,' she says. ‘I've tried to make it a bit less formal in here.' He sits in the chair, making sure not to sprawl. All of this, just getting into the room seems to take a long time, as if it was happening underwater.

‘It was painful to read. Very different from the statement you made at the time –' she gestures at the file ‘– but it feels true,' she says.

‘It is,' he says. ‘My brief went for the jealousy angle. From the start, he said it would be easier for people to understand that I flipped and went for her because she was messing me about . . . Then forensics turned up that she'd had it with the gym instructor – it was a gift, my brief said. And maybe I
was
jealous. But it wasn't why . . . It was how you've just read.
Because she wouldn't take out the contact lenses . . . Same result, of course.' He looks straight at her. What he's talking about, what he wrote about, seems almost to belong to another life.

‘What was it like to write this?' she asks.

‘It was OK once I started,' he tells her, jauntily, ‘but hard afterwards. I wouldn't say it has improved my quality of life.'

‘Are you going to write more?' she asks, her head cocked to one side again as she waits for his reply. It's always the left side that she leans to, he notices. The shine of her eyes comes from them being such a very dark brown, and maybe there is some subtle kind of eye shadow on the lids, maybe not. Maybe she's just tired.

‘I don't know,' he says. ‘This was for Tasmin. What would be the point, now?' And for Christ's sake, he thinks, wasn't it enough? Though if she wants it, maybe I . . . then he catches himself: What the hell's going on here? The fact is he wants somehow to keep this thing going, he wants to please her, but that's ridiculous, because what is she going to be thinking when she looks at him? Strangler? Coward? Loser? You Sick Bastard? Nothing at all? He can't know, unless he asks – not even then, and he can't ask . . . But even so, he's smiling.
Why? What possible good is a smile right now? All the same, it uselessly comes and to hide it, he looks down at his hands, the lettering there on his fingers, indelible blue: DUMB CUNT.
I did the thing written down on that paper, he thinks. I did that . . . In the same life, he is now sitting next to Bernadette Nightingale and feeling like he's inside a washing machine, a
cocktail shaker, on one of those rides at the fair . . . What is it about her? He looks across again. Bernadette is not smiling, but her mouth is plump, the corners upturned. Her eyes are still on him, but it doesn't feel like a stare as such, more like warm water pouring over his skin.

‘I feel this is a beginning,' she's saying. ‘You call it the end, but I feel this is really a beginning.' It's a shock to realise she is about to start giving him the exact same kind of jargon that Barry used to offer up and in almost the same words.

‘You do, do you?' he says, the smile obliterated, his voice narrow: stop there. Don't make me go back.

‘Yes,' she says; continues, impervious, her mouth still plump, the corners still upturned, ‘This changes things. It makes the offence seem more complex than before . . .' she pauses, frowning slightly. ‘But
also
–' her face opens, it's like the clouds have suddenly been swept away ‘–
also
it means you can move on. You can begin to feel the consequences of what you did that night. You can start to look at how you came to act that way, and that certainly wasn't an option before you admitted how it actually was . . .'

‘Sounds like that will be one big bundle of fun,' he says.
‘Enjoy it, would you? Like to watch?' This finally brings her up short, but immediately he feels grubby and says, ‘Sorry'. She makes a quick gesture with her hand, so as to push all that aside.

‘I take your point,' she says.
I take your point
– it's as if they're on a serious radio discussion,
Kaleidoscope
or the
PM
pro-gramme or something; it's just as if she expects him to have the same kind of mindset as her, bar a few superficial differences – ‘The thing is, if you don't begin to look at all this, Simon, what then?' The thing is, he thinks, if I do, what are the chances I'll make it through? Life's a gamble, everyone knows that, even him. So far, he feels he has tended not to win . . .
What does she know about all that? Even so, he takes in a breath, lets it straight out. Empty, he tells himself . . . empty.
Then
go
: like making a jump or a catch.

‘You may be right,' he says. He waits to see how having said such a thing feels: OK, good even, except for them being in
this room, with other men's misery stuck to the walls and asbestos beneath the paint and lining paper. A window that opened would be something. Still, you can't have it all and now the smile is back and this time he lets it be.

‘Yes,' Bernadette says, smiling too. She picks up the papers in her lap and looks across at him. ‘I really do think you should keep on doing this.' She removes the paperclip she's put on it, and returns the original copy of Tasmin's letter to him. He puts it on the floor, and leans back in the chair.

‘Unless you want me to, I won't say any more about it right now,' she says, ‘except to make clear how much I admire you for having done this. I do think it is very courageous.'

‘Oh,' he mumbles. ‘Like I said, Tasmin wanted me to.' But her words, the sentence
I admire you
, the adjective
courageous
, sit in the room like some third person who has suddenly arrived by mysterious means. And, just like the typewriter, he never knew before that he wanted them, but now they are here he realises that he always did. Perhaps they too will be a curse as much as a blessing, but there's no point telling himself Fucking likely story! or pointing out that he doesn't deserve such words, because whether he does or not, they've already been snatched up. It's how it must be when a fix goes in: no, he never asked for it, but yes, he could want some more pretty soon and the shock of how it makes him feel means he only half hears Bernadette saying how she has been talking to her line manager.

‘There will be a meeting in the next few weeks to discuss all this and the implications . . . Your new Home Probation Officer should be in touch any day now, but meantime, I'll certainly argue that you should be in a situation more suited to looking at all these issues . . .'
Issues?
Really, this can only be some kind of dream in which he has been turned inside out, become someone else like his former self only in that he is its opposite; whether this is good or bad Simon is not certain, but some time – soon, he supposes – he will wake up.

‘Simon?' she prompts.

‘It's been good talking to you,' he says, twisting across and
offering his hand to shake. I've got to get out of here, he's thinking, as, overcoming her surprise, she grasps the offered right hand, the one with DUMB tattooed on the backs of the fingers, and gets to her feet. Her hand is hot and dry. Her hair is flying out at the edges of its cut. It's like she's two times alive.

‘Same time next week?' he asks. ‘What shall I write about next, then?'

He notices her hands lift themselves, the ringed fingers outspread in front of her – as if to catch something flying towards her.

‘That's up to you,' she says.

17

‘Ice cream?' Bernadette asks, with a short, perplexed laugh. This time she's wearing a soft-looking, maroon sweater and new denim jeans, along with a string of silver-mounted amber beads, earrings to match.

‘I is for ice cream,' he tells her, grinning, ‘which used to be my favourite food. Can't get it here, of course. It's a memory.
Nothing to do with Amanda, I'm trying to steer clear of all that.' She glances at the single spaced page, ICE CREAM in capitals at the top, back at him, down again, as if to make sure nothing is concealed.

‘Go on,' he says, ‘it won't bite.'

Twenty-six years ago, Simon, aged nearly four, is sitting in his pushchair in a park, eating an ice cream cone. It's vanilla.
Next to him, sitting on a wooden bench, is a woman with an almost hollow face, paper-white face, her hair scraped back into a pony tail: Sharon. He's taking his time with the ice cream – he'll be in a hurry later on, but right now it is just beginning to soften, yet still icy cold and perfect. He runs his tongue in careful circles, keeping the mound evenly pointed and smoothly round. He gives himself over to the cold, the sweetness, the way it shocks his tongue alive. Meanwhile, the thin woman stubs out one cigarette, lights another. Her hands are shaking. Her eyes scan the distance; he might as well not be there. He's used to this and doesn't much care, just goes on with the ice cream, sinks his lips down, pulls them up, presses them closed as he gets towards the top of the ice cream hill, twisting the cone, so as to ease off the very tip; he holds that right on the middle of his tongue, until it melts . . .

‘Sharon – this is your mother?' Bernie asks, quickly looks up
– by now, she has had time to really study the file. He nods, smiles: the memory of ice cream came to him clear as day, like some kind of slow-moving movie projected onto the wall of B232, except that he was inside it too, tasting the lost taste of vanilla ice, and feeling the sun on his scabby little knees. Then it was gone and he was remembering it, so he could write it down.

And now, grown into a man, callous killer, cunt, prick, dick head, et cetera, he sits in the poky room haunted by Bernie's almost imperceptible, thoroughly complicated scent. He sits, straight-backed in his chair, hands on knees, watches as she reads these words of his about the vanished past, notices how she swallows a couple of times; thinks how she is perhaps a little older than he first thought, observes that she definitely does wear make-up: mascara, a bit of lipstick just darker than the skin beneath, perhaps other things he's not close enough to see.
He doesn't mind it . . . At one point she frowns a little, then raises her brows as if she were talking to someone rather than just taking in typed words. Later, she smiles . . . It's a three-quarters view. Hanging from the lobe of her left ear is the string of tiny amber beads on their silver pin, absolutely motionless.
If I was an A for artist, Simon thinks, I'd draw this. Woman Reading a Man's Memories. I'd draw it, so I could have her picture on my wall –

Bernie reads how four-year-old Simon was biting neat scallop shapes from the side of the cone, when Sharon suddenly turned and smiled at him as if someone had switched all the lights back on inside. ‘I'll get you another one!' she said, picking up her bag. ‘Wait right here, OK?'

‘And she just never came back . . .' Bernie says, a moment later, putting the paper down in her lap. For a moment, her face has slipped, as if what had happened back then, to someone else, has physically shaken her. He finds himself trying to explain.

‘She got distracted. You've surely seen how it is once someone gets hooked on that stuff? She met someone who had something for her, you see. Probably why we were in the
park in the first place – I don't think she was a fan of fresh air.
So Iris Kingswell collected me from the police station. She was fostering. Monthly visits, I think it was, but Sharon vanished pretty soon after this. Later, after she killed herself, they almost got me adopted, but it didn't work out. Too stroppy. Back to the Kingswells, but she was having the change of life and couldn't cope either. Anyway, this is the last I remember of Sharon –'

‘Your mother,' Bernie says.

‘As for him,' Simon leans back, interlocks his fingers in front of him, turns his hands palm out, stretches. ‘Who knows! Could be some old lag in here, for all I know. Maybe it is. Maybe that's why I've turned out this way . . . Mind you,' he says, leaning forward, ‘I didn't really want that second cone, though double-size to begin with would have been fine! When I was working, I used to have ice cream almost every lunchtime. Sometimes that
was
my lunch: a King Cone or a Choc Ice. Or both. Any kind, really, but those are what I used to like best. I reckon that's the first thing I'll do when I get out. I'll buy an ice cream.'
The phrase ‘when I get out', brings him up short and hangs between them in the room, glittering treacherously with what Bernie might call its ‘implications'. Another thing, Simon thinks in the pause that follows, another thing is that by now, there must be kinds of ice cream he's never even dreamed of.

Bernie puts the typing to one side. She doesn't say anything about ‘abandonment' or ‘issues' or ask him to go into how he felt. Her face has composed itself again, a new picture, could he draw, and she's sitting there waiting, or thinking things over.
It's hard to tell.

‘Not what you expected?' he asks.

‘Well, no!' she says.

‘You did say
anything
. I'm not just what I did that night,' he points out, meaning
I'm not all bad, am I?
and immediately wishes he could press a button, explode himself out of the place. Where's the one-liner that would do that? It won't come, though it would have, without him even asking for it, were he talking to Barry or someone like that.

‘No,' Bernadette says, again, smiling at him, ‘you're not. Of course you're not. I'm sure you have many good qualities.'

Name them
, he thinks at her, but it doesn't have any effect: she leaves him there on his own with this new kind of desperation: it's fucking pathetic, he thinks, wanting something from someone like this, some stupid words – give me my old kind of desperation any time! But the horse-to-be-ridden has galloped away, leaving not even a plume of dust, and he is stranded in this chair, in this flimsy room, with Bernadette Nightingale. Who are you? he thinks at her, half angry, What the hell are you doing here? Where do you live? What roads do you drive in that Ford of yours?