by Sonia Paige
‘When you start behaving like one.’ The door closes and the key turns.
They look at their paper plates but no-one starts eating. Mandy puts mine on the bedside cupboard where I can’t see it.
‘Lippy bloody kangas,’ she says.
‘Kangas?’ I ask.
‘Kangaroos, screws,’ says Debs, ‘They’re bastards either way.’
Later, when the cell is dark, I start to remember what happened before I was arrested. I wish I didn’t. I remember someone saying, ‘You endangered life.’ I remember someone telling me that it was only down to chance that no-one was seriously hurt. I remember realizing that I’d blown my relationship with my lover for ever.
And I remember the water, always the water. Water everywhere. The flood, washing away my hopes.
In the storm light from the yard I can see Debs’ untouched meal sitting on the low cupboard beside her bed. Her blankets are twitching and knotting.
‘Settle down, babe,’ says Mandy.
From under the covers Debs moans, ‘It’s like insects are crawling on my skin.’
I hear footsteps stop in the corridor. Outside in the street, a police siren drives past the prison. Beverly’s breathing is thick as she sleeps. In the bed next to mine, Mandy is lying propped up on her elbow. She seems to be using the light from the yard to write something on a piece of paper.
I slide myself down onto the floor beside my bed, and sit staring at the wall in the gloom. I can make out the graffiti, and the number one that Mandy has written above them. Every so often my body judders. I pick up the blue felt tip pen and below where it says ‘I love Tracey’ I draw a circle. I can’t get it very regular. Peering through the semi-dark, I make a series of lines radiating out from it. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Then I start near the middle and join up the lines as best I can. It all seems to wave and wobble, but I manage to keep going round and round. Until I have drawn a spider’s web.
2
Dirty Sentences
Monday 17th December 1990 5.45 am
‘Help!’ one of Anthea’s plump arms flailed out from under the duvet and sent her bedside lamp flying. ‘Help! No!’ the hand reached out as if pushing something away, and capsized the small bedside table. A book, The Greeks and the Irrational, fell off and landed face down on the painted floorboards, its pages buckled underneath. Around it fell a scattering of small objects: a tube of handcream, a halfeaten bag of cashew nuts, a torch, a packet of kirbigrips and a dark red pebble with a hole through it. ‘Help!’ Anthea shrieked again and emerged fighting off the duvet.
‘What’s up, Doc?’ Morton switched on the lamp at his side of the bed and sat up, blinking. ‘Are you OK?’
‘It happened again… ’ Anthea stared around the room as if she didn’t recognize it. ‘I was there again…’
‘You’re here, you’re here with me now.’ He cupped her chin in his thin hand and smoothed the frizzy red hair which radiated from her head like an electric shock. ‘You’re safe. Go back to sleep.’
She did as she was told. ‘Sleep,’ she repeated without expression. ‘Sleep.’ She shut her eyes, slid back under the duvet, and was silent.
Morton sat in the lamplight in his pyjamas. His deep-set eyes watched her mountainous contours swathed in white as they settled into stillness. Then he looked at his alarm clock and cleared his throat. He picked up a sheet of paper from the bedside and re-read a paragraph he had written:
‘In European tradition, the earliest medium of narrative was the voice. The verses of Homer were composed and sung by many storytellers over hundreds of years in the Aegean area before they were written down. Prior to the rediscovery of literacy, they were created and recreated by word of mouth. Sung to people who had no books. As Angela Carter put it in 1987: “the voice is the first instrument of literature.”’
He looked up and watched a spider edge its way along the wainscot, a large spider with thick hairy legs. It promenaded across the cream-painted floorboards and climbed over some tulip petals dropped from a vase on top of the bookcase. It circled round a pink and red striped sock which had fallen from the radiator. It stopped. Morton looked back at his page and a flicker of thinking passed across his boyish face. He reached out to the bedside table for his Parker ballpoint pen, and picked up a book, Luis Buñuel. A Critical Biography. He rested his paper on it and wrote:
‘All ancient Greek literature now carries the tang of snobbery, reflecting the élitism of those educations that encompass the classics. It is hard for us to imagine that Homer was not only the Shakespeare of the first Greeks but also their East Enders. The characters were familiar to most people, even to those on the underside of the rich/poor divide. Storytelling is free.’
He turned to Anthea. The bedside lamp showed the mass of curly red hair fallen over her face. It trembled when she breathed out and every so often she snored quietly. Her face, barely lined, seemed peaceful.
The central heating boiler switched itself on with a thump in the kitchen below. Morton looked up. On top of the radiator was the other pink and red striped sock, with some glittery threads in the pink stripes. Next to the sock a pair of white knickers. Pinned to the wall above the radiator was a Biff cartoon with a line drawing of a man at a restaurant table telling a woman, ‘I’d like to go on about myself at great length if that’s okay’. At the bottom was added in handwriting, ‘To my loquacious lover, Happy Birthday, from Ant’ followed by a string of kisses. Beside the radiator a heavy brown velvet curtain shut out the early morning darkness, and behind it the window fidgeted in the wind.
Morton looked at the clock: it said 6.13 am. He looked back at his page and his pen created a trail of elegant italics in neat rows, even without ruled lines to guide it:
‘Generations of scholars have pictured those early Greek people listening to tales crowded around the smoky hearths in the draughty halls of the small-time local leaders, the wealthy “squires” in those settlements that grew on the hillsides of Early Iron Age Greece as it emerged from the “dark age.” They have envisaged the rhapsodes, like travelling minstrels, singing the myths and exploits of men like Agamemnon, Hector and Odysseus, the heroes of an idealized past set in the Bronze Age. The poems themselves describe such bards, singing for their supper: we can see Demodocus leaning, with his lyre, against a pillar in the high-roofed hall of King Alcinous while he performed for the banqueters.’
The spider had circled a pair of furry slippers and was struggling to surmount the peaks and crevasses of a crumpled black skirt lying on the floor. Morton put his pen, paper and book down by the bedside and got out of bed. He drew the curtain half open and eased the sash window up a few inches. Raw Hackney air sliced into the room. He squatted and waited his opportunity to catch the spider, encircling it in his two hands. Then he placed it carefully on the sill outside and shut the window. He collected the sock from the floor and lined it up across the top of the radiator next to its pair.
He walked round to Anthea’s side of the bed, righted the small table and put the bedside lamp back in place. He picked up the capsized book. It was open at the first page with the Classical Library’s label pasted in. He looked at the date stamp; it was overdue. He smoothed the pages, closed it and put it on a pile of books on the floor topped by a paperback Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation. He shook his head and tidied up the cashew nuts and the other fallen objects. Turning back, he saw Anthea’s pale feet sticking out of the bottom of the duvet. He pulled it down to cover them and gave them a pat. Then he got back into bed and picked up his pen:
‘And in the Homeric poems the professional minstrels are not the only oral storytellers. Odysseus himself tells King Alcinous’ court the saga of his journey home from Troy: about the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe and his other fantastic adventures. At another dinner table King Menelaos tells the assembled gathering about his brush with the shapechanging sea-god Proteus on the shores of Egypt, in the course of which Proteus also launches into a story of his own. Everyone can tel
l a tale. Stories nested within stories, all oral.’
Anthea twitched in her sleep, then her body shuddered. ‘No!’ she said loudly. Then, almost a shriek, ‘No!!’ She yanked the duvet round her as if she was hiding from something and rolled away from him. Morton’s sheet of paper and the book underneath it fell into a valley. He tried to extricate them but Anthea rolled back with some unintelligible words, sealing the entrance. Morton gave up. The clock said 6.37 am. He put the top back onto his pen, laid it on the bedside table and switched the lamp off. Then he pulled on the edge of the duvet and slid underneath it towards Anthea. He folded his arm around her warm shoulders and shut his eyes.
The room was left to its quiet early morning noises. The window rattled. From the kitchen below came a dull thudding as the dog scratched herself, banging against the cupboard door. The central heating boiler switched off and made a sucking sound. Morton stirred in his sleep. For a few moments the bed was still. Then Anthea spoke again, ‘Help me!’ Her eyes opened and she stared at Morton’s sleeping face as if she did not recognise it. She slid out from under his arm. He twitched without opening his eyes and rolled back the other way.
She reached for the torch on her bedside table, climbed out of bed and found her furry slippers. She crept to a chest of drawers on the other side of the room. From the bottom drawer she took a small wicker box; inside it were some pieces of bone. She took out a small fragment about three inches long. It had an irregular diagonal break across the top, and at the other end it had a neat edge like a knife cut. On the outside it had a smooth, cream-coloured surface with a series of lines ingrained along it. She tried to clean it with the nail of her little finger; it made a grating sound. She turned it over in the palm of her hand. The inner surface resembled a sponge turned into stone: irregular, porous. Like the inside of marrow when the pips have been removed, it had viscous threads running along it, but these too were petrified. In one of the pockmarks was a tiny bit of soil.
Anthea cupped the bone in her two hands. ‘I’m listening,’ she whispered. ‘What is it you’re trying to tell me?’
Monday 17th December 7.25 am
A sluggish light through the narrow prison windows tells me it is the beginning of another December day. My second day in prison.
The headache is still banging and my clothes are sweaty. My body feels as if it has been infused in a toxic pool. The other women are still asleep. I negotiate getting out of bed. I put a hand on the bed to steady myself: the cream cell walls are spinning around me. The toilet behind the wall next to my bed is doorless. Must be so that staff can check on prisoners through the hatch in the door. Stop them from shooting up, or hanging themselves. I guess the possibility we might die of embarrassment is not a consideration. Luckily the hatch is closed and there is no eye pressed to the door at this moment. I hobble back to my bed, pull my watch out of my bag and sit on the floor beside my bed. I gasp for breath. Confused images whirl in my mind. I stare at the graffiti. ‘I love Tracey.’ Who is Tracey?
A woman down the corridor starts banging on her cell door. ‘Nurse! Nurse! I want to see a nurse!’ Bang. Pause. ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ Bang bang bang. A longer pause. ‘You fuckers! Fuckers!’ Bang. ‘Where’s the bloody nurses? I need a bloody nurse!’ Bang bang.
From her bed Beverly groans.
Mandy stirs and looks out over her sheet. ‘It’s going to be one of them days.’
Debs sits up, shivers and looks around. ‘Why don’t someone see to her?’
Mandy pulls a face. ‘“I want never gets.”’
I am still sitting on the floor facing the wall. In my hand I have the pale blue felt tip pen. I start drawing another spider’s web on the wall.
From down the corridor the sounds continue: ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Bang bang bang.
‘Go on then, Karina,’ Debs says to me. ‘You’re awake. Take our minds off it.’
‘She’ll keep this up for hours now,’ says Mandy. ‘You OK, Bev?’
From under the covers comes: ‘Just let me sleep. There ain’t nothing to wake up for.’
‘Go on?’ I say.
Mandy gets out of the next door bed in her clothes and climbs over my bed to look. ‘What you doing? What’s with the webs?’
I can’t answer that. I drop the pen and slump back against the bed.
‘Where’s the spider?’ asks Mandy.
No spider. Just webs, stifling me. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘Spider doesn’t know where it is.’
‘Great,’ says Mandy. She picks up the pen from the floor and writes the number two on the wall, adding the circle round it with a flourish. ‘Day Two, you’re still alive,’ she says. ‘So did you or didn’t you?’
‘What?’ I say. Perhaps if I keep staring at the wall, the last few days will come back to me.
‘The Greek boy. He wanted you to give him your body. Did you?’ Mandy goes back to bed and pulls the bedclothes around her.
‘Oh, that.’ I climb back onto my bed. I have been hoping they might forget. ‘No. I fought him off. He didn’t fight very hard, it was a kind of ritual. I knew it from my time in Athens. Their honour required that they make an attempt. But they didn’t really hope to succeed.’
Lefteris. He was a nice boy. I wonder who he is touching now. So many paths not taken, refusing happiness again and again. Twisted roads leading to here. And now I’ve lost another chance, it slipped through my fingers… No, I wrecked it myself. When I’m offered love, I turn away. I’m not happy enough to find happiness. Who said that?
‘So what did he do then?’ asks Debs.
‘Who?’
‘The Greek boy. After you blew him out.’
‘Lefteris? He took defeat in good spirit,’ I say. ‘We walked back down to the village. On the outskirts, by the cemetery, we passed an older woman dressed all in black. He greeted her and they chatted in Greek. I could see her looking me over from the corner of her eye. Then she went into the graveyard.’
That was a strange encounter. I didn’t understand it. Perhaps we are doomed to keep re-telling what we don’t understand until we can make sense of it.
‘I asked Lefteris who the woman was.
‘“My aunt,” he said. “She goes every day to talk to her daughter.”
‘I looked round to see the daughter.
‘“Her daughter, she died,” he explained. “Before five years. Now there is only bones. After some years, we dig the bones, we wash them and keep them.” He gestured towards his aunt, who I could see sitting in the graveyard, rocking to and fro, making a low moaning sound.
‘“Her daughter was very beautiful,” he said. “She was ill and then her thread was cut. You understand me?” He made a gesture of scissors cutting. Then he stretched his hands down in a gesture of helpless despair. “The people here say: Meera tees. Her fate. The Fates.”
‘I knew about the Fates from Greek myths. Spinning people’s lives and cutting them.
‘“She was my cousin,” he said. “Very beautiful.”
‘“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘“You look a little something like her,” he said. He scrutinized my face. “But not the hairs, no.” He reached out and spread my hair over my shoulders, stroking it. It was long at the time and very blond.’
‘Out of a bottle?’ asks Debs.
I shake my head. ‘I never had to.’
‘Unlike some,’ says Debs, eyeballing Mandy.
Mandy ignores her. ‘Go on,’ she says.
‘Lefteris said, “Since then every day my aunt…” Then he stopped, took my hand and pulled me away. “We are alive,” he said and gave that smile again. It made the scar on his left cheek crinkle up.
‘That evening we went to the pictures. An outdoor cinema with upright wooden chairs, and lizards crawling on the screen. The film was Doctor Doolitle so a few more animals didn’t matter. They sold sugar-crusted almonds in little bags instead of popcorn. I can’t remember much of the film.’
‘Too busy
snogging, I bet,’ says Debs from her bed opposite.
‘Not much. It was a public place so he held back. The Greeks are strict like that. It’s just that the movie wasn’t worth remembering. The night sky was more interesting. A dome of diamonds in blue velvet. A lid of warm air pressing down on us. The sounds of the evening streets around the cinema. Friends calling to each other through the dusk. I held Lefteris’ hand and afterwards he kissed me goodnight. Very polite.’
‘No action there, then,’ says Debs.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Afraid not.
‘The next day he took me to meet his family. They all lived in one house. Lefteris’ grandfather was still working the land, the family had a plot at the far end of the beach. The grandfather kept a donkey in the field behind the house. His handshake was brusque, the skin on his palms was rough. Lefteris’ grandmother was crotcheting with a tiny hook and the finest thread. Her hands moved regularly like the inside of a clock. Beside her sat the widowed aunt dressed in black, the one we had seen at the cemetery. She watched everything from her hollowed-out eyes. On the table was a bowl full of crimson red hard-boiled eggs; Lefteris explained they were for Easter.
‘His dad had a shop on the harbour which sold a little of everything including tickets for the shipping line. He was suave and hospitable as he poured the home-made wine. Two younger sisters hovered shyly at the edge of the room. Apparently Lefteris was the first ever in the family to go to university, he was the apple of his mother’s eye. She was a heavy woman in a dark patterned summer dress. She had huge breasts, they looked like they were built for mothering. Unlike mine.’
‘Yeah,’ says Debs, ‘I ain’t being personal, but there’s not much going for you in that department.’
‘Don’t mind Debs,’ says Mandy. ‘So what did his mum do?’
‘She kept her eyes on me while I nibbled politely at the olives and nuts, as if she was deciding whether I would pass some kind of test. I wondered if she thought my blue cotton dress a bit shabby, or its skirt a bit short. Her first question sounded aggressive, and she made Lefteris translate: “Where is your mother?”