The Star Witness

by Andy Hamilton

  “Post-natal depression,” prompts Louise.

  “Yeh, only she won’t talk to anyone ’cos she reckons they’ll take Sean away and, like, when the Social Services lady comes, she puts on an act, so do I…we smile and say it’s all fine, but it’s not fine, it’s not, it’s really not.”

  His voice seems to have gone up a few semitones now and every word is quavered as he gallops towards the end of the story and part of me wants to step in and stop him, but I dare not. I am transfixed, like everyone else in the room.

  “And I’m not sleeping and Sean’s just crying every second of every day and Carol’s crying all the time and drinking, and there’s neighbours starts thumping on the wall and it was too much, so one night, he’s screaming, he’s purple, his face, purple, been screaming, she’s hysterical, I feel like…like my mind is going to explode, explode through my head and she’s yelling horrible things at me, and I can’t think, can’t think, she’s yelling that she hates me, she wishes she’d never met me, and he’s screaming even louder, and she yells louder, she’s screaming she wishes he’d never been born and I can go to Hell and she can’t take any more and I can’t think, and he’s still screaming and I just want to make it all stop and she’s beating the floor with her fists asking God to kill her and before I can think, I don’t think, I can’t think, I’m in a rage, he’s screaming, she’s screaming and I pick up Sean and I throw him out of the window.”

  I hear a gasp behind me. Then utter silence. I can see Pulse’s jaw hanging down. Simo has his hand over his mouth. Horror. Horror is filling the room, like nerve gas. And Albie is standing before us with his hands tearing at his hair.

  “I never meant to hurt him! It happened before I could think! A split-second! My little boy!”

  Dougie is the first to speak, slow and deliberate.

  “You…murdered a baby.”

  Albie’s eyes are hollow with terror.

  “I know…I’m an animal. I must be, mustn’t I?”

  “We…” continues Dougie, “…have been eating biscuits…and drinking tea…with a baby-killer.”

  Suddenly Pulse stands and hurls his chair across the room, it clatters against the wall and the floor.

  “I never meant to,” he wails. “And I killed Carol.”

  And then something bursts inside him and he collapses sobbing into the floor. We all freeze, paralysed by the intensity of his torment – except for Dougie. Dougie attacks him. He starts kicking him hard, in the head, in the ribs, and, from what I can remember, Albie’s not trying to protect himself, he’s not curling up into a ball, not shielding himself with his arms, he is a rag doll for Dougie to kick and kick and after that it is a blur of arms and legs and curses. Prison officers, three, four of them are knocking Dougie to the ground, and pinning his arms behind him, pushing his face to the floor. The medic rushes in and crouches over Albie, as Dougie is dragged towards the door screaming that Albie is vermin and how you should kill vermin and, as they try to drag him out through the doorway, his blazing eyes fix on me.

  “And you…you fucking knew, didn’t you, eh?”

  Stupidly, even though I am guilty of nothing, I try to justify myself.

  “No…I knew there was a secret, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  It sounds so limp, I wouldn’t believe it if I was him either.

  “You’re a liar, the whole world knows you as a liar.” I go to reply but suddenly he has broken free and is surging towards me. Two of the guards rugby-tackle him a few inches in front of me.

  “Yeh, you fucking knew…you’re halfway up the governor’s arse, you knew! And you didn’t tell us! You’re a fucking traitor!”

  As they finally succeed in squeezing him through the door, he begins shouting that he is going to kill me. The threats continue, fading slowly, as they bump and haul him down the corridor.

  The medic is on his walkie-talkie, asking for assistance, Albie is going to need a stretcher. There is no whimpering, no pain, no noise of any kind, he is staring blankly into nothingness. He looks anaesthetised, purged of feeling.

  I sense movement behind me and turn to confront Louise.

  “All this has to be wiped, do you hear? Not one second of this is to be includ—”

  I stop in mid-shout. There is a tear rolling down her cheek and her eyes are blurred with more.

  “What…?” Her voice cracks, her chin is trembling. “What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  The camera operator is packing up. He throws me a perfunctory glance.

  “She told me to stop filming ten minutes ago.”

  20

  The Long Night

  An hour later, I am summoned by Malcolm. But I have to sit outside his office while he finishes a phone call. Is he making a point by keeping me waiting? Who cares? Mrs Braddock gives me the occasional supportive smile.

  There is a pile of magazines on a table and I find myself leafing through a copy of the New Scientist. My eye is drawn to an article titled “How Real is Reality?” It is written by a neuro-scientist to explain what science does and doesn’t understand about perception. The section about vision is quite interesting. Basically it says that what we think of as vision is mostly virtual. Only the central section of the rectangle of our field of vision is actually recorded by the optic nerve. The rest of the picture – the periphery – is modelled by the brain, like a computerised simulation. In the final paragraph, the writer challenges how much of our view of the world can be defined as real. He argues that we only see what we think we see. Or what our brain thinks we want to see.

  “My life in a nutshell,” I mutter. Mrs Braddock looks up from her computer screen to give me another wan smile. I smile back.

  “You can never see the full picture, can you?”

  She keeps smiling, even though she is bewildered.

  Then the door flies open and Malcolm tells me, briskly, to step inside. There are no biscuits. His tone is distant, detached. He tells me that he is disappointed in me, he expected me to manage things a little better.

  I protest that my various warnings had gone unheeded. Also, I point out, I might have been able to manage things better if I had known Albie was a time-bomb. He lapses into jargon about trust, confidentiality, duty of care and boundaries. By the end, I have stopped listening. I feel nauseated, probably from delayed shock. I don’t want to be sick, I loathe it, but as a precaution, I inch closer to the waste-paper bin.

  “How’s Albie?” I ask.

  “Broken ribs, fractured jaw.”

  “But…he’ll be OK?”

  “Physically, maybe.”

  “Will he be coming back?”

  “I think he’ll need to go to a special unit.”

  “And Dougie?”

  “Solitary. Three weeks. Then we’ll see.”

  He calls up an e-mail on his laptop.

  “You’re getting a new cell-mate. He’s Lithuanian, Vilnis.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  Malcolm ignores the question and waves a copy of an email at me.

  “I just got this. From Louise. ‘Due to recent events’, blah-di-blah-di-blah…‘and as the performance will clearly no longer be taking place, we feel that the documentary would have no climax. We do have some dramatically interesting footage, but I feel that it would be inappropriate to broadcast. Thank you for all your help, we are sorry that this experiment has not worked out as we might all have hoped. We will, of course, honour any contractual financial obligations thus far. Yours, Louise’.”

  He swivels his chair around to look out of the window at the gun-grey sky.

  “Well, that makes sense,” I say, to his back. “I…um…I think I may have been a little harsh on Louise…y’know, perhaps I um…obsessed about her a bit, y’know…drew too heavily on previous experience.”

  “This is a setback for the prison,” says Malcolm’s back. “If we’d been showcased, well…we might have attracted more funding, but now…?”

  He swivels back round to face me
, circles of darkness beneath the armpits.

  “You let us down, Kevin.”

  “I’m sorry your vanity project went tits up, Malcolm.”

  He giggles nervously – not the Goonish laugh – and closes his laptop. Shouts can be heard in some distant corridor.

  “I looked out for you, Kevin…I won’t be doing that any more.”

  A prison officer enters with an “excuse me” and informs the governor that there is a riot in C block. Malcolm orders a lockdown and I am escorted, through the wet, warm air, back to my cell.

  The next few days were quiet, virtually silent in fact, because none of the inmates would speak to me. I was being sent to Coventry. It took me a little while to piece together why this was happening. The riot had seriously blackened the mood inside the prison, several people – prisoners and prison-officers – had been hospitalised and, according to one of the warders, the trouble had started when Dougie had somehow got hold of a plank of wood.

  The rage in Dougie had triggered the riot and, because of the riot, prisoners had lost all privileges. Furthermore, Dougie’s rage was being laid at my door. I was the traitor who – in collusion with the governor – had kept from them all the filthy secret that there had been a baby-killer in their midst. So I was now a pariah, an outcast.

  My new cell-mate, Vilnis, anxious not to get involved, communicated with me only in grunts and nods. But at least the heatwave was easing off and, to be honest, the silent treatment didn’t really bother me. I was in no mood to talk to anyone. I felt numb from the shock of that final rehearsal. The speed with which the explosions had happened felt impossible to take in. One moment Albie had been receiving support and sympathy, the next…

  Silence was fine by me. There was nothing more to say. True, it was obscene and unfair to blame me for Albie’s secret, or Dougie’s insane reaction, but there was little point my trying to set the record straight. No one was going to listen, not when the lies and the rumours were more attractive. People need scapegoats. That’s how we make sense of things going wrong. Prison is like society, only more so.

  I would be lying if I said that I had not considered the possibility of being attacked. But, although I had spotted many contemptuous glances, no actual threats had been made. After a while, I began to think if anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now. If the silence was the worst I could expect, then, fuck it, I could handle that. What did that matter compared with the carnage of that last rehearsal?

  Then the silence was broken.

  I am in the prison garden, on my knees, weeding, when Gerald quietly kneels down beside me and pretends to be weeding too.

  “How’s things?” he asks, extremely quietly.

  “Quiet”, I whisper.

  “Yeh.” He gives a soft, mischievous chuckle. “This time it really is about you.”

  “Should you be talking to me? I’m the leper, aren’t I?”

  “Too right…all sorts of rumours circulating about you…”

  “I don’t care, I’m not interested.”

  My instinct is not to give Gerald the satisfaction of rattling me.

  “Shame about the show,” he sighs. “I’d worked up all that material.”

  “That’s showbiz.”

  He glances over his shoulder, then edges slightly closer.

  “I can get you a knife.”

  It takes a few moments for what he has said to sink in.

  “What?”

  “I can get you a knife.”

  “Why the f—“ I pause to get control and lower my voice. “Why the fuck would I want a knife?”

  Gerald looks at me as if I’m an amusing oddity.

  “You’d want a knife if you found yourself with someone else who has a knife.”

  He waits to see the penny drop. He is creating his own entertainment.

  “That’s bollocks,” I tell him, “no one cares enough about me to stab me.”

  “That might have been true, but not now. The rumours have changed that. New rumours.”

  “What new rumours?”

  “What do you care? You’re not interested.”

  He is wearing that simpering grin of his. I don’t want to play his twisted little game, but I need to know.

  “What new rumours?”

  “Word is…you’re one of these ‘establishment’ paedos.”

  “What?! How the…?!”

  “That’s the rumour, courtesy of Dougie.”

  “He’s in solitary.”

  Gerald gives me a pained look. “What? You can’t start a rumour from solitary? Come on Kevin, you know what this place is like. Stuff passes clean through the walls…”

  For a moment, I wonder if Gerald is making all this up, just for the recreational value of frightening me. But can I risk ignoring him?

  “I hate gardening,” he says, “it’s what average people do.” He pulls up some clover. “Three leaves. Has there ever been such a thing as a four-leafed clover? Or is that just a con?”

  There is a pumping inside my forehead now.

  “I am not a paedophile.”

  “That’s irrelevant, I’m afraid. So do you want the knife or not?”

  “Come on, Gerald, you know I’m not a—”

  “Well, strictly speaking, I don’t.”

  “Is no one prepared to stick up for me?” I ask, aware that it sounds pathetic. “What about the group? Pulse, Simo…?”

  “Have they spoken to you at all?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  In his repellent, cold way, Gerald is driving it home to me that I am abandoned and without allies. Hence the knife.

  “Apparently, Dougie has commissioned some associates to do the deed…soon.”

  This fills me with unspeakable sadness. The man with whom I had shared all those rambling nocturnal conversations, all that trench humour – that same man now wants me dead. And for what? Some infantile, warped, synthetic sense of betrayal.

  “This makes no sense,” I mutter.

  “He’s a madman,” says Gerald, casually. “Now, do you want the knife?”

  “Why are you looking out for me?” I ask.

  Gerald giggles. . “I’m not looking out for you. I’m selling it to you. I’m not a charity shop.”

  Well, I didn’t buy Gerald’s knife. I decided to put my faith in the system. I went straight to the nearest prison officer and told him I had reason to believe my life was under threat. He did not seem particularly bothered. He said he would report my concerns to his superior. I told him that was not good enough and asked to see the governor, Malcolm.

  “He’s not the governor any more,” I am told.

  “Really?”

  “No. He’s gone on gardening leave. There’s a new man now. Interim.”

  I feel no sympathy for Malcolm. He, more than anyone, set these events in motion. The prison officer repeats that he will record my anxieties in his file notes for the next shift and that a review procedure will be set in motion. The abstract tone of his words is terrifying, set against the physical reality of a prisoner – somewhere close – who has a knife and orders from Dougie.

  I return to my cell with a sense of leaden dread. Perhaps I should have bought the knife. Or perhaps Gerald was making it all up. For some reason, a song, an ear-worm, is burrowing into my brain.

  “I’ve grown accustomed to her face…”

  How the hell did that get there? When I have such serious matters to worry about, how has some banal lyric sneaked into my head?

  Is this really all Malcolm’s fault? Is it anyone’s fault? Where does the chain start? With Albie’s alcoholic mother? Dougie’s brutal father? Or his father’s father? The man who might be coming for me has a father.

  Gerald could have been lying. He was definitely enjoying himself.

  It was after midnight when they came for me. Not that I had been sleeping, I had been staring at the blank, answerless ceiling with Albie’s horrifying words echoing through
my head. I had been replaying Louise’s tears and Dougie’s animal snarl and Gerald’s insidious offer, so I didn’t register the approaching feet.

  Suddenly, two officers, Henderson and Bluntstone, were shaking my bunk. My cellmate, Vilnis, pretended to be asleep as they ordered me to get dressed, now, immediately, and not ask any smartarse questions. I knew better than to remonstrate with Bluntstone, he had a reputation for sly violence. I got dressed as fast as I could to a backing of affected snores from Vilnis, then they marched me out of my cell, through the neon whiteness of many corridors, to a side-exit that I never knew existed and into the yard, where a prison van was waiting, headlights on, engine ticking over. As they push me through the cold night air towards the back of the van, the fear kicks in.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask, as I’m steered through the doors.

  “Don’t piss me off with lots of questions,” says Bluntstone. “Night-shift’s supposed to involve watching porn, not driving low-life around.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The front doors slam and the engine is revved into life.

  “I have a right to know where you’re taking me.”

  Through the grill I can glimpse the prison gates opening and, as we edge into the dark outside world, the fear intensifies.

  “Where the fuck are you taking me?”

  “Don’t bang on the grill, Carver,” Henderson sighs. “Just sit back and enjoy the excursion.”

  I repeat the same question, two, three times, but am ignored. Now we’re driving through some suburbs, I can see loft extensions, trimmed hedges, my temples are drumming as my mind clicks through the possibilities.

  A transfer? Is that it? They’ve decided I won’t be safe in the same prison as Dougie, so they’re moving me out of harm’s way. The prison authorities don’t want some ex-soapstar being found with his throat slit, so they’re shifting me. Yes, that makes sense. But why now? Why the early hours of the morning? Why all this melodrama?