Arnold had asked me if I wanted to go on Rule 43 to protect me from other inmates. In prison, if you’re a certain class of offender, they stab you with a knife in the showers first and ask questions later. I refused, saying either I’d be attacked or I wouldn’t. But one morning in my second week I was standing on the upper landing in a line of men waiting to slop out, when I realised the man standing next to me had received a sharp nudge in the back once he had drawn level with the stairs. I watched him tumble down two flights of metal stairs, hitting his head several times on the way. Word had got out that he was in for the rape of a minor. I decided to try to take control of my own destiny.
People didn’t tend to ask you straight to your face what you had done. They were more likely to ask someone else. My cellmate, Joel, who was known to be reliable in one way only, as a gossip, had told me what had led him inside: he had thrown a punch at a debt collector’s chin and while Joel, who had apparently always been as thin as a reed, even before becoming addicted to smack, had dealt him a feeble blow it had caused the debt collector to take a step back, lose his footing and hit the side of his head on the sharp edge of a brick wall. Blood everywhere. So Joel told it.
One night, I waited for Joel to fall asleep and then threw a pen at the stainless-steel toilet bowl in the corner. The noise woke him up. Disorientated and flustered, he asked what was going on. I said I didn’t know. Nothing. But that I was lying there thinking about what I’d done to end up in a jail cell with a man who’d murdered a debt collector by doing little more than breathe on him.
‘No offence,’ I said.
‘None taken.’
I lay there in silence waiting for him to pick up the baton.
‘So, what did you do?’
‘I killed a man,’ I said. ‘I suppose you could say it was in cold blood, or you could argue it was a crime of passion, as my lawyer did, not very successfully.’
‘Why did you kill him?’ Joel’s voice, with its strangulated Glaswegian accent, sounded vulnerable and needy in the dark.
‘His name was Trevor.’
‘Reason enough,’ Joel cut in.
I grunted. ‘He was an airline pilot who’d been sacked for being drunk on the job. Anyway, I found out my wife was having an affair with him. She tried to end it. She took my two daughters up to see him to end it, thinking that if he saw she’d got two little girls with her—’
‘Twins?’
‘What?’
‘Are they twins?’
I hesitated. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They were twins. She thought if she turned up with the twins and told him it was over he’d just accept it. He wouldn’t make a fuss.’
‘What do you mean “were twins”?’
‘I’m coming to that.’
‘Sorry, pal.’
‘So, anyway, he made them go up in his four-seater plane. He was allowed to fly small planes. The plane crashed and they all died.’
‘Except Trevor, right?’
‘Yes, except Trevor.’
‘So you killed the cunt.’
‘I tracked him down and I killed him with my bare hands. I throttled him. Strangled him. Somehow I even managed to break his neck.’
‘Fair play. The cunt deserved it.’
After the visit to the hill where his wife and children died, I don’t see Lewis for a couple of weeks. The Residential is looming and I have to make certain preparations for it. The days will be structured, the mornings around exercise-based workshops, while the afternoons will be given over to one-to-one tutorials. During the evenings there will be readings.
Helen emails me and suggests we go on a research trip together, as previously discussed. Helen is from Bristol (I checked the information the department holds on file) and is renting a place in Fallowfield, so I suggest I pick her up one evening and we go for a drive. As we head down Kingsway, an Emirates flight passes over the road ahead of us from left to right. We come off at Cheadle Royal.
‘So are we going to John Lewis?’ Helen says. Playing with her ponytail, which she has pulled over her right shoulder, she looks very relaxed in the passenger seat of my car.
I smile, but don’t answer, as I drive past the exit for John Lewis and past the exit for Heald Green before turning left into the business and leisure park. The plane is very low now, just visible in the distance, perhaps as it passes over Ringway Road.
‘I guess that’s where you play tennis, right?’ she says, nodding at David Lloyd.
‘If I played tennis, maybe I would play there,’ I say.
‘My dad plays at David Lloyd,’ she says. ‘A different one, obviously.’
I laugh. ‘Do I remind you of your dad?’
‘He’s older than you.’
I negotiate the roundabouts and enter the parking area behind an office building of blond brick and smoked green glass.
‘You like places like this,’ she says.
I’m not sure if it’s a question or a statement.
‘Their anonymity is interesting,’ I say. ‘The very blandness that should make them boring makes them interesting. They could be anything. The people who work here by day could be doing anything at all.’
‘What about the people who come here by night?’
‘Security guards?’
‘Isn’t this the kind of place you write about where people go dogging and piking?’
‘Do I?’
‘You gave a reading at uni, remember?’
‘What’s piking?’ I ask, looking at the bright white lights of an approaching plane in the darkening sky over the Stockport Pyramid.
‘Isn’t it watching? Dogging’s doing it and piking’s watching people do it?’
‘Sounds like you know more about it than I do.’
‘I doubt it,’ she says, pulling her fingers through her ponytail.
A car enters the parking area and drives slowly by.
‘What do you think they’re up to?’ she asks.
‘I think it’s a bit early — it’s only dusk — but you tell me.’
Helen tosses her ponytail back over her shoulder.
I start the engine and we drive out of the car park and back into the network of wide empty roads and roundabouts that serves the business and leisure park. I take the road for Heald Green and slip the Rachel’s CD into the CD player — Full on Night. I turn right into Ringway Road and slow down as we pass the Moss Nook. I try to spot another ponytail through the tiny square panes of the restaurant’s windows, but there’s a car behind us. I press my foot lightly on the accelerator, but the driver behind overtakes me with an angry sidelong glance. We’re now beyond the restaurant, but, while there’s no longer anyone behind me, I slow down again as we approach the layby on the left. I turn the wheel sharply and pull on the handbrake.
‘What’s this?’ Helen asks.
I show her the runway lights and tell her how it would once have been a good spot to sit and watch planes landing. I look over my shoulder to see the lights of an approaching airliner.
‘If the police come by?’
‘They’ll move us on.’
‘Just that?’
‘Depends what kind of mood they’re in.’
‘Have you ever spent time in a cell?’
‘Why do you ask me that?’ I snap.
‘All right, all right,’ she says, palms in the air. ‘I have, that’s all. And I’m in no hurry to do it again.’
I turn to look at her.
‘What did you do?’ I ask her.
‘I was on a demo. A load of us got rounded up and spent a night in the cells.’
I look out of the window. The plane is almost on top of us. I reach out my left arm and grab hold of something and squeeze.
‘What the fuck?’ she says.
‘Sorry,’ I say, withdrawing my hand just as quickly. ‘Must have missed the handbrake.’
Helen seems to shrink back against the door.
‘We’d better go,’ I say.