by Ann Walmsley
To Deborah’s question, Dread provided another answer: “’Cause she’s being abused, she internalizes it and tries to blame herself and see ways that she could have made things better, when the fault is not with her.” He had a way of talking that was a rapid, run-on monotone, as though warding off interruption.
“I agree with him,” said Colin. “My parents were like that. And my mother was complacent toward the actions that my father was doing to her. Like she would just pretend things weren’t happening or try to change the topic and act like something else was happening. I see a lot of similarities to my mother and father’s relationship as I do with Paula and Charlo.”
“She was in a state of denial,” said Carol. “I mean, is there anybody here who hasn’t known about domestic abuse in their own family or in a family close to them?” From the response around the circle, domestic abuse was well-known to many.
“I was raised in an abusive home,” said Parvat, a new member with long hair and hooded eyes. “I read books about what to do and what not to do when I get into a relationship and have children.” So he’d tried self-help. And as I found out later he’d needed it because his experience was more traumatic than most. He told me his father had dangled him from the balcony by his feet when he was a young child because he had tried to prevent his father from hurting his mother. Parvat and his mother had lived in a shelter for victims of domestic abuse for a time.
“I salute you, Parvat,” said Carol in a maternal tone, referring to his self-help initiative.
Peter told the others that when he attended the family violence correctional program in prison, they said that one in nine women are abused. He was not happy about being in the program, saying his partner was bipolar and would throw things at him, then call the police when he walked out. In the program he was told that yelling back in an argument or walking away was abusive, advice that he was not sure he agreed with. Despite that view, Peter was keen to see more domestic abuse prevention. “I believe most abuse is learned,” he said. “If we could break the cycle.” The men suggested greater access to psychologists and psychiatrists.
“I think that you are enormously wise about your pasts and about how you move forward,” Carol said to all the men. If only Lillian-Rose and Ruth from our ladies’ book club could have been in the room to see how sensitively the men had navigated the issues in the book, I thought.
When I’d originally recommended the book, I’d forgotten how much sex it contained, as Paula recalls her first encounters as an adolescent. Correctional Service Canada prohibits pornography, but not sexual content, in prison materials. Stieg Larsson novels, for example, aren’t censored, despite the sexual violence. And The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was well within the rules. But I realized during the meeting that I was more comfortable talking about violence than sex with a roomful of male prisoners.
Before the meeting was over, Ben had one question about the sex. “There’s a statement he made about eating fries off her knickers,” he said hesitantly, seeming to want an explanation.
Dread said to Ben, “Why would you remember that?” Then he looked at Carol and said, “He’s disgusting, Miss.”
Everyone laughed.
Then Dread got the last word. “Your new name is Knicker Fries,” he said to Ben.
At coffee break, the men took time to write some responses to the women in the Toronto book club. One that stood out was the comment from Michael, who was serving time for his role in a drug trafficking operation. “The book captured the feeling of numbness abuse can have on a woman,” he wrote in non-cursive round letters. “Paula became a zombie by absorbing constant pain with little feeling. Her maternal instinct became her salvation.” He was talking about what finally gave Paula the courage to throw Charlo out of the house: the prospect that Charlo might turn his attentions to her daughter.
They also scribbled their questions to Roddy Doyle: Why did you write this novel? Did you witness this as you were growing up? Do you believe that abuse is learned and carried from generation to generation? Was holding back the abuse content of the book done for the purpose of maximizing the impact? (Doyle spends the first half of the book giving us Paula’s memories of her adolescence and early relationship with Charlo, and leaves the description of the abuse and alcoholism for the second half of the book.)
Parvat came up to me afterward. He was keen to tell me about the book he was reading to learn about how to better communicate with women. “It’s called The Five Love Languages,” he said. When I looked it up later, I saw that the author’s prescribed five ways to express love are gifts, quality time, physical touch, acts of service and words of affirmation. These were certainly good ways of forestalling an abusive relationship. But it also struck me that, except for physical touch, these were the graces that Carol was bestowing on the men. No wonder they respected her.
That evening, after a rough ferry crossing over choppy water, Carol and I went owl watching on Amherst Island. Snowy owls arrive on the island most winters in search of voles and I’d never seen one of these majestic birds, with their enormous white mass and exotic yellow eyes. We drove to the south shore of the island, past a flock of black-and-white bufflehead ducks bobbing in the shallows, where the lake was free of ice, and past a flock of snow buntings. And there, atop a telephone pole perched a bird that looked like an elongated marshmallow, with eyes the colour of Meyer lemon rind and a rounded head. It was a snowy. He tolerated us for a moment and then drew his wings up sharply, pushing off from the pole with feathered feet so massive they resembled paws. With slow-motion balletic strokes of his wings he pulsed the air and tilted into the woods. We took separate cars back to Carol’s, and I travelled alone along a side road at sundown where some short-eared owls swooped in spurts over a field, their pale, disc-like faces seemingly sewn on to their bodies. It seemed to me that Amherst Island was a wildlife sanctuary first, and a settlement of humans second. And predators were more visible than prey that day.
I cooked chicken for our dinner that evening, to which Carol had added a salad. I pointed out to her that she still had an ash mark on her forehead leftover from the Ash Wednesday mass she had attended earlier that day. She rubbed it away. That evening she told me that charitable donations were starting to come in as people honoured the pledges they’d made at the fundraiser. It came as a huge relief. She would be able to buy the books for the coming year.
The next morning I set off early from Carol’s for the prison to visit Ben. The sun seemed to rise with unusual speed that day, as though it were a school play where the stage crew had mishandled the hoist.
It was Ben’s last month in the book club. We would miss him terribly. He had noted down a few pages from The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, about how Charlo brainwashed Paula. He read to me from the part where Paula remembers Charlo telling her that she wasn’t fit to look after the children because of her alcoholism and stupidity. “He broke her down,” said Ben, looking up at me.
Then he read from another section in which Paula imagines running away, trying to wrest back control over her life. He was struck by Doyle’s description of how in Paula’s nighttime dreams she could never run away, how she couldn’t breathe or move. “That description, like wow. Just fighting something. You’re trying to sleep. You’re trying to not let it in, but you have no control over it.”
“The control issue makes me think about what it must feel like a little bit to be in here,” I said.
“That’s one of the worst things,” he said. “You might be in the yard and then you’re coming back in here. You know it’s a thing that you just have to do. It’s terrifying just to think about it. So you try not even to think about it.”
He would wrestle back some control in fifteen days, when his family would pick him up at the front gate of Collins Bay Institution and drive him to his halfway house. He had requested day parole in a Toronto halfway house near his aunt’s place. His girlfriend lived in the Toronto area, and had just put down a deposit on a loft u
nder construction north of the city. This time, the authorities were giving Ben a full month, not just seventy-two hours, to gather his financial records and present them to his parole officer.
I looked down at his journal again. On January 5, he made a note in his journal about reputation and that it was important. His own reputation in the prison, he told me, was as someone who’s quiet, who gets along with others and attracts others. I pointed out that he never reacted when Dread provoked him in book group. And I remembered how he didn’t respond angrily when the men ganged up on him about being institutionalized when we were reading War. Why did he put up with that? “No, I don’t succumb to nothing like that,” he replied. “I can’t, while I’m in this place. I should not basically say how I feel. Like, I still hold my feelings, but act nonchalant about that.”
The chaplain called, “Count,” and Ben had to leave. He would be in touch with Carol’s organization when he got out, he said. He would be taking all his book club books with him when he left.
“When you get out, do you see yourself reading on an e-reader?” I asked him. Some of the other men were interested in trying one.
“I’ll think about it. But I still want that good smell of a book and turning the pages. Even building your own little private library.”
“That’s great, Ben. That’s great.” We shook hands and he walked toward the door.
In a women’s book club on the outside, we’d probably have a festive send-off for a member who was moving away. Champagne, maybe, and certainly a card or present of a book. But at Collins Bay, men disappeared from book club abruptly, never to be seen again. Those stepping down to minimum usually told us. Others just evaporated. Some were deported and some wound up in solitary for a spell. One nearly died from a heroin overdose, we were told.
As Ben walked away from me, holding his journal, I wondered if he would be the book club member who would start a book club on the outside.
17
THE SUSPECTS
IT WAS THE SETTING MOON that woke me on March 14, its beam shining through the slats of our bedroom window shutters just before dawn. To be woken by the moon felt as though the earth had been bumped off its axis. When I sat up, my copy of William Boyd’s novel Ordinary Thunderstorms slid off the bed, reminding me that it was book club day at Beaver Creek. When the sun finally appeared, it marked the beginning of a record-breaking March heat wave that would bring hail and, yes, thunderstorms to Toronto and the areas just south of Beaver Creek.
Carol did not usually accompany me to the Beaver Creek Book Club, but this time she was planning to meet with prison officials to accelerate the launch of a book club at the adjacent medium-security prison, Fenbrook Institution. So she had scheduled that meeting to coincide with book club. As she sat in the passenger seat answering emails, her cellphone rang. It was an Anglican chaplain calling from Cowansville Institution, a federal prison in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. He had heard about the book clubs and wanted to start one in his prison. He was telling her that it would be an English-language book group—20 percent of the inmates spoke English only. She turned to me grinning widely and explained that this was the second call in a week from people wanting to start book clubs in federal prisons outside Ontario. The first call had been a former CSC employee wanting to start one in Stony Mountain Institution, the men’s medium-security prison in Manitoba where Graham had spent some time. Carol’s ambitions made her hungry to expand quickly, but her board was more cautious and asked her to make sure the funding would be in place before venturing out of province.
As we drove onto the Beaver Creek grounds two hours later, Carol fished her lipstick tube out of her purse and again expertly applied the colour without looking in a mirror. It was a trick that always made me laugh.
The next two books at Beaver Creek were mystery novels about criminal suspects in Britain and India. William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms was set in London in 2009, and Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects, an Agatha Christie–type mystery, was set in New Delhi in 2001. Both explored ideas of dramatic reversals of fortune and overturned stereotypes about class and criminality.
Ordinary Thunderstorms was the latest novel by Boyd, author of the Booker Prize–nominated An Ice-Cream War. Technically a thriller about corruption in Big Pharma, this new novel twisted the literary formula. Adam Kindred, the protagonist, is an innocent man who stumbles upon a body and, through a series of naive decisions, finds himself on the run and homeless, sleeping rough by the Thames. After the disintegration of his marriage and the loss of his job as a cloud scientist in the U.S., Adam is in London for a job interview. He is eating lunch at a restaurant when he notices another diner has left behind a plastic business file with his business card visible. When Adam attempts to return the file to the owner’s Sloane Avenue address, he finds the man with a knife in his chest begging him to remove it, which Adam does. That fateful decision makes him a prime suspect and soon, despite his innocence, he is hiding out in bushes below the Embankment at Chelsea Bridge. Evading the law drives him into ever-deepening circles of homelessness, begging and, eventually, a stunning criminal act, upending everything the reader thinks he or she knows about Adam.
Adam’s decision to help the victim by removing the knife from his chest tested the book club members’ patience. “Anybody who’s been in prison knows don’t touch the murder weapon,” said Graham. “Don’t touch the murder weapon. Leave it right there, right? Hands up and back out of the room.”
“That does seem to be the litmus test for cons, doesn’t it?” said Earl. “We all just back right out of the room. No way, I’m not touching that.”
Carol countered that she might very well remove the knife if asked. But then, she’d never been in prison as an inmate.
Raymond, who in prison parlance was a “commercial criminal,” and not a violent offender, instead focused on Adam’s actions after pulling out the knife. In his view those choices simply strained credulity. “Adam went from this towering professional with great ethics and great academic history to a subterranean culture and immerses himself to the point that he can’t escape it without going to the lowest common denominator of that culture,” said Raymond. There was something about the ramped-up volume of his voice, and the slow pacing of his sentences that made me think he was used to being listened to by underlings. He had, after all, been the founder of a major public company before his conviction for fraud.
Someone pointed out that there is a turning point in the novel when Adam enters the Belgravia Police Station to turn himself in and assist police, but changes his mind, thinking that the circumstantial case against him is too great. Again, Raymond protested that the guy had a plausible defence and should have just picked up the phone and called a lawyer. My mind went immediately to the name of the top criminal defence lawyer whom Raymond himself had called to handle his own case.
But many of the other book club members had had experiences that ran counter to Raymond’s, quite apart from what calibre of lawyer they could have afforded. “Many of us in this room have been to neighbourhoods,” said Graham, “where, if you happen to be there, the police don’t really give a shit what your explanation is.”
“You may well be able to explain your way out of it,” agreed Earl. “But not before the cuffs are on, you do the perp walk, you get the picture in the paper and everything else happens first. Maybe you get to explain it all later and you get a walk. But maybe you don’t.” Tom nodded. He said he knew people who had made the same choices as Adam.
Unfazed, Raymond continued his critique, protesting that the characters were “contemptible,” the plot “predictable” and Adam’s transformation “inconceivable.”
But then Graham gave Jason, a new inmate in his early twenties, the floor. Jason told the others that they were being too critical and made a case for thinking about the book as a parable. “I think Adam’s transformation ties into the whole theme of the book, which is social identity and how we’re all interconnected. We’re not so differ
ent from each other. Anyone can go from one position to another position like that.” He snapped his fingers. Then he suggested that everyone turn to the final chapter where Adam reflects on how two lives can overlap without being observed. Jason read aloud the passage, which talks about an invisible network of almost-realized encounters between individuals. I hadn’t seen it before, but now I could imagine the slender threads that connected the novel’s Big Pharma executives and Shoreditch prostitutes, the police and the criminals. It struck me that crimes are Venn diagrams where the desperate and the privileged intersect.
“I think you’re both right,” said Graham, telling Raymond that, yes, the events seemed implausible, but that he’d seen situations where well-off people made terrible mistakes and chose to disappear.
And yet, as Byrne pointed out, despite those overlapping lives, none of the characters in the book seemed to care about each other. “From the top CEOs to the lowest bum on the street, they didn’t seem to give a heck about each other,” he said. Tom and Graham and Richard all came up with examples from the book that supported that view. And Carol suggested that it was a way for the author to show how it feels to be homeless in the world.