‘I thought you should know,’ he says, clumsily pulling his balaclava back on again, ‘I’m so very grateful for all the things you’ve done for me, and I’m leaving in the morning.’
Then we drive home,
darkly
.
It’s a long night. Jack Henry spends the best part of it scurrying around inside my head catching cockroaches and devouring them ‘for the protein’. When he pauses for a moment, he tells me this story about how he once used his regulation Bible to make a club during a long run in solitary – he used water from the lavatory and constructed it out of papier maché – then when one of the guards popped his head in to check up on him, he bludgeoned him soundly with it. Cut him quite badly.
The man had been systematically tormenting him, he tells me, like you are, he says,
like you are
.
He seems to think this story is terribly funny for some reason. But when he laughs his stomach starts hurting.
Bile
. So he stops laughing and quietly starts hunting for bugs again.
I am awoken by Black Jack, banging heavily on the front door, and calling. It’s too early. Everything’s still dazy. I crawl out of bed to answer him. He’s breathless. He’s panting. He just got a call from the mainland, he says. Some people from the immigration service have asked for a quick lift over.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he tells me. ‘I delayed enough already.’
Big’s coming downstairs, rubbing his eyes, but I sprint up past him. Top floor, dark corridor, aquamarine door. I burst in.
La Roux is standing by the window. It is five-thirty a.m.
‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ I tell him, ‘the immigration people are coming. Maybe wait until they’re off the tractor and heading up here, then run around the back way and try crossing the water. It won’t be too deep. We’ll keep them busy in the meantime.’
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say
anything
.
It’s bleak and bad and quiet and grey. It feels like we are dreaming.
The Immigration People, when they arrive, are the Immigration Person. One woman. Called Sandy. Skinny. Polite. Hails originally from Saffron Walden. Owns a pug, called Maudsley, she tells Big pleasantly over a quick cup of tea. A pedigree.
Believe it or not, she’s in no particular hurry.
He was never going to make it over. Can’t swim. Too risky. And the tide’s still strong. They pick him up, later, in a rowing boat. He’s wandering around aimlessly, waist-high in the water. The whole thing isn’t even scary or frightening. Just sad, and strange and a little embarrassing.
They tell us to pack the rest of his stuff together. So I go and I do it. The stupid white clay pipe, the cushion cover his mother made him, the picture of Spookie, his army pyjamas. His pony sweater.
On my way downstairs Big calls out my name and scurries up and – almost apologetically – shoves two spare crochet needles and two balls of wool into my hands. Then he scuttles off again.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Patch is still lying face-down on the pine table, sobbing uncontrollably. Feely is sitting on his bean-bag, just next to her, like a clucky hen, staring up at the ceiling where the fan’s revolving.
I’m tearless, at this point, and resolving coldly to stay that way. But then something awful happens. On my way over to the mainland – the sea is gone, the sand is back, the beach is dry – Black Jack comes running down after me.
‘If you’re seeing him,’ he says, panting…
‘I’m not seeing him. I’m just dropping his stuff off at the Post Office. They’re picking it up later.
‘Well, anyway…’
He puts his hands into his pockets and pulls out three slightly battered packets of Iced Gems, and a fully illustrated colour book of British birdlife. ‘I thought he might like these,’ he shrugs, ‘as something small to remember me by.’
And that’s what finally gets me. The tears start welling and before I know it I’m bawling like a baby. And once I start, it’s difficult to think about stopping again. Because then, when I do, I know it will all truly be over. And he’ll be gone for ever. Back to South Africa. And military prison or wherever the hell they take people like him. And I know I’ll never see the skinny, self-centred, stupid, impolitic mother-fucker again.
On my miserable trudge back home to the hotel, I glance up and see Poodle sitting on the wall at the edge of the balcony, swinging her legs and staring blankly out to sea. I walk over and stand in front of her, seething. She smiles down at me, unfocused, almost dreamy. ‘I can see Outer Hope quite clearly from here,’ she tells me idly, ‘it’s such a clear day.’
‘Christabel,’ I snap back at her, my voice as tight as a skinny-rib-sweater, ‘I will never,
never
forgive you for the thing you did today.’
And I’m sixteen years old. And my nose is running. But I mean it. And I stand by it. I never will forgive her. Not ever.
She just stares at me impassively. ‘I think you should know that Patch is going to have a baby,’ she says. Then she glances down the coast again like she finds the view captivating.
That night, when I’m sleeping, a piece of glass falls out of the ceiling. Green glass. And smashes into a thousand pieces next to the safe, warm place where I’m lying and I’m dreaming. But not of Jack Henry. For some strange reason, he’s gone away. He’s left me.
What more can I say? She was thirteen when she had it. A boy. She called it Michael. (How uninspired is
that
?) The father was fifteen and lived in Scilly. Mo came back. We moved to Skye. It was cold. It was weird. It was winter. And
dreary
.
But before that, even, on the 18th of July, Jack Henry murdered a man called Richard Adan, a Cuban actor–waiter in a restaurant called the Boni-Bon. New York. Early one summer morning. For no particular reason. Then he went on the run. And they caught him. And they locked him up again.
The book sold. It made him a fortune. And a short while after, a famous comedian contacted him in prison and bought the film rights for a quarter of a million.
A few years later, when I’m a little older, I finally get to see a picture of Jack Henry Abbott. He’s not at all as I imagined. He has bouffant hair – this strange and audacious teddy-boy affair – like a pompadour. Jack Henry. A
poseur
. Who would have thought it?
And Patch says, ‘I’m sure if I’d seen a picture, I would’ve felt differently about him way back then…’
She’s a teenager now. She doesn’t know any better. And although I take her point, I’m not really sure if I agree with her…
Well, not
entirely
, anyway.
Here’s something funny. In 1995 I lose my older sister. She goes on some stupid skiing trip to Austria and ends up dead. At this stage, there’s only two of the family remaining in England. That’s Patch and me. So we go on a trip to the airport together, along with an undertaker, to collect the body.
And that’s when Patch tells me. ‘It wasn’t Poodle who phoned the immigration people, all those years ago,’ she says, staring up at the flight numbers, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee. ‘It wasn’t Poodle who betrayed La Roux, Medve. It was me. It was
me
.’
At first I’m not really listening. I don’t know what she’s saying. I can’t make sense of it.
‘Because he knew I was pregnant. But I swore him to secrecy. I thought if no one knew, then it would go away. So I set you both up in the cove that day. I thought Big’d get rid of him, after. But he didn’t. So I phoned them. The immigration people. And then later, when she put two and two together, Poodle said she’d pretend it was her. Because you were so
angry
. And I felt so
terrible
. And I was
frightened
.
‘She said you hated her anyway, so it wouldn’t really matter. But I suppose it did, in the end.’
I’m not looking at Patch. I’m staring up at the flight numbers. It’s eleven fifty-nine p.m. and fifty-seven seconds, and the screens are glowing, and my eyes are filling.
‘My God,’ I mutter, ‘did you know it was St Valentine’s Day?’
And as soon as I’ve uttered it, we’re in the day after.
I guess it’s time to pull those pins out. I’m getting quite dozy. I don’t know if I’ve been sleeping. But the acupuncturist returns and starts twiddling again. He takes out seven. ‘But the single one, in this ear,’ he says quietly, ‘I’m going to cover with a small plaster and leave there. So whenever you feel the urge you can give it a twirl, and hopefully it’ll help you.’
He does just as he says. Then I sit up and the bed creaks. He goes to the door. He passes through it, and into the reception area. He writes me out a bill and signs it. He hands it over. I take it.
‘You know what?’ he says casually, as I scrabble in my bag for my
money. ‘I honestly believe you are sick enough and mad enough to walk out of here today without even openly acknowledging to me who the hell you are.’
I find my purse and open it.
‘Big spoke to your dad about a year ago. They bumped into each other on holiday in Florida. He said you were here, and I was in England for a while, so he wrote and he told me. ‘
La Roux shrugs his shoulders, like this is just an everyday occurrence, then asks me cordially about the family.
‘But I want to know first how you managed to stay here,’ I say. ‘I didn’t. I came back again in 1993. And I settled in Finchley. Then I moved to Tufnell Park. And I’ve grown quite attached to it actually.’
‘But what about the mousebird,’ I ask, frowning, ‘and the huge moths and the hail stones and the badly behaved apes near Cape Point who molest the tourists. And what about Grape Fanta?’
He smiles. ‘I can get that here now, if I feel the urge, at certain, specialist retailers. And you know what?’ he tells me, ‘I like British birds. Even though they’re kind of dowdy. I still have that book Black Jack sent me. I know the robin and the jay and the wren and the stonechat. I know their songs and their eating habits and their favoured terrain and everything.
‘In fact,’ he continues, grinning, ‘I was actually maid of honour at Black Jack’s wedding. He had a better man than me as best man already.’
I blink. ‘Black Jack? Somebody actually married him?’
‘Two years ago. He met this tiny Maori girl and settled in New Zealand near a place called Rotorua which is full of geysers and the smell of sulphur. And they have a whole theme park there dedicated to the kiwi fruit…’ He pauses. ‘You know, even though they grow it in South Africa, the first time I ever ate it was with you and Patch and Feely… Tell me about Feely,’ he says.
‘Oh God,’ I grin, ‘he’s living in Sydney, Australia. He’s a performance artist now. He sets fire to stuffed animals, puts them out by pissing on them, then paints himself with the wet, black ashes. It’s all ridiculously dramatic.
‘He’s in love with a man called Samson who has thirty-seven piercings. They have five miniature Schnausers together. He’s only four foot nine, but hugely muscular. He never got the regulation boy-growth-spurt in his mid-teens, which was problematic to begin with, but he eventually got over it.’
‘And Poodle?’ La Roux asks, still smiling. I pause and swallow.
‘
She died in 1995. In February. On Valentine’s Day. From this crazy little blister she got when she was skiing in Austria. She got blood poisoning and it killed her. It was really stupid. It was just one of those improbable things…’
He looks briefly crestfallen. ‘Big never mentioned it,’ he says, ‘in any of his letters.’
‘He never talks about it. She was always his favourite.’
‘It seems like true beauty is destined to live a short life only,’ he says sadly.
For some reason this irritates me. ‘Talking of letters…’ I quickly change the subject, ‘I wanted to say thanks for the lovely lace penguin you sent from prison. It was very, very sweet of you.’
(Naturally I don’t mention how I still sleep with it, propped up on my pillow, and how I bought some tea tree oil from a New Age pharmacy and doused this scruffy, ill-constructed, flightless bird with it. Or how I smell it at night when I’m dreaming and it fills my head with hospital dramas and minor infections and the horrible prospect of clinical enemas.)
He shrugs. ‘It’s always hard to know what to send for a baby.’
(Oh Jesus. How embarrassing.)
‘Michael’, I stutter, reddening, ‘will be fifteen this year. He collects military medals and has a slow eye. He’s a revolting child but a real addition to the family.’
For some reason La Roux seems temporarily awestruck. ‘Do you think…’ he stutters ‘… she might’ve actually named him after me?’ And his eyes start welling.
(Michael?
Is he serious?! So is
that
where it came from?)
‘And you, Medve?’ he mumbles finally.
So I tell him how I trained to be a solicitor, because of stupid Jack Henry, and how I hated myself for hating him when he betrayed us all so badly, and how I married a Grand Larcenist called Jordan while I was practising in America. And how it lasted for six months and then we wanted to kill each other (He likes this bit especially. He’s still a little shit, when it finally comes down to it).
And then I tell him how Big is living in Acapulco, with his second wife who’s a dietician. How he still lives on soya and has a beard to his breastbone. And how Mo married Bob Ranger in the end, but they were never really very happy, but how the Probe might finally be becoming a viable proposition, fifteen years later (God, who would have thought it?), and how she’s writing a definitive text about the coil which is due for publication next February (but only in non-Catholic countries).
‘The coil?’ La Roux asks, dumbly.
‘A form of contraception popular in the seventies,’ I tell him.
‘Oh.’
And then the conversation fizzles out, and to avoid resorting to talking about the weather and how he’s losing his hair a little, and how his sideburns are preposterous, I make a fuss about settling the
bill and how much better I feel already with the pin in my lobe and all the rest of that crap. Then his three-thirty appointment arrives, a woman with a limp like a Grand National faller.
And then it’s time I was going. And I say goodbye. And I leave him. And it’s over. It’s all finally
over
. And I walk down the street, swinging my arms and congratulating myself on what a good plan it was to see him, and how well it went and everything. How glad I was I didn’t mention that it was Patch who turned him in, not Poodle. How glad I was I didn’t still blame him for making me hate my bigger sister and how she went and died so inconsiderately without me ever getting around to forgiving her. Or her forgiving me.
I walk into the station. I feed my ticket into the machine and retrieve it when it spits it out again. I walk down onto the platform. I push my hand into my bag and pull out some notes on a case I’m thinking about taking. A man who killed a neighbour’s cockerel because it woke him every morning at three a.m.
I’ve learned something, I keep telling myself (but I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know if I care). I tap my foot. I inspect my watch. The platform fills up, gradually. The station master makes an announcement that there’s five more minutes until the train arrives. Because someone went under at Mile End. Again. Poor fucker.
I look down at my notes. I think I’m really concentrating. Then there’s some kind of commotion at the end of the platform. I keep on reading. The cockerel was called Jasper and it lived in a kennel.
The yelling continues. It’s something indecipherable. I notice that I’m frowning because suddenly I’m not concentrating. The voice is getting louder still.
‘The girl penis!’ it’s shouting. ‘Do you remember? The girl penis! It changed my fucking life. I forgot to tell you. I needed to tell you.’
He stands, out of breath, next to me on the platform. And every-body’s frowning because he’s a South African.
‘I just wanted to tell you,’ he gasps, ‘about the girl penis and how it changed everything. It was a revelation.’
He collapses on to a bench, his skinny legs sticking out at all angles. ‘And I’ve got something,’ he pants cheerily, ‘that I wanted to show you.’
He pulls it out of his pocket. His face is glistening. I sit down next to him, cautiously. He opens his hand and shows me. A small, red, plastic centipede, browning with age.
‘My God, you kept it?’
He nods. ‘Fished it up from the bottom of the cove. Took me almost two hours.’