The Enemy of the Good (38 page)

‘You don’t have to get up for me, man. I ain’t royalty.’ He gave a throaty chortle, revealing a silver front tooth. Ignoring Clement, he moved straight to the chest of drawers and took out a tube of cream, which he spread liberally on his hands. ‘I have to pay for this from my canteen. That’s wrong, man. It should be provided. You need asbestos fingers to pull steaming T-shirts off rollers.’

‘You work in the laundry?’

‘Hey man, you’re good. You should be on
Mastermind
. I’m Dwayne.’

‘Clement.’

‘
Clem
ent… Cle
ment
. What kind of a name is that then? I never met a Clement before.’

‘My parents called me after their favourite prime minister.’

‘No shit, man. I reckon I’m lucky my dad didn’t call me Margaret. He used to say “She’s one sexy lady!”’ Dwayne turned to the noticeboard as if for
confirmation
. ‘So what are your deps then?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Your deps, man? Your depositions? Your sentence?’

‘Oh, three years for attempted murder.’ For the first time Clement made light of the charge.

‘Hey, you the fellow that was on TV last night?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t watch.’

‘You’re famous, man!’ Dwayne’s face clouded. ‘Hey, you’re not a batty boy?’

‘No, I’m not,’ Clement said, intent on making a distinction that would be vital for his sanity and their relationship. ‘I’m a gay man.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘The same as the one between nigger and black.’ Dwayne drew himself very close and Clement braced himself for a blow, but all that hit him was a gust of sour breath.

‘You can call me nigger if you like. I’m cool. I’ll knife you in the ribs, but I’m cool.’ Then, flashing him a broad smile in which the silver tooth glinted like the threatened blade, he tapped Clement on the cheek and, wiping his feet on his counterpane, hauled himself up to the top bunk. He remained there absorbed in his magazines – either the women’s breasts in
Men Only
or the men’s pectorals in
Men’s Health
– until, at five o’clock, they were let out to fetch their supper and breakfast trays, and evening medication.

‘This is gross, man,’ Dwayne said, toying with a spam fritter. ‘I wouldn’t feed it to my dog.’

‘Oh, do you have a dog?’ Clement asked eagerly.

‘No-oo. You deaf or something? If I gave him this, he’d be dead.’

Clement ate his meal, grateful that the shock of incarceration seemed to have dulled his sense of taste. As Dwayne turned back to his magazines which, to judge by the trembling of the bunks, were of the
Men Only
variety, he resigned himself to an evening of introspection, resolving that first thing the next morning he would ask to visit the library. A shout of ‘Chapel’ reminded him that he had put his name down to go and, unsure of the protocol, he consulted Dwayne, who told him to ‘ring for room service,’ only for the officer who answered the bell to announce that he was too low down the list.

‘But the chaplain invited me specially,’ he said, with a rush of alarm.

‘Tough! We don’t have enough escorts. So you’ll just have to pray on your own. I’m sure Dwayne here’ll help you.’ Dwayne made no comment. ‘I said I’m sure Dwayne will help you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dwayne replied, with a rancour that spoke volumes. ‘Cunt,’ he spat at the officer’s back.

‘I’d no idea that there would be such an enthusiastic congregation.’

‘It’s so’s they can get out of their pads. Talk to their mates off the other wings. Buy and sell gear. I mean, man, where you been all your life?’

In cloud-cuckoo-land, Clement thought, stretching out on a bed which convinced him that prisoners would be better served by an osteopath than a psychologist. At ten o’clock he surreptitiously took his pills, only to discover that his discretion had been unnecessary when, half an hour later, Dwayne stood at the basin struggling to swallow his own dose.

‘Hey man, what you staring at?’

‘Nothing. I’m sorry… this cell is so small.’

‘Don’t you go getting no wrong ideas. Just because I take these pills I ain’t no batty boy… oh excuse me,
gay man
!’ He chuckled. ‘No sir. This here,’ he said rubbing his crotch, ‘is top quality
Kitekat
. Specially designed for pussies!’

Clement was obliged to revise his opinion of the authorities. The
accommodation
was neither arbitrary nor cruel. But, while he was no longer afraid of being vilified or harmed on account of the virus, he gave up any hope that his cell-mate would be a soul mate. Glancing furtively at Dwayne rolling a table tennis ball along his biceps, he had never felt so alone.

Having finally managed to close his eyes and blot out his surroundings, he was jolted by a loud blast of reggae music. As Dwayne played his ‘sounds’ with no concern for him or, to judge by the shouts from the neighbouring cells, anyone else, despair as much as cowardice kept him from complaining. He pressed his pillow over his ears, but it was no more use as a muffler than a support. The nightmare grew worse when he looked up to see Dwayne’s face leering at him.

‘Hey, Mr Prime Minister, this one’s for you,’ he said. Listening to the
hate-filled
lyrics, Clement feared that his relief had been premature. Four tracks later, he was grateful for the noise, which offered some distraction from Dwayne’s unrestrained bowel movements… although nothing could drive away the smell. Returning to his bunk, Dwayne switched off the light as abruptly as he had switched on the music. Then, after playing two more songs, he plunged the cell into a blessed silence.

Clement’s reprieve proved to be short-lived, as he adjusted to as strange and disturbing a nocturnal soundtrack as any in his mother’s African stories. From the yard came the din of barking dogs and booming exchanges between blocks. Across the landing a man screamed that, unless he were let out, he would hang himself, sparking cries of ‘Schizo’ and ‘Nutter’, with even the duty officer telling him to ‘Shut the fuck up and get some rope!’ Meanwhile, the constant clanging on the pipes attested to either dangerously defective
plumbing
or sinister codes.

Lying back with his senses numb and brain pounding, he wondered if sleep deprivation were to be a part of his sentence. He felt as though he were being sucked into a vast hole and refused to close his eyes for fear of becoming
permanently
trapped. He must have dozed off in the early hours, because he was roused by a sustained drumming on the pipes. Stealing a hurried glance at Dwayne’s watch, he saw that it was only a quarter to five. He used the loo and instinctively flushed it, inciting Dwayne to a torrent of abuse. ‘What’s up with you, man? You sick or something? Don’t you never think of anyone else?’

‘I’m sorry. I was startled. The pipes.’

‘It’s the Muslims. The righteous ones. The holy brothers. They have to pray, man. And I have to sleep. Right?’

Dwayne fell asleep, compounding the cacophony, but Clement remained wide awake. At breakfast, he felt as if he had spent the whole night crying, although his cheeks were bone dry. With a fluttering in his stomach that went beyond panic, he sat on the edge of his bunk unable to move until even Dwayne noticed and, glancing up from the cornflakes and
UHT
milk that had replaced the proverbial porridge, told him to ask the doctor for
tranquillizers
. ‘There ain’t no shame, man. Half the nick’s on tablets. Whatever gets you through the day.’

‘Thanks, I’ll be fine,’ Clement replied, afraid that taking them would sanction thoughts of suicide, ‘I just need some air.’ Recklessly encroaching on Dwayne’s territory, he moved to the window. ‘I just need some air,’ he repeated, hauling himself up to one of the three inch panes that made bars superfluous and peering out at the desolate vista. He felt strangely heartened by the sight of an officer playing with a dog, albeit an Alsatian, but, when he tried to convey his pleasure, all Dwayne replied was ‘If the screws here had their ways, man, they’d change the dogs with lions.’

Mid-morning Exercise gave him a chance to go down to the yard, but his relief at being outside was tempered by the dismal surroundings. Every wall and walkway was profligately covered in rolls of razor wire and the entire area wrapped in acres of meshing. The fitter men were working out, racing around the perimeter as if in training for an escape, kicking a ball in a roisterous
free-for-all
and practising martial arts. Only the parallel bars remained untouched, like the climbing frame on a sink estate. Meanwhile the indolent majority loitered aimlessly, their sole exertion being to stamp their feet in a bid to keep out the cold. As he tried to blend into the background, afraid of provoking an assault by an inadvertent glance or gesture, he found himself approached by a stream of baleful men. But, far from the crazed killers of his imagination, they were dealers offering supplies of drugs, tobacco and phone cards. Having declined the offers with enough grace to retain their goodwill, he was even more alarmed to be accosted by a man so intricately tattooed that he
resembled
a piece of William Morris wallpaper.

As he stared in dismay at the sinuous pattern of swastikas, the man announced that he was the drummer for the Aryan band, Ploughshare. ‘You have a problem with that?’

‘No,’ he replied faintly.

‘All the bleeding hearts bang on about saving pandas and polar bears and what have you, but the white race is the most endangered species on the planet and nobody gives a fuck.’ Clement wondered if he were trying to recruit him. ‘Word is you’re a wicked artist. I want you to draw my picture to send to my tart. Make sure she won’t forget me. I’ll pay.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ Clement replied.

‘Course I do. You should never do nothing for nothing in here, mate. You ask for nothing, they think you’re nothing. I’ll give you some burn.’

‘Burn?’

‘Baccy.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘No problem. You can give it me back then,’ he said, with a broad grin and a half-friendly poke in the kidneys.

Clement’s success with the portrait led to other commissions on similar terms and he spent several Association periods in a corner of the landing,
softening
the lines of hardened faces in front of an appreciative crowd. Finally, even Dwayne took notice, asking him to draw him a woman.

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘A sexy woman, man. I want to see her tits and pussy. I want to rub my face in her cunt juice. You understand?’

‘I understand.’ It was a fitting irony that, with his artistic dreams in tatters, he should have ended up as a prison pornographer. The success of his new role did nothing to alleviate his depression. Each morning he woke up exhausted, as though he had spent ten hours in the studio. He suffered from permanent nausea and his gut felt as constricted as if it had been fitted with one of
Gillian’s
bands. He lived on his nerves. Death seemed to lurk around every corner. The need for constant vigilance was compounded by being cooped up day and night with Dwayne. Passing wet sheets through the presses put a severe strain on his cell-mate’s back. Claiming to be feeling ‘well ill’, he made an
appointment
to see the doctor, whose standard diagnosis was
malingering
and whose sole expression of sympathy came on the disclosure of his own slipped disc.

‘He said I’m the most healthy person he’s seen this week.’ Dwayne said. ‘I asked him: “Where you been working, man? The morgue?”’

The doctor passed him fit, but the works manager demurred, insisting that Dwayne take time off to recuperate from an injury whose seriousness was made clear to Clement when he demanded to swap bunks, a true loss of face for someone with a deep compulsion to be on top.

Clement’s days were now as fraught as his nights, with the morning and afternoon naps which had been his one solace destroyed alternately by Dwayne’s music and his taunts. Everything he did seemed to irritate his
cell-mate
, whether it was reading: ‘You just get all them library books to show you’re better than me; you can’t tell me you really enjoy them’; or opening mail: ‘What’s that? Four letters today. It seems like the whole world’s your friend, man. I ain’t had four in the last ten months.’ Clement’s retort that
correspondence
was a two-way process backfired when Dwayne asked him to check the spelling of a note he’d written to his girlfriend, an effusion of sexual violence he described as ‘nice’, for no other reason than that the word
nice
occurred in every second line.

Nothing incensed Dwayne more than to be asked the time. Nonetheless Clement braved his anger three times on the afternoon of Mike’s first visit, even after his warning that ‘If you bug me once more, you won’t be off to no visiting room but the hospital.’ Meanwhile, he tortured himself by picturing everything that could go wrong, from a crisis at the school through a tailback on Brixton Hill to a riot on another wing which left him without an escort. Just when he was convinced that, even allowing for Dwayne’s malice,
visiting
hour must be over, he was hauled out of the cell, searched, made to put on an orange tabard, and ushered into a crowded hall. He walked up to the dais where an officer took his name and number and pointed to a table, at which, for the first time in three weeks, he saw a face that wasn’t a threat. Guards patrolled the hall and balcony, routinely ordering people to display their hands, but Mike’s hug was more precious than any contraband, imbuing him with hope.

‘Great gear,’ Mike said. ‘Orange has to be your colour.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘I’ve been worried about you. On the phone you sounded so distant. But, seeing you in the flesh, you look terrific.’

‘You’ve never been a convincing liar.’

‘A little thinner, perhaps.’

‘It’s not the Ritz! We’re locked up with our dirty plates from five at night till eight in the morning, so half the tea – that is dinner – ends up out of the window. Is it any wonder the place is infested with rats?’