She was silent for so long I thought we had been cut off. I leaned my back against the wall, hearing myself breathe into the clammy hollow of the mouthpiece, and watched Billy where he sat with his legs crossed, lighting another cigarette, self-conscious and ill at ease, glancing about him with studied casualness as if he thought there might be someone watching, waiting to laugh at him. He caught my eye and smiled uneasily and then let his gaze drift, dismantling his smile awkwardly in a series of small, covert readjustments of his facial muscles. He had seemed so natural when we were inside, so sure of himself, in his affably menacing way, padding along the catwalks with feline grace. I am convinced there are people who are born to go to jail. It is not a fashionable notion, I know, but I believe it. And I, am I one of those fated malefactors, I wonder? Was it all determined from the start? How eagerly, quaking like a rickety hound, my poor old conscience leaps for the well-gnawed bone of mitigation.
‘You could have told me it was today,’ my wife said.
‘I would have,’ I said, ‘but …’
‘But?’
‘But.’ Amazing how we had fallen straight away into the old routine, the deadpan patter that used to seem so sophisticated, so worldly, in the days when we had a world in which to perform it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
I pictured her standing in the hall, a big, dark, serious woman waylaid for a moment in the midst of her day, a day in which until now there had been nothing of me. My wife. What shall I call her this time — Judy? Perhaps she will not need to have a name. I have dragged her deep enough into the mire; let her be decently anonymous.
‘I’d like to see you,’ I said.
Again she was silent. I listened to the harsh susurrus on the line and thought myself sunk in the deeps of the sea.
‘I don’t think,’ she said slowly then, in a toneless voice, ‘I don’t think I want you to come here. I don’t think I want that.’ This time I said nothing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You don’t sound sorry.’ In fact, she did. ‘I need my things,’ I said. ‘My clothes. My books. I have nothing.’ I was feeling aggrieved by now, in a happily sorrowful, self-pitying sort of way.
‘I’ll send them to you,’ she said. ‘It’s all packed up. I’ll post it.’
‘You’ll post it.’
Silence.
One of the drinkers at the bar tranquilly raised his backside off the stool and farted.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay away.’ I waited. ‘How are you —?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, too quickly, and then paused; I could almost hear her biting her lip. ‘I’m all right.’
‘What do you mean, all right?’
‘I mean I’m all right. How do you think I am?’
Was that a hint of tears in her voice? She does not weep easily, but when she does it is a terrible thing to see. I put a hand over my eyes. I felt weary all of a sudden. Come, I told myself, make an effort, this may be your last shot at what will be the nearest you will ever get to normal life. I still had hopes, you see, that the human world would take me back into its simple and forgiving embrace.
‘Can’t I see you?’ I said plaintively.
She sighed; I imagined her tapping her foot impatiently. She is not unfeeling — far from it — but the spectacle of other people’s sufferings always irritates her, she cannot help it.
‘Someone was looking for you,’ she said.
‘What? Who?’
‘On the phone. Foreign, by the sound of him. Or pretending to be. He seemed to think something was very funny —’
An angry bleating started up: my money was running out. I gave her the number and hung up and waited. She did not call back. The absence of that ringing still tolls faintly in my memory like a distant mourning bell.
My cup of tea was on the table, with one of those swollen brown bags submerged in it, its horribly limp string dangling suggestively over the rim. The tea was tepid by now. I put in four lumps of sugar and watched them slowly crumble. My sweet tooth: another vice I picked up in the clink.
‘Everything all right?’ Billy said.
‘Oh, tip-top,’ I said. ‘Tip-top.’
He nodded seriously and took a sip of beer. How calm he is, how incurious! They expect so little from the world, these people. They just stand there quietly, looking at nothing and chewing the cud, until the bone-cart comes for them. Sometimes I think I must belong to a different species. Suddenly he brightened and reached down and unzipped his bag and brought out a bottle of gin and thrust it at me with another awkward dip of his shoulders and another embarrassed smile. A present! He had bought me a present! For a moment I could not speak, and sat, dumb with emotion, clutching the bottle in helpless hands and nodding gravely. I could feel him watching me.
‘Is that kind all right?’ he said anxiously. Billy does not touch spirits; he is quite the puritan, in his way. ‘I got it from my brother-in-law.’
‘It’s splendid, Billy,’ I said thickly. ‘Really, splendid.’ I was on the verge of tears again. Honestly, what a cry-baby I am.
Things improved after that. Billy became talkative and kept on laughing breathily in the enthusiasm of relief. He told me about his job. It seemed he delivered things, I cannot remember what they were supposed to be, for that brother-in-law, the gin merchant. It was all very vague. He had his own van. What he really wanted to do, though, was get into the army. He did not know if they would take him. He hesitated, sitting on his hands and gnawing the corner of his mouth, and then blurted it out: would I write a reference for him?
‘You know,’ he said excitedly, ‘sort of a character reference.’
I laughed. That was a mistake. He looked away from me and brooded darkly, staring before him with narrowed eyes. There are moments, I confess, when I am a little afraid of him. Not that I think he might injure me — he would not dream of it, I know. I am just aware of a general uneasiness, a creeping sensation along the spine, the kind of thing I would feel walking past the cage of some crouched and simmering, green-eyed, big-shouldered animal. I wonder if others find me frightening in the same way? I can hardly credit it, yet it must be so, I suppose. Do they realise, I wonder, how afraid of them we are, on our side, for all our bruited ferocity, as we watch them sauntering abroad out there in the world, masters of the whip and chair?
A rain-shower clattered briefly against the window. Idly I watched the drinkers at the bar.
‘Can they spot us, Billy, would you say?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Oh, they can. They’d spot us, anyway.’ He grinned and made a clockwork motion with his arm, wielding an invisible club. ‘Two of a kind, you and me. Sort of a brotherhood, eh?’
A man with an orange face and desperate eyes and a mouth like a trap came on the television and began to tell jokes at breakneck speed, mugging and leering, mad as Mister Punch.
‘Yes, Billy,’ I said, ‘that’s right: sort of a brotherhood.’
WIND AND SMOKE and scudding clouds and wan sunlight flickering on the rain-splashed pavements. The river surged, steely and aswarm. Billy strode forward muscularly with his hands stuck in the pockets of his jeans and his bag under his arm, fairly springing along on his stout leather soles, careless of the cold wind. I remembered the two tramps at their colloquy; we must look an odd pair too, Billy all brawn and youthful tension and I scurrying at his heels huddled around myself as if I were running in a sack-race. We passed by junk shops and bargain stores and flyblown windows with the names of solicitors painted on them in tarnished gold lettering. A plastic bag flew high up into the sky, slewing and snapping. These are the things we remember.
Billy’s van was a ramshackle contraption with fringes of rust around the mudguards and a deep dent in one wing. In the back seat a spring stuck up at a comical angle through a hole in the upholstery. I could see he was anxious to get away from me, making a great show of looking for his keys and frowning like a man awaited importantly elsewhere. I did not blame him: I find myself creepy company, sometimes. When he bent forward to open the door I looked down at the crown of his head and the little white twirled patch there and without thinking I said: