Double Vision (16 page)

Peter’s story ‘Inside the Wire’ was longer than the other pieces in the issue, though the potted biography at the end of the book gave less information than other contributors had thought necessary. His MA was mentioned, but almost nothing else.

Andrea White teaches Art inside a high-security prison. When people expressed surprise that her entire working life was spent locked up with some of the country’s most dangerous men, and asked if she did not feel nervous, she replied that she often felt safer inside the prison than she did waiting at the bus stop after dark to start the long journey home.

Andrea lives in a one-bedroom flat, in an area that was supposed to rise but hadn’t risen yet. A year before, she’d split up with her boyfriend. Two years before that, she’d had an abortion after her boyfriend decided he was too young to be saddled with a family. Now,
despite his fear of being a child bridegroom, he’s married and his wife is pregnant. Andrea passes her sometimes trundling her trolley round Sainsbury’s.

Once safely home, Andrea puts on soup for supper – home-made – warming it through, gently, as you should, while cutting the bread – home-made, warm from the oven. She knows all about the deep demoralization of the microwave, does Andrea, and she wants none of it – she’s fighting back. But it’s a precarious little life she leads – trying and failing to get over the boyfriend, getting drunk at a party and having a one-night stand, but lacking the emotional toughness not to feel bad about it afterwards. Next morning, getting up and staring at herself in the mirror, she notices that the creases at the corners of her eyes look deeper when she’s tired, and then she drags herself off to work.

She’s a good teacher, though she rarely encounters any actual talent. The prisoners generally go in for disturbingly sentimental portraits of children, chocolatebox flowers, gooey pictures of Christ – Peter was very good on the links between sentimentality and brutality. But one prisoner, James Carne, is doing something different. He returns again and again to a single image: a figure of indeterminate sex, the face hidden by bandages or tape, enclosed in a double helix of barbed wire. It’s a bit like the Amnesty International candle. ‘Did you,’ she asks James, ‘have the Amnesty International candle in mind when you drew it?’ ‘No,’ says James. ‘But you were thinking of imprisonment and the impossibility of escape?’ ‘Oh, yes.’

Andrea’s starved of meaning, so she attaches meaning to this. After a while she begins to suggest that perhaps he should do something else. ‘When I’m outside,’ he says. ‘Shut up in here I can’t think about anything else.’

She goes out of the prison gate, feels the wind and rain on her face, sees the barbed wire outside the high perimeter walls, hears the snapping of scraps of cloth and paper caught on the barbs. Of course he can’t do anything else. It was stupid and insensitive of her to think that he could.

James is a tall, rather good-looking man, muscles toned from long hours spent in the gym, obsessively working out. Andrea’s feelings for him, though, have nothing to do with physical attraction – or so she tells herself, hurrying through the weekend’s shopping so she’ll have time to go to the hairdresser.

James notices the new haircut, as he notices the shorter skirts, the brighter lipstick, the way the lipstick bleeds ever so slightly into the lines around her mouth. He watches her tug the skirt down over her knees when she catches him looking at her. He’s a man who notices things.

Without actually saying so, he implies that he’s innocent of the crimes for which he was sentenced, and she believes him. How could a murderer, a drugs dealer, an armed robber or a rapist – Andrea prefers to remain vague about the details of precisely what it is that James didn’t do – paint pictures as sensitive, as beautiful, as this? The figures glow inside their cages of barbed wire.

And then he comes out. He waits for her at the bus
stop where so often in the past she has felt afraid, with the floodlit rain-streaked walls of the prison towering over her.

There was no suspense. The ending had never been in doubt, and yet Stephen couldn’t stop reading. There’s a horrible fascination in watching an innocent human being become complicit in their own destruction. The violence, like everything else, was beautifully controlled, neither shirked nor lingered over. Barbed wire figured prominently, as did masking tape.

Andrea died a terrible death because she projected her own values on to an image created by somebody else for his own purposes. Stephen felt enormous compassion for her, but then he wondered whether he was not projecting his own values into the story, doing, in fact, exactly what Andrea had done with the paintings. You bring everything you are, everything you’ve ever experienced, to that encounter with the sculpture, the painting, the words on the page. But behind the smoke the sibyl crouches, murmuring too low for you to catch the words, ‘Ah, but I don’t mean what you mean.’

There was great insight into the small rituals of middle-aged female loneliness – remarkable in a young man. Insight, yes. But compassion? Stephen looked back at the description of James noticing the shorter skirt, the brown spots on the back of Andrea’s hand, the leaking of lipstick into the lines around her mouth. Peter was inhabiting James’s mind with disconcerting ease.

The second story, ‘The Odd Job Man’, was about a
widow who employs a man to do the small jobs around the house that she’d always relied on her husband to do in the past. There are a great many odd jobs to be done – it seems no sooner has Reggie (a rare false note) mended one thing than another breaks down. Eventually Reggie declares his passion, and she refuses him, saying she’s not over her husband’s death. The next morning, setting off for work, she finds her husband’s decomposed body on the doorstep with a note, saying, ‘What’s he got that I haven’t got?’

Christ
. Stephen put the book down. That was one story he wouldn’t be reading twice. Again the emphasis on female helplessness, the detailed observation that always implied empathy, and yet, somehow, mysteriously failed to deliver it. The stories kept slipping into sympathy with the predatory behaviour they attempted to analyse. There was no moral centre. That was Stephen’s final verdict, and it was this ambiguity in the narrator’s attitude to predator and prey, rather than the actual events, that made the stories so unsettling.

He read them over breakfast. They recurred throughout the morning in that second life of fiction that generally confirms the first impression, though in this case his estimate of the skill involved went up. It was the setting that gave the writing such authority. The smells on the landings, semen, socks and stew; the sour smell of chicken shit from the man trusted to work on the farm; the smell of dried urine from the cells of inveterate bedwetters; the grey cruds of chewing gum stuck to the
undersides of the top bunk; the iron taste of the mist that hangs over the prison, the only tangible evidence that there is a world outside.

Of course, it’s amazing what research could do to suggest that first-hand experience was being used. Saul Bellow wrote
Henderson the Rain King
without setting foot in Africa.

But that was Saul Bellow.

He left the book lying on the coffee table in front of the fire, where that evening Justine found it. She said nothing, but curled up on the sofa to read, a fuzz of golden hair visible under the T-shirt, which was the only garment she wore. He watched her brow furrow in that elusive expression of pain that was, he realized suddenly, the thing he found most erotic about her. She was so strong, so full of energy and hope. What did it say about him that it was her capacity to feel pain that aroused him?

She closed the book with a snap. ‘Thank God I did Science.’

‘They’re good, don’t you think?’

He assumed she’d been reading Peter’s stories, and she didn’t contradict him. ‘They’re horrible.’

She was quiet for a while. At last he went across to her and held out his arms as one does to a sulky child, and she came into them and cried. Rubbing her shoulders, he tried not to get excited by the smell of their earlier love-making and to focus simply on consoling her, but she pushed him away. ‘How long have you known about me and Peter?’

‘Kate mentioned it.’

‘Kate Frobisher?’

‘Yes.’

‘How the hell does she know?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps she saw you together.’

She was wiping her eyes fiercely, her chest too tight to support her voice. ‘Typical. You can’t do anything in this sodding place without being spied on.’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t spying. Did your father know?’

‘Of course he did.’

‘Did he approve?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

She tried to stare him out and failed. ‘Actually, Dad was a bit of a hypocrite about it. You know, he belongs to this Fresh Start initiative that tries to help people who’ve just been released from prison? That’s how he met Peter. Years ago, this is, and then he showed up again last summer and asked if he could stay for a few weeks. And as long as he was just doing the garden, it was fine, great, we were all doing this great Christian thing, but then I started going out with him – and that was a bit different.’

‘So he was actually
living
with you?’

‘Yeah, for a few weeks.’

‘And you fell in love with him.’

‘He made the running, not me.’

‘You’d be still a child the first time you met?’

‘Yeah. Which is what you think I still am. I don’t know what that makes
you
.’

‘Of course I don’t think you’re a child. C’mon, don’t take it out on me, I’m only trying to help.’

‘Sorry.’ She smiled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. He got up and found her some tissues.

‘What was he in for?’

‘I don’t know. Except it wasn’t sex offences, because Dad said he couldn’t take those, not with me in the house.’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘Peter or Dad?’

‘Peter.’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t that surprise you?’

‘No, and it wouldn’t surprise you either if you knew Peter.’

‘I don’t see how you can have a relationship with somebody and not tell them something like that.’

‘Don’t you?’ Her mouth was pursed as if she’d been sucking lemons. ‘He didn’t. He didn’t talk about the past much and when he did… I learnt to avoid the subject.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there was never any depth. It was always one-layer thin. You could poke your finger through it – and I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to know what was on the other side. But I did think one day…’ She was struggling for composure. ‘When we went out – that night, the night we finished – I thought it was going to happen, I thought he was going to tell me, because he obviously had something on his mind.
Instead of that, he cut my head off.’ An attempt at a laugh. ‘Chalk it up to experience, I suppose.’

‘Was he cruel?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was staring into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight. ‘I don’t know if cruel’s the right word.’

‘They’re cruel stories.’

‘Yes, but he isn’t James. He certainly isn’t Reggie.’

‘He created them.’

She shrugged.

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Of course he did.’

‘I mean physically.’

‘You mean was he violent? Oh, for God’s sake, do you think I’d put up with that?’

‘Some women do.’

‘Not me.’

He could sense that in her. ‘So how?’

‘I don’t know. It was… like everything was turned against you. Sometimes I’d open my eyes when we were making love and he’d be just staring at me and… It felt like being an insect on the end of a pin…’ Unexpectedly, she chuckled. ‘You know, not coming, but going. But I was in love with him. None of it mattered. And I thought it was going really well, and then…
chop
.’

‘Do you think your father had talked to him?’

‘No, I don’t think so. If he went in for that kind of heavy-handed father stuff, he’d be talking to
you
. No, I think Peter always intended it to be just for the summer.
Because I was going to university, I think he thought it was limited, off I’d go, and that’d be that. Only I got ill, and suddenly there was no obvious end-point. I think he was afraid of saying too much.’ A pause. ‘He did love me.’

‘Are you sure?’

Again that baffled, groping look. ‘No.’

‘Would you have wanted it to go on?’

‘Yes.’

‘In spite of not knowing what he’d done?’

She shook her head. ‘Whatever it is, he’s served his sentence. You can’t hold things against somebody for ever.’

That depended on what they’d done, he thought. ‘You must have some idea.’

‘No.’

‘Drugs?’

‘He hates them.’

She was starting to defend him, the last thing Stephen wanted. ‘It sounds as if you’re well rid of him anyway.’

‘That’s exactly what Dad said.’

He was glad to know Christian charity hadn’t entirely stifled common sense. ‘Yeah, well, we’re the same generation.’

He looked at her again in her ridiculous baggy T-shirt and thought, I’ve got to stop patronizing her. All along he’d assumed she was suffering from nothing more than the pangs of disappointed calf love, as painful as a toddler’s temper tantrum and as difficult for an adult to take seriously. He’d never allowed for the possibility
that she might have encountered, early in life, a man who would have been bad news for any woman at any age. Or man, perhaps, remembering certain nuances in his conversation with Peter.

Coldness, manipulation, a passion to control, an abnormality of mind that makes generosity in giving count against the giver…

He patted her ankle, then impulsively bent and buried his face in the golden hair between her legs, groping, flicking, sucking, nuzzling while his hands pressed her thighs gently apart. For a second her pelvis arched, like a flower in a dark corner angling to find the light, and her stomach muscles tensed and quivered.

But then, almost immediately, she was laughing and pulling away from him, pushing his head to one side as she wriggled free.

‘I’ve got to go home.’