‘I wonder if it will always be so.’
‘Who knows.’
THE RUNNERS OF AFTON JAIL
They sometimes ask – the thick black line of death having been crossed – why I would wish to revisit people and places so integral to my demise. Did expiation work? Or, in the great scheme of things, does it matter at all? I leave that to others of us to judge. Perhaps it is that we just need to carry over with us a compelling story.
It was not difficult to spot him, in Fenner’s Café, staring ahead at nothing in particular, moodily stirring his tea. It was the same image I’d had of him in Afton Jail, sitting at a long table amongst other mobsters and the like, before the parole board had been persuaded, somehow, that he’d shown remorse. What he’d done didn’t interest me; what linked us was his friendship – if that’s the right word for cell-mates thrust upon one another – with my brother. He was the only one Harry ever mentioned during my visits – those fraught, infrequent visits when we were allowed just twenty minutes to chew over past demeanours with – thankfully then but regretfully now – no time left to consider… well… deeper issues.
Without looking up or apparently seeing me, Grimston – I never knew his given name – stopped stirring. Perhaps in prison one becomes sensitive to approaching footsteps, as like as not spelling danger. Then he showed me a face bearing the mental scars of a potential lifer, unexpectedly cast adrift in an unwelcoming world. And I saw there the dregs of the same hopelessness that I’d begun to see in Harry.
‘I got your message,’ I said, taking the seat opposite.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said. His tone implied reluctant compliance with an instruction, as if he’d been thrust into an action that didn’t come easily. ‘You want a drink?’
‘You said you had something of my brother’s.’
He picked up a brown paper package from the seat beside him. I expected him to push it across the table but he just fidgeted with it. I judged his reluctance to part with it as having significance: a sole momento of someone who had meant something . And I couldn’t imagine there had been many of those in his bleak life.
‘He’d worked on it, y’see. Days at it he was, before his… before he came to grief. Never told me why. Made no sense.’
‘May I see it,’ I said.
He kept his hand on the parcel.
‘Look when I’ve gone. It’s nothing I can help you with. Give it to my brother,’ he said. ‘Make sure you give it to Michael. He’ll understand.’
It didn’t quite make sense. ‘That suggests he knew something was going to happen to him.’
‘Don’t know how he could. Always kept his head down. I couldn’t see anything coming.’
‘And you don’t know who did it?’
‘Probably wouldn’t tell you if I did. But nah, no idea.’
‘And he had no enemies, that you know of?’
‘Beaten up, a couple of times, long time ago. Respect thing. Meant nothing. It happens.’
‘When they found him, were you there?’
‘Soon after. On my knees, bloody crying.’
And indeed that was not difficult to imagine, for I could see his eyes were glistening. Suddenly he got up and made for the door. I called after him, ‘If there’s anything I can do for you…’
He stopped in the doorway and turned.
‘Like you did for Harry? No thanks.’
Seeing me alone at the table the waitress – who had perhaps wisely kept her distance – came up to me. ‘You want something?’
I felt like saying, my brother back, but that would have needed an explanation and she didn’t look the type. ‘A coffee,’ I said. ‘No milk.’
I fingered the brown package, then tore it open. I withdrew a notebook – of poor quality, with the Afton Jail stamp – that I imaging was issued to prisoners to fend off boredom. I felt the pulse at my temple quicken. A diary, I thought at first. But on turning the cover it was nothing of the kind. The few used pages were covered in what appeared to be calculations, and geometric shapes based upon the circle. Before his arrest he’d worked in a surveyor’s office and my first thought was that they related to a building, for here surely was a dome. And yet… It made no sense and I replaced the notebook in the bag.
As the waitress bent over my shoulder I caught the drift of a perfume more subtle than her status suggested. ‘Your coffee. You look as if you need it.’
‘I do. Just lost my brother. He died in prison.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Topped himself, did he?’
‘No. Got attacked.’
‘Know how you must feel. Mine was a suicide.’
‘At Afton?’
‘Yeah. Years ago though.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Me partner. Left me with two kids.’
I suddenly felt a desperate need to talk. ‘Can you sit for a minute?’
‘No, but we close in five minutes. When I shut the door you can finish your coffee and I’ll join you.’
But under her searching eyes I still couldn’t tell her my great secret, which from the moment I entered the café and saw Grimston had expanded within me like a flesh-consuming infection. Yet wasn’t this girl a lifeline too valuable to throw away? ‘Can I ring you sometime,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah, okay.’
Without invitation she wrote her number on the paper that had enclosed Harry’s book. As she held the door for me our eyes engaged and I felt an unexpected warmth flow between us.
On the way to my mother’s – our mother’s – I passed St Peter’s Church, where the funeral was to be. I saw myself in the pulpit spouting about loyalty and respect and family values. But how do you speak about someone with love and affection – even if that was the case – when you’ve sinned so much against them? I felt already the lump that would creep into my throat and the tremor in my speech, and imagined the accusations in the eyes of the congregation, even though no such thoughts yet troubled their minds. I had volunteered a reading, which I thought I could manage, but Mum had said, no, you owe it to Harry. And so I had agreed, knowing that embarrassment – and pain – would surely be my lot.
I was still grasping Harry’s notebook and felt a compelling urge to study it, to get inside his mind during those last bleak days. Did I not owe him that – to understand? I retraced my steps to the church and went in. The sepulchral gloom seemed appropriate to the task and I sat at the foot of the pulpit, to contemplate my Armageddon.
The light was dim but I could see enough of the numbers and drawings to make more sense of them. Here was a circle, with arrows against it, as might represent the dome of a building subjected to the stresses of overlying concrete. And in the equations supporting this were surely coefficients relating to stress. A link with his former life, perhaps? A mental exercise to stimulate a soul reduced to immeasurable boredom tipping over into the intolerable?
I recalled my last meeting with him three months before, after the regularity of my weekly visits had tailed off – the effect of a trade-off between brotherly duty and hypocrisy. Yet the regret was on all my side. Nowhere did I see the resentment that was my due. He’d looked at me with those soft child-like eyes. Don’t worry about it, Michael, it’s okay, it’s in the past. What’s done is done and can’t be undone. Now I just want you to live your life and be successful.
And successful I had been, if a big house, a wife and kids, and a Range Rover in the drive were benchmarks. And a business – if that’s what you call a… well, let’s say an activity in the pharmaceutical supply industry – as yet unlikely to be rumbled.
A faint cough from behind made me turn. The girl from the café was sitting two pews behind.‘I happened to be going the same way and saw you come in here. I’m a good listener, if that’s what you want.’ But it was still too early to tell. As she walked away I doubted if I would see her again.