‘Get this in here. [Click.] You don’t know of me personally, but me name might ring a bell. I don’t know — are you a reading man? Me, I never was a reader. Didn’t seem to have the time. Nah: wasn’t that. See, in prison, it’s just another way they can hurt you. “Where’s your book gone, Jo? Bookworms must have eaten it.” And then the little smirk. And then of course you’d do them and they’d do you. Goes with the territory. I never held with reading in the nick. Don’t believe in it. You hear about blokes getting degrees from fucking Oxford while they’re banged up. I never held with that because as soon as they start the reading they get religious and all. Nutters who’ve sliced up families of six going round with they hands clasped behind they back. Praying and that. Don’t hold with it. If I see a con with a Bible they was due a bash. I know what loss of freedom is, what confinement is, but me thoughts are me own. It’s like the Kray Twins, from their book: “Flowers are God smiling at us.” And if that don’t send you to the bog then I don’t know what will.
‘But one day the book trolley come round. As it’s gone past I see the spines and one of them’s only called Joseph Andrews! Me first thought was: someone’s gone and taken a right raging liberty. Someone’s gone and done me uh, me life story with no permission whatsoever. I give the screw a shout — and the slag’s name is Henry Fielding. But of course after a while I’ve calmed meself down. Joseph Andrews was one of the first English novels, published as early as 1742. I got me TV glasses for a read of it and I’ve not made head or tail of the language they use in them days. But there’s something very near the beginning, about a good man being more … influential than a bad. And them’s wise words …
‘Years later I’ve come across another book, in three volumes, entitled Tom Jones. Must be the life story of the singer, I’ve thought, him of “It’s Not Unusual” fame. But no: it was only by the same fella — Henry Fielding. I always was an avid Tom Jones fan, and to this day I’ll get on a plane to attend one of his concerts. “It’s Not Unusual” was his greatest hit, but me own favourite’s got to be “The Green, Green Grass of Home”.
‘I want you to think about that. If you would: the green, green grass of home.’
Click. Joseph Andrews now summoned his amanuensis, Manfred Curbishley: braces, a horseshoe of hair going round the back of his head, mouth and eyes as moist as oysters. He looked as though he’d never left London — never left the bookies’ office in the Mile End Road. And a drinker’s face, with its pattern of heat: its oxbow of oxblood.
With a wag of the head: ‘There’s more, but you can start turning this into English. And take out all the language … Where’s Rodney?’
‘Accompanying Miss Susan to the airport, Boss.’
‘Course he is, course he is.’
The frowning gaze of Joseph Andrews (every mote of age visible in the carbonated air) settled on the green file, which lay open on his desk. Cora, he now saw, had underlined a name in one of the clippings. He adjusted his glasses: Pearl O’Daniel. With an inner murmur he pictured her father: Ossie O’Daniel. A good man, a sound man, a man of principle: never took any fucking rubbish from the screws. Remember once he came into Association in the middle of the day with his privates hanging out. This was at Strangeways. There’d just been an off — someone kicking up. No one said anything about Ossie and his privates, not even the screws. He’d just had twenty-four of the Birch that morning, so you made allowances, and tactfully turned the other way.
7. We two
Brendan Urquhart-Gordon lay in bed with his laptop. The imagery being fed through to him was from Oughtred; it attempted to duplicate, by the use of ‘isosurfaces and volumetric rendering’, the material on the Princess. Emboldeningly, the counterfeits of the first stills could not be distinguished from the originals — or at least not by the unassisted eye; and the four-second loop, where the Princess swivelled in the bath, was an apparently perfect simulacrum, down to the very eddies of the water. But the attempt to morph the enemy’s latest offering, the attempt to carve it out of light and magic, was a clear failure. Here the technology came up against its structural limits. Brendan could feel his body temperature climb: the inner casuist was acknowledging the first great wound in his defence. He thought (again): if the enemy so much as gave the time and place — the Château, the Yellow House … A chimerical mischief would at once become something actual, something to be investigated, and the media …
The new image, anonymously remailed on to the Net that morning, showed the Princess in three-quarter profile. It was an enlargement, and the quality — the definition — seemed relatively weak. Yet this much became clear: she was not alone. It wasn’t a shadow, louring above her. It was an implicit presence, demanded by the demeanour of the Princess. Her crossed hands resting on her shoulders, the angle of her torso minutely averted from the hypothetical entity, her expression … This was what the technology couldn’t capture: it couldn’t capture the complexity of the Princess’s expression. She looked surprised, and shocked too, but not quite startled or fearful; she looked intensely anxious; she looked slightly sick. But it was the eyes and their pitiful attempt at comity, at courtesy, at good manners: this could not be duplicated.
Retaining his pyjamas, and adding all his sweaters, Brendan got dressed and went to the King. He found him in his dressing-room, sitting before the empty grate with his face in his hands. Without looking up Henry pointed at something on the low table. Was it a golf ball? No, it was a crumpled sheet of paper. Brendan didn’t find it pleasant to watch the King flatten and straighten this out, his lower lip pendulous with reluctant concentration, and then pass it on with a sigh that closed his eyes. Brendan asked for and was given permission to activate the one-bar electric fire. Don’t like that colon, he thought, as he settled down to it:
Dear Daddy:
So it’s ‘we two’ now, is it? Mummy will be delighted when she hears. But she won’t hear. Perhaps I could have told Mummy what happened in the Yellow House, even though she would have been much more horrified than you. But I can’t do that, can I? Because it’s just ‘we two’.
I’m so sad to learn that you’re suffering. On the other hand I am absolutely fine. It’s nice to know that everyone on earth is leering at you. I don’t dare look at any of it, but I’ve talked to my friends, until I stopped daring to do that too. The very air seems full of me; even the wind seems to say my name. But the air and the wind are polluted. When I’m not sleeping, or sitting there with you, not eating, I’m bathing. And even bathing, now, deeply reinfects me. Even the clear water feels like sewage.
I want to get farther and farther away from the thing which is called World.
May I close with a few quotations from your letter? ‘Thoroughly rotten … It’s my poor character … Sweetheart … let us be in this together.’
Uh-huh?
‘I dare not close my eyes for fear of what I may see.’
Oh go on and close them. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.