Alphabet (16 page)

‘No,' Simon says. ‘None of them!' He breathes out hard, tries to loosen the muscles in his arms and hands but there's no point, they tighten again straight away.

‘Animals?' Clarke asks. ‘Or any other variety of unusual stimulus?'

‘What the fuck is going on here?' He must have been sent to the wrong place. This can't be what Bernie meant. It can't.

‘Just answer yes or no,' Dr Clarke replies, smoothly. ‘These are only questions, not accusations.'

‘No, then.' Simon tells him. ‘But if this place is full of people who fuck sheep, I'm out.' How, though? How do you get out of here? And how does it look on your records if you do?
Supposing they don't agree to it?

‘Which varieties of the sex act do you enjoy?' Simon gulps down his coffee, it's too hot, and some of it splashes on his shirt. He dabs at the stain with some tissues.

‘Is there much more of this?' he asks.

‘Simon,' Dr Clarke says, ‘you seem very agitated. Would you like to talk about that or would you perhaps prefer to complete the questionnaire on your own?' Well, that one is pretty easy to answer with a yes.

‘No sweat,' the doctor says, a phrase that seems bizarre coming from someone in a white coat obviously educated at a fancy school. ‘Just make sure that at the end of each question, you read carefully where to go next. Give me a shout when you are through, and we'll check it over.' The doctor beams at Simon and ambles to the door, leaving it half way open behind him. Simon goes straight away to close it properly. Then, minutes later, he leaves his chair, opens it again and goes to the bathroom, where there's a Don't Die of Ignorance poster and a wicker basket full of condoms. He does the piss test into the plastic bottle, returns to the huge room, closes the door, sits down again. You don't have to do this, he reminds himself, sitting with the booklet on a clipboard on his knees. But then
again, does he want to bottle out and go straight back to where he's come from? Does he want to tell Bernie he made a mistake? Suppose there's something in it? He sits for some time with his eyes shut, remembering yesterday's orientation talk: a
therapeutic unit
, the new intake were assured by a successful inmate from B wing, is
not
a mental hospital . . .
Tests
are not to catch you out but to obtain information which will be useful to you in your therapy. Some of the assessment will likely seem way out of order, the man said, but think carefully before you overreact . . . Simon breathes deeply a few times, opens his eyes and finds his place in the form.

Which of the varieties
– these are just words, he tells himself, reading through the examples given. He circles female-to-male oral sex, which does interest him and might be OK, and intercourse, both man and woman on top. It doesn't mention
watching
. Next, it asks,
Have you ever paid for sexual services? How
frequently?
The last time is what he remembers, how the girl lay down exactly how he wanted and did what he told her just fine until just before he was finished and then she started to squeeze him with the muscles inside her. ‘What's the matter,' she said as he pulled out of her, too late, yelling. ‘That was your free gift, handsome, why don't you relax!' He didn't go back and he won't be telling Dr Martin's form about that. Well, no harm was done, why should he?

Do you find it hard to talk about sex?
Not easy.

Was sex discussed openly in your family or by adults in the place
where you grew up? Was it ever explained to you at home or at school?
What kind of a joke is that?
At what age would you say you fully
understood sex in terms of what men and women do and how babies are
made?
Three of the girls in Burnside got pregnant while he was there, two had terminations. Maybe there were more of those that he didn't know about.

At what age
, Dr Clarke's baby asks him next,
did you have your
first sexual experience?
What exactly is that supposed to mean?
Simon gets up again and strides straight out to Dr Clarke's office opposite. The door is open, and the noise he can hear is a printer churning out a graph on continuous paper. The office
too smells very strongly of oranges and the doctor, half hidden by an enormous computer screen, is reading a journal called
Research into Deviance
. He looks up, smiling.

‘I was fucked in the arse in the kids' home, right?' Simon tells him. ‘But I didn't like it, it hurt. I did it so that I wouldn't get beaten up. Is that a sexual experience?'

‘I see, well, yes. I think so.'

‘You should make it clearer, right?'

Somewhere between eleven and thirteen
, he writes.

Who did you tell about this?
No one. It wasn't a big deal, it could have been worse: say if it was the staff. The main kid who was doing it got moved on, it faded out.

Pornography?
John Kingswell sometimes left it in the garage.
He'd be about eight. What imagery did it include?
Women's
bodies? Genitals? Heterosexual Intercourse? Coercion, Violence, Sadomasochism?
Lesbian? Homosexual? Other?

Women. Intercourse. Genitals. Women touching themselves. Putting things in. Offering it. Fascination. Fear. Curiosity – how do you get them to . . . He remembers the smell of engine oil.

‘It's John's fault for having this muck in the first place, but if I find you in here again . . .' That's what Iris Kingswell said.

Finally, it's done:
age at time of first wet dream
,
masturbation
,
frequency of
,
duration
,
number of orgasms
,
recurring dreams
,
how do
you rate yourself as a sexual partner
, the lot. He puts the pen in his back pocket, drops the form on Doctor Clarke's desk.

‘Good, good, very good,' the doctor says, wiping his fingers on a tissue. How many oranges can a man eat in one morning?
What kind of job is this man doing?

Back at the reception unit for lunch, they've kept Simon a plate of egg mayonnaise sandwiches because he missed the hot lunch. The food tastes unusually good, but there isn't enough of it. Everyone else is out playing football, but they want him straight back in Assessment after half an hour's break. He does some stretches, jogs on the spot. Well, hopefully, the worst is over.

‘What do you call your penis?' Dr Clarke asks, as they settle down, this time in the office with the printer. Well, Simon thinks, here's a man who's got no small talk.

‘I don't call it anything,' he says. ‘D'you have a name for yours, then?'

‘I mean, which word for it are you most comfortable with?'
The next test, Clarke explains, is a physical one and will take place in the special diagnostic suite at the end of the hallway.
He hands Simon a small piece of rubber tubing, made into a circle, attached to a wire. It's oddly heavy: a mercury filled measuring gauge, Dr Clarke explains, which will sit a third of the way up the penis and is sensitive to increases in girth. It's individually fitted. There is no possibility of electric shock.

‘Once this is fitted, you'll view a variety of slides with sexual content and listen to some audio tape scenarios. The gauge will measure the strength of your response . . . and this information can be used to increase our understanding of your sexual drive in the context of the index offence. We try to make it as relaxing as we can. Any questions?' Yes, lots. Does everyone do this or have they just picked him? Suppose he don't get it up to any of it? Suppose, for some reason, he just reacts to everything? Could you turn out to be some kind of beast without knowing it and what happens if they find out?
Suppose, he thinks, I refuse, what then? He can't get all that out, not even half of it.

‘What happens,' he says, grinning, ‘if I get a hard-on at a picture of a sheep's arse?'

Perhaps Dr Clarke has met this question before; in any case he smiles and says, ‘Ah, yes, that would be very interesting! But of course we are really far more concerned with your response to women . . . Just sign here, to show that the procedure has been explained to you and that you give your consent . . .'

‘Does everyone do this or is it just me?'

‘It's perfectly routine,' Dr Clarke says, holding out the pen.

They walk to the end of the hallway, and enter another room, very warm, windowless, lit only by a standard lamp. Here, the smell is disinfectant. A skinny man comes out from behind a partition, turning on the main light as he does so and revealing that the room is painted baby pink, and that his white coat, in contrast to Dr Clarke's, is crisp and dazzling white. A reclining chair, covered in huge sheets of pale-blue paper towelling, sits on a square of plastic. There's a hand-wash basin, a towel rail, a potted plant.

‘Julian,' says Dr Clarke, ‘this is Simon. Simon, this is Dr Julian Bentley, who will administer the test. I'll leave you to sort things out . . .'

‘Well,' says Julian Bentley, when he returns from closing the door Dr Clarke left ajar, ‘first I do like clients to know how the room works. You can see, here, this is the screen – I'll pull it down. And here, attached to the chair, some headphones, for you to put on when I tell you to. I will be there, behind the partition, with the door closed. You'll notice the ceiling mirror up there, which is angled to allow me to observe your eye movements via the observation panel over there. I will check from time to time that you are actually watching the screen during the presentations . . .

‘Well now . . . what else? The suite is fully insulated against sound. There's a two-way intercom, so you can talk to me if you need to, just your normal pitch of voice will be picked up easily . . . That, there in the partition, is the opening for the projector. OK so far?'

OK? Hardly. It's a kind of nightmare. But at least, Simon tells himself it is not Dr Clarke sitting behind the projectors and eating oranges at the same time. At least this man speaks in a steady, dullish kind of voice and doesn't constantly rub his hands together . . . All the same, he can feel his heart stepping up its beat. Fight or flight . . . He'd like to run away, or smash the place up; he can't. But you can stop this any time, he tells himself, you can. It's hard to believe.

‘OK,' he says.

‘We need to fit you first. It's easiest if you take your jeans and underwear right off and settle yourself there on the recliner. I'll just go and get some gauges . . .'

When he returns, Dr Bentley is wearing white latex gloves.
He puts down a plastic box and a jar of disinfectant, casts a practised glance at Simon's genitals which, despite the warmth of the room, have never seemed smaller. He selects a gauge from the collection in the box, holding it by the wires as he immerses it in the disinfectant and jiggles it around.

‘I like to reassure clients about hygiene!' He blots it dry and passes it over, using a piece of kitchen paper. ‘If you could just . . .' He stares pointedly away for a minute or so. ‘A little lower . . . yes, perfect. You're all set.' He connects the trailing wires, and – at last – turns off the bright overhead lights. The door in the partition closes behind him with a muffled click.

‘Are you comfortable, Simon? Can you say something?'

‘Oranges and lemons,' Simon says. The lights go out. A piece of strange, repetitive string music plays for a minute or two and then fades away. Suddenly, and three-quarters life-size, there's a naked boy maybe twelve years old, with an earring, holding his cock and grinning out of the wall at him: look at what I've got. The boy's face reminds Simon of someone he's met, whether it's the tilt of his head or the glint in his eyes, someone in a café, a playground somewhere – but before the name comes clear the boy vanishes, to be replaced by first a blank screen and near-total darkness than long-haired blonde with huge breasts, one leg raised on a low footstool, fingering herself. Simon studies her, the curves and the pink-nesses of her flesh, the way she's using her fingers. It's quite something – after all this time between pale-grey walls. Then Bentley whisks her away too and the next one has her hair messed up and a black eye, she's bruised all over and tied up, lying on the ground in some dark place, looking up scared – it reminds him all right and it goes on much too long, so he shuts his eyes even though he was told not to and counts to sixty.
When he opens them, he is glad of the naked toddlers splashing at the edge of a municipal paddling pool, who are replaced by a couple fucking on a floor somewhere, him on top, her head thrown back, exposing her throat. Last of all there are two women, fondling each other's breasts and kissing, weird, but –

‘Now please put the earphones on. You are going to listen to some stories,' says the doctor's voice. ‘You can close your eyes now if you want.'

It's over an hour later that the hiss in his ears stops, leaving a shocked silence behind. Simon lies on the recliner, sticky from his eventual success in response to the final request to make himself come, any way that works, because it would be very useful as a benchmark.

He's exhausted, overwhelmed by the fantasy tour, by the plethora of taped voices – who were they all? – soft, harsh, male, female, wheedling, brutal, insinuating, lascivious by turns, who have whispered in his ears describing how he, that is Simon, likes teenage girls at the swimming baths, likes them best all fresh and clean and smooth, just before they turn into women, how he watches one in particular and then waits outside in his car, offers her a lift and then gets her to go down on him, or else how he watches from the garden while a woman slowly undresses in her bedroom with the curtains open. He has listened to a man telling him in a south London accent about sodomy in a men's urinal from the point of view of a boy who just can't get enough of it and he has also been told how he waits for the blonde, grabs hold of her and forces her down to the ground, slaps her face, tears her pants off, turns her over, she's struggling but she can't stop him, she's screaming, you can hear it on the tape, she screams even more when in it goes in her –