On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (10 page)

“Aw.” Apparently repetition now became acceptable. “That's for you to say.”

He was obviously a simpleton. I hadn't much patience with simpletons.

“Oh for heaven's sake! Don't you know, man?”

“Nope.”

“Isn't it your business to find out?”

“Nope.”

“Who brought me in?”

“Found you here this morning. Keys back on desk. Shucks. Often seems to happen that way.”

He smiled companionably; pondering life's little mysteries.

“How long do I have to stay?”

“Well I suppose that depends,” he nodded.

“On what?”

“How long it takes you. Shoot! How should I know?”

I wasn't sure if I could stand much more of this. I had to keep stomach-clenchingly quiet for an instant while I tried to control my irritation. “How long it takes me to do what?”

“Work out what you're charged with. Then what you ought to do about it. Then if you feel prepared to go ahead and do it. You ready for some grub yet?”

“No.” After a pause I grudgingly softened it. “Thanks.” Hardly his fault he was such a dunderhead. I sat on my cot and drew up my knees; encircled them with my arms. Went on trying to remember. I might have been drinking but at least I had no hangover. My brain seemed clear. Was I a cardsharp? Con man? Killer? Thief?

I wasn't a killer. They'd hardly have bothered with the jail. They'd have strung me up on the spot. They? The good citizens of this plainly one-horse town. Besides. If you'd killed someone you'd know about it, you'd have to know about it. My instincts told me I couldn't be a killer. Hadn't got the guts.

No—be fair to yourself—that wasn't the reason.

Thief?

No.

Oh yes sometimes when I'd thought I could get away with it I'd travelled on the train without a ticket and when I'd transported my TV set from home to Cricklewood I hadn't taken out a licence but I don't think I'd ever actually stolen from anyone, not even as a kid, not even later on from Price-As-You-Like-It when small amounts of pilfering were regarded almost as a part of one's wage; and if I'd ever found anything of value in the street I'd immediately taken it to a police station. My parents had raised me to be honest.

Con man then? Well only in the sense we all were. We tried to look confident when we weren't, we projected an image, embroidered an anecdote: usually stories which redounded (ever so subtly) to our own credit. But I had never tried to take anybody in with mischievous intent, and the lies I'd told had only been the kind that made life easier for everyone. Again. My parents had aimed to make us all considerate.

But still—

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Clem.”

Well wouldn't you just have known it: that his name would almost have to be Clem?

“I'm Danny. Clem? Were
you
brought up to be considerate?”

“What kid ain't if he's raised up in a good home?”

“And were you raised up to be charitable?”

“How d'ya mean? Money to the poor and sichlike?”

“No I guess I'm thinking more about attitude: attitude towards the poor and suchlike. Giving money to them is the easy part.” Oh yeah? I was remembering that afternoon in Leicester Square—well naturally I was. “Not that I ever did. Give them much. Always told myself I couldn't afford to. Another time maybe; when things got easier.”

When things got easier … But even with Brad I'd tried as far as possible to contribute to household expenses; hadn't aimed to be a kept man. My salary from The White Hart had mainly been spent, if not on necessities or keeping myself looking decent (though Brad had always paid our fees at the gym), then on various bits and pieces I'd hoped were going to give him pleasure.

He'd probably have preferred me to spend it on the poor.

The sheriff spat again; again there was a clearly relished sound effect.

“Can't say I ever thought a whole heap about it,” he remarked after a moment. “Can you be reared to feel them proper things you should towards the poor?”

I didn't see why not. Superficially at any rate. But how deep it was going to permeate plainly depended a great deal less on your parents and a great deal more on yourself. And the sad thing was for me—I had to face up to this—it so clearly hadn't taken.

“With me it didn't take,” I said.

“Don't follow you too well.”

“Who would?” I struggled to explain it; for both our sakes. “I think I never walked a mile in another man's shoes, never more than a yard or two at most. I think I never said, ‘There but for the grace of God …' Not seriously that is, not more than as a thing to say. I suppose in fact I didn't waste much time in thinking about them at all—the really poor, the dispossessed—other than as total losers who in the long term had only themselves to blame. I think more than anything I usually felt revulsion and contempt. No that isn't true: more than
anything
I usually felt indifference.”

“And is this then the charge you're considering of?”

“I suppose it is—basically. Because that's what I had on my own doorstep and could have tried to do something about.” I paused. “Though of course it reached out way beyond the poor on my own doorstep.”

“You're doing well Dan I reckon you're doing well. I guess you'll be out of here in no time.”

I hadn't been setting out to impress him nor expecting either encouragement or understanding from such a seemingly unlikely quarter. So to add to all my other sins I was patently a patronizing git. I smiled a little bleakly. “Thank you for your sympathy. You should have been a priest.” I looked about me at my tiny cell. “This should have been the confessional.”

He gave his yellow gap-toothed grin and meditatively—raspingly—rubbed his leathery unshaven chin. “But you always did show a fondness for them old western movies. Din't you boy?”

Yes especially for the ones so old they were frequently in black-and-white. Where the good guys had invariably won and the bad guys had invariably received their just deserts. A fairy tale for all ages: monochrome simplicity. Why couldn't life itself have been like that?

But if it had been … if it had been…? The question then was this. Would old Danny Boy have emerged wholeheartedly on the side of the marshal and the homesteaders? Or might he have been one of those outlaws weakly swayed by the rationalizations of a greedy and uncaring boss?

Because—yes—the indifference had reached way out. Dramatically. Victims of earthquake, flood and cyclone. Victims of war and civil war and genocide. Of terrorism. Victims of murder and torture and mutilation. Had I ever really
cared
? (Apart from New York and London, that is, but they of course were easy.) Often plenty of lip service naturally—maybe a reaction of genuine abhorrence lasting
a full five minutes
before the sigh and the switching of the channels and the pouring of the glass of Scotch. But could you really be raised to feel more than that … just that very fleeting moment of compassion? No man is an island. Any man's death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind.

John Donne was Brad's favourite poet. I'm not sure I'd even heard of him before I met Brad. I do know I could never have recited a single line of his entire output.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I wish I could have written that. I mean I wish I could have written that in the knowledge of its being an absolutely honest reflection of the way I felt.

“He lacked compassion Clem.”

“Who did?”

“That's what they should have written on my tombstone. Or”—once more I had forgotten—“should be about to write on it. I think that sums it up.”

In fact I had usually been more moved by the agony of just one individual. Only look at that girl of fifteen who had been killed by over fifty knife wounds slowly inflicted by her boyfriend. Or at the young man who had been kicked to death by three assailants in the street—every bone in his head had been broken. Or at families, often children, who awoke to find their homes on fire and themselves most terrifyingly trapped.

Or think about Ken Bigley. Imprisoned for weeks and growing old and growing thin from anticipating his threatened end—decapitation. And think about his eleventh-hour escape from the house, his stumbling flight across the field at its rear, his no doubt burgeoning hope of deliverance. Think about his sudden awareness that he had been spotted; that his jailers were fast catching up on him. Whilst brandishing their implement of execution. Only think about it.

Or think about James Bulger, the three-year-old plastered in model paint and then stoned to death, his body left on the railway line, to be cut in half by an early-morning goods train.

Or think about anyone, absolutely anyone, who'd had the misfortune to die horrifically. Where
was
God, on all occasions such as these?

(Yet nobody ever asked where was God when all the good things happened: when the universe was created, the first breath of human life blown into it—animal life as well—when butterfly wings began to be designed.)

But even after learning of these sorts of tragedy how long-lasting had been my state of sober-mindedness—and how could you possibly hope to share; or do any good at all by attempting to imagine? And again—how long before I might have been chatting cheerfully to some friend on the telephone or selecting with Brad the DVD we thought we'd like to watch?

“Or what about this, boy? ‘He came to know he lacked compassion.' That's at least some slight improvement ain't it?”

“‘But came to know a bit too late. He was such a dunderhead.'”

“Seems to me this inscription is getting longer and longer.” The sheriff chuckled. “Poor stonecutter will sure need to put in some danged overtime. Seeing as how there are other things could just as easily be added.”

“‘In fact to tell the truth he probably always knew. Just never did anything about it.' I feel it in my bones: this stonecutter isn't going to care for me a lot.”

“Unless he's getting paid by the word—and twice as much for the long uns.”

We laughed; although in truth there wasn't much to laugh about.

“Them weren't the other things I was thinking of anyways.”

He lifted his boots down from the corner of the desk. Took up his bunch of keys and walked unsteadily towards the door of my cell. “Hell's bells a man gets awful stiff,” he said.

“Why are you letting me out? Even if I'm more or less right about what I've been charged with I don't see how I can make up for it.
Is
there any way I can make up for it?”

“Never say die boy,” he answered. “Never say die.” Again he took the straw from his mouth. He contemplated it like there was writing there: very small print that he couldn't quite decipher. “But … what's done is done. Don't you go leaning over backwards to think that you're a bad person.”

“Thanks.” I was now standing on the outside of the cell and shook his hand. “But it's a fairly new experience,” I continued drily. “Perhaps you oughtn't to discourage it.”

(In fact—to be entirely accurate—it wasn't all
that
new an experience, not by any means.)

Yet in any case he ignored it.

“Because if it was up to me,” he said, “which it's not; but if it was … I'd do my best to see you didn't swing. And that's the truth of it boy.”

I gave him a hug.

12

Double feature?

Or work experience? It
felt
more like work experience. Much! There seemed no way on earth that I could simply have been sitting on my butt. There seemed no way on earth that I couldn't have been actively involved.

I don't mean in a film. I mean for real.

Right there outside the window the old woman was giving the old man a blow job.

“Oh come on Gertie do you
need
to make it quite so public? We'll have the police back here again.”

I expostulated further.

“Besides. Who ever knows where that thing's been?”

The woman didn't so much as pause. Her lank grey matted hair fell forward from her grubby neck and it looked—though mercifully didn't smell—like someone had been sick down the back of her dress. Six inches to the right of where she knelt there was a newish pile of dog's muck.

The man, however, sitting with his ragged-trousered legs stretched out across the gateless cement forecourt and with his brown-jacketed shoulders resting against the windowsill (it didn't strike me as too comfortable) did in fact cast me a look. A drunken distracted conspiratorial look. He winked at me too as though to say, “You after me mate. If you're smart and play your cards right.” Then his eyes lost focus and he gave himself up once more to his enjoyment.

I couldn't just use force and pull her off him.

“Well I'll go and fetch the garden hose, set that on the pair of you!” We all knew it was an empty threat. I think I even delivered it like the punchline to some joke.

“Yes you do that lad,” said the old man. “You just do that.”

But the sad thing was—he wasn't an old man. Well one of the sad things. It shocked you each time that you remembered. He was forty-eight; looked every bit of sixty-eight. Gertie was indeed in her sixties, late sixties, could easily have been his mother although she was no more connected to George than she was to any other bloke who ever used the refuge; she was just fairly free with her favours. George had been a teacher who'd had a fling with one of his fourteen-year-old pupils. His wife had left him. He'd never seen any of his three daughters again. He told us he'd once lived in a six-bedroomed house, detached, in the nicest suburb of Birmingham, a house that had cost about a hundred and fifty grand. Now he sat on the cement and let a woman who was twenty years older than him (when he had ruined his life for a girl at least twenty years younger) join him in a highly public performance of indignity and sleaze.