Bolton stuck his head in the mess. He was wearing headphones, unplugged, the wire hanging at his side.
‘Just had a call,’ he said. ‘Only heard it because the needle got stuck on the second act of Carmen. Fluff. Where does fluff come from in here? They’ve rung through with a Special Visit for Seamus Nugent. It’s to go down as a family visit. It can’t be good news. Nugent hasn’t taken a visit in three years, he won’t put on the uniform.’
‘The hard man,’ Frig said, proffering a roll of fruit pastilles.
Bolton looked sad. ‘Always the purple one,’ and popped it in his mouth. ‘Dunn, will you take him down for it? Shandy’s supposed to be visits runner but I expect he’s too drunk—’
‘Should I run it past SO, Sir?’ asked Frig.
‘SO is sleeping it off in the stores. Mr Dunn’s going to bring the prisoner up.’ He stood at the circle a minute rather than going back to his office. ‘Wait up, I’ll go down with you Dunn, to get Nugent.’ He went for his cap and the two of them strode together towards the wing.
‘Prisoner 3334 O’Brien and Prisoner 1052 Nugent . . . both called Seamus as it happens. Open the cell, Officer Dunn.’
Dunn fumbled with the keys, opened the door, stepped into the space. One of the men was squatting in the corner; the other was standing at the window, his back to his cellmate. There was a different smell, an eggy aroma, warm, somehow at once cosy and sickening.
‘The prisoner is going to the toilet, Sir.’
He had a recurrent dream; in it he was desperate to open his bowels but could never find a toilet and when at last he found one and was about to unburden himself with the sense of imminent relief that borders on pleasure, he noticed that the walls of the toilet were transparent and he was being watched.
‘Don’t go in there for a while if you don’t mind,’ he’d said formally to Angie the night before. She’d been coming up the stairs with two cups of tea as he emerged.
‘Prisoner 1052 Nugent,’ Bolton had his eyes on the ceiling of the cell.
‘You have been called for a Special Visit. I’d hazard a guess that it’s important. Family news.’
The prisoner at the window did not turn. The light outside was dim. There were no lights in their cells. The prisoner who’d been squatting sat now on his piece of foam. He put his finger and thumb to his jaw line and stroked it, looked over at his cellmate, waiting.
‘Mr Nugent,’ said Bolton, dipping his head and venturing inside the cell. ‘It could be important news. I don’t know what it is. But it might be about your mother or father. Your wife.’
The prisoner remained as he was, looking outside.
‘All right, ok.’ Bolton stepped backwards, uncertainly, out of the cell. Dunn was let home early. ‘Why don’t you go home, Dunn,’ Bolton said. ‘We don’t need more than ten of us to watch locked doors.’
‘That poor wee lad got shot on the Clifton Road, waiting for a bus to go to the Crumlin Road prison,’ said Angela, when he got home, turning off the TV and watching the image fade to a dot. ‘He wasn’t even a proper prison officer but they still shot him. Twenty years old. Married for just three months.’
‘Hello you,’ said John Dunn, standing in the doorway of the front room. She remained crouching before the television; she closed her eyes for a second. The way he said those two words, in his flat-vowelled Michael Caine voice, it turned her over. It was the caution of the man that thrilled her. How much he kept back.
‘Well,’ she was in her nightgown, ‘you’ve always been the deep type, so you have John.’
‘You’ve read the letter then.’
‘I thought it might be a love letter at first but no such luck. So, now, have you been seeing this boy’s mother at all, in the last few years?’
‘No.’
‘It’s only about the lad then?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looks like you does he?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘So you’ve got a child, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Lucky you,’ she said, touching his cheek. ‘That lump on your face is getting worse, you ought to show it to a doctor.’ Her finger was extending towards a small growth that had been beneath his chin for some months. He pulled his face away. ‘I don’t want anything to change, John. Do you think it’s going to change?’
He moved away. ‘Sorry,’ he said and he went up for his shower.
He stood in the bath, his mouth open, cracked but noiseless. He let the water go all over his face. Then he turned off the taps and dried himself, clearing a space on the steamed mirror with a bit of towel, then touching it to his face; cold.
When he came down he showed her his feet that were all blistered and bruised with the standing around in ill-fitting boots. She said she’d run him a foot soak.
‘I’ve just had a shower.’
‘It’ll do them good, John.’
He picked up the letter on the table. ‘Independent little bastard,’ he said, looking dispassionately from the note to his bare feet and back again. Angie was cleaning the washing-up bowl at the sink.
Mark Wilson’s writing was long-stroked, spidery. He’d written that he’d make the arrangements to come out himself, would probably take the ferry from Liverpool. He was just finishing up his first term of the second year. He’d stay in Bristol, working at the university bar, stocktaking and closing it up then he’d come over on the Saturday and they could play it by ear from there. He needn’t stay with them the
whole time. He had a friend in Londonderry he could go and see.
‘In Londonderry? Tell him he’d best stop here.’
He went on that John needn’t have sent the money; he would bring it back with him.
‘Trying to make a point. I said, he’s trying to make a point.’
She squeezed a good amount of washing-up liquid into the bowl and turned off the tap, moving her hand in the water before bringing over the bowl. ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell with only words to go on.’
‘What do you mean by that? All we’ve got as human beings is words.’
‘What have you got yourself in a mood for, now?’
‘He’s going to come over here and have a go at me for what I did. I didn’t know she was going to get pregnant did I? She never gave me the chance to do the right thing. Christ Angie. What will we have in common? Nothing. Nothing at all.’
It occurred to him that his son might come over, have a go at him and go home again. Then they could all get back to their real lives. The boy had had a milk round, he knew that much, so he wasn’t soft, he worked in a bar, perhaps he liked a drink. He was at university. Between these pieces of information ran a gamut of other possibilities that he couldn’t imagine. He was worried that his son wouldn’t be like him and that he wouldn’t like him. But if he was like him, it would be hard to take.
Angie thought he would be like him. She’d already found what was in it for her. She talked about the food she’d ordered for Christmas, saying more than once, ‘If he’s anything like you . . .’ adding with an eye to his approval, ‘we’d better get in plenty of beer.’ She was going to tidy up the spare room, put all the stuff they stored there in boxes under the bed.
He raised his toes and saw the soapy water sliding back on to the hairs of his upper feet, bubbles clustering about his ankles like flies. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Angie. I’ve barely been in that prison any time at all and already I’ve had it up to here.’
‘Shame you can’t wear your own shoes. Pair of tennis shoes or something would be better with all the walking you do. You could all wear the same kind so it’s a uniform like. Dunlops do black ones. Why can’t you wear them?’
‘You’re off your rocker.’
‘Well it makes sense. You’d do the job the same, better. Probably cost them less to buy. They ought to think about it.’
‘It doesn’t matter about the shoes, love,’ he said, lifting a foot. ‘You know, we’ve got these bloody great uniforms, we’re dressed up like a bunch of clowns. We’ve got the outsized boots, all we need is red noses. Listen to this right, one of the lads told me how he was on front desk at the Visitors’ Centre and this woman was giving him grief because the last visit she’d had was cancelled, and she’s going crazy giving off f’ing this and f’ing that, you black-coated bastards and so on and so he calls on the phone for Jaws to come out the front and deal with this woman who’s got some mouth on her. Well she goes and buggers off to the toilet, doesn’t she, so this little old lady, she’s got to be in her seventies, comes up to the desk, shows the officer her visiting pass, nice as pie, and out comes Jaws, picks the old lady up and carries her off, puts her outside, tells her to eff off, her visit’s cancelled.’ He started to laugh, excusing himself saying, ‘It’s not funny,’ and then he laughed some more until his eyes were watering. To see him like that, Angie started as well. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘That’s awful, John. Is it true?’
‘Yup. That’s how it is, see. I don’t know whether something’s funny or whether I need to laugh so I think it’s funny. So tell us, Angie, is it funny?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She sat on his lap, her legs to the side and they laughed with their arms around each other, her head nesting atop of his, her shiny good hair in his face.
‘Let’s go to bed, love. Together for once. I’ll get up quietly, I don’t need an alarm. I’ll sneak out.’
‘Let me clear this lot away.’ She got up.
‘Stuck up little git. Big head. I wonder if I’ll like him?’
She put their tea plates in the sink, turned the tap on them.
‘Angie. You’ve got a nice arse.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Angie. Would you rather be the fox or the farmer?’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘Angie, thanks a lot.’
‘What for?’
‘About Mark.’
She was asleep when he came out of the bathroom. He’d been in there a long time with the day’s paper. At least he was regular. He lay down beside her, but he couldn’t sleep. The prison was still with him.
Wordless, Bolton had walked ahead of Dunn to the grille and waited there, hands on his waist, looking away. ‘Nothing. Not even “shove the visit”. After what, four years? When it could be that his mother is dying.’
He needed to get some sleep. He should stop thinking about it all. It was as if something in Bolton had just given in.
He had to sleep or he’d feel like shit in the morning. Angie was asleep. If he could just follow in the shade of her breathing, trace the outline of her strength . . .
The cell that is built of bone; the promenade along the ramparts of the skull, twin look-outs through eye sockets, now watch your step, don’t slip, there are the nose holes. Turn around. Feel your way. There, back in the blackness is the soft something that has no wall, has no end, it is in here but it goes beyond this cell space, drawing strength from what sun, what water, what humus? To produce what? Excrete what? Soft thing, backwards mattress, riddled with crime. Behind reason and before God. Bastard thing. Troubled until it stops, if it stops. If you can ever stop it—
John woke. He had dropped off. If he went in and out like that a few times he’d be fucked, no chance of sleep. There he was perched on the brink, ready to take the helter-skelter into sleep, but held back by the parental authority of his speaking mind. All of life is a war on your own nature.
Scraping a plate of strawberries into the toilet. The woman’s face going from concern to understanding, it was all a joke. Goldfish circling. Then in the palm of a hand. Meter of life. Trembling. Tenuous. Dying alive.
Where was it coming from, when he closed his eyes? He was not in control of the images that came, it was as if he was invaded.
He lay there feeling hate and fear, adrenaline-sauced. There was no way he’d sleep with his heart cracking on at the pace it was going. The bloody prison.
A good soldier respects his enemy. You had to learn to hate them to fight them – that happened naturally, when your mate to your left copped a bullet. It doubled the effectiveness of a unit if one of the lads took a bullet. The killer instinct is revenge, that’s all. Like before he went on the screening job when one of the young para lads got ambushed down an alleyway, and John came down afterwards and saw him with three bullets in him, blood in the side of his mouth and his trousers wet, his head to the side, his eyes wide. He’d knelt down to check him. He was dying, he looked scared of where he was going. When John stood up, he hated.
You could hate them and respect them. With the screening job, you were taken out of it after four months because you got to respect them. They put you on patrol on the streets for a few weeks before to get you to hate them.
‘Screening.’ Funny word. Talking it through beforehand, deciding what you were going to do. Either you got something or you didn’t. Small fry, the nobodies, gave you something. The big men wouldn’t. They were too much a part of it, they didn’t know where they stopped and where ‘the cause’ began.
Things changed though, and they were right to move you quick out of it. He’d shared half a bottle of scotch with a big IRA man, lay into him then they finished off the bottle together.
He was watching the empty theatre of his mind, waiting for the actors to emerge. There was Jaws addressing the new officers, the spittle between his upper lip and lower lip a little white ball, then a white string, then gone, then back again. Laughter, applause. There was Bolton, the music, the soaring harmonies, and men sweating and raging and fighting.
He thought of Nugent staring at a point across the yard. A goldfish in his bowl head.