Sonata of the Dead (17 page)

Part Two – Reality

I lie asleep in bed, but only sometimes. Mostly I’m awake, struggling with my fear of the dark, conscious of the sweat on my forehead. Conscious of the cruel silence. After ten years the dreams still bother me. Ten years.

Sometimes, when I’m awake, the sheets becoming oiled with perspiration, I hear a dog barking in the night. Sometimes I want to scream when I hear that. When I hear a dog barking, it takes me back. Like tonight for instance. The dog barked and that was it. Sleep stays away.

So I’m sitting here. Looking out on to my street. It’s quite chilly, and all I have on is a pair of shorts, but I’m sweating.

It is a cold February night. It has been raining; I can see puddles of water on the pavement and the road is shiny and wet. The streetlights are dripping and tears of rain runnel the windows.

The moon is full, the colour of ice that has strong light glinting on it. Almost blue in its brightness.

I can’t see the dog but I can hear it. I think it belongs to number 27 or 29. I’m not sure. It sounds like a big dog. Not necessarily mean. But big. An alsatian. Or a doberman. A rottweiler.

I can feel the cold now. My arms have become covered with a layer of goosepimples. A car crawls past my house. I’ve got a notebook in front of me. One of the thick ones with the large spiralling metal rings that keep the paper together. I’m doodling.

I read what was on the cover and managed a smile. I don’t smile much these days because there is nothing much to smile about.

The notebook is an old one, intended to record the events that happened ten years ago. I haven’t written in it. Until now that is.

The cover is full of messages from my old friends. They are old messages. Stuff like: ‘Bri85’ and ‘Skool stinx’ and ‘Johnno is a geek’.

The one that made me smile was directed at me, written by a girl in my class in the last year of school. ‘To Ali, we were ships that passed in the night. Love, Joanna.’

I can conjure up her face in my mind if I try hard enough. Sometimes I wonder what happened with her. Where she went, what she’s doing with her life now.

Sometimes I wonder what became of all the school friends. It’s natural.

Only, I know what happened to some of my friends, my close friends.

And that’s part of the nightmare.

I’ve started writing. I knew that I would have to get this down at some stage or another. That time has arrived.

I sit here. A cold, February night. The wind has become strong and clouds – angry, charcoal-coloured ones, have shut out the moon’s light.

The rain has started again. Spitting lightly on my windows like fingernails tapping softly.

I hope the dog doesn’t bark again.

I’m writing faster.

And the memories are flowing.

Shelton Farm. Autumn.

My friends. Moon, Croc and Thommo.

And Midnight at the start and end of it all.

I nipped to the cigar terrace at the hotel on Manchester Street and bought a box of Nicaraguan cigars, the best I could afford. The guy I bought them off said the Oliva Serie V Melanio Figurado had been the previous year’s winner of
Cigar Aficionado
magazine’s top smoke. He kept talking about nuanced leaves and notes of coffee and leather as he wrapped them in gift paper. It all went over my head. I’d just as much inject bleach into my eyeballs as suck on something that would turn my lungs to kippers.

I got on the motorway fast. I came off the M1 at Aspley Guise and drove through the countryside along ever narrowing B roads until I reached a long approach road to the ten-metre electrified fences around HMP Cold Quay.

Graeme Tann. I had not seen him since the trial. I had not read the papers or watched the televised bulletins; none of it was news to me, and I didn’t want to see photographs of my wife. I hardly knew anything about him, other than he was a janitor at the leisure centre near where we had once lived, and that he had hidden a camera in the female changing rooms. Out of the hundreds of women who passed through those doors he developed a fixation for Becs. Part of me wanted to know,
Why her?
But most of the time I was saying,
How could he not?
I remember a couple of bottles of guilt I drank off the back of feeling more disgusted that his taste in women was impeccable over the horror he had visited upon her.

And what did I know about him now? Incidentals. Prison life detail. He slept on a mattress that was two inches thick. He now owned three pairs of prison clothes consisting of a dark green shirt displaying his surname and identification number. Someone clipped his finger and toenails once a week. Everything he owned – and none of that was from his life outside – could fit inside the five foot by fifteen inch locker that was kept under his bed. He was in C-wing, unofficially known as Red Row, where they kept the meat-heads, the serial killers, the psychopaths. I knew that his day began at six a.m. with breakfast. There were 200 men on Red Row – nobody ate until every man had arrived at the canteen. Once seated you had ten minutes to eat what had been dumped on your tray. After that came Punishment 60, an hour of ‘free time’ in the quadrangle – the outside communal area. You could exercise out there: they had a cinder running track, they had a stack of free weights, they had batting nets and football goals. There were no cameras here: security was afforded only by a handful of guards on each of the corner towers. If convicts were going to dole out any pain, this was where it happened. I understood that Tann had received a couple of beatings during his time at Cold Quay.

At eight a.m. everyone returned to their cells for the count. Anyone not sitting nicely on their bunks was red flagged. Three red flags and further punitive action – usually a ban on free time or curtailing of other privileges, sometimes a period in solitary confinement – would follow. Then the wait for the doors to unlock for the next plate of slop, the next hour in the Quad – rain or shine – and lights out at nine p.m.

I crossed the gravel forecourt to the gate. There were two guards with Armalite rifles slung loosely across their shoulders; one of them was stroking the barrel as he watched me progress. The car that had shadowed me through the Bedfordshire countryside since I slipped off the M1 at Aspley Guise had parked a little distance back; a pair of blank faces tracked me from the front seats. Nobody was taking any chances with this gig.

Mawker had wanted to accompany me, but I told him I wanted to go it alone. Publicly I explained it was because I didn’t want Tann to have the satisfaction of seeing somebody holding my hand; it was a rite of passage, an exorcising demons process, something I had to do to try to propel me to some halfway normal life path, especially if Sarah was bent on never being reunited with me. Privately it was because I didn’t want him to suffer any fallout were I to launch myself at Tann and try to chew through his carotid artery.

I was met by the governor’s assistant, a guy called Furniss who had chunky hands with squared-off fingers and doe eyes with long lashes. His body language was professional and warm, but his mouth couldn’t disguise his distaste of me or my reason for this visit. It was curled as if he’d just taken a lick of something rotten. Disdain dripped through his words like venom.

‘Welcome to Cold Quay,’ he said.

Outside the visiting area I was halted in front of a desk, behind which was seated a thickset man with close-cropped silvering hair and damp blue eyes. He looked as if he had worked out a lot in his youth and then let everything slide. He wrote my name down in a ledger and gestured at the box.

‘What’s in there?’

‘Cigars,’ I said. ‘For Tann.’ I knew full well that he wouldn’t be allowed such luxuries and that they’d be confiscated before I got near him, to be returned to me on my way out. The desk jockey said as much.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But let me tease the bastard, just for a while? It’s a cheap shot, but I don’t have anything else.’ The desk jockey smiled, his lips peeling back to reveal tiny pebble teeth set in broad gums. I was frisked before they opened the doors for me. If the officer who did it noticed how wet the back of my shirt was, he didn’t let on. A buzzer sounded, the door unlocked. I went in.

All the tables and chairs were bolted to the floor. Each set of furniture was accompanied by a steel pivot loop. I sat down and waited. The air was heavy with the smell of Doublemint and Juicy Fruit. The fluorescent tubes arranged across the ceiling bleached the skin and chased away all shadow. One of them was on the fritz and it buzzed and popped erratically, scattering chancy light like a strobe.

I’d thought about this moment a lot in the years since Tann’s arrest, but I’d never rehearsed it, despite my conviction that I’d meet him some day, face to face. I just never imagined it would be while he was still incarcerated. It was always in some dark alley, or in the kitchen of whatever squalid backwater he found himself in were he to be granted parole. I remember when the life sentence was passed, thinking,
Good. I hope he rots in jail. I hope he contracts Hep B. I hope he overdoses on bad gear. I hope someone tears his eyes out and wears them for earrings.
But pretty soon after I was fantasising about a day he was allowed to go free so that I could find him and do something to him that would secure a long custodial sentence of my own.

Buzzers sounding in muffled distance. Bars sliding open and ramming home. I tried to relax. My fingernails were jammed into the tops of my thighs. A shadow falling through reinforced glass and lengthening across the floor towards me. I wondered if my nails were long enough, sharp enough. I wondered if I was quick enough. Would I have time to tear his throat open before the guards fell on me?

I kept my eyes on the cigar box, even as the shadow stilled, and he sat down before me. I heard the slither of chains as they were fed through the pivot loop. I concentrated on the words:

Oliva Serie V Melanio… Gran Reserva Limitada

‘Hello Joel…’

Figurado…

Tabacalera Oliva SA

‘Joel… how have you been keeping?’

Esteli, Nicaragua

‘Are those for me, Joel?’

I lifted my head and my first thought was,
How could someone so small do what he did?

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re for your jailers. I bought them for you, but, you know. Rules.’ It was puerile. I wish I’d never picked them up in the first place. It was an expensive way to try to hurt him, but all I’d done was make myself look a dick.

‘Pity.’

‘Yeah, after all, these could have been the cigars to finally give you cancer.’
Keep it up, dick. Keep it up with the petty jibes.

‘One of the things about not being able to smoke in here… at least it’s meant I’ve become fitter now, Joel.’

His words came at me as if from far away, from a dream zone I was unable to access; something remembered, or a hit of telepathy from a distant mind. The shape of his head was curiously beautiful now that it was shorn back to stubble: petite, fragile, all neat angles and planes and blue shadow. He barely blinked those ash-grey eyes of his. He barely moved his mouth when he spoke but he licked his lips a lot. His tongue was broad and thick and purple; it was crimped white at the edges like the top of a pie. I imagined it clamped between his teeth as he masturbated on to the dead body of my wife. I hated how he kept using my name.

My stomach performed an oily roll.

‘Are you okay, Joel?’

‘What do you fucking think?’

‘Joel, I think you need help.’

‘
I
need help? I’m not the one who killed in cold blood. I’m not the one who took photographs of naked women in changing rooms and then tossed off over them back in his sad pad.’

‘No. But it’s a sunny day. And you chose to come and sit in a cold room in a prison miles away from where you live. Shepherd’s Bush, isn’t it? Or did you move? I’m guessing you would have moved. Somewhere smaller. You’d have been rattling around that old place, wouldn’t you, Joel? You and perky tits… what was her name?’

I’d stood up without realising it. The guards in the room stepped closer. One of them rested his hand on the Taser in his belt. I’d come in here determined to control myself, to control him, to control the situation, and within seconds he had the upper hand. He was playing me like a knackered trombone.

‘What did you think you could do, Joel? Why did you even come here?’

I was shaking my head. I was digging my nails into my palms. I could feel the adrenaline from my kidneys, a hot liquor that was slowly poaching me from the inside out.

‘May I offer a hypothesis?’

A peeping Tom. A guy who scraped shit off toilet bowls. A coward. A thief. I remember word for word how the judge had referred to him just before passing sentence:
a pathetic, tragic alien living among us, the antithesis of everything good in his victim
.

‘I think you came here because you consider me the strop that keeps your edge keen. You came to see me because you’re losing your grip on who you are and what you feel your point in life is. Rebecca was your anchor. She kept you grounded. And now you’ve been cut adrift, there’s nobody to steer you into safe waters, is there?’

He licked his lips. His face hosted boles of deep shadow, like the cross-hatchings in a bleak political cartoon. His eyes were pale crucibles of cold flame. In the dock he had stood bowed, like an S, like something defeated, burdened with a weight only he could feel. A grey man, his hair thinning, apparently being eaten away by something more deleterious than the most aggressive of cancers. Now he was loose-limbed and lissom. Muscles shifted like oiled rats against each other under his clothing. His skin was pink. He gleamed.

He rubbed his hand over his mouth. His nostrils flared. His fingernails were like polished slivers of almond.

‘So Joel, how’s the search for your daughter going?’

The guards picked me off the floor thirty seconds later. My nose was bleeding heavily – I think it was broken – and my eyes wouldn’t stop watering. Pain strummed rhythmically across my face. A guard was standing over Tann, his Taser drawn. Tann himself was sitting upright, his chained hands as far above his head as he could raise them, and he was slowly, calmly talking the guard down.