Alphabet (5 page)

‘These cost fifty quid a throw. I can get ten books on weight-lifting for one on Picasso and more people read them.
It's the way of the world, I'm afraid.'

‘I don't damage books,' Simon tells him.

‘You probably don't,' Travers says. ‘As ever, everyone has to suffer because of a few selfish people. Libraries are about sharing, so far as I'm concerned, but there you are.'

‘What do you suggest, then?' Simon asks. All the while, he's kept his eyes on Travers's thin, shiny face, giving him nowhere to hide. Now he watches him get his pen out of his shirt pocket. He wears these little short-sleeved shirts in polyester, all of them roughly the same but in different checks. Because he forgets the cap and puts the pen in head down, most of them have blots at the bottom of the pocket.

‘I don't mind sticking my neck out just once to see how it goes,' Travers says. The library screw is in the office having tea served to him by the orderly, but even so Travers looks over his shoulder when he says this, as if someone might be taking notes.

‘Something general,' Simon suggests, ‘about the Modern Period plus any of these you can find.' He hands over the list he copied from the back of the Picasso. Travers pulls a face.

‘These'll have to come from Boston Spa,' he says. ‘I'll see what I can do. Keep it under your hat and don't hassle me.'
Travers has seen some of the Pre-Raphaelites, he says, in Birmingham and in the Tate in London. Dreadfully detailed,
he says, must have been such a headache to do, but he doesn't like them, or only one, ‘The Scapegoat' by Holman Hunt. He goes to show it to Simon in the book, but just as he said, it's been torn out. In the encyclopedia there's a tiny reproduction, about the size of a postage stamp.

Simon walks past the TV room on his way back, zonked-out bodies slumped in rows like it was the cinema, except the chairs are hard, there's a few hundred watts of fluorescent light picking out every line on every face and every speck of ash on the floor, and of course there's a screw instead of an usher watching from the doorway. Slack faces, soaking up soap before the switch gets thrown at eight-thirty. He thinks of a mushroom farm. He thinks: suckers. He's on to something better, doing something for himself.

He doesn't like Picasso, props Pendez open over the sink, so he can study a picture a day and make his mind up. Pendez lived 1889–1959, in Barcelona with his sister. Over half the pictures are of her, a plump girl with her hair up in a knot. They're roughly done, not trying to be exactly real. You can see the brush marks, and bits where he's gone over and over the same thing. Simon can't work out if they're actually any good, but that means they probably are, because normally he knows straight away when he dislikes someone or something.

A name comes to him in the middle of the night: Joseph Manderville. It suits the address: 3 Sandringham House, Mile Road, London SE22. In reality, it's a council estate, but since the number's low she need never guess. Joseph Manderville is very polite. He holds open doors for women. He uses cups and saucers, not mugs, and he's clean and tidy, competent around the house, without being fussy. He's forty-seven: Simon thinks Vivienne would like someone just a little but not too much younger than her. He reads a lot and has got a serious, lined sort of face and wears hand-made shirts open at the neck – Simon has seen adverts for the kind of shirt in the quality press. Also, Joseph would use a fountain pen, but Simon will have to make do with a brand new fibre-tip.

He's wired up, high on the challenge and danger of the thing. It takes a week to do a short reply, looking things up, copying and recopying, checking the grammar, examining every word, thinking over how it makes him sound, what picture of Joseph she'll get in her head, running the lines over in his head as he is doing his rounds, or eating his bright yellow vegetable curry and welded-together rice. He's thinking about it all the time, even when showing respect to the tough guys, talking to some deluded idiot like Jones, who thinks a) that he is innocent, and b) that he can play guitar, or taking in the outside news.

It's not a race, he keeps reminding himself. Quality not quantity. He spends the maximum possible time in the library, not actually hassling Travers, but making sure he doesn't forget. There's nothing about Pendez or Hal Brodrick in the encyclopedia, but A for artists get quite a mention in general.
Art is different from craft in that it doesn't have a practical purpose: you don't need to have a ceiling with God painted on it, whitewash would do. You don't need sixteen pictures of your sister when a camera would take the perfect likeness, plus you live with her anyway, so why? But still, they do it.
Mainly, artists paint women. Women's faces, women's bodies, women with babies, women washing themselves, women asleep, women running along the beach with their arms in the air and two noses, even dead women, women with wings.
The artist's mother, sister, lover. The women sit still and let themselves be painted. Just like I said to Brainy Barry, Simon thinks, they like to be looked at. Men don't. If you look at someone too long here, it's What you looking at? and a smashed face. Mind you, you can get one of those without doing anything. You've got to keep eyes in your back. Another good reason for having no visits and no home leaves is that no one thinks you've got anything in your arse worth ripping you to bits for . . . Plus, of course the canteen deals
keep people sweet. Trade. The writing paper for Vivienne Whilden cost half an ounce of tobacco for thirty sheets from Jaycee in the print shop.

Dear Vivienne,

I imagine it would be far worse to read the essays. Hopefully the matter has by now been resolved in your favour?

As for presentation, his ‘childish' style, for which he'd use a cheap biro and press really hard, put in a capital or a backwards letter now and then, is clearly no use.
Dead Normal
: upright, gently rounded, very even, is only good for official things, or where he doesn't know who he is writing to. He tries doing something slanted and bohemian, like hers. But in the end, he decides complimentary is better and he writes to Vivienne Anne Whilden in his scholar's hand, which is very small and low, like knotted string, but with confident down strokes and plenty of space around the words.

I was fascinated to read that you lived with Hal Brodrick. What a rich and interesting life you have led. Did you continue your own work at all? What was it like to live with an artist? Did Hal ever paint your portrait?

Questions are good; they fill the other person's head up.
It's herself, he guesses, that she's interested in right now. He apologises for his life being dull in comparison to hers. He tells her about his late mother's illnesses and how he looked after her because he couldn't bear for her to go into a home.

It's hard to do that bit, even though he's overheard people talking about such things many times in the past. For some reason it repeatedly puts him in mind of Hazel Brooks, Amanda's mother, who was always kind to him, and it's not good thinking of how things must be for her. Barry and Co., they want you to rake every last thing up, but they can't have a clue what that means. They haven't ever had to do it themselves, have they? It's good to be someone else.

We certainly share a love of painting,
Simon writes.
Lately, I
have developed a particular interest in an obscure Spanish painter called
Pendez – do you know of him?

As for alcohol, he's only got to look around. No preaching.

He tells her many people have had drink problems and got rid of them, so no doubt she will too. Then he throws in that he recently visited Robin Hood's Bay, on the north-east coast, with a reference to the landscape putting him in mind of Holman Hunt's ‘The Scapegoat'.

I am looking forward very much to hearing from you again if that is
what you want. I am curious to know more about you, and hope you
will reply.

It's just two pages long, but he feels as if he's written the phone book.

‘To be honest, mate, I've been thinking it's not worth the risk,' Tev says. They're jogging, side by side at exercise, and for a moment Simon feels as if his legs have dropped off. Then they're going double time and it takes all Simon's got not to hit out, this fucker has already had everything he's got, result of several complex deals, selling ordinary canteen goods for smuggled-in cash at a hundred per cent mark-up to those who can't keep control of themselves and live within their official income . . .
I've got to stay cool
, he tells himself and finishes the circuit.

‘What's up?' he asks, his face a careful blank, when Big T catches up. It turns out that Chas further down on the threes has nicked Tev's Walkman and now he wants Simon to get it back.
I'm not stupid, Simon thinks, Tev's paid for something with that Walkman and now the stuff's gone he wants it back. Most likely outcome: I get the beating if Chas adds up and makes four, who wouldn't? And/or I get the rap, may be fourteen ADA, so much in the seg, whatever, if we're caught Offending Against Good Order And Discipline . . . Or, maybe Chas is especially riled, gets me with some kind of blade or another and
I bleed to death in the toilets, End of Story. Take your pick.
But after all this, I want my letter out.

He goes in, finds the Walkman under the pillow, for God's sake! and stuffs it in his shirt. On the way back he bumps into Doggie, who's supposed to be lookout but he's pinned and not doing such a good job of it. Simon gives him a half roll-up, and he's just on a lucky streak and so is Doggie, because Chas shouts blue murder all night but the next morning, like magic, he's ghosted, so none of them have to pay, or not in the foreseeable.

‘We're a team, mate. It'll go first class,' Big T says, stuffing the letter down his jeans. It doesn't bear thinking about where it'll have been before it gets to Vivienne.

There's nothing more he can do. He lies back in the nearest there is to dark and imagines: Vivienne, letting herself into the big hall of her house after a day's work. A glance in the mirror shows grey hair falling out of the knot on top, lipstick worn off, but at least wrinkles don't show too much indoors. Briefcase down, she kicks off her shoes. Picks the post off the mat. Hangs up a cardigan or a hat or something on the post at the bottom of the stairs, then straight to the kitchen to get a drink, cold white wine or G&T. Then she's back to the study at the front to put on some music. Classical. Pictures are everywhere. Portraits of her when she was young. She has a desk in the alcove by the chimney, covered in papers she ought to attend to. But instead, she sits in the antique easy chair, shuffles through the post and comes upon his envelope, because it's handwritten. She's forgotten all about answering that advert in the middle of the night and she wants to know what it is, wants something new – because, this is what Simon thinks, when people write letters to strangers, they're on the turn between one phase of their life and the next, like snakes struggling out of an old, too tight skin. They need to be free of themselves and of the memories of those who know them best.

Vivienne. It's a nice name, he decides.

Lunch was bad: vegeburger and chips, everything brown, even the lettuce that came with it. He's washing his hands when the door crashes open. Two of them plus dog come straight in, another one is waiting outside. They're in overalls, with a two-way radio and a tool belt, and look fitter than average. As for the dog it's got a wet, shiny nose, dribble dangling out of its mouth and the longest, pinkest tongue you ever saw, hair sticking up in a ridge on its back.

‘Time for a spin. Got anything here you shouldn't have?
Out on the landing, now.' They go for the bed first. Covers off, round the edges of the mattress, open up the pillow, turn the frame over, unscrew the legs. Ventilation grille next, nothing there. They shake the art books, losing all his markers, peer down the spines. They take the Adidas box off the table, turn it upside down, screw off another set of legs. Then they go back to the box, shake Viv's letter out of its envelope, shuffle through all the drafts of his that he's kept copies of, the lot.

‘Dear Vivienne,' one of them reads aloud in a funny voice.
He should've just learned them by heart, ripped them up and flushed them away. Or even eaten them first, then flushed them away, once the words had become part of him. But the point of a letter is that it is a thing. It doesn't vanish like conversation. People keep letters even when they'd be better off not to, in shoe boxes like he has, or slipped between books on the shelf, tied up with ribbon at the back of the wardrobe.
Years later, there it is: not what you remember being said, but what was actually written down. You may feel different about them, but you won't so easily forget the people who have written to you, nor who you were, then, when you wrote to them because you wanted to, badly enough to write
Dear
, and then the name of someone you'd never met.