The Pure in Heart (3 page)

And yet … there had been something of the life spark within her to which Simon had responded from the beginning, and which was deeper and greater than compassion or even a sense of simple kinship with someone of his own flesh and blood. Before she had gone to live in Ivy Lodge, he had often taken her out to
the garden, or strapped her into his car and driven her for miles, sure that she enjoyed looking out of the window; he had pushed her chair around the streets to divert her. He had always talked to her. She had certainly known his voice, though she could have had no idea of the meaning of the sounds that voice made. Later, when he had gone to see her in the home, he had been aware of an intent stillness
that came over her as soon as she heard him speak.

He loved her, with the strange, pure love which can receive no recognition or response and demands neither.

Her hair had been brushed and lay loosely round her head on the high pillow. There was no real character or definition in her face; time seemed to have passed over it leaving it quite unaffected. But Martha’s hair, which had always been
kept short so as to be more manageable for her carers, had recently been allowed to grow, and shone in the light of the overhead lamp, the same white-blonde colour as his own.

Simon pulled the chair out, sat down and took her hand.

‘Hello, sweetheart. I’m here.’

He looked at her face, waited for that change in her breathing, the flicker of her eyelids, which would indicate that she knew, heard
him, sensed him, and was comforted, reassured.

The green and white fluorescent lines of the monitor flowed on, making small regular wavelets, across the screen.

Her breaths were shallow as they passed rustily in and out of her lungs.

‘I’ve been in Italy, drawing … lots of faces. People in cafés, people riding on the vaporetto. Venetian faces. They’re the same faces you can see in the great
paintings from five hundred years ago, it’s a face that doesn’t change, only the clothes are modern. I sit in cafés and drink coffee or Campari and just look at the faces. No one minds.’

He talked on but her expression did not change, her eyes did not open. She was somewhere further away, deeper down and more out of reach than she had ever been.

He stayed for an hour, his hand over hers, talking
to her quietly as if he were soothing a frightened infant.

He heard a trolley being pushed down the ward. Someone called out. An immense tiredness came over him so that for a moment he almost put his head down on the bed beside Martha so that he could sleep.

The bump of the door brought him up.

‘Si.’

His brother-in-law, Cat’s husband Chris Deerbon, slipped into the room. ‘I thought you might
need this.’ He held out a polystyrene cup of tea. ‘Cat said you’d got here.’

‘She doesn’t look good.’

‘No.’

Simon stood up to stretch his back which always ached if he sat down for long. He was six feet four.

Chris touched Martha’s forehead, and glanced at the monitors.

‘What do you think?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Hard to know. She’s had this all before but there’s an awful lot against her.’

‘Everything.’

‘It’s not much of a life.’

‘Can we be sure?’

‘I think so,’ Chris said gently.

They stood looking down at Martha until Simon finished his tea and threw the cup across into the bin.

‘That’ll see me home. Thanks, Chris. I’m bushed.’

They left together. At the door Simon looked round. There had been nothing since he had arrived, no flicker, no indication, apart from the rusty breathing
and the steady blip of the monitor, that the body on the bed was a living young woman. He went back, bent over Martha and kissed her face. The skin was damp and slightly downy, like the skin of a newborn baby.

Simon thought he would not see her alive again.

‘Gunton?’

There had to be something of course, even today, just to let him know that nothing changed, until eight o’clock the next morning.

He turned.

Hickley was holding up the garden fork. ‘Call this clean?’

Andy Gunton went back into the long shed where all the tools were kept. He had cleaned the mud off the fork as carefully as he always did. If Hickley, the one screw he had never
managed to get on with, had found a blob of dirt between two of the tines, then he had stuck it there himself.

‘No dirty tools, you know how it works.’ Hickley shoved the fork into Andy’s face.

Go on, the gesture said, go on, try me, answer back, cheek me, have a go at me with the garden fork … do it and I’ll have you in here another month, see if I don’t.

Andy took the fork and went over to
the bench under the window. Carefully, he wiped every prong and probed the cloth down between the blades, then
he rubbed the handle over and over. Hickley watched, arms folded.

Beyond the window, the kitchen garden was empty, work over for the day. For a single, strange moment, Andy Gunton thought, I’ll miss it. I’ve sown seeds I won’t harvest, I’ve put in plants I won’t tend as they grow.

He caught his own thought and almost laughed.

He turned and handed the recleaned fork to the screw for inspection. He didn’t resent Hickley. There was always one. Hickley wasn’t like the other screws here who treated them more as teachers with pupils and got the best out of them as a result. To Hickley, they were the still inmates, the enemy. Scum. Was Andy scum? The first few weeks behind bars,
he had felt like it. He had been shell-shocked by everything, but most of all by the reality he could not get his head round, that he was inside because, in the middle of a botched robbery, in panic he had shoved an innocent man and the man had crashed to the concrete, fractured his skull and died. The word
killer
had rung round and round his own head like a marble in a basin,
killer, killer,
killer
. What else was a killer but scum?

He waited while the man inspected the garden fork. Go on, get your microscope out why don’t you, you won’t find an effin speck.

‘Put it away.’

Andy Gunton slid the handle slowly into the metal holder on the shed wall. ‘Last time,’ he said.

But Hickley wasn’t going to wish him well, would have choked sooner than congratulate him on his final release.
‘Don’t let the bugger wind you up,’ someone had advised on his first day out here eighteen months ago. He remembered it again as he walked, without a word or a backward glance at Hickley, out of the shed, through the market garden away to the east wing of Birley Open Prison.

Through one of the ventilators in the kitchen block came the smell of boiled egg; through an open window the sound of a
ball to and fro across a table tennis table, pock-pock, pock-pock.

Once, overhearing him say, ‘There’s always a first time,’ one of the screws, during his first week in Stackton Prison, had snarled back at him, ‘No, Gunton, there isn’t always a first time but there’s sure as hellfire always a last one.’

In the raw and still shell-shocked state he had been then, almost four years ago, the words
had thwacked into his memory like an arrow on to a target and stuck there.

There’s always a last
. He stopped at the door to his own residential block and looked round. Last working day. Last time he’d clean a garden fork. Last eyeball-to-eyeball with Hickley. Last warm boiled egg with beetroot and potato. Last game of pool. Last night on the bed. Last. Last. Last.

His stomach churned momentarily
as the giddy thought of the outside world came to him again. He had been there, first on shopping trips with a screw, then on the greengrocery run, delivering, but it
wasn’t the same, he knew that. Open prison began to loosen your shackles bit by bit but you still had them, you still belonged inside and not out, you were still conditioned by where you ate and slept, the company you kept, your
past, the reason you were there.

Your body might be allowed out, but your mind stayed behind, your mind could not, dared not, take it in.

He unlocked his door. The late-afternoon sun touched the mushroom-coloured wall making it look even dingier. The whole place needed painting. They must have tried quite hard to start with, someone had probably been proud of themselves for their efforts to
make it look as little like a prison cell as possible, and the public areas more youth club or office block. Now, though, everything needed recovering, repainting, refurbishing, replacing and never seemed scheduled to get it.

Last time, last time, last time. Out of here. Out …

Andy opened the window. He remembered the first few days and how he couldn’t get used to that little thing, being able
to open his own window when he wanted to. He’d kept on doing it, opening and closing the window, opening and closing it.

He leaned out. Tomorrow, this room would belong to someone else. Another man moved from closed to open prison would do it all over again. Open the window. Close it. Open it. Close it, over and over. Tomorrow.

There was a bang on the door and Spike Jones was in the room before
Andy had time to call out. Spike was OK.

‘They’re getting up a five-a-side.’

‘Nah.’

‘You what?’

‘Anyway, I’ve handed in me boots.’

‘Right. You taking Kylie Minogue?’

‘She’s yours.’

Spike laughed, picking up the rolled-up poster which was propped against the cupboard. He wouldn’t be leaving Birley for another ten months. He’d always had his eye on that picture.

‘You ent brooding?’

‘Get
off.’

Brooding. Andy turned back to the open window. Brooding. No. That had been at the start, in the first days and weeks at Stackton, when he hadn’t known day from night and thought his mind was going. Brooding. He hadn’t done that since coming here and getting out into the market garden. He wasn’t about to take it up again.

The evening passed, like all the rest of them, and he was glad of
that. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to be different. He ate in the canteen, stood outside with a couple of the others watching the floodlit five-a-side, having a roll-up, went back in and played pool for an hour. At ten he was in his room, watching
The West Wing
.

He woke confused and sweating out of a nightmare. Security lights round the perimeter meant that it was never completely dark.
It was just after three.

Then the shock of what was going to happen hit him again and he was terrified so that his stomach clenched and his throat felt tight. Four and a half years of prison life, of learning to conform, putting on a front, keeping his own real self so concealed that now he scarcely knew who that self was, of routine, of rules, of learning, and of every emotion there was played
out, four and a half years swinging from rage to despair to acceptance to hope and back again. In five hours the four and a half years would be over. In five hours he would be out there. In five hours this room, this place would be nothing to him and, even more, he would be nothing to any of it. History. His name off the registers, his face forgotten.

Five hours.

Andy Gunton lay on his back.
If it was like this after four and a half years of a sentence, how was it for the ones who came out after fifteen or more? Did they feel this sudden wash of panic at the thought of being without walls, without props, without the deadening routine which after a short time became the only thing you clung to for safety?

He remembered the first week at Stackton. He had been twenty. He’d known nothing.
The stench of the place and the racket, the dead faces and suspicious eyes, the need he had had not so much to
break out or run away but simply to vanish, to dissolve, the droning snores of Joey Butler, his first cellmate, that he never got used to, never slept through deeply enough, the red scaly patches on his skin which erupted in eczema after a couple of nights on the prison mattress and did
not properly heal until he had come here – all of it came back to him, he lived through it all again, lying awake looking at the dull glow of the lights on the wall. They said it did one of two things to you. It took your soul away so that you never belonged to yourself again, you belonged in prisons for ever after and just went on doing whatever it took to get back there, or it scared the lights
out of you, changed you, chewed you up and spat you out. Cured you.

He had been cured from the moment he had handed in his own clothes and put on the prison uniform. He could have been let out then. It had worked. He wasn’t coming back.

How could he have dreamed he would feel like this, four and a half years on, terrified to go, clinging to the familiar, half longing to be told of a mistake,
that he had another term to serve, that this room would be his tomorrow night after all?

He went on staring at the light on the wall until it began to change and soften to pale grey as the dawn came up.

Simon Serrailler had slept deeply and woke to the sound of the cathedral clock ringing eight. The flat, the perfect space he had created with such loving care for himself, was cool and silent, filled with the bland light of a March morning. He pulled on his dressing gown and padded into the long sitting room, curtainless and tranquil with its polished elm floor, books, piano, pictures. The
light was not blinking on the telephone answering machine. No one had rung to tell him his sister was dead.

He filled the grinder with coffee beans and the filter with water. In half an hour the first cars would pull into the spaces at the front and the sound of the early arrivals at work echo up the stairs. The rest of this Georgian building had long been converted into offices for various Diocesan
organisations and a couple of solicitors. Simon’s was the only residential flat. He had usually left for the station by eight and was not often home until after seven, so he rarely met anyone else – during the day the building had a life of its own, about which he knew little. It suited him, self-contained
and private as he was, content in his orderly space. He relished his job, had enjoyed almost
every day of his life in the police force, but his refuge here was essential to him.