Remedy is None (27 page)

Charlie sat staring into their absence. He seemed as external to their grief as the dead man is to the funeral rites. Their sorrow could be shared with each other, but not with him. He was beyond the point where these things could relate to him significantly. The message-bag epitomized their helpless love, just as the pitcher and food left with the corpse are all that his mourners can give him as token of their love. It was like the words that had been spoken in this cell, the only currency
they had, but one which had no meaning here, obols in the mouths of dead men.

Every gesture made towards Charlie was nullified by his stillness, his inability to respond. He.was isolated in himself, struggling for the private resurrection of understanding that would transform what had happened into meaning. The confusion of things occurring around him deepened, entangled, became utterly inextricable.

As time passed, he could not remember whether events had happened within minutes or within hours. He existed outside of any present, in a strange limbo that rested upon a subtly shifting past. Events never reached him as happening,but only as having happened. There had been the dark bumping journey with two policemen sitting with him. He had washed himself somewhere and dried himself on a rough towel. He remembered its texture on his skin. He had disembarked into a rough courtyard surrounded by high walls, another prison. Men had been watching him. A policeman had tried to get him to eat the meal Elizabeth had brought him. He had stood in a courtroom. He had been given a bath and had been dressed in anonymous corduroy clothes.

Through it all he had paced endlessly, trekking, it seemed, through a terrible emptiness where people and places were shed from him like useless lumber. Night found him still walking in that second cell, exhausted but driven on by some desperate impulse that seemed to promise him destination.

Suddenly, the tiredness of two days pressed a plunger on his pent fatigue. Sleep came like a detonation as he lay down. Thoughts thrown off drifted in isolation across his mind, a line of poetry, the image of his father’s face, the date of Mary’s birthday, parts of himself surrendered to oblivion. And then they too were waterlogged with sleep.

He lay on the bunk, huddled in a foetal crouch.

Chapter 21

YOU WAKE INSIDE FOUR BRICK WALLS, A CELL. AND
that is all you need. You go on from there. The cell splits like an amoeba, to a bunk, a floor, a window, the shifting clouds beyond the bars. Days take shape. Morning means tea and bread, a basin of water, a tablet of dun soap, a square of gauze towel. You progress from your first sight of the gauze towel through the drying of your hands on it many times until you have become the user of the towel. Two more meals means evening. There is a twice-daily half-hour exercise, when the prisoners walk round and round the enclosed yard, a walk of refugees from reality, a trek to nowhere. There are men you come to know in this exercise period, men who walk with you regularly while the guards lounge and watch. They begin as strange presences, their faces weird in the unnatural light of their circumstance, until familiarity learns to see the wart or the broken tooth and invests them with humanity. Charges are formally exchanged like visiting-cards and friendships grow like grass in pebbled streets. There is an issue of books to read, dished out peremptorily, the iron rations of sanity. Like a chameleon you take colours from all this.

This was Charlie. This was the meaning his crime bestowed on him, the legacy of action. The dark ritual of violence in which he had sacrificed Mr Whitmore and himself had evoked nothing more than this divine indifference. The chimera of truth that he had felt haunting his father’s death, whose plaintive cry he had heard demanding admittance to their lives, was by some terrible irony farther from him than ever. He had pursued its elusive presence as far as Mr Whitmore’s body and he had surrendered his own identity to bring it into being. And still it had not materialized. Instead,
there was only the vast waste his search for it had created. That cry came fainter now, dying in distance, and seemed a dwindling mockery.

Its departure left Charlie in terrifying loneliness. It had stripped him of himself, of friends and future, luring him towards it with promise of some deeper meaning. And now it left him with nothing but the banal functions of his body, food and sleep and the company of strangers. At first he still tried to believe that the meaning of what had happened would be understood, that the machinery that had taken possession of him would be the means of interpreting the message that was written in the death of Mr Whitmore, in the grief of his family, and in the deprivation of himself. But he learned gradually that here he had no right to be understood. Here life was reduced to the barest sustenance of itself, meant no more than its own prolongation. It gave no rights beyond itself, only concessions. It granted food for body and mind in order to keep them functioning. But it offered them no purpose for which they should function. It measured out fresh air, but only in such quantities as would suffice to counteract the lack of it.

Here one thing negated another, and each activity only existed to counteract its opposite. It was a miracle of equilibrium, the very perfection of futility. Those huge walls were a temple dedicated to meaninglessness. Each day from the endless rooms of cells men were brought forth to walk like shadows in the sunlight, but only long enough to be able to appreciate what they were not, so that their illusory freedom from futility should only serve to intensify their real bondage to it. Then they filed patiently back into their cells like macabre monks to continue their devotions to their pointlessness. And the bolts clanged home along the corridors.

Joining every day that circular pilgrimage of men on parole from meaning, Charlie came to understand their calm despair. A dull acceptance was all that was possible here. Only real people can have real emotions. And these people were not real. They were automata, mechanisms stripped to a
few basic functions of existence. Each one was anonymous. Each wore the same faded corduroy clothes, which had not been made for anyone in particular. Each drank from mugs worn by other people’s mouths. They were provisional people. Each one here had done the thing which didn’t belong to him, small or large, had aggressed beyond himself by taking or doing. Each one here had been taken away from himself, and must wait to see what he was given back.

In the meantime, they merely existed, hung on to the periphery of living, as purposeless and elemental as a limpet. Their chief connection with reality was in the visits paid to them by their friends and families, when they pushed quiet words and hurried messages at each other through the grille. For Charlie, these visits only served to remind him of the suffering he had caused. John came every time with masochistic regularity, determinedly hopeful. Elizabeth came once with a carefully rehearsed expression of brightness, but her presence brought an even more painful tension to these meetings, with her speaking in charged whispers, and she did not come again. Andy and Jim came once, and Charlie’s Uncle Hughie and some others. But with all of them, Charlie had the same feeling, though it might vary in intensity. He felt guilt. They all seemed to him people he had betrayed. They looked stunned and hurt, as if something had happened which had no right to be happening in their lives. Charlie’s guilt was not only that he had killed a man. It was not just that he had introduced something ugly and horrible into their lives, something that would shadow many of their lives until they died. That was terrible enough. But then he had sensed for a long time that something terrible was going to happen if the deliberate self-deceit and the casual cruelty that he had seen implicit in their lives was to be acknowledged. The real guilt lay in what he had failed to do, more than in what he had done. For he had failed to make the wrong that he had felt be acknowledged. The terrible action had taken place, and it had left in its wake nothing but numb despair, unbalmed by understanding. To them his action was a
thunderbolt that shattered without illumination, a summary judgment based upon no reasons, an edict passed upon their lives by some divine whimsy. They saw only a terrifying freak of fortune, one of the aimless hazards of living, like flood or hurricane, that come without warning or purpose out of the mysterious darkness that surrounds our lives, wreak their havoc, and are gone. They were not aware of error that had produced it, but only of the error that it had produced. They saw only a wanton wastage. They knew only the unnecessary grief, the unprovoked suffering, the fortuitous tears, and the waste of lives.

So it was that when Charlie saw them facing him through the grille he felt an awesome sense of guilt chill him. What meaning was in his action that could justify this? What right had he to have caused this havoc ? They came and sat before him, bemused and stricken with an alien grief, to look at the cause of it. He felt like an oracle that had failed. What had his vision of the wrong in their lives produced but pain? What had his violent conjuration called up but misery? Where was the revelation that should have accompanied it, the understanding that was to have given meaning to the agony? He was to have been harbinger to some kind of truth, without which they could not go on living. He had cleared a way for it in their lives through a man’s death, and it had not followed. There should have been something to offer them in return for the glib assurance that had been taken away – a deeper understanding of themselves, some kind of knowledge, some kind of truth.

But there was nothing. There were only the painful visits with John sitting there, a living recrimination. There were the aimless parades round and round the prison yard when they seemed to be enacting their own pointlessness, engaging in a ritual celebration of their own nonentity. There was the sense of utter hopelessness that the prison taught to all its inmates, stamped it like a motto on their minds. It was evident in the way the prisoners talked among themselves in the yard. They discussed cases. But those who had any experience did
not make the assumption that their actions had any meaning for those who were considering them, or that their meaning had any connection with what was going to happen to them. They simply accepted that when you did certain things you set some force into motion and you had to abide by certain rules. But what followed was no more than a sinister game of chance. There were rules. But the rules were self-contained and need have no relevance to the pressures that had provoked your action. You simply waited while the men who knew the rules applied them to your case.

Some prisoners made forecasts among themselves about the outcome of their respective cases. Their lawyers had stressed certain points to some of them, indicating their particular importance, favourable or otherwise, with the result that they might sense their luck running one way or the other. But none of them understood what was going on and it was all so chancey that most of them tried to suspend thought on it and hold hope in abeyance until society had tossed its legal pennies and examined the entrails of their dead actions. They simply developed tricks of thought and held on to them like superstitions. One relied on the fact that he had been provoked, another on his family’s need of him, another on the faith he had in his lawyer. Armed only with these, they waited, like gamblers crossing their fingers and closing their eyes while the wheel spins or the horses jump.

Charlie developed no such protective device. He submitted himself completely and honestly to the penance of afterthought that follows upon spontaneous action. The intensity of the process would not allow him to hide from the truth. He saw with terrible clarity that whatever his action meant had no bearing on what was happening now. What was happening to his action now seemed almost like a conspiracy to rob it of meaning. He was shut up here, and elsewhere, in places that he knew nothing of, men sifted facts and gathered fragments of evidence into arbitrary patterns. The only contact he had with it all was through the solicitor John had engaged for him. He visited Charlie a few times, telling him
about what he called ‘the progress of the case’. He was there when Charlie made his second court appearance to be charged officially with murder. Each time he came after that, he had a different ‘angle’ that he wanted to talk over with Charlie. He had a list of people that he was visiting systematically, taking statements from all of them. His energy never flagged. He was a young man and though he always tried to show consideration for Charlie, he couldn’t quite control the sheer enthusiasm that he had in the whole thing as a case. When he came to the point of legal procedure, he had a tendency to talk with self-satisfied pedantry, quoting from statutes, savouring the sound of the official terminology. Murder must have been a rare commodity for him, and he was enjoying it.

Being with him and observing him, Charlie felt utterly despondent, not so much at the lawyer himself as at the fact that he symbolized the whole process that was taking place around him. He was quick as a compass-needle to redirect his position according to the facts. He strained statements to the sediment. He wrote sentences in his notebook, pausing over them, bolting them together carefully. Then he re-examined them, feinting at them, trying to ambush them, until he was sure that they were impregnable. He kept referring to what ‘they’ would do and what ‘they’ would say.

It was all somehow unreal, like a morality play with Charlie as the stage. His lawyer did everything possible to minimize his responsibility for what he had done. He emphasized the fact that Charlie had been drinking. He dwelt on the provocation of Mr Whitmore. He talked of filial piety until Charlie suggested that his conception of it must be fairly elastic if it could contain what he had done. He hinted at ‘a temporary state of diminished responsibility’.

And the other side would be doing the opposite. The prosecution lawyer would be trying to make Charlie’s action seem one of unprovoked and unmitigated violence. It did not matter what they happened to believe personally, or if they believed anything personally. Nobody made any pretence of
being involved in the reality of the thing. It was all just make-believe.