D&P20 - Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

  It would have been all right if I could have told them the truth about my fellow cons, which was that to most of them crime was a job like any other, except there was no unemployment problem. Treating prison as a retraining opportunity is pointless when you're dealing with people who think of themselves as out of circulation rather than out of work. Better to spend all that public money sending them on holidays abroad in the hope they'd get food poisoning or Legionnaire's. But I knew that advancing such a theory wasn't going to get me letters after my name, so I dripped out the usual gunge about socialization and rehabilitation and in the fullness of time became Francis Roote, MA.

  But I was still in the Syke, though by now I'd hoped to have smoothed my way out to Butlin's, which is what my ingenious fellow felons called Butler's Low, Yorkshire's newest and most luxuriously appointed open prison on the fringe of the Peak District.

  I couldn't understand why I didn't seem to be making any progress in that direction. OK, I played chess with Polchard, but I wasn't one of his mob in the heavy sense. I put this to one of the screws I'd sweet-talked into semi-confidential mode.

  'You lot can't keep giving me black marks for playing chess,' I protested.

  He hesitated then said, 'Maybe it's not us who're giving you the black marks.'

  And that was it. But it was enough.

  It was Polchard who was making sure I didn't get a transfer.

  He didn't want to lose the only guy on the wing, probably in the whole of the Syke, who could give him a run for his money on the chessboard and all he had to do to keep me was let the screws know that losing me would make him, and therefore everyone else, very unhappy.

  I could see no way of changing this, so I had to find a way of countering it.

  I needed some big hitters in my corner. But where to look?

  The Governor was too busy watching his back against political do-gooders to have any time for individual cases, while the Chaplain was an old-fashioned whisky priest whose alcoholic amiability was so inclusive he even spoke up for Dendo Bright, who, thank God, had been transferred to some distant high-security unit.

  As for my obvious choice, the Prison Psychiatrist, this was a jolly little man with the unreassuring nickname of Bonkers, whom it was generally agreed you'd have to be mad to consult. But then came a Home Office inspection, which led to a temporary improvement in menu and the permanent removal,under some kind of cloud, of a still-smiling Bonkers.

  A short time later all over the jail ears and other things pricked when it was announced that a new trick cyclist had been appointed, and that it was a woman!

  Professor Duerden has interrupted me again.

  I see now that I misinterpreted his reaction when he first saw me. He wasn't dismayed to find he was sharing the Quaestor's Lodging but puzzled to find he was sharing it with someone he'd never met and never heard of.

  An Englishman would have slid around the subject, and some Americans can be pretty devious too, but he was of the straight-from-the-shoulder school.

  'So where're you working, son?' he asked me.

  'Mid-Yorkshire University’ I replied.

  'That so? Now remind me, who's running your department these days?'

  'Mr Dunstan,'I said.

  'Dunstan?' He looked puzzled. 'Would that be Tony Dunstan the medievalist?'

  'No, it would be Jack Dunstan, the head gardener,' I said.

  Once he got over his surprise, that really tickled him, and I saw no reason not to be completely open with him. I explained about being Sam Johnson's pupil and how Sam had got me a job in the gardens, and how, as well as being Sam's student, I'd also been a close friend and was, through the good offices of his sister, his literary executor.

  'Sam was scheduled to present a paper at the conference,' I concluded, 'and when the Programme Committee contacted me to ask if I would be willing to read his paper, I felt I owed it to him to accept. I presume my name's been substituted for his all down the line, which is how I come to be in the Quaestor's Lodging.'

  He said, 'Yeah, that must be it,' but I suspect he didn't really reckon that even Sam rated high enough to be his roomy.

  In fact, I've been wondering about this myself and I think I've got it sussed. The programme says that special thanks are due to Sir Justinian Albacore, the Dean of St Godric's, under whose auspices we are the guests of the college. That name rings a bell. Could this be the same J. C. Albacore whose study of the Gothic psyche, The Search for Nepenthe, you probably know? I've never read it myself, but I often saw it propping up the broken leg of a sofa in Sam Johnson's study. For this man was the great hate of Sam's life. According to Sam, he'd given a lot of help to Albacore when he was writing Nepenthe, and the man had shown his gratitude by ripping off his Beddoes project! Sam got suspicious on finding someone had been ahead of him when he delved into a couple of rare and apparently unrelated archives. Finally it emerged that Albacore was also working on a Beddoes critical biog. to appear in 2003, the bicentenary of TLB's birth. And not long before his death, Sam was spitting fire at the news heard on the grapevine that Albacore's publishers intended to preempt the field by publishing at the end of 2002.

  I described myself to Dwight as Sam's literary executor, which wasn't precisely true. What in fact occurred, as you probably heard, was that Linda Lupin, MEP, Sam's half-sister and sole heir, decided out of the generosity of her spirit to place the reins of Sam's researches into my hands. It probably won't surprise you to learn that the publisher with whom Sam's biography was contracted wasn't best pleased.

  I can see his point of view. Who am I, after all? In literary terms, nobody, though my 'colourful' background was something their sales department felt they might have been able to use if the field had remained clear. But with Albacore's book already being hyped around as the 'definitive' biography, their judgment now was that setting me up to carry on where Sam had left off was throwing good money after bad.

  So, sorry, mate, but no deal for the big book that Sam was aiming at.

  They did however make an alternative proposal.

  Because Beddoes' life is so thinly documented, Sam had been interlarding his script with what he clearly labelled 'Imagined Scenes'. These, as he explains in a draft preface, made no claim to be detailed accounts of actual incidents. Though some were based on known facts, others were simply imaginative projections, devised in order to give the reader a sense of the living reality of Beddoes' existence. Many would, I believe, have been much modified in or totally expunged from the finished book.

  How would I feel, I was asked, about cutting out most of the hard-core lit. crit. stuff, working up a few more of these 'Imagined Scenes', well spiced with a sprinkling of sex and violence, and producing one of those pop-biogs which had done so well in recent years?

  I didn't need the time offered to think about it.

  I told them to get stuffed. I owe Sam a lot more than that.

  But while I was still reeling from the injustice of it all came this invitation for me to take up Sam's place at the conference.

  I'd taken it on face value as the programmers paying a posthumous tribute to a valued colleague and at the same time saving themselves the bother of rejigging their programme. But this was no explanation of why, instead of being stuck in a student's pad like the commonalty of lecturers, I was queening it in the Q's lodging alongside Dwight Duerden. There had to be another motive and, since seeing Albacore's name, I've been suspecting he might have hopes of sweet-talking Sam's Beddoes research database out of me.

  Maybe I'm being paranoid. But the groves of academe are crowded with raptors, so Sam always assured me. Anyway, I'll be in a better position to judge once I've actually met the conference organizers, which will be at the Welcome Reception and Introductory Session in fifteen minutes' time.

  Now where was I? Oh yes, the new female psych. Her name, believe it or not, was Amaryllis Haseen!

  Sporting with Amaryllis in the shade was, you will recall, one of the alternatives to writing poetry whi
ch Milton's most un-Puritanical imagination suggested to him. My only acquaintance with the flower is the garishly fleshy specimens that sometimes turn up at Christmas. Well, by those standards, Ms Haseen lived up to her name and was generally regarded by most of the sex-starved cons as an early Christmas prezzie. As one of Polchard's top lads said dreamily, ‘Tart like that you can tell all your sexual fancies to, it's better than pulling your plonker over Women on Top.'

  Everyone developed psychological problems. Ms Haseen was no fool, however. Her purpose in taking on the Chapel Syke consultancy was to garner material for a book on the psychology of incarceration, which she hoped would put more letters after her name and more money in her bank. (It came out last year, called Dark Cells, lots of nice reviews. I'm Prisoner XR pp. 193-207, by the way.) She quickly sorted out the wankers from the bankers. When Polchard's lieutenant complained that he'd been dumped while I'd got a twice-weekly session, I smiled and said, 'You've got to make 'em feel they can help you, and that doesn't mean flashing your bone and asking her to give it the once over like you did!' That made even Polchard smile and thereafter whenever I came back from a session I had to face a barrage of obscene questions as to the progress I was making towards getting into her underwear.

  To tell the truth, I think I might have managed it, but I didn't even try. Even if successful, what would I have got out of it?

  A few top-C's of mindless delight (no chance in the circumstances for more than a quick knee-trembler) and a coda of post-coital sadness that might stretch for years!

  For I had to be a realist. Even if Amaryllis could be seduced into enjoying a bit of sport in the shade, when she walked out into the bright sunshine beyond the Syke's main gates and thought of her promising career and her happy marriage, she was going to shudder with shame and fear and pre-empt any future accusations I might make by marking me down as a dangerous fantasist. (You think I'm being too cynical? Read on!)

  So I set my mind to finding out what it was that she wanted from me professionally and making sure that she got it.

  There was another danger here. You see, what she really wanted was to get a clear picture of what made me tick. And the trouble was that this subject fascinated me also.

  I've always known I'm not quite the same as other people, but the precise nature of this otherness eludes me. Is it based on an absence or a presence? Do I have something others lack, or am I lacking in something that others possess?

  Am I, in other words, a god among mortals or merely a wolf among sheep?

  The temptation to let it all hang out before her and see what her professional skills made of the fascinating tangle was great. But the risks were greater. Suppose her conclusion was that I was an incurable sociopath?

  So, regrettably, I felt I had to postpone the pleasures of complete analytical honesty till such time as 1 could pay for it out of my pocket rather than out of my freedom.

  Instead I devoted my energies to letting Amaryllis find what suited us both best - that is, a slightly fractured personality which would make an interesting paragraph in her book.

  It was good fun. The checkable facts about my background I was careful to leave intact. But after that, it was creativity hour as, like Dorothy after the twister, I stepped out of the black and white world of Kansas into the bright bold colours of Oz. Like most of these trick cyclists, she was fixated on my childhood and I had a great time inventing absurd stories about my dear old dad, who actually vanished from my life so early that I have no recollection of him whatsoever. You'll find most of them in her book. I knew I had a talent for fiction long before I won that short-story competition.

  Yet at the same time I was very aware that Amaryllis was no one's fool. I had to assume she knew that my agenda was to help myself by apparently helping her. So, as with my chess games, I needed to play on many levels.

  It didn't take many sessions before I began to think I was truly in control.

  Then she took me by surprise. Her opening was to ask me, 'How do you feel about the people you hold responsible for putting you in the Syke?'

  'Apart from myself?' I said.

  This seemed like a good answer, but she just grinned at me as if to say, 'Come off it!'

  So I smiled back and said, 'You mean the policemen who arrested me and built the case against me?'

  'If that's who you think responsible,' she said.

  'I don't feel anything,' I said. 'In fact I've hardly thought about them since the trial.'

  'So revenge never enters your mind? No little fantasies to while your nights away?'

  It was funny, I'd been feeding her lies and half-truths for weeks, and now when I was telling her it like it is, no prevarication whatsoever, I was getting that disbelieving grin.

  'Read my lips,' I said distinctly. 'Thoughts of revenge haven't broken my sleep nor troubled my waking hours. Cross my heart. Kiss the Book. Swear on my father's grave.'

  I meant it, every word. Still do.

  'Then how do you explain the topic you propose for your PhD thesis?' she asked.

  This took my breath away for two reasons.

  First, how the hell did she know what my proposed thesis topic was?

  And second, how did I explain it?

  The Revenge Theme in the English Drama.

  Could it be that all the time I thought I was coolly, calmly and collectedly planning my future like a rational man, deep down inside me some bitter scheming fury was obsessed with thought of vengeance against you and Mr Dalziel?

  Well, since then I've had a lot of time to think about it, and I can put my hand on my heart and declare with complete honesty that not one thought of you or Mr Dalziel crossed my mind as I chose my thesis topic.

  Like I said earlier, I was bored to tears by all the sociological crap I'd had to shovel out for my degrees. I wanted something different. I wanted something to do with real people feeling real passion and I knew I had to turn from sociology to literature for that, and to the theatre in particular. I remembered an old English teacher who used to say there are three springs of action in the drama - love, ambition and revenge - and the greatest of these is revenge. So I started reading the Elizabethans and Jacobeans and very soon realized he was right; In terms of dramatic energy, nothing was more productive than revenge. Love moved, ambition drove, but revenge exploded! I knew I had found my theme, but it was an artistic, an academic, an autotelic choice, having nothing to do with extraneous matters like my own situation.

  But I could see how it must look to Amaryllis with her Freudian squint.

  I opened my mouth to argue, decided this was the wrong tactic, and said instead, 'I'd really never thought of that. Good God. And here's me thinking .. . well, I never!'

  Let her see me gobsmacked, I thought. Let her feel completely in charge.

  And all the time my brain was racing to work out how she knew about my proposal. I'd never mentioned it to her. Indeed I'd only put it together myself last week and sent it off to the extra-mural department of the University of Sheffield who had still to reply ...

  That was it! Her husband. I knew from the grapevine he was a university teacher. Her presence at the Syke meant it was likely it was one of the Yorkshire universities. I'd assumed his discipline would be the same as hers, but why should it be?

  If I was right . . . but first check it out.

  I could see no easier way than the most direct.

  I said, 'This would be your husband telling you about my application, I presume? And you filling him in about me. Funny that. Don't the usual rules of patient confidentiality and pastoral responsibility apply in the case of convicted felons then?'

  A fishing expedition she might have wriggled away from, but this was a grenade lobbed into the water.

  She did her best but she was floundering belly-up from the start.

  'No, really, nothing sinister,' she said, flashing me an all-sophisticates-together smile from those tubulous lips. 'Just one of life's little coincidences. Jay, that's my husband, happens to be
in the English Department there, you see, and he happens to chair the committee which looks at these things, and he happened to mention that there'd been an application from someone in Chapel Syke

  An expert interrogator like yourself would have easily spotted the symptoms of evasion, too many happenses, trying to cover the fact that when she leaves here, she heads home and chats away quite happily with her poncy husband about the funny things her banged-up clients have been telling her, fuck professional confidentiality, probably livens up the chat round the dinner table with little anecdotes plucked from our soul-baring confessions. For a moment I felt genuinely indignant till I recalled that most of what I personally had told her was crap, more arsehole-baring than soul-baring.

  I said, 'Well, that's handy. Maybe you could give me a hint how my application's going, seeing as they're taking forever to respond to me direct. I was thinking of having a word with the Visitor about it. He's always banging on about prisoners' rights.'

  That gave her something to think about. Lord Threlkeld, our Chief Visitor, must be familiar to you. I bet he's one of old Rumbletummy's pet hates, being a notorious bleeding heart who likes nothing better than a good case of professional misconduct either from the police or the prison service to wave at his peers in the House.