Alphabet (36 page)

Phrases he wrote for the Parole Board present themselves as needed and the letter comes surprisingly easily, so long as he pushes away thoughts of Charlotte sitting in her roof garden or sprawled on the sofa in her red sitting room to read it. The fact is, he realises, I am writing about the past.

I wanted to be in charge of everything that happened between us, including in a sexual sense. I didn't want her to have any autonomy but she had started to stand up for herself; I was terrified and angry that was what led me to murder her. It was as a result of my admitting this to myself and others that I agreed to go to the therapeutic unit at Wentham, where I was very often put in a position to appreciate the link between feelings of panic and my own violent response when I feel my control of a situation being eroded. I was also able to understand more fully the extent of the suffering I inflicted on Amanda at the end and how, even before that, I treated her as if she was a video and I had the remote, not as a person, even though I liked her.

At the end of it, he feels calm and empty, almost lightheaded, though perhaps that is because they've just repainted the cells and the smell lingers, despite the open window. It is possible that Charlotte will read what he's written and then withdraw, as Vivienne did, or just vanish – but, he reasons, if so, best get it over with. Adopting a business-like tone, he calls her two days before the next possible visit, to check that she received his letter and whether or not she is coming to see him.

‘Yes,' she says, ‘I would tell you if I wasn't.' Though this is probably true, he can't quite be sure.

43

The visitors in their sundresses and bright, sleeveless tops are like clouds of butterflies, sipping at the sugary, fluorescent orange juice the volunteers serve, warm, in styrofoam cups. Most of the other inmates are wearing singlets and shorts.

‘So,' Charlotte says, setting down her cup and shifting gear, ‘you've had this problem with women and what I still want to know is, why is it you won't do the course that they want you to do?' That's another thing he notices about her: she doesn't care what the conventions are, has no interest in the fact that she, the visitor is there to cheer him, the inmate, up, and is not supposed to ask this kind of thing. Of course she doesn't.

‘I mean,' she says, ‘it doesn't add up.'

‘The course,' he explains, ‘basically, it's for sex offenders proper. It's very practical . . . There was a sexual element in what I did but the point is, I've already tried what they're offering and I know. Take it from me.' He wants, he says, to spare her the details – at which point Charlotte bursts out laughing, and it feels as if the whole of the room has gone quiet, wanting to know what on earth the joke could be that produced such a sound. He glares at her across the table.

‘Sorry,' she says, as the hum of conversation closes over them again. ‘But actually, I'm pretty easy with details. If you think about it, I've had to tell an awful lot of strangers how I knew I should have had a vagina and couldn't be happy without one. I'm hard to shock.' She sits there, dressed in a skirt and a short-sleeved, scoop-necked blouse with lace trim, a cascade of beads around her neck, her legs crossed, and says that. There's nothing she won't say if she sees a need, even here, right in the visits room of a men's prison. He stares at her.

‘Wasn't that Vic?' he asks. Charlotte shrugs, nods.

‘So?' Well, she's asked for it.

‘They put a measuring gauge round your cock,' he says. ‘You look at pictures. They measure what's going on. Then you have to work out tending-to-the-normal storylines and masturbate about them for homework. Or you put in the correct fantasy right at the end, and gradually work back from there. They test you to see.'

‘Does it work?' she asks, sipping again at the fluorescent juice, dabbing her lips with a tissue.

‘Well, maybe,' he tells her. ‘I got quite a way with it, but I couldn't discuss it with the doctors the way they wanted, so they threw me out . . . I've been there,' he tells her, drying the palms of his hands on his jeans.

‘It's a hoop,' she says.

‘Yes.' They agree, then. Perhaps, he hopes, they can move on now?

‘So: you jump through it,' she tells him. ‘Four months is nothing. If you remember, I had to do two years for my final hoop.'

‘The point is,' he tells her, ‘I did do it. In a way. But I picked someone to think about, someone I cared for, but who wouldn't have liked it. Someone I fell for, but she already had a partner. Right? It did work, but I couldn't discuss it – her – with the doctor. I can't go through it again. OK?'

‘How did you know if this person minded or not?' Charlotte asks. ‘Did you ask her? Would she ever have found out, anyway? Who was she?' she stares at him, then tosses her head. ‘Don't people do this to each other all the time, for heaven's sake?' she says.

He doesn't answer. Puts his elbows on the table, his face in his hands. There's about ten minutes of this to go.

‘If you want something,' Charlotte tells him, pushing stray strands of hair from her face, ‘you just do what it takes. You keep going back. You find a way.' She leans across the table, sending her earrings into a paroxysm of motion. He can see her bra strap on one side of the blouse, the dark dusting of grape-coloured shadow on her eyelid, the slow beginning of a smile.

‘Do it again,' she says, adding: ‘So what? Four months. You could use me, if you want.'
What
? It's his turn, now, to laugh, but his laughter is more of a gut-punched gasp; the room doesn't stop talking, doesn't hear him at all.

‘Charlotte!' he says. She's back on her side of the table now, looking him up and down as if waiting for a perfectly ordinary decision. Not long ago, she was telling him not to get romantic feelings, now she suggests he wank over her. ‘Drop this,' he says.

‘Why not?' she says. ‘So long as it's nothing nasty. I wouldn't mind. Actually, I'd like it. Maybe I could give you some ideas.'

‘Stop it!' Rage washes through him. Then it's suddenly gone. They're still sitting there in their chairs.

‘Maybe I wouldn't be good enough?' she says.
No. Yes.
Maybe.

‘You don't know what you're talking about. It's very confusing,' he tells her.

‘It is,' she says. She takes hold of the hand he has on the table, reaches out for the other one. Waits, insistent, until he gives it her. Her thumbs nestle in his palms. Big hands, but soft-skinned, each nail filed perfect. He looks down at them, feels slightly sick. It's unreal. ‘I'm still finding out what I want,' she says. ‘This part of me has been on ice for so long. I'm a terrible flirt. I love the excitement, when you meet someone – I know I'm attractive – it's fantastic, being a woman, the way you can reel a man in . . . But I can see – I'm already beginning to feel, I want more than this . . . As well, I mean. Not instead . . . First the fling, the passion, and then, gradually, it turns into something else – but with the men I've met so far, well, there's nowhere else to go, really . . . I know I'm all over the place. Sorry,' she says, releasing his hands and hunting in her skirt pocket for a tissue. ‘Are we still friends?' she asks, and he ends up saying
yes
.

The thing about Charlotte is that she is just utterly impossible and in a category of her own. And to think about her sexually, Simon decides, you would start with what just happened, with two pairs of hands holding each other over a table, and go on from there. You'd stay in the present tense and only much later, when you had made something real, would you be able to go gradually back to the past, to think how you both got to be here, where you came from, and what it all amounted to.
How do you know that?
The philosophy tutor would ask. Well, he doesn't know how he knows, and now he's going to forget it, fast.

At the next visit, Charlotte asks politely about his course and the training he is doing for the print shop. She outlines her dissatisfactions with her job, describes her aerobics class, discusses at length whether she should join a gym and gets him to promise to write out some exercises for her to do.

The visit after that, she asks if next time she can bring Gavin along with her.

‘Gavin?'

‘I really want you to like him,' she says.

Gavin owns a restaurant. He sits there with his hand on her leg, wearing his fancy clothes and a suntan, every little thing he has
designed
, and looks around the room like an ambassador from a superior race. He wants people to notice him, and see what he's got. Charlotte, Simon thinks, is part of that. She's wearing a short skirt and sheer tights, has her hair down and blow-dried in a way that makes her look completely different. She's quieter than usual, tries all the time to get Simon to talk to Gavin about being in prison, what the regime is like and so on. It's a complete wind-up and he tells her so on the phone afterwards.

‘I'm seeing a lot of him,' she says.

‘He's not right for you,' he finds himself telling her.

He would know that, would he? He does.

Gavin accepts her completely, she informs him. They are going on holiday together in a few weeks' time. She won't have time to visit until afterwards, but she'll keep in touch, right?

Right.

He gets a postcard from Italy. It won't last, he thinks. He's a prick and she's all over the place, that's what it is. She's trying to prove herself and her desires are limitless, she'll crash and fall, cut her hopes down to size, sob on Diane's shoulder, start over. That's how it's bound to be.

But what is it to him, really? Just a bit of interest, though he has to admit, he does miss Charlotte's visits, the forty minutes a fortnight when, relatively speaking, anything can happen. At the beginning of September, he phones her at the flat and, waiting for her to answer, is gripped with the fear that she will have moved, that perhaps she never returned from Italy, and that it really is the end of it all, whatever it was . . .

The voice that eventually answers is subdued, less musical than he remembers. She'll visit soon, she says, once she's more on top of things.

‘You've lost weight,' he tells her, not approvingly. She talks of being exhausted, hints at humiliations and insults from Gavin. She cries, apologises because he's surely got problems of his own; he takes hold of her hand and he tells her she just made a mistake, and a pretty small one at that, it's not the end of the world. After this, they take care to avoid sore spots for a while and start to write again, in between the visits. Accounts of their daily lives. His reading:
the most miserable book I have read so far
,
almost seven hundred pages long
.
It is incredible to think of him sitting
down and writing it and not topping himself
. Her thoughts as to what her situation is, as to the kind of woman Victor has become:
they are right
,
in the end
,
we are a kind of woman
,
but we
aren't the same
. . .

Periodically, there is a man in Charlotte's life for a few weeks or months; of these, she brings along Paul, a humourless computer fanatic, and Tom, a college lecturer, quite interesting to talk to but far too old and, it turns out, married.

‘You need to watch out,' he tells her at the end of Tom. ‘The world is full of bastards, I should know.'

‘Tell me about it,' she says. ‘I wish I'd been warned that it's only the locked-up ones that have time to talk and be interested. But there's no point in waiting for you, is there!' They both laugh, but she seems angry too, with herself as much as anything. The volume of communication shrinks, just as suddenly revives. A year passes. He starts the degree.

Alan has been promoted. He's had a too-short haircut, looks older. A brand new, square-edged briefcase sits on the spare chair beside him. He says he has come to tell Simon something, something he technically speaking doesn't even have to inform Simon of, but which he has decided to pass on, because he thinks Simon deserves to know and he will be able to deal with it . . . However, he wants to stress that Simon doesn't have to respond to what he is going to tell him, not at all, in any way.

Right.

Alan looks down at the table top as if something was written there in tiny print, up again, smiles, but it's obvious he's not feeling particularly happy.

It must be Tasmin, Simon thinks, because Tasmin always comes out of the blue, when you're not expecting her and she must be eighteen by now, old enough to do what she wants. He hasn't forgotten her, so she probably still remembers him.

‘Tasmin? No,' Alan tells him. ‘It's more serious than that. Probation have received a letter from Amanda's mother, Hazel Brooks, which she wants you to read.'

Simon hears, somewhere in the back of his head, the noise of the wing, a door slamming behind him.
In there
,
you
.
This is a
one-way street
. What the hell can she want with him? Why now? He watches Alan reach forwards, unscrew the cup of the thermos on the table, remove the lid, pour.

‘You're not in any way obliged to read it. If you want to, you may do so, that's what I want to make clear.' The letter can't be in any way circulated. It is between the two of them, with Alan as a kind of intermediary. If he wants to read it, then it will be a matter of them sitting side by side at the table, or in the same room, at least. They will have to commit to discussing it thoroughly afterwards.

‘Look,' Alan repeats, ‘no one is going to think badly of you if you say no.'

‘I don't have an agenda here,' Alan says. ‘I just felt you should have the choice.' Is choice necessarily a good thing?
Discuss
. Once there was the prison wall. There was the world of the wronged, and the world of the perpetrators, each protected from the other. Now, a communication, negotiated, inspected, unwrapped, sampled, discussed, is passing with tortuous slowness and many conditions from one side to the other. Towards the other: it has not yet arrived. Not quite. ‘There really is no rush,' Alan says, breaking the long silence between them just before it becomes impossible. How, Simon thinks, can he not read what Hazel wants him to read? How long can he sit on that decision? The letter, he supposes, is right there, waiting, in the new briefcase with its brass clasps and combination lock.