Alphabet (8 page)

‘You've been writing letters,' Dickie Walters says as he waves Simon to a squat four-legged beast of a chair opposite his own state-of-the-art swiveller with suspension and padded arms. Despite the sudden lurch in his chest, Simon keeps his face in neutral, shrugs.

‘So?' he says. ‘It's allowed.' He notices Walters's office had been refitted since the last time he was there: fresh off-white paint, huge mahogany desk with framed photos (smiling wife, four children) propped for Walters to contemplate; Venetian blinds, big posters on the wall: a desert, a pod of whales, skyline of Manhattan. Behind the desk, certificates, photos of Walters himself, beaming from ear to ear while shaking hands with the Home Secretary.

‘Your girlfriend, she must like those letters of yours,' Walters says, pulling a quick grin. ‘Spicy, are they?'

‘No,' Simon tells him, ‘they're not.'

‘Must be. Anyhow, she's sent you a parcel which contains a metal object. You'll have to make an application.'

‘Parcel?' Simon says, bewildered.

‘Make an application, and then a decision will be made as to whether you can have it or whether it will be kept for you, or returned to the sender,' Walters tell him.

‘But what's in it?' Simon asks.

‘A typewriter,' Walters tells him, just as the answer comes to him from inside.
Of course
. And now he wants that metal object, that typewriter, that gift, sent because of something he wrote in a letter, more than he can remember ever wanting anything before.

10

The vinyl case zips off from the base. Inside, the rows of keys, the hollow curve of the waiting letters on their long steel arms, a brittle-looking blue-grey shell. Space bar, carriage-return, caps lock, tab key, margin stops: all there. Plus a spare ribbon, still wrapped, a little packet of what turns out to be correction paper, ten sheets of Croxley Script with five envelopes . . . It's sitting on his table and it's like a spaceship has landed in the back garden, all blinking lights and soft little hissing and beeping noises, doors wide open but what's in there? If he goes in, will they ever let him out again?

I meant what I said,
her note says.
What's the point otherwise?
Perhaps this will help?

The paper vibrates as he fumbles to feed it in, falls still as he snaps back the bar. He looks straight ahead at the wall, stops thinking, finds his fingers do indeed reach unbidden and remember well:
You cannot imagine
, he types and the noise of the keys picking themselves up and careening into the paper is almost wet. It's like rain on a tin roof. The space bar chugs along. There's a sharp ring, a tiny cranking sound, then the sudden freefall of the carriage-return, a crash as it hits base.
You
cannot imagine what it is like for me to receive such a gift!
, he tells her, speeding up.
I was not hinting
, he tells her,
in what I wrote. But,
spot on! Thank you, it will be very useful indeed . . . Still, it is very
difficult for me to do what you want
. . .

Somehow, the air in the cell seems extra quiet when he pauses – as if perhaps it has been listening to the words as he typed them. So he finds himself listening to them too, and then imagining Tasmin, dark hair like a curtain, sitting on some low beanbag thing in a dark-coloured, complicatedly lit
attic flat, hearing his voice in her head as she reads the letter he's working on. What she says back is,
Try. Aren't you going to
try?

Amanda
, he types, this time slowly, watching the letters appear one by one until the word is complete. According to psychologists and probation officers, using a victim's name can help bring her or him properly back. Although that doesn't occur, he feels the name pulling at him to go on. So he types it again and again: Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.

She told him, he remembers, that Amanda is a Latin name; it means
worthy of love
. At the sports centre where she worked, Amanda sat all day in the glass box, issuing tickets, making bookings, answering the phone, opening the turnstile. He came in with Tim Briggs to fit new lino, acres of it, in a turquoise marble effect. She was bordering on dog, according to Tim: even though she couldn't be blamed for the tracksuit he could tell just from the glasses with thin gold frames and the scraped back hairdo and the naff make-up and cheap jewellery she wore that she had absolutely no style, not to speak of far too much flesh on her . . . But Simon liked shy girls and one time he saw her laughing with one of the others, they couldn't stop themselves, kept looking back at each other and starting up again, wobbling and spluttering into their Cokes and he liked that too. The first time Amanda came back to his place he knew she expected him to kiss her and he was very nervous. So when he sensed her waiting for it he just said to her instead:
what does your hair look like undone? She had it in a pony tail, high on her head, and straight away she reached up and let it down.

‘I like it like that,' he said, and gave her a smile. Despite the glasses, she was vain. And it seemed like she was very eager to please. But all that was before. Before Before, almost.

Amanda. Everything is there, waiting, in that one word. He takes the paper out and is putting in a fresh sheet when the bolts on his door shoot back and it lurches open, making him jump; he's completely forgotten to be listening.

‘Grub!' shouts Miller.

He eats the vegetable pasta bake, thinking it's pretty good until he finds a long, grey hair in it that can only be from Dave Wellington. Then he sits all evening with the typewriter on the table, refusing to be ignored. Although he wanted it so badly a few days ago he sees now how he could grow to hate the thing. All these years, he has been confined, but at least he's never had to share for more than a week or two and there was a space around him that was almost his. Now, it's been occupied by this thing he asked for without meaning to, and there is nowhere else to go.

At the Kingswells', and after, when he used to bunk off school, the first thing he'd do was get some distance. Run, till his breath ran out, then walk. Jump on a bus, get thrown off, walk some more. Half an hour, an hour, more, moving on, not quite sure where he'd end up, which would be the result of opportunities thrown up, the 66 coming before the 45, as much as any decision made. Come eleven o'clock, he might be on a building site, picking up a bit of cash for getting teas or banging on miles of skirting board, or he might be shirt off in some park, or lying on his back by the outdoor pool, soaking up sun and listening to the muddle of other people's voices.
Maybe he'd find some older lads kicking a ball, hang around, join in. Movement was the thing: pumping his legs and filling his lungs, the sheer relief of it. Being able to go, to get away, feel alive, look down on the world from up a tree or a tenth-floor window ledge. If he needed even more distance he'd jump the train and do the same things in a strange place. He was always found the next day or the day after, courtesy of his unusual eyes. He was never in serious trouble, partly out of luck but mainly because he didn't like the look of what drugs did and hated the thought of needing anything that bad, it was bound to let you down in the end. So he'd let them take him back; he knew he could go again.

Here, he thinks, I can pick the typewriter up and hurl it at the wall. I can do what Tasmin is asking me to do. Or I can just
sit here like this – except that I can't, because the damn words have started to come into my head, whether I type them out or not.

11

Tasmin, I am going to try and do what you asked.

September 2nd 1979, Amanda and I ate in a fancy Chinese restaurant Amanda had heard about from a friend.
We had won ton soup, crispy seaweed, then pork in black bean sauce with spring onions and ginger: peculiar, salty-sweet, slightly sticky things. Egg rice. Straw mushrooms.
What do you mean when you say,
Tell me everything
? How much detail do you want? Those bright yellow chickens squashed flat, the brown ducks slowly turning on spits in the window, the bundles of lanterns, the little red candle in a glass bowl, the tiny waitress with heavy framed glasses who poured out wine for Amanda and water for me, Amanda's napkin smudged with lipstick, our smiles as we fumbled with our chopsticks, us pushing hand in hand through the crowds in Leicester Square to get back to where I'd parked the van in Frith Street?

Tasmin, I want to point out there's nothing I can do right here. Such as, when I use the word ‘we'. You and I both know that Amanda and I are soon to be as separate as you can get. Her dead, me alive, that's what's coming along, via me doing it. All the same we were a couple of sorts. So everything I write will pull both ways and start to hurt your ears, like the weird music you get on Radio 3 when no one normal is listening.

Also, I'm putting into words something I know already even if I'd rather forget it. You – sitting up at night in a dim-lit room, jolted along in a tube-train fug or sipping breakfast coffee in some busy café – are taking in something you did
not know before. Well, you may have started this, but you don't have to go on. As for me, it's all or nothing. I've lifted the lid, and I've got to go on until the box empties out, which is why I never wanted to do it in the first place, because if you let it, memory grows like weeds in here.
Attached to each memory are another six and attached to each of those six more. If you've the patience you can unwind it all. And once you've got it, you can deliberately re-remember it as a whole, then call it up whenever you want. You pick pleasant memories if you've got any sense, but even those can connect up unexpectedly to bad ones, and lead you astray in the end. Which is why I always avoid those tangled lanes and try to live in the present, which is all there really is. The past doesn't actually exist. It's only some kind of story, in parts. The End. Before. Afterwards.

We're still just about in Before. I drive us back to my place, She's chattering and flicking through music stations on the way, roughly the same as we've been doing once a week for the last couple of months since we met at work.
The pattern being, I drive to collect her from her parents' house up by Streatham Common: thirties semi, replacement windows, brand new pink Wilton throughout. Mr Brooks fitted it himself; did a good job. Though why? Everyone fits them for free.

‘Do call me Hazel,' Mrs Brooks says, then starts on the third degree. ‘Do you have brothers and sisters, Simon?' and there's the cake crumbling in my hand and the teacup and saucer and spoon and so on – too much. I try to take the initiative, ask rather than answer – difficult with Mrs Brooks, she being used to having her way in conversation.
Mr Brooks just watches, smokes his pipe. ‘Look after Mandy,' he says, grabbing my hand at the door. She's twenty, but still living at home, that same house all her life.
They always seem glad for her to get out a bit.

We climb up the three flights of stairs. I'm fiddling to get the key in the lock in the dark on the landing, making a joke of
it, feeling nervous but pretty good. We don't touch, except when I guide her in to the dark room: the main bulb's gone and the lamp's on the other side. She pours herself a glass of the fizz I always get in for her and then looks at me, so as to say, what next, Simon? Because the deal we've come to is that we go out and afterwards she comes back here, and we talk a bit about what we've done, or rather she talks, I ask:
what did she think of the movie? What did she like about the food? She's good at talking. And she has a fantastic memory. Everything: people, names, places, her whole past is still there, all the Christmases and Easters and trips and holidays and long weekends she had taken with her mum and dad, Mr and Mrs Brooks, and brother, Alan, all the friends she'd ever played with in the street and the park, what game they'd played, individual programmes and episodes she'd seen on TV, toys and pets she's had, towns she'd visited, the location of the shops where she'd bought everything she'd ever bought and how much it'd cost. It's all there. So I get her talking.

Or sometimes I turn the TV on. We talk or she watches TV, and meanwhile, I watch her doing the things I've told her to do: take your top off, pull your skirt up a bit while you talk to me, put your hand in your pants. A big part of it is that she has to try and keep talking properly while she does it, though she can't really manage it of course. I sit there and watch her, she's right on the verge and breathing hard, beginning to sweat, looking back at me through her thick specs . . . and it gets me high as a kite, her too though sometimes it gets her laughing instead. She's good at that too: watching her watching a movie, you'd know from the set of her face almost exactly what was on the screen – grim, heartwarming, boring, difficult, funny. If it's even the smallest bit funny, she laughs out loud, no holding back, no being critical. She crumples up, shaking like a four-year-old. I like that too, but I don't always want her doing it, I talk her back until she's serious again, her faced flushed, her eyes deep.

‘Aren't you going to do anything?' she asked me at the beginning, holding her tits, the way I'd told her to.

‘This is the way I do it,' I said.

So I tell her: ‘Take your things off, everything.' She's waiting for this. Looking forward to it, you could say.

She goes to the bathroom. I'm supposing it's just for a pee and I sit there, pleased with myself and the world, in the fancy reclining chair I got hold of shortly after we met. It and the lava lamp and the stereo and the TV are fine things in the otherwise pretty sordid bedsit, brown carpet, torn two-seater sofa, limp curtains blowing in a gritty bit of city breeze, sagging shelves and units with their doors long gone, whoosh, whoosh of the traffic on the New Cross Road. I flick through a couple of channels. She's gone a fair while.
It's when she comes out that I realise things are going wrong. She's already completely naked as I've never seen her before. I notice that the hair on her is fairish, like her head hair was when she was a child, in the photo on the dresser in her parents' house. I notice how pink her skin is, I notice that the curves of her look better, more dignified somehow with absolutely nothing on. But I meant for her to undress in front of me, talking like usual. I had it planned.
I'd have her put something in herself while I watched.
Maybe she'd beg to have me in her instead, but I wouldn't, not yet, though don't get me wrong, I'm fully functional down there, I can prove it, but if the deal's not financial, if it's a ‘relationship', then I think you need to be careful and know what you are getting into and who's in charge and be sure that it won't get out of hand. All the same, looking back, I'm the first to admit it could only have gone on so long like this. Perhaps I would've ditched her. Or her me, or maybe it would have been all right, somehow turned into a normal relationship. There's a chance. I think about it sometimes, that chance, that needle's eye that could have been gone through, if only she had kept on doing what she was told.