Michelle has not returned to the little group she was dancing with before. Jack finds that it really doesn’t matter. He feels on top of the world. Dancing is easy, he’s a natural. He knows he’s high but he couldn’t help it, could he? And all the pain has gone now. He is not threatened by anyone. Since it can never happen again he might as well just enjoy this once to the max. There’ll be plenty of time to make up with Michelle. He’s got the rest of his life, hasn’t he? He’s got his whole life ahead now. Steve the mechanic pats him on the back, and clenches into a half-hug. And Jack is sure that this moment will never fade. Everything is possible and wonderful. Nothing can ever go wrong again.
But the ginger bloke from the toilet is poking into the air at Jack. Moving towards him, bewildering him, shaking his confidence just when he thought he could dance. Just when he was slipping some new expression into his rented routine. Jack thinks that ginger bloke is laughing at him, pushing hands towards him, mocking him. He tries to copy ginger bloke’s moves, mirroring to make himself less vulnerable. Ginger bloke seems to like this. His eyes sparkle and he exaggerates his dance: hands all over the shop, like an orangutan doing kung fu. Jack keeps copying, really loving it, realizing that ginger bloke was being nice all along. Not laughing at him; dancing at him. Friendship floats between them, Jack can feel it. Like he feels the strobe lights in his hair.
He spends two hours at this elevation. In this state of elation. Buoyant in a world populated by dancing strangers, who are no longer strange. With his friends Chris, and Steve the mechanic, and ginger bloke, and girl with flares, and other girl with blue highlights and a vest that looks like fish scales. There are others too who may not quite be friends, but must at least be acquaintances because they dance nearby.
They all clap and cheer when the music finally stops, and by the power of their collective will they force the DJ to play two more tunes. It is generally concluded that these are the best tracks of the night. And Jack is happy to agree with ginger bloke, that the evening has been: ‘Well pucker.’
‘Listen, mate,’ ginger bloke goes on, shielding his eyes from the sudden rise of the house lights. ‘I’m mates with the organizer, and there’s going to be a massive after party. You gonna come?’
‘I’m with my other mates,’ Jack says, thumbing behind him to where Chris and Steve the mechanic have got an arm around each another.
‘Bring ‘em, man, bring ‘em all. Look, I’ll give you a wodge of tickets, you’re all right you.’
From the back pocket of baggy trousers, he produces a stack of tickets like a TV gangster’s bill-fold. He peels off six and hands them to Jack.
‘If you need more come back to me, yeah,’ ginger bloke says. ‘I’m s’posed to have given ‘em all out anyway.’
He saunters off into the thick of dazed clubbers, to distribute more tickets among the hardcore, some of whom are still dancing, oblivious to the fact that the music has died.
Chris is chuffed with the news of the party. He takes two tickets from Jack, and sets about finding a female who might be receptive to a last-minute panic chat-up. Steve the mechanic tells Jack that Michelle is still inside. And leads him to where she and Claire are sat, on a section of dark velvet sofa that runs a whole wall.
Claire and Steve the mechanic move to a table a few feet away, leaving Jack standing in front of Michelle.
‘You can sit down, Jack.’ She says, ‘I’m not in a mard with you.’
Jack places himself beside her. His legs still want to move, but he’s fighting it.
Michelle laughs. ‘Look at your jaw going,’ she says. ‘You’re gerning all over the place. I’m the idiot for not seeing it.’
‘I’ve got tickets for a party,’ Jack says. ‘Do you want to come?’
Michelle shakes her head. ‘I want to spend time with you, Jack. But not now. Not when you’re like this.’
‘But I’m all right, I feel great.’
‘I bet you do, Jack, I bet you do. And you love me and the sex would be fantastic and you’d think that we have everything in common. But none of it would mean anything. You go to your party, Jack. I’ll see you Monday.’ She gets up, and with the palm of her hand wipes his sweaty forehead, and then she kisses it. Just once she kisses it, but she holds the kiss for a second or two, before she goes to get Claire. Jack touches the spot, sure it is glowing. He tries to remember the last time anyone kissed him, but can’t.
‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ a bouncer asks.
Jack has got a home. Even better is the fact that he’s not going to it. He rejoins Steve the mechanic, and the two of them set off to find Chris, before the bouncers lose their patience.
A beige Nissan Sunny gypsy-cab drops them at the site of what the tickets describe as an ‘After Hours Extravaganza’. They are still just three; unable to locate others from work to share their fortune, or women without a better offer. Their location is just a house, albeit huge. It’s in a wide leafy grove, an inner-city suburbia.
The two brawny black guys at the door are not as fussed about the tickets as they are about a ‘contribution to security’. Steve the mechanic is informed that security is more expensive than he obviously thought, and asked to donate again.
Chris leads them about from room to room, too quickly for Jack to take in as much as he wants. There are beers in the bathtub, so they grab one each, and queens in the kitchen, out of which Chris whisks them, almost as soon as they step in, with a mumbled: ‘Let’s check upstairs.’
Upstairs is not much cop. Bedrooms are either locked, or flocked with sitting, spliffing student types. Jack has no wish to be around more drugs, and to his relief his friends don’t seem to fancy it either. The lengthy lounge is a dance-floor, but all three of them agree that the time for dancing has passed. Even Jack’s virginal rushes have slowed to a lingering, easy pleasure; and the lounge is too packed anyway.
The dining room is home to DJs and decks, but through it, and out of a set of bright white plastic patio doors, they discover the garden. The night is still balmy; positively un-British, but the garden is green and pleasant.
There are fewer people out here, most of them sitting or lying on rugs or the lawn. A dreadlocked white bloke is breaking up wood from a stack of pallets to feed the fire.
‘I know where you could get a fiver a piece for them pallets,’ Chris tells Jack.
The fire is in a side-turned shopping trolley raised on bricks. It and the pallets look out of place in the neatly kept garden. There are dark trees and a board fence at the end. Someone’s taking a piss down there. Everyone else is near the fire, many are not even talking, just staring into the flames.
The three of them sit down on a free patch of grass, in the vague circle around the fire. The beer Jack sips feels like a blanket. The can is comforting to the touch and the brew warms him.
‘I’m going to try a few lines with that lass over there.’ Chris nods in the direction of a blonde elf, sitting on her own.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in chat-up lines, oh great master,’ Steve the mechanic says.
‘This is different, not chat-up; foreploy.’
‘Foreploy?’
‘The plan that gets you into foreplay. Look and learn, boys. Look and learn.’
Chris gets up and, with Apache stealth, makes his way around the rear of the ring. He says something to the girl that Jack can’t hear, but she smiles and says something back and Chris sits down.
‘I can’t bear to watch,’ says Steve the mechanic. ‘I’m going to get another tin, d’you want one?’
‘Cheers,’ Jack says.
The pill must have increased his tolerance, he thinks. He can’t even begin to work out how many drinks he’s had tonight, but he feels all right on it. More sober now than he was when he went into the club. What time is it anyway? It’s too late to ask Steve the mechanic. He’s nearly inside.
Chris looks as though he’s doing all right. He’s lying back on one elbow and the girl’s laughing a lot. Jack is at
once envious that Chris can have such an easy way with people, and proud to be his friend.
Two guys come out through the patio doors together, forcing Steve the mechanic to take a step back and wait for them to pass. They don’t acknowledge him. They both wear hugely baggy jeans, crotches hanging almost to their knees. It’s supposed to be a prison thing, where trouser distribution is haphazard, and the screws won’t let you have belts. Jack doubts these two have been inside, though. Clothes that don’t fit mean you have no respect. No one would advertise that.
There’s something about the way the two guys walk so directly to Chris and the elf-girl that straightens Jack’s back. Brings his thoughts to the moment. One of them, with a shaven scalp, says something to the girl, and she shakes her head. Then he says something to Chris, who just shrugs. The guy kicks out the arm that Chris is leaning on, so that he falls on his side.
Jack feels his balls being winched up close to his body, and his hair prickle upright.
Chris gets up as well. Leave it, Jack thinks. Please let him leave it.
It looks as though he’s going to. Chris starts to walk away. But then the shaven-headed guy grabs the girl by her arm, tries to pull her to her feet. She yelps. Chris turns around. Jack stops breathing. The shaven-headed guy drops the arm and takes a step so that he’s toe to toe with Chris. He’s shouting. Or the adrenalin’s pumping to Jack’s ears.
‘Do you not get it? Piss off, is basically what I’m saying!’ There’s a vein standing out on shaven-head’s neck.
Come on, Steve, how long’s it take to get a beer? Jack thinks. He doesn’t need this, he can’t afford this; where the fuck’s Steve the mechanic?
Chris doesn’t reply to the man, but he doesn’t back away either. Jack can see that there’s really nothing between the two of them in height. The girl pushes herself away with her hands. It’s OK, Jack thinks; if it’s an even fight I don’t need to get involved. He’s got the impression that Chris would be able to handle himself. But maybe that’s the impression Chris wants people to get. It doesn’t necessarily mean a lot.
‘Piss off!’ the shaven-headed guy shouts.
‘Fuck it, you warned him.’ The other guy punches Chris on the side of his head, connecting on the ‘f’ of ‘fuck’.
Totally blind to the blow, Chris is dropped like a sack of charcoal on a garage forecourt.
Jack is looking round, but there’s no sign of Steve the mechanic and no one else looks like intervening. ‘Let that be it. Let it be over.’
But the shaven-headed guy kicks Chris twice in the stomach, and his friend is lifting a foot to stamp on his head.
‘No!’
Jack is not fickle. He’s had few friends in his life, and he won’t watch his friend’s face get stamped on. He’s on his feet in an instant.
Jack is not clumsy. He closes the distance fast, dodging between people. He launches himself over a brace of sleeping hippies. And lands on his feet, still in stride.
Jack is not big. He’s skinny in fact, by nature. But weightlifting in prison has put dense muscle on his light bones. His momentum carries him straight into the shaven-headed guy. He ducks his shoulder and uses the force of the impact to stay on his feet. Not expecting the collision, shaven-head is knocked to the floor, landing in a tangle on the girl.
Jack is not a fighter. But he’s been in enough fights to know how to take a punch. As the second guy swings, he steps forwards, inside the blow. It barely catches him, glances the side of his head. He steps in further and locks his hands together, behind the man’s neck.
Jack is not dirty. But he fights dirty. Fighting is dirty. Distinctions are made by people who haven’t had to fight. Jack head-butts, grunting as he does so, face tight with the effort. He feels something crunch under his forehead. The man tries to hit back, but he can only reach the back of Jack’s head, and knocks him into his own nose again. Jack sees a blur of red in front of him. He doesn’t know if it’s blood or adrenalin. He butts the man again anyway. And again before he’s recovered. The man tries to pull him off, but Jack just keeps slamming his head forwards into the same spot. His head hurts and his neck hurts. But it isn’t him that’s squealing.
‘Jack, leave it!’ Steve the mechanic pulls them apart. The man drops to the floor when Jack lets go of him. He’s got blood all over his face. Jack has too.
The other guy, shaven-head, is lying on his back.
‘Steve smacked him with a tin of Stella,’ Chris says. The can is nestled in the grass, gently fizzing from its side. Chris is on his feet, holding his stomach.
Some people are staring at them. Other people are staring anywhere but at them. Jack wipes his face on his shirt. Trembling like old age.
‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ says Steve the mechanic.
He and Chris start running for the end of the garden. On auto-pilot Jack follows them. He’s faster, they all jump on to the fence at more or less the same time. It collapses under their weight, sprawling them down into an alley. They can’t see anyone following them, but they leg it anyway. They don’t stop until they’re almost knocked down by a cruising mini-cab driver. Who eyes Jack’s red-stained shirt, but is willing to take them for twenty quid upfront.
‘What the bloody hell have you lot been up to?’ the driver asks, when they’re in the back.
‘You should have seen the other fellas,’ says Chris. Him and Steve the mechanic laugh with the safety.
Jack does not laugh. Jack feels his whole world crumbling around his ears; sees the prison gates opening up in front of him – reaching out for him, like the long sticky tongue of a frog. Of a filthy, gloating, wide-mouthed frog.
‘Come on, Bruiser.’ Chris puts his arm round him. ‘You should be on top of the world. You’re a hero, son. A proper hero. It’s just the come-down making you feel crap.’
‘Yeah, I reckon it’s time for bed,’ Steve the mechanic says. ‘We’ll drop you off first, heh, Bruiser. What a night. What a fucking night.’
H is for Home.
Home Help.
The screw that brought A back from the infirmary took him to a new cell, on a different landing, a different wing. It looked just the same as the old one, although the door was painted in a primary-school yellow. The screw told him he was now in cell 17, threes, Kestrel wing. His new pad-mate was called Hacendado-563.
‘Cheers, sir,’ said Hacendado to the screw, when he saw A. ‘Twoing me up with Quasimodo. Thanks for that one.’
A knew he looked a state. His face was purple, his lips busted and swollen, one of his eyes sealed shut, the good one blackened and bloodshot.
‘Sorry,’ he said to his new pad-mate.
Hacendado looked at A, and raised a dark eyebrow.
‘Sorry is a large word, my friend; and apologizing to someone you don’t know looks weak.’
‘I’ll leave him for instruction in your capable hands then, Hacendado,’ said the screw. ‘He’s fresh in, first timer.’ And he locked the door.
A stood, holding his bed-pack, all he had: two blankets; two T-shirts; two jeans; two jumpers; two pants; two socks; one jacket; one sheet; one pillowcase; one shoes; one toothbrush; one toothpaste; one razor; one soap; one shaving brush; one comb; and one property card to list the above.
Hacendado chipped himself slickly on to the top bunk and turned on his radio. A walked to the lower bed and sat down on it, still holding his bundle. With his tongue he felt the raw gap where his front teeth had been. He could have done with a dump, but the toilet was at the end of the bed, in plain view. Unsure of etiquette he thought it better to wait.
The lights went out before he had moved or spoken.
During the ten days that he’d spent in reception A had heard the nightly chorus of conversation from remote windows. Isolated down in the lowest coldest cells. Locked up alone for twenty-three hours a day, he had longed for this human contact. Voices, too faint to hear the words, spoke to him of solidarity. And singing, there was often singing, he could make out nursery rhymes. T
hough he feared what Feltham was going to fling, A was sure that he’d be better off up on a wing. In a paired cell where the shared hell could be halved. But his first pad-mate had nearly killed him, and his new one was ignoring him. When the voices started A began to believe that there was no amity left in the world.
Suck your mum. Fuck you. Batty boy. Batter you. Fucking kill yous. Sing you shit. Arren sucks screws. Baa baa black sheep. Window warriors. You’ll be sorry. Quarter in the morning or I break your fucking arm. Bitch had a rape alarm. Fresh Fish threes 17. Eighteen. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. Stop when I say so. Lay low. Tomorrow Jethrow. Kenny says he’ll chivvy your throat. Your mum’s so fat, so ugly, so broke. Your mum fucks old bald Pakis. Gives hand jobs outside Stakis. I’m a soldier. One for the master and one for the dame. You ain’t getting no older. Cut you a slash like a gash. Like your mum’s. One for the little boy who lives down the lane. Sing it again, bitch. Again.
A could hardly believe what he was hearing. Threats and insults and bullying and bragging aggressed his ears. Some messages echoed as they passed along whole wings of barred windows. Some were aimed close to home. Live and direct. Live and kicking.
‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, open your window,’ someone shouted.
‘That’s you,’ Hacendado said from above.
‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, come to your fucking window.’
‘Open the window, Fresh Fish.’ this time it sounds real close, like the pad next door.
‘You’d better go.’ Hacendado said impassively, ‘They won’t let up until you do. You might as well go right away and not look scared.’
A was scared. But he put down his bundle, got up, and trod the four steps to the wire-crossed pane of glass.
‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, open your fucking window.’
‘Wait till I’m under the blanket before you open it,’ Hacendado said. ‘It’s gonna be cold out there.’
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