Robert was examined by a prison doctor in Crumlin Road. The doctor made him take off his clothes and get on the scales. It reminded him of swimming at Warrenpoint baths. The white tiles and the chlorine smell hanging in the air. Men stripped naked and padding between the wooden benches. Robert was weighed and measured. The doctor looked into his eyes and ears. He held Robert’s testicles in a gloved hand. Robert watched himself in the mirror above the sink.
‘I’m working on the physique,’ Robert told the doctor. ‘I’m doing one hundred chin-ups in the cell before breakfast.’
The most chin-ups Robert had ever managed was twenty-five. He thought it was important to convey the right impression. To say to the world, here is a man who is not prepared to go to seed despite an unjust incarceration. He started to scratch the days of his confinement on the cell wall. He fed pigeons between the bars. He had read about men who had spent many years in prison. In the Mickey Spillane books he had read about the importance of doing your time. Hard time. Easy time. He had read about the Birdman of Alcatraz. He thought about a man in a dusty cell, the lonely years stretching out. He wished that he had been put in a place like Alcatraz. He appreciated the lonely grandeur of it, the island prison surrounded by deadly shifting sea currents, the fogbanks closing.
‘I suffered a head injury when I was an infant,’ Robert told the doctor.
‘There’s nothing in your records to indicate a cranial injury,’ the doctor said. He was a small man with a dissatisfied look. Robert wondered how you ended up being a doctor in a prison. He thought it must be because you weren’t allowed to work anywhere else. Robert looked at the man’s hair, dyed and slicked back. The doctor told Robert that excessive masturbation was an indicator of sexual deviance.
‘I’m not a pervert,’ Robert said. The doctor measured Robert’s skull with a set of brass dividers then wrote in a spiral-bound notebook.
‘If they hang me can I leave my body to medical science?’ Robert said. ‘There’s things could be learned by examining the like of me.’ He imagined an eminent doctor bent over the corpse, an eyebrow raised in surprise and wonder.
‘The corpse of the executed man is the property of Her Majesty,’ the doctor said, without looking at Robert. ‘Post mortem the body is interred in the grounds of the prison. No record is kept of the body’s location.’
Robert couldn’t stop telling the other prisoners about what happened to the executed man. He was impressed by the sweeping heartlessness of it, the body denied to the family. One of the warders told him that quicklime was poured on the body in the grave to ensure that it was erased from the earth. He could see, when he closed his eyes, the body incandescent in the dark earth.
‘The prison doctor looks like a Nazi on the run,’ he told Mervyn at visiting time. He had that Josef Mengele look to him. Robert had read about the ratlines, Nazis spirited out of Germany.
‘South America. Chile and the like. That’s where you find Nazis,’ Mervyn said. ‘Wearing panama hats in the jungle.’ Robert wasn’t convinced. He watched the doctor as he went about his surgery. Robert thought he looked evil. There was an air of vile experiments about him.
Mervyn was interested in how the prison worked, the timetabled mealtimes and slopping out, men in procession through the exercise yard.
‘I’m just keeping me head down, doing my time. The screws isn’t too bad.’ Letting the prison phrases hang in the air between them. He knew that they were wasted on Mervyn. He wasn’t able to focus through the prison noise, the clang of iron doors and keys rattling, raised voices, the whole arduous hubbub of prison life. Iron and stone. Robert knew that Will would appreciate it. The prison argot. Cons and lags. He waited for Will to come and see him but he didn’t. All he had was Mervyn, white-faced and tongue-tied.
Legal documents were served on him every day, the story of his life opening out into new dimensions. Robert felt as if he had access to whole new languages. His solicitor brought him affidavits and writs, laid them out on the bare prison table. You thought of them as being written on archaic materials, parchments and vellums, the scribed wisdom of ages. Robert loved the sound of the Latin terms in his mouth. Habeas corpus. He hadn’t thought that the bare events of that night could be retold in such a way. That you did with malice aforethought. He read the documents late into the night. The warders who checked on him through the spyhole saw him as scholarly, hunched over.
After an initial period in a cell on his own Robert was put into a cell with a young prisoner called Hughes. Hughes had been an apprentice in the Belfast Telegraph print room. He was thin with tattoos on both arms and an inked-in teardrop below his right eye. He had tried to tattoo letters on his own fingers and on the backs of his hands but the ink had leaked under the skin so that his hands looked like he had been conducting some narrative of self in a lost tongue.
‘What are you in for?’ Robert asked.
‘Interfering,’ Hughes said.
The prison psychiatrist found Robert to be of average intelligence. He seemed to bear some hostility towards his mother. He was described as boastful and arrogant although these qualities may have masked low self-esteem. He was prone to flights of fancy, for instance ambitions to be the world bodybuilding champion. He also referred to an alleged approach from Russian intelligence during his time in London. Robert had a rudimentary knowledge of psychiatry that he had acquired from books in the library and had a tendency to use medical terms out of context. He asked the psychiatrist about blackouts caused by blows to the head. He spoke about aneurysms and tried to engage the psychiatrist on the subject of schizophrenia and of phantom voices urging you to wrong. Robert was found fit for trial, although emotional immaturity was noted. A mild anti-depressant was also prescribed.
Agnes thought that being the mother of a criminal would lead to shunning but that was not the case. Of course there were certain women in the town who put their big noses in the air when Agnes walked past although Agnes knew for a fact that they were more dragged up than reared themselves. In fact Agnes found at first that she was granted more respect than had ever been shown to her. For the first time people knew what a heartbreak Robert had been and not from laxness on her part. She was sympathised with in the street though when she saw the Gambles and them ones from Upper Damolly she looked the other way. The man from the Daily Mail took her to the Shelbourne and she was taken also to the Great Northern Hotel by other gentlemen of the press and also to the Crown Hotel in Warrenpoint by a man from the Press Association who bought her Courvoisier in a balloon glass all night. He was after more than a story that one well she had news for him.
Agnes was a Scorpio, kind but also passionate. She read her stars every day. There were often mysterious references to a burden she would be called upon to bear in her life, which she took to mean Robert, but also there was romance just around the corner.