Prison. This place. I have described it already.
My first visitor was a surprise. When they told me it was a woman I expected Daphne, straight from the airport, or else my mother, and at first when I came into the visiting-room I did not recognise her. She seemed younger than ever, in her shapeless pullover and plaid skirt and sensible shoes. She had the unformed, palely freckled look of a schoolgirl, the dullard of the class, who cries in the dorm at night and is mad on ponies. Only her marvellous, flame-coloured hair proclaimed her a woman. Jenny! I said, and she blushed. I took her hands in mine. I was absurdly pleased to see her. I did not know then that she would soon prove my usurper. Joanne, actually, she mumbled, and bit her lip. I laughed in embarrassment. Joanne, I said, of course, forgive me, I'm so confused just now. We sat down. I beamed and beamed. I felt light-hearted, almost skittish. I might have been the visitor, an old bachelor friend of the family, come to see the poor duckling on the school open day. She had brought my bag from Coolgrange. It looked strange to me, familiar and yet alien, as if it had been on an immense, transfiguring voyage, to another planet, another galaxy, since I had seen it last. I enquired after my mother. I was tactful enough not to ask why she had not come. Tell her I'm sorry, I said. It sounded ridiculous, as if I were apologising for a broken appointment, and we looked away from each other furtively and were silent for a long, awkward moment. I have a nickname in here already, I said, they call me Monty, of course. She smiled, and I was pleased. When she smiles, biting her lip like that, she is more than ever like a child. I cannot believe she is a schemer. I suspect she was as surprised as I when the will was read. I find it hard to see her as the mistress of Coolgrange. Perhaps that is what my mother intended – after her, the drip. Ah, that is unworthy of me, my new seriousness. I do not hate her for disinheriting me. I think that in her way she was trying to teach me something, to make me look more closely at things, perhaps, to pay more attention to people, such as this poor clumsy girl, with her freckles and her timid smile and her almost invisible eyebrows. I am remembering what Daphne said to me only yesterday, through her tears, it has lodged in my mind like a thorn: You knew nothing about us, nothing! She's right, of course. She was talking about America, about her and Anna Behrens and all that, but it's true in general – I know nothing. Yet I am trying. I watch, and listen, and brood. Now and then I am afforded a glimpse into what seems a new world, but which I realise has been there all along, without my noticing. In these explorations my friend Billy is a valuable guide. I have not mentioned Billy before, have I? He attached himself to me early on, I think he is a little in love with me. He's nineteen – muscles, oiled black hair, a killer's shapely hands, like mine. Our trials are due to open on the same day, he takes this as a lucky omen. He is charged with murder and multiple rape. He insists on his innocence, but cannot suppress a guilty little smile. I believe he is secretly proud of his crimes. Yet a kind of innocence shines out of him, as if there is something inside, some tiny, precious part, that nothing can besmirch. When I consider Billy I can almost believe in the existence of the soul. He has been in and out of custody since he was a child, and is a repository of prison lore. He tells me of the various ingenious methods of smuggling in dope. For instance, before the glass screens were put up, wives and girlfriends used to hide in their mouths little plastic bags of heroin, which were passed across during lingering kisses, swallowed, and sicked-up later, in the latrines. I was greatly taken with the idea, it affected me deeply. Such need, such passion, such charity and daring – when have I ever known the like?
What was I saying. I am becoming so vague. It happens to all of us in here. It is a kind of defence, this creeping absent-mindedness, this torpor, which allows us to drop off instantly, anywhere, at any time, into brief, numb stretches of sleep.
Joanne. She came to see me, brought me my bag. I was glad to have it. They had confiscated most of what was in it, the prison authorities, but there were some shirts, a bar of soap – the scented smell of it struck me like a blow – a pair of shoes, my books. I clutched these things, these icons, to my heart, and grieved for the dead past.
But grief, that kind of grief is the great danger, in here. It saps the will. Those who give way to it grow helpless, a wasting lethargy comes over them. They are like mourners for whom the period of mourning will not end. I saw this danger, and determined to avoid it. I would work, I would study. The theme was there, ready-made. I had Daphne bring me big thick books on Dutch painting, not only the history but the techniques, the secrets of the masters. I studied accounts of the methods of grinding colours, of the trade in oils and dyes, of the flax industry in Flanders. I read the lives of the painters and their patrons. I became a minor expert on the Dutch republic in the seventeenth century. But in the end it was no good: all this learning, this information, merely built up and petrified, like coral encrusting a sunken wreck. How could mere facts compare with the amazing knowledge that had flared out at me as I stood and stared at the painting lying on its edge in the ditch where I dropped it that last time? That knowledge, that knowingness, I could not have lived with. I look at the reproduction, pinned to the wall above me here, but something is dead in it. Something is dead.
It was in the same spirit of busy exploration that I pored for long hours over the newspaper files in the prison library. I read every word devoted to my case, read and reread them, chewed them over until they turned to flavourless mush in my mind. I learned of Josie Bell's childhood, of her schooldays – pitifully brief – of her family and friends. Neighbours spoke well of her. She was a quiet girl. She had almost married once, but something had gone wrong, her fiancé went to England and did not return. First she worked in her own village, as a shopgirl. Then, before going to Whitewater, she was in Dublin for a while, where she was a chambermaid in the Southern Star Hotel. The Southern Star! – my God, I could have gone there when I was at Charlie's, could have taken a room, could have slept in a bed that she had once made! I laughed at myself. What would I have learned? There would have been no more of her there, for me, than there was in the newspaper stories, than there had been that day when I turned and saw her for the first time, standing in the open french window with the blue and gold of summer at her back, than there was when she crouched in the car and I hit her again and again and her blood spattered the window. This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told that policeman is true – I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what that means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative. How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy? I am puzzled, and not a little fearful, and yet there is something stirring in me, and I am strangely excited. I seem to have taken on a new weight and density. I feel gay and at the same time wonderfully serious. I am big with possibilities. I am living for two.