“You’re famous,” said the sister, and pointed with a thumb over her shoulder to the man coming through the door. “He’s from the local paper. Wants to interview you and take your photo.” The man came up to the bed, taking the lens cap off a camera. “And don’t be long, mind,” the sister warned the reporter. “I’m sticking my neck out allowing visiting outside the proper hours.”
“You’re a good ‘un sister,” the man winked, winding on the film. He didn’t look like a reporter. He was too plain and ordinary, I thought; and he wore a striped jumper. “Now then, lad, what have we been up to?” He didn’t wait for a reply and moved Max into position on the other side of the bed to Ruby. “That’s good, that is. Closer, everyone. How about putting your arm around him, lass? That’s fine. Hang on a second…” The flash blinded us all. “Now how about one with just the two lads, eh?” he said mechanically, winding on the film as he spoke, adjusting the dial on the flashgun and refocusing the lens as he took up a different angle.
Ruby stepped to the side, her hands behind her back, grinning widely. Max reluctantly smiled for the camera, a smile that disappeared from his face the moment the camera shutter had finished clicking. He moved away to sit on the plastic and chrome chair at the side of the bed. The reporter then whipped a tattered writing pad out of his coat pocket and the smallest stub of a pencil you’re ever likely to see in action. He licked the tip and proceeded to interview us one by one, nodding at us, prompting us, saying “uh, uh,” every now and again. It was over in minutes. “It’ll be in the Chronicle this Friday,” he assured us.
“That’s a decent camera,” I said as he stowed it away.
“My old Canon? Been with me years. Seen all sorts of wars.”
“Really?” I said.
“He laughed. “I don’t mean real wars with bullets and bodies, son. I mean it’s seen all kinds of action. Other action. Local action. Fires, funerals, petty theft, that kind of thing.” He rose to leave.
“Is it an interesting job?” I asked. “Reporting and all that?”
He shut one eye and thought hard about it. “I guess you’d call it interesting. What’re you gonna be when you leave school, eh? Thought about that yet? That’s if you can keep from falling into canals.”
Ruby chuckled. The truth was I had been thinking hard about work, it being only a matter of months before I left school. A careers advisor had seen us all, one by one, and was taken aback when I told him that I didn’t fancy either the mines or the police force, both of which seemed to be not only the favourite options of all the others who preceded me, but the only options available. “What else do you want?” the advisor had asked incredulously. “More to the point, what else is there around here?” I’d shrugged in my ignorance, and he’d scratched his head. “There’s good money in the police force,” he advised me eventually, obviously puzzled and glancing helplessly at the papers on the desk in front of him. “I wouldn’t drop the idea. And think about the pension. If I were you, starting out as you are, I’d be looking in the direction of good money with job security. Now the mines are ideal – plenty of cash to be earned and a job for life. They’ll always want coal, won’t they?” he’d said, probably dismissing me as some kind of crank. I knew I loved to write, but that was about as far as I got as regards a definite career. I didn’t have the guts to say this to him; it sounding sort of effeminate like it did, not at all as masculine as being a police officer or miner. What I was to say now cemented my future, albeit a weak cement mix.
“I’d thought about becoming a reporter,” I babbled too quickly. The more I thought about it the more I convinced myself.
“Like me, eh? I’m flattered. Look, when you get your GCEs and leave school, give me a call.” He reached into his pocket and took out a creased card, handing it to me. “Who knows, maybe we can use you. They’re all old farts in the office anyhow. Need more young blood on the Chronicle. My name’s on the bottom – King, that’s me. Jimmy King – ‘king tired, ‘king fed up, ‘king hungry, ‘king off!” and he nodded his hasty goodbye, informing us he had to interview the manager of a supermarket who’d been terrified by the ghost of a pensioner doing her weekly shop near the cold meats section. The atmosphere had turned cold, apparently. What do you expect standing next to a bloody fridge, the reporter sneered as he waved goodbye.
I lay there in bed clutching the card to my chest. I wondered at Fate’s mysterious mechanism that could so easily throw you into the arms of a beautiful young woman one moment, then throw you into a canal the next, and, not content with that, it throws you at your future career, all in the space of a few days. Though I’d narrowly escaped death, I never felt happier.
As they say, ignorance is bliss.
* * * *
13
Gavin Miller
He had long ago grown tired of all this. In the beginning he’d soaked up the adoration like a kind of vain sponge. They’d stare at him with those doll-like fixed expressions, with downright awe at times, and he’d sit there and lap it up. They were in the presence of a god, of sorts, and he let them believe that, remaining aloof and just out of reach, never letting them get too close so that he always managed to keep that thin, glossy barrier of fame between them. Sure, they were there to buy his books, it’s what kept him in the elevated position he was, but he never let them quite believe that. He was there to do them a favour, he was there to sign their copies, he was there and he didn’t have to be. In fact he never tired of seeing ‘Gavin Miller’ scrawled across the title page, because each signature was in its way proof in ink that he’d done it, he’d achieved his goal. He was there more because of his growling vanity than anything. They lined up to feed this insatiable beast, which sucked on their admiration like they were marrow in a bone. He always came away tired but curiously revitalised by the book signing.
But now it was different. There was no desire to feed, no hunger, no gratification. Exhaustion was setting in. Self-contempt was freezing his veins. Instead it had all turned about, and the people filing past him now were gorging themselves on his emaciated corpse, tearing great bloody chunks off his unresisting body, chewing him, swallowing him, digesting him. He saw the look in each and every one of their eyes, one of ravenous insatiable appetite, the hunted transformed into the hunter. He could only scribble away with the pen, each line another drop milked from his soul.
“Could you dedicate it ‘To Mary’?” she asked politely enough, her eyes imploring.
Once upon a time, in the time he called his Golden Age, he would have sucked on that youthful, attractive marrow with relish. But now he couldn’t see what the big deal was anymore. She was too young, too foolish, too hung up on something he wasn’t and never had been. His look admonished her for her naivety, and he felt a tiny electric thrill of satisfaction course through him when he saw her flinch, but he obliged anyway, signing ‘To Mary, all the best, Gavin Miller’. She went away sporting a baffled expression.
There seemed no end to them, one book after another thudding on the table in front of him, and he mindlessly scribbled away till his hand ached and his signature degenerated into something bestial, something alien even to him. He felt it reflected his true self and he was afraid of it. He paused in his signing, taking a cup of coffee, exchanging idle gossip with customers, with the shop staff, eventually having to escape to their staffroom to sit all alone and brooding at a Formica table beside a gurgling water heater and a wall clock that ticked loud and incessant. But he couldn’t stay cooped up here forever in a dingy tube-lit den that was an austere reminder of his past, and so he went once more to his thankless task.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the manuscript he’d brought back from his visit to Overton Hall, which remained like a firebrand at the forefront of his mind. He’d put it somewhere safe. Out of sight of his wife.
He noticed a young man’s hand sliding a book towards him, and he glanced up at him. Tall, gawky, hardly out of his teens. The youth read it as an opportunity to talk. “I write, like
you,” he gabbled, “well, not like you, not like that, not as good as that. I write – you know, in my spare time. I’d like to be a writer one day, like you. I’ve read all your books. Inspired, they are. They inspire me. One day I hope to be able to put down words on paper like you. Thank you, Mr Miller, thank you for the autograph. I’ll treasure it. You don’t know how much this means!” and he withdrew from his life as fast as he’d speared into it.
He signed for another ten minutes or so till a migraine savagely attacked a point behind his eyes and he took a couple of aspirin the manageress handed him.
He wondered how he could kill himself.
He’d thought about it a lot lately. Actually, it wasn’t only lately; the thought had been there hounding him for more than a few years, but he’d only recently started to consider it with a modicum of seriousness. Aspirin, he thought? Too painful. Drowning? Too frightening. Hanging? That was a contender. But what if you dropped and the rope didn’t break your neck? What if you hung there gasping for breath that wouldn’t come, awareness slow to dissolve? Would that put it on a par with drowning?
“Excuse me,” a shrill voice intruded.
He looked up at the middle-aged man in a leather coat. He smelled faintly of stale deodorant.
“Yes?” Miller asked tiredly.
“Who’s ‘Maxwell Stone’?”
“Pardon?” said Miller, taken aback on hearing the name.
“Look, you’ve signed my book ‘Maxwell Stone’.”
Horrified, Miller snatched the book back, struggled for words that wouldn’t form, and ripped out the entire page, screwing it up into a tight ball and then ramming it into his pocket. Sweat pasted a dull sheen on his forehead. “Sorry," he said. “Sorry.”
* * * *
14
Sunday
A strange thing happened in the yard only yesterday. At least, I judge it strange. Perhaps to you it is perfectly ordinary. Perhaps it is my peculiar situation that lends it strangeness.
I was circling the walls of my prison at a steady pace, having given up my running. I have had time to give careful consideration to my obsessions, of which my timed runs were but one amongst many. It comes with confinement, I recognise that now, a desperate need to find meaning. I was at one time obsessed with the exactness of my paper and pen on my desk, lined up perfectly each day to the faintest of faint scratches and scuffmarks on its polished surface. I became obsessed with the lines on my face, peering closer into the mirror in an increasingly protracted morning ritual that sometimes lasted till noon, to a point that I believed one day they’d become massive gashes and slits across my features. I’ve had similar obsessions throughout my time here – food, masturbation, air quality, thoughts of dying, fluff and dust – each has been a focus for my diseased attention. One day I shall write about them all in perfect detail, for I believe obsession is revealing. Or perhaps I am risking becoming too obsessive about writing in detail about my obsessions. I find the thought interesting.
My obsessions, thankfully, wear themselves out in time. So now I walk. It’s wintertime, the murky brown hills above the walls sprinkled with snow or frost, the sky above white like virgin paper. It’s beautiful, but it’s bloody freezing in the yard. So I could have done with running to keep myself warm. Only I refuse to go back to an obsession that’s worn out, tired, used up. I walk slowly and I freeze.
I don’t know why but something caused me to glance upwards. And there it was, held aloft on a breeze that carried it this way and that, and then let it fall sharply as if it had slipped through careless fingers.
It was a feather.
Just a single white feather tipped with black. I guessed it was from a gull, though there was no sign of the bird anywhere; the sky remained a blank expanse waiting an artist’s hand. I watched it fall like a solitary snowflake, and at first I was sure it would be carried back over the wall and out of sight. But just as it seemed it was to clip the edge of the wall and be lost forever, a wayward gust took it up again and tossed it towards me. I stopped to watch its progress. It drifted lazily to a halt before my feet, edging closer inch by inch as if willing me to bend and pick it up.
Wise and his colleague didn’t appear to be the slightest bit interested in me, though I knew this to be untrue. They were engaged in superficial conversation, a fact easily read in those tired, impassive features. I looked at the feather; it nudged my shoe impatiently. So I stooped and lifted it up, holding it to the light – and oh! the way that light tore through the filaments, rendering it translucent and lustrous, as if it carried the very sky within its pristine whiteness.
“What have you got there?” Wise’s voice shattered my reverie.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“It’s got to be something,” he snarled, walking rapidly towards me, one hand brushing the baton by his side.
I grew afraid that he would take the feather from me, my gift from the sky, and so I held it out on the end of an outstretched arm like I was a naughty schoolboy before a teacher. Before Mr Walton again. “It’s a feather. Nothing but a scraggy old seagull feather. Look, it’s even got bird shit on it.”
He snatched it from me, crushing it in his puffy, graceless paw as he did so. He ran his gimlet eyes over it, scouring the surface of the feather so much that I was afraid he’d scour the thing right out of existence. “What do you want it for?” he grumbled.
I never noticed before, but his eyes were green and watery. I was reminded of grapes. I found it difficult to furnish an answer. “Because…What harm can it do?” I said feebly.
He snorted and handed it back to me, his dull, sluggish brain reaching the same conclusion. What harm could it do? It was a feather, a common feather from a common bird. A feather with bird shit on it.
I cradled it in my open palm, carrying it to my room and placing it on my desk. It is here now as I write, lying where I can see it, where I need it most. I have combed its strands together, so now it looks neat and plastic-like, too perfect. It gives me a certain thrill to look on it, because I’m nudged by its presence into remembering that there is still a world outside the walls of my confinement. It has a link with the sky, with the birds that soar unfettered through vast acres of pure, undiluted freedom. It sends a charge through the choked channels of my tired old system, awakens something within me that I haven’t felt for ages, something that I thought had been beaten into a messy, formless pulp. I feel it is progressively melting my compliance, cutting through my passivity like a heated blade. It is the desire to be free again.
And this is why I find myself terrified, with my heart crashing away in fear, and it’s like a white-hot scorching fire being channelled through the narrow passages of my veins; my entire being is so consumed with burning dread. I get up, move away from my desk, from the feather; yet my eyes remained fixed to that gash of white against the dark grain of my desktop. I would like to fight it. I pace around my tiny room, muttering, fingering my jaw frenetically, turning over the thoughts in my head. I imagine a plough going through the soft soil of my brain, revealing rich fertility beneath a barren layer that has for so long remained crusted and paled.
It is so long ago that I last felt this way that the feeling is alien to me, this nipping desire. Strange and yet familiar, like an old flame that storms back into your life following a disastrous affair. She looks so damn good. You remember her beauty, the contours of her warm body, the ardour, the sense of complete deliverance, the intense promise that life seemed to hold. And you recall the hopelessness of it all. It was headed nowhere, travelling at a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall without you once bothering to apply the brakes, even though you knew you should have done it far sooner, before it was far too late. Sweet bitterness.
I try to subdue the feelings, press my hands against my head to force back the thoughts to whatever dark place they resided. I know I have only survived this long because I accepted things – accepted my lot, my situation, all hope gradually being submerged so that I live like a dis
carded human battery, storing my energy without an avenue to discharge it. There comes a time when to fight and to hope becomes too painful to bear; because there is nothing worse than to be tempted to believe in that which never comes to fruition. Then hope becomes hell. It becomes a place of screams. Screams in a vacuum. It is like screaming with a plastic bag taped over your head. So leave hope where it is. Leave it outside where you found it. I know it is the best thing.
But I can’t destroy the feather. I want to. I hold it there, so frail inside the clamp of my open hand. I want to crush it like Wise did. Tear it up, bend it, twist it into some ghastly, a distorted parody of what it once was. Yet I can’t. I can’t! Something is holding me back. Something inside me wants hope back again. Some crazy thing is insisting it is safe to think this way. I lift the feather to the harsh lights and yell at it:
“Stop it! Stop it!”
But it doesn’t. It goes right on being…
Being a feather.
A feather with bird shit on it.
* * * *
15
Tuesday
Feathers…
There were feathers scattered all over the place. One clung stubbornly to the wood of the hut, flapping in the breeze as if the instinct to fly was so absorbed into its fibres that it just couldn’t stop.
“It’s a sign of the times, it is,” he remarked forcibly, rheumy eyes that were both accusing and suspicious, searching my face with an intensity I found disturbing to say the least. “Anarchy, that’s all it is. Bloody anarchy. I could weep, I really could.”
He wasn’t kidding either; his eyes filled in response to his words. “Well, Mr Woolley…” I began.
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