Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 (16 page)

‘So what about them two stories you did do?'

‘When I left I had the carbon copies in my handbag. With my dole money and my cheque book and my passport. That's all I had on me when I started for Greece.'

‘That's it?'

‘And a hairbrush and a conker and a couple of chess pieces to remember him by. I shouldn't have bothered. I couldn't forget him. And after that I never produced any piece of writing. I think if I could write again now, I could get dry and make a new start.'

‘What about the bloke you're with now? You got some geezer now, yeah?'

I am guarded. ‘Yes.'

‘Well, can't he get you going?'

‘Not in that way.'

‘She twinkled at me for a moment. ‘I did wonder. You don't wanna talk about him, do ya?'

‘I'm trying to get used to life without him. After what I did. He said he couldn't ever see me again. Can't go back there, where I was living.'

‘Nowhere to go? Good luck, mate.'

‘It's not as bad as what you lot are going through. And here I am whingeing on.'

‘So you lost your bloke and your home and your selfrespect and you got a bad habit and you did something that landed you in here. Don't sound too good to me.'

‘I've remembered what I did.' Only too clearly.

‘No-one's going to ask you, in here.'

But I want to tell her. I'm sick of having secrets bottled up in my throat. ‘I lost it with an ex-girlfriend of his. Went round her place when she was out. Seriously lost it. You can do a lot of damage with a kitchen knife and a water bed on the first floor.'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know exactly. I was rat-arsed at the time. But I remember the ceiling came down and there was a guy living underneath. “He could have been killed” they said. “Didn't think of that, did you, Miss Jenkins?” But he was in the toilet. His computer took the hit.'

Mandy roared with laughter. ‘Nice one. So what she done, this ex?'

‘She hung around and oozed into everything. Wouldn't leave him alone. He always sided with her.' I bite my lip. I've been trying not to remember that woman.

‘D'ya try telling her to get lost?'

‘Useless. She's a queen bee type. Draws everyone in. I was out of my league.'

‘More like you gave up, you silly cow. Like with all this about being a writer. All I hear you saying is, “I can't do it.” Sometimes you gotta.'

I shrug. ‘Nothing comes.'

‘Why don't ya get off your arse and write something now?' Mandy says. ‘You got time. You're doing time, ain't yer, ha ha… '

‘Write about what?' I say. ‘It's a frozen landscape. Nothing moves. No air crash survivors. Not even people looking for bits of sandwiches. No crumbs.' I blow on the window then rub away the mist with my hand.

Mandy's not going to drop it: ‘That teacher, right, he says if you can't get going, start with what it's like when you wake up. What you see. What you feel like. Every little detail. That's the stuff, he says… How d'he go? “That's the stuff of fiction.”'

‘Everything I start goes round in circles and ends up where it started,' I say. ‘Like that kids' rhyme, you know it? “It was a wild and stormy night…”'

Mandy rolls her eyes.

I carry on, ‘“It was a wild and stormy night. Two men sat on a bridge. One man turned to the other and said…”' I put on a haunting, dramatic tone, ‘“It was a wild and stormy night. Two men sat on a bridge. One man turned to the other and said….”'

‘Don't tell me,' says Mandy, ‘“It was a scorching hot day…”'

‘“It was a wild and stormy night. Two men sat on a bridge. One man turned to the other and said…”'

‘“I'll push you off the fucking bridge if you go on like that…” You gotta get outta the loop, babe.'

I look out through the mist-free patch on the window and say, ‘So he fell off the bridge into the icy turbulent water and he floated down the river until he could get to the edge and drag himself out. He was in woodland. In the middle of the trees there was a woman standing, glowing gold, giving off heat. He went up to her for the warmth, and his clothes steamed. Then he saw something up in the silver birch tree beside her, a piece of paper blowing in the wind. There were words on it. He climbed up the wet slippery bark of the tree and just managed to catch hold of the scrap of paper. He looked at the words and it said: “It was a wild and stormy night….”'

‘Cut it out, you're doing my head in!' Mandy yells.

‘See what I mean?' I say. ‘On and on. Round and round. Going nowhere.' I lay my hand on my throat. ‘It's as if it's all blocked…'

‘Know what you need, mate? A good plumber!' Mandy laughs raucously at her own joke and goes back to bed.

I go to sit down on the floor beside my bed and pick up the pale blue felt tip pen. My hand is unsteady. I start tracing lines round and round to draw a new web opposite my bed head. There's not much room left on the wall.

‘I still don't get it,' says Mandy. ‘All webs and no spiders.'

How can I explain to her?

‘Yes,' I say. ‘Nobody at home.'

5

The Point of Light

Tuesday 18
^th
December 1990 1.00 pm

Icy rain drifted in onto Ren as she stood in the red phone box and dialled. Inside, it smelt of urine and there was a pane of glass missing near the top.

A woman's voice answered: ‘Hi, Alex here.'

‘So these mobiles do work sometimes. It's Ren. You left me a message to phone you.'

‘Great. Are you busy making snowballs?'

‘I'm in a coin box. I've just done a session and now I'm going in to do a massage class.'

‘I'll be brief, then,' said Alex. ‘Can I borrow your Christmas cake recipe?'

Ren's eyes opened wide. ‘You're making Christmas cake?'

‘Long story. I'm doing family Christmas for a change.

You?'

‘Ute is coming Christmas Day as usual,' said Ren. ‘With Emilio and the kids. Turkey and angels and holly and ivy. Brenda will probably turn up at some point after Christmas. I hope you will too.'

‘Sure thing. What about Maureen?'

‘She's coming over from New York for the New Year.'

‘Romantic. Thing is, I'm in Hackney later today, I could drop by to pick up the recipe.'

‘Fine. I've got an old friend coming to supper, and I'll be home six or seven o'clock. If you get there before me, wait in the pub. The one on the High Street.'

On the main road the snow had not settled and the feathering of sleet was making the pavements shiny. As Ren came out of the phone box, she put up her small umbrella, and waited for a gap in the stream of traffic. Then she ran across the road to the prison.

There was a queue at Reception. A large woman with three children in tow was complaining loudly that she wanted to see her sister, and she hadn't been told which was the right form to bring. Prison officers coming back from lunch were trying to get past. Ren and others who had business inside waited to have their ID checked and get a visitor label. The queue jostled with umbrellas, and the floor of the Reception area had puddles. One family stood outside shivering. When Ren's turn came, the big-bosomed prison officer behind the counter gave her a label, waved her through into the glass airlock chamber, and pressed the button to close the sliding door behind her. There was a security waiting time before the sliding door on the other side would open to let her into the prison. Ren adjusted the visitor label on its chain round her neck.

On the side wall of the airlock chamber, in a heavy wooden frame, the prison's mission statement read: ‘It is our responsibility to protect, nurture and educate those in our custody and enable them to return to life in the community with renewed values, self esteem and hope for the future.'

Someone had used a marker pen to write on the glass, turning the ‘h' of ‘hope' into a ‘d'.

The officer at Reception pressed the second button, the inner door slid open, and Ren stepped into the prison.

Tuesday 18
^th
December 1.05 pm

The South Bank complex looked like giant lumps of concrete left out in the rain after a cosmic building job. The hands of the Shellmex building clock edged past one o'clock as Alex's bus crossed Waterloo Bridge. Snug in the back seat of the upper floor, she wrapped her mobile in a handkerchief and put it away in the big pocket of her coat. Further away to the west, on the bend of the wintry river, the House of Commons was dimly visible as the sky curdled and the sleet thickened again into snow. She fished in her bag for her Walkman and put a Pogues tape into it.

In the Aldwych, through the velvet curtains of the Waldorf Hotel, people could be seen seated on gilt chairs drinking coffee. A dusting of white gave a historical grandeur to the entrance of the BBC at Bush House, with its columned portico and its carved motto dedicated ‘To the friendship of English speaking peoples'. Halfway up Kingsway the bus was passed by a fire engine with siren wailing. Alex plugged her headphones into her ears and watched the people below scuttling through the slush in and out of Holborn Station.

Shop windows were decorated with tinsel and coloured lights. On Theobald's Road snow was floating horizontally when the bus stopped opposite a shop front clad in scaffolding. Through a gap in the tarpaulins hanging down the outside of the scaffolding, Alex caught a glimpse of a man in a brown woolly hat. He was rubbing down the paint on a first floor window, the same height as the top of the bus. She watched him turn away from the window and blow on his black fingers, which stuck out from his fingerless gloves. He shook his hands to get the circulation going, then took sandpaper from his dungarees pocket and turned back to work on the window as the bus pulled away. Further along Theobald's Road, Alex stared onto the snowy waste of Gray's Inn stretching away to her right. On the Clerkenwell Road, some of the Italian restaurants had a Christmas tree outside the doorway. Flakes were settling on the troughs of plastic flowers at their windows.

As Alex got off the bus, she pulled up her hood and then set off with long strides to her office building. She stepped into the lift, pulled the old-fashioned cage-like door across in front of her and pressed the button for the second floor.

A smell of burning hit her as she went in the office. Dora, her wildly back-combed hair sticking out at all angles, was stuffing the contents of a wire wastepaper basket into a black plastic bag. ‘Thank Christ it's you,' she said, ‘I thought it was the others coming back from their meeting.' Dora had the kind of face that looked permanently startled.

‘What's going on?' said Alex. ‘What's burning?' She screwed up her nose. Her features were as sharp as her mind, pretty but angular.

‘Nothing. It's all out now,' said Dora. ‘Just an accident.'

‘What happened?'

‘I dropped my fag into the wastepaper basket and it wasn't quite out. Nothing serious. I was in the loo when it started smouldering.'

‘I saw a fire engine coming up Kingsway,' said Alex. ‘I might have known.'

‘Very funny. It was only in the bin.' Dora took a paper handkerchief off her desk and went down on her knees in her leopard-skin trousers to wipe the residue of carbon from the inside of the basket. ‘Do you think he'll realize?'

‘He will if you don't get rid of the smell.' Alex opened the window and cold cut into the warm air of the office. Snow flakes were drifting down outside, and some of them blew onto the window sill. ‘For fuck's sake, Dora, setting fire to a publisher's office! What's the idea?' Alex sat down at her desk and pressed her hand down on her wiry black hair, clutching her head. When she took it away the short curls bounced up again like heather. ‘Are you trying to get rid of the backlog of unsolicited manuscripts? Get out of proof-reading? Do us out of a job?… For Chrissake, get a grip!'

Dora dropped the basket and sank into her chair. ‘You won't tell the others, will you?' She tried to wipe her hands clean on another paper handkerchief. ‘Anyway, you're late. What happened to you?'

‘Doing a half day. The council came to fix a window in the flat. Fucking horrible weather. The Houses of Parliament are wrapped in obscurity. That figures. The monuments of the media are benefiting from a wintry whitewash. The legal world looks like Siberia. Then Christmas lights draped all over everything to make it look pretty.' She pulled her coat collar tighter round her neck, and switched on her computer. ‘And since it's Christmas, they're hoping we won't notice that they're going to start a war in the Gulf. Kill a few people in the Middle East. That's the Christmas spirit…' She looked across the neat piles on her desk at Dora. ‘Christmas is madness,' she said.

Dora nodded across the chaotic and perilously stacked heaps of papers that covered her desk, nearly burying her electric typewriter. ‘Mass hysteria,' she said, and shivered.

‘Capitalism running amok,' spat out Alex.

‘Bah, Humbug!' Dora threw her head back. Her dishevelled hair was hurled into a new disorder. ‘Scrooge had the right idea.'

‘Hang on,' said Alex. ‘Poor old Scrooge has been misappropriated. In the service of consumerism. The whole point of
The Christmas Carol
is about the redistribution of wealth, the wealthy sharing with the poor. “Mankind should have been my business,” groans Marley's ghost. Especially at the festive season.' Alex spoke swiftly, as if the words were racing to keep up with her thoughts. ‘But how do they use that story? They use Scrooge as a taunt to make every poor sod on a low income feel they're being mean if they're not overspending on Christmas presents. To boost the profits of the big companies. Dickens wanted the rich to give to the poor, not take even more from the poor because it's Christmas.'