Alphabet (13 page)

A wedge goes in under the door. ‘Ink,' Alex says, putting on his glasses, wire-framed NHS. ‘Lie on the floor, we'll get intimate!' He squats to one side, leans in close; first there are a series of light marks as he measures the word out across Simon's chest, then the ballpoint presses into the newly exposed skin as it moves steadily around the shape of each letter, from right to left across Simon's chest. COURAGEOUS.

‘Fits well,' Alex says. ‘Look in the mirror, here.' The outline is faint and everything's reversed, seems fainter still in the small panel of polished steel. He checks it carefully. ‘Hurry up,' Alex
hisses. His Glasgow accent comes out thicker as he works and the point of his tongue sticks out between his lips. He's somehow warm and dangerous at the same time. The friend he almost killed ten years ago is in a wheelchair and still visits him.
‘I'll do a few at a time,' he says. The pen moves minutely this way and that, pulling at the skin as he fills in the letters C, O, U, R . . . Then he sits back on his haunches.

‘Look –' From a soft grey rag he unwraps a Walkman motor.
‘My baby. See? I can go very even with this . . . plus, it's quick. Wake up your nerves, she will . . . Tense up, then you won't move, OK?' Alex bends close, holding the skin firmly with two fingers of his left hand. There's a deceptively gentle humming noise, then the needle bites, rapid and relentless.
Simon gasps – he's almost forgotten what it's like, to be just feeling the needle dig in, not controlling it at the same time.
He breathes steadily, imagines the pain as something he has to absorb through his skin, dissolve and incorporate. A good thing. Something he wants . . . Certainly it's better not to watch Alex's face: the tension round his eyes and the zeal in them, the wet tongue-tip between his teeth, the pores of his well-shaved skin, its growing dampness. Simon shuts his eyes and tries to follow the shape of the letters. Sweat runs down the curve of his ribs, around and under his back. When suddenly the buzzing of the motor stops, the pain continues, changes, grows even, as if what's already there expands to take up the available space.

‘I should stop really, but what d'you want?'

‘Finish it off,' Simon replies, one half of his chest liquid fire, the other blank . . . Well . . . ten letters instead of the usual four! Something different. Something to not forget, but also, something to grow into.

‘Keep it clean,' Alex says. He rubs some vaseline over the word, then sticks a bit of torn sheet on top. ‘Swelling should be down in a week or so.'

19

Then there's Lockerbie, 270 dead. Possibly a bomb. ‘Puts all of us in the shade,' Jolly Roger next door opines; his enjoyment of the recent spate of bad news from the outside world is driving everyone mad. The air is, literally, thick: by Christmas Day the smell of hooch: sickly but sharp at the same time, has thickened, risen, filled every crevice and pocket of the confined, indoor space to the point where just walking around the landing might give you a hangover. Stolen sugar, yeast, tap-water, a sweatshirt chucked over the top to keep out dust . . . there are three buckets in cells on just Simon's landing, plus one in the cleaning cupboard and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Not that he touches the stuff himself, after he once saw someone carted off in the ambulance for drinking from a batch that turned to ethanol. The majority have been at it pretty solid since the screws v. cons game yesterday afternoon (actually, before, because, let's face it, it's only because of OK Simpson in goal and Simon himself scoring once that they managed a draw). Now, in the lunch queue, the fumes could spontaneously combust or at the very least make you throw up. Down at the servery Diesel, Hoskie, Q Tip and Co. are wearing plastic antlers as they dish up, watched by fifty-odd pairs of bloodshot eyes. They had better get it right because if some bastard thinks he's missed a sausage or hasn't got enough meat on his plate or pudding in his bowl, then whoosh, up it goes. The vegetables are another matter.

‘Here, mate,' says Q Tip, as he grabs Simon's plate with one huge brown hand and with the other shovels on a double load of the Brussels sprouts, colour of snot, texture, no doubt, of rotting sponge and already more or less cold. ‘Veggie-tarian, ain't you?'

‘Great, ta,' Simon says. It's good he's only half there. The rest of him is spread between the Portakabins and West Cork, which he has looked up in the library atlas. He hopes it's a sunny, bright day over there, though the chances aren't good – all the place names on the map seemed to have water in them somewhere.

‘Can you give me some
more
of those please?' he says to Q Tip.

‘Boy, you want more?' Q Tip comes back. Q Tip is about seven foot and on a short fuse, but all the same Simon jerks his plate out of the way just as the spoon angles, thinking: Go on then, start something if you want, so long as I come out of it alive, a week or two in the block would be a blessing in disguise. The overcooked Brussels sprouts land damply on the floor, Twinkletoes Jones slips on one and crashes into Simon from behind, so the rest of the plate goes flying too.

‘Call the ambulance!' Twinkle calls out in a falsetto, hamming it up to stop himself looking a fool – or maybe to save them all? There's a split second of laughter, loud but hollow, then shouting from the back to fucking move on, will you?

Grease has solidified over the entire replacement meal by the time Simon's back at his cell, where Jolly Roger, lugubriously hopeful, waits, leaning by the door. ‘Join you?' he says, pulling himself up to his full six feet plus. He has sloping shoulders, pale skin, dark stubble and lank black hair, one eye that was lost in a fight and sewn shut. Simon shrugs.

‘Seen you in the library,' Roger says settling himself cross-legged on the floor. ‘I enjoy a good book myself. How's things?'

‘Not bad,' Simon observes, from his position on the bed, tray across his lap. He accidentally puts one of the Brussels sprouts into his mouth and neither tastes it, nor feels its wet collapse. ‘There's talk of me going on a course.' He's still only half there, and from a distance, these bizarre words sound almost natural.

‘It's probably not worth it,' Roger tells him, mouth full.
One of the many annoying things about Roger is that he has a habit of making depressing statements like this in a bright, perky voice, as if he enjoyed them being that way. Bernie, Simon hopes and imagines, will have better company than this. She'll be listening and smiling, sitting among her brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, some old lady in a wheelchair, all of them crowded round a huge mahogany table in a big dining room with French windows that look out towards the blustery sea . . . She's wearing a deep red chenille sweater-dress, close but not clinging, just like one he saw advertised in the
Mirror
magazine, tights, ankle boots and her silver pendant like a melted O . . . but no, come to think of it, he's getting it all wrong because now, at 11.45, she is maybe just coming in, perhaps with one of her brothers, from taking the dogs out.

‘Anyway, what course?' Roger says. ‘I've done 'em all.'

‘I don't know,' Simon says. ‘Some new thing.' The letters on his chest itch suddenly, and he fights the urge to rub at the scabs through his shirt.

‘You're not some kind of
nonce
, are you?' Roger asks, half serious. ‘They're always setting up new stuff for them, aren't they just, state of the art, but everyone knows none of it works . . . You know what I think?' Jolly Roger forks in the last of his grey turkey and pale-brown gravy, then climbs onto his own personal hobby horse: ‘Us lifers should have the right to suicide. An injection, if you wanted it. An alternative –' as Roger waves his plastic fork, gravy lands on Simon's bed, ‘to this.'

‘You'd take it?' Simon says. Right now? he's thinking.
Ireland is lost, he can't get back there with this cunt in his room.

‘At times,' Roger says. ‘If it had been there, I'd be gone by now. Less trouble for all concerned. Especially me.'
No, me
.
‘Know what I mean?' Roger asks.

‘No,' Simon says. If I did, he thinks, I'd fucking do it, not expect someone else to oblige . . . ‘And listen, what's wrong with a shave and a shower,' he says, ‘it might cheer you up.'

‘You'll get there,' Roger tells him. ‘You'll hit bottom. Then you'll know.'

‘Oh yes? Piss off,' Simon puts his uneaten meal on the floor and leans back against the wall, closes his eyes briefly. He's going to take a breath in and then he'll open them wide and yell: ‘Still here? Didn't I tell you to –'

‘No harm in talking,' Roger tells him, mildly, before he can finish the breath, ‘and look – company!' Simon opens his eyes to see Big T filling the doorway, the sheer bulk of him making the room seem even smaller. Even so, he's started to go to flab, Simon notes. Tev holds out the pint-sized blue plastic mug he's walked past the screws with.

‘Real Smirnoff !' he announces, grinning at them both.
‘Genuine Christmas cheer. On the house! . . . I've got the lot,' he continues, leaning in, ‘weed, tabs, the absolute lot, even though that cow sent me nothing. So take some, go on, Christmas, you've gotta have a drink!' Wrong: I haven't gotta do anything, Simon thinks, but Tev is half way down the plughole and he can't be bothered to point it out in words . . .
Plus, a drink, a real drink, might just take the edge off things, let him slip away again. He holds out his own plastic mug and Teverson tips in a good measure: vodka, and undiluted orange squash, fiery, sickly-sweet.

‘Me too,' Jolly Roger says.

‘Get lost,' Tev tells him.

‘What about that spare pudding then?' Roger asks, scooping it up, shameless, as he gets up to go. Tev stumbles over – it's a matter of move along or have him in your lap, but given the state he's in, if Tev gets any ideas in his head (not that there looks to be room for them) he'll be easy enough to deal with.
Roger has gone, so one down, one to go. It's noon, he'll be locked up again by eight.

‘Cheers!' Teverson beams. He's pretending to be in a pub.
Simon feels the alcohol burn its way to his stomach, descend, minutes later, like a soft fog inside his skull.

‘Cheers!'

‘Cheers . . .'

In West Cork, Bernie will be drinking dry sherry, say, in an antique crystal glass. Waterford. Or is it Waterville? She won't drink much. She likes to loosen up, but keep aware. A glass of red wine, maybe a brandy with the coffee at the end of the meal. For that, they'll move into tatty leather armchairs (like the one he once saw in Anthony's Antiques in Streatham, costing almost a grand) around the fire. Maybe they'll open their presents. Some little niece or nephew bringing them around. A gift for Bernie would have to be jewellery. A one-off piece made by some queer bloke in a tiny shop for two months' wages. Earrings, necklace, something for her hair.
Bold shapes. Intimate gifts which you have to have the right to give. At any rate, there was nothing here that he could give her, and because of the timescale, nothing good enough to be got from outside. He had to choose from the selection of cards at the shop: Dutch snow scene, teddy bears or drunken reindeer. Seasons Greetings, Bernie, you deserve a break, Simon.
Did she check her pigeonhole before she went? Will Bernie, at some point during the course of the day, even momentarily, think of him? His head swims as he gets to his feet.

‘Do you mind?' he asks Teverson. ‘I need to piss.'

‘Give me a break!' Tev tells him, closing his eyes. ‘I'm not looking.' He's lying chin on chest, eyes all but closed, body melted. All the same, Simon puts his cup on the floor and goes out, down the landing to the stalls where the usual amoniac reek of piss has been overwhelmed by that of hooch-induced vomit. He picks his way out, stops half way down the landing for some reason to look down over the rails and through the safety netting to the ground floor, where a few men mill about in the extra space there, smoking, going to or from the TV room, while others lounge in their doorways, looking on and waiting for this extra bit of association, irresistible, but not in the end a pleasure, to be called to its end. The lighting makes them look paler than they are, and at the same time shows up the stains and marks on clothing, walls and flooring alike, the scars and stubble, the fading professional tattoos and dark blue new ones, like his own, done inside. It's the first time in a very
long while that he's looked at the place and the people in it, unprotected, as someone from outside might do. A world without colour, or softness or contact. I will get out of here, he tells himself – but thinking has no effect at all on what he sees around him, and he hurries back to B222, where at least he'll see less of it.

‘What's this?' Teverson asks him as he re-enters the cell. The exercise book in Tev's hands is marked Property of Her Majesty's Prison Service, Do Not Remove, and he begins reading from it in a loud, carefully flat voice like some unwilling kid at school:

‘ ‘‘You are turning me inside out.'' '

‘Give it here!' Simon tells him. ‘I'll fucking kill you –'

‘It fell out when I got the pillow to lean on,' Tev says, shrugging. ‘ ‘‘When I am with you I feel as if I can be the better part of me that has been hidden so long . . .'' ' He spins the book across. ‘That's good stuff,' he says. ‘How much, to do one for me?' The page already torn out, balled in his hand, Simon grabs at Teverson, then punches him in the chest – it should hurt. But the big man's flesh is somehow disconnected, pickled in vodka, it doesn't react. ‘Get out now!' he yells again, as Big T reaches for Simon's half-full cup of vodka, drains it, then rises to his feet, putting an arm out almost gracefully to steady himself.

‘I'm off,' he says.

‘Someone lock this fucking door!' Simon shouts after him, his whole body going into the shout, his skin red, the opening of his mouth pushing his eyes shut – for once, he's lucky: an elderly screw drafted in for the holidays, comes slowly along the landing, whistling ‘Good King Wenceslas' between his teeth . . .