The Star Witness

by Andy Hamilton

  “And…” I jab a finger in her face, “you were specifically requested to switch the camera off.”

  “By you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the group.”

  She wants to smirk, I can tell, but she hides it behind a wide-eyed mask.

  “Well here’s another thing, Louise, you’ll have to get Mohammad to sign off on that and he’s going to say no.”

  “Well, let’s see.”

  “I’m telling you, he’ll say no.”

  “Oh loosen up, Kevin, all we filmed is a good, old-fashioned piece of human conflict. It’d be an interesting element. What we saw was a microcosm of what’s happening in society at large. Free speech versus extreme Islam, Liberalism versus intolerant religiosity. Gerald’s like a cross between Richard Dawkins and…”

  “A hyena.”

  “He’s a very watchable character.”

  “Well he certainly needs watching, he’s a total—”

  “It was great TV.”

  “Look, Louise, Mohammad is young and very vulnerable and—”

  “You’re his protector, I know.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I snap. Oh shit, I said it. She giggles at the catchphrase Gerald gave me.

  “Look.” I pause to steady myself. “Look, you agreed, Going Forward Productions agreed, that we would have editorial approval and I, for one, wouldn’t be happy to see that go out on TV and I don’t suppose, for one moment, that the prison governor would be prepared to let that go out either.”

  She has that challenge in her eyes; the look of someone who needs to win, always.

  “Well why don’t we all go away and have a little think about it?” she breezes, “Let’s mull it over.”

  I watch her as she walks away to chat with her technicians. What is it about her? Why does she always get a reaction out of me? Maybe I’ve become sensitised to her, like an allergy.

  We resume rehearsals as if nothing had happened.

  “Is Mohammad coming back?” asks Albie, quietly.

  “I don’t know, Paul.”

  And then Simo tells us he has some new dance moves he would like to show us, so we clear some space.

  It was somewhere around this time that I got a letter from Mac who was touring across Europe with yet another theatre company that nobody had ever heard of. It was a few pages long, full of gossip and salacious stories, but tucked away on the last page was the news that Sandra was pregnant.

  I was genuinely taken aback. Although I don’t know why I felt that way, because it was hardly an extraordinary plot-twist. She had made it crystal clear that she would be trying for a baby, so how come I was so shocked? Was it just plain egotism? Maybe, because I was also surprised that she hadn’t written to tell me the news herself. But then again, why should she? I was a finished chapter, it was none of my business. Perhaps she was still angry with me. My conciliatory letter had not prompted a reply. Perhaps she had given up on me, I could hardly blame her.

  Ah, what the hell.

  There had been a period, towards the end of our relationship, when we had tried for a baby, probably for the wrong reasons – a last roll of the dice, an attempt to see if two people could bind themselves together by creating a third person. Well, it didn’t work. She gave up coffee and alcohol and we had lots of sex at propitious times but, deep down, my heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps that was a factor in why she failed to conceive. Perhaps my sperm were demoralised. Mum always used to say “Nature Knows Best”. I can hear her saying it now. I am not sure she was right, because Nature presents all sorts of abominations, but perhaps there is an unseen timing to life. Sandra was ready for a baby, at the right time, in the right place, and now one was on its way. If she and I had had a child, it would have been a disaster. I’m far too selfish to be responsible for another human being. Acknowledging that makes me feel sad, because I wonder what I’m missing, but I’m comfortable that I understand the limitations of my personality. I’m tumbleweed.

  I did debate whether to drop her a line of congratulation. But somehow that felt like a presumption, so instead I accepted myself as an irrelevance and tried not to think about her any more. I did wonder what she would think about my work with the drama group. She would approve, I felt sure. That was a comfort, to know she would be proud of me, if she knew what I was doing. Isn’t that odd? Fifty-three years old and looking for approval.

  I did once have a fantastically intense dream where I was a dad, one of those dreams that is so vivid that when you wake up your brain spends several moments refusing to accept that the world you’ve left wasn’t real. I had a son, named Christopher, he looked about five or six years old and he had black hair, blue eyes and an infectious, gurgling laugh. We were hunting crabs in a series of sparkling rock pools. But then I lost him in a department store which, for some reason, was staffed entirely by people with one arm. So I woke up feeling bereft and ashamed. So many of my dreams end in failure. Is that normal?

  Well, I know it is probably too late for me to be a dad now. I have reached an age where I often sit down to pee. Even if I met the perfect Mrs Carver tomorrow, which is highly improbable, I would be one of those fathers who is always mistaken for a grandad.

  I can’t remember what I did with that letter from Mac. I think I must have thrown it away.

  Mohammad made it crystal clear that he would not be rejoining the group and, in addition, he filed a complaint that he had been subjected to racist abuse, which means that I end up in the governor’s office, staring at the many colour-coded charts on his wall.

  “It does feel a little like you let this get out of hand,” muses Malcolm, as he scans the text of the complaint.

  “Well, first off, I don’t see how it’s down to me, I’m not their leader, or carer, or whatever, and second, what was I supposed to do? Shut Gerald up the moment he started doing a Muslim character? Censor him? He was just doing jokes – I mean yes, it was black-ish humour, it was Gerald, but they were clearly jokes. Mohammad over-reacted. He lost control of his emotions, everyone knows what he’s like.”

  “He’s alleging there was racially offensive content. Biscuit?”

  He pushes a plate of Hobnobs my way.

  “Well, I don’t remember any.”

  “It mentions hate-speech here.”

  “I didn’t hear any hate-speech, whatever that might be.”

  Malcolm doesn’t respond, but continues reading.

  “Well…this is a bit of a bummer…I’ll have to do something…otherwise they’ll send me on another course on Diversity and Ethnicity.” He gives a Harry Secombe chuckle. “I don’t want two days in Hastings.”

  “It’s all down on tape.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeh, they filmed the whole thing, Gerald doing his stand-up routine, the fight, well, it wasn’t actually a proper fight, just a—”

  “So I could present that as evidence?”

  “Suppose so.”

  He chomps pensively on his biscuit for a few seconds. “What was Gerald’s stand-up like?”

  “It was a sort of…satire on prison life.”

  The chomping quickens. “I don’t like the sound of that.” Now he starts texting someone. “I’d better ask Louise for a copy.”

  “Incidentally, when the…dust-up was brewing, I did ask Louise to stop filming and she refused.”

  He keeps texting.

  “Said she didn’t see me signalling her. I thought it was a bit opportunist…and I thought what she was filming might give a rather negative impression of the prison.”

  Now I’ve got his attention.

  “Negative? In what way, negative?”

  “Well, it could make this place look like a bit of a…a cauldron of sort of racial-slash-religious tension.”

  He starts drumming his fingers on the desk.

  “We have editorial approval,” he says, as if confirming it for his own peace of mind.

  “I know, but…well, you know my feelings about this whole process.
I think the camera just stirs people up, I just sense trouble ahead.”

  The fingers stop drumming.

  “I share your concern, Kevin.”

  “Good.”

  “But I still feel that, provided it’s handled properly, the programme could be a valuable social document.”

  Where’s he going with this? He seems uncomfortable.

  “I’ll raise these concerns with Louise tomorrow. She’s…um…she’s coming in to record some interviews with me in the office here.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Yes, she says that she thinks my, um…observations will provide the narrative spine of the piece.”

  “Right.”

  “But no, I will raise the…I’m of a mind to say she can’t use the footage of Mohammad’s…upset.”

  “I think that’d be best.”

  “And if she disagrees then…”

  “We pull the plug on the whole thing.”

  “Absolutely, Kevin. That’s our back-stop position.”

  He starts flicking through the pages of the complaint again.

  “I’ll have to follow this up somehow. His Imam’s coming to see me tomorrow.”

  “Best check those biscuits are halal then.”

  Not a flicker.

  “Definitely no racial abuse, you reckon?”

  “Watch the tape,” I say.

  I presume he must have watched the footage because a few days later he stops me cheerily in the corridor and tells me that, after due consideration, he feels that the confrontation between Gerald and Mohammad should be included in the documentary, as it’s an interesting microcosm of what’s happening in society at large. Louise has got to him.

  I trudge back to the sapping heat of my cell, certain that what I feared from the very beginning is now playing out before me. We are being turned into screen-fodder. It’s happening. Just as I predicted.

  Circus time.

  18

  The Ambitions

  The next day, in the canteen, I told the others my concerns about the group being exploited for cheap sensationalist TV. I recommended that we abort the whole thing but they were having none of it. To a man, they felt I was over-dramatising, Dougie slapped me playfully around the back of the head and told me to stop being such a queen. Even Albie, normally so quiet, said that it would be a shame to stop now. So I was stymied. I would just have to get on with it.

  The general attitude towards Mohammad was that if he wanted to throw a strop, let him. Good riddance. Word had gone around that he had made a formal complaint about racial abuse, so now pretty much the whole canteen was subjecting him to racial abuse. Some of the Muslim inmates started shouting in his defence and soon bits of food were flying through the air, until the prison officers stepped in. Luckily for Malcolm, no cameras were there to witness it.

  The heatwave was strengthening its hold now. The air seemed to smother you like a blanket and I found myself recalling Dougie’s dark predictions. What would I do if there was a riot? What was the etiquette? Was hiding frowned upon? Riot-etiquette struck me as a funny idea, so I gave it to Gerald and he developed it in his stand-up.

  Louise had clearly sensed my suspicion because she definitely backed off for a couple of days. Rehearsals carried on in a reasonable atmosphere, despite the pervading smell of stale sweat.

  The TV crew stayed as uninvasive as possible, but in my gloomy state of mind, it felt like the still, quiet dawn before a great battle.

  Then, halfway through a tea-break, Louise takes the floor.

  “If it’s OK with everyone, I had a little idea for a section of the programme. Um…it’s basically each of you talking about when you were a kid. What you wanted to be when you grew up, y’know, childhood ambitions. Is everyone happy to do that?”

  A ripple of shrugs goes around the room, so they set up the camera, point it at a chair and first on to the chair is Pulse.

  Louise sits down behind the cameraman’s shoulder.

  “So, Pulse, tell us your childhood ambition.”

  “Well, Louise, I—”

  “Can you answer without saying ‘Louise’?”

  “Oh…right…sure…well, my childhood ambition was simple. I wanted to be Viv Richards.”

  Louise looks blank.

  “He’s a cricketer,” I tell her.

  “Just Pulse on his own, if you don’t mind. Sorry, Pulse, could you start that again.”

  He clears his throat. “My childhood ambition was to be like Viv Richards…the cricketer.” He laughs to himself. “And when I say the cricketer, I mean the cricketer, ’cos there ain’t ever been anyone like him, and there never will be.”

  Louise asks him what made Richards so special.

  “Everything!” exclaims Pulse, clapping his hands in delight at the memory. “Ev-er-y-thing. Everything about him was so cool. I wanted to be him, I wanted to look like him, I wanted to bat like him, but most of all, I wanted to walk like him. Man, he could strut. When he came out to bat he’d walk out of that pavilion like a King – King Viv – he’d walk out with his sleeves rolled up like he was on a day out, his chest sticking out, whirling that bat of his through the air like it was a sword and, man, you could see the blood draining from the faces of the other opponent fellas when they saw him coming. They knew he was destruction in human form, and so did he. That’s why he swaggered, he knew he was destruction. When he walked out that stadium would shrink, it belonged to him and once he start batting – boom! Boom! That ball’s a-flying to all four corners, boom! Out of the ground! He was it. He was proof that a black man could be king. And loved. A loved king. And that’s who I wanted to be.”

  Pulse leans back in his chair and breaks into laughter. “Sadly, I was crap at cricket.”

  Laughter all round. Next on the chair is Simo who, to no one’s great surprise, wanted to be the next Jackie Chan. Louise soon gets bored with him and invites Gerald to take the chair.

  “As a child,” he begins a little wearily, “I wanted to be Viceroy of India.”

  We all laugh, who wouldn’t?

  “I mean it,” he continues. “Viceroy of India, that’s what I wanted to be. I’d read about Viceroys in a book.”

  Louise leans forward.

  “But when you were young, there was no Viceroy of India. Hadn’t been one for decades.”

  “No, I know. But nonetheless that is what I wanted to be. Viceroy of India. Or failing that, emperor of somewhere.”

  Everyone laughs again, because they think Gerald is laughing at the child-version of himself, but I’m not sure. There is a half-smile there, but it’s inscrutable.

  “So, Viceroy, or Emperor…anything a little more…mundane perhaps…more achievable?”

  Gerald ponders her question for a few moments. “Forensics expert, possibly. I liked Sherlock Holmes. Or an explorer perhaps, discovering lost tribes, that kind of thing. Cricketer as well. Scientist. To be honest, there was nothing that I felt I couldn’t do.”

  After a few more questions which reveal Gerald as a terrifyingly certain little boy, Louise turns to me.

  “I suppose there’s no point asking you to take the chair.”

  The others jeer at me like schoolkids, so reluctantly I plonk myself in the chair.

  “So, Kevin, did you always want to be an actor?”

  “No, originally I wanted to be a footballer. When I was six I wrote to Arsenal asking for a trial.”

  “Did they reply?”

  “They wrote saying I was too young. So I switched to supporting Chelsea.”

  “And you’re still Chelsea?”

  “Nah, I don’t support anyone now. Pointless. Been ruined by the money.”

  “And how old were you when you realised you wanted to be an actor?”

  “I dunno, fifteen, sixteen.”

  I’m waiting for the next question, but it doesn’t come, so I fill the silence.

  “I was at home, watching the Great Escape and…well, it was Steve McQueen. He got me hooked. My reaction to St
eve McQueen was…similar to Pulse’s about Viv Richards. Steve McQueen was cool.”

  “And when you became a professional actor, what did you most enjoy about it?”

  She’s using the past tense. Is she winding me up?

  “Was it the chance to lose yourself inside the character, to become someone else? To stop being you?”

  Right, that’s it, that’s her lot.

  “I thought this was supposed to be about our childhood ambitions.”

  “Yes, it—”

  “Well, I’ve told you mine.” And I rise out of the chair.

  She pushes her tongue into her cheek as she tries to control her reaction. I’ve annoyed her. Excellent.

  “Well, thank you for sharing, Kevin. Who’s next?”

  Dougie virtually throws himself into the chair and starts talking about his early dreams. The stuff pours out of him, how he wanted to be a Grand Prix driver and then a boxer like Barry McGuigan and then a popstar and, before that, a human cannonball.

  “A human cannonball?” she echoes.

  “Yeh. Someone who gets fired out of a cannon.”

  “Why were you so keen on that?”

  Dougie looks at her in bewilderment.

  “What young boy doesn’t dream of being fired out of a cannon?”

  He thinks about what he’s just said. “Actually, I’d still quite like to be fired out of a cannon.”

  Pulse laughs in his deepest bass. “He’d do it as well, he’s one mad human being.”

  Louise is a little thrown, so she changes direction.

  “You said popstar. Was music a big thing for you as a kid? You have a very good voice.”

  “I was in the church choir.”

  I get a fleeting image of a tiny Dougie wearing a ruff and a cassock and covered in tattoos.

  “A church choir?”

  “Yeh, I didn’t listen to the religious shit. I just liked the hymns. I love a good song, me. My dad was a good singer. When he was pissed he’d sing. Well, in the early phase of being pissed, y’know…then he’d sing, but later…when he hit the nasty phase, he’d get that look about him – then the singing would stop.”

  Dougie tails off and stares at the floor with a bleak expression. Nobody quite knows what to do. I can hear the whining of the camera. Is she hoping he’ll spill his guts for her?