Alphabet (19 page)

‘Just another fucking screw, that's all,' says Steve, as the tone sounds on the PA, indicating five minutes left to go.

‘To be continued,' Andy mutters under his hand, which is his trick, to say nothing much until there's no time left, to seem to participate, without actually doing so.

At the end of the group they stand in a circle with their eyes closed and hold hands. Holding hands is weird enough to begin with and further complicated because, while these pairs of hands have done a host of ordinary and useful tasks like counting change, laying bricks, playing catch with a ball, mending a bicycle or picking up a fallen child, they have also committed awful, unwanted intimacies. Another thing is that right now Simon is standing opposite the fake mirror, with Doctor Mackenzie presumably sitting behind it, watching everyone but especially, he feels, him. Or maybe he isn't there and it's all just a con, you can't tell.

It's your best chance, he reminds himself. And the fact is that after a good group you do feel different. Take today as an example: you absolutely know why Steve doesn't want to see
the writing on the wall. And somehow, even though he won't read it, you can, and you can say to him, ‘Tough group, mate?
Nice bit of self-control you did there, I thought you were going to lose it, but you didn't . . .' You can have a good idea of exactly where he's at, and even offer to make the bastard a cup of tea, if you feel like it.

Steve won't come out of his cell, so Simon offers the tea to Ray instead. Ray sits on the bed, while he's at the desk. Ray has had his pony tail cut off and he's bought some designer-effect jeans; he gulps the tea while it's still at boiling point and nods in the direction of the cracked Walkman parked on the window ledge.

‘Don't use it,' Simon tells Ray. ‘I'm just hanging on to the machine. Drove me mad. Besides, I'm not some fucking nonce, I just –'

‘Me neither,' Ray cuts in. ‘I just like to scare them out of their wits first! That's all!' He cracks his knuckles, grins. The scar on his jaw glows white. ‘What did they dream up for you?'
he asks. ‘As for me, The Thunderstorm, I like that one. She's scared already, see? Or else there's this
other
bloke, right, that has scared her and then I come along . . .'

25

Simon is on the floor of his room, belly down, knees bent, the soles of his feet reaching back and up towards his head, his head thrown back towards his toes, his hands gripping his ankles:
The Bow
. For the first time ever since he took up yoga, he has an actual foam mat to lie on, blue, which he got from the catalogue for three weeks' money. It makes a big difference and he's going to get curtains next. Another thing that would really help would be access to the garden; he has written to the Governor about that. He keeps the typewriter out on the desk and the chair set on four blocks so as to obtain the ergonomically correct posture when he works because now, he's got a job. He only got the job after two hours of infuriating self-justification in a special meeting, but that's history now and it is his: editor of the newsletter, reporting to Phillipa from Education, which means: incite staff and residents to write articles, draw cartoons. Then tidy the stuff up, fill the gaps himself, put it all into the computer, arrange the pages . . .

Computer training is provided; the pay's bad but even so, he can't believe that no one else wanted to do it – that they'd rather trim the edges of the lawn, sweep the corridor or chop carrots when he can already see it in his mind's eye, the columns, the typeface, the headlines in bold:
Sorry, Sigmund!
What Next?
A yoga column, perhaps . . . ? It's hard not to think about it, even right now when he should be emptying his mind. He shifts the grip on his ankles, deepens the stretch across his chest.

Editor is certainly up on CARPETT-FITTER, which is tattooed around his right buttock, the two
t
s on the carpet not his fault, but still . . . When there's time, maybe he'll have
EDITOR done underneath. A neat little asterisk in between . . . He relaxes, goes onto knees and hands, arches his back up, holds it, then kneels and bows, forehead to floor, inverted hands to feet.

There's a knock on the door.

‘Post, Simon,' says officer Bryan. Simon grunts his thanks, stays with the position. Eventually he relaxes, and slides back and up into
Dog
, then down into
Float on Belly
, then it's a jump into
Dog
, back to
Belly
, head up and back, down,
Dog
again, jump . . . finally, up. His heart pounds from all the jumps and it's only when its slow again and he's finished the standing pose and the rest at the end that he goes to the office to collect the letter.

Inside the large, shiny-brown institutional envelope is a smaller cream one dated February 10th, from Tasmin. Who else? It's stiff and quite thick, probably a card, postmarked York. Bewildered, he examines it for a moment or two. It's like something from another world. He slips it into the shoe box and then turns his mind to the half-dozen eggs he purchased from the canteen and is planning to scramble for himself, Ray and Pete. Afterwards, seeing as for some reason bananas are not banned here, they will have banana custard, courtesy of Ray. A yellow meal. Then he'll read himself to sleep. Here, the library is open every day and there are soft chairs to sit in while you chose up to six books. In a row on the shelf above the desk he has his current selection:
Intermediate
Yoga
,
Freud for Beginners
,
Smiley's People
,
The Paintings of Chaim
Soutine
,
The Golden Notebook
.

‘Tell me about watching,' Mackenzie says.

‘Why don't you tell me? You do a lot of it,' Simon points out, and Mackenzie writes something, just one word, in his small leather-bound notebook, then underlines it. He's frowning when he looks up again.

‘So what is it you think I am trying to do to you with my questions?'

‘Make me hurt. Show me how bad I am?' Simon says. What
Mackenzie wants is for him to talk off the top of his head – keep going, get it off his chest and the right kind of thing that Mackenzie is after is bound to pop out . . . But if it does, what will he do with it? That's something Simon feels he's got to wonder about. He doesn't trust the man.

‘What about the contact lenses, what is she going to see?'
The questioning about the contact lenses is pretty much constant and it's not as if he doesn't know what Mackenzie is getting at there: he didn't like Amanda being able to see better in case she saw how scared he was and he didn't like her not doing what he told her to. He had to keep her under his thumb or else she'd have him under hers. Then she'd squash him like a beetle, wouldn't she? Annihilate him, if he let her.
Because, basically, women don't like him, they piss off, and they're right, aren't they? Bernie was the exception, in a class of her own. Bernadette Nightingale is a kind of a saint with a body, and if he had met her earlier in life then things might have been different . . . that's how it seems, off the top of his head, but he doesn't say any of it. Of course, if Simon were to give in and talk more, the forty-minute appointments would pass more quickly, but mostly, he holds out. It seems safer that way.

‘What are you frightened that I will see?' Mackenzie asks.

‘Something that isn't there.'

‘Have you thought about how you might safely have sexual relationships with women in the future?' That's a question and a half. Since he came to Wentham the past, which used not to exist, is getting blended into one with the present, but he's not really got any feeling at all for the third term, or how to get from here to there. What future? It's frightening.

‘No, I haven't. What would you do, in my situation?' As ever, Max Mackenzie falls silent when Simon turns the question back like this. Not to answer is some kind of rule that he obviously thinks very important, though what harm would it do, for fuck's sake, if he knows, to tell? And if he doesn't know, what the hell is he doing here?

It's a wind-up, but one good thing is that at night, when
finally the talking stops, Simon falls into a pit of deep, dreamless sleep.

Greg is solid and very fair. Martin Clarke means well, despite his methods. As for Annie, Simon can't tell where she stands, nor what she makes of him: that's the problem he has with her. She sits there, group after group, tiny, upright in her chair, her white, bony hands loose in her lap. Could be a ballet dancer, perhaps, waiting to go on stage. Her face is calm and still; it gives virtually nothing away. Sometimes, he's sure she must be cracking up inside at the things the group say, such as in the workshop on Expectations of Women – where it turns out that most of them are wanting their clothes washed and their children raised by a totally faithful playboy centrefold constantly available for sex who knows when to keep her mouth shut and also when to disappear completely, who never interferes but understands them completely and forgives their sins – even then, Annie sits there, her hair in its elfin cut, her elaborate earrings hanging motionless from her ear lobes; she sits there like that, gets up now and then to write what they say on the white board and all you see is her eyebrows momentarily shooting up a few millimetres and then straight down again, or maybe her lips widen an even smaller amount and then she swallows and they relax again. What's she getting out of it? That's what he wants to know.

Outside of the group, he's noticed her chatting to Greg and other staff as they walk between the different parts of the institution, or along the gravelled walkway to the car park, and then she is quite different: her gestures free, exaggerated even; her head thrown back when she laughs. Clearly there are two Annies, and it looks like an us and them situation . . . So Simon waits until Greg and David have gone ahead and then he follows her out of the group room.

‘Annie?' he calls out, ‘I've got something to ask.' He stays a few paces away, careful not to go too close. She glances at her watch, a tiny golden thing that must be almost impossible to read. He smiles, shrugs.

‘It's just that I've been wondering: what is it that makes a person work in a crazy place like this?' he tells her. ‘Especially a woman,' he adds.

‘Good question!' she says, and, to his amazement, returns his smile with a full-sized one of her own. ‘But it would take more time than I have to answer it.' She settles the satchel she's wearing over one shoulder, raises her other hand in a kind of wave – any moment, she'll be on her way out of the door, and he doesn't want that yet.

‘That's OK. I was wondering,' he says – the thought comes to him as he speaks, a complete gift – ‘I was wondering, would you write about it for the magazine?'

‘Write about why I do this crazy job?' she asks.

‘Up to five hundred words,' he says.

‘I'm very busy at the moment,' she tells him. ‘It's something I've thought about a lot and it's a nice idea, but really –'

‘It could be whenever you've got time,' he says. ‘No deadline.
I'll just fit it in. Getting things out of the staff is like getting blood out of a stone, but I want the magazine to have some depth, you see, and to get in something from a woman's point of view.'

‘Oh, all right,' she tells him. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

He can hardly believe it. Later, when he lies in his room thinking over the day's events, it seems clear that the Annie in the corridor is the real one, and the one in the group is a set of skills or techniques that she's learned. He doesn't like this: it seems as if she's got something over him, an unfair advantage.
Of course, it's the same with Greg, no doubt, but it doesn't bother him so much in a man, women being as ever the issue here. Was it the same with Bernadette? He would hate to think of the warmth he felt from her being judiciously applied. No, he feels it really wasn't that way. She was a natural at what she did and didn't need techniques. She was a professional but at the same time, she was herself. That's why he trusted her and why, when in his imagination he allows the gap between them to close to nothing so that their flesh is pressed together, and he is breathing in the smell of her, it's all right. More than all right.
Habit-forming, even.

He slips back into the Portakabin, the kiss; he feels all over again the ignition of his flesh, the sudden, overpowering wash of sensation. But this time, to his surprise, she pulls away, and says, ‘Not here.' Fair comment, but here is all they've got! He eases up the thin sleeve of her sweater and strokes her forearm.
She can feel it all over and through her and he can feel her feeling it; soon, they are kissing again, their hands inside each other's clothes, him pressing himself into her – but there are footsteps outside the Portakabin and she has to answer the knock on the door, because everyone knows they are in here.
At the last minute before she opens it, she turns to him, flushed –

‘Si?' yells officer Bryan. ‘You coming to football practice or not?'

‘No!' he shouts back.

‘You're letting us down!'

Too bad. What was Bernadette going to say? He tried to find his way back, but it's gone. All gone. And, as he reminds himself as frequently as he can bear to, it was not her as such and neither was this madness his idea to start with.

An interesting thing, he thinks, is that the more she hesitates, the surer I am . . . Sometimes, it seems as if they, the probation officers and psychiatrists and so on, have been right about him all along, even
Barry
. On the other hand, sometimes not; and very often indeed it seems as if they don't know when to lay off, and one thing he's sure of is that he is keeping the imaginary Bernadette to himself.

‘Look,' he tells Martin Clarke a few days later, having declined a visit to the media room, ‘I didn't use the tape and there's no point in trying out a different scenario, I won't use that one either. I'd rather go solo with this. I am taking it on, but in my own way, all right?'