On the morning of the conjugal, Laroche was restive. He kneaded the muscle in his forearm as if he wanted to separate it from the bone. The lines around his eyes were pulled tight.
Michael shot a look at him. “What’s up?”
“It’s me bleedin’ wossname conjugal, that’s what.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t want to see ’em. Changed me mind.” He shifted his weight in the chair, got up, walked to the door, kicked it, then came and sat back down. “Besides, got a daughter already. My little Zazie. Don’t need another one.” He sniffed then wiped his nose on his shoulder. “Nobody likes to be made a fool of, Rosbif – do they?”
“Who’s making a fool of you?”
“Her bloody mother, that’s who. It’s not the kid. I like kids – couldn’t eat a whole one yada yada oink oink. But she’s having a laugh. Well, fuck her.”
“You’ve got nothing to lose…”
At that, Laroche leaned his forehead into his hands. He slumped against them. “Thanks for pointing that out, Rosbif,” he said in a low voice. “I feel shitloads better now. Lilian Laroche – the man with nothing to lose. Merci bleedin’ beaucoup.”
Michael couldn’t help himself. “Lilian?”
“Yeah?”
“Lilian?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just that – it’s a girl’s name, isn’t it?”
Laroche eyed him coldly. “Let’s do a list of things that frost me muffin: number one, Rosbif ponces.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s both.” His leg started jiggling. A vein surfaced beneath the skin of his temple. He cracked the knuckles in one hand.
“Alright, alright.”
He cracked the knuckles in his other hand.
“About your daughter – Marianne,” Michael said quickly. “Her mum will have got her up and washed and changed and fed and changed again and probably caught three buses in order to bring her here to meet you. It wouldn’t do you any harm to go along.”
Laroche looked askance at him. He laced his fingers together and cracked all the bones at once.
“You’ve got to man up,” said Michael apprehensively. “It’s what you keep telling me I must do – Lilian.”
~~~
There were days when time didn’t pass, it congealed, and the afternoon of Laroche’s conjugal seemed to last a week. Being alone in the cell felt a bit too close to solitary confinement. I’ve got half a lifetime of this ahead of me. He tried reading a book, but it failed to grip him. How am I ever going to bear it? He attempted to do a pencil sketch of Delphine from a dog-eared photo he used to keep in his wallet, but it came out full of all the fear he had for her. How will she manage? Where will she live when Lisette is too old to look after her? Would his father step into the breach on a long-term basis? Would he even want him to? He was drawing a picture of Charlotte’s mouth from memory, when he heard the particular articulation of the key turning in the lock. The law of unintended consequences is harsher than the one that sends you down for twenty years. He observed a kind of silence within himself, a stilling of his thoughts.
Laroche burst in through the door as if he were fleeing from the paparazzi, his hands, palm outwards, screening his face. “Leave me be, leave me be.” The air crackled around him as he sat on his bed, tilting himself away from Michael. Instead of jiggling, he rocked back and forth, a movement so slight it was no more than the beating of a pulse. “Can’t get me head round this,” he muttered. “Can’t get me head – oi, Rosbif.”
Michael was extending his drawing of Charlotte, shading the line of her jaw, pencilling in the lobe of her ear. He couldn’t bring himself to draw the intimate sweep of her neck. “How did it go?”
“Like that.” He threw a photograph onto the table.
Michael studied the picture. A bald baby with close-set, white-lashed eyes.
“I’m basically fucked.”
“She is very like you.”
“Poor little rug rat.” He sniffed. “Let’s do a list of ten ways to shaft your kid: kill its mother – that’s a good one, that should come top in all fairness. Next one: get yerself sent down for armed robbery–” he wiped his nose on his sleeve, then glanced at the photo again and looked away. “Your turn,” he said. His gaze was drawn back to the photo. “She’s quite like me, isn’t she? You know. Just a bit.”
“Don’t they say babies always look like their fathers? Makes the dad invest.”
“Think she’s got me mouth – whaddya reckon? And me hair, obvs.” He bit his lip.
“I think she’s got your eyes.”
“Did you say invest? Fat chance. Five years, that’s what my lawyer said I’d get. She’ll be half way to leaving home by then.”
“You can still be some kind of a dad – while you’re in here.”
Laroche grunted. “Don’t have much to do with the other one – Zazie. Her mum’s not so keen. Got a court order against me, as it happens. We could do a list of all the court orders that’ve got my name on them if you’ve the time.”
“Marianne’s mum seems quite keen.”
“Yeah, well.”
“You could write her letters, when she’s older.”
“I could record her bedtime stories an’ all. I’ve got the leaflets. I know the drill. But.”
“It’s better than nothing.” A heaviness descended on Michael. He stared at the picture he had drawn and with a few swift strokes of the pencil sketched in Charlotte’s neck, her broken neck, at a pitiful and incongruous angle. “We’re in the same boat, you and I. Fathers of daughters we won’t get to see.”
A laugh cracked out of Laroche, “Result!” he said mirthlessly. “You made it in the end. You took yer time about it but yeehaw! – here you are.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You blew in here all I’m not like the rest of you. Look at you now, me old Rosbif. I’m not the only one who’s been doin’ Education.”