Alphabet (25 page)

‘Look: this is from the horse's mouth: my mum couldn't
cope and the outcome wasn't good for either of us. She killed herself when I was small. I've ended up here, OK, I'm right now, maybe making a bit of sense of things, but someone else is dead, right? See what I'm driving at?'

‘Well,' she says ‘I think –' He interrupts again.

‘Second, well, OK, if you lived in village in the jungle you'd have three by now, but you don't. You've had an easy life. It'll be hard to be on call 24/7 and all that. You probably are too young. That's just an opinion, because you asked. I could be wrong.'

There's a pause. She says absolutely nothing, makes no sound of any kind, then suddenly tells him: ‘I've already got a bit of a tummy, you know. No one notices because I'm so skinny to start with but –'

‘I've said what I can,' he tells her. ‘And, you need to find someone out there to talk to . . .' He hears her sigh.

‘I do really like you, Simon,' she tells him. ‘Will you call me again? Or can I call you?'

‘No!' he says. ‘I'm in a special unit, doing therapy. I'm supposed to be honest about everything. Just like you recommended! Well, sometimes I think it is a waste of time, but maybe I'm getting a result. I don't want to mess things up.' She considers a while.

‘Don't you want to know what I decide?' she asks.

‘No,' Simon tells her. ‘No. it's got to be End of Story, Tasmin.' His new voice is that bit gentler than the old one but even so, she bursts into tears again. It's a fact that women do cry a lot, he reminds himself. It doesn't mean they'll kill themselves. Ten minutes later they can feel fine, better for it. All the same, he can't leave things like this, feels he's got to give her something more. What?

‘Look, it doesn't matter what you choose,' he says, his voice full of a sudden, desperate energy that comes from some place he doesn't know about. ‘Whatever it is, stick to it, stick up for it. You can't know what's right, but whatever you do, it's yours. Tasmin? You there?'

‘Yes,' she says. She's crying up there in York and down here
on the east coast his shirt is soaked: sweat not tears, but for a moment you could be fooled about that. It's too much. He's done his best, hasn't he? He didn't ask for this, for fuck's sake!

‘I'm going,' he tells her. ‘Best of luck, now.' It's as Simon hangs up that Nick passes, wearing his latest designer sweat pants and shower shoes, carrying a not-bad-looking towel and a bottle of fancy shower gel.

‘Well!' he says with a grin. ‘Gotcha! It's not you can't talk, just you won't talk to
us
eh?'

‘Emergency,' Simon says, trying to stare the other man out.
At the same time, he's thinking, suppose she goes and does something stupid? Should he ring her back and say, don't? But then –

‘Don't tell
me
about your girlfriend that you never had before,' Nick says, as he sets off, again whistling between his teeth. ‘Group business, ain't it?' Simon thinks briefly of the blurry, drugged-up peace that swaddled him in the hospital wing, but it's too late for that. He's gone and done something and now he'll be in it up to his neck.

33

‘I don't feel safe. Not if there are important things I don't know about someone and where he's coming from –' Nick makes a brief gesture, both hands fisted to his heart.

‘Bollocks!' says Steve.

‘Safe?' Simon yells. ‘Where's that idea coming from? Who
ever
feels
Safe
? Am I supposed to feel
safe
right now?

‘It said
emergency
.' He looks round at the rest of them, their hunched shoulders, fisted hands, their legs akimbo, or wound round chair legs, or thrust out ahead, their feet tapping the floor; their necks bent at odd angles, their tight jaws . . . today everyone is sallow and hollow-eyed except for Nick, whose eyes glitter with excitement, or, the rumour is, smack smuggled in by his sister on her monthly visit . . . But surely it's obvious, surely they can all see his point?

‘I was going to tell you all along,' he tells them, an almost, a
possible
truth, who knows, he might have, probably would have, except that he hadn't got so far as working it out before Nick came up on him like that, so his hand was forced and now he's gone the whole fucking way, told them all about it, and why. Mistake. ‘But,' he repeats, ‘because of that, the word
emergency
, I had to act.'

‘That's where you went wrong, mate,' Pete tells him, jabbing the air with his blunt, nail-bitten forefinger. ‘
Impulsive
, see. Not good.' He grins, creases forming in the stubble around his mouth. ‘All the same, it's not drugs, violence or sex is it? It's a
phone call
! So we're not talking chuck-out, just making sense of what's going on with our editor here, right?'

‘
Nothing
is going on!' Simon says. ‘Is it my fault she wrote to
me after she was told not to? Is it my fault she got knocked up?
What would you lot have done?' No one answers this.

‘Not been exactly
transparent
, have you?' Nick says ‘Because what
is
this about getting the letters and just
not reading
them? Do you think we're morons? How are we to know you haven't been on the blower to this underage girl every single day? I mean, we've gotta ask, haven't we? What else aren't you telling us? With respect.'

‘Has anyone
ever
seen me on that fucking phone?' Simon says. Stay in the chair, he reminds himself, gripping the edge of it, keep going. They'll see it in the end . . .

Ray grinds out his roll-up, surveys the room. ‘Sounds like he did a good job. Plus it got him out of his dumb thing, which was a wind-up. Why can't we leave it at that, or do you have another agenda here Nick – like you need to be top of the class, or something?'

‘Top of the
grass
,' Steve suggests.

‘Is this payback for that warning you had? Or do you want Si out of the way because he's on your case? With respect . . .
Because the rest of us just want to get on with what we're here for, right?'

‘Well . . . can't we just –' Andy comes through after trying to get a word in for the past ten minutes, ‘can't we just say:
idiot, you should have told someone, don't do it again?'

‘Well,' officer David gathers himself up and turns to Simon, ‘maybe, but we do have to work from a position of trust here.
So is there anything else we should know, Simon?'

It actually doesn't occur to Simon as he glares around at the room that there is anything else he could add.

‘What more do you want? A blood sample? There's others that would be better used on, let me tell you,' he says, and the room goes quiet, alert; everyone sits that bit straighter in their chairs.

‘Is that an accusation, Simon?' Greg asks ‘Are you saying that someone here is using drugs? Please be specific.'

‘I'm saying, it might not be a bad idea to do a test.' Oh, it's familiar, this feeling of going for broke, familiar, and
exhilarating at the same time . . . Who knows how many of them are having a little smoke or dipping the tips of their tongues into whatever it is that Nick's sister brings? Maybe everyone's in on it and they'll all hate him now, but why not go the whole way, seeing as he's started? He looks Greg right in the eye.

When they all rush over to the tea urn, Simon stays put, sits in the empty circle, grafted to the chair. He sees Nick coming over to him, carrying his mug. Simon's foot is stuck out and he decides that he'll just leave it there, and that since Nick isn't looking down there's a good chance he'll trip.

‘You cunt,' Nick yells, saving himself just from hitting the floor, but not from the coffee. ‘The bastard tripped me!' Hot liquid steams from his legs and crotch. Simon gets to his feet, just in case. ‘You should look where you're going,' he says.
Oh, he's really done it now: Nick's ripping his pants down, got to get cold water on it, he says, and then the rest of them are sent off to exercise with the promise of a special meeting in the morning.

‘Look,' Mackenzie says on the telephone to Greg, ‘we have to take this very seriously. None of this stuff about the girl was disclosed. I've looked and there's just a very brief reference in his file to a discussion with the Governor at the last institution after a complaint was made by the girl's father. It's been overlooked.'

‘All the same, he's not here for molesting teenagers,' Greg points out.

‘He's here for murdering a shy twenty-year-old girl who still lived with her parents . . . Don't you think she could be described as rather child-like?' Mackenzie suggests. ‘Why shouldn't he move in that direction? A vulnerable girl like Tasmin could be very attractive to someone who needs to have the upper hand. I think we all have to agree about that.
A relationship like this could well start off in a benevolent, rescuing form, but later, it might begin to follow old patterns.
This has to be taken very seriously indeed.'

After lunch, they turn over his cell. They're polite about it and do a tidy job, purposeful, no dogs, no taking the bed to bits or throwing stuff around. Derek stands next to him while David and Johnny Lyndon look inside his books, confiscate the shoe box full of letters, two exercise books, some papers to do with the magazine, and the typewriter.

‘Those letters, I want them back. They're not even just mine. They belong to the people that wrote them too, it's their privacy as well, isn't it?'

‘Yes, well,' Derek says soothingly. His greying hair has been cut to within a couple of millimetres of its existence. He peers at Simon through new bifocals. ‘I see the point you're making.
But mail can be read at any time, you know.' Simon insists on being taken to the office to fill in an application.

‘I want to see Welfare. And I want to see the Governor, like
now
,' he says, filling out his name and number in capitals. His voice echoes in the unusually quiet corridor. Nature of complaint? Lack of fairness, he writes. ‘How long will this take?' he asks. Well, it could be a couple of days or it could be a week.
A
week?

In fact, it's half an hour later at 3 p.m. They call it a conference, and it takes place in one of the rooms on the therapy wing. His box of letters is on the table. Everyone's read them. Everybody knows how he pretended to be someone else and how many times he wrote the letters to get them right. Max Mackenzie, Greg and David, who ran the morning meeting, plus Annie, a probation officer from Welfare and the Governor, Mr Honeywell.

‘It's clear enough from what she says herself that she wasn't getting any answers from you. That's not the point.' Mr Honeywell looks weary, his greying hair smoothed to the sides of his head shines in the fluorescent glare; his jacket is undone, his collar and tie have been loosened, his body slumps in the chair. ‘The point here is that we have a rule of full disclosure. We're supposed to know about all of your outside
contacts. These other letters –' He waves at the box. ‘Clearly there was in the past a breach of prison rules, not to speak of wilful deception – and now you have kept it to yourself and acted deviously and impulsively, not consulting any of the team. Then, of course, there is the incident with Nick Berry-man.'

‘Nick Berryman hates my guts and is trying to get me out of here,' Simon states. ‘OK, I shouldn't have left my foot out, but that's the score.'

‘Dr Mackenzie has some very serious concerns. We have to ask, is this the best place for you?' Mr Honeywell says. ‘We don't like to use conventional discipline tools here in the unit, so if you behave in a way that warrants them . . .' He sighs.
‘Maybe someone else can get the message across better than I can?'

‘Simon,' Annie says, in perfect Barry-speak, ‘it's not about the rights and wrongs of the call, it's about whether you can show us that you can hold back on your first response to a situation, reflect, ask for advice.' They're all staring at him like he was some really dumb kid in a class, but all their lives depended on him doing one thing right for once. Whereas the fact is, there's just one of him and he has to get his point across to a whole class of dumb kids.

‘You're telling me I was supposed to show her letter around, explain it all, get it voted on . . . or talk to some stranger from Welfare about it, or get hold of Alan, wait
even longer
, till he could come and visit?'

‘Why not? And have you asked yourself why did you find this appeal so irresistible?' Mackenzie asks. Just those few words from him are enough to make Simon lose control of his voice, make it come out in something like a growl.

‘It was already a
month
late!'

‘Why assume we would have stopped you?' Annie asks, her turquoise eyes drilling into him.

‘This is doing my head in,' he tells her, shaking his head, looking away. ‘Did you do the piss test yet?' he asks. No one answers. Two wrongs don't make a right, etc.

‘I am available this afternoon,' Mackenzie says. ‘If you'd like to explore this.' Like hell! Instead, he sits in his room looking out through the window at the pond, thinking how he hates it at Wentham, how basically they are brainwashing him and he's supposed to abandon every last shred of himself and be rebuilt according someone else's plan and not one of them would stand for it if they had to stand in his shoes . . .

He remembers the feeling after the phone call: a satisfaction because he did what she asked of him, pure and simple. It wasn't like Vivienne and Joseph Manderville, where he shot himself in the foot by being someone else. It was different again to talking with Bernadette, because it wasn't about his problems and he wasn't the one being helped. It was her, and he did his absolute best, under the circumstances, right? Annie might be right that now he's contacted her, Tasmin may not leave him alone. Could be a problem. But there's nothing he did that strikes him as
wrong
. They're all talking arse, right up the bum-tree; if that's how it is, if they want to believe someone like Nick over him, well, they're idiots, right? And he'd be better off elsewhere, some normal nick where you just go head down and plod through your time, just keep
saying
you're sorry instead of having to feel every bit of it for real all the time and be turned inside out and try to actually do different . . .
Why push against the tide? Why be messed up some well-meaning but half-trained psychobabbling idiots with their own problems plus a load of other offenders including nonces and a good sprinkling of actual die-hard psychos?