Brian moved out. Mum went back to the hospital, after she had scratched a lot of skin off her arms. While she was away, I moved around the house in a strange cramped dance with Dad, trying never to be in the same room. I could feel he wanted to talk to me, which made me all the more intent on avoiding him. Above all, I didn’t want him to try to make friends, not now that I was finally about to get away.
When my exam results came out, the first people I went to tell were Maggie and Colin. I wanted Maggie to share my happiness: I had my place at the LSE, my ticket out.
When Colin opened the door I waved my results paper at him. “Hi, Colin. Guess where I’m going.”
He just stood there on the doorstep, staring blankly at me. “What do you want?” he asked curtly. He didn’t invite me in.
“I just came over to tell you I got in.” I was hurt by his abruptness. He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t reacted at all to my wonderful news. “And,” I added, trying to be polite, “to — to see how you are.”
“Well, I’m bloody awful, if you’re interested.”
“Where’s Maggie?”
“Where’s Maggie? How the hell should I know?”
I was floored by this response. He had a strange, twisted expression on his face. I couldn’t think of anything to say and it must have shown.
He snorted and let out a humorless staccato laugh. “Sorry to disappoint you, Christopher, but she’s not here. She’s gone and she’s not bloody coming back, or at least that’s what she said in her letter. So now you can turn round and piss off home. I never liked you sniffing round her anyway. All that wide-eyed admiration rubbish.”
“But — I never—”
“Oh, you never, all right. Not for want of trying, you dirty little sod.”
“I didn’t, I swear. . What happened, Colin? Where did she go?”
He mimicked my voice. “Where did she go? She left me, you ass. She buggered off to Ghana or Bongo-Bongo Land or somewhere to go and save the little black babies. So no more CND, no more free food, no more singalongs, no nothing, comprende? It’s over. Now fuck off and leave me alone.”
And he slammed the door in my face.
I’ve often wondered what happened to Maggie. I can never
picture her. Perhaps she’s still in a classroom in Africa, the headmistress, the director of the orphanage. Perhaps she’s dead. And then there’s Freja and Sofie and all the others my daughter can’t imagine, all the threats to the charmed circle of her-and-Mummyand-me. Which of them am I driving toward now? Is it really just Anna?
* * *
By the time I reach the Paris périphérique I’ve fallen into a trance of headlights and signage. Round I drive. Porte d’Orléans, Port d’Ivry. Blossoming red lights, brake sharply, traffic suddenly filtering in from a hidden slip-road, brake again. The road’s like a go-cart track, one damn thing after another, running in and out of orange-lit tunnels, through billboard-lined trenches and elevations. Was that my exit? My eyes are tired of squinting into the darkness for — what am I looking for? Porte d’Orléans. Didn’t I pass that already? I have no idea of the time: Miranda never set the dashboard clock. Thirty thousand pounds’ worth of high-status German engineering, but she doesn’t set the clock. Round and round. Though I’m dog-tired, I can’t face the complexity involved in turning off and looking for somewhere to sleep. So I carry on, round and round, Porte des Lilas, Porte de Montreuil, right shoulder inward, circumambulating the large stupa at Wat Tham Nok, following the line of chanting monks, the tea light in its little clay bowl warming my hands. Circling in the Aegean, the taste of salt on my lips, blank and free. Round and round. Porte de Charenton. Trudging round the yard at morning exercise. My revolutions: a hundred of us walking, two abreast, inner ring clockwise, outer ring counter-clockwise. Back in the days when Pentonville was the gateway to transportation, the builders constructed an endless double path of flagstones, two snakes eating their own tails, set into the black tar. The regime was designed to isolate prisoners from all human contact. Face masks, enforced silence. Round and round, a folk dance or a fairground ride. Very important, they thought, never to give the scum a sense of achievement.
I never found out why I came to be sent to HMP Pentonville. It was the recidivists’ prison. Remand prisoners went to Brixton,
first-timers like me to the Scrubs. It had a bad reputation, which a police constable gleefully told me all about as he led me out to the “meat wagon,” a Black Maria with metal-grilled windows. “The lags’ll have you for breakfast, you hippie cunt,” he told me cheerfully, as he locked me in.
As we got down from the van a gang of prison officers descended on us, screaming like squaddies performing a bayonet charge. We were doubled into a low hall, searched, and assembled into a ragged line. The screws marched up and down, shouting at us to stand up straight, poking us in the ribs and asking rhetorically if we knew where we were. They locked us into small wooden cubicles, where we stood in semidarkness while one of them read out the rules. The purpose of prison was to encourage and assist us to lead a good and useful life. We were to address all prison officers as “sir.” We would be required to perform useful work for not more than ten hours a day. Failure to obey an officer would be punished with removal of privileges. The list went on. When we could receive visits. When we could receive letters. More rules were written on a card pasted to the wall in front of me in the coffinlike cubicle. I peered at them as I waited. I was not to fight or set fires. I was not to possess a greater quantity of any article than I was authorized to possess.
I was pulled out of the cubicle by a pair of POs, and taken to the desks at the end of the room. Behind each desk sat a trusty with a red armband, writing in a ledger. I was ordered to stand on a scale and my weight was written down, along with my age and occupation. “Religion?”
“None,” I answered.
“C of E, then,” said the prisoner-clerk.
“No, none,” I insisted. “I don’t believe in God.”
“That comes under C of E.”
I was frogmarched into a second room to stand before a PO who occupied a stool behind a high desk, like a Dickensian clerk. He ordered me to undress and as I took off my clothes, they were itemized and dropped into a cardboard box. I had to bend over and
spread my buttocks, then show the soles of my feet. Afterward I was given a dressing gown and taken to the showers, where the two POs escorting me shoved me into a stall and gave me an unhurried beating. Thought I was Fidel Castro? Long-haired wanker, I looked like a girl. They bet I took it like a girl. After a while it didn’t hurt so much. Water spattered over me as I pressed my cheek against the cold white tiles of the wall.
Round and round. Porte d’Orléans. Porte d’Orléans? Turning circles in the sea. Walking round the stupa, mindfully placing one foot in front of the other, counting my breaths. Round and round, circling the Old Building steps, under a banner that read, archly, BEWARE THE PEDAGOGIC GERONTOCRACY. Exactly the kind of thing nonstudents sneered at as studenty. It had taken only a few weeks at the LSE for that clever-clever tone to wear thin. Still, I knelt under that same banner to have my picture taken for the newspaper, along with all the other sitters-in, clever young people trying to look serious and committed and political, which would have been easier if they’d stopped grinning like chimps.
We were in occupation. Smile! Speak into the mike. “It’s not even about Adams per se, it’s what he represents. In Rhodesia he did nothing. He didn’t oppose the UDI, didn’t speak out when they started to arrest his students. The administration paints a picture of him as oh-so-brave, keeping his mixed college open while the Fascist, racist regime was consolidating power. But what’s that? Just collusion, as far as we’re concerned. Now he’s foisted on us as LSE director and we’re supposed to accept it without question.” It was freezing at night. None of us was prepared for a sit-in. No sleeping bags, no food. They locked the doors open, hoping that would be enough to get rid of us. A lot of people did slope off home.