Alphabet (37 page)

It's word-processed and printed out on a dot matrix printer. The first thing about it is that he knows what it must have cost her to do, to pick these words and type them out, read them back to herself, decide. The second and by far the worst thing about the letter is its gentleness and the chatty, informal way Hazel expresses herself, which somehow puts Simon in mind of Amanda. Even a remark as to how once Hazel wanted nothing more than for Simon to die in pain too and even now, she would tear him to bits herself, if she thought it would do any good – even that is expressed as if she were talking to another bit of him, which would understand.

You remember my husband Tom? He always said it was a fault of mine, to want to see the best in everyone. But it was more than just seeing the best. Terrible as it is to admit now, Simon, I liked you. I thought you two would make a go of it and I was happy for her. That's the truth. Ever since, I have had to ask myself what was wrong with me that I didn't see, that I encouraged her in this, had no suspicions, no idea, failed her . . .

Then there are questions she wants answers to. A list of them. And finally, a request to meet him.

I used to think that if I had magic powers I'd use them to bring Mandy back to life or else, second best, just to wipe out her pain at the end of it . . . But seeing as neither of those has been given to me, if I could choose to talk to someone about all this, someone who might answer my questions, then it would be you.

‘Read it as many times as you want,' Alan says.
Want
? ‘Take time to think about whether you can make a response at all, and if so, what form it might take.

‘Hazel knows there is no structure for this, that it will drag on and could come to nothing,' Alan says. ‘It's important that you consider yourself here, Simon.'

He calls Charlotte straight afterwards, feeling faint from the shock of it. He's glad to be able to hear her stirring sweetener into her tea, her radio muttering in the background.

‘Why on earth would she want to meet you? What could the point of it be?' Charlotte says, ‘What bad timing.'

‘I'm not sure. Her husband died recently.'

‘Don't!' she tells him. ‘They shouldn't even put you in this position! It's already messing you up, I can hear it in your voice.'

Hazel, he explains, used to kiss Amanda goodbye, put her hand on Simon's shoulder as they went out of the door. ‘Have a good time.' She used to offer him tea and cake, while Amanda finished getting ready upstairs. She was always trying to get him to call her Hazel, not Mrs Brooks. She was like an older, plumper Amanda to look at, but socially the opposite. Not a bit shy. Once, he bought an offcut from work, and carpeted the bathroom for her.

‘That was you, then,' Charlotte tells him. ‘You are a different Simon now.'

He's older, for sure. He's thirty-four next birthday and has been serving his sentence for twelve years and six months, plus the nine months four days on remand, which makes thirteen years and three months, give or take, since he killed Amanda. Outside, Thatcher's finally gone. He learned the alphabet. Now he's started a Social Science degree. As for relationships, he started out pretending to be someone else, was beaten at his own game by Tasmin, fell for Bernadette. Now he has an extraordinary visitor who tells him he is attractive and makes jokes about waiting for him: he has learned some things, you can say that, but nothing that's any use in dealing with the contents of Hazel's letter or the request she makes at the end of it.

Can he just put it on hold? Can he say that he can't think about it properly right now because he has to finish an essay? It's going to be assessed and he needs to do a good job. And also he is feeling stressed because Charlotte is infatuated with Kevin, a photographer she linked up with in some kind of club, and she insists on bringing him for a visit.

Kevin has longish, unmoving wavy hair and beady, reptilian eyes, he sits with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket and mutters about what a wonderful subject Charlotte is and how he would love to take Simon's photograph too, if it could somehow be arranged. A double portrait, perhaps . . . It's a real effort not to yell at Kevin to go fuck himself but Simon manages to just look through him, as if he hadn't spoken.

‘Why are you always so uptight?' Charlotte asks.

‘Look,' he tells her, ‘just come on your own from now on, will you?'

44

He's the last one in. They do the air-kissing thing; mechanically, he notices a new hair ornament, the smells of warm skin, foundation and face powder, perfume.

‘Hi, there,' Charlotte says as they slip into their chairs. ‘I was just thinking you were going to stand me up!' He tries a smile, doesn't do well.

‘The drive?' he asks.

‘So-so,' she says, pushing some stray hairs behind her ears. ‘I got off early, but you just can't beat the traffic on the M25 . . .'

‘You're not listening,' she tells him a while later. ‘I'm not going to talk if you're not listening.'

Actually, he can hear what she is saying perfectly well: she's had a bad week, scraped the car, and she's really had it with Tony at work . . . But at the same time, he can more or less hear Hazel's voice, speaking the words she wrote over two months ago now. Mandy was such a lovely girl, she tells him, and if he didn't love her, then why did he not leave her to find someone else? Why did he have to make her suffer? It breaks her heart, Hazel says, to know that Mandy was alone with her fear, her body closing down on her.

‘What's going on?' Charlotte asks.

‘The letter,' he tells her. ‘I think about it more and more.'

‘I wish you hadn't read it,' Charlotte says.

‘I had to,' he says, shrugging. It's true, though, that at the same time, he too wishes that he had not. Could forget it. Could unread.

‘Now,' Charlotte says, ‘I imagine you are feeling: how can you not meet her?' He shrugs, nods: yes, that's it, more or less.

‘Think this through,' Charlotte tells him. ‘Do you want to show her how sorry you are?' she asks. ‘To apologise?'

‘Apologise?' He spits the word straight back at her. Apologise? Get out his remorse like it's a pet mouse he keeps in his pocket? ‘I'd be embarrassed to apologise,' he tells her. ‘It's not like he farted during dinner or dropped her best plate. Sorry, Hazel, I wish I hadn't . . .' How wrong can you be? His eyes bore into Charlotte across the table, but she ignores it, continues as if she has a list to get through.

‘Are you hoping that Hazel might forgive you?'

‘Why the hell should she?' Isn't it more likely that she'll hate him even more for what he did? And as for whether he is hoping to feel less guilty afterwards, that too is more likely to be the exact opposite, isn't it? So, what is this?

‘Do you,' he asks, ‘enjoy playing shrink?'

‘Hey, back down,' Charlotte tells him. ‘I'm only trying to understand what's in it for you.' Her huge eyes, shadowed in complex variations of pewter and plum, go momentarily hard.

‘Sorry,' he says. ‘I don't know what's in it for me.' It's unreal. Too real.

Charlotte has taken his hand in hers. She's rubbing the back of it, over and over the same place. At first he's so remote from her, from the room even, that he can't actually feel it, and then, suddenly, it irritates him. He puts his other hand on top to still the movement, then takes them both back.

‘Are you expecting to feel better afterwards?' Charlotte's voice is low. ‘I mean, when this woman whose daughter you murdered sits with you in a room and tells you how it's been for her, are you going to feel better or worse?'

There's a long silence between them. He is aware of her still looking at him, of his hands, of the pattern on the table and the muddle of voices in the room, the smells of smoke and perfume. A baby sitting on its dad's lap two tables away is crying, outraged. You can see the mother wants it back, but he keeps holding on, trying this and that. Some other kids are playing with toy cars on the mats in the corner.

He is aware that he has, at last, decided to say ‘yes' to Hazel's request and that the reason is not just guilt, though it's there, of course. It's something to do with knowing that where it went wrong was the lenses; that when Amanda stood there in front of him ‘yes' or even ‘maybe' would have saved them both.

‘There would be counselling before,' he tells Charlotte. ‘There'd be other people there,' he tells her, ‘to mediate. If it did something for her,' he says, ‘if she got something off her chest, then it might make me feel a bit better.' There's something wrong with this, he knows, but he can't put his finger on it.

‘She might feel a whole lot worse,' Charlotte says, her voice still low, her face set. ‘As for what you told me before, about how she feels she should have known and been able to stop it, she doesn't need
you
to say she couldn't have. Anyone can tell her that . . . What bothers me is that if you do this it could set you right back and who knows where you'll end up. Then at the end of it, you'll still have your hoop to jump through, they've told you that. Simon, don't. Say no.'

Next to them, the man reluctantly gives the baby back to its mother and immediately, the crying stops.

‘Don't you want to get out?' Charlotte asks. She just doesn't understand! ‘You know you could get out of here, live a life, if you put yourself to it. It drives me mad,' she tells him. ‘You don't seem to want to!' Simon glares at her across the table, aware suddenly of all her imperfections, the strong jaw, the over-use of make-up, especially blusher on the cheekbones, to distract from it; the skin-tight tops; the whole me-first way of thinking and the way she assumes she can have a valid opinion about anything when the fact is she herself is a total mess anyway.

‘You don't know what you're talking about!' he tells her. More than anything, he'd like to go back to his cell and lie down. But she's not having it:

‘No?' she comes back at him. ‘I haven't killed anyone, if that's what you mean, but I have been alive for twenty-nine years and I can tell you, this is not something you can make better.' She just doesn't know when to stop and that is a thing about women, they just never seem to know when to stop. Who the hell do you think you are? he thinks. How dare
you
tell
me
–

‘You're alive, aren't you?' she's saying. ‘You can fill your life with something else,
as well
, can't you?' You stupid cunt, he's thinking, what's it to you? His hands are fisted and he's going to stop this right now.

‘Listen –' he barks at her. But still Charlotte doesn't stop; she puts both her perfectly manicured hands flat on the table, leans forward a little.

‘No,' she says, ‘you listen to
me
, Simon Austen. I can tell you for free that the interesting thing isn't what you did but what you do
next
.'

‘I – don't – know –' he belts the words out one at a time, so loud that his face and throat hurt, likewise, differently, his balled hands and rigid shoulders. ‘I – don't – know – what – I – do – next!' The room empties of sound. Two officers descend on them.

‘Sorry,' Charlotte tries, faking a smile even though she is swallowing back tears. ‘It's all right really. Please.' It doesn't work, of course, and Simon is glad to stand up and be taken away. Glad? Well, he needs the movement but not the glimpse of her he has, still at the table by the window, a broad-shouldered blonde, head in hands, sobbing while an officer waits awkwardly near by.

In the cell, he punches the wall. The walls are well used to such attacks, were built with them in mind. They don't care. He punches the wall again. Pain shoots down his arm. The room has never seemed so small. When the hand won't take any more, he sits down, breathing hard.

Charlotte! How come he's let himself come to be mixed up with a disaster zone like her, set himself up for all this extra grief? Didn't he always know that visits were more trouble than they were worth? How is it she can't see how awful she's being? Why doesn't she understand that she can't know about this? That she should back him up, or keep right out of it. Can't she see how she is just making it worse, putting more pressure on when he is already feeling like he could burst into a million pieces? Why is she letting him down, now, of all times? It's never going to be the same for him as it is for anyone else – why can't she see it? What he did is never going to go away. He can't have a fucking operation, right?

Blood oozes from the chipped knuckles on his hand. They're swelling up. He's got to get all this over to her, he thinks. How things are. That living includes this. You go along nicely and then wham. It's part of him. She's just got to accept it.

He lies down. Closes his eyes. Breathes, in and out until he can no longer hear the blood rushing in his ears. Then he tries to imagine what his life would be like without her. Suppose that name wasn't in his head any more.

Of course, he thinks, the fact is, Charlotte hasn't
got to
do anything. Won't. Charlotte won't ever do anything she doesn't want to do, or not for long. Only as an experiment. And the fact is, she didn't actually say that the past would go away. She said that it
wouldn't
and then she said: ‘You can fill your life with something else as well.' That's what she actually said. The fact is, if you look at it straight on, she's not so very far out, but she's in there fighting him for something and they have just had a row. A
blazing
row.

He lies there on the bed, exhausted now, and says the words aloud:
a blazing row
. It's a fucking miracle! First, no one's been hit. Or died, for that matter. Second, there's this to consider: when she said, Don't you want to get out of here?, was she saying also that she wanted him to? Was she saying, despite him being how he is, she would really like to see what it was like, with him out of here? That they might, for instance, sit across each other at a table in a pub or restaurant? Drive somewhere, lie on their backs on a sunny hillside? Forget. Turn on to their sides, face to face, close?