So he set on his way to nowhere in particular. He was a man with no ties, no material belongings and no friends. It didn’t matter where he would go. The change he had in his pocket would be enough for tonight and he would worry about getting some more the next day.
As he wandered down the country lane, the prison fading away into the distance behind him, he felt the excitement of freedom and possibility mount in him. A swirl of memories breathed in him as recently as if they had happened yesterday, as one accomplice after another drifted into view. He savoured the deliciousness of it all, and savoured the knowledge that his hardening desire for submission would be meeting its release very, very soon.
A tumbledown, stone-built pub with a welcoming light in the front porch way stood out up the lane. There weren’t many houses around here, mostly empty spaces with plenty of dry stone walls dotted in outlines around fields and lining the roads, spikes of grass poking through. Squat yellow flowers poked their heads up along the sides of the lanes, with larger, swaying pink ones nodding thoughtfully in the breeze. There was a bleakness in the air, and a slight chill.
Silence was punctuated with the odd rustle of wind in the leaves – but there were no voices and no other audible signs of life.
He sauntered up to the pub – the Green Man – and pulled open the heavy, iron-clad door. A warmth rushed out to greet him and he bent his head down so he could step into the entrance way. It was one of those ancient places, built years ago, for men of another era. Today, it was crumbling somewhat on the outside but it had a cosiness about it that served well the men of today.
Inside, there were two old boys drinking together and another off to the side of the bar on his own. Joe made his way to the front and noisily sat himself down. He’d forgotten the spatters of brown, crusted blood that served as a vivid tableau of that dreadful night six years ago. By now anyone looking at him wouldn’t be able to guess what those stiff stains were – with his youthful face and strong hands they would probably guess he was a labourer of some sort. He lacked the weathered tan of someone who worked outdoors, but there was plenty of other work so he attracted no undue attention.
He had had no trouble fitting back into his clothes – the only difference now was that he had built up his body so the leanness of his early twenties was now usurped by a rugged, muscular solidity. The proportions were more or less the same. But if you touched his arms, you would feel their strength. If you saw his torso, you’d think he had trained as an athlete. If you felt his grip, you wouldn’t escape.
The black hair had been kept meticulously in check over the years inside – short back and sides with a floppy, boyish front that disarmed everyone from the prison guards to cooks serving up the slop. He always got extra portions of meat by winking at the ladies who stood at the hatch. Somewhat unusually, they had been brought in for a short time from the Women’s Voluntary Service to give some much-needed assistance. And well, they thought he was just lovely. So handsome! So strong looking! They would admire the angular jaw, the breathtaking green eyes and the hint of muscle you couldn’t help but catch sight of, stiffening under his clothing as he carried his tray or walked over to the table to eat. Even his table manners were impeccable in comparison to the other animals he was in there with. The ladies would gossip quietly behind their hands, trying hard not to look too often in his direction, but he was distractingly good-looking, and his hands had a grace and a strength about them you couldn’t help but wish might one day caress your hip or hold you tight.
And then there was that voice! Oh goodness, that was something else. Like Sinatra himself had dropped in to prison. Or rather they didn’t really know much what Sinatra would sound like if he talked, but they imagined that this was it. If this man talked, that smooth, deep unctuousness could lull you to sleep.
Several of the women rather fancied that when he got out, perhaps that’s exactly what he would do – captivate them and take them to his bed. There was certainly the odd moment of flirting here and there, as they competed for his attention. Each and every one of them would nurse a desire to be in his gaze, with the possibility of serving him up a different sort of scrumptiousness when he got outside.
Joe of course was entirely unmoved by all this – all he cared about was that this tiresome flirting was his ticket to the possibility of more meat. The lamb chop sort.
He didn’t experience sexual desires in the way other men did. Others in the prison would be so desperate for release they would sometimes do it to each other. More often than not a younger, weaker prisoner was singled out for attack.
But there was also no shortage of rampant flirting (and more) with the serving ladies and the women in the laundry. The other prisoners were consumed with sexual frustration and took whatever they could. Some even found ways around the system to ensure their visiting spouses made the most of their time inside, as it were. Others discovered the clever tricks you could do to have a quick one with one of the ladies visiting someone else.
Joe barely considered the women as sexual beings and had no desire to use a man to release some primal urge, either. He had a far more disciplined, sophisticated approach, he thought.
The women would spend hours wondering why he was in there, speculating that he had been framed. How could anything as gorgeous as that be guilty of something terrible? He looked as if he could be one of those Hollywood film stars. There were rumours that he had killed a man. Not a single one of them believed he could have done it.
Meanwhile, oblivious to their ample and open charms, he would keep himself to himself. Inspiring jealousy and even more suspicion from the other inmates. They thought he couldn’t be right in the head. It was the only way they could justify his lack of interest in girls and his refusal to smuggle dope, buy fags or join in the moonshine ring where you’d take turns to get your socks bundled up, keep back your potatoes from dinner and make paint-stripper alcohol to share around. Everybody did it, even though it tasted like shit. But it got you high and it helped numb you away from this shitty life.
Joe wouldn’t take part in any of this stuff. Dying though he was to have even one more drop of alcohol on his tongue, he had no sense of communion with the guys and no inclination to participate in anything they did. So he didn’t.
All this got picked up of course by the warder who thought he was some sort of saint and gave him endless good write-ups to the inspectors and the chiefs. Joe was held up as some sort of model prisoner. Never smoked, didn’t smuggle anything in, didn’t get caught up in the moonshine ring and didn’t attempt to take advantage of the ladies.
He was just about the best-behaved prisoner they had ever had.
Of course, if they could have taken a peek into that corrupted mind of his, they would have seen how on the money the other inmates had been. They thought he couldn’t be right in the head. How devastatingly wrong he was though, was something nobody guessed.
He would while away hours on end, nursing his memories and making plans. Disciplined and sophisticated. He would think it a badge of honour to keep an erection alive for several hours at a time, just allowing himself a squeeze or a tug or a gentle stroke underneath from time to time. He dedicated his life inside to the perfecting and the prolonging of his aroused state. He would see it as training for outside – to use his own sense of desire and restraint, arousal and discipline – to develop an extraordinary ability to stay hard for hours.
When he did allow himself release, he would always think back on one of his accomplices. The Finnegan memory was one he came back to time and time again, as was the politician, despite its unwelcome denouement. But Mr and Mrs Businessman was his favourite – he would dwell on the picture he had in his mind of what she would have done when he left.
It would drive him to a point of near release just thinking of how desire would have swelled through her body, how desperation for his touch would have compelled her to explore where he had explored, to touch where he had touched.
He would think of her
looking at herself – the hard, round point of her dusky nipple, aching upwards and crying out to feel his touch. She would see that right breast exposed in all its creaminess, trails of her wispy cardigan brushed aside to reveal its full roundness. She would gaze at it, seeing what he saw, and feel her groaning sting rising inside her.
She would have to take hold of that roundness and stroke around it in circles – first tenderly, then harshly, working inwards to that tantalising first touch of nipple. She would judder in pleasure-pain as that pulsating gorgeousness would be bursting into hardness – that budding point unrecognisable in its tenseness from anytime she had ever seen it or felt it before. It was gorging with desire, needed hard, hard twisting – darting flashes of sheer ecstasy down inside her.
And with her other hand, slowly, that unfamiliar navigation to the places he had taught her. Surprised at her ready wetness, the folds of her warmness engulfed her third finger, copying his actions and feeling that darting connection with her twisting nipple.
She would be craving his hands, his touch. With every trace of her fingers, she would be feeling him.
But this was just ‘near release’ for Joe. He had no doubt in his mind of what would have ensued after he left. No doubt at all. The picture he had was so clear and vivid, it was as if he had watched it take place. If he had witnessed the truth, he would have seen Polly collapse into relief of an entirely different sort, holding her dear son and wretched on the floor of the nursery with fear and horror.
She vomited shortly afterwards, aghast that something so vile and unexpected could have happened in her own house.
But for Joe, the story in his head was playing out differently. He saw Polly, helpless with desire for him, bringing herself to ecstasy in waves of release. He saw her imagining him, desperate for his touch. He saw her continue to fantasise about him, as he did about her story, in a way that would destroy her marriage and wipe that smug smile off that smug face of Mr Businessman.
His was a long game. It wasn’t just the idea of her flowering into a new understanding of arousal and pleasure with him and for him – it was the idea that this new understanding would inevitably weave its decaying path to the end of a happy union. He had despised the jaunty merriness of that man – something about him made him want to destroy him.
And so that was where the ‘near release’ became release for Joe in the story of Mr and Mrs Businessman. Thinking about the scene that would unfold as Mr Businessman got home, discovering his wife’s passion for a passing stranger, seeing her lack of satisfaction with him and with her life … this was the scene that Joe would play out when he wanted to finally end his own engorged entrapment. To find his own release.
He had no idea whether or not his fantasy had played out into truth – but it almost didn’t matter. In Joe’s world – he had achieved what he had set out to accomplish and there was no doubt in his mind that that was that.
He had even managed to justify in his own mind that his current incarceration had been part of the plan – because without it he wouldn’t have been able to train his mind and his body so effectively and so precisely if he’d been forced to go to war.
Everything had happened for a reason. And everything going forwards would happen for a reason.
Which was what brought him here tonight. He’d been walking for about five hours – wanted to break the link from his most recent past as forcefully as possible – so had relentlessly kept the pace up through lanes and streets and fields until he came across this lonely place with its tumbledown pub and its quiet stillness.
Joe asked for a pint of the black stuff.
He watched the lady at the bar pour it, slowly. He watched the liquid cream its way into the glass with a thick promise of bitter bliss.
He saw her pause, waiting for it to collect itself into a pool of softly undulating lather, then watched as she tipped in the last few drops, collecting as it did in a meniscus of dairy creaminess at the top.
The condensation collected down the side of the glass and the black liquid shimmered like oil.
He felt his saliva glands moisten in anticipation, the build-up of six years’ worth of expectation. He pulled the glass towards him and lifted it up, dipped his lips around the rim and inhaled the familiar aroma. As his nostrils filled with the treacly, homely sweetness, he sucked in his first draft. Savoured it, slowly, in his mouth, without swallowing. Absorbing the sense memory of a thousand drafts before.
He smiled, then drank it down.
And that night, slowly, slowly, sip by sip, he began to slake one of the two thirsts he had been cultivating these last six years.
The other he would begin to slake tomorrow.
Possibilities
She sat there, pored over her book, entranced by this latest revelation. Rilke, again – how did he come to be so wise, when he died so young?
How did one young man learn so much truth and knowledge about the world? How did he know he was right? And for that matter – was he right??
She paused, staring into the distance, ruminating in what she had just read.
It was from a collection called Letters to a Young Poet. Although her book hadn’t printed out whole letters from the 10-letter series, it had poignant extracts. This one came from the eighth letter, the same source for her newfound talisman.
Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you.
Simply let it happen … well yes, that’s exactly what she’d done, wasn’t it. Time and time again …
Gracie couldn’t help her habit of wondering why so much bad stuff had happened to her. She would fiercely question what she had done wrong, trying to work it out. She was sure pencil pockmarks stabbed into her arm must have happened for a reason. She was sure being trapped in a cold, dark, mossy prison must have been her fault. Sure not having a Da must be punishment for something. Sure her Ma’s violent slap, that day of the pencil pockmarks, must be retribution for some unknown crime. Sure Joe’s raven stare and soulless vileness must be recompense at her for some dreadful past unwitting crime.
Sure her Ma’s refusal to tell the police about what was going on at home must be some ill-fated redress and reprisal for some mysterious misdeed of her daughter’s. Why else would she not try to protect Gracie? Why not try to protect herself? It was a slow, shameful acceptance that whatever would unfurl had a purposeful inevitability. Not worth stopping. Not worth bothering to try.
It was this reluctance to act – to do – well – anything – against her own brother, even when he was hurting both her and her only child – that Gracie found most hurtful. She couldn’t begin to fathom what lay behind her Ma’s inaction. Her refusal to talk to the police, seek help from neighbours, ban him from ever coming again. It had to be some strange penance, it had to be.
Gracie was baffled and wounded and scared. That constricting feeling pressing hard on her chest, stopping her breathing, was something she began to experience more and more. Whenever she remembered … what happened … that familiar pressure would seize her chest and force the oxygen out of her. A few times now she had actually fainted with the dizzying blackness of it.
She was paralysed with perplexity. Didn’t understand the bath business at all. Couldn’t understand that her own mother’s instincts weren’t to roar into battle to safeguard her. Assumed there must be some dark secret she was unaware of but must somehow be responsible for.
She reread Rilke’s prose.
Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you.
She wondered whether the scrutiny she had subjected herself to was helping or hindering t
he situation. It certainly wasn’t helping her feel better. And when she discussed it with Billy, they would go round and round in circles, him insisting nothing was her fault.
Only yesterday they had gone for one of their walks to the glade and had sat down to thrash it out again. The topic, as ever, was Gracie’s Ma’s refusal to deal with the ‘Joe Issue’ as they both called it. Gracie couldn’t bring herself to call him uncle – that would have been as much a lie as calling this house a home. Uncles brought you gifts and played with you and told you you looked pretty in your dress. Homes were safe places where you could rest and read and bathe and play in peace. She felt she had neither.
As for her mother, she was nothing like the placid, kind woman her Ma had once been. Fear and shame had eroded that calmness and loveliness from her these days. Perhaps if he went away, forever, it wouldn’t be too late for her?
He – on the other hand – was a sneering, stern, stygian presence that exuded threat and darkness.
Where sister had been soft and beatific like a sunbeam dancing on water, brother was hard and obsidian like an armour-clad raven.
Looking back at the diary entry on these observations years later, trapped in a lavender prison, the old woman would reflect that they had been the twin halves of a whole. She the light, he the dark. She was sure there was a name for that … Either way, they were bonded together, forever.
But today, they were there in the glade, Gracie and Billy, each trying out different descriptions to attempt to capture the essence of the problem.
They were both quite grown up now. Gracie a willowy, tawny 14; Billy – voice broken and getting quite handsome – a solid, proud 16.
Still the best of friends, the pair would potter off together to natter and try to solve the world’s problems whenever they could. Since the incident a couple of years ago there had been several more visits from Joe. What had started in the bathroom was just the beginning. Gracie had tried to blank it all out of her memory. Each time was worse than the last.
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