The paramedic sitting on the other gurney wants to know if Dott’s trying to say something.
I’m thirsty, Dott croaks. Can I have some water, please?
The paramedic shakes his head. Not just yet. Very soon. We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, he replies.
Dott’s eyelids feather closed. On either side of the ambulance, as we decline to sea level—sea level?—the trees and bushes on the hills melt into the land. The slopes appear more than ever like sand dunes I want to climb. If tonight’s the night, as Dott puts it, I want it started tout suite. What’s the sense in hanging around? And I can’t mistrust what he’s told me. If he doesn’t intend to call in what he needs to call in, why is he performing the act of goodness and kindness that will protect me from the ugly bombs landing? We know that goodness and kindness are no fucking good to the yoot.
Do it now, Dott, I stress as loudly as I can.
Oh, all right, Dott says aloud, making his carer frown confusion.
As you’ve asked nicely. Wake up, Billy! The show must go on.
Three.
Dear Julie
It shouldn’t happen like this but it has. A great but terrible realisation has come upon me and it’s taken me several days to be able to pick up my pen, let alone find the words to express how I’m feeling. But here goes. You need to be without me. I cannot support your decision to start a family with Billy Cardman. It is not right with anyone. But if I hold up my hands and accept defeat, it might be easier for all involved. Still, I need to know. Will he take care of Patrice? Please consider this question honestly. If you think the answer is yes, I will not so much walk away as stand still. It’s not as if I can move very far anyway. But I won’t interfere. I don’t think you should visit me again—and I don’t want to see Patrice either. It’s too painful. I cannot communicate with her and she cannot communicate with me. In this respect, she and I are like you and I. When she can talk—or better, when she can read—there will be a letter waiting for her. I haven’t written it yet; and even if I write it tomorrow, which I doubt I’ll be strong enough to do, I won’t send it yet. Why not? Because I can’t, and because. Cardman will destroy it, I think. Before you get angry, please don’t tell me I don’t know him. Please don’t proffer platitudes. ‘His heart’s in the right place.’ ‘He wouldn’t harm a fly.’ Both of those things are as may be. But I’ll ask you this: how much more intimate can you get than knife-craft?—than wounding? Believe me, Julie—an attack is a personal thing, even if the victim is random, as was the case with Cardman. I had nothing against him I do now, mind, but that’s my problem; he simply wouldn’t give me what I thought I had every right to claim. I think differently now, as you know. So what did I learn about him, by attacking him? I learned a brisk lesson about his stoicism and resolve. He resisted me; he resisted a knife. And now this: I can tell you that he’s strong- willed, opinionated, hurt and excited about his new adventure. He won’t want me to write to Patrice, any more than he’ll want you to come and see me. In his mind, you’re his now. And I know that you’ll hate a sentence like that, but it’s true. You will learn, very quickly, I think, about male pride and male jealousy. He will take care of you and our daughter, I hope. Only if he doesn’t will I return to your lives. Please pass this message to Billy. There really is nothing much to add. I have resigned my position as the Library Redband. I needed a change of scene, ho ho. With Christmas approaching, I wanted to begin the new year with a new job; and for once serendipity and bald good fortune were on my side. It was Ostrich who gave me the idea, but it was luck that made it happen. Ostrich—you’ve never met him, of course, but perhaps you feel you know him a little bit, seeing as I’ve talked about him often enough when you’ve come to visit and I had nothing of my own to tell you—well, he’s enrolled on the Mechanics course; and I thought—okay, I’ll try that. Unfortunately, Motor Mechs already has a Redband who’s good at his job. On the other hand, when I looked around a little more, I found out that the Bricks Workshop Redband has been transferred to another prison because of some gang connections on the out that are threatening to brew up a war inside. So the job was vacant. I applied. I am the Bricks Workshop Redband, starting on January 1 . Happy New Year! A new year and a new beginning: that’s the plan at least. All I fervently want to do, Julie, is to keep my cerebellum busy. Ride my time. It won’t be long before I’m released: this is what I endeavour to teach myself. And at the end of my time—what then? A dead five years. Five years of my transitional period between late teenage-hood and early adulthood—gone, all gone. Dust and breeze. Rain and filth. Five years of mould. So you’ll do me this favour, won’t you, Julie? Please don’t write back; and save your money on train fares or petrol—I don’t want to see you again. Not for a long, long time. Let me serve my sentence in peace. It’s a favour. And I’ll be sending a very similar letter to Mumsy, straight after this one. I am certain, if you ask her—if you really want her to—she will continue to support you with her granddaughter. Patrice is the only one she’ll have and mothers, I think, do not ever stop being mothers; they do not wish to cease caring. Irrespective of how she might moan from time to time, she will take Patrice in the pushchair—to the park, to the shop, to the doctor, to JobCentre Plus. If I may, allow me a second favour. Don’t cut Mumsy out of Patrice’s life. Please. Goodbye, Julie. In this spirit of utter candour, I will go a step further. Truthfully, I don’t know if I ever loved you; but I thought the world of you. I don’t know what love really means, but if I can convince you of anything, allow me to convince you of this: the photograph of you on Ealing High Street, by the bookshop—that photograph got me through many a tricky night. I would stare at it for hours sometimes. But I don’t anymore. And I don’t stare at the photo of you bathing Patrice in the kitchen sink either. I loved it then. I’m scared of it now. I’m scared of the outside world. People have told me that this might happen, even though I’ve still got a good chunk of my tariff left to ride. It’s my fault, Julie. It’s all my own fault. Don’t blame yourself. Kiss Patrice goodbye for me, would you?
With my very best wishes.
Billy
Four.
There is no slow-motion commencement to the atrocities. Like flash fires leaping from one dry shrub to the next, the sounds of all-response alarms moves swiftly from Wing to Wing. The silence is detonated. Panic noise rises, swarms and swells. Then the screaming begins. Screaming and roars: the zoo sounds of squirming, writhing animals noticing the vipers in the grass that are now making their moves. Takes seconds for me to understand what is happening. It is of course night, and the yoots are banged up. Fights are not possible—neither fights between prisoners, nor fights between prisoners and screws. The only conflict on the menu is between a yoot and his cell. I am still at my window. But the concept is meaningless: I am everywhere else too. I’m with Dott in the ambulance; I am also in the prison graveyard, where the ground is shivering, though not in response to the evening’s frigidity. No. There are pulses abroad. A single pulse, rather—a magnified heartbeat, or so it seems at first. It’s probably in keeping that I’m walking the corridors on the ones on Puppydog Wing: the corridors I have strolled for time as part of my duties delivering reading matter. There are screws in a panic, wondering what to do; wondering where to start. Not inside every cell, but inside quite a few, the prisoners are bumping their heads on the walls, in unison. And it’s a highly contagious disease: the thumps are on the ones, but they are also upstairs, on the twos—and inside many cells on the other Wings as well.