Alphabet (4 page)

‘However things turn out, I'd like to keep in touch: I've always wanted that.' Finally, she stopped.

‘But I don't. I never have,' he told her. ‘I never wanted all those birthday cards. I don't want you watching me sent down.
I want nothing from you, nothing, understand? I'm going to get life. Then, I'll start over, once I'm properly inside. Look, Iris, the past, the whole fucking lot – just forget it!' They sat there opposite each other on the bolted-down chairs, her with the tears now running down her powdery cheeks, the round-edged plywood table, also bolted down, in the middle. Why, he thought, doesn't she just get up and go?

‘It didn't work out before. It's not going to be any better now, is it?' he told her.

Finally she levered herself up out of the chair, pulled her cardigan tight around her.

‘Nothing I could say would ever been good enough. You're a bad lot and that's the end of it!' she said. ‘I shouldn't have come.' He stayed sitting down until she started to walk out.

‘Goodbye, Iris,' he said then, and she turned round.

‘Where on earth does that smile come from?' she said. ‘It doesn't belong to you. You must of stole it off another little boy, going down the slide in the park.' He didn't even know what his lips were doing, until she said it and anyhow, that was the end of that.

Teverson's shovel scrapes along the ground, then the coals hit the side of the bunker and tumble down over the existing pile.
Simon takes off his gloves and throws them and his own shovel on top of the plastic sack of shit in his barrow, picks up the handles, swallows his frustration and begins the return journey to the bins. There's no point in hurrying. It's still better out of doors than behind them.

‘Here, mate,' Tev calls out, just as he's about to turn the corner, ‘see you later, eh? Drop by.'

Big T, Teverson likes to be called. Some creep has drawn a cartoon of him, all the muscles even bigger than they are, which makes him look just like the capital letter, and he's got it taped to his wall. Right now, he's on his bed, zonked, the magazine that was in his hand on the floor next to him. The bums on the wall behind look down like so many misshaped planets.

‘Got any batteries?' he asks, his speech slurred. He turns onto his side to look at Simon standing in the door. One hand dangles down over the edge of the bed. Like some fucking Roman emperor or something, Simon thinks, is that what you think you are?

‘No,' he says. Tev's either got the letter or he hasn't . . .
Let's get there. Slowly, Tev sits, then pushes on the edge of the bed to get himself standing up.

‘You got any of them wobblies that's going round?' There's one he's dropped on the floor, bright green, and Simon points it out to him.

‘Look, T, I've paid up front,' he says.

‘It was harder than I thought,' Tev tells him. ‘I need something else. What can you get me?' Simon looks back at him, tries to keep his face in neutral. He notes the bulge of Tev's bright blue eyes, their red rims, the mixture of sunburn and freckles, a day's growth of ginger stubble, the neck twice as wide as his own, shoulders pretty much like the cartoon, a kind of anatomical joke. Tev looks steadily back.

‘Not up to much, are you?' he says, breathing heavily. He's half way out of his tree and he's gonna try and go for me, Simon thinks. He loosens up his own hands, relaxes his knees,
settles himself right on his feet so he can get out of the way or even flip him back on himself if there's room. After all this time putting up with Tev, you could say it's an opportunity – but then the bastard grins and says:

‘No use to me, is it? Over there, under the
Sun
,' and all Simon has to do is take one step, check the door, pick up the envelope and get it inside his clothes.

‘Cheers!'

Big T grunts, sits heavily down on his bed again, passes out.

‘Body count! Back in your cells,' they're calling out on the landing, all of a sudden business-like, and blokes are shouting back at them.

‘Come on!', ‘Get lost!', ‘Fuck off !', ‘On the Roof !', because it's almost ten minutes early and the TV's been switched off.

‘Hurry up. Get in. Lock down, now!' The metal landings shake with the weight of men legging it back. The bolts shoot home, quicker, harder than normal. Shouting and chanting start up. It'll be a long night, Simon thinks. He sits back to the wall, cross-legged on his bed, as he does every night. The envelope is waiting under his pillow. He rests his wrists on his knees, lets his hands open up to where the sky would be, were it accessible. He breathes in, a while later out and – as suggested in the book the tutor lent him, years ago – imagines that he is sitting at the bottom of a deep, green pond, thick, opaque water above and around him, the bubbles – images, memories, thought – slowly emerging from his nose and floating away.

6

There's a smell of hot dust and drains, uncollected shit-parcels. Simon is in his football shorts with the window open the entire three inches but it doesn't make any difference. The cell faces in; bricks hold the heat. Sod's law: the kangas decide to work to rule and the same day the temperature soars to 28 in the shade and stays there. Everyone's had enough of it. There are sudden, surprising moments of quiet that make you hold your breath, then the banging and yelling starts up again. Roger next door is singing hymns. Chip Butty two along lost it yesterday, got twenty days in the seg for trying to improve the ventilation. Niall likewise, for going for a screw when he was unlocked. But Simon's OK. He's got plenty to think about.

Dear Whoever-you-are
, is how the letter begins. Her own name, Vivienne Anne Whilden, is embossed along with the address on the top of creamy-smooth writing paper, thick stuff that won't fold properly. As he reads, the noise turns into a kind of soup and then he doesn't hear it any more.

Who am I? A maudlin, menopausal drunk who looks every inch of her age and is about to be unemployed. Currently off sick, which does not help. Bereaved three years ago, but I should have got over it by now. Yes, sir! I have never done this before. I probably won't send it . . .

The letter is eight pages long, partly due to the size of the writing. It tangos across the paper in huge italics that just don't give a toss whether you can read them or not, or maybe, even, they would rather you didn't. But Simon has been sitting on
the bed with his back against the wall, hour after hour, reading it over and over until it's almost part of him.

Hal and I lived together for twenty-seven years. No children – I regret it now. I am v. fond of my teenage niece. She is not allowed to visit me at the moment because, my saintly sister Laura says, I'm a bad example.

He's read the letter so many times now that he can actually hear her voice: someone who believes she has a right to exist, and to bend the rules if she wants. Loud. A bit sarcastic. On the out, it would annoy the hell out of him but, as he puts it to himself, we beggars aren't to chose and Vivienne Ann Whilden has cost the equivalent of twelve hundred quid, if you bump a week's wage in here up to what it would be on the out. He's got to make a go of it. Though it's not easy:

It seems no one likes me much. I dare say you won't either. Even I can't think of much to recommend. Well, I'm not fat. I dress well. I speak my mind – though that's unpopular too. I should have been a man, really. But then I would have had to use the Gents. Too bad –

Where possible he adds two and two together: Hal was much older than her, an artist. She was one of his students at art school, moved in with him, ended up lecturing herself,
Art
His-story
, so that he could sit around and drink and paint. This all happened before Simon was even born. The later years, Hal did quite well selling his pictures but he was falling to bits physically and pretty much gaga: Vivienne looked after him.

They both drank.
Like bloody whales
. Right now, she's refusing to retire early, but off sick, due to the drink problem. The other teachers in the college are all young and
don't understand
paint
. Last term, an American student on exchange made a complaint after she mislaid his work four times. But really, she once lost an essay of his when she left it outside and it was blown away in the night. As for the other times, he's an idiot:
Utterly inane. Virtually brain dead!
She couldn't bear to read what he'd written or deal with him, so she just let the work slip to the bottom of the pile, then, when he asked her, she said the first thing that came into her head.

Tomorrow I have to go in and be hauled over the coals about Nathan Goode. At nine a.m., Good God, why? Shall I stick to my story, or else suddenly find all his rotten little word-processed scripts and read them? Which is worse? What do you think, whoever you are? Still there?

Vivienne Anne Whilden does not bother with any kind of goodbyes. The signature is huge and sprawling, like she's thrown it down, and there's a messy sickle shape of what can only be red wine filling up the rest of the page. That big, empty house of hers, Simon thinks, must smell of empties and ash trays, a high note of oil paints and a good sprinkling of house dust thrown in. She's someone who will wake up with a thumping head, and not much idea of what she's said or written the night before. But she'll keep smart even though she's going down the drain, freshen up regularly, using some classy kind of soap and a splash of matching perfume. She'll slap on some lipstick and a bit of jewellery and sit in front of the Dean looking together enough, even though she's at least half mad . . .

He's pretty sure he can work with her, now he's got over the initial shock and disappointment. She's desperate and he understands desperation. It's a force, running through you head to toe. You can struggle to tame it, to resist, to drive it out, but it will probably win because the fight will drain you dry. Or, you use desperation's energy, to take you where you want: that's the clever thing to do, and that way the thing that frightened you becomes the thing you need most, and both of you have won.

What she wants is a feeling of someone on her side: an ear, a hand – but nothing too obvious. He can do that, once he's found the right way in.

When he stops in his readings of Vivienne Whilden's letter, the noise comes back and the heat pushes in, like it's some kind of
thing
, a monster you can't see. Sweat runs down his chest and back. He's on his feet before he knows it, going for the door with fists and feet:

‘Sort your fucking selves out, won't you,' he yells at them.

‘You dumb cunts! You stupid bastards! If you don't like the job someone else'll do it!' He yells it over and over, with variations: ‘Get on yer bikes! Get those fat arses into gear! No one asks you to work in this shithole!' until his voice gives up, then he lies down again, his heart racing. Nothing happens.

It's one hour until supper, fifteen till breakfast. He's had the letter four days. He was twenty-nine last month. More numbers: he's served three thousand and eleven days (not counting remand), that is, more than eight years. If he keeps busy and gets tired out it's OK but that's a challenge in itself.
When things are slack like this sometimes the bad dreams do come despite the breathing exercises and so on. Afterwards he doesn't want to get out of bed in the morning and says it's flu.
If he told Barry, he'd get a brownie point, but then he'd have to go over and over it again in the daytime too.

The door took skin off his knuckles, but the plus side is he's tired now. He doesn't move a muscle when he hears the screw pause and look in, move on.

Six days he's had the letter by the time conditions return to normal, some promise or other made, and at last he gets to the library, where the same old posters, prisoners themselves, are up in the same old places, fading gradually in the fluorescent glare. A shelf of poetry. Thrillers. Sociology. Law. Romance. A picture of Shakespeare and another one of James Baldwin. The pen is mightier than the sword! Of course it is, hasn't he seen with his own eyes how a bloke can be stabbed in the kidneys with a ballpoint, and almost die of it? Not that he'd mention this to John Travers, the civvie librarian: if he's got a sense of humour he doesn't bring it to work, plus he leaves his bicycle clips on half the time.

‘What else have you got on art?' Simon asks Travers. He already has the entire stock lined up: someone called Pendez, plus Picasso, Pre-Raphaelites, Rembrandt, Rodin – all oddly close together alphabetically, and all falling to bits. Some kind of job lot.

‘Nothing,' Travers says. ‘I don't get art in any more because people cut the pictures out. I can't be turning every page over to see if anything's missing. Or else there's this kind of thing.' He opens the book on Rodin and as it happens there's a photograph of sculpture called ‘The Kiss', and someone's drawn in the hidden bits. He flicks through the others.