Boy A (19 page)

He plays with the coffee mug on his knee. ‘What about my stuff? I haven’t got my uniform and that for work.’

‘I’ll take you round to yours early in the morning.’

‘OK, yeah.’

‘I’ve got something to show you, then.’ She pulls open a drawer on the low lounge table, and produces a small parcel, wrapped in red tissue-paper. ‘Happy birthday, Jack,’ she says.

He’s confused. He hasn’t celebrated a birthday in many years; occasionally with Terry, but this isn’t it, not his real one or Jack Burridge’s. ‘But it’s not my…’

She places a finger on his lips. ‘I know. This is for all the birthdays we’ve missed.’

He turns the present over and over, looking for an easy way in, before he tears the tissue slowly away. There’s a wallet inside, leather, the colour of caramel. He lifts it and sniffs it, understanding suddenly how people get turned on by leather. It smells lavish, lush, of lust.

‘Look at it,’ Shell says.

He takes it down and does so. His name is on it, Jack, burned in like it was branded on the cow. More final, more
real than anywhere else he’s seen it. This is the proof of who he has become. The wallet opens out like a book. There are slots inside, lined sheaths for crisp notes. She’s put a penny in one of them, as shiny as he’s ever seen, like it was made on the day they met.

‘It’s got a secret compartment, too,’ she whispers, her hand sliding on to his thigh.

He studies it, and sees what she means. There’s a credit card section which looks as though it might lift. It does; there’s a brass pop-stud underneath. It flips open to reveal a plastic-covered photo. It’s a shot he took himself. Shell, naked, coated in bubbles, holding her breasts out to him. She’s cut off the picture so that it fits in; her nipples are just out of view. She looks like a goddess to Jack, unblemished as soap and snow.

‘Shell, I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’ He can hear his voice croaking, feel his eyes glistening.

‘You like it then?’

He nods.

They go to bed.

Dorset. Portland Young Offenders’ Prison. Induction wing. Smith-678, they had called him. Smith stank as a false name, too obvious. Might as well have called him
B
-678.

It stank in the cell too. A bowl, as basic as the Victorian prison itself, swam with his piss and shit in the corner. Yesterday they had let him empty it twice. The door hadn’t been opened at all yet today.

He started pacing again. He wasn’t the first, there was a trail worn into the tiles around the cramp, cold cell. Turn left by the steel bed, around the blue table, reach the door, and to the bed again. He had paced his way through last night, shouts all around him, unwilling to sleep. Sometimes burning toilet paper had fluttered past the mucky grilled window. He had masturbated for an hour, dully, unexcited by it, just trying to numb his thoughts. When he finally jizzed on to his belly, he had left it there, because it made him feel stronger somehow. Not for long.

The tiredness was creeping in now. When he sat down on the solitary wooden chair he started to nod, drifted towards oblivion. Only it wouldn’t be oblivion, that was the problem. He knew the dreams would come. Sometimes he didn’t know which was worse: to live in constant nagging fear, or to sleep with the risk of terror. His psychologist at the secure
unit, Michael smug-wanker Webster, had said the dreams would go if he talked about them. Lying fuck. They only became worse, more real; alive in his waking mind as well.

He could picture the two dogs: hideous, pig-like bodies and tiny spiky legs. They faced each other, in one of the dreams, growling and threatening, and opening their huge snot-drooling jaws. But the dogs never moved, like their stunted little legs had lost the power to carry them. Then one of the beasts would eat the other one, swallowing it whole. Jerking its head to shake the vast meal through its throat. Snorting with each stage of success. Until only a fat, black sausage-tail, still writhing in panic, hung from its teeth. Then
B
would feel the panic too. The abject terror of the devoured beast, and also the sudden rising fear of the victor, as it understood that the thing it had eaten was too big.
B
would see the blood that squirted out of its arse and ears. Not its prey’s blood, its own. Organs ruptured and squashed by the thing that still shook its death throes inside. Just one dream of many.

The slot slid open in the door, dark eyes peered through, nodded slowly. The slot was closed again.

B
coughed. The cough made him feel sick, reminded him he needed a cigarette. As if he didn’t know. They gave him ten with his ‘welcome pack’ when he got his clothes. He had four left. He didn’t know when he could get some more. He figured with four he was fucked anyway. Decided he’d smoke a half of one. It tasted acrid and exquisite. They reckoned smoking was bad for you, but he never coughed when he smoked, only when he didn’t. He doubled the value, by breathing out through his mouth and sucking all the smoke back in again through his nose. It looked beautiful, he knew, like a reverse waterfall, but there was no mirror to watch it.

Breakfast came on a tray, from a trolley that a trustee wheeled along. He was with a screw, who was there to
unlock the door and watch him, but watched
B
more. The screw snarled disgust as he left.
B
pulled his knees to his chest on the bed and closed his eyes, surrendering to the urge to sleep.

The chaplain came to see him later. He spoke with a slight Dorset slur that suggested cider and straw sucking.

‘They tell me you’ve been a regular chapel attendee.’

B
nodded.

‘Are you any particular denomination?’

‘I don’t believe in God.’

‘You don’t believe in God, then why would you go to chapel? I warn you, inmates here are not given a Bible, so if it’s the fine paper for rolling tobacco you’re after, you’ll be wasting your time.’

‘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.