Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (26 page)

Greenslade, preposterously, accused Danny of nicking his ideas. Cracknell, ludicrously, imagined Danny was appropriating what passed for his style. Tensions ran high. There were two weeks to go before the entries were due in, and during that time the three men studiously avoided one another. This wasn't easy, given that they all had to type up their manuscripts in the same room. Danny was acutely conscious that he'd managed to avoid any trouble on the nonce wing until now; but he sensed that Greenslade wouldn't hesitate if he thought that a strategic jugging was all that lay between him and the literary laurels.

Mahoney attempted to defuse the rivalry: ‘I'm aware that the three of you feel very competitive about this, but I urge you to remember that there are at least ten men in this prison who will be entering for the Wolfenden, let alone the tens of others that will be entering in other nicks. And anyway, when you write you are competing only against yourself and posterity – there can be no living rivals.’

Mahoney certainly believed this, but he also believed that Danny was a genuinely talented young man who really deserved a break. He'd read Danny's story and it was streets ahead of most of the stuff currently being published. He'd never discussed Danny's crime, or sentence, to do so was taboo, but Gerry Mahoney didn't believe for a millisecond that he was a nonce.

Cal Devenish had agreed to judge the Wolfenden Prize for Prison Writing in the way that he agreed to do so many other things – without thinking. It sounded like a worthy cause, and there was something sexy about the whole notion of prisoners writing. Perhaps Cal would discover another Jack Henry Abbott, and become tied up in an infamous correspondence like Norman Mailer? What Cal hadn't factored in was the actual reading of the entries, set against his own fantastic indolence.

The shortlisted entries had arrived about three weeks before. Cal signed the courier's docket and leant them against the radiator by the front door. They were still there, a bulbous Jiffy-bag full of unimaginable pap. Cal groaned. It was a sharp, cold morning in early April, and he was scheduled to present the prize the following afternoon. He'd been awoken at nine sharp with an apposite alarm call: it was the secretary of the visitors’ board at Wandsworth Prison, where the prize giving was to be held: ‘Mr Devenish?’

‘Yeah, what? Yeah, right?’ Cal was gagging on consciousness.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't wake you or anything?’

‘Naw, naw!’ Cal had been having a dream of rare beauty and poignance. In it, he had awoken and tiptoed downstairs to discover that the novel which he had been procrastinating over for the past two years had been completed during the night and lay, neatly word-processed on the desk. On picking it up and beginning to read, Cal was delighted to find that it was just as he had conceived of it during the long hours of not writing – but far far better.

‘It's John Estes here, I'm the secretary of the visitors’ board at Wandsworth.’

‘Oh – yes.’

‘We're very much looking forward to seeing you tomorrow –’

‘Me too.’

‘I wondered if it might be possible at this stage, Mr Devenish, for you to give me some idea of your decision regarding the winner – and the runners up?’

‘Decision?’ Cal floundered in his slough of irresponsibility.

‘As to who's “von the prize?’

‘Is there any particular reason, Mr Estes?’

‘Well, the thing is, as you may be aware, Mr Devenish, a lot of prisoners get transferred, and we wanted at least to be sure that the winner would be actually in the prison when you came tomorrow.’

‘Oh I see, that does sound reasonable . . . the thing is, I was about to reread my short shortlist when you called. I should have an idea about that before the end of the day; may I call you then?’

Cal took the secretary's number down and hung up. Christ! It wasn't as if he didn't have enough other things to do today. He swung himself out of bed and, naked, stamped down the stairs of the mews house into the main room where he worked. Cal's desk was thatched with an interesting rick of unpaid bills, unanswered letters, notes for unwritten articles and unwritten books. As if to garnish this platter of ennui, almost all the sheets of paper, the desk itself, the computer and the fax machine had Post-it notes stuck to them recording never answered phone calls. Cal groaned and headed for the Jiffy-bag; at least with the formidable excuse of judging the short-story competition he could hold the rest of the obligatory world at bay for another day. He headed back up the stairs and dived into bed with the entries.

Cal Devenish had won a prestigious literary prize himself about five years previously. It was for his third novel, and the previous two – which had barely been in print – were yanked back into favour as well. The glow had been a long time fading, but now, along with the advance for a further novel, it had. Cal told himself that he was marking time, allowing himself the creative liberty of genuine abstraction. But on days like these, when he was confronted with other potential contenders’ work, he was worse than rattled.

It didn't matter that about ten of the fifteen shortlisted stories were barely literate – at least their authors had managed to get the words down on paper. And anyway, reading bad writing was like playing against a bad opponent – your game suffered as well. Every duff sentence Cal read convinced him that he himself would never write another good one; every feeble plot he speedily unravelled hammered home the fact that he himself would never contrive another interesting one; and every wooden character's piece of leaden dialogue left him with the chilling intimation that he lacked any human sympathy himself.

The stories ran the whole gamut of predictable awfulness. There were chocolate-box romances, and dead-pet dramas; there were ‘it was all a dream's, and Stephen King copycat nightmares. Naturally, there was also a whole subgenre of justification, stories about honest crims who would do a bank and give the proceeds to a charity; or else save kiddies from unspeakable nonces. The stories were so terrible overall that Cal decided to order them in terms of being least bad, because he had such difficulty in judging any of them to be good.

That's until he got to the last three in the batch – these definitely had something, although exactly what it was difficult to say. One was a kind of spoof space opera about an intergalactic empire called Printupia. The writer had attempted to compress five thousand years in the history of this enormous state into the six thousand words allowed, and the result was an astonishingly compacted, near meaningless prose. Cal wondered if it might be a satire on the ephemerality of contemporary culture; narrative itself characterised as a non-biodegradable piece of packaging, littering the verge of the cosmos.

The second story was a piece of well-sustained, naturalistic writing about two young black guys dealing crack in north-west London. The writer had done well with all the orthodox conventions of the short story, but then he'd got carried away and added magical realist elements that jibed. There was that, and there was the uneasiness of his spelling – he could never quite decide whether to come down on the side of phonetic transcription of non-standard English, or not. The result was far less accomplished than Cal hoped for when he began reading.

The third story was the strangest in the whole batch, the most unsettling. Ostensibly a description of a man's intense love for his dead wife's cat, ‘Little Pussy’ was written with a close absorption into the minutiae of a solitary man's life that reminded Cal of Patricia Highsmith's style. There were other Highsmithian elements: the sense the writer imparted that awful things
were
happening – both physically and psychically – a little bit outside the story's canvas. The story was told in the first person – but the narrator wasn't simply unreliable, he was altogether non-credible as a witness to his own life. Nothing dramatic happened in the story – the man adapted his routines to those of the feline, and so mitigated his mourning for his wife – but when Cal tossed the typescript to one side, he realised it was one of the cleverest and most subtle portrayals of the affectless, psychopathic mind that he had ever read.

At five that afternoon Cal called John Estes back. ‘Mr Estes? Cal Devenish here.’

‘Ah, Mr Devenish, any decision in the offing?’

‘Yuh – I think so. There's a short shortlist I have in mind – the stories by Cracknell, O'Toole and Greenslade – but I haven't decided on an overall winner as yet.’

‘That's not necessary – I only needed to know that the winner would be able to attend –’

‘And he will?’

‘Oh yes, no problem there.’

At two o'clock the following afternoon Cal Devenish, wearing an unaccustomed suit and carrying a superannuated briefcase, met the secretary to the visitors’ board in the reception area of Wandsworth Prison. Estes was carrying a large bunch of keys; he was a small, dapper man who radiated considered concern. ‘It's a pleasure to meet you,’ Estes said proffering his manicured hand, ‘I enormously enjoyed
Limp Harvest.‘

‘Thank you, thank you,’ Cal blustered – he hated references to his past success. ‘You're too kind.’

‘The inmates are also very much looking forward to talking with you –’

‘How many of them will be here?’

‘Ah, well, there's a thing.’ Estes paused to unlock a door and they passed out of reception and into a high walled yard. ‘By a great, good coincidence, the three inmates on your short shortlist are the only ones left here at Wandsworth – all the others had been transferred.’

‘That's lucky.’

‘Isn't it.’ Estes broke off again to unlock a gate, and they passed into a second high-walled yard.

They were crunching across this expanse of gravel, under the slitted eyes of the cell windows in E Block, when Estes halted and turned to Cal. ‘Mr Devenish,’ he began hesitantly, ‘I don't want to confuse in any way, or unsettle you, but I did wonder if you noticed anything special about the three stories on your short shortlist?’

Cal was nonplussed. ‘I'm sorry?’

‘If there was anything the authors seemed to have in common?’

‘Well.’ Cal mused for a few seconds, scrabbling to recall the stories he'd hurriedly flipped through in bed the previous day. ‘There was an element of err . . . how can I put it . . . sort of
distance,
almost a remoteness in all of them –’

‘I'm glad you noticed that,’ Estes cut in, ‘you see the thing is all three were written – purely coincidentally – by inmates who're under protection.’

‘Protection?’

‘Erm . . . yes, prisoners who're . . . erm . . . convicted sex offenders.’

‘I see.’ Cal began internally to rewrite his speech as they crunched on across the yard.

‘I thought I err . . . ought to tell you, because the prize giving is being held on F Wing. It's the block over there, outside the main prison, that's why we have to go through all these yards . . .’ Estes unlocked another gate with one of his lolly-sized keys. ‘F Wing is the clearing house for all protected inmates in Britain –’

‘Jesus!’ Cal blurted out. ‘You mean where we're headed is the biggest concentration of sex offenders in the country?’

‘Five hundred and forty, to be precise,’ Estes said with a limp smile, then he unlocked the door to the nonce wing.

Gerry Mahoney came by Danny's cell to pick him up and take him to the prize giving. He already had Cracknell and Greenslade in tow. All three prisoners had done their best to spruce themselves up for the occasion, and Greenslade had, optimistically, starched creases into his prison-issue denims. The Wing was uncharacteristically busy today, knots of prisoners hung over the railings on the upper landings, and there was a large number of suited men milling around by the POs’ office.

‘Wass goin’ on?’ Danny asked Mahoney.

‘You’ re going on – those are all AGs come for the prize giving. You see, the actual cheque will be handed over by Judge Tomy, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, and all the staff here are expecting him to make a speech that isn't entirely focused on literature.’ The creative-writing class walked to the end of the wing, then began climbing the spiral stairs to the Education Room.

Upstairs the desks and equipment had been tidied away and about forty chairs had been crushed into the room. By the time the four of them had taken their seats, near to the back, the rest were fully occupied. As well as the twenty-odd assistant governors, in regulation middle-management suitings, there were about fifteen uniformed POs and the Governor himself, who was accompanied by a white-haired, elderly man sporting a loud bow tie and a cashmere overcoat.

“Tomy,’ Mahoney whispered to Danny ‘don't be fooled by his appearance – he's one of the most outspoken critics of the Home Office there's ever been. You wait – he'll give this lot a lambasting.’

As if prompted by Mahoney, Judge Tomy now stood and took control of the proceedings. He welcomed them all to the Wing and then gave a fifteen-minute speech outlining every single thing that was wrong with the prison administration, from failure fully to end slopping out, to food lacking adequate nutrition. The Governor, the assistant governors and the prison officers all sat tight, sinister smiles on their thinned lips. They could do nothing – Tomy was the Inspector of Prisons, he was merely doing his job.

Cal Devenish, who was sitting beside Judge Tomy at the front of the room, was amazed by the elderly man's combative vigour. This was an Inspector who took his remit seriously. But Cal was far more concerned about his role in things. It was easy to spot the three men who he'd shortlisted for the Wolfenden Prize – they were the only prisoners in the room, crushed in between the rows of their jailers. The young black prisoner was obviously the writer of the story about the crack dealers. He looked intelligent, but his expression was on the aggressive side of fierce. Cal felt threatened whenever this gaze fell on him.

Next to the black guy sat an amiable-looking, white-haired man in his late fifties. Cal knew better than to be taken in by such superficial considerations, but it was really very hard to conceive of this man as being a
serious
sex offender. He might have been a flasher of some sort, Cal hypothesised, but not a truly revolting nonce. Anyway, by contrast, the man who was sitting next to him was so obviously the real McCoy that he made everyone else in the room look like Peter Pan by comparison. This individual's hideous countenance was the fleshly equivalent of a wall in a public urinal, the individual tiles grouted together with shit. He was terrifying. Cal pegged him as the science-fiction satirist.