Alphabet (3 page)

He's collected a few fags, so he offers Teverson one. Tev takes it without a word, banging his head up and down to the beat. ‘Risky,' he says. ‘I don't want to kill the goose that lays my golden eggs, do I?' But then again, he's got a few of them.

‘How much?' Simon asks. If you want something, drink, snout, junk, sex, letters, it's the same: you have to put out for it.

But if the bloke has any sense, he won't charge you more than you can get hold of.

‘Thirty,' Teverson says. He claps his arm round Simon's shoulders and gives a squeeze, then a slap between the shoulder blades.

‘How long you done?' he asks. ‘Eight? That's as long as I
reckon I'll serve,' he says, pleased with himself. ‘Keep busy and it'll go in a flash. Everything'll be hunky-dory when I get out.'

Dear
is how you begin letters, even if you don't know the person, even if you don't like them, and
Dear
is what they call you when they write back. I like that, Simon thinks, and he also likes the thought of someone making the effort to get out paper and pen, and maybe looking back over his last letter to see if there are any questions to answer or points to pick up, pausing for a while and then beginning to write. At any point they might stop or be interrupted. But the idea of him waiting to know what they have to say keeps them going until the end:
yours
,
best wishes
,
keep cheerful
,
take care
,
write soon
,
love
. . . He is not deserving of these words, but once, according to Dr Grice, he must have been. Well, perhaps he can have the ones he's owed from back then?

He's waiting, just waiting, here on his bed. To the right: door, sanitary unit, ahead: table, chair, books, pens. Fifteen years, minimum. Five minutes to lockdown. Eleven hours in. Four hours till there's any peace and quiet. Eight weeks, he figures, till he might get a reply: the ad lies around at the newspaper office for ten days or so. Then the paper comes out, then it flits around the house for a bit, nearly gets thrown out, and then late at night she's looking through it and thinks, well, yes, I might. Then she has to actually write the letter. Then she forgets she's done it then she doesn't have a stamp and forgets to post it for a week and nearly doesn't bother. Then she does and it gets to Teverson's wife's sister, and hides under the doormat. Sod's law, she finds it straight after a visit, or it's not her turn, so that's another fortnight gone.

It's all relative is the thing to remember, and what he finds helps is to breathe in very slowly, hold it a bit, then out the same way. Plus, he tries to direct his thoughts the way he wants them to go. Forward, not back. What could be, not what once was. He's thinking now how he will keep copies of the letters he writes in one half of the Adidas box that he got from the
Irishman, and the letters that he receives from her in their envelopes in the other half. He's thinking how meantime, he'll keep up with the hap-kid-do and the stretching exercises and of course the yogic breathing. He'll read, and develop his imagination. One way you do this is by asking yourself questions, like, what kind of place do you think Teverson has on the outside? Easy.

A big council maisonette, with peeling paint on the outside, and every mod con indoors. Tiger-stripe rug, big mirror, huge TV, Marantz sounds, fancy lighting. Tropical fish. Huge bed.
Sawn-off shotgun under it. Steel front door, metal grille on the windows.

What will she be like? he thinks. I don't know.

Who will I become? Ditto. A leap in the dark.

5

It is only four days since Dickie Walters called Simon to his office. What's going on? he was thinking as he followed the officer into the Magnolia Zone, where the odour of stale food and bodily miseries ceases abruptly, replaced by the aroma of fresh coffee that floats out of the cubby hole at the end of the wing. Had they found out about the deal with Teverson? Had someone grassed him up about something as petty as this? Just the thought of it balled his hands into fists; at the same time his eyes drank in the deep red of the carpet and his ears adapted gratefully to the new, soft soundscape of low voices, typing and telephones, female laughter from behind doors left ajar.

Get on with it!
he thought as fresh-faced Walters shook his hand then sat down and went through endless preliminaries.
Don't piss me about!

‘Well,' said Walters eventually, ‘good news. After consideration, as a privilege, but not a right, I've decided to allow you access to your last F75 report –'
Why?

‘I don't want it,' Simon told him. ‘Why would I? I never asked for it.'

‘These days we are trying to be as transparent as we can,' Walters continued, regardless, light glinting from the smearless lenses of his glasses. ‘We feel it could be of benefit for you to see these reports, as and when, of course, staffing levels make it feasible. Just put in a request to your Personal Officer.'

First he had a good laugh. Ask that bastard for something?
You
must be joking!
Then he thought he was indifferent. Then he thought he'd hold out: wrong. He applied and here he is, seated at a metre-square formica table placed plumb in the
centre of a windowless cube of a room, perfectly aligned beneath the rectangular fluorescent panel on the ceiling. Hos-kins is propped against the wall two paces away, sucking his breath in through his teeth, checking his watch every other minute. The report is in its slide binder in front of him. It's about half an inch thick. He can see that it's a mistake to have come, but even so, he opens it.

‘Austen has an arrogant attitude. He has made no effort to address any of his offending behaviour other than poor literacy, which can have had only a minor impact on the trajectory of the offence . . .' Walters himself. Where do they go to learn this stuff ! On it goes, on and on. Five, six pages! He whisks through, almost tearing the typed sheets as he turns them: ‘. . . attended the anger-management course but said it was only to satisfy the institution and commented that he had already discovered most of the techniques for himself . . .' Well, yes, it's called put a lid on it, you fucking have to or you'd explode! He looks up at Hoskins, who is looking at the ceiling, cheeks bright with burst veins, dandruff on his shoulders, no doubt fantasising about retirement, likely to be dead within six months of it.

‘Austen is deeply in denial . . .' These words, typed out by the woman in the acrylic knitwear suits who sits next to the governor-grade offices, clickety clack, makes him want to spit.
Literally, he can feel his mouth fill up.
Remove the stimulus!
He turns over a few pages at once.
Time out,
right? The Personal Officer, at least he's done his with his own hand, pressing hard, making blobs with the biro ink: ‘Good behaviour, but sarcastic and a loner. This man strikes me as a time-bom (sic) that could go off any day.'

He turns over another clump of pages. Dr Grice!

‘Steady,' puffs Hoskins, pushing himself away from the wall for a moment in case action is required, then settling back again.

‘Rather than confront his early experiences of abandonment and rejection, Simon has developed a strategy of using hostility
to pre-empt further rejection. He shows no interest in exploring this and over six sessions he frequently used mockery to . . .'

And so now all at once he's as tense as he used to get in that apricot-white room of Grice's: nothing to do but look at the over-painted brickwork, the freckles on the backs of Grice's hands, the stray grey hairs in his nose, the bald patch, the weave of the cloth his jacket is made from, look and look and look until it's like some kind of hallucination, waiting for time to pass. Grice could ask a question, and wait twenty minutes for the answer to come, or not. Didn't seem to bother him. Whenever Simon looked up at his face, he was always looking back, not staring, just alertly looking, just as if something
had
just been said, and it was setting him off on a new and interesting train of thought. By the time he got out of that room, Simon's teeth would be jammed together and his whole back hurt and he'd want someone to lay into him, just for the release of it and so he could hit back. The one time it happened, in the showers, some idiot laughed at one of his tattoos and he got him on the ground in two seconds flat, smashing his head on the tiles, ‘Don't you dare laugh at me.' Result: a lot of respect, plus five extra days for resisting the screws who pulled them apart, plus he had to do the anger-management course. That was the last time before this that he had to go to see Walters.

‘Well,' Grice said at the end of the last ‘meeting', as he called them, ‘we can of course resume at a later date, should you change your mind . . .' Simon was thinking:
Is this some kind of
joke, it must be, when are we both going to crack up laughing or have
you never done it?
But at the same time he was standing there in front of Grice as if he'd been turned to stone, as if somehow he couldn't go, now that it was really over.

Hoskins clears his throat, which sounds as if it's full of half-cured cement with a handful or two of gravel thrown in. He's on at least forty a day, and clearly desperate to get out of this No Smoking room. ‘Just a few minutes more,' he says, and
Simon could leave it there but just to spite Hoskins he flicks over some more pages at random: ‘Austen is fit and attends well to personal cleanliness,' he discovers, courtesy of the Medical Officer. What a gem! So who, exactly, is the expert here? Am I right or am I not? But does it matter one little bit?

‘Crap!' Simon barks at Hoskins.

‘What's new?' Hoskins comments, smiling gratefully as he finally unsticks himself from the wall.

‘Learn anything?' he wheezes, bent over to lock the door behind them. I could floor the fat bastard, Simon thinks, but for some reason it doesn't happen. ‘Back to business?' Hoskins grins, reaching for his Embassy and gold-plated lighter. How many times has he done that in his lifetime? I could write your card, Simon thinks:

Hoskins uses nicotine, alcohol, spouse abuse and a mildly sarcastic
manner to distance himself from his environment, colleagues and
charges. His unusual hobby, photographing night scenes, especially
firework displays, provides relief and satisfaction . . .

How can anyone here act normal, even remember what it is? Hoskins sighs as he lights up, and as an afterthought, offers Simon the packet. He takes two, puts one behind each ear.

Hoskins accompanies him to the toolshed, unlocks it, watches him pull on huge red rubber gloves, like udders, and extract wheelbarrow, dustpan, brush and so on. Then he's on his own for almost an hour. Despite his being a time-bomb, his new job requires him to be trustworthy and he gets a red band to wear on his arm while out of doors. Mornings, it's a matter of picking up the shit-parcels thrown from the cells of those not fortunate enough to have their own sanitary unit, along with the odd sandwich, sweet paper and so on. Afternoons, sweeping up dust. The job doesn't earn respect, not even much of a wage, but it gets him out of doors. He can walk behind the Education block and hear Marsden practising on the upright piano. He can inspect a larger bit of sky, feel scraps of wind on
his face. And at some point, he can pass by the boiler sheds where Teverson works, shovelling coal. He does it stripped to the waist, dusty and sweating, like something in a picture book about the mines a hundred years ago. He only takes the job on to keep up his fitness, he says, and he's certainly winning there.
The screw looks on, pot-bellied, smoking.

‘Got mine?' Tev yells at Simon. ‘A big, sticky one. No paper. Sorry, couldn't wrap it up, mate.'

‘A rat ate it up,' Simon tells him. ‘Then it died.'

‘See ya!' Tev says, seemingly satisfied, and turns back to his work. Tev has been coming up to Simon two or three nights a week, on the scrounge. Hand on shoulder, like a ton of bricks from behind. Mostly, but not every time, Simon gives him some dark, gummy prison tobacco or a couple of real cigarettes, like the ones he's just got from Hoskins. Simon doesn't ever ask about his letter, not even when, as today, he knows Tev has just been visited, has sat out his half hour in that stuffy room where two worlds meet, where half of the other halves are blubbing, all the kids are screaming blue murder and everyone concerned would be better off not doing it, but they do.

His own last – only – personal visit was in remand. His ex-foster mother Iris Kingswell asked to come and he let her, just so as to get things clear.

‘Simon,' she gasped, when they brought him in, ‘it's ten years but you look just the same!' She didn't. She was bigger, softer and less distinct, like a shop-window reflection of what she used to be. Old. He hardly recognised her, which made it hard to say what he had to say, but he started out anyhow.

‘I don't know why you wanted to come here –' He meant to go straight on, but at this point she leaned forward over the table, took hold of his arm.

‘Because I care,' she said, frowning and looking into his face like there was something lost she might find there. ‘I'm sorry to see you here,' she told him; her eyes teared up. ‘I know it went wrong, Simon. And I'll admit it wasn't all your fault. Sometimes, I feel we really let you down. I was going through the
change, you know.' A shame she didn't change into something better! He can still remember how she told him he was more trouble than she was paid for and now this woman she was hiding inside of wanted him to say how he had turned out wasn't her fault. Well, work it out for yourself.

‘Whatever the rights and wrongs, you were with us a good few years.'

‘I didn't want to be!' he told her, but she went on as if he hadn't spoken, talked right over him, it was all some sort of script she had learned by heart.