The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  ‘I admit they’ve found something, but I’d dispute the fact that it’s Christ.’

  ‘Are you doubting the love of God?’

  ‘Not at all. Just your interpretation of it.’

  ‘Get back to your cell. One more word and I’ll have you on report.’

  ‘Yes, Jim,’ Clement replied deliberately.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Willis thundered, to Clement’s delight. He walked back with a restored sense of purpose. Echoing the prisoner who thanked God for enabling him to approach Him without distractions, he thanked Him for locking him up in order to show him new ways to be free.

  The next morning Clement was called to see the deputy governor, a rumpled middle-aged man with exceptionally large hands, which he wrung repeatedly during their conversation. ‘I hope you’ve settled in all right,’ he asked, like a headmaster greeting a junior member of staff whose function eluded him.

  ‘I’m not climbing the walls, if that’s what you’re getting at. My cell-mate seems a decent enough chap.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted you placed with a lifer. Experience has shown that they make the most placid prisoners. It’s the men serving five years or less who have something to prove.’

  ‘All Parker’s out to prove is his skill at model-making. Except, of course, his devotion to his dead wife.’

  ‘He might have thought of that before he killed her,’ the deputy governor said tersely, leaving Clement open-mouthed. ‘But I must confess to having a further motive for summoning you. We have an honourable tradition of prison literature in this country. Think of Malory, Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. And, of course – ’ he added, as if in deference to Clement – ‘Oscar Wilde. Sadly, we don’t have a comparable tradition of prison art. That may of course mean that we’re locking up the wrong people.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Either way, we’d like to redress the balance. I’ve been authorised by the Chief, who’s something of a fan of yours, to ask if you’d paint a piece for the prison chapel.’

  ‘Really? I’m flattered… although I can’t say I feel inspired. Quite the reverse.’

  ‘Isn’t that the artist’s fate? One per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration?’

  ‘It certainly would be in here. To tell the truth I’ve taken a long break – over a year, in fact – from painting. I’d only just picked up my brush again before my arrest and that was… that was a one-off.’

  ‘Surely that will make it even more of a challenge?’

  ‘I must admit I’m tempted. If anything’s going to keep me sane, it’s work. But I need time to think. May I let you know in a day or two? I’ll have to get a sense of the space.’

  ‘That’s easily done. I’ll ask one of the officers to take you there right now.’

  ‘No, there’s no point when it’s empty. I have to see it in use.’

  The first opportunity came the following Sunday, when he joined the line of prisoners braving the taunts of ‘God Squad’ as they waited for the officers to escort them across the yard.

  ‘They jeer at us for being Christians,’ Desmond said, ‘but they’re quick enough to ask us to say a prayer for them when they’re up in court.’

  Stick ran out at the last minute. ‘Will you walk with us?’

  ‘Sure,’ Clement said, to Desmond’s visible annoyance.

  ‘D’you want to hear my joke?’

  ‘No!’ Desmond roared.

  ‘Go on,’ Stick pleaded, ‘it’s religious.’

  ‘So long as it’s short,’ Clement said, offering a compromise.

  ‘There were three lads in this playground… no, this café… no, playground… well, it don’t matter.’ Desmond moved away in disgust. ‘There were three lads anyway. The first one, he says, “My dad’s a teacher; he makes me clever for nothing.” The second one, he says, “My dad’s a doctor; he makes me well for nothing.” The third one, he says, “My dad’s a vicar; he makes me good for nothing.”’

  ‘Excellent,’ Clement said, his smile under increasing strain as Stick dissected the pun.

  They entered the chapel, a sombre room painted a municipal beige, with a vase of peonies on the altar, a wooden crucifix suspended from the ceiling and the Stations of the Cross hanging like cheap pennants on the wall. Feeling as depressed by the confused churchmanship as by the tawdry furnishings, Clement made his way to the seats where, true to his Anglican training, he kept a respectful distance from his neighbour until one of the officers ordered him to ‘fill up the gap’. Stick needed no encouragement, sitting so close that Clement yearned for a cloud of incense. After the opening hymn, Holy Holy Holy, in which, despite sharing his hymn book, Stick muddled not only the tune but the words, the chaplain called up a prisoner to read the lesson: Christ’s account of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25. Although the halting delivery marred even the crude cadences of the Good News Bible and Stick’s schoolboy giggle on ‘naked and you clothed me’ was a profound irritation, Clement found the references to prison-visiting strangely moving. He was less convinced when, in a generous, if laboured, attempt to reach out to his congregation, the chaplain preached on the need to let Christ into their lives.

  ‘Don’t keep Jesus standing on the front step. He doesn’t have a search warrant. He won’t break the door down like the police. He’s waiting for you to invite him in. Would you rather leave it till you’re up in the dock on Judgement Day? “Who’s this?” God will ask. “Never seen him before, m’Lud!” Jesus will reply. And you’ll be sent down not just for life but for eternity.’

  After leading the prayers of intercession, with only those for families and friends receiving any response, the chaplain drew the service to a close. He stood at the chapel door, greeting the men as if they were going home for their Sunday roast. Holding Clement back, he asked if he might have a quick word and led him up to a tiny office.

  ‘I must apologise for the mess,’ he said, dumping a pile of service sheets on the floor. ‘I share it with my Free Church, Catholic and Sikh colleagues.’

  ‘Practical ecumenism?’ Clement asked.

  ‘We’re never here at the same time.’

  Shifting in his seat, like an actor unable even to play himself authentically, the chaplain asked if he would agree that there were many different paths to God.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I urge you not to dismiss Officer Willis’s. He’s complained about your disrupting his prayer group. He claims that you put your own will above the Good Book.’

  ‘Not my will. My mind, my spirit. I can’t sit there like a statue while he demeans God’s love.’

  ‘To you, God may be love. To someone else, He may be self-restraint. You’re living among men who need don’ts, who can’t – who’ve patently shown that they can’t – exercise the same freedom of choice as people outside. It would be cruel – no, downright wicked – to deny them the chance.’

  ‘So there are the sheep and the goats and then the in-betweens: the goats in sheep’s clothing whose bleating gets them through the gates?’

  The chaplain’s response was to call an officer to escort him back to his cell, where the tedium of prison life took on its distinctive Sunday timbre. Clement spent the afternoon reading a dog-eared biography of Bobby Charlton, while Parker watched a Western, unable to decide whether he had seen it before. At five o’clock they collected their tea and breakfast trays, to which Parker added his modelling tools and glue. Eager not to betray himself by an anxious glance at the Stanley knife, Clement watched a programme about loft conversions while Parker worked on a scale model of the Titanic until, with unwonted clumsiness, he cut through the hull. Setting it aside, he joined Clement in playing Monopoly with the men in the next-door cell. Their neighbours held the board, threw the dice and moved the pieces for all four players, with everything proceeding smoothly until one of them claimed that a double three had landed Parker’s old boot on his Bow Street hotel. Clement, with a total recall of the board dating from boyhood, insisted that the correct position was Marylebone Station, ref
using to back down even after Parker’s conciliatory offer to pay. The game collapsed in bitter recriminations, with Clement taking full advantage of the dividing wall to hurl around charges of chicanery, demanding to know ‘Whatever happened to honour among thieves?’

  Over the following weeks he grew fully attuned to the Bullingdon rhythm. He learnt how to supplement his food and eke out his canteen, renouncing regular shampoo and deodorant, along with the assumptions behind them, for the sake of extra chocolate and tea. He created a niche for himself by drawing portraits of the prisoners and their families. One man who had brought him a snapshot of his daughter, a lantern-jawed pub singer, the self-styled Newham Nightingale, was so thrilled with the result that he planned to use it on a poster advertising her availability for ‘weddings, christenings and acquittals’. Everyone valued his unique take on likenesses which, by any objective standard, were better captured in photographs or, in some cases, mugshots. The wonder was that, after the cynicism of the art world, he should encounter such enthusiasm in jail.

  He was unsure if it were his example or the supposed soft option that had generated so much interest in his class. They met in a fusty art room, whose small barred windows let in insufficient light and whose cracked cream walls were inimical to a vibrant use of colour. He gazed dolefully at the rudimentary materials that Officer Braden had laid out on the table: six boxes of cheap powder paint, one between two, which were certain to lead to conflict; twelve brushes, either caked with ancient paint or balding; thirty sheets of sugar paper. His intention to range the desks in a circle around the walls was thwarted by the officer, who insisted on their all pointing towards the front. When everyone was finally settled and introduced to the alien concept of sharing, he smiled awkwardly at the twelve expectant faces and outlined both how he proposed to proceed and what he hoped that they would achieve.

  Given how the class had been oversubscribed, he had looked for a degree of indulgence from the chosen few, but his admission that this was his first taste of teaching fostered the suspicion that they were being short-changed. He began by asking what sort of artists they wanted to be, prompting a near unanimous cry of ‘piss artist’, which they immediately set about demonstrating, until Officer Braden weighed in with the warning that anyone who failed to produce at least three decent pictures by the end of the week would be thrown out. Although he baulked at imposing the standards of the workshop, Clement was grateful for the officer’s ability to concentrate the men’s minds.

  ‘What I suggest is that, for the first few lessons, we should all tackle the same subjects,’ he said, ‘the view from the window, a still life and a model… I’m hoping Officer Braden will oblige.’

  ‘I’m not taking my clothes off!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Clement said, struggling to make himself heard above the catcalls. ‘I’m sure we’d all rather you were fully dressed… The point of the exercise is to show that, while we each have a singular vision, the world remains recognisably the same.’

  The principle came under increasing threat when the staff houses were transformed into playschool blocks and lunar landscapes, the vase of chrysanthemums into an octopus and a triffid, and the officer’s pitted face into a bowl of liver and an armoured tank.

  He soon gave up hope of discovering a prodigy. The closest he came was Joe, the young Nigerian from Willis’s prayer group. The classes created a bond between them, which they consolidated during intimate chats at Association. Joe confided that he had come to the country to study law, but his funding had run out and he had been drawn into an elaborate infection racket, whereby healthy Africans faked symptoms at HIV clinics and then sent genuine patients to give blood in their place. When their positive diagnoses were confirmed, they became eligible for income support, preferential housing and a raft of benefits. Joe claimed to have harboured misgivings, not least about reinforcing the view that Third World immigrants were crippling the NHS, but he had justified himself by invoking both the racism of hospitals in which black faces were interchangeable and the evil of Britain’s colonial past. Everything had proceeded according to plan until the ringleaders grew greedy, insisting that Joe take a second test in his own right to prove that he was HIV negative and then sue the hospital for misdiagnosis and emotional distress. The subsequent police investigation brought the scam to light.

  ‘It is a very good thing that I’m here,’ Joe said. ‘In three years I study and take my exams to become a lawyer. My heart is light.’

  When Joe failed to turn up for either the class or Association, Clement sought out Desmond. ‘You haven’t seen Joe by any chance? He’s not been around all day. Have you heard if he’s ill?’

  ‘No, he’s gone to the VP unit.’

  ‘You mean he’s a sex offender?’ Clement asked, choking back nausea.

  ‘Did I say that? No, he’s running scared of the Muslims. They’re harassing him day and night.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Asking why he doesn’t grow his beard… why he won’t pray to Allah… threatening him with deep shit if he won’t convert.’

  ‘He never mentioned anything to me.’

  ‘So he had no choice, poor bugger! He goes up to the VPU and gets banged up with the nonces or he stays here and gets jugged.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jugged! Burnt with boiling sugar.’

  ‘Good God! They do that in the name of religion?’

  ‘They blow people up in the name of religion, don’t they? You think I’m biased because of Rafik. But that’s what opened my eyes.’

  ‘Why Joe? Why have they singled him out?’

  ‘Because he’s black, in case you haven’t noticed! White blokes don’t even figure on their radar. Half the Muslim Brotherhood were sentenced for selling drugs, which is against their religion. But, so long as they don’t sell them to other Muslims, their imams tell them it doesn’t count.’

  ‘Come on! I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Ask anyone here… Nixon!’ He called to a safe-cracker with a pronounced resemblance to the former president.

  ‘No, don’t bother! Really,’ Clement said, embarrassed. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘And so you should,’ Desmond said, ‘since it’s you and me and all the wimps in power who are letting them get away with it. Take this nick. We all have the right to freedom of conscience, right? Even though half the cons in here don’t know what a conscience is. So the Muslims have to be let out of their pads five times a day to wash and pray. That’s the law. And they have to be allowed a minister. Only they don’t have a proper one, like us and the Left-footers, and even the Sikhs. So the Governor lets them use a con. You must have seen him, swaggering about in his little white cap and beads like he’s something special?’

  ‘Not so as I’ve noticed.’

  ‘He’s special all right. Specially evil. He’s fighting to stop the government sending him to America on account of a bomb he planted at their embassy in Sudan. And every day – not once a day, but five times – he gathers them all to pray, spouting at them in Arabic. So what do you think he’s telling them? I get the feeling it isn’t Love thy neighbour.’

  ‘Now you’re being paranoid. They’ll have to have an officer present, just like us.’

  ‘Sure they do, but they’re talking Arabic. Arabic! How many of these fuckwit screws do you think speak Arabic? The only GCSE they’ve got is in key-rattling! I’m stuck in here for another eight years so I’m safe, but I’m telling you I wouldn’t want to be going back on the out as quick as you.’

  Clement returned to his cell with a heavy heart. He trusted that Joe at any rate was secure in a unit where no self-respecting prisoner ever ventured. In his absence, the class’s talent level plummeted. Even so, and in spite of demarcation disputes more suited to a playgroup, Clement enjoyed teaching, not least on account of the link with Mike. He felt doubly excited to be greeting him on his first visit to Bullingdon and longed to compare notes but, sensing that Mike was more sceptical than
charmed, he asked him instead for a report of Newsom’s funeral. Having been forced to mourn his former lover alone, he was eager for a full account of an event from which he had felt cruelly excluded. Mike duly obliged, describing a ceremony which had bordered on the surreal, from the moment when, as one of only two mourners to be wearing a tie, he had been mistaken for a priest by the crematorium attendant and directed to the robing room. While grateful for the touches of black humour, Clement refused to believe that Mike was not embellishing his picture of the coffin being carried by a chapter of Dykes on Bikes and of the culture clash when the 3.30 mourners in T-shirts, jeans and radical drag collided with the 4.00 mourners in heavy suits, sashes and bowler hats from the south London lodge of the Orange Order.

  ‘Newsom chose the music himself. There was a sticky moment when the coffin came in to the sound of Ella Fitzgerald singing The Way You Look Tonight.’

  ‘I hope you kept a straight face.’

  ‘Just about. Though I totally lost it during his yoga teacher’s eulogy, when she praised the way he practised right to the end. “Even when his buttocks lost their grip, his thighs remained supple.”’

  ‘You’re making it up!’

  ‘I swear to God!’

  Their laughter drew hostile glances and, gazing round apologetically, Clement caught sight of Stick talking to an older woman with a baby.

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stick. The young chap with the hair three tables away. I knew he had a son but not a baby.’

  ‘Why should you? Does he tell you everything?’

  ‘Pretty much, or so I thought.’

  ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘About Stick? Good lord, no! Not at all. He’s modelling for my Crucifixion. I told you about the governor’s commission?’

  ‘You said he’d asked, yes.’

  ‘I was… I am petrified. But it’s too good an opportunity to miss. A chance to shape the image specifically to my fellow prisoners. I have an idea, which I’m not telling anyone – ’