Billy Rags (5 page)

So that's what it is today. An unwanted cup of tea, to demonstrate to me again what is happening downstairs behind the counter.

I loosen Linda's arm and cross the room and take the cup from Mum and open the door to the stairs and edge my way down past the cardboard boxes and the Vimto crates and the Craven “A” cartons and at the bottom I open the door that leads into the shop.

Dad is standing in the dusty sunlight, his head bowed, his arms rigid, his knuckles quietly grinding into the counter top. The shop is as hushed as a church.

I walk over to the counter.

“Dad,” I say. “Mam's sent your tea.”

Only the head moves, slightly, in my direction.

I put the cup and saucer down on the counter. I look into Dad's face. His eyes are on the tea and his head begins to shake slowly from side to side.

I walk back to the stair's door and close it behind me and as I go back up the stairs I hear the sound of the cup and saucer as they are swept from the counter down on to the floor.

In prison, you never get tired. You can always sleep; but that's because you use sleep as an ally, to shorten consciousness, to defer thought. Lots of cons make a career of sleeping. Always on their pits whenever there's a chance, hoping their nap will carry them closer to the gate and farther away from the subsequent awakening. But that kind of sleeping is easier during the day, when it's light, because you can see what it is you want to shut out, but at night, in the dark, when there's nothing to look at, it's harder to sleep because the imaginary outside images are brighter in your mind than the grey realities of the day.

The mistake most cons make is to try and fight the pictures in their minds, to black them out with sleep. But that never works. It's better to approach the problem from the opposite direction, to make the pictures even brighter, bring them into sharper focus, move around in them, stage manage them, make them work for you as an alternative reality, tire out your mind by trying to make the unreal real and giving the shadows form.

This is what I used to do. I'd pick on an event, just something at random, then I'd start with the time of day the event took place, remember the light, the colour, the temperature. Then the location, and the same with that, down to the last detail. Then the people who were involved, colour eyes, colour hair, colour clothes, style, cigarettes, drinks. Then I'd tie everything together and move through the same scene from the beginning to end, saying all that was said and acting all that was done in my mind, endlessly going back to the beginning to make sure I'd got it all right. And not always events on the outside. Sometimes I'd take the characters I mixed with every day and go through them, head to toe, mannerisms, histories, conversations, and check them out against my memory the next day, to see how well my mind was working, to make sure the nick wasn't softening up my brain. That way I knew my outside memories could still be trusted.

For instance, I'd take Benny Beauty.

Benny.

The hair; black, jet black, a bit gyppo, especially with the style, too-long Tony Curtis, greased inches thick, freezing the dandruff, the fore-peak always stuck to his forehead, the tops of his ears thrusting up behind the motionless convokes. And the brass ring on his left ear lobe, the colour of the wax inside. And his eyebrows, jet black again but flecked with grey, almost off-white, at the edges. His eyes, black-blue, sleepy lidded, the bags underneath bulbous and wrinkled. The nose, flat and shiny, lips fat and skin-cracked pursing forward above the cleft chin, almost Cypriot in its depth and darkness. The heavy hands, muscular, like the rest of his body, just on the verge of being too fat. His movements slow, always relaxed, almost tired.

He'd nailed a man called Cecil Foster to a tree in Epping Forest, Benny had. On orders, of course. The brief had been to show Foster's backers that Benny's backers were only good for a laugh for so long. But the method had been left to Benny himself. So Benny and two of his free-lancers had sorted Foster out of his club in Meard Street on a Saturday night and taken him up the A11 to the forest and given him the message Benny's way. They'd left him far enough into the forest for him not to be found for a couple of days.

The case had made all the nationals. Someone had grassed on Benny and normally Benny's backers would have been able to get him off but this time someone on the law advised them against so they'd given Benny away and stayed out of it themselves. I know how glad Benny's backers must have been when he got maximum security.

Or I'd take somebody like Ray Crompton. Ray was more difficult than Benny. When you first thought about Ray you saw a face without features, hair without colour, a body with only two dimensions. But when you concentrated, really pulled everything together in your mind, you realised that after all there was something that gave you a hint of some kind of personality, and that something was his mouth, and the only thing special about that particular feature was that it hardly ever moved, not even when he spoke. It was hard and small and straight and it told you everything you needed to know about Ray. It was the mouth of a man who could wait for revenge on an unfaithful wife. Which was what Ray had done. He'd had a firm in Birmingham that had been doing very nicely until his number two, a man called Jackie Smails, had started pumping up Ray's wife every Wednesday afternoon. Ray's wife had been the usual, but Ray apparently had never seen it. They never do. To Ray she'd been the perfection every man always wanted; perfect except to everyone else who didn't have to use bifocals. It'd taken Ray even longer than usual to find out what was going on under his nose. When he did of course he had Jackie Smails reduced to little bits, but left just alive enough to remember the pain for the rest of his invalid life. Of course this threw the shits into Audrey, Ray's wife, and she must have started packing her cases the minute she heard about Jackie. But Ray had got to her before she could clear off. And to everybody's surprise, not the least Audrey's, he'd done absolutely nothing about it. Never even mentioned it. Come home, had his dinner, watched TV, taken Audrey upstairs and given her the usual pumping up. Got up the next day, had his breakfast, went out, back in the evening. The same thing for a month. Audrey couldn't believe her luck. So naturally she'd turned it on all the more, given him the ever-loving bit twenty-four hours a day, and according to Ray she'd been even better than ever in the pit. So after about a month or so Ray had suggested a weekend in London, a kind of second honeymoon, taking a couple of open cheques instead of luggage so that Audrey could do a bit of kitting out. The Saturday, he took her round all the shops and let her have whatever she fancied. One item he'd chosen for her himself, and that had been a French lace negligée. In the evening he'd taken her to dinner at Quaglino's and then they'd gone back to the hotel and she'd put on her new negligée and they'd got into bed and Ray had taken this razor out of his pyjama pocket and cut her face so that she was all one gaping mouth. Then he'd taken her over to the mirror and made her look at what he'd done and then he had put the razor to her throat and still forcing her to look he'd drawn it across her flesh until there wore two new mouths instead of one. Then he'd sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette and watched her until she was dead. That was the kind of man Ray Crompton was.

I used to go through this kind of mind-exercising with all the cons. I'd done it in every nick I'd ever been in. It helped to pass the night away. And recently, since my last caper, it had become more and more necessary.

It helped keep away the thoughts of Sheila. And the kid.

The shop is warm with morning sun. Dad sits at the counter, the paper spread out in front of him. Next to him, discarded, waiting for me, is the crisp new copy of the Hotspur. I take it from the counter and go and sit down on the stairs. Today is the final episode of Montana Mike, the boy with a past. It's the most fantastic story I've ever read. Mike is being hunted for a murder he committed under extremely extenuating circumstances, but in spite of this he lives by his own code of great fairness and integrity.

I read the final episode. Mike is killed, sacrificing his own life to save that of Marshall Ned Rutter, the man who has been hunting him, although each respected the other. I read the episode again, unable to accept Mike's death, unwilling to give up the world set out on the sweet smelling newsprint. I feel depressed. A sense of loss and anger at returning to the real world of my parents clouds my mind. Mike is dead. I wish I was. Dead that way, nobly, everyone acknowledging the outlaw's natural nobility, everyone sad at his passing.

I hadn't felt so unhappy since the day I'd finished
Wuthering Heights
.

“Here, Billy,” Ray Crompton said to me. “Heard the latest?”

I was squatting by my pit doing my stomach exercises.

“No,” I said, not moving. “What's that, Ray?”

“About the gear.”

“What gear?”

“Our gear. Listen. Prison shoes, shirts and trousers to be worn at all times. Overalls only to be worn to work.”

I stood up.

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “What for? What the fuck's that to do with security?”

“Maybe Moffatt thinks he won't hear us if we get on the roof in our baseball boots.”

“And what about Creasey? What's his answer?”

Ray shrugged.

“Has anybody put it to him?”

“I don't know.”

I swore. It wasn't just the fact that the prison stuff was less comfortable than our own gear. It was the idea behind it; just one more method of reminding us of where we were and what we were. This was nothing to do with security. It was an attack on our identities.

I walked to my door and looked out. Creasey was making his rounds, flanked by a couple of screws. I strolled out of my cell and stood in their path.

“Back inside, Cracken,” said Bastin, the senior screw.

“Permission to speak to Mr. Creasey,” I said, taking my fags from my overall pocket.

“No smoking when you address the assistant governor,” said the other screw. I lit up. The screws looked at Creasey but he ignored them and said:

“What is it, Cracken?”

“About these regulations, sir.”

“Which regulations are those?”

“The regulations relating to dress, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I mean, do they stand?”

“Regulations are usually meant to stand, yes. That is, in my experience.”

I looked Creasey up and down. Considering what he was, he was quite a reasonable fellow. I didn't dislike him, any more than I could dislike a brick in the prison wall. The fact that from time to time he allowed a certain dry humour into his conversations with the cons meant that at least he didn't regard us as being entirely without any kind of humanity. But he was what he was, and that being so, he wasn't going to get out of this one so easily.

“What exactly is the purpose of the new rules, sir?”

Creasey looked at me for a moment before answering. I knew what he was thinking; being reasonable, he knew that there was no purpose to the new regulations. They were just regulations. But that was something he could never admit to me. At the same time he knew that any of the dozen or so answers he could let me have wouldn't go down at all well, either. So to avoid getting into a losing battle he attacked:

“Is there something in the new dress regulations you disapprove of, Cracken?”

“Only that everybody's happy enough with things as they stand at the moment, sir.”

Of course, I shouldn't have said that. That really let him in.

“Perhaps that's why they're to be enforced. As a reminder to everyone that happiness is not the main aim of this establishment.”

He began to walk by me. The two screws were grinning all over their faces. And that kind of thing I can do without.

“Sir,” I said.

Creasey carried on walking away.

“Sir,” I said. This time my voice rang round the gallery.

Creasey stopped and half-turned. I put on my innocent face.

“Hope Mr. Moffatt knows what he's doing.”

Creasey's face went black. He strode back to where I was standing.

“What did you say?”

“I said I hope Mr. Moffatt knows what he's about. I mean, happiness isn't the main purpose of this establishment is it? On either side.”

“Meaning precisely what?”

I shrugged.

“Cracken,” Creasey said, lowering his voice in inverse proportion to his anger, “we have your file. From time to time we even read it. Not a lot in it, really, as far as any remission's concerned. But at the moment it's an open file. It would take very little to close it.”

I smiled at him. He turned away again and marched off.

“So now what?” said Ray Crompton.

“So we keep asking Creasey why the new regulations.”

“What for?”

“So that eventually he'll get so sick and tired of the same bleeding question that he'll pass the buck on to Moffatt and Moffatt will have to answer us himself.”

“Where will that get us?”

“I dunno,” I said, going back into my cell. “But at least we'll have the satisfaction of getting Moffatt on the spot.”

I sat down on my pit. The bastards. They'd do anything to remind you what you were. Well, maybe we could remind them back.

Suddenly a thought struck me, and for a moment I didn't feel so bad.

“Here,” I said to Ray. “Does Walter know the news?”

“I don't know,” said Ray, getting it and beginning to smile. “I don't think so.”

I smiled back.

“Walter'll take it especially hard,” I said. “All that mohair going to the wall.”