The Star Witness

by Andy Hamilton

  “Please, take some, or I’ll end up eating them all. And they’re full of butter, so, please, for the sake of my arteries…”

  So I take one. He leans back and plonks his stockinged feet on the desk, as the squall chucks volleys of rain at the window.

  “We’ve got a hosepipe ban where I am…my wife sneaks out in the middle of the night to water the garden.”

  He seagoons to himself for a few moments. Why am I still here?

  “How’s the drama workshop coming along?” he asks, breezily.

  “Um…yeh, not bad, thanks.”

  “Any Laurence Oliviers?”

  “Well, actually, Gerald is a surprisingly good actor.”

  “Not that surprising, he’s a con-man. Takes considerable acting skill to convince three banks that you’ve got the ear of the Sultan of Brunei.”

  “Is that what he—?”

  “On one occasion, yes.”

  “Right.”

  “I didn’t tell you that, of course…I’m not supposed to discuss prisoners’ criminal records with other prisoners.”

  “No, ’course not.”

  “What about the others?” he asks, brushing crumbs off his shirt, “Are they OK?”

  “Well, I’ve got two who are a bit of a problem. There’s Simo…”

  “The lad who never finishes what he’s saying?”

  “Yes, he’s challenging…”

  Malcolm nods and smiles at the euphemism.

  “…and then of course there’s Albie…Paul.”

  “Oh yeh, how’s he getting on?”

  “Well, to be honest, he’s just a presence, really. He makes no contribution.”

  Malcolm stares pensively at the desk. I sense an opportunity.

  “Look, what exactly is the deal with Albie?”

  He looks up, he’s miles away. “Sorry?”

  “Well, Albie said, at an early session, that he was participating in the workshop because you told him he had to, to boost his confidence prior to his release.”

  “That’s right, yes. I’m not forcing him to attend though. You must be doing something right.”

  “I…I think he just likes the company.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nods, his thoughts still elsewhere, somewhere full of shadows.

  “So what’s Albie’s story? What’s he in for? I know you’re not supposed to discuss it but—”

  “Housebreaking. He, er…he broke into a house, um, set off the burglar alarm and was still inside the house when the police arrived.”

  “Right…so, he’s an incompetent burglar.”

  “Oh he knew what he was doing.”

  “I’m sorry, how do you mean, he knew what he—”

  “He wanted to get caught. Just like the dozen or so previous releases where he got done for housebreaking.”

  “But why?”

  “Albie prefers prison. Life outside scares him too much. Not uncommon. He’s just a particularly chronic example. He’s been re-incarcerating himself for the last seventeen years.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Bloody hell indeed. It would be brilliant if he could set himself free somehow, wouldn’t it.”

  This conversation is beginning to worry me. Am I being co-opted on to some kind of Escape Committee? Malcolm sits forward, with that zealot’s gleam in his eye.

  “He just needs some help. To conquer his fears.”

  “Oh, I dunno.” I shrug. “If that’s the choice he’s made then—”

  “But he’s never had a choice, Kevin. Not a real choice. Not since he was a boy – And, in many ways, that’s what he still is.”

  He sits back in his chair in exasperation. “I mean if he ends up spending his whole life in prison, that’s…well that’s just a total waste…waste of his life…taxpayer’s money…and I don’t like waste, Kevin, I really don’t.”

  I find myself wondering if it is a waste for someone with Malcolm’s energy to be managing some shabby two-bit jailhouse. Oh no, here he comes again with the biscuits.

  “Come on, Kevin, they need finishing.”

  He is a hard man to say no to. “All that we need is to give Albie…Alb— Paul…Paul…the confidence to face the outside.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “It’s worth a go, surely.”

  “Why’s he so terrified?”

  His expression darkens, and he starts to pick his way through an answer.

  “Well, he was extremely unlucky. Fate ganged up on him…in a big way.”

  “Go on.”

  “See, Albie…Paul…is what used to be called ESN.”

  “Educationally sub-normal?”

  “Yuh, and so life was always going to be a bit of an obstacle course for him but…well, his first crime…the one he got sent down for…”

  “What did he do?”

  Malcolm looks at me intensely for a few moments and I start to experience a tremor of foreboding.

  “I…I really can’t tell you, Kevin…that would be…I can’t take the risk…for his sake and…well, for everyone’s sake…”

  My God, this is starting to sound grim.

  “…all I’ll say is that…he was only sixteen and there were millions of mitigating factors that the judge took into account, which is why he gave a comparatively light sentence for an offence…of that seriousness.”

  My imagination starts to run away with me.

  “You might as well tell me. I can always ask one of the prisoners, they’re bound to know.”

  “No, no, I’m pretty sure they don’t…not yet at least. The original case was dealt with using great discretion; Paul pleaded guilty, and it was done and dusted before the media could go to town so…and it was seventeen years ago.”

  “Well what if they find out?”

  “…Then he’d have to move prisons. He’s seen lots of prisons already.”

  In the silence that follows, sunlight starts to illuminate the rain-streaked windows.

  “And this…crime,” I begin, “is the reason he’s so terrified of everything?”

  Malcolm thrusts the plate forward one more time. “Last biccy. Take it, go on.”

  “You’d make a great Jewish mother.”

  His shoulders heave as he giggles.

  “Yes, I would…Do you remember the Furies?”

  “Rock band?”

  “No, Greek mythology. They harried their victims every day, as a punishment, for transgressing against divine law, driving them mad in the process. That’s what Paul’s up against – he’s trying to hide from the Furies. I think he needs help to turn and face them.”

  For the first time I realise how dangerous a man Malcolm might be. He’s a romantic, and they can wreak more havoc than hurricanes.

  “I’m not a social worker,” I tell him, as I polish off one last biscuit.

  14

  The Scottish Play

  One of my trips to the library triggered a brainwave. I found a DVD of Polanski’s film of Macbeth, so I checked it out and showed it to the group. It’s far from being a masterpiece and, at first, it prompted quite a lot of lewd heckling. But, gradually, the story took hold and they fell quiet.

  As the final credits spool past, I ask them for any first impressions.

  Pulse laughs and shakes his head. “Man, those old bitches saw him coming. They burnt his arse good.”

  Simo wades in, agreeing with Pulse. It’s a bit hard to follow his argument as it’s expressed in a machine-gun fire of fractured obscenities, but his gist seems to be that the whole tragedy was the fault of the old hags and that Macbeth had a knife so he should have just shanked them.

  “But what about Macbeth?” I ask. “The blame lies with him, doesn’t it? He’s the master of his own destiny, surely?”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely” nods Dougie. “It annoyed me when he started whingeing about all the blood and the ghost coming to dinner and everything. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

  I try to prise an observation out of Albie, but the o
nly critique he offers is that the wife isn’t a very nice person.

  “Tasty, though,” adds Pulse. “Ve-ry tasty.”

  I start to explain the various theories about tragedy, probing them for what they think is Macbeth’s fatal flaw. Mohammad says Macbeth’s weakness is that he turns away from God, so God destroys him, just as he will destroy the Americans.

  “Is it ambition?” I ask. “Is that the aspect of his character that destroys him?”

  “Yup, definitely,” says Dougie. “I mean we’ve all been there, haven’t we? We all want to be top dog. That’s just human nature. But there’s a line, isn’t there. A line you don’t cross. Y’know, I mean, you don’t go around stabbing kings while they’re asleep, that’s just mental.”

  Pulse argues that it’s sex that powers Macbeth. Clearly, him and Lady Macbeth have got some heavy sex-vibe going and she uses it to manipulate him. Simo starts shouting about evil, e-vil, the old bitches are e-vil and Macbeth should def-initely have shanked them.

  “End of story. End of— no old bitches— no story.”

  Pulse weighs back in and soon the three of them, Pulse, Simo and Dougie are talking animatedly over each other, until I have to step in and ask them to keep the volume down. Then I find myself waxing lyrical about Shakespeare.

  “What is so fantastic is that you have all watched this story and you’ve all taken something different from it. It’s touched you in different ways. Even though it’s written in verse, in an old kind of English, it still reaches us. And it’s exciting, and dynamic and gripping, but it’s also ambiguous and complex…and dense…”

  I continue to talk in this vein and, as I talk, a different part of my brain starts to monitor what I’m saying. After a few moments, I realise I’m experiencing a feeling that I had assumed was long dead. This is enthusiasm. I am being enthusiastic. How long since that happened? There’s no trace of irony, there’s energy in my voice as I try to convey the wonders and the plasticity of language that make Shakespeare a genius. It feels invigorating. And I seem to be cutting through – they all look interested and engaged, apart from Gerald, who is peeling flaky paint off a windowsill.

  “Gerald, what’s your take on Macbeth?”

  He gazes at the ceiling for a few moments. “My take is the only take.”

  “Well I think we’ve already seen that Shakespeare’s tragedy is subtle enough to support lots of interpretations.”

  Gerald sighs. “There is no tragedy. It’s all pre-ordained.”

  “Yeh, by Allah” adds Mohammad.

  Gerald gives him a pained smile. “Duncan is doomed from the start.”

  “Once the witches trick Macbeth.” Now Pulse receives the same smile as Mohammad.

  “Duncan’s doomed from before that. From before page one,” says Gerald, very matter-of-fact.

  “How come?” asks Simo.

  “Because Macbeth’s a killer,” Gerald replies. “Pure and simple. He’s a killer. He’s decided to kill Duncan from before the play even begins.”

  Dougie takes issue with this. “Nah, nah, look at how he reacts, he’s got a conscience, there’s tons of guilt.”

  “There’s tons of self-dramatisation and sentimentality,” counters Gerald, flicking some flakes of paint to the floor. “No, the witches are an irrelevance. So is the wife.”

  I point out how, in Shakespeare’s time, there was a genuine belief in witches being sent from Hell to entrap and destroy people.

  “Then why doesn’t he ‘shank’ them, as Simo so eloquently suggested? If they’re such a danger. No, he listens because they tell him what deep down he’s already decided. Duncan is kaput. Macbeth is a killer. Shakespeare understands that. It’s just that most of his audience are too stupid to.” He gives us all a little smile. “There is no tragedy. Just banal inevitability. Sorry, folks.”

  “So, let me just check I’ve got this right, Gerald.” I pause to see if he’ll stop picking at the paint. He doesn’t. “You’re saying that we are all pre-programmed. That nobody is capable of change”

  “I think this place proves that.”

  “…and that Shakespeare knew that, and you know it, but the rest of us are too mired in stupidity to understand it.”

  Gerald gives a chuckle and flares his eyes. “Give that man a coconut,” he sniggers.

  I think Gerald may be a psychopath.

  “Lady Macbeth changes,” Dougie points out, “she’s a bitch without a conscience, then, hey presto, she’s a bitch who can’t sleep ’cos her conscience is sending her doollally.”

  “That’s a very good point.” Dougie looks pleased with my compliment. “Lady Macbeth demonstrates that people can surprise you.”

  Gerald stares at the ceiling for a few moments as he weighs up this counter-argument.

  “Shakespeare probably wrote that bit just so that she got punished. Bad women always have to be punished, don’t they? First rule of our culture.”

  “You’re saying Shakespeare wrote something he didn’t believe?” I ask.

  “He was just delivering what society expected of him. Most people do that.”

  A thin smile twitches across Gerald’s lips. Pulse starts another branch of discussion about the link between tragedy and hot women, but time is up, so I end the session and we fold the chairs away as Pulse reminisces about a stripper who led to his downfall in Montego Bay.

  One morning – it might have been a week later, maybe more – I received a letter from a TV company that called itself Going Forward Productions. I know, my reaction as well. I nearly didn’t bother reading any further. They said they had heard about my drama group (how?) and that they felt it would make a fascinating documentary. They stressed that the documentary would be a serious study of how people in the darkest circumstances can still embody the human spirit. They used the word “narrative” several times. And “uplifting”. And “synergy”. I scanned the letter once more to check I had understood it and then I threw it in the bin.

  Then I picked it out of the bin, tore it into tiny pieces and threw them back in the bin. I didn’t want Dougie to read that.

  I showed the group a succession of DVDs of Shakespeare plays. They were riveted by Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Hamlet, but they struggled with King Lear, who they felt was irritating and deserved everything he got.

  One morning, with the stink of stewing cabbage filling the room, we are halfway through watching Othello – which Gerald claims should be called Iago – when the very skinny warden, Stewart (strange, how much better I’ve become at remembering names) slides into the room and raises his arm to get my attention.

  “Yes, Stewart, can we help you?”

  “The governor wants to see you.”

  “OK, we’re nearly finished.”

  “No, I think he wants to see you now.”

  When I step into Malcolm’s office he is on the phone, sounding stressed. I sit quietly and wait for a few minutes while he argues with someone about the difference between investment and overspend. Eventually, he hangs up and gives me a tense smile.

  “Welcome to my world,” he says. “I’m all out of biscuits I’m afraid.”

  He stretches his arms and folds them behind his head.

  “I got a phone call from Going Forward Productions. You didn’t respond to their letter.”

  “Well I did respond to it, actually. I chucked it in the bin. It was bullshit.”

  “Yes I know.” He sees that I’m puzzled. “I got virtually the same letter. Lots of ‘synergy’.” He flourishes the letter for a moment, with a weary sigh.

  “Like I said, it’s bullshit,” I say, falling on the word “bullshit”.

  “Yes it is bullshit, but it could be helpful bullshit.”

  “What?”

  “A programme like this could show the prison in a positive light. Good PR could help us. If we become a showcase prison, then it’s easier to ask for a showcase budget. A bigger budget means everyone’s lives – prisoners’, staff’s, everyone’s lives get a little easier
.”

  “Oh come on, you know why they’re interested. They’re not interested in my drama group they just want to gawp at me.”

  “Oh, so it’s your drama group, is it?”

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  “It’s all about you.”

  “I didn’t say that I—”

  “Don’t you feel that maybe you should put the offer to the group, see what they think?” I get a strong impression that Malcolm is playing me, although he is very hard to read.

  “I don’t want to be…gazed at by the public any more, they’ve had enough pieces of me. I’m done with that circus. I just want to be left in peace.”

  “Are you sure? I think you could come out of it very well. It could show the real you.”

  “Isn’t the ‘real’ me a woman-hitter and a perjurer?”

  He tosses his arms up in exasperation. “Well, what about the others? They might get something out of the experience.”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “Well, I think it’s sad you’re not even giving it any considered thought, it’s— you’re starting to achieve something – a small something, possibly – but…well, you can’t just go on assuming that the whole world is trying to stitch you up.”

  He is rubbing his forehead now, as if he’s trying to stir his brain into finding some magic compromise. I decide to put him out of his misery.

  “Can I go now?”

  It took a few weeks for me to pluck up the courage; but in the end, I decided I would just blurt out my idea and see what happened.

  They are all clustered round the tea urn, laughing at a joke Dougie’s just told about a parrot that is rescued from a brothel. Even Albie is laughing. The atmosphere feels good; this seems like the right moment.

  “How about we do a performance?”

  The chatter stops and they are all staring at me, so I feel obliged to carry on. “A show. Not a big one, something small-scale. Something simple.” They are still staring. “I just thought it would be nice for us to have a goal. Something to work towards.”

  “What kind of performance?” asks Pulse, with a challenging bob of the head.

  “Well, that’s for the group to decide, obviously, we’d all have to agree.”

  “With an audience,” checks Dougie.