Alphabet (20 page)

‘Well, not really. It does rather defeat the object,' Dr Clarke tells him. ‘We need to monitor and to measure progress.
On the other hand . . . Hmm . . . Perhaps you can give me an account of what you are finding effective?'

‘No,' Simon tells him. ‘I can't. I'm telling you and it's up to you whether you believe me.'

‘Can we work towards disclosure, perhaps in stages?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Perhaps later?' Clarke suggests. Simon shrugs, smiles back, which might just be construed as suggesting the very faintest possibility of a ‘yes'. You have to admire the man for his persistence, he thinks, but at the same time, if I give an inch, they'll be taking a mile, or ten.

‘Aren't you encouraging us to see women as
sex-objects
?' he asks, keeping the smile fresh. ‘Isn't there a danger we're all going to come out of here expecting them to behave like they do in our heads?' and at this, Martin Clarke puts down his pen, leans forwards.

‘Interesting point!' he says. ‘Yes. This is a matter for your group, really, but I can certainly say –' he pauses, to reach over to the side table to switch on the coffee machine ‘– I can certainly say that there was something in those heads already and what we're trying to do is see if it can be improved upon . . . of course, you've still got to learn to take no for an answer. Accepting the other person's will. Negotiation, all that . . .' He rubs his hands together, studies Simon with interest.

‘Also,' Simon says, ‘suppose real life doesn't ever live up to it, have you thought of that?'

‘Do you mean,' Clarke says, ‘that in that case it would be better to have nothing in your head so as to avoid the disappointment? I'm not sure about that.'

‘I don't know,' Simon answers. ‘I was just wondering about it.'

‘Very interesting,' Clarke says. ‘Want a coffee?'

In my case, Simon thinks, perhaps it doesn't matter, because real life is a very, very long way away. And another thing to remember is that even when Bernie is an illusion she is still herself; that's got to be true because just as in real life, he can't push her around. She surprises him and he even likes it.

‘I won't this time, but thanks,' he says, getting to his feet and offering Dr Clarke his hand to shake.

‘Two weeks' time,' Dr Clarke says. ‘We'll discuss all this again.'

26

Detailed case conferences come around once every seven weeks, unless there's an emergency. The staff meet in Mackenzie's office; he gives a draft report then asks for their comments to include. What is said is recorded by the tiny Dictaphone that sits on Mackenzie's desk, then typed up by the secretary and distributed within a week.

‘He finds emotion overwhelming or devastating in its consequences, so he tries to intuit things intellectually. At the same time to erect barriers which save him from fully experiencing them emotionally . . . or sexually,' Mackenzie says. The others consider, grunt, nod their agreement. ‘Subconsciously, even consciously, he believes we want to hurt him or rather, to make him hurt –' Mackenzie pauses, gives a slight smile. ‘Of course, there is a sense in which this is true: insight will inevitably be painful. These intuitions of his are conflated with the hurt he has suffered on his own account in terms of repeated rejection and maternal abandonment. That's the background, I think we're roughly agreed? Well, how do we find Simon here? What's he up to? Martin, would you like to fill the others in on what's been happening?'

‘A slow start, admittedly,' Dr Clarke says, smiling affably round at the rest of them. ‘Yes. Very slow, in fact. We're doing a lot of negotiation and there's something of a stalemate over his homework at present, but frankly it's not a surprise. Not in a case like this. I haven't given up hope. He's very articulate, intelligent. An interesting chap, I find . . .'

‘Annie?'

Annie lights up before she answers; she and Greg both smoke, are constantly fighting it. Staff smoking is always
commented on in the group meetings, so they try to avoid it, then chain-smoke when they can't be seen. Mackenzie, who jogs at lunchtime and doesn't smoke, gets up to open his window.

‘Well, he's definitely the most attractive con we've had in here so far!' Annie says, just to see Mackenzie's jaw drop.
Greg's face relaxes; Martin Clarke laughs aloud. ‘Seriously,' she says, ‘he's coasting along. He'd got a certain distance before he came, but I don't think he's been challenged yet. He likes it here. He's enjoying his editing role. He even got me to agree to write an article for the sodding magazine,' she adds.

‘Really? Perhaps that should have been discussed?' Mackenzie says. ‘What's it about?'

‘Why I've ended up doing this weird job.'

‘So he's looking to see what makes you tick,' says Greg, stretching out, hands behind head, click, click in his neck, ‘that's for sure.'

‘Anything new there?' she says.

‘It could be he's making you undress while he just sits there in his leather armchair and watches,' Mackenzie points out.
‘When did he ask?'

‘After the group, in the corridor.' Annie colours, just a little, frowns. ‘OK. Maybe,' she says. ‘But it's a perfectly reasonable question after all.'

‘Context,' Mackenzie tells her. ‘Go over it, see what comes up.' His tone of voice suggests, without anything being said, that he is speaking not as part of the team, but as line manager.

‘
And why have we ended up doing this weird job
?' Annie asks, rhetorically. They've been over it before. To make a difference and prove that things can be fixed, according to Greg. Out of curiosity, in Mackenzie's case. To be part of the force for good in the world, engaged in the patient work of making something out of the ruins violence leaves behind is Annie's line, or part of it.

‘Some people like to be close to violence without actually getting hurt,' Mackenzie once pointed out to her.

‘Someone has to do it!' Martin Clarke says with a grin and a quick rub of his hands.

‘We're getting off the point,' Mackenzie says. ‘I am certainly finding Austen extremely resistant and highly manipulative.
Still, we know he has opened up before, to the duty probation officer often at his last institution. A very positive transference occurred. Unfortunately, he seems to be building this into a self-defeating mythology about an impossible object.' He smiles, waves one hand airily. ‘Well, time will tell, but we definitely need to keep an eye on him.'

‘I just wish we could have the meetings in the pub,' Greg says, clasping his hands above his head again and stretching his unwieldy body in a huge arc over the chair. It's after five, on a Friday afternoon. Just a few more minutes, and the staff will walk to the car park, climb into their vehicles and drive to their homes, to ordinary, insignificant arguments; children's laughter; the blessed babble of unexamined life.

27

Simon's eyebrows bunch over his eyes, which glint in the shadows beneath. His jaw tightly sprung, he speaks with unnatural clarity and more loudly than usual, as if to a group of deaf people: ‘I am just doing my job! That's why I asked you! There is nothing else to it!' Behind him, pinned to the wall of the group room, is a circular diagram, laminated in plastic and labelled ‘The Wheel'. A circle is divided into segments, coloured so that they fade into each other. ‘Sad', ‘Contemplative', ‘Angry', ‘Motivated', ‘Active', ‘Happy', the labels say. Various arrows suggest connections between the different states. Speech bubbles amplify the connection here and there:
Anger takes me away from my sadness and moves me into
action. Action can create change or reinforce the way things are
. Often, as now, the diagram appears as an absurd kind of halo behind someone's head.

‘You could've asked Greg, couldn't you? Or even Bryan or Dave or Derek here, they work here too,' says Ray. His new jeans are bedded in now and the pony tail is just a memory; he looks almost like some smart-arse superior type on the outside, though the gravel-pit voice gives him away. Nick grins, nods:

‘A woman, see,' he says. ‘A threat, so you've gotta get a handle. Know about her so that you can deal with her, that's what it looks like –'

‘You're on to something, mate,' Steve tells Nick. ‘And it takes one to know one doesn't it?'

‘How are you feeling Simon?' Greg suddenly asks, so Simon spins around and tells him.

‘Like I want to beat the lot of you to a pulp! So would you, mate! I am just trying to do a job. I want to do something
constructive –' It's hard to stay in the chair, which is one of the rules: no violence or threats, no getting out of the chair, no leaving the group . . . Say what you want, but stay in that chair. He grips the edges of it, tries to relax his legs.

‘You've been challenged. You're angry and you want to be violent . . . Let's look at this. What is it like physically, the way you're feeling now?' He glares back at Annie, who sits with her hands in her lap as usual, staring at him.

‘Something wants to burst out of me and I'm having to hold it in, like pulling back some dog, some starved Rottweiler or Razorback or Alsatian, and it takes a lot of strength to keep it back, but also I'd quite like to see it go and I'm thinking –' he jabs his finger in Greg's direction ‘– if you push me one bit further I might just –'

‘Who are you angry at?'

‘You! Her! And you too, mate! The fucking lot of you! This fucking place!'

‘Look,' Pete chips in, ‘it's gotta be your mum, hasn't it?' He's absolutely serious, completely certain he's got it right. ‘Dumped you, didn't she?' There they all are, idiots, remembering what he's told them, mauling it around, drawing half-baked fucking conclusions.

‘Leave it out! She screwed up but she was just a no-hoper from the start. Will you listen to me –'

‘When you get angry enough, Simon, you can kill someone,' Greg says. ‘That's what happened to Amanda. That's why we want to know about you and getting angry . . . That's why we want to know about your feelings for Annie here. We want to find out how they might link up to –'

‘Well both of their names begin with A, don't they?' he says.
She's sitting there still, like a blank page. Oh, how he'd like to make her jump. ‘They're both cunts, aren't they?' he says.
They're all looking at him again, some of their faces have gone limp with shock, the others have tight grins. ‘I've had it. I want out of this nuthouse –' He's on his feet now, looking round at the rest of them, to see who'll stop him if he makes a move.
Everyone's frozen, looking back.

‘Sit down,' Ray says. ‘Get back in that chair, right? We're all in the same boat. Count to ten.'

‘Simon,' Annie says. ‘If you leave your chair without agreement, you will have to leave the programme.' It's a nursery school, that's what it is!

‘I want to leave!' he tells them. Ian left two days ago, refusing to back down. The staff said they had no choice; he said he didn't either.

‘You want to take me to bits,' he yells. ‘Shake it around, throw most of it away, turn me into something else, like there's absolutely no fucking limits, well wouldn't you be angry, mate?' Greg nods, but doesn't reply. There's a silence, broken, eventually by the officer of the day, Bryan Mills.

‘The thing is,' he suggests in a quiet, almost timid voice, ‘when you're a danger to others, the way you are, you can't really complain, can you? I mean, I can see how you feel, but in the end it's just not reasonable to cling to your identity, is it?'
He looks at Simon over the top of his glasses then takes them off and polishes them with a lens cloth.

‘You're admitting it, are you?' Simon barks back at him.

‘Plus, you've got to remember, mate,' says Ray, ‘what's the alternative?' And then all of a sudden the stuffing's gone out of Simon. He reaches back and touches the arm of the chair.
His shirt is wringing wet across the chest and under the arms.
His hair's sticking to his head. His legs are shaking so hard that surely the others can see. But now they're in a group hug, half embrace, half scrum, people saying, ‘Well done, mate.'

‘Well,' Simon says, as the scrum eases apart, ‘I'm a piece of shit, aren't I? Now you all know for sure.' He gives a hard laugh, grins around at them, sits down. Annie says, Good, they have opened up the discussion and she will write the article, but she doesn't appreciate being called a cunt, which suggests that women are no more than their private parts, viewed negatively at that.

‘Sorry,' he tells her. ‘It was a way of trying to cut you down to size.' There's a moment, then, when she drops her guard
and laughs, along with the rest of them at the notion of cutting someone already so small
down to size
.

Afterwards, all he wants is to lie face down in his cream-painted cell, pull the covers over his head and sleep. But once he gets there, even though it's as quiet as it ever gets, with most of the others out on exercise, he can't do it. He's first freezing, then suddenly too hot. His body won't relax. He gets up and walks to the officer station.

‘Can't sleep after all,' he says, declining a cup of tea, and Kevin Wilkes calls for someone to take him to the field. He joins in the end of a game of five-a-side, which doesn't feel exactly good, but it's better than being on his own.

On his return, there's a memo from the Deputy Governor, thanking him for his comments and saying that he is prepared to have the courtyard garden door opened in the afternoons, 2–4.30 p.m. for a trial period of two weeks with immediate effect. Simon goes straight round to test it.

The inner door is clipped back against the wall. The barred door hangs ajar and he pushes it aside, then steps through. He walks several times around the central area, which is paved in some kind of yellow and grey irregular-shaped stone, the same as the fountain is made from. If he peers hard through the vegetation, he can see into his own cell, and the others on that stretch of corridor. No one's in, but they might be. They might be lying on their beds with their eyes closed and their headsets on, or they might be looking right out at him sitting in the garden. Double goldfish bowl. Then again, what in this life here isn't? He stretches out on the wooden bench, which is still in the sun, closes his eyes and listens to the outside sounds, the fuss of the birds in the budding shrubs, the occasional splash of water on the rocks, the tiny breaths of wind that somehow find their way inside . . . It seems like a good place to think of Bernie.