The Blueprint (32 page)

I soon realise
that they’re no longer within earshot, and that I’m alone, shouting
into nothing. I stop trying to push open the lid, and I stop trying
to rock the dumpster until it falls onto its side. I do this
because I no longer want to get out; I want to remain in the dark,
and go back to solving the maths problem I’d been stuck on before
the bell rang to signal lunch. I know that, sooner or later,
conscience will get the better of one of them and they’ll come to
rescue me; that I’ll probably have to go into my science lesson
smelling faintly of yesterday’s school dinners; that the whole
story will eventually unravel itself; that I’ll have to try to
explain to the deputy headmistress that it isn’t through fear that
I’m refusing to tell her the names of the people who did this to
me; that this explanation will fall on deaf ears, and that I’ll be
able to sense her frustration, bordering on anger, which makes me
feel almost as though I’m the guilty party. Which I am, in a way, I
suppose.

I suddenly
find that I’m not myself anymore. I’m Charlie, thinking Charlie’s
thoughts. I don’t want to live as a person; I want to live as a
pop-song. I want to be three minutes long, and last forever at the
same time. I want to be a perfect artifice of rhythm and lyrics and
melody, all coming together to form one perfect idea. I want to
project that idea out into the world, as my replacement, and then I
want to die, because I wasn’t built for real life.

I thrust an
arm up through the filth and lift the lid of the dumpster, just a
crack. The sun has gone down. I peek out in a meerkat-fashion and
search through the darkness for passers-by. The cold wind rushes
over my face, reminding me of who I am, and what I’ve done. The
coast looks clear, so I squeeze myself out of the bundle of garbage
bags and flop over the side of the dumpster. The floor seems to
jump up to greet me. Clutching a hand to the lump forming on my
head and lurching up to my feet, I suddenly spot two dark figures
at the end of the alley. It’s difficult make out their faces, but I
could swear that they’re staring back at me. I perform a swift
about-face and march away from them as fast as I can get away with,
throwing in a drunken stumble in an attempt cover my tracks.

I ram my hands
in my pockets and my chin to my chest as I walk down the street,
keeping my pupils strained upwards so I’ll be able to catch anyone
approaching before they get close enough to recognise me. Though
I’m sticking to the least well-lit areas, what with this being
Newcastle I can’t help stumbling across a pub before too long. I go
to hang a left down an adjacent street so the smokers can’t catch a
glimpse of me, but something stops me in my tracks. Through the
window, I can see that Sky News is playing on the TV in the pub,
and plastered across the screen of that TV is my Facebook profile
picture. Suddenly it hits me that my parents are probably looking
at the same image right now. I wonder what the banner below it
says; I’m too far away to make out the words properly, but one of
them looks suspiciously like ‘manhunt’.

There’s a
scene in
Fight Club
where Brad Pitt says, ‘It’s only when we
have nothing, that we’re free to do anything.’ Yet here I am: no
girlfriend, no friends who want to keep being friends, and parents
who are at this very minute wondering whether it’s too late to get
an abortion, and I don’t feel free. I feel lonely. I feel cold. My
leg is hurting. Is this how Phoebe feels all the time? How the hell
does she do it?

You’d
better work that out fast, or you’re going to prison for a long
fucking time,
my brain responds.

I jog off down
the adjacent street, towards the moor. One person looking out of
their window and phoning the police could put an end to my freedom.
Could someone recognise me from that photo, in this darkness? Even
if they could, won’t the police be getting hundreds of calls from
overeager Samaritans at this very minute, placing me in every
corner of Newcastle? One call that happens to identify me correctly
would surely be a drop of blood in the ocean.

I try to talk
myself out of my paranoia, insisting that if I’ve made it through
without being spotted, my chances are good of escaping the
outskirts and making it to the moor. Behind all of it, though, I’m
internally writing my Christmas list, and all that’s on it is
another year, another week, another day of freedom. I can’t shake
the feeling that all Santa’s going to bring me is coal.

As if to prove
that my paranoia isn’t going to be discouraged so easily, a sudden
change of lighting in the distance sends my body hurtling to the
tarmac and rolls it under a parked car. When my mind has time to
catch up to my eyes, I realise that the paranoia had a point.
There’s a car approaching at a pace which I’d find curious even if
there wasn’t a flashlight beam poking out of the passenger-side
window, I tease my body closer to the kerb as the beam creeps
towards me, wishing to God that I’d gotten rid of the gun when I
had the chance, and praying that my shadow won’t betray me.

The car goes
by, and my desire to get rid of the revolver diminishes instantly.
I roll back out from under the car and, despite the throbbing pain
in my knee, I pick up my pace to a run. For some reason I’ve got it
in my head that if I can reach the spot on the moor where we buried
the loot, I’ll get out of this. I’m now chasing that feeling, like
a smackhead chases the dragon or a lonely man chases a girl who
showed him some small token of pity. It’s only now, when I’ve
brought myself to the brink of losing it, that I understand the
value of freedom. My picture is plastered across television screens
all over the country; to the world, I’m no more than a criminal,
but that’s not who I am, that’s not what I can be. In an instant,
my petty, provincial concerns fall away, and for a snatch of a
second I can understand Phoebe, or whatever her name is now. Then
the understanding rolls back, and the fear crashes over it.

Like a pirate
at the X-marked spot of buried treasure or, better yet, a starving
dog discovering some discarded scraps of food, I fall to my knees
and scrape at the dirt with my hands. Great clumps of it come away
in my fists, despite it being so cold that the soil should be
frozen solid, like it was when we were digging the hole in the
first place. My fingers hit plastic. I grope around through the
dirt for the sides of the box, and, finding them, drag it out of
the earth.

I pop the top
off and throw it aside.

It’s my phone.
I don’t know what my phone is doing there, but I know for damn sure
what it’s been traded for, and by whom. I dig around inside the
box. My phone; the shotgun; a hoody; my watch; another hoody; the
pistol… and one five-pound note, probably left there to mock me.
But why did she take my phone?

Like the dumb
kid at school waving his hand around, clamouring for the chance to
finally answer a question, my mind throws me back to the morning
after I met her:

Drunk Charlie has such
a prolific habit of hiding or losing Sober Charlie’s possessions
that two phones ago I decided to add his number to my Find my
iPhone app.

Charlie had
his phone on him when we buried the evidence.

‘
What’s you PIN,
again?’ he called after me.

‘
Oh-two-seven-six!’
I hollered back.

I thought she
took losing out on the loot remarkably lightly.

‘
Because she had a
feeling that someone’s bedroom window would be unlocked…

She knew the
house would be empty, and that my phone would be there on my
bedside table, ripe for the taking. So she took it. Then she was
able to follow us here, without even having to follow us.

I wouldn’t exactly
call you a “hero”, but you guys were the most interesting group
I’ve ever ripped-off.

She saw
exactly where we buried the money.

‘
FREEZE!’

Even with all
my supposed nerdiness, I’ve been outfoxed by a girl who’s never
even heard of
Star Trek
. Never used a computer. Doesn’t have
a Facebook account.

‘
HANDS ON YOUR
HEAD!’

You win some,
you lose some, I guess.

I can see the
police officers emerging from shadows, now.

Fuck Steve
Jobs.

He tells me to
raise my hands again. I raise my hands.

A sudden
convulsion hits my chest, but it’s not a sob, it’s a laugh. It
spreads up from my chest to my throat and my shoulders, and down to
my stomach and knees. I fall down, paralysed by the spasms of
psychotic mirth. Even after they’ve finished dragging me the back
down the moor and they’re throwing me into the back of the waggon,
the night still resounds with the sound of my laughter. As the
HA
’s echo back off the inside walls of the police van, it’s
as though the whole world is laughing with me.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Thankfully, it
turned out that the prison rape rumours Hollywood insists on
spreading are mostly bullshit. Less thankfully, the stuff about
other forms of assault is most certainly not. Perhaps it says
something about my looks that the men I share a jail with would
rather kick the shit out of me than fuck the shit out of me, but
I’d hate to think that Liz had less discerning tastes than a swarm
of convicts.

My case got a
fair amount of play in the media - especially after I made a plea
of diminished responsibility at trial, on the grounds of
determinism – so I came into prison with an aura of infamy
surrounding me like the stench of decay, attracting hyenas. I think
it was the combination of the big aura and the small, weak body it
surrounded that made me such a perfect target for inmates with rage
issues. God knows those weren’t in short supply. There were two
incidents in my first week alone. The first wasn’t too serious; I
managed to scrabble free before they’d left anything worse than
cuts and bruises on me. The following incident, however, caused me
to spend my second week at her majesty’s pleasure in the hospital
wing.

The first
month of my incarceration was quite similar in tone to my first
month at university, if Tim and company had hunted me for sport
instead of just shunning me at social functions. Much in the same
way as at university, I didn’t help myself out by pathologically
keeping myself to myself and then acting silent but creepy on the
rare occasions where I did find myself in company. Rather than
salvation coming from a girl, as it did in my first year, in prison
my salvation came from confinement. After my second spell in the
hospital wing I was transferred to a solitary cell and put on
lockdown for 23 hours a day. I don’t know if this was a pity move
on the guard’s part or an attempt to dodge the bad press that would
come from me being murdered whilst my name still held some cultural
currency.

The period I
spent in confinement gave me plenty of time alone with my thoughts.
I wasn’t on speaking terms with my thoughts – it was them who got
me into this mess in the first place – so I did push-ups to
distract myself. Prison had been a new and scary environment, and
I’d allowed myself to fall back into the old, scared skin I’d
uncomfortably inhabited for twenty years prior to the whole armed
robbery thing. I hated that dude. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of
East London tough-guys turn me back into him.

An entirely
press-up and prison food-based regimen takes a few months to kick
in; I was only on lockdown for a few weeks – pesky human rights
legislation puts a cap on that sort of thing – so I didn’t come out
with any more dangerous tools than I went in with. I did, however,
come out with a far more dangerous mindset. When the bell for the
second round sounded, I came out swinging.

This isn’t to
say that many swings landed. At least not to begin with. And it was
most definitely not as though I was winning any – or, indeed, any –
of my fights in the time after I got out of solitary. It was
interesting, however, to see how many of my would-be bullies found
better ways to entertain themselves once I began standing up for
myself. I soon found out that it isn’t about winning; it’s about
causing enough damage, and not showing enough fear, that in future
your opponent will decide you’re not worth the effort.

For the more
tenacious characters who decided that I
was
worth the
effort, I made sure that every time they went after me I’d be
stronger, I’d fight dirtier, I’d be more creative in my use of
weaponry, and my general outlook on life would be just that little
bit more psychotic. Towards the end of my first year inside I was
put back on lockdown, but this time it wasn’t for my protection, it
was for biting a chunk out of a fellow inmate’s ear. I’d become
quite the little savage.

I’m now five
years into my sentence. I’m not sure whether it’s because my infamy
has faded or because I’ve proven myself willing and occasionally
capable of inflicting damage, but it’s been a long time since I
felt uneasy in the lunch queue. I choose to believe it’s for the
latter reason. It feels like a victory that way. Since such
victories are the closest one gets to controlling one’s destiny in
a place like this, I’ve found myself almost missing those
five-minute windows of terror and mayhem. Without them, there’s
nothing to distract me from the fifteen hours and fifty-five
minutes-a-day of lining-up for sub-school-dinner grade food,
sitting in my cell in silence, communal showers and shitting in
front of my cellmate. As for the eight hours I spend sleeping, the
last nine months have been an endless repeat of the same nightmare.
That’s the thing about prison; your waking life is so regimented,
so mundane, that before long even your subconscious follows suit.
The nightmare in question consists of me sharing a sofa with Liz,
watching one of those police-chase reality TV shows. More often
than not, my head’s in her lap. Lately I’ve noticed a bassinette in
the corner of the room, but every time I get up and go to look
inside, I wake up.