Alphabet (26 page)

Just as he's almost convinced himself, some other part of him thinks: it's different here, isn't it, though? It's something new.
Maybe I've started to move along.

Well you can keep on
moving along
! he tells himself. No problem there! You've got the plan and the tools now, haven't you? You know the books, they're all in the library. You know a bit about yourself, your
id
and your
ego
, your
introversion
,
voyeurism
and
erotophobia
, your
lack of attachment
and
stunted
emotional growth
, your
buried needs for affection and connection
and
desire for total dependence masquerading as the complete opposite
.
You've got a grip on that little lot, haven't you now? So you won't slip back. Actually, you don't need this place. You can work something out. Alan will help and you'll get on just fine that way . . . Plus, if you leave now you won't have to go through that pure bullshit meeting tomorrow, forty cons watching you justify sticking your foot out in front of Nick, yakking on about whether it was
actual violence
or not.

Why let the lying bastard squeeze me out?

Why let him force you to stay?

It's too much. He thinks back again to the phone call, goes over it phrase by phrase, remembers the swooping of her voice, the posh vowels, how she started to sob.

‘It doesn't matter what you choose, just stick with it,' he said to her. So, he tells himself: you, you too, just choose, then get on with it. He looks at the pond, which reflects an evenly grey sky, blank, unhelpful, from which, long weeks ago, the heron descended . . . He can't decide.

‘Got a coin you can toss for me?' he asks officer Derek, who does the job, lifts his hand to reveal: tails. He's going, then.
‘Thanks, mate,' he says. The door closes. A great heaviness falls over him, like a cloak of lead.

‘I'll stay,' he decides.

In the morning thirty-eight men, all the groups in the wing, are crowded into the biggest room.

‘This place is shite,' Nick snarls. ‘It's full of beasts and pillow-biters, drama queens, a real man can't stick it here!'
The test was positive and two others from one of the other small groups have attempted to avoid punishment by admitting in advance of tests to sampling what he had.

‘That test was fixed,' Nick says. ‘People here want me out of the way because I tell it how it is . . .' But he's had his chances and the focus of the meeting has shifted completely. Simon makes an apology for sticking out his foot, and that's that . . .
Nick's gone the next day. It's enough to make you think that some old man in the sky is lending a helping hand, that justice actually exists.

‘You think so?' Ray tells Simon. ‘Don't ever forget, you've made an enemy and until he drives someone to kill him, he's still around. And also, don't ever forget, this place isn't the real world.' That's true, but Simon's on a roll and even forty-five minutes with Mackenzie can't bring him down.

Does he have anything to say about the letters? He most certainly doesn't like them being read, they're personal. What was he trying to achieve when he wrote them? He was trying to have relationships with women. Why did he have to assume an other identity in order to do that? Isn't it obvious? No, he won't spell it out. No, he doesn't intend telling the group about that side of things. Because it's irrelevant. He doesn't do letters any more, it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. He just wants his letters back is all. Why? He just wants to have them. Because they were sent to him. Does he read them often? Never.

‘What do you think will happen if you continue to refuse to co-operate?' Mackenzie asks. The two of them sit for some time in a heavy silence, during which Simon finds himself thinking how Mackenzie just never gives a millimetre and how the only time he has ever given him a straight answer to a straight question was that one time when he said despair was normal. He has never been keen on the man, but now it's getting serious. The feeling of disliking him is like having a burden to carry. A stone, a rock – about the size of a human head. Maybe bigger, even. Its weight surprises him. He has to cart it up here with him every time and sit it on the table between them. Still, it's only once a fortnight and just about another eight minutes to go. He shifts in the chair, drums his fingers on its arm.

‘I do co-operate,' he says. ‘It's just that you and I don't get on.'

‘Think about it,' Mackenzie says. ‘If you were me, what would you do?' So he doesn't. Can't. Won't.

34

‘Let me tell you why this is going to be a waste of time,' Simon tells them all. ‘One, because I know I can stop it any time. Two, I can never feel it as big as it was. Three, we're leaving out the
pain
, for chrissake . . . I blotched it, it
hurt
.' He sits still, but his arms and hands slice the air in sharp gestures, a kind of angry ballet. ‘And – four – this whole thing is sick: who do we think they are, trying to get inside some poor woman's head even when she's dead?' The rest of the group stare back at him, watching as much as listening. He's sitting there in just a pair of boxers, because that's what they agreed. It does make a difference. He can feel the air on his skin and he knows everyone is reading him. Outside, it's a day of spasmodic winds and blustery rain, the bare trees outside whipping in the wind then freezing suddenly still.

‘It's going to be me, not her, isn't it?' he says. ‘Because you can't actually get inside someone, can you? Even if they are there to help. When you communicate, you guess someone is feeling something, you check it out, they come back to you, you listen, et cetera, but with this, it's just going to be fantasy, isn't it? You can't get it right when someone is not there to correct you, when they are
dead
.' His hands meet in front then move apart to suggest a horizontal line. ‘Is that the point? Are you just trying to show me that she's dead? Because I know that already . . . You can't force me to do this.'

‘No,' Grey says, ‘we can't.'

‘So?' Annie asks.

‘I'm scared,' Simon admits, because now, after all this time, he knows where she's coming from when she asks him something like that: it's an invitation. She wants to rebuild
something out of what's been destroyed. It's a huge and probably impossible project, a team effort; it might take more than one generation: that's what she said in her article. ‘What I said is true,' he says, ‘but yes, I'm scared. Bear it in mind, will you?'
He rises suddenly to his feet, carries his chair over to where it is needed.

If Nick hadn't gone, Simon thinks suddenly, sod's law would have put him sitting right in that chair where Ray is right now. A blessing to count, though Ray did ask if he could smoke, so now a thin, blue-grey plume unwinds itself slowly up from Ray's right hand. He's not actually dragging on the thing, it just hangs there between two nicotine-stained fingers. He narrows his eyes as he says:

‘Take those out or get out of here.' Simon steps forward touches Ray's shoulders. Ray exhales, glares at him.

‘Get off !' Ray shouts. ‘Get off !' He does anger well: it's a release for him, he's said, it's a bottomless pit, he can always find more: white-knuckled fists, burning eyes, clenched teeth, tight jaw, the genuine article. With Ray bearing down on you, you wouldn't move to save your life; you'd know it was, basically, over.

‘Now!' Ray yells, as he springs up, his face beaded with sweat. ‘Fall!' he yells. Simon goes down, Ray throws himself back in the chair, gripping its arms, his eyes drilling into the space ahead of him where the TV was. Silence compacts the room. Simon wants to stay where he is, he wants to get out of the rest of it. You were right, Amanda, he thinks, but why did you pick this moment to have it all out and say your piece?

No reply. She did it, is all. He pushes up onto his hands and knees, crawls over to where Ray sits. When Amanda did this, her cheeks and mouth were loose with shock and her eyes would not leave his face, they were huge and dark, hurt one moment, furious the next. Not afraid, though. Proud, in fact.
He forces himself to say her words.

‘I won't lower myself. I won't wear glasses for you when I
don't want to. I've got nice eyes. And if this thing is going nowhere, well, I do get –'

‘Just fuck off out of here, you cunt!' Ray barks, spinning round. But Amanda continued; so must he.

‘I've been out with a bloke from the gym, just a few times – but we haven't done anything, really we haven't . . . I'm just saying this, because I'd much rather it was you, I really would –' Simon reaches his hand out towards Ray. The gesture takes him further than the words: what it is to want someone else to understand, to see who you are.

‘Get off me!'

They're on to the floor, it's slow-mo, symbolic stuff now.
Ray doesn't put weight on him, or hold him down; he has a rubber quoit as a prop, something to grip. Something in Simon gives a sick lurch when he looks up at Ray, whose face is a grid of lines, unseeing, apparently unhearing, who spits his breath in and out between bared and gritted teeth. The sweat runs off him and falls on Simon's chest.

Simon beats his arms and legs on the floor. ‘No! I'm not going to let you! No! Get off. Help! Save me!' he finds himself yelling. ‘Let me go. You don't mean it. It doesn't have to be like this. I'm sorry . . . I love you. Please! I'll do anything, I'll go away please, please –'

No one's coming
, he thinks.

‘Open your eyes, you sick bastard, open them!' he yells. The room swallows the sounds, not the hint of an echo. ‘Help me, someone!'

They were at the extreme ends of the same event. Where their skins touched, it felt opposite. His numb, hers agonised . . . It was the inverse of intimacy. There must have been a moment when she knew it was useless.
This is it
.
No one can
hear
.
I can't win
.
I'm going to die like this
. . .

‘Mum! Help me, Mum!' he shouts. Then he turns his head towards the group, what he can mainly see is boots and trainers, chair legs. The rough carpeting grazes his cheek.

‘I've had enough,' he says. ‘Please, I want to stop.'

Ray climbs off, helps Simon up; they stand apart for a moment.

‘Did I do good?' Ray asks. The scar on his jaw is livid, his eyes glitter still. ‘Did I scare you, eh?' He holds out an arm for Simon to steady himself on as he climbs into his jeans.

‘Well, I'm pretty sure I would have stopped, if she'd said all that!' Simon says as he takes his place in the circle. A few of the others pull quick grins, but Annie's voice is brittle:

‘Since you were asphyxiating her,' she says. ‘She couldn't say anything at all!'

‘Give him a break!' Ray says. It's true that Simon is shaking, vibrating really, especially his legs, if he tries to change their position at all. But all the same, he doesn't want defending, he wants Annie to continue, to bludgeon him (physically even) or failing that with the hardest words she has: as if she could in that way pay him back for the other woman's suffering, imagined, real, both, doubled, it's immaterial. But Annie inclines her head; stops. Her small, bony hands lie upturned in her lap; she won't give him what he wants. Outside, the trees toss and jerk, but in the room, for a moment or two, everyone sits absolutely still.

He knows the whole story of his life has led him to this: a shadowy, concrete bunker of a room, on a winter afternoon, these companions, witnesses, the saintly and the awful alike.
Led is too mild a word. Pursued? Propelled? Driven? In any case it has caught up with him now but instead of frightening him to the death, it has climbed, somehow, inside of him.

He can't say any of this and Annie doesn't make him try.
They shake out their arms and legs. They do breathing exercises. You can hear the tick of the electric clock on the wall, and the wind outside.

35

Simon sits opposite Alan, pushed back in his chair, one foot up on the other knee, head to one side, waiting. He's relaxed, although perhaps there is also a hint of a challenge in his gaze:
Can you believe this
?
Here I am
.

‘Like I said, I've come for your advice.' He gestures at the envelope on the table between them. ‘It's something like myself and Bernadette, but the other way around. I can see how it is for her, and I can see why Bernadette said no. But I don't want to upset her.' Alan unfolds the letter, scans through it, noticing the quality of the paper and the large, confident writing as much as the contents. Of course, everyone on the staff already knows the letter has arrived, and what is in it; Alan already knows what he will offer to do.

Three days later a taxi takes him from the station at York through Walmgate, out of the city for a few minutes, then left through a tangle of residential streets, red brick and old roofing slate, heavy in the rain.

The house is in a cul-de-sac. It's three storeys high, semidetached. There are a few steps up to the door. He pushes the hair back from his face and presses the bell; a tall, elegantly dressed woman in her forties comes almost immediately to the door.

‘Alan Wishart,' he says. ‘Good of you to meet like this.' He sits for a few minutes alone in a high-ceilinged room, painted dove-grey with white mouldings and an enormous intricate ceiling rose.
‘You can imagine!' Jay says, as she puts down the tea-tray.
‘First I discover she is pregnant, and now it seems she's bent on
writing letters to a dangerous criminal . . . Perhaps it's lucky I never had children of my own!'

He returns her smile, fills her in on the letters, Tasmin's lie about her age.

‘The school threw her out,' she tells him in turn. ‘I've had to get a private tutor. She might just get some of her exams in before the due date, if she can concentrate. She's determined to have the baby . . . and I can understand it, actually. Her father won't talk to her. They both work all hours, write me cheques, arrive, depart . . . My sister says she can't cope with her own life – as if this wasn't part of it! I'm getting used to the idea of being a granny for a while,' she tells him. ‘And now that I've met you I can say yes, do please talk to her about this man.
That's her, coming in now.'