Boy A Page 15

  ‘I want to believe. I just don’t.’ His voice sounded drained, even to himself, weary of this place already.

  The chaplain put his hand on B’s shoulder, cautiously, like the first pat of a pit-bull. Then firmly with a squeeze, when no bite came. ‘Well then, maybe that’s something we can help you with; if you have hope, then faith may follow. I’ll find out if we can get you out of induction on Sunday, for the service; I’ll ask the number two governor.’

  Even the governors have numbers. Screws wear their numbers on their shoulders, three digits. Cons have six. Doors have numbers, floors have numbers, wings and keys and bins have numbers. Everything you own is numbered on a property card, itself numbered in case of forgery. Forms are numbered, complaints are numbered and punished with numbers: ‘Allegations against a prison officer not upheld can result in up to 156 extra days,’ read the signs all around. So days are numbers, nights are numbers. Nonces are numbers: section 43. Suicides are numbers: code 1. Even the public can become numbers: 200,000 coupons had been sent in from the Sun, demanding B’s sentence be a longer number. Blame was a number: three months younger and he couldn’t have been tried at all. Would not have been demonized. But God has his numbers too.

  ‘Luke 23, 43,’ the chaplain said. ‘“Today you shall be with me in paradise.” Jesus told Dysmas that – one of the thieves – and he was saved at the eleventh hour. There is always time, you see, if you have the will there is always enough time.’

  Time was the only thing B didn’t feel short of. He had no watch and no release date. Time is meaningless unless it’s numbered.

  He was escorted to service on the Sunday. A prison officer to himself, the only one on induction going along. They walked side by side through the corridors, not looking at, or speaking to, each other. B’s gait had altered in the secure unit years. He discovered that the stride he had adopted to ward off monsters provoked inside, instead of protecting. He learned gradually and painfully to saunter instead of strutting, to stroll and then to shamble.

  The officer stopped at the door of the chapel, motioning B to continue in. The other prisoners were there already, seated on old plank benches. As B entered they stood, and there began a slow hand-clap. Not an applause, an identification. We know. Getting louder as more found the rhythm. Until it seemed like everyone inside was clapping. To his horror B saw that one of the screws was doing it too, hitting the wall at his back with the flat of his hand. The unhurried ovation continued, even after B had found a seat on an empty row. He knew that it was out. He’d been fingered already. He would have to hide under section 43, but he was strangely unafraid, as if his body no longer had the energy for fear.

  The noise had died by the time the chaplain entered, wearing a dress and a look of piety. He was middle-aged, of middling height, with mid-brown hair. But he had an exuberance that was for some reason undented from his years at Portland. He scanned the ranks for B’s face, as he mounted the pulpit, and smiled when he caught his eye.

  ‘Thou shall call his name Ishmael,’ the chaplain said, ‘because Jehovah hath heard thy affliction. And he shall be as a feral ass among men; his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall be set against all his brethren.’ He rocked back on to his heels, and tilted his head, as if in this quotation he had asked the room a question. ‘Genesis 16, 14,’ he continued. ‘Many of you here may have felt like that. How many of you have thought that the whole world was out to get you, as it was out to get Ishmael? Who among you has believed himself completely alone?’ With this he looked at B once again. ‘You are not alone. You are never alone. Because the Lord is with you.’

  The number one governor concurred with B’s request for protection. He was sent to F-wing, when he came off induction, to where the wild things roam. The fraggles: kid fiddlers, grave diggers, grey rapers, nonces, bent coppers, shower hawks, snitches, chesters, cho mos, the retards, the radio rentals, the snotters, the scunners, the diaper snipers, baggawires, grasses and all the rest who were hiding from a hiding. And there, among the chevvy dodgers and shank skankers, he was given a one-person cell to call home. At least it had a flushing toilet in it, though in spite of this the mattress was stained with piss.

  B began to spend most of his time in his pad, even when he didn’t have to, occasionally emerging to watch television. He had made a couple of attempts at conversation, but the fraggles repulsed him. They were all freakish, ill-composed, put together from oddments. Survival of the fittest had been suspended on F-wing. These were the people who couldn’t even fit in prison. Nothing fitted, every part of them seemed grotesque. At the bottom rung of the laundry pecking order, even their clothes either hung off them, or left mocking gaps at the cuffs and ankles. B would flinch whenever one of them brushed against him. He paced his cell all day, doing push-ups and chin-ups on the fat pipe that wound around one wall. Bulking his short, stocky body.

  He realized he needed a new charm, a spell to keep people from him. He tried to ask for it, from the God that the chaplain knew. But He was never there, or the radio was too loud from the cell next door. B lived in a state of depression and tension for so long, it became normal. He felt like he was in a bunker, with a grenade on the floor. But he knew he could never get to it in time, so he didn’t bother. He just stood there watching, waiting for the explosion.

  In the TV room he saw a programme about Vietnam veterans. It was explaining how constant fear could rewire the brain, when someone turned it over to Coronation Street.

  B told him to switch it back. ‘Can’t you see?’ he said. ‘They’re talking about us.’

  The youth was part of a group who considered that they ran F-wing, multiple rapists mostly, who would have been bitches in the main gaol. He told B to fuck off.

  B floored him with a flung chair, and fought off two of his cronies until the screws broke it up. They dragged him back to his pad, and banned him from any association time for a month. B didn’t much care. He figured he might have found his spell. And, while pacing his cell, he discovered that his walk had recovered too. The shamble strolled into a strut, and though his concrete hut was only four strides long, he began to feel it was enough.

  He had learned to read in the secure unit, and in the unmissed absence of company he requested books. He liked biology. The books he was given had many pages missing, where pictures had been removed for masturbatory consumption. But he discovered other subjects of fascination. For example: did you know the human eye sees everything upside down, and it’s only some trick, with mirrors in the mind, that makes the world approach the shape we believe it to be? B knew that. And he reclaimed the slow hand-clap that had started his descent into this place. Practising it as he paced, ever further each day, around his tiny room. Sometimes he would sing, just to remind himself of his voice.

  ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,’ he would bellow, thinking that this further proof of instability could only help his cause of solitude.

  He was smacked once, as a child at primary school, for refusing to clap at the right point in that song. He could see now the injustice of that, because he had not been happy. Except for some few weeks with A, before even that soured to an impossible poison.

  Because he was restricted to his cell, B’s meals were brought to him by another prisoner. A trustee from a different wing, who had grown fat, or at least remained so, by stealing the choicest bits from all the trays on his trolley. B had never spoken, or moved a muscle in protest. He sat impassive when the line of grease next to his lone sausage revealed that there had once been two. Or when three fat finger trails streaked through his baked beans. But when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone hoiking up phlegm and spitting it, outside his cell, just a moment before he was given his dinner, he coldly asked for another one.

  ‘This is all you’re getting, you little queen,’ the fat guy said, and he stirred his finger into the ice-cream-scoop of indeterminate veg. ‘Enjoy your greens.’

  B rose an
d took the tray from him. Then, staring straight into his eyes, tilted it so that all the food slid between their feet. The fat guy looked down, and when he did so B smashed the tray up. It wasn’t that heavy, but the blow was hard enough to make the guy stagger back, and allow another shot. B held it by the sides, above his head, and slam-dunked it down onto his opponent’s hairline. This time, the guy’s legs dropped from under him.

  He had a flap of skin hanging from his forehead, like a mangled second nose, by the time the prison officers could take B off to the segregation wing.

  Back to where he had begun, almost. There was only a mattress in segregation, no bed, a chair but no table, a pot and a blanket. Only now he found he could sleep unafraid on his mattress. When the dreams came, he could take control. If the two dogs faced each other, slavering away, B found he could reach his arms into their world, and bang their heads together. They whined and whimpered and turned against him with their snarls, but they became friends, and both were saved. Other than the indignity of the pot, B was happy in segregation. He didn’t count the hours or the days. There was only him, no numbers, he just was.

  It was an evening when the numbers came back. There were four of them. They opened the door and rushed in. They wore pillowcase hoods with ragged eyeholes. They looked like Klansmen. And by the noose of blanket-platted rope one carried, it was clear they meant to have a lynching. B knocked him down, and leaped like a power-surge for the emergency button on the wall. But he was blocked by two more. They wrestled him to the floor, and while three gripped his thrashing body, the fourth placed the noose around his gnashing, spitting head.

  It was all they could do to hold him beside the grill, as the rope was threaded through it. Twice he got a hand free and punched pillowcased faces. Then they pushed the chair under his twisting feet.

  Though his wrists were still held, B saw his opening to land a kick. He launched off the chair, and it toppled backwards to the floor. But he had exploded with sufficient force to ground his foot with a crack of broken jaw. And as the rope went tight he thought: ‘I got you, you fucker, I got you.’

  R is for Rocket.

  Reward and Resolve.

  I see no reason, Why gunpowder treason, Should ever be forgot.

  It’s the 4th on Tuesday, when Terry comes around to pick up Jack. The cinema’s classic reshowing attempt has flopped, so they’re back to the arranged night out. Terry’s serious; his lips barely flicker into their usual smile when he sees Jack. It’s obvious there’s something on his mind. When he finds that Kelly isn’t in, he sits them both down on the sofa.

  ‘Jack,’ he says, ‘something’s been brought to my attention today. I’ve debated with myself, but I think you’ve got the right to know.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘There’s been a bounty posted on the Internet.’ He lets the words sink in. ‘For information about your whereabouts. The police are investigating, but it looks at the moment like it’s been posted in the States, in which case there isn’t really much we can do.’

  Jack always knew that something like this could happen, but that hasn’t lightened the blow.

  ‘This doesn’t necessarily affect anything. There’s no information about where you might be, no pictures. It just confirms what we already knew; that there are people who will never let this go. But they don’t know a thing. In a way this just proves how successful we’ve been, how successful you’ve been. They wouldn’t have to do this unless they really didn’t have a clue.’

  ‘The reward,’ Jack says, ‘it’s just for information.’

  ‘Just for information. There’s no explicit threat of violence.’

  ‘How much am I worth?’

  ‘Thirty thousand dollars, about twenty thousand pounds,’ Terry says.

  ‘Maybe I should turn myself in.’ Jack laughs a dry damned laugh.

  Terry puts his arm around him. He can smell Brut aftershave, and beneath it the safety of the special Terry smell.

  ‘No one but me and the protection squad police know where you are, Jack. They’re not going to find you, I promise. Nobody’s going to find you.’

  Jack wonders if he should tell Terry about the man he thought was following him the other week. Shell said it was just her ex, though, didn’t she? And nothing’s come of it. Maybe it wasn’t anything at all, just paranoia. If he says something, and Terry takes it seriously, they might move him. He’ll lose everything: Shell, Chris, Steve the mechanic, the job, his room, this whole world. He’d rather take his chances. He doesn’t feel like he could do it all again even if there was another Michelle out there.

  Neither of them much feels like going to the pub after that, so they ring for a pizza. It arrives with a pubescent on a moped, and a free bottle of coke.

  Jack guesses closest to the time they get back to the yard. Under the rules of the bet, Chris owes him a pint. A small victory in a grey day. Someone’s written www.washme.com in the thick city grime on the side of the van. Chris thinks it’s funny. It aggravates Jack’s Internet anxiety.

  ‘Are you coming to the fireworks tonight?’ Chris asks. ‘I’ll buy you your winnings.’

  ‘I said I’d go somewhere with Shell.’

  ‘Bring her along. I’m meeting Steve and his mate Jed in the Crown at eight, and then we’re going over.’

  Fireworks sounds like a good idea. So does company, Jack’s feeling too broody to want to be alone with Shell. She’d know something was up. ‘OK, let’s go and ask her.’

  Shell agrees, but Dave shoos them rapidly out of the office. He’s got an angry red boil on the side of his neck, which is threatening to go volcanic. The office is erupting too, into pandemonium over some lost stock.

  ‘Ungrateful bastard,’ Chris mutters, when they’re back on the unit side. ‘We were heroes a few weeks ago. He’s forgotten that one pretty quickly.’

  Three children, wearing faces like film orphans and dragging a go-cart, intercept Jack, as he starts to walk home from the drop-off.

  ‘Penny for the Guy,’ their leader says, in a plaintive voice that suggests some illness could take his feeble life at any moment.

  Unless Fawkes was a teddy bear in a babygrow, the Guy is not a close likeness, although they’ve tried to biro a beard on to its worn beige face. Jack finds himself giving the boy a pound anyway, before he’s even thought about it. They all rocket off as soon as they have the money, as if afraid he’ll change his mind. The cart rattles behind them on twin tow ropes. Guy Fawkes would be unseated if his stunted legs weren’t sellotaped to the plank chassis.

  The Crown’s busy, being opposite the park. Actually it’s called the Crow, the ‘n’ seems to have fallen off. Not a good omen, but Steve the mechanic and Jed have managed to secure a table. Jed’s thick-set, olive-skinned, shaven-headed and could look menacing. Only he doesn’t; he looks friendly and familiar. He stands up to give Shell his chair and goes off to try and find another one.

  Chris arrives last, grinning like Scooby-doo, and holding a plastic bag full of fireworks and cans. He shakes Jed’s hand, apparently he’s never met him either, and kisses Shell on the cheek. They talk about work for the next pint, having to explain about people and events to include Jed. He doesn’t seem to mind though, or else he puts on a good show of polite interest.

  Shell says that Dave’s been going mad all afternoon. Apparently the missing stock is worth quite a lot of money. If it doesn’t turn up, then not only will DV Deliveries have to pay for it, but they could lose the contract with that company. It’s sobering for a second, but Chris and Steve the mechanic crack with laughter when she tells them how she christened Dave’s boil ‘Mini Me’, because it mirrors his bald, bright red head.

  It’s raining when they cross over to the park, just before the fireworks are due. Some scallies are selling disposable plastic macs for two pounds a pop. Chris hands out sparklers and lagers from his Asda bag, as they make their way to the chunk of crowd that looks the thinnest. The field is already thick with mud; Jack’s
glad he wore his work-boots, not his trainers, but realizes that he’s going to have to clean them before tomorrow.

  A bonfire, big as a house, is burning ferociously; but ropes prevent anyone from getting close enough to enjoy its heat. Two fit birds, with horsy waxed jackets, sit sharing a spliff on inflatable armchairs. He sees Chris eyeing them, torn between his friends and the potential pull. Jed and Steve the mechanic light their sparklers and this seems to sway Chris, at least temporarily.

  Jack tries to write his name with his sparkler. The letters leave a brief imprint on his eyes, but the blackness quickly swallows them. Only by scribing into the air again and again in rapid succession can he reach the level of permanence required to see his whole identity at once. Jed slashes Zs in the air with his brand, like Zorro.

  The display starts with a warning, safety instructions delivered through a loud speaker. Stuff that should be common sense, pounded out from fear of litigation. The last instruction is to not discharge any of your own fireworks. Chris manages to send off a rocket with a trailing whistle almost the second afterwards, and soft laughter ripples through the crowd nearby.

  The official rockets shoot up in clusters. They crackle like high amp rice-crispies as they fire. Explode into bright, life-loving, punk-rock colours. Then drift slowly downwards like destroyed worlds. Jack is entranced. He holds Shell’s hand, but doesn’t murmur a word while volley after volley lights up the sky. When it’s all over the darkness looks more dark because of what it’s known.

  ‘Which were your favourites?’ Shell asks, as they meander back to the pub or the car, still undecided which.

  Jack preferred the long bleached streaks, that flowed down like Tina Turner’s hair, and he says so. Shell laughs and squeezes his hand.

  ‘Best legs in the business, Tina Turner,’ Steve the mechanic adds, with sham sincerity.