The Star Witness

by Andy Hamilton

  Albie blinks a few times.

  “I like Jesus?”

  “As a god, or as a person?”

  “I don’t know…I used to pray to him, but only ’cos my dad made me.”

  “Gerald, I’m guessing that piece did very little for you.”

  Gerald straightens in his chair and sighs.

  “You’re right, many prisoners are religious. But which ones? Those who are mentally trapped in adolescence. Religion will always appeal to the adolescent mind because it provides facile certainties. A comfort blanket of simplicity. Complexities are rendered into black or white, pure and simple. But the real world where we grown-ups live is a patchwork of greys.”

  Part of me agrees with Gerald, but the sneer in his voice is nauseating. The cameraman has pushed in for a profile close-up, because he senses that Gerald cuts an exotic shape and will make good TV. The circus is open for business.

  Out of a sense of duty, I ask Simo if he has anything to say. He stutters and stammers for a few moments, then stops. There’s a panic behind his eyes.

  “OK, let’s move on. Pulse, how’s your Shakespeare coming along?”

  Pulse stands, looking pleased with himself.

  “You ready for this, ladies?”

  He draws breath to begin, but is interrupted by a deafening crash as Simo backflips into the table.

  The Lemon yelps as she’s showered with hot tea.

  “Like…sorry,” mumbles Simo.

  We cleaned up the mess and carried on with fitful rehearsals for about two more hours. The showing-off died down a little, as if Simo’s pointless backflip had marked a highpoint, and we managed to get some work done. I was surprised at how quickly they all seemed to adapt to the presence of the camera. To begin with, they kept throwing the lens self-conscious glances, but soon they were looking straight past it.

  As I bag up the rubbish, Louise comes alongside me with a single polystyrene cup.

  “There you go,” she says, dropping the cup in the bin-liner.

  What’s she up to? I can sense her positioning herself.

  “I think we’ve got the makings of a really strong documentary, Kevin. You’ve assembled a really interesting cast here.”

  “I didn’t assemble them,” I correct her, “they chose to attend the group. I’m not their leader.”

  “Of course, I forgot, this isn’t about you. What were the backflips about?”

  “Simo’s not good with words…so he expresses himself physically…that’s why his bit in the show is going to be mostly dance.”

  “…with backflips?”

  “No, that was just him trying to dazzle you.”

  She laughs. Odd, I don’t remember her laughing.

  “How did he end up like that?” she asks.

  “I’ve no idea”

  “Be interesting to find out though, wouldn’t it, why he’s like that? And why does Albie say so little? Who filled Mohammad’s head with Taliban shit? Did that happen in here? Or was he like that already? These are all questions I think our audience would like answered.”

  I finish tying up the rubbish bag and hand it to her. “Make yourself useful. Dump this on your way out.” She slowly takes it from me.

  “Yessir.”

  A marker needs to be put down.

  “Just remember, Louise, I’m going to be watching you like a hawk.”

  She gives me an inscrutable smile, then turns and strolls towards the door, breezily swinging the rubbish bag, like a young girl contemplating love. She’s hatching something. And I’m the only one who can stop her.

  17

  The Circus

  The following morning, I received a surprise visit. There, waiting for me in the Visitors’ Room, and causing a few male heads to turn, sat Nina Patel. She greeted me with a broad smile.

  As I sit down opposite her, she reaches into her briefcase.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” she says, lifting out a thick manuscript. “It’s Derek’s autobiography. His publishers sent it to us so we could check it through from a legal standpoint. It’s four hundred and thirteen pages long and it’s complete and utter vomit-inducing bilge. They’d be mad to publish. It’ll be greeted with derision.”

  So far, nothing she has said could be described as a surprise, so I’m starting to wonder why she has travelled so far to tell me this.

  “I had to read every page of it. I may need counselling. But the good news…the very good news is that, in several places, Derek gives details which completely contradict evidence he gave in the trial.”

  “Which trial?”

  “The second trial.” Her brow furrows for a second. “Actually, and the first trial, come to think of it.”

  I start to laugh at the sheer inevitability of it. When someone lies in such volume, they forget which lies they’ve told. Nina Patel’s eyes are shining bright with optimism.

  “This is an open goal, Kevin. We can prove he told lies in the witness box. That makes your conviction unsound.”

  “Does it though?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But demonstrating he’s a liar doesn’t prove that I’m not a liar, does it? I did commit perjury, that’s a fact.”

  Nina Patel grips my forearm and then withdraws her hand.

  “Am I allowed to touch you?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “The thing is – yes, you’d still be guilty of perjury – but we’d be able to show that you were manipulated into committing perjury. We can present you as more of a victim. And we can demonstrate that the prosecution case was built around a fantasist.”

  A few tables away from us, a young woman visitor is crying very quietly.

  I tell Nina Patel that I would not feel comfortable presenting myself as a victim. She exhales in exasperation.

  “We can get your sentence reduced, Kevin.”

  “But only by raking it all up again.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “I’m not sure if I’m up for that.”

  She leans back and swings an arm over the back of her chair.

  “Not even if it means doing less time?” she asks.

  I shake my head, which makes her laugh.

  “Are you enjoying prison, then?”

  “I’m in no massive hurry to get out.”

  She eyes me quizzically.

  “Really? Why?”

  “I quite like the obscurity.”

  “Obscurity,” she repeats back at me.

  “Yuh.”

  Nina Patel looks me straight in the eyes and keeps looking, as if she’s hunting for some tell-tale fleck of meaning.

  “What do you do all day?”

  “This and that. There’s a drama group that I…supervise.”

  “Ah,” she chuckles triumphantly, “you have a project.”

  “Yeh, it’s good.”

  She leans forward conspiratorially, lowering her voice.

  “Kevin, I honestly think we could get you out of here very soon.”

  A ripple of satisfaction passes through me. After months of distress and confusion, I find that I now know what I want. I don’t want my whole story to be told yet again, even if this revision will work in my favour. I want to stay and finish what I’ve started, see it through.

  “I’m very appreciative of the offer,” I tell her, “but I think I’d rather just…leave it.”

  “You’d let Derek go unchallenged?”

  Is she trying to goad me into it?

  “He’ll have told lies about other people. They’ll all be going after him.”

  With a wistful sigh, Nina Patel picks up the manuscript and chucks it into her briefcase.

  “I read that entire crapfest for nothing.” She looks at me from beneath hooded eyebrows in mock reproach. “You owe me one, Kevin Carver.”

  Over the next few minutes, we exchange small talk, a little gossip. Graham is thinking about taking early retirement. My barrister, Seymour, has been done for drink-driving. She has taken up flame
nco.

  As she rises to leave, she tries one last time.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to pursue this?”

  “Positive.”

  “You’re looking a lot better than I anticipated,” she tells me. “I’d heard you were a bit of a wreck. But you’re looking pretty sharp.”

  I thank her for the compliment and invite her to come and see our show.

  A week passed – three more rehearsals – and Louise made no detectable move. Mostly, she sat and watched from a respectful distance in the corner of the room. The cameraman was discreet and restricted himself mostly to general shots of the group. It all seemed fairly harmless. Occasionally, Louise would ask if she could record some one-on-one interviews during our tea breaks. But I hovered nearby to keep an eye on things. Her questions were serious-minded, never prurient. Although I did wonder what her questions might be like if I wasn’t policing her. Her co-producer –the Lemon – mostly sat to one side forcing a smile and trying not to look out of her depth. Then, come the fourth rehearsal, she fails to show.

  “Where’s your mate?” I ask Louise.

  “Off sick.”

  “What’s she got?”

  “Nervous exhaustion.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Yeh, I think all that sitting around on her arse has finally taken its toll.”

  Louise has clearly not lost her dislike of women colleagues.

  “What’s her production background?”

  “She’s Julian’s shag-bunny. That’s her production background.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And she owns twenty per cent of Going Forward”

  I am enjoying Louise’s bitterness. And so’s she.

  “Still, it suits me, Kevin. I prefer to hunt alone. This session, I was thinking of recording some more autobiographical stuff with the guys, if that’s OK.”

  She spots the alarm in my eyes.

  “…with you there, obviously…as their guardian.”

  The date for the performance was finalised as August 3rd – three weeks away – in the chapel, to an audience of invited guests and specially-selected inmates. Malcolm clearly wanted to make sure there would be no boisterousness or heckling.

  Temperatures had started to climb into the high 70s Fahrenheit and life in an old prison with no air-conditioning was starting to get uncomfortable. So, there I am, lying on my bunk, headphones on, listening to the “Test Match Special”, trying to ignore the stickiness of the air, when I hear Dougie turn a page of his newspaper and groan.

  “Oh fuck me, no.”

  “What?”

  “They’re saying next week’s going to be the start of a proper hot spell. Ninety degrees. As hot as fucking Kuwait. Jesus wept. Everything will start to stink, the drains, the people, prisoners start getting grumpy over the tiniest things, so do the screws, someone does something stupid and then it all kicks off. You mark my fucking words, Kev-boy, I’ve seen it happen. If it hits ninety, this place will go up like a fucking firework.”

  I turn the cricket up a little and try not to worry about Dougie’s grim prediction.

  “Fucking global warming. And yet those posh restaurants with outside bits are allowed to have fucking great heaters to warm up the open air. How is that legal, eh? Answer me that.”

  I don’t bother answering. I’m saving energy, listening to Geoffrey Boycott fulminating about how his granny could bat on this wicket with a stick of rhubarb. Then the springs above me start to bounce, Dougie is laughing.

  “Hey, Kevin, your mate’s in the papers again. And he’s not happy.”

  “Is this Derek?”

  “Yeh, his publishers have binned his autobiography…and now, his character’s been axed from your show. He’s talking about suing them for unfair dismissal.”

  Poor Derek. And he said I wasn’t any good at dealing with rejection.

  “He says he’s the victim of a ‘malicious secret agenda’. Do you want to read it?”

  “Nah.”

  “Says he’s not going to take it lying down.”

  “He’ll probably throw himself in front of the queen’s horse.”

  Dougie chucks the newspaper down to me.

  “I said I don’t want to read it.”

  “Clock the photo. Looks like he’s chewing a wasp.”

  Dougie’s description is pretty accurate. Derek’s face, normally so forgettable, looks thunderously resentful. Despite my indifference, I find myself reading the news article. There is a diplomatic quote from the network, thanking Derek for his work but explaining that they had to make room for exciting new characters aimed at younger audiences. Derek won’t like that. But he’s their problem now, they brought it on themselves.

  A bluebottle is dozily circling the light. Boycott thinks the bowlers are banging it in too short. It’s a Saturday. And nothing in the newspapers is going to bother me ever again.

  Louise, her camera operator and a sound man continued coming to our rehearsals and, to be honest, it was not nearly as intrusive or destructive as I had feared. She was consistently polite, always asking permission before she started filming and always respectful if we asked her to stop. This unsettled me still further. Again, this was not the woman I remembered.

  The group seemed to quite like her and she seemed genuinely interested in all of them; but especially interested in two. One, obviously, was Albie, because he was such a mystery. Also, on camera, his translucence made him look like – to quote Louise – a spectre. The other was Gerald. My suspicion was that she had spotted a kindred spirit, someone else who – when bored – liked to push people’s buttons.

  The performance is about ten days away when Gerald announces that he’s been working on a comedy stand-up routine that he would like to be included in the running order.

  “What if it’s shit?” asks Dougie.

  Gerald looks him squarely in the eye. “It’s not shit,” he informs him.

  And he is right. From the first gag, Gerald is funny, often vicious, but funny. His act is a satirical tableau of prison life, mocking everything and everyone. He does a very well-observed parody of the governor’s liberal jargon and some brutal impersonations of some of the guards, the prison chaplain and the prison psychiatrist who loves his lustrous hair so much. Then he turns his attention to the inmates.

  People start shifting a little uneasily in their seats. Most of his characters are types – macho, old-school gang-bosses, gay opportunists, weasel-like black marketeers – but some are identifiable as particular individuals. And now he is doing Dougie, doing him very accurately, as a comic mixture of thuggishness and sentimentality. I find myself watching Dougie intently and inching ever so slightly towards the red panic button on the wall.

  But Dougie is laughing, laughing and nodding in recognition. Even when Gerald’s version of him talks about building himself an extra testicle because he’s run out of body-space for his tattoos, Dougie is laughing, dabbing at his eyes with the back of his meaty wrist.

  Next it’s my turn. I am portrayed as a rather effete luvvie, slumming it with the lowlife. He gives me a catchphrase – “this isn’t about me” – which everyone seems to find hilarious. He’s a bit unfair, but I feel obliged to laugh along with them. Also, I can feel the camera is trained on me, looking for reactions. As Gerald moves on to his next creation I catch a glimpse of Louise grinning like a cat in a bird-house.

  The next few characters are types, a junkie, a God-squad type and then a failed suicide bomber who is writing a letter of complaint to Semtex. As he reaches a section where he is lamenting about all the virgins who will “not now be deflowered as faulty equipment prevented his scheduled arrival in Paradise”, Mohammad jolts to his feet and starts yelling.

  “Shame on you! Shame on you! Do not mock the martyrs, my friend, they are the messengers of Allah! Allah sees everything! He is all-powerful! The martyrs will smite the enemies of Allah!”

  “Well if he’s all-powerful, why does he need to employ middlemen?” retorts Ge
rald, instantly.

  Mohammad rocks back for a moment.

  “You show some respect!”

  “Do I have to respect mumbo-jumbo?”

  At this, Mohammad bursts towards Gerald who does not retreat one millimetre, but Dougie and Pulse intervene and push the two of them apart.

  “All right…put the handbags down,” says Dougie.

  “Just ree-lax,” adds Pulse.

  Now Mohammad is pacing in crazy circles around the room, his eye filling with tears.

  “I’m not standing for this, man, no way, this is bullshit, man, being disrespected, no fucking way, this is total bullshit.”

  He punches the wall in frustration. I indicate to Louise that she should stop filming, but she pretends not to have seen me.

  “Are you going to allow him to disrespect my religion like that?”

  Slowly, I realise this question is being directed at me.

  “Well…um…it’s not really a question of my ‘allowing’ or ‘not allowing’.”

  Gerald interrupts “It’s not about him. That’s right, isn’t it, Kevin?Decisions are taken by the group.” There is a savage light in his eye, he is relishing every second of this.

  “Well that’s right, and if the group feels that—”

  “Oh fuck the group.”

  “Mohammad, listen…”

  “Fuck the group! Fuck the lot of you! Fuck right off to Hell! I’m out!”

  The door slams behind him, rattling in its frame.

  “I don’t know,” mutters Gerald, “you just can’t have a laugh with some people.”

  Albie and Simo are both looking a little shaken, so I call a coffee break and make an immediate bee-line for Louise.

  “I signalled for you to stop filming.”

  “Oh, did you? I didn’t see, sorry.”

  “Well that’s got to come out.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s got to be edited out.”

  “What?”

  “That’s got to be edited out of the final programme.”

  “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Because…it’s not fair on Mohammad. He wasn’t in control of his emotions, he was upset, all over the place.”

  She furrows her brow in fake puzzlement.