After this encounter, if that is what it can be called, I found myself going along with a lighter step, almost gaily, despite the bitter wind and the ashen light. It was as if I had been sent a signal, a message of encouragement, from my own kind. All at once the world about me seemed more vivid, more dangerous, shot through with secret laughter: my world, and I in it. This was not what I had expected, this sudden, unlooked-for lightening, this chipper step and brisk straightening of the shoulders. Surely it was not right, surely in common decency the least I could do would be to put my head down and creep away abjectly into some dark hole where the world would not have to look at me. Yet I could not help feeling that somehow something like a blessing had been bestowed on me here, in this moment by the river. Oh, not a real blessing, of course; the paraclete will never extend forgiving wings above my bowed head. No, this was a benison from somewhere else. The angels sing in hell, too, remember, as the prophet K. tells us — and ah, how sweetly they sing!
Billy was waiting for me in the Boatman. It is not the kind of place I would have frequented in the old days. A handful of drinkers were at it already despite the early hour, rough-looking, indeterminate types hunched over their pints in the furry grey gloom. The sour stench from the quays outside was mingled with the smells of stale beer and cigarette smoke. At that hour the atmosphere of the place was watchful and faintly piratical; I would not have been surprised to glimpse a peg-leg under a chair, or the flash of a cutlass. Whenever the door opened a whitish cloud of light from the river came in like ectoplasm, hovered a moment and then sank down among the scarred tables and the plastic stools. Billy sat on a bench seat with a glass of beer untouched before him, tense as a pointer, gazing up in rapt attention from under a fallen lock of oiled black hair at the busy television set above the bar. He had been out for six months. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, with the cuffs buttoned, and very clean jeans and very shiny black shoes with thick leather soles. A fag-end smouldered in one fist, and with the other hand he was kneading pensively the bunched muscles of his upper arm. When he saw me he stubbed out the cigarette hastily and scrambled up. He shook my hand with violent energy, rolling his shoulders and frantically smiling. Behind him on the television screen a cartoon bulldog was holding aloft by the neck a cartoon cat and slapping it back and forth rapidly across the snout with grim gusto.
This, I told myself, this is a mistake.
Billy was blushing. He blushes easily. He went on pumping my hand as though afraid that if he let it go he would have to do something even more awkward and embarrassing. His hand was as hard as stone. He has the body of a boxer, short and broad and packed with muscle. He seems made not of flesh but of some more solid stuff, a sort of magma, pliant and weighty and warm; beside him I feel bloated and cheesy, a big, soft, wallowing hulk. He exuded a faint, plumbeous smell, like the smell of machine oil; there used to be talk, I remembered, of an enthusiasm for motorbikes: perhaps this whiff of hot oil was their ghostly after-burn. He must be, my God, he must be nearly thirty by now, though he looks about eighteen. He still had a trace of that washed-out, tombal pallor that I suppose our kind never lose. His eyes, though, brown as sea-snails, were clear and clean as ever. Billy the butcher, we used to call him; very handy with a flensing knife, our Billy, in his younger days.
We sat down at the table and there was an awful silence, like something tightening and tightening in the air between us. I wondered if I still smelled of prison: something musty and mildewed, with a hint of wet wool and old smoke and cold cocoa. Billy kept shooting his white cuffs and plucking at the knees of his jeans. I pictured the nerves fizzing and popping under his skin like bundles of electric wires. He had a bag between his feet. It was a very small bag, black, solid, and peculiarly dangerous-looking; all Billy’s things give off an air of casual menace. When I pointed to it and asked him if he was going somewhere he shook his head. ‘Just gear,’ he said, mysteriously. Billy always seems on the point of departure. Even in our early days inside, when I was still in shock, searching for the first hand-holds on the ziggurat of my sentence, he had the air of an innocent confidently awaiting imminent release. He would sit on his bunk, braced to leap up, his legs folded under him like a complicated pair of springs, or stand at the cell door beating out tense little rhythms with his fingertips on the bars, as if it had not sunk in even yet that this was real, that they were not going to come pounding down the corridor any minute now, redfaced and apologetic, to tell him it was all a preposterous mistake and slap him on the back and let him go. Ah, Billy. His trial was held on the same day as mine (a perfunctory and dispiriting affair, I’m afraid, much as I expected), which made us natural chums; he was by then already an experienced jailbird, having passed his adolescence in a variety of correctional institutions between riotous and increasingly brief bouts of freedom, and he was a great help to me in there in those first months, poor fledgling jailbird that I was.
The shirt-sleeved barman came over, wiping his reddened paws on a filthy rag. I asked for tea and got a sour look.
‘Not drinking?’ Billy said, with a sly, sideways grin. He has an unshakeable notion of me as a terrible fellow.
The barman slouched off. Why do barmen wear such awful trousers, I wonder? I hate to generalise, as I have probably remarked already, but they do, it is a thing I have noticed. On the screen before us the incorrigible cat, having suffered another whacking, sat slumped and skew-eyed under a spinning halo of multi-coloured stars.
‘Well, Billy,’ I said, ‘tell me, how do I look? Honestly, now.’
‘You look great.’
‘No, really.’
He rolled his shoulders again and squinted at me, biting his lip.
‘You look like shit,’ he said, with a crooked little apologetic smile.
‘I took a breath.’
‘Do you know, Billy,’ I said, ‘the last time I was in a pub, a very long time ago, someone said the same thing to me. Exactly the same thing. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?’
All at once I thought I was going to weep; I felt that tickle in my sinuses and the tears squeezing up into my eyes. I stood up hurriedly, fumbling in my pockets for a hankie and muttering under my breath, terrified of making a spectacle of myself. I could not start blubbing now. I had thought I was finished with all that. Prison is supposed to harden but I’m afraid it softened me. I am like one of those afflicted sinners in a medieval altarpiece, skulking under my own little personalised cloud that rains on me a steady drizzle of grief.
There was a telephone at the far end of the bar. I hurried to it. I had difficulty getting it to work; I was out of practice with such things. The drinkers looked up from their pints and watched me with sardonic interest. ‘Them are the wrong coins,’ one of them said, and the barman, waiting for the kettle to boil, snickered. It is by such little signs — outmoded width of the trouser-leg, sideburns cut too long or too short, a constant expression of surprise at the price of things — that the old lag betrays his provenance.
My wife answered. She took her time. I was convinced, mistakenly, I’m sure, that she had known it was me and had deliberately waited to pick up the receiver until I was about to hang up. Why do I think such things of her?
‘You,’ she said.
It was a bad connection, hollow and crackly and overlaid with an oceanic surge and slush, as if great waves were breaking in the distance across the line.
‘Yes, me,’ I said.