Some people can see this whenever they want to, I thought, but then I had to stop thinking that because it would have got in the way of the things I wanted to think about. It was a time to be feeling grateful, not to be coveting my neighbour’s wife, or his sea views.
We ate in a seafront restaurant not far from the hotel. I had a nice piece of fish, and the men ate squid and lobster, and Jess had a hamburger, and I drank two or three glasses of wine. I won’t tell you when I’d last eaten out in a restaurant, or had wine with a meal, because I’m learning not to do that. I didn’t even try to tell the others, because I could feel the weight for myself, and knew it was more than they would want to carry. Anyway, they knew by this time that it was donkey’s years since I’d done anything at all, apart from the things I do every day of my life. They took it for granted.
I would like to say this, though, and I don’t care how it sounds: it was the nicest meal I’ve ever had in my life, and perhaps the nicest evening I’ve ever had in my life. Is that so terrible, to be so positive about something?
Martin
The first evening wasn’t too bad, I suppose. I was recognized once or twice, and ended up wearing JJ’s baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, which depressed me. I am not a baseball-cap sort of a chap, and I abhor people who wear any sort of headgear during dinner. We ate so-so seafood in a tourist trap on the seafront, and the only reason I didn’t complain about just about everything was because of the look on Maureen’s face: she was transported by her microwaved plaice and her warm white wine, and it seemed churlish to spoil it.
Maureen had never been anywhere, and I’d had a holiday just a few months before. Penny and I went away for a few days after I’d come out of prison, to Majorca. We stayed in a private villa outside Deya, and I thought it was going to be the best few days of my life, because the worst three months were over. But of course it wasn’t like that at all; to describe prison as the worst three months of one’s life is like describing a horrible car crash as the worst ten seconds. It sounds logical, and neat; it sounds truthful. But it’s not, because the worst time is afterwards, when you wake up in hospital and learn that your wife is dead, or you’ve had your legs amputated, and that therefore the worst has just begun. I appreciate that this is a gloomy way of talking about a mini-break on a perfectly pleasant Mediterranean island, but it was on Majorca that I realized that the worst was nowhere near over, and might never be over. Prison was humiliating and terrifying, mind-numbing, savagely destructive of the soul in a way that the expression “soul-destroying” can no longer convey. Do you know what “quizzies” are? Neither did I, until my first night. “Quizzies” are when drugged-up psychos hurl questions at each other across the blocks, all of them centred around what the participants would like to see done to unpopular and /or celebrated newcomers. I was the subject of a quizzie on my first night; I won’t bother to list even the more imaginative suggestions, but suffice to say that I didn’t sleep very well that night, and that for the first time in my life I had intensely violent fantasies of revenge. I focused everything on the day of my release, and though that day brought with it an overwhelming relief, it didn’t last very long.
Criminals serve their time, but with all due respect to my friends in B Wing, I was not a criminal, not really; I was a television presenter who had made a mistake, and paradoxically, this meant that I would never serve my time. It was a class issue, and I’m sorry, but there’s no point in pretending it wasn’t. You see, the other inmates would eventually return to their lives of thieving and drug-dealing and possibly even roofing or whatever the hell it was they did before their careers were interrupted; prison would prove to be no impediment, either socially or professionally. Indeed, they may even find their prospects and social standing enhanced.
But you don’t return to the middle class when you’ve been banged up. It’s over, and you’re out. You don’t go and see the Head of Daytime TV and tell her you’re ready to reclaim your seat behind the Rise and Shine desk. You don’t knock on your friends’ doors and tell them that you’re once again available for dinner parties. You needn’t even bother telling your ex-wife you want to see your kids again. I doubt whether Mrs Big Joe would have attempted to deny him access to his children, and I doubt whether many of his mates in the pub would have stood in the corner muttering their disapproval. I’ll bet they bought him a drink and got him laid, in fact. I have thought long and hard about this, and have turned into something of a radical on the subject of penal reform: I have come to the conclusion that no one who earns more than, say, seventy-five thousand pounds a year should ever be sent to jail, because the punishment will always be more severe than the crime. You should just have to see a therapist, or give some money to charity, or something.
That holiday with Penny was the first time I fully apprehended the trouble I was in, and the trouble I would always be in. The villa at the end of the road was owned by people we both knew, a couple who ran their own production company and had, in happier times, offered us both work. We ran into them one night in a local bar, and they pretended they didn’t know us. Later, the woman took Penny aside in the supermarket and explained that they were worried about their teenage daughter, a particularly unprepossessing fourteen-year-old who, to be perfectly frank, is unlikely to lose her virginity for a good many years to come, and certainly not to me. It was all nonsense, of course, and she was no more worried about my proximity to her daughter than she was about my proximity to her purse. It was her way of telling me, as so many others have done since, that I’ve been cast out of the Garden of Islington, doomed to roam the offices of crap cable companies for evermore.
So the dinner that first night in Tenerife just made me gloomy. These weren’t my people. They were just people who would talk to me because I was in their boat, but it was a bad boat to be in—an unseaworthy, shabby little boat, and I could suddenly see that it was going to break up and sink. It was a boat made for pootling around the lake in Regent’s Park, and we were attempting to sail to fucking Tenerife in it. You’d have to be an idiot to think it was going to stay afloat for much longer.
Jess
I don’t think everything the next day was my fault. I take some of the blame, but when things go wrong, you just make them worse if you overreact, don’t you? And I think some people overreacted. Because my dad is New Labour and all that, he’s always going on about tolerance for people of different cultures, and I think what happened was that some people, in other words Martin, were not tolerant of my culture, which is more of a drinking and drug-taking and shagging sort of a culture than his culture. I like to think that I’m respectful of his. I don’t tell him that he should get pissed up and fucked up on drugs and pick up more girls. So he should be more respectful of mine. He wouldn’t tell me to eat pork if I was Jewish, so why should he tell me not to do the other stuff?
There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That’s nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything. Anyway, at the end of their seven years, they’d probably got sick of the sight of each other, and you can see that they wanted different things. John wanted to be in a bag or whatever, and Paul wanted to be on his farm or whatever, and it’s hard to see how you can keep a relationship going when you’re so different, and one of you is in a bag. OK, we hadn’t even been going for seven weeks, but we were different in the first place, whereas John and Paul liked the same music and went to the same schools and so on. We didn’t have any of that to go on. We weren’t all even from the same country. So in a way, it’s no wonder that our seven years got condensed into about three weeks.