Alphabet (15 page)

‘That's why I didn't want to go to fucking Wentham,' he tells her. ‘You.'

‘Well, first, thank you,' she says, simply, standing there in front of him empty-handed, ringless. Then she sits down, leans back in her own chair. ‘You've cleared the air. These kind of circumstances,' she adds, ‘throw up a lot of emotion, but I –'

‘Don't tell me, I know, right!' he cuts in. ‘You're married.'

‘I do have a partner,' she says. ‘We're very happy together.'
The more she says, the stupider he feels. He wants out, is actually making moves to get up from the chair – but the thing is, she knows when to stop or change tack. She's always known that.

‘That must have been difficult to say. But it cleared the air
and stopped us ending up with a crisis . . .' That means she won't be writing him a bad report to go in his file. She won't be claiming he nearly grabbed her, pointing out that she felt threatened and that he is in her opinion still a danger to society, women in particular, et cetera . . . that's what she's telling him: she is giving him the benefit of the doubt.

‘Actually, it was you that saved the day there,' he tells her.

‘Both,' she replies.

He looks at the other stuff she has given him. There is a picture of the place on top of the pile of papers; it looks like low-slung, seventies comprehensive school, with what look like patterned breeze-blocks over the windows rather than bars. Underneath, it says again HMP Wentham Special Unit for Violent Offenders, then a lot of small type.

‘I'll go, then,' he tells her, putting the sheaf of papers down on his lap, letting his eyes settle on her face, noticing all over again the lipstick, the way she looks younger than a few weeks before.
Woman with Good News
, he thinks.

‘I think you should take it away and read through carefully, then talk it through with someone else before you sign the papers,' she's saying. ‘Like my colleague Martin, he's very good. Plus, we have to get the Medical Officer to refer you.'

‘No,' he tells her. ‘It doesn't matter. I've gotta do something, haven't I? I'll sign it now, if you've got a pen.'

She gives him hers, a fancy marble-effect ballpoint with a gold clip, no cap, you have to click it on at the top. He goes over to her desk for something to lean on while he writes. It's at this point that he notices that the cable track leading up to the panic button is not quite long enough: there's a small gap between it and the metal housing and from that, a wire protrudes.

‘It's not properly connected,' he tells her, putting his finger almost on the wire. ‘You must get it fixed!' His name comes out too big for the space and nothing like any signature he's ever done before, but who cares, it's not as if anyone is going to accuse Bernadette Nightingale (her own name, he notices, an even worse scrawl) of forging it.

‘Shake, then,' he says. She doesn't immediately take his hand. Her face looks different again, emptier, as if something private is taking place behind its smoothness. Standing there, hand out, one half of him wants to cry, the other to laugh. Any minute, the crying will win: something to do with being left out. With how very far he is beyond the pale, with the absurdity of it all . . . he tries to somehow freeze his own face.

‘You've done a good job, thanks,' he tells her. She doesn't answer straight away. Just stands there and then suddenly, shockingly, she puts her hands over her face, fingers up, covering her forehead and eyes and presses them in hard – it makes him want to grab hold of her, pull her to him – and then what?
But a second later the hands are back at her side and the old Bernie is back, eyes shining, head cocked just slightly to the left.

‘Simon,' she says, taking his hand, squeezing, letting go. ‘I believe you can make it through . . . And look, you do know you can make another appointment meanwhile, if you want to? I appreciate that right now you probably don't . . .'

By now, he's busy getting out of the door. ‘Cheers!' he calls back at her as he tumbles half blind down the three little steps and waves at the shape of an officer waiting by the wing door, who beckons for him to walk across alone. Well, so long as nothing runs down his cheeks he'll be OK. It's a kind of blind tightrope walk.

‘Tough as old nails, that one,' the man says as he locks the barred door between them. ‘Mind you, she's got to be a lez, hasn't she?'

‘Lunch,' he's told on the wing. ‘Just get it, then get out of my way.' It's good to lie down.

‘Work, Austen,' another screw says, then louder. ‘W-O-R-K.'
He's still lying on the bed without moving. The lunch tray is untouched on the floor beside him . . . because why had she taken off all her rings? he is wondering, did she just get up late, and forget, or what? And what the hell does
partner
mean?
Could the idiot on the gate be right? What was that other ‘good'
news she implied but never told him? Where was she when her face emptied out, and again, just after, when she covered it up?

‘Snowing,' the screw tells him. ‘We need you. Come on, you'll get a coat out of it.'

Since he was last out, the ground has become lighter than the sky. A thin white film has fallen over the yard, begun to melt, then been covered over with fresh fall. He can feel, through the worn soles of his trainers, how treacherous it is. He heaves a sack of salt and grit into the barrow, splits it open and begins, as instructed, with the path from the gatehouse to the Governors' wing, clearing with the shovel first, then scattering a thick layer of the pinkish grey salty grit. He grows hot inside the coat and gloves, wet about the feet; the sky darkens.
Sun
headline, he thinks with the vestige of a grin: Callous Killer Falls for Lesbian PO . . . Bernadette Nightingale, he says to himself, in a different voice entirely. What's happened can't, he senses, be undone. Or
maybe
it could be, if he wanted to undo it badly enough, but that's it: he isn't sure that he does.

The Medical Officer approves. The Governor signs. Dickie Walters tells him he thought he'd never see the back of him, don't come back! He'll be leaving
soon
, though they won't tell him exactly
when
. Then, all of a sudden it's
now
.

Simon does not need a phone call to inform anyone of his moving at short notice. He packs his radio, typewriter, exercise books, yoga pamphlet and the Adidas box into a transparent plastic sack; he gives the end of his shaving foam and toothpaste to Jolly Roger. A couple of officers on the landing wish him the best, some of the men hanging around on the wing say, ‘Cheers.' It feels as if he's leaving the place without a mark behind him and also as if he's already vanishing while he goes through the last motions of his departure, handing in his clothes, signing out his sealed property box. He follows Owens out to a small room and sits, locked there, to wait while Owens smokes and chats outside until they are ready to take him.
Owens doesn't bother with the solid door, just the bars, but
there's nothing but bricks to see from where Simon sits. The barred window, high up, casts a rectangle of dusty white light on the floor near his feet. As well as Owens's cigarette, Simon can smell engine oil and fuel from the vehicle yard beyond the window, and hear, from further away, a radio playing. He can't put a name to the song but it seems familiar, a woman's voice, strong and slow. He closes his eyes and imagines, as per Yoga for Beginners, that his head is painlessly suspended from a silken string that runs through the centre of the top of his skull, what was once the fontanelle, and his spine hangs beneath, the spaces between his vertebrae opening just a paper's width, a crack of light, as gravity pulls them down.

Outside, an engine cuts in then goes off again. Someone says, ‘You must be joking!' Owens laughs, a car door opens and then slams shut. Footsteps. One way or another, I'm moving on, Simon tells himself. But still no one comes to get him and the fact is he's alone in a freezing room and his feet are getting cold. About twenty minutes pass. He thinks of other journeys: in a minibus, handcuffed to a bloke doing cold turkey. In the sweatbox, with its narrow cubicles and the dim light filtering through. He wonders how far he will get before he starts to feel sick. It always happens, something to do with sitting in the back or in the dark and not being able to see where you are going. The first time it happened was in that police van coming down from Whitby, straight after his arrest.
One of them yelled at him when he asked for a stop, and then he had to sit with the windows wide open and his feet in the stuff for nearly two hours.

‘I'm saying nothing!' he told them in London. ‘I'm entitled to a solicitor!'

‘Keep it simple,' the brief said when he arrived at last, a pudgy soft-looking guy with a bag full of plums in his mouth and hair that kept falling in his eyes. ‘She told you she was seeing someone else, then you lost it. That's the important thing here . . . It's easier for people to understand.' Now, he's undone that bit of work and it seems that Bernadette Frigging Florence Nightingale, bless her, has sentenced him to spend
the rest of his life understanding five minutes of the past. Well, cheers, Bernie!

A key chain rattles outside and then Owens steams in.

‘Right then,' he says. ‘Long day ahead of us.' An officer Simon doesn't know comes in behind Owens, locking up behind himself. Simon holds out his arms to be cuffed up, one to each of them. You can do it, he tells himself. Got to:
your bluff's been called and you've got that damn word on you now, haven't you?

They make their way, an awkward threesome, to the cab and civvie driver waiting outside, ease into the back.

At any rate, he reminds himself, as the car door slams and the engine cuts in again, at any rate the chances are I won't be seeing fucking Teverson again! The car does a three-point turn, lurches forwards. It stops at the gatehouse for the final checks: someone opens the door, slams it again, bangs on the side. The inner gate closes behind them, the outer one opens.
Then they're on the road, full speed ahead.

A

21

The door facing Simon is painted bright blue and the burnished aluminium plate fixed to it says Assessment. Just to the right-hand side of it are a tiny speaker and a button. His instructions are to simply press on the button and call out his name: the person inside will then just as simply let him in. Or so he's been told – along with the sudden increase in his freedom of movement, the simplicity of an action like this is both hard to believe in and unsettling if he does give it credence. All the same, there's no point in standing here reading the plate over and over again.

‘Come on in, Simon,' a cheery voice booms out from the intercom as the door unlocks itself. There's a short corridor, more of a hallway, painted yellow and carpeted blue, with a framed print of a vase of angry-looking flowers. The owner of the booming voice pokes his head out from behind one of half a dozen doors. ‘There you are!' he says. The hand he holds out to shake is big and hot, and overall, with his sandy hair and sideburns, his lumbering gait, brown sweater and brown suede shoes, he could be half animal, a bear or a lion, perhaps – at any rate, a creature ill-suited to the once-white lab coat he wears over his other clothes, unbuttoned, crumpled, too small for him. A selection of pens are clipped to the breast pocket. On the other side of the coat a label proclaims that he is Dr Martin Clarke. Simon is going to have a very busy day, he says when the greetings are over.

‘How are you finding it so far? Big adjustment to make, no doubt? Come in here and take a pew . . .' Simon follows Dr Clarke to a large, airy room, furnished with blue easy chairs and a coffee table. There's a strong smell of oranges, as if someone had only minutes ago finished eating one.

‘Everything we're going to do here,' Dr Clarke explains once they are seated, ‘is about gathering information so we can build up a detailed picture . . .' Does Simon, he wants to know, have a good grasp of spoken and written language?
Good. Is he in good health at present? Good. Any sexually transmitted diseases? Good. Not using any drugs?

‘Whenever you feel ready,' he says, ‘pop into the bathroom and do a urine sample in the container there, just for the record . . . Good, good, good . . .' Dr Clarke smiles, rubs his hands together and offers coffee, tea, water, chocolate biscuits.
He goes next door to pour out the coffee, returns with a cup and saucer.

‘And now,' he says, ‘we might as well begin.' He shows Simon a booklet made up of A4 pages ringbound together.
‘This is my baby!' he says. ‘A short questionnaire, nothing to be worried about. No need to think about it too much. Off the top of your head is fine . . .'
Please answer ALL questions
is written on the front,
add any comments in the spaces beneath
. ‘Let's go through it together,' Dr Clarke suggests.

‘Were your parents married? Did they live together?'

‘All that is in my file,' Simon says. ‘I've been over it a hundred times.'

‘Are you married or in a long-term relationship or have you been married or in a long-term relationship in the past?'

‘No. Not really,' Simon says. Amanda probably should not count.

‘Which, if any, of the following are you sexually attracted to?' Dr Martin asks, beaming. ‘You can choose more than one option here, or none. Women, men, both women and men?'

‘Women.'

‘Just women?' Clarke asks, nodding encouragingly.

‘Yes!'

‘Are you additionally attracted to any of the following?'
Dr Clarke pauses, leaving long spaces between the options that follow, as if to allow time for Simon to make up his mind.
‘Female teenagers? Male teenagers? Male children? Female children? Infants of either gender?'

‘What is this?'

‘These questions are designed to cover everything. I have to ask them all . . . do you need me to repeat –'