Alphabet (35 page)

How old is she, actually? Back in the hospital, he would have put Vic the man at a little younger than himself: twenty-eight perhaps. In the photograph, half-way to her current state, made-up, she looks both younger and older. The face is younger, but the dress doesn't work . . . In any case, weeks pass, and she doesn't write back, whereas the Introduction to Philosophy tutor sends a typed letter telling him that he has done quite well but needs to develop greater patience in following through and testing the stages of an argument. He is welcome to take the subject further, but it is one in which temperament is as important as intelligence and it doesn't suit everyone. Right. End of Story, then. He might as well start reading for Literature and chooses
The Plague
because it's shorter than
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
.

I just can't seem to sit down and write a proper letter these days, but I do want to keep in touch. So here's an idea: how about I come up and see you one Saturday, if you have a visiting order to spare? Of course, you might not. But my thinking is that it is time you knew who you are writing to! Plus I might be able to cheer you up. It's not that far and I've got a new car. I'm doing lots of visiting.

News: On top of everything else, I have had my first romance and I've done a photo shoot for a magazine article about gender dysphoria! I got a free Sassoon hair-styling session and had to pose in a whole range of outfits: work, party, beach – should get some nice pictures out of it.

I've included my home number, so, if you want, you can give me a ring to arrange a time. Charlotte.

It's good to hear that voice again, warm and liquid, sliding down and rushing up, appearing, suddenly, around corners. Why speak in a monotone, when you can do all this? Why stick to just the words, when you can make them into music? Why not throw in a whole lot of soft exclamations, fragments of laughter? He appreciates it a lot, though at the same time, he makes no concessions to it, resolutely chats to her as if she were a man.

‘I'm not busy. Take your pick,' he tells her.

‘Mmm . . . Actually, I might bring Diane,' she tells him.

‘Bring Diane? Why?'

‘Why not?' she asks.

‘It's not a zoo, Charlotte.'

‘Someone to talk to on the drive,' she says. ‘And she's nice, you'll like her.'

Why not? Why not sit down at a visits room table with two ex-men? Plus, of course, it's not been expressed as a choice. Probably she just wants to be sure he doesn't get any ideas. This way it's not too intimate.

‘All right,' he tells her. ‘Bring whoever you like, Charlotte.'

Naked to the waist, Simon spreads the washcloth, hot as he can stand it, over his face. COURAGEOUS is written backwards in the mirror and WASTEOFSPACE runs up the side of his spine, ATHREATTOWOMEN up the other. On one shoulder blade it says STUPID, on the other BRIGHT. Just below the hairline on his neck, in tiny capitals BASTARD; CALLOUS wraps around one bicep, MURDERER around the other. Bernie's word, across his chest, has the largest, neatest lettering. The rest depend on who did them for tidiness and spacing. Across his back, just above the waistline, it says ARROGANT. The rest, the job titles on his right buttock, the other recently added Wentham words on his upper right thigh, are covered by a nearly-new pair of prison-issue jeans with most of the colour still in. Across from the washrooms, behind him, is his cell, where a clean shirt lies ready on the bed. The mirror clouds over, he wipes it, applies foam to his face. He's so nervous he feels sick. There's only so much you can do about looking presentable. It's not that. It's what are they going to say, face to face? Just what can you say, in what amounts to public, to a person who has just had their genitals remodelled? What is Charlotte – not knowing anything above the basics of what you've done to get in here – going to say to him? And what kind of idiot would agree to a thing like this? Getting dressed, Simon's fingers are so cold that he fumbles doing his shirt buttons up, and has to go back to the washroom to soak his hands in a basin of warm water.

It's unusually bright in the Social Visits Centre: a row of windows look out on some bushes and flowerbeds, and there are two large skylights high up in the sloping ceiling. The room is already half-full, the warm air thick with the hum of voices. The tables and chairs are packed in close, with just a small area set aside for kids to play with some toy cars and teddy bears from a plastic bin. Officers stand at the edges of the room and one of the others who are patrolling between the rows of tables takes Simon over to a seat by the window. The two brightly dressed women sitting there stand up and then it's all a blur: she takes hold of his shoulders puts her cheek to his and kisses the air to either side. No one female-looking has touched him like this for over a decade, and his heart is doing panic-stricken overtime even while the smell of her perfume takes him momentarily back to Vic's baths in the hospital, but things move inevitably on: he's shaking hands with Diane now and the officer tells them to settle themselves quickly down at the table, please.

He looks from one to the other. Charlotte is both uncannily familiar and utterly strange. She sits with one hand on the table, her large grey eyes looking back at him, amused, from beneath eyebrows plucked to a perfect curve.

‘Under the circumstances,' she tells him, ‘it's OK to stare.' He does. She has blonder hair than he remembers, full of different gradations of colour and looking as if every hair has been individually polished to a shine. She's wearing a black top that's stretched tight over what are definitely breasts, a fuchsia shirt, with pearly buttons, unfastened, over it. Diane, a small woman with a helmet of tightly permed curls, is wearing a floral print dress and, he notices distractedly, a wedding ring.

‘Well,' Diane says cheerfully, gesturing around the room, ‘it could be worse.'

‘Thanks for coming,' he says. ‘How was the drive?'

‘OK. You're looking better than when I last saw you,' Charlotte tells him.

‘You too!'

‘It sounded as if you needed cheering up.'

‘It's gone off the boil now,' he says. ‘I'm OK. What's going for you then, out there? Is it as good as you thought?'

‘It's better,' Charlotte says. While Diane nods and smiles and offers the occasional prompt, she tells him a long story about how she met a man called Boris at a bookshop in her lunch break and he turned up outside her office at the end of the day, and they went for dinner together. It lasted for five weeks, with a couple of weekends away, he had a Porsche, and she liked it at first, but then she'd had enough of him; he was trying to take her life over. Plus, in physical terms it wasn't a perfect match, he was rather on the fat side and not prepared to do anything about it – after all, why cast pearls before swine? She tells him how her mother is beginning to enjoy having a daughter, and shows him the engraved pendant she gave Charlotte after the operation . . .

Men can be very irritating, she tells him, with Tony, her boss, as prime example. She does an imitation of him pretending he hasn't just changed his mind, forgotten something or made a huge error of judgement. Then, she describes a pottery figure she bought to go on the coffee table in her living room, he's seen the table, she thinks. It's a nude woman, lying on her side with a baby curled up in the crook of her arm – quite realistic, but simple. It must be fantastic to have a baby, she says, but after all, not all women do it.

‘Not all women even want to,' Diane says, firmly.

‘I'd like to be able to make things, things like that statue I bought, for myself,' Charlotte says. ‘Maybe I'll take a class – sculpture, pottery – come September. Are you in any way artistic?'

He tells her no, but explains that there is a painter he remembers quite liking, though, a Spanish artist, Pendez. A lot of art strikes him as a bit hard to get the point of. Like philosophy! But he likes to study. He likes reading. He couldn't actually read, when he came into the system. Now, he's thinking he'll end up with a Social Sciences degree or even Anthropology, perhaps. Maybe some History or Literature thrown in.

‘It passes the time better than anything else,' he says. His hands are sweating. It's a big effort not to gaze over their shoulders or down at the table while he speaks. What else is there to say? Ninety-five per cent of his life seems unsuitable for a conversation like this. Things are grinding to a halt when Diane, who has been sitting there with a benign, half-interested expression on her face, suddenly asks:

‘How long do you still have to do? Or shouldn't I ask that?' He shrugs.

‘I don't know. In theory it could be, say five or six, or eight, more. But honest-to-God, I don't think I'm ever coming out. Basically, I can't be released unless I do that course I told you about. And I know it's bollocks.'

‘You did tell me,' Charlotte says, ‘but I don't understand. Why on earth wouldn't you do a course, any course, if it helped you to get out of here?'

‘It's hard to explain,' he says.

They both sit there, waiting.

Get off my fucking back! he thinks.

‘Five minutes!' Calls out one of the screws standing by the door.

‘There's no time,' he says. ‘Let's stop talking about this. Tell me, where are you going after this? What car is it you've got, Charlotte? I see you in a BMW. Open top. A silver one.' She laughs.

‘If only!'

They're about to go. He thinks how they'll probably be splitting their sides laughing at him as they drive off in the car to do their bit of shopping and sightseeing. Or saying what a creep he was, weird, poor you, Charlotte, fancy being stuck in a room with that! The fact is, he's wasted the visit and he'll probably never see them again.

‘Look, the trouble is,' he says at the last moment, ‘I feel like a fucking Martian!'

‘Oh, Simon,' Charlotte says, leaning over the table. ‘I know that one. I know it well . . . You have to push it aside.'

‘That's it now, ladies and gents!'

They stand up, reach across the table, do the cheek-to-cheek thing again, the soft, hairless skin, the perfume, it's all there.

‘Call,' she says, ‘or write. Whatever.' He walks over to the inmate exit without looking back, working hard, already, to expunge the whole thing from his memory. End of Story. End of. End.

He starts on some of the supplementary reading: another one by the same Camus bloke called
The Outsider
, which is about a murder, but he can't work that one out, there's something missing and one thing's for sure, the bloke in it wouldn't do well in the group at Wentham. He orders some books about Camus from the interlibrary loans and whatever else happens, it's good to know that there will be enough books in the world to keep him busy until he dies.

Charlotte sends a card. Perhaps, she suggests, it was insensitive of her to bring someone else along. She's sorry. Can they start again?

He doesn't answer it for almost ten days. And then he doesn't call, but writes.

I enjoyed meeting you and hearing what had been going on but talking about my sentence is not easy and while there was nothing wrong with Diane
per se
, it probably didn't help having her there. Also, I am not sure why you want to visit me, and that makes me tense. You can't be that desperate for friends, I'm inclined to think. I've got the impression you have a lot of them. If you were trying to make up for not having time to write letters any more, don't. I wish you all the best. Simon.

It's not exactly a welcoming letter, but by a kind of sleight of hand he allows himself to include the visiting order, intended as an option, only. Then he blots the whole thing out so successfully that he's caught out completely when the call comes: Austen! Visitor! He is miles away, shaved, albeit hours ago, but with nothing to put on but a shirt with a rip on the front as if someone's been stabbed in the thing.

She is there at the same table, next to the row of houseplants by the window, her hair up, wearing black jeans and a tight lilac top with a scoop neck, hoop earrings, lipstick. She's half-smiling as she looks around at the people deep in their conversations at the other tables in the room. If she catches someone's eye, she smiles, maybe gives a little nod. She doesn't see him coming until he is quite close up.

‘Hello, there,' she says, standing up for the air-kissing ritual. ‘I was just thinking you were going to stand me up!' He grins back at her.

‘I was busy,' he says, ‘reading.'

‘I've been thinking,' Charlotte says and, he is beginning to realise, one of the things about Charlotte is that she can listen innocuously, or chit-chat for five minutes about someone she has met or about decorating a bathroom, and then catch her breath, allow a short pause and suddenly shift gears: ‘I've been thinking, you've got a very unusual face. Some women have a thing for men in prison, don't they? But I'm not like that. I'm the complete opposite. Though I suppose,' she says, with another shifting of gears, ‘that really, I should ask you to tell me a bit more about how come you got here?' He's sitting opposite, watching her closely. His hands rest on the table, fingers interlinked: DCUUMNBT.

‘How much more?' he asks her.

‘Just a bit.' He remembers Tasmin, years ago now:
tell me
everything
. This is more realistic. Yes, he tells her. He will. Meanwhile, he asks her to tell him about Brighton, and she describes sitting on the little square of roof garden she has attached to her flat, with the grey-and-white gulls wheeling and quarrelling overhead, the smell of the sea fighting with the traffic fumes.

To begin with
, he types later that week, sitting at the small table in his cell,

To begin with, I knew I had done something terrible but I just blotted the whole thing out. I thought I had screwed up and would have to start all over again but I didn't have any idea how, I couldn't take advice and I didn't want to look back. After about seven years of this I came to the point of admitting outright that the reason for the killing was more ‘intimate' than had emerged in court.