17

The Circus

The following morning, I received a surprise visit. There, waiting for me in the Visitors’ Room, and causing a few male heads to turn, sat Nina Patel. She greeted me with a broad smile.

As I sit down opposite her, she reaches into her briefcase.

“I’ve brought you a present,” she says, lifting out a thick manuscript. “It’s Derek’s autobiography. His publishers sent it to us so we could check it through from a legal standpoint. It’s four hundred and thirteen pages long and it’s complete and utter vomit-inducing bilge. They’d be mad to publish. It’ll be greeted with derision.”

So far, nothing she has said could be described as a surprise, so I’m starting to wonder why she has travelled so far to tell me this.

“I had to read every page of it. I may need counselling. But the good news…the very good news is that, in several places, Derek gives details which completely contradict evidence he gave in the trial.”

“Which trial?”

“The second trial.” Her brow furrows for a second. “Actually, and the first trial, come to think of it.”

I start to laugh at the sheer inevitability of it. When someone lies in such volume, they forget which lies they’ve told. Nina Patel’s eyes are shining bright with optimism.

“This is an open goal, Kevin. We can prove he told lies in the witness box. That makes your conviction unsound.”

“Does it though?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But demonstrating he’s a liar doesn’t prove that I’m not a liar, does it? I did commit perjury, that’s a fact.”

Nina Patel grips my forearm and then withdraws her hand.

“Am I allowed to touch you?”

“Not really, no.”

“The thing is – yes, you’d still be guilty of perjury – but we’d be able to show that you were manipulated into committing perjury. We can present you as more of a victim. And we can demonstrate that the prosecution case was built around a fantasist.”

A few tables away from us, a young woman visitor is crying very quietly.

I tell Nina Patel that I would not feel comfortable presenting myself as a victim. She exhales in exasperation.

“We can get your sentence reduced, Kevin.”

“But only by raking it all up again.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“I’m not sure if I’m up for that.”

She leans back and swings an arm over the back of her chair.

“Not even if it means doing less time?” she asks.

I shake my head, which makes her laugh.

“Are you enjoying prison, then?”

“I’m in no massive hurry to get out.”

She eyes me quizzically.

“Really? Why?”

“I quite like the obscurity.”

“Obscurity,” she repeats back at me.

“Yuh.”

Nina Patel looks me straight in the eyes and keeps looking, as if she’s hunting for some tell-tale fleck of meaning.

“What do you do all day?”

“This and that. There’s a drama group that I…supervise.”

“Ah,” she chuckles triumphantly, “you have a project.”

“Yeh, it’s good.”

She leans forward conspiratorially, lowering her voice.

“Kevin, I honestly think we could get you out of here very soon.”

A ripple of satisfaction passes through me. After months of distress and confusion, I find that I now know what I want. I don’t want my whole story to be told yet again, even if this revision will work in my favour. I want to stay and finish what I’ve started, see it through.

“I’m very appreciative of the offer,” I tell her, “but I think I’d rather just…leave it.”

“You’d let Derek go unchallenged?”

Is she trying to goad me into it?

“He’ll have told lies about other people. They’ll all be going after him.”

With a wistful sigh, Nina Patel picks up the manuscript and chucks it into her briefcase.

“I read that entire crapfest for nothing.” She looks at me from beneath hooded eyebrows in mock reproach. “You owe me one, Kevin Carver.”

Over the next few minutes, we exchange small talk, a little gossip. Graham is thinking about taking early retirement. My barrister, Seymour, has been done for drink-driving. She has taken up flamenco.

As she rises to leave, she tries one last time.

“You’re sure you don’t want to pursue this?”

“Positive.”

“You’re looking a lot better than I anticipated,” she tells me. “I’d heard you were a bit of a wreck. But you’re looking pretty sharp.”

I thank her for the compliment and invite her to come and see our show.

A week passed – three more rehearsals – and Louise made no detectable move. Mostly, she sat and watched from a respectful distance in the corner of the room. The cameraman was discreet and restricted himself mostly to general shots of the group. It all seemed fairly harmless. Occasionally, Louise would ask if she could record some one-on-one interviews during our tea breaks. But I hovered nearby to keep an eye on things. Her questions were serious-minded, never prurient. Although I did wonder what her questions might be like if I wasn’t policing her. Her co-producer –the Lemon – mostly sat to one side forcing a smile and trying not to look out of her depth. Then, come the fourth rehearsal, she fails to show.

“Where’s your mate?” I ask Louise.

“Off sick.”

“What’s she got?”

“Nervous exhaustion.”

“Oh, right.”

“Yeh, I think all that sitting around on her arse has finally taken its toll.”

Louise has clearly not lost her dislike of women colleagues.

“What’s her production background?”

“She’s Julian’s shag-bunny. That’s her production background.”

“Ouch.”

“And she owns twenty per cent of Going Forward”

I am enjoying Louise’s bitterness. And so’s she.

“Still, it suits me, Kevin. I prefer to hunt alone. This session, I was thinking of recording some more autobiographical stuff with the guys, if that’s OK.”

She spots the alarm in my eyes.

“…with you there, obviously…as their guardian.”

The date for the performance was finalised as August 3rd – three weeks away – in the chapel, to an audience of invited guests and specially-selected inmates. Malcolm clearly wanted to make sure there would be no boisterousness or heckling.

Temperatures had started to climb into the high 70s Fahrenheit and life in an old prison with no air-conditioning was starting to get uncomfortable. So, there I am, lying on my bunk, headphones on, listening to the “Test Match Special”, trying to ignore the stickiness of the air, when I hear Dougie turn a page of his newspaper and groan.

“Oh fuck me, no.”

“What?”

“They’re saying next week’s going to be the start of a proper hot spell. Ninety degrees. As hot as fucking Kuwait. Jesus wept. Everything will start to stink, the drains, the people, prisoners start getting grumpy over the tiniest things, so do the screws, someone does something stupid and then it all kicks off. You mark my fucking words, Kev-boy, I’ve seen it happen. If it hits ninety, this place will go up like a fucking firework.”

I turn the cricket up a little and try not to worry about Dougie’s grim prediction.

“Fucking global warming. And yet those posh restaurants with outside bits are allowed to have fucking great heaters to warm up the open air. How is that legal, eh? Answer me that.”

I don’t bother answering. I’m saving energy, listening to Geoffrey Boycott fulminating about how his granny could bat on this wicket with a stick of rhubarb. Then the springs above me start to bounce, Dougie is laughing.

“Hey, Kevin, your mate’s in the papers again. And he’s not happy.”

“Is this Derek?”

“Yeh, his publishers have binned his autobiography…and now, his character’s been axed from your show. He’s talking about suing them for unfair dismissal.”

Poor Derek. And he said I wasn’t any good at dealing with rejection.

“He says he’s the victim of a ‘malicious secret agenda’. Do you want to read it?”

“Nah.”

“Says he’s not going to take it lying down.”

“He’ll probably throw himself in front of the queen’s horse.”

Dougie chucks the newspaper down to me.

“I said I don’t want to read it.”

“Clock the photo. Looks like he’s chewing a wasp.”

Dougie’s description is pretty accurate. Derek’s face, normally so forgettable, looks thunderously resentful. Despite my indifference, I find myself reading the news article. There is a diplomatic quote from the network, thanking Derek for his work but explaining that they had to make room for exciting new characters aimed at younger audiences. Derek won’t like that. But he’s their problem now, they brought it on themselves.

A bluebottle is dozily circling the light. Boycott thinks the bowlers are banging it in too short. It’s a Saturday. And nothing in the newspapers is going to bother me ever again.

Louise, her camera operator and a sound man continued coming to our rehearsals and, to be honest, it was not nearly as intrusive or destructive as I had feared. She was consistently polite, always asking permission before she started filming and always respectful if we asked her to stop. This unsettled me still further. Again, this was not the woman I remembered.

The group seemed to quite like her and she seemed genuinely interested in all of them; but especially interested in two. One, obviously, was Albie, because he was such a mystery. Also, on camera, his translucence made him look like – to quote Louise – a spectre. The other was Gerald. My suspicion was that she had spotted a kindred spirit, someone else who – when bored – liked to push people’s buttons.

The performance is about ten days away when Gerald announces that he’s been working on a comedy stand-up routine that he would like to be included in the running order.

“What if it’s shit?” asks Dougie.

Gerald looks him squarely in the eye. “It’s not shit,” he informs him.

And he is right. From the first gag, Gerald is funny, often vicious, but funny. His act is a satirical tableau of prison life, mocking everything and everyone. He does a very well-observed parody of the governor’s liberal jargon and some brutal impersonations of some of the guards, the prison chaplain and the prison psychiatrist who loves his lustrous hair so much. Then he turns his attention to the inmates.

People start shifting a little uneasily in their seats. Most of his characters are types – macho, old-school gang-bosses, gay opportunists, weasel-like black marketeers – but some are identifiable as particular individuals. And now he is doing Dougie, doing him very accurately, as a comic mixture of thuggishness and sentimentality. I find myself watching Dougie intently and inching ever so slightly towards the red panic button on the wall.

But Dougie is laughing, laughing and nodding in recognition. Even when Gerald’s version of him talks about building himself an extra testicle because he’s run out of body-space for his tattoos, Dougie is laughing, dabbing at his eyes with the back of his meaty wrist.

Next it’s my turn. I am portrayed as a rather effete luvvie, slumming it with the lowlife. He gives me a catchphrase – “this isn’t about me” – which everyone seems to find hilarious. He’s a bit unfair, but I feel obliged to laugh along with them. Also, I can feel the camera is trained on me, looking for reactions. As Gerald moves on to his next creation I catch a glimpse of Louise grinning like a cat in a bird-house.

The next few characters are types, a junkie, a God-squad type and then a failed suicide bomber who is writing a letter of complaint to Semtex. As he reaches a section where he is lamenting about all the virgins who will “not now be deflowered as faulty equipment prevented his scheduled arrival in Paradise”, Mohammad jolts to his feet and starts yelling.

“Shame on you! Shame on you! Do not mock the martyrs, my friend, they are the messengers of Allah! Allah sees everything! He is all-powerful! The martyrs will smite the enemies of Allah!”

“Well if he’s all-powerful, why does he need to employ middlemen?” retorts Gerald, instantly.

Mohammad rocks back for a moment.

“You show some respect!”

“Do I have to respect mumbo-jumbo?”

At this, Mohammad bursts towards Gerald who does not retreat one millimetre, but Dougie and Pulse intervene and push the two of them apart.

“All right…put the handbags down,” says Dougie.

“Just ree-lax,” adds Pulse.

Now Mohammad is pacing in crazy circles around the room, his eye filling with tears.

“I’m not standing for this, man, no way, this is bullshit, man, being disrespected, no fucking way, this is total bullshit.”

He punches the wall in frustration. I indicate to Louise that she should stop filming, but she pretends not to have seen me.

“Are you going to allow him to disrespect my religion like that?”

Slowly, I realise this question is being directed at me.

“Well…um…it’s not really a question of my ‘allowing’ or ‘not allowing’.”

Gerald interrupts “It’s not about him. That’s right, isn’t it, Kevin?Decisions are taken by the group.” There is a savage light in his eye, he is relishing every second of this.

“Well that’s right, and if the group feels that—”

“Oh fuck the group.”

“Mohammad, listen…”

“Fuck the group! Fuck the lot of you! Fuck right off to Hell! I’m out!”

The door slams behind him, rattling in its frame.

“I don’t know,” mutters Gerald, “you just can’t have a laugh with some people.”

Albie and Simo are both looking a little shaken, so I call a coffee break and make an immediate bee-line for Louise.

“I signalled for you to stop filming.”

“Oh, did you? I didn’t see, sorry.”

“Well that’s got to come out.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s got to be edited out.”

“What?”

“That’s got to be edited out of the final programme.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Because…it’s not fair on Mohammad. He wasn’t in control of his emotions, he was upset, all over the place.”

She furrows her brow in fake puzzlement.

“And…” I jab a finger in her face, “you were specifically requested to switch the camera off.”

“By you.”

“Yes.”

“Not the group.”

She wants to smirk, I can tell, but she hides it behind a wide-eyed mask.

“Well here’s another thing, Louise, you’ll have to get Mohammad to sign off on that and he’s going to say no.”

“Well, let’s see.”

“I’m telling you, he’ll say no.”

“Oh loosen up, Kevin, all we filmed is a good, old-fashioned piece of human conflict. It’d be an interesting element. What we saw was a microcosm of what’s happening in society at large. Free speech versus extreme Islam, Liberalism versus intolerant religiosity. Gerald’s like a cross between Richard Dawkins and…”

“A hyena.”

“He’s a very watchable character.”

“Well he certainly needs watching, he’s a total—”

“It was great TV.”

“Look, Louise, Mohammad is young and very vulnerable and—”

“You’re his protector, I know.”

“This isn’t about me,” I snap. Oh shit, I said it. She giggles at the catchphrase Gerald gave me.

“Look.” I pause to steady myself. “Look, you agreed, Going Forward Productions agreed, that we would have editorial approval and I, for one, wouldn’t be happy to see that go out on TV and I don’t suppose, for one moment, that the prison governor would be prepared to let that go out either.”

She has that challenge in her eyes; the look of someone who needs to win, always.

“Well why don’t we all go away and have a little think about it?” she breezes, “Let’s mull it over.”

I watch her as she walks away to chat with her technicians. What is it about her? Why does she always get a reaction out of me? Maybe I’ve become sensitised to her, like an allergy.

We resume rehearsals as if nothing had happened.

“Is Mohammad coming back?” asks Albie, quietly.

“I don’t know, Paul.”

And then Simo tells us he has some new dance moves he would like to show us, so we clear some space.

It was somewhere around this time that I got a letter from Mac who was touring across Europe with yet another theatre company that nobody had ever heard of. It was a few pages long, full of gossip and salacious stories, but tucked away on the last page was the news that Sandra was pregnant.

I was genuinely taken aback. Although I don’t know why I felt that way, because it was hardly an extraordinary plot-twist. She had made it crystal clear that she would be trying for a baby, so how come I was so shocked? Was it just plain egotism? Maybe, because I was also surprised that she hadn’t written to tell me the news herself. But then again, why should she? I was a finished chapter, it was none of my business. Perhaps she was still angry with me. My conciliatory letter had not prompted a reply. Perhaps she had given up on me, I could hardly blame her.

Ah, what the hell.

There had been a period, towards the end of our relationship, when we had tried for a baby, probably for the wrong reasons – a last roll of the dice, an attempt to see if two people could bind themselves together by creating a third person. Well, it didn’t work. She gave up coffee and alcohol and we had lots of sex at propitious times but, deep down, my heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps that was a factor in why she failed to conceive. Perhaps my sperm were demoralised. Mum always used to say “Nature Knows Best”. I can hear her saying it now. I am not sure she was right, because Nature presents all sorts of abominations, but perhaps there is an unseen timing to life. Sandra was ready for a baby, at the right time, in the right place, and now one was on its way. If she and I had had a child, it would have been a disaster. I’m far too selfish to be responsible for another human being. Acknowledging that makes me feel sad, because I wonder what I’m missing, but I’m comfortable that I understand the limitations of my personality. I’m tumbleweed.

I did debate whether to drop her a line of congratulation. But somehow that felt like a presumption, so instead I accepted myself as an irrelevance and tried not to think about her any more. I did wonder what she would think about my work with the drama group. She would approve, I felt sure. That was a comfort, to know she would be proud of me, if she knew what I was doing. Isn’t that odd? Fifty-three years old and looking for approval.

I did once have a fantastically intense dream where I was a dad, one of those dreams that is so vivid that when you wake up your brain spends several moments refusing to accept that the world you’ve left wasn’t real. I had a son, named Christopher, he looked about five or six years old and he had black hair, blue eyes and an infectious, gurgling laugh. We were hunting crabs in a series of sparkling rock pools. But then I lost him in a department store which, for some reason, was staffed entirely by people with one arm. So I woke up feeling bereft and ashamed. So many of my dreams end in failure. Is that normal?

Well, I know it is probably too late for me to be a dad now. I have reached an age where I often sit down to pee. Even if I met the perfect Mrs Carver tomorrow, which is highly improbable, I would be one of those fathers who is always mistaken for a grandad.

I can’t remember what I did with that letter from Mac. I think I must have thrown it away.

Mohammad made it crystal clear that he would not be rejoining the group and, in addition, he filed a complaint that he had been subjected to racist abuse, which means that I end up in the governor’s office, staring at the many colour-coded charts on his wall.

“It does feel a little like you let this get out of hand,” muses Malcolm, as he scans the text of the complaint.

“Well, first off, I don’t see how it’s down to me, I’m not their leader, or carer, or whatever, and second, what was I supposed to do? Shut Gerald up the moment he started doing a Muslim character? Censor him? He was just doing jokes – I mean yes, it was black-ish humour, it was Gerald, but they were clearly jokes. Mohammad over-reacted. He lost control of his emotions, everyone knows what he’s like.”

“He’s alleging there was racially offensive content. Biscuit?”

He pushes a plate of Hobnobs my way.

“Well, I don’t remember any.”

“It mentions hate-speech here.”

“I didn’t hear any hate-speech, whatever that might be.”

Malcolm doesn’t respond, but continues reading.

“Well…this is a bit of a bummer…I’ll have to do something…otherwise they’ll send me on another course on Diversity and Ethnicity.” He gives a Harry Secombe chuckle. “I don’t want two days in Hastings.”

“It’s all down on tape.”

“Is it?”

“Yeh, they filmed the whole thing, Gerald doing his stand-up routine, the fight, well, it wasn’t actually a proper fight, just a—”

“So I could present that as evidence?”

“Suppose so.”

He chomps pensively on his biscuit for a few seconds. “What was Gerald’s stand-up like?”

“It was a sort of…satire on prison life.”

The chomping quickens. “I don’t like the sound of that.” Now he starts texting someone. “I’d better ask Louise for a copy.”

“Incidentally, when the…dust-up was brewing, I did ask Louise to stop filming and she refused.”

He keeps texting.

“Said she didn’t see me signalling her. I thought it was a bit opportunist…and I thought what she was filming might give a rather negative impression of the prison.”

Now I’ve got his attention.

“Negative? In what way, negative?”

“Well, it could make this place look like a bit of a…a cauldron of sort of racial-slash-religious tension.”

He starts drumming his fingers on the desk.

“We have editorial approval,” he says, as if confirming it for his own peace of mind.

“I know, but…well, you know my feelings about this whole process. I think the camera just stirs people up, I just sense trouble ahead.”

The fingers stop drumming.

“I share your concern, Kevin.”

“Good.”

“But I still feel that, provided it’s handled properly, the programme could be a valuable social document.”

Where’s he going with this? He seems uncomfortable.

“I’ll raise these concerns with Louise tomorrow. She’s…um…she’s coming in to record some interviews with me in the office here.”

“Oh, right.”

“Yes, she says that she thinks my, um…observations will provide the narrative spine of the piece.”

“Right.”

“But no, I will raise the…I’m of a mind to say she can’t use the footage of Mohammad’s…upset.”

“I think that’d be best.”

“And if she disagrees then…”

“We pull the plug on the whole thing.”

“Absolutely, Kevin. That’s our back-stop position.”

He starts flicking through the pages of the complaint again.

“I’ll have to follow this up somehow. His Imam’s coming to see me tomorrow.”

“Best check those biscuits are halal then.”

Not a flicker.

“Definitely no racial abuse, you reckon?”

“Watch the tape,” I say.

I presume he must have watched the footage because a few days later he stops me cheerily in the corridor and tells me that, after due consideration, he feels that the confrontation between Gerald and Mohammad should be included in the documentary, as it’s an interesting microcosm of what’s happening in society at large. Louise has got to him.

I trudge back to the sapping heat of my cell, certain that what I feared from the very beginning is now playing out before me. We are being turned into screen-fodder. It’s happening. Just as I predicted.

Circus time.