by Jane Jago
‘I never put you onto him.’
‘I’ve signed him up. Starting price of a million . . . Been wearing him down for weeks. His wife’s just had a stroke and he needs to be nearer the hospital.’ Liam’s mouth fell open. How he hated and feared the likes of Colin, soulless bastards, ever ready to prey upon any human weakness.
Colin looked at his watch. ‘Tell Paul to leave the keys for Sheffield Drive on my desk.’
‘Tell him yourself,’ said Liam, selecting property sheets from a file drawer and placing them in a folder for his one o’clock client.
‘I can’t. I’m meeting a rugby mate for lunch – up from Wentworthville for the day.’
Liam looked up.
‘That’s right,’ said Colin. ‘Wentworthville’s not far from your old stomping ground, is it? What school did you go to again?’
‘Meredith Smith-Baxter College.’
Colin sneered. ‘Don’t suppose they played rugby there.’
‘I don’t know. I only came in year twelve. I did correspondence before that.’ Dark patches of perspiration appeared at the underarms of Liam’s brown shirt.
‘Religious weirdoes, were they?’
‘Who?’ snapped Liam.
‘Your parents.’
Liam transcribed several numbers from his desk blotter into his appointments diary. ‘My dad was a surveyor with a mining company. We moved around a lot.’
‘A drunken surveyor?’
Liam’s eyes flashed with anger. Catherine must have told him that. Why did she always feel obliged to make excuses for the fact that he didn’t drink? He stood up and tapped the folder of documents against the desk. Colin was still leaning on the partition barring the doorway.
‘Colin, would you mind just fucking off?’ Liam looked him directly in the eye. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
‘Wooh-hoo-hoo! Well, fuck me!’ Colin drummed his fingers heavily on the partition and pointed theatrically at Liam. ‘Don’t get too competitive – we’re all on the same team here. Remember that.’
Liam made a show of calmly collecting his mobile phone and his keys from his desk. Internally, his pulse raced as he recovered from the physical effects of standing up to Colin. ‘I need those keys by two o’clock,’ said Colin, as he retreated from the cubicle.
Liam, 2001
Meredith Smith-Baxter College had been unknown and frightening territory, a progressive school, based on the Montessori method, a senior college for years eleven and twelve only – Liam had been thankful for that. Low-rise modern buildings arranged in a square that opened onto a central courtyard, surrounded by nine and a half acres of landscaped gardens and recreation areas. There was even an organic ‘mini-farm’ and a saltwater swimming-pool.
At first Liam had felt a measure of contempt for the other students, with their privileged backgrounds and charmed lives. As he observed their self-confidence, freely expressing an opinion and counter-opinion on everything, he began to see for the first time the deficits in his upbringing. In the presence of offspring who were wanted and cherished, he felt more alienated and miserable than ever.
He missed the predictability of the secure unit, where his situation was known to a core group of sympathetic professionals. His exclusion from this new world of happy young people was more than self-imposed and he felt as though he were on the wrong side of an invisible screen.
Despite the armoury of medication he was taking, depression soon took hold. His parole officer, whom he saw weekly at the boarding house where he was accommodated, hinted that it might eventually be possible to arrange a meeting with his mother. The suggestion, meant to lift his spirits and give him something to hope for, stimulated an even deeper anxiety.
One morning the headmistress pulled Liam aside and asked him into her office for a ‘chat’. As they sat opposite each other, Liam wondered what he might have done.
The headmistress smiled warmly. ‘Things get very busy in a school like this and I have to apologize for not touching base sooner. It’s quite an adjustment to change schools, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And in your situation, your history makes it so much harder to relax and be yourself.’ Liam rubbed his eye nervously. What did she mean by his history? And his situation? Was she talking about the history the school had been provided with or something else?
‘It’s okay, I know all about your circumstances.’
Liam’s pupils dilated and his head felt light.
The headmistress smiled again. ‘It’s all right. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Many years ago, when he was around your age, my younger brother was also involved in a car theft.’
Liam breathed a sigh of relief. ‘A car theft?’ he heard himself say out loud.
‘It wasn’t his idea, but he was involved. He was headstrong but not a bad kid. Anyway, he got the right support and turned himself around. I know how easily things can go pear-shaped in a young person’s life and how important it is to have people you can trust, people who believe in you, to get back on track.’
Liam nodded blankly.
‘It might help to remember that worse things have happened . . . I’m not saying that property crime is okay, of course, but at least no one got hurt.’
By the time Liam rejoined his communications class in the library, Ethan and Shona, his project partners, were busy drawing up a story board.
‘Check this out,’ said Ethan, unpacking a compact camcorder from its padded bag.
Shona used a protractor to draw dialogue boxes in the frames of the ruled grid. ‘So, what do we want to do? Any ideas, Liam?’
‘It’s a pretty broad concept,’ said Ethan. ‘Anything that fits into the theme of “a day in the life”.’
‘Whose life?’ Liam was having trouble catching up with the conversation.
Shona rolled her eyes. ‘That’s what we’re trying to work out.’
‘Does it have to be a real day? Like what really happened?’
Shona shrugged, ‘Nuh, could be entirely fictitious.’
‘Yeah, let’s do that – make something up,’ concluded Ethan, pushing a greasy dreadlock away from his face.
Liam picked up the camera and took off the lens cap. Shona looked up impatiently from her notes. ‘So, who’s our character, then?’
‘I don’t know but let’s give him something really dramatic. Maybe he’s done something really bad, committed a crime.’
‘We’ll have to film around here,’ said Shona, looking out of the full-length windows onto the central lawn.
‘What about a ticking clock, a countdown to something?’ added Ethan.
Shona looked at Liam ‘You’re not saying much.’
‘What’s he done?’
‘Who?’
‘The character, what’s he supposed to have done?’
‘Something really bad. Maybe he’s in jail already and got the death penalty.’
‘What for?’ asked Liam, hoarsely.
‘I dunno. Murdered somebody during a robbery?’
‘Did he mean to?’
‘Maybe.’
Ethan’s brain was processing the idea. ‘What if he’s already on Death Row and the clock is ticking down to his execution? My dad has this book about all these prisoners on Death Row, profiles on every person executed in Texas for the past ten years. Height, weight, age, level of education, a description of the last meal they ordered. We could use one of them.’
‘What did they eat?’ asked Liam.
‘Anything they wanted, usually crap, but as much as they liked.’
‘All You Can Eat, that’s what we’ll call it.’
‘Yeah. I’ll bring the book in tomorrow.’
True to his word, Ethan brought Farewell to Texas to school the following day. Liam was transfixed. Headshot after headshot of male malefactors. Arrested, charged, depressed and frightened, a clipboard on their chests, they looked born to kill and born to have their lives extinguished by a heartless state. Nobody smiled for the camera.
>
Profile number twenty-six. One Chester Lake, who appeared to be about fourteen years old, was just eighteen when he abducted his niece and strangled her because she had threatened to tell her parents he had molested her. ‘A double cheeseburger, French fries, apple pie and a Dr Pepper’: his last request. ‘I’m sorry’: his final words after more than twelve years on Death Row. Liam closed the book.
‘You all right, Liam?’ asked Shona. He tried to smile. ‘Maybe you can choose the subject and write up the basic facts of his story.’ He looked doubtful.
‘You can take the book home with you and bring it back on Wednesday,’ offered Ethan.
Liam found his accommodation at the boarding house an impersonal relief from the forced interaction at school. He felt reassured by the fixed mealtimes and looked forward to the privacy of his room. Tonight he was eating at his desk while he studied. He picked at his macaroni cheese and began to read some more profiles in Ethan’s book. After a while he imagined that he could see in their faces who was innocent and who was guilty. Over a small sample his intuition proved right, but the more profiles he perused the more his strike rate dropped. He read their stories, whom they had killed, their sordid motives, denials or admissions of guilt, their clumsy remorse and belated Christianity. The more he knew about each individual the less certain he became.
Birth dates, race and height, how long they had stayed in school. Some of the faces were painfully young. He identified with them all. Their final statements, spoken to those who gathered to witness their executions, were printed below their crimes. Quite a few apologized to the families of those they had killed and said that they hoped seeing them die would help them to find some sort of peace.
Liam felt a terrible keening sadness as he read the detailed descriptions of the last meal each had ordered. Many of the meals seemed very ordinary, as though the condemned man was trying to relive one normal or fondly remembered experience before his life was taken away. He noticed that those who appeared guilty and unrepentant ordered a long list of dishes, trying to extract some small bonus from a withholding world before they were eternally expelled from it. Most of those who proclaimed their innocence to the last wanted nothing except the symbolic meal of ‘peace, hope and justice’ ordered by one inmate.
Liam thought about his last meal. What would he order? Certainly not cold macaroni. If he were about to be put to death for his crimes, would he be able to raise the enthusiasm to conjure up a favourite meal? He wondered how many prisoners actually ate what was delivered to them. What happened to the contents of your stomach when you were electrocuted or given a lethal injection? When he had had his tonsils taken out in the secure unit he hadn’t been allowed to eat for a day beforehand because he might choke on his own vomit.
What interest could food hold in the hours before death? Maybe it was purely a distraction. He decided that his last meal would be a glass of water.
Liam chose profile number twenty-three, Eugene Williams, as the subject for the video production assignment story line. Eugene was twenty when he had entered a Stop and Go garage in Houston, Texas, armed with a .38-calibre pistol and demanded the contents of the till. He was convicted of capital murder after shooting James Leopold in the chest when the terrorized store attendant, also twenty, reached for something beneath the counter. Williams was arrested a few streets away, running from the scene. His last meal on earth was nachos and a red-pepper salad.
In his final statement he asked to be forgiven and for the death penalty to be fought. He also read a short poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye for his mother who attended the execution.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there: I did not die.
Liam was deeply moved by the poem. He ran his finger over the image on the page. Eugene Williams was a young white man, with a boyish face, who had taken a wrong turn. He was not a monster: he had killed a man, but he had not set out to do it and he had paid the ultimate penalty for his crime.
Ethan had been unable to convince Liam to play Eugene in the film. Although he participated fully in drafting the story of prisoner 4132, and helped film the kitchen scenes, neither Ethan nor Shona could persuade him to appear in front of the camera. Liam was immovable on the subject.
‘All you have to do is sit there, Liam.’
‘I can’t be in it.’
‘Can’t? You mean won’t.’
Liam felt desperate. If Ethan insisted on him being filmed he would have no choice but to cry ‘sick’ and not turn up. Ethan caught the pleading look in his eye and relented. ‘You really don’t want to do it?’
‘No.’
Ethan shook his head. ‘OK, but you’re going to have to get familiar with the camera.’
At the class screening, the students were even more animated than usual. Between each of the five seven-minute films, Mr Bradshaw allowed time for discussion. The first film was a montage of sequences of action, shot over the course of a day at the school, set to music. Time-lapse footage showed students arriving and rapidly filling the quadrangle. It was so good that it could easily have served as a promotional clip for the school.
Liam felt slightly depressed by the film, the sense of time passing so quickly and the rapid, seemingly meaningless movements of students around the school grounds. Catching a glimpse of himself among the crowd, in the CCTV-like footage, sent a stab of adrenalin through him.
The third film, All You Can Eat, was shot in black and white and opened with a frame on Ethan’s eyes staring blankly ahead. In the following scene he ran away from a service station while a police siren sounded. Once apprehended, Ethan looked hopelessly out through a car window as it pulled away. There followed an apparently unrelated sequence, shot in colour, of stove jets hissing and exploding into flame, ingredients being sliced and chopped and thrown into a sizzling pan. Scenes of food preparation were intercut with shots of a wall clock counting down from two thirty to three o’clock.
Finally the meal was assembled on a plate and placed on a tray.
At four o’clock the tray was placed heavily on a metal surface in Ethan’s ‘cell’.
The film ended abruptly with a mug shot of ‘Eugene’, a.k.a. Ethan, an outline of his personal details and crimes printed below with a description of his last meal.
The rest of the year at Meredith Smith-Baxter flew by. With his exams completed Liam was preparing to be relocated, once school was over, to a new area where he was to begin his adult life. The hot topic of conversation among the students was the school graduation dinner. At Shona’s suggestion Liam went to the Salvation Army store and found a near-new electric-blue suit that he matched with a black shirt and a lurid geometric-patterned tie. He had grown so tall in the previous six months that a series of raw-pink stretch marks had appeared, at odd intervals, on his back along the line of his spine.
His face, too, had changed, his features now somehow more in proportion to his lanky body. Admiring his suit in the wardrobe mirror, adjusting the lapels, buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket, he saw, as though from a great distance, that he could possibly be called handsome. Even his unruly dark hair, uncut for several weeks, had decided to behave itself.
At the venue Liam found himself seated at the end of a long table opposite Shona and her mother. Shona wore an extravagant black flamenco dress with a tiny red bolero. He could smell the soft-pink rose she wore behind her left ear. He looked away as she caught him staring at her, occupying himself by devouring several unidentifiable canapés from a nearby tray.
; Shona’s mother ordered a whisky from the drinks waiter and looked repeatedly in his direction, talking loudly to the woman on her left in a raspy voice that frequently broke down into husky laughter. ‘God, I’d kill for a cigarette,’ she said, turning to her daughter.
‘You can’t.’
‘I didn’t say I was going to . . . Do you smoke?’ she asked Liam.
He shook his head and swallowed another pastry.
‘Nobody does.’ She sighed. ‘And it’s a good thing. Stay smart and don’t touch them.’
‘Oh, Mum, leave him alone.’
‘I used to.’
Mrs Wilcox and Shona looked at him with renewed interest.
‘When I was a kid.’
‘I had my first cigarette when I was sixteen,’ confessed Mrs Wilcox. ‘My mother recommended them for keeping the weight down. She wanted me to be a dancer. Can you imagine? Stupid woman. She’d been smoking most of her life and it never kept her weight down, not until she got cancer and died.’
Liam looked across at Shona for some sort of cue. She laughed.
Before dinner each class of graduating students was called to the stage at the front of the room to be presented with their reports and references. When all sixty-four students were assembled onstage a professional photographer ushered them into rows of standing and seated to take a series of shots. Because of his height Liam was asked to stand in the centre of the back row, where he towered over the young men on either side.
‘Say “cheese”.’
‘Cheese!’ The photographer’s flash illuminated the smiling faces. Liam blinked, the white imprint of the photographic lamp hovering behind his closed eyelids.
‘Where is your family tonight?’ probed Mrs Wilcox, as plates of turkey breast and spinach ricotta pie arrived at the table.