Alphabet (22 page)

Susanna slows down her movements, then lies perfectly still.
Simon opens his eyes and turns away from Susanna's face to meet the gaze of the others in the room. Andy is staring at his own feet but the rest of them are all looking right back at him.

He and Susanna get up, shake hands, remind each other who she is, and that this is now, not then; he thanks her.

‘I'm beginning to think,' she says, ‘that I've been murdered more times than I've had hot dinners!' They brush fluff from their clothes, then help move the blue chairs into a circle again.
Susanna sits opposite him, like some twice-removed ghost, or the witness there never was, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap.

Simon? Annie asks. There's a great distance there. He did this, they did not. He's thinking, of course, about Amanda, how it could have been different. Couldn't he have just kept on telling her to go? She might not have. Well, then, so what, he had legs, didn't he! He could have left the bedsit himself, could have walked down the stairs through the big door with the spring attached that made it automatically slam behind, out into the street with the traffic still pulsing by and the drunks and down-and-outs sheltering in doorways . . . He could have gone to a club in Peckham or the late-night shop and got a can of beer. Even later on, at that moment when she said was he some kind of weirdo, he could still have sprung up, shouted anything he wanted but not stayed there, run out, straight down the stairs, kicked the wall, broken the glass in the door as he slammed it . . .

Who knows what would have happened to Amanda and to him if he had managed to do that? They still might have talked on the phone after, though if she had any sense she would have ended it and gone out with the other bloke, but at any rate, what happened would not have been exactly
this
: her dead, him sitting soaked in sweat with a half a dozen other killers, rapists and assorted low-lifes in a concrete bunker of a room.

No, it was before that. It was when she showed him the lenses. He should have done something different then.

‘
Bit of a surprise. Take a while to get used to, Mandy.

' ‘
They're lovely
.' Suppose he had said that? It's only when Greg hands him a box of tissues that he realises his face is wet.

Time's up. It's like diving: they've been down, now they must come up in stages, pausing to acclimatise. The men
stretch, grimace, sigh. Everyone agrees Simon has shown some bottle. He's still very focused on himself, granted, but that's OK at this point.

‘You did good, mate,' Ray tells him, clapping him across the shoulders. They're allowed off the chairs. Pete fills the electric kettle, throws teabags into the pot.

‘Thing is,' he calls out to Simon, ‘you can think of ways round it now, but you were a different kind of bastard back then, weren't you?'

But how? How much different, when he's just been right back there, back to the doing of it, felt the hairs rise on his neck?

29

He doesn't sleep well, loses weight, can't concentrate.

‘Look. It's been interesting,' he tells Dr Clarke, ‘but I've come to the end of the line with this sexual stuff.' He shrugs.
‘Chuck me out if you want.' Clarke meets his eye then glances at the file on his desk. He suggests, after a moment or two, that Simon should take a break. They will get back to work in a month or so, when Simon is ready. They will make a fresh start. He writes a date for this in his diary and says he will send a reminder. At the door, he rests his huge paw on Simon's shoulder.

‘Try to get things off your chest in the group,' he recommends. A good plan, perhaps, but the trouble with it is that, since the group on Amanda, Simon has been losing it with words, or with thinking: it's hard to know which. It is increasingly difficult to say what he means. Or maybe what he means is not good enough, is not worth saying? When he reads, sentences fight back against his understanding of them.
Mainly he gives up; if he succeeds, he wonders why he bothered. He lies on the bed with his navy blue curtains closed, his eyes searching the shadowy corners of the room while his heart – the thing that keeps him alive whether he wants it to or not – pounds away in his chest.

He finds himself remembering Amanda all the time: things she said, jokes she made. She and her mum sitting on the patio to sunbathe with identical drinks and hats. The moment when she told him about the lenses.

Life goes on. Ray, his arms folded across his chest, his ankles crossed and his eyes screwed very tightly shut, tells the group
about sleeping in the bathtub and being shut in the cellar. He has to tell it this way, he explains, so that he can't see people not believing him and taking the piss.

‘But, Ray, if you look, you might see us believing you,' Annie suggests, her voice unusually soft. Ray shakes his head and starts to sob, still with his eyes shut. He refuses all comfort and asks if he can get onto the floor and curl up; they let him. It's as if he's turned into the child he used to be. Is it also because of the dark in the cellar that he must keep his eyes so tightly shut? Simon wants to ask Ray about this, but can't.

‘Got any ideas?' Ray asks, when the storm has passed through him. He's still on the floor, although sitting up now, red-eyed, looking oddly young despite the lines and stubble on his face. ‘Where do I go from here?'

‘Very good question,' says Pete, who last week in drama spent forty-five minutes gagged and tied to a chair. Now, he cracks up, laughing: ‘Look at it this way,' he tells Ray, it's just gotta get better, has it not?'

Another thing that's happened is that the figment of his imagination Simon called up after Bernadette has abandoned him. She has gone, leaving no message, no explanation and nothing to argue with, even if he wanted to. Seen him for what he is? Come to her senses? Got real? Well, good for her. So must he. He's having a rough patch.

‘The fact is,' Simon tells Annie, ‘you're on your own with it. You want to beg forgiveness, or you want to point the finger. But there's no one there to be begged or pointed at. You want someone to love you, no matter what, someone to hold your hand and say it will be all right but, not surprisingly, there isn't anyone for that either.'

‘Yes. It's hard. Don't withdraw,' Annie advises, leaning forwards in her chair as if to bridge the gap. ‘Whatever you do, keep communicating. Try to stay open.' She means well, he knows she cares and she is probably right. But he looks down at his hands, away from those huge eyes the colour of swimming pools.
‘Don't forget, we're all in the same boat,' Ray points out, running a nicotine-stained forefinger along the scar on his jaw.

‘You mustn't give up,' Greg insists. ‘You owe it to yourself to keep on. And to the rest of us, come to that.'

‘I'm finding it hard going,' he admits to Mackenzie.

‘Well, yes.' Mackenzie, leans back in his chair. ‘Yes: the past cannot be undone or be made to go away. Its consequences continue to exist and develop. Perhaps, under the circumstances it is normal, at some point, to experience despair?' Is this supposed to be helpful? It's hard to tell. A couple of minutes pass, during which Simon's eyes don't stray from Mackenzie's face. Then Mackenzie reminds Simon of the contract at Wentham: his despair can be spoken of, drawn, sung about, explored – but it must not be acted out. Suicide and self-harm are not options. Expulsion from the unit is the penalty for attempting either.

‘Why?' Simon asks. ‘Why aren't they options? Why drag it out?' He remembers Jolly Roger chewing his greasy bit of turkey and saying much the same thing. ‘I've murdered a woman.' He checks this first point off on his forefinger, waits for some kind of acknowledgement. It doesn't come, so he continues: ‘I can't undo it.' Another finger. ‘Even if I did some wonderful heroic deed, would it help Amanda? Or Hazel and Tom or her brother for that matter . . . right? No easy solutions. Agreed. That makes three . . . Well then, Why? What's the point of me?' He slumps back, exhausted by the effort of so much speech. Of course, Mackenzie declines to answer; the two men sit facing each other in their identical chairs.

‘Punishment?' Simon asks.

‘Is that how you see it?' Mackenzie blinks, swallows. His face is calm. What's underneath? Where is the man? What matters to him? Why is he here?

‘What's wrong with a fucking
answer
?' Simon asks. There's a kind of pain in his chest. He bends down, holds his head for a few seconds with his good hand as if shielding himself from a
blow. Still no answer. Why doesn't Mackenzie
do
something?
Simon unrolls himself, quits the session without offering a hand to shake, not banging the door behind him, but leaving it open, like another question mark.

‘Simon!' Mackenzie calls after him, more than a trace of anger in his voice. ‘This session is not finished!'

Simon calls Alan – the one who fell off a rock face and finally came back to work wearing a neck brace and using crutches – not a bad bloke, as it turned out.

‘Can I talk to Bernadette Nightingale?' he asks. He's thought about this a lot: the next best thing to someone who loves you has got to be someone who you wish loved you even if they didn't, but who all the same did a bloody good job, and once touched you on the shoulder in a certain way that somehow opened everything up. Yes, as it happens, she is also someone whose image he's had sex with in his head, without her permission . . . Given that, could he still talk to her about this life and death stuff?

Yes. He's desperate, sense doesn't come into it. Could?
Must.

‘I don't know,' Alan says, slowly. ‘But, you know, you definitely can talk to me. I'm booked to travel up and visit you the first Wednesday of next month. Do you want me to come sooner? I can, if you want.'

‘She was very helpful before. Would
she
visit me? I mean, just the once?' It doesn't sound that unreasonable, now he's said it. ‘It's important,' he adds.

‘If you send me a letter, I'll forward it,' Alan tells him and it's good to have something to do, a step to take:
Dear Bernadette
– it keeps him going for over a fortnight, until he realises September is almost over and there's been no reply.

One afternoon Philippa from Education comes back into the computer room for a box of discs and finds Simon Austen is still there, staring at the exact same screen she left him with ninety minutes previously, when he outlined for her the magazine contents so far. Two short stories: one true, about a
kid running away from home, doing drugs, going under; the other set in a different solar system, where they were doing fine until earthmen arrived and tried to set up a McDonald's franchise. Crossword, a pen-and-ink drawing of a rose, cartoon of the Governor finding a mouse in his soup, four poems, a ramble from the Governor about how proud he was of them all for June's fun sports events in aid of the children's play area in the visitor centre . . . At that point, Simon had just finished entering in a list of the runners' names and how much they each raised. He was just beginning the editorial.

Now, an hour and a half later, he seems still to be on the very same first sentence.

‘Are you OK?' she asks. ‘You're very pale.'

‘Alive,' he points out.

‘You're one up on me then,' she says, looking over his shoulder at the screen. ‘What about your own pieces, then?'

‘I haven't done anything yet. Maybe I won't.'

She pushes some papers aside and sits on a nearby table, a middle-aged woman with thinning salt and pepper hair and a twinkle in her eye.

‘You must!' she tells him cheerfully, crossing her ankles. ‘I tried the yoga tip last time. I got my feet right over, like it said.
Getting them back was another matter – Jon nearly had to call an ambulance crew to get me out of it! Best laugh we'd had in ages!' He returns the smile, but there's no life in it. ‘I liked that alphabet idea that you showed me, too,' she says. ‘Done any more? Those little essays. A is for appetite, B is for beautiful . . .' Suddenly, he jerks up the T-shirt, exposing the flesh beneath and Bernie's word, COURAGEOUS.

‘No touching, now,' he says. The torso he has revealed is muscled but slim, tanned. Her face flares up as she looks at him.
From inside the curves of a C and an S his two nipples stare back at her like a pair of sad, puffy eyes.

‘You can read me like a book!' he says. ‘No offence,' he adds as he rolls the T-shirt down again. ‘It's quite a word to live up to. Now I'm stuck on D.'

‘Dogs?' Philippa suggests ‘Dinner? Look, for heaven's sake
don't stay in here all day. There's no natural light, it'll only make you D-pressed. There, you smiled. Go out and play for a bit.'

After supper, Simon gets himself put on the evening-class list and goes back into Education. While nine guitars start tuning up next door and the pottery teacher slowly explains how to put a handle on to a mug, he opens up his alphabet file, erases the contents, starts over. He ignores the smell of re-re-rolled fag ends in a no-smoking zone, the temptations of the tea break, the terrible near-unison of the guitars and the broken voices singing along. Periodically, the computer interrupts its perpetual hiss and mutters to itself as he instructs it: save.

A, he types, is for answer. Perhaps there will be one. Perhaps not. Answers are shy beasts, terribly hard to find; it may be best not to even look for them. A is also for ambivalence, a word I learned here, and for art, a kind of communication to which some people dedicate their entire lives to the detriment of all else, a religion without a God (see G). Yes, I am A-voiding because more than anything A is for Amanda, who lived her whole life in the same house and liked to laugh and eat and drink and sunbathe in her parents' garden, who remembered everything that had ever happened to her and wanted the ordinary things of life, commitment, closeness, children, a future opening out into who knows what – but I, Simon Austen killed her in a bedsit in New Cross, September 2nd 1979.