Engleby. Part 25

And other things are worse than even I foresaw.

For instance: my country recently invaded another country.

That's not something anyone could have foreseen. Invading other countries was what Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm or the kamikaze j.a.panese did.

Not invading other countries: that was our thing. It more or less defined who we were. America likewise. Obviously there were those CIA things (Guatemala, Iran and so on) but they were unofficial: when we begged the American government to join us in our European World War Two, prim Mr Roosevelt said No: the US has not been attacked, so it wouldn't be proper. Then the j.a.panese bombed them at Pearl Harbor and it was OK. invading other countries: that was our thing. It more or less defined who we were. America likewise. Obviously there were those CIA things (Guatemala, Iran and so on) but they were unofficial: when we begged the American government to join us in our European World War Two, prim Mr Roosevelt said No: the US has not been attacked, so it wouldn't be proper. Then the j.a.panese bombed them at Pearl Harbor and it was OK.

This Blair guy, though. My age, Oxford-educated, looks and sounds quite reasonable. You'd have thought that he'd understand his own country's recent past, wouldn't you? Apparently not. They sent inspectors to find weapons and the inspectors came back empty-handed; they sent spies, and the spies returned with nothing.

Never mind, said Mr Blair, I don't care: if we can't find the weapons then he must be hiding them, and in half an hour or so he could attack us. We must get him first.

My old friend Peter Mandelson came on the radio. 'Oh yes,' he said, 'saddam's got a supermarket.' He p.r.o.nounced it 'shoopermarket'. 'saddam's got a shoopermarket selling deadly weapons. We must invade.' Peter had seemed rather a sophisticated man, I thought, when I'd met him during that General Election. Why was he now talking this c.r.a.p about a giant Asda in Tikrit?

The funny thing was that almost no one outside Westminster believed it. For instance, no one in Longdale believed it.

'Paranoid' Pete Smith on my corridor never thought we'd find hidden weapons, yet Paranoid is someone who rolls an orange under his bed each night to check there's no one there.

Johnnie Johnston wouldn't give the time of day to that 'intelligence' dossier, and Johnnie is a man who believes his own thoughts are controlled by the BBC Radio 4 long-wave transmitter at Redruth.

Not much has happened in Longdale in the last seventeen years. There have been some improvements in the kitchen twice a week you can hold it down and in the gardens and the workshops.

I am no longer under the control of Dr Braithwaite (retired) or Dr Turner (moved on, alas). My 'case officer' (sounds like M16, but it isn't) is now Dr Vidus.h.i.+ Sen, a severe young woman in her first senior appointment in the exciting world of Special Hospitals. She has more than her fair share of old lags like me, poor thing; the senior doctors bag the newer patients because there's more hope of an outcome.

They stopped giving me drugs because everyone could see they did no good. Take drugs away from a patient and he may improve; at least he'll stop experiencing the side effects. But take drugs away from a shrink and all she has left is chat.

Dr Vidus.h.i.+ Sen is a very poor chatter. She sits opposite me with her s.h.i.+ny black hair tightly drawn back and pinned, in her pretty cotton s.h.i.+ft worn over trousers that taper and b.u.t.ton at the ankle. She blinks over her shallow black-framed gla.s.ses, clipboard in hand, and waits for me to spout.

I don't think Dr Sen subscribes to the Exley theory of 'personality disorder'. There's a nasty mix there of nature and nurture, of a 'biological substrate' and plain bad behaviour. All a bit murky for her, I think. Am I meant to be mad or bad? The Exley answer, which essentially says 'a bit of both' is not to Dr Sen's taste. And since I don't really fit into any category of mental illness in either the American or European handbooks, of which there have been several new editions since I've been in Longdale, all of which she's studied dutifully, Dr Sen is left with the conclusion that I am bad.

She thinks I am a very nasty man indeed and should really be banged up in Strangeways or Winson Green with the robbers and the 'sane' killers and the nonces. She believes I'm far too lucid, too well controlled and too reasonable to be mad. She'd like to say too well educated, too, but, in a way so convoluted one can barely follow it, that would be incorrect, politically.

Dr Sen would never actually say that I am bad. She's very hot on 'blame' and 'guilt': absence of need for, destructive effects of.

Another thing she's very hot on is me being gay. She hasn't said as much, because it's not her way to suggest things; but she's always leaving the pink door ajar, hoping that one day I'll sidle through. I'm dreading that in desperation she'll order up another 'penile seismograph' or whatever the thing's called, but instead of looking at some forlorn toms with their legs apart, I'll be staring at Master Meat the Butcher's Boy.

She's a keen student of my journal and reveals a good deal about herself by the pa.s.sages she chooses for our delectation. Those concerning Margaret and my relations.h.i.+p with her are of particular interest.

'You called her "candid, optimistic and polite".'

'So?'

She says nothing, merely raises a shaped eyebrow. I know what she means: that these are the terms in which you might describe your chartered accountant, not your lover. I don't say so; I just give her rather boring justifications of each adjective in turn.

She echoes Exley's comment on my restrained description of the first time Margaret and I had it off together; I point out that I wasn't writing to t.i.tillate. She also draws attention to my repeated references to sodomy and fisting in Her Majesty's prisons, presumably wis.h.i.+ng to imply that my obvious distaste is oh, toiling paradox! a concealed desire. I hear her big feet coming from the next valley.

'And this boy "Rough", the one who became so good at squash because he had gay desires...'

'What about him?'

Again the raised eyebrow. She is at the very least implying that his name, as in Trade, is another throttled longing on my part.

'Dr Sen, as you probably know, there is a huge amount of h.o.m.os.e.xual activity in this hospital. Two men in my block are virtually married, with the blessing of the supervising psychiatrist. They share a room. They have a standing order for condoms and KY from the hospital shop. Their relations.h.i.+p is said to have helped them both to earthly joy and the prospect of an early release. What's to hide? Being gay would only make things better for me.'

Dr Sen seldom pushes things. She's young, maybe thirty-two, and it's against her training to suggest. You must also remember that Longdale is a maximum-security inst.i.tution. Although we have confidentiality for our tete-a-tetes, the door of the consulting room is unlockable and I sit nearer to it, so that if a rescue has to be made I am easy to get at. The wall behind me is half gla.s.s and gives onto the corridor where a male nurse patrols, never more than a few paces away. There can suddenly be an undertow of danger. I see her sense it. Sometimes I see fear in her wide dark eyes: the dilating black pupils almost cover the brown iris.

Her view I know, because she is transparent, so much better at self-disclosure than I am is that I am a furious misogynist whose hatred of women springs from a violently suppressed h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

She also thinks I am a racist, and this is delicate because even though she's as English as I am, with a similar regional accent, her family is originally from southern India. (Her first name, Vidus.h.i.+, incidentally, means 'Learned' in Hindi, which tells you about her pushy parents in Maidenhead. I looked it up in hinduism.about.com on the Internet on the heavily firewalled computer in the day room.) on the Internet on the heavily firewalled computer in the day room.) When she asked me about a pa.s.sage I wrote many years ago on immigration, I repeated that I merely felt pity for the West Indians who were given a false prospectus and found Britain cold and inhospitable, and sorry that for the many people from the Asian subcontintent who traded in their beautiful country for the grey rain of Catford and Lewisham.

She didn't look convinced. She also brought up my description of s.h.i.+reen Nazawi as 'EFL-speaking'.

I conceded that it was ungallant but true: English wasn't s.h.i.+reen's first language, and she struggled with it, as, consequently, did the readers of her articles.

Dr Sen didn't push too hard here, I must admit, because although racism was an important part of her view of Engleby as Utter s.h.i.+t, it wasn't central to her a.s.sessment of why I killed Jennifer Arkland.

For misogyny, she relied on my description of the wine bar in Knightsbridge, suggesting I implied that all women were basically prost.i.tutes, and on my 'fascination' for the street tarts in Paddington.

Obviously, I had no difficulty batting those two away.

More difficult was a sort of experimental undergrad riff that went: 'Anne, Molly and Jennifer are, like all women, weirdly obsessed by appearances looks, colours, fas.h.i.+on, surfaces; they have no interest in ideas or deeper truths, only "style" and status and the rapacious purchase of goods to underline them. Their cordiality conceals a sense of bitter rivalry that they'll carry to their death, without ever acknowledging it. They're really machines for surviving in the compet.i.tion for resources. Carrying the species in their wombs, they have to be.'

She didn't remember the exact words, but I was able to fill her in.

I then explained, as in a Dr Gerald Stanley supervision, that context is all. This wasn't necessarily 'my' view; it was a a view that had been offered as a corrective to a romanticised depiction of the girl students' lives that had preceded it. It was a squirt of lemon in the eye to defuse the charge of 'sentimentality'. view that had been offered as a corrective to a romanticised depiction of the girl students' lives that had preceded it. It was a squirt of lemon in the eye to defuse the charge of 'sentimentality'.

Dr Sen did have one powerful argument for misogyny in my case, and we both knew what it was. To her credit, it was six months or more before, under provocation from me, she brought it up.

As I recall, I was irritated by her refusal ever to pa.s.s judgement on me for what I'd done. She never seemed able to express even so much as a mild disapproval.

'You're like Bill Clinton,' I said, knowing the comparison would appal her. 'He took the intern as his girlfriend, then denied it. He screwed her and he lied and lied and lied. But in the end when he coughed up he couldn't say that he'd done wrong, he'd only say what he'd done was "inappropriate".'

'I don't believe the idea of blame is helpful,' said Dr Sen, as always.

'With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.'

'Where?'

'Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.'

Dr Sen coughed and rearranged her notes. 'I was merely thinking it might be worthwhile for you to think again about your att.i.tude to women.'

'Why again? I've thought about it so many times. You seem to think that everything can be explained by it. You see significance even in the fact that I once stole a girl's bike when I was at school. It wasn't an insult to worldwide womanhood. It was because I needed transport for the gin and whisky I was stealing, so I could make money. It was about cash, not women. If there'd been a boy's bike to hand, I'd have stolen that instead.'

She stopped looking down at her notes and met my exasperated gaze, quite calmly.

'But you stole a woman's bike again, in Cambridge, didn't you?'

'What have bicycles got to do with misogyny?'

'That's your word, not mine. I've never said you are misogynistic. But if anyone wanted to find evidence for that in your character, they needn't look far, need they? After all, by your own admission, you violently killed a young woman.'

She'd gone too far, and she knew it. She blushed a little, which gave her cheek a most beautiful colour, of rose under gold.

And in her shame was her humanity.

I don't think that's a misogynistic remark.

Thirteen.

I had a visit from Stellings today. Yes, you can have visits here. I told you: it's a hospital.

Like you, I'd imagined iron-barred cells with famous Panthers and Rippers served food by armed yet windy guards through hatches using lengthy tongs while the men inside went more and more insane down the years, beating their brains against the damp brick walls.

In fact there are only a handful of people kept locked up and it's mostly for their own safety. But all the famous guys you can b.u.mp into them over the seed boxes in the garden stores, or doing some fiddly work with a bradawl in the carpentry shop.

I met Stellings in the overheated day room where Johnnie Johnston and a couple of others were watching Neighbours Neighbours on television. on television.

Stellings was dressed in what he imagines to be a non-homicidal-maniac-inciting outfit of blue jeans, stone windcheater and open-necked plaid s.h.i.+rt with a nasty little polo pony on the breast pocket.

He's very butch about being normal and makes a thing of saying h.e.l.lo to anyone he remembers from previous visits. 'Hi, Frank!' he calls with a wave to creepy Frank Usborne, who, I told Stellings, had killed three rent boys and kept bits of them in the freezer compartment of his fridge.

This is completely untrue. I've no idea what crime Frank committed, but by far his worst offence inside is that he always gets to the Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper before anyone else and completes it before breakfast. If above the grid it gives the rating 'Difficult', Frank puts a little left-out sign and adds 'Not Very' in ballpoint next to it.

This is really annoying.

At the age of 52, Stellings has retired from Oswald Payne. He renounced his equity partners.h.i.+p to give some of the younger bloods a shot, but in fact he had little choice in the matter as fifty is considered the end of the line in his world.

'Some of these young guys, they're just animals, Mike. There's a twenty-eight-year-old called Sean Busby I'm afraid I was responsible for hiring. Normally our partners work on a lockstep arrangement, but Busby wouldn't stay unless he worked on an "eat what you kill" basis.'

'Couldn't you have done that in your day, Stellings?'

'No. I was very much for lockstep, it's more collegiate, it encourages people to pool their resources and work as a team. I'd hate to be on an eat-what-you-kill basis. That way, everyone's just working for themselves.' He puffed out his cheeks. 'Though I suppose I wouldn't have minded eating what Sean Busby killed.'

'Or Frank Usborne.'

'For Christ's sake, Mike.'

I don't think Stellings likes coming to Longdale with its barbed-wire walls and silly regulations. 'Toiletries. Patients can only receive these if they are in plastic bottles. NOT gla.s.s or aerosols. Items should be new and in the original wrapping. Any seals must not be broken.' Christ knows what Clarissa and her smart friends with their personal trainers make of his visits. He can't bring food or sweets in case he's tampered with them; he can't even bring cigarettes for fear that he's replaced the tobacco with a bit of Glynn Powers's finest.

The only reason Stellings comes to see me is because entirely by chance, one evening almost thirty-five years ago, he found himself sitting next to me at dinner in a candlelit hall in our first week in college.

Everything else every single thing in the intervening thirty-five years is down to politeness.

I've been in here since March 1989, so that makes seventeen years. And I'm managing. I'll come up for review again in 2008, apparently, and by then society or the Daily Mail Daily Mail may feel I've done enough, even though in theory I haven't been punished at all, I've only been treated. It is a weird thing with us guys who are not 'mentally ill'. There was a schizophrenic who in a moment of early mania cut off his mother's head and baked it in a pie. His father killed himself from grief. The son did seven years in a Special Hospital, got better, and was released. People like me, on the other hand, are for ever defined by what we did; we can't really get 'better' in that way. But don't let's go there again, or I'll get as 'vexed' as Dr Turner. may feel I've done enough, even though in theory I haven't been punished at all, I've only been treated. It is a weird thing with us guys who are not 'mentally ill'. There was a schizophrenic who in a moment of early mania cut off his mother's head and baked it in a pie. His father killed himself from grief. The son did seven years in a Special Hospital, got better, and was released. People like me, on the other hand, are for ever defined by what we did; we can't really get 'better' in that way. But don't let's go there again, or I'll get as 'vexed' as Dr Turner.

I often sit on a bench in a part of the grounds known as the Verandah in fact a sort of raised gra.s.s embankment that gives long views down over Rookley, towards Chatfield. I have thoughts there. I remember.

Once I saw a mother in a supermarket in Paddington an obese, poor woman with bare legs and a small child who was making a noise. She swore at him and slapped him in the face, which only made him howl more. It wasn't her fault really; she was clearly exhausted, broke and stretched to snapping point. But I knew that when she got the child home she'd beat him more, and if there was a father (a bit unlikely) he too would hit him.

And that child would slowly ascend towards full awareness in a world whose sky was violence and whose horizons were fear. And however resourceful he was, however patient and fortunate in the events of his life that followed, he was like a creature in a nest of imprisoning boxes who could never really break free. That was was his world and any attempt to persuade him that it was merely a 'subjective' or 'individual' experience could never convince him. his world and any attempt to persuade him that it was merely a 'subjective' or 'individual' experience could never convince him.

And all of us, I think, are like him. We may think as we grow older that we know more, but in truth no one has an overarching view, no one can see in the round. We are like cards in a pack, and the king of spades is a better thing to be than the two of diamonds; but none of us is a dealer or a player with free will and power to dispose; none of us can see or understand the value of the entire deck, let alone the rules of the game in which it's employed. Even the best of us is no more than an inert piece of card with some markings.

All of us Julie and Jennifer and me and creepy Frank Usborne and even Dr Turner are like that child because we are so severely limited by the operation of our consciousness the faculty that Unamuno called a 'curse', that made us lower than the jacka.s.s or the crab.

In much of my childhood and adolescence I never knew how unhappy I was. I accepted everything as being the norm because I knew no different. How could I? I had nothing with which to compare it, and all my impulses were towards normalisation on the 'constancy principle' (Freud surely did get that bit right). Only now can I see with a little more perspective how damaging that degree of misery was to me. Not because (and here the psychoa.n.a.lysts are mistaken) I pressed into service the mysterious hypothetical mechanisms of 'repression' to put it to one side, away from the normal processes of mind, so that it festered and grew toxic until such time as it was ready to wreak havoc on my entire metabolism. No; but just because that much pure, continuing unhappiness is bad for you. It burns away your gentler impulses. It corrodes the soul.

When I look at Gerry and Mark and I think of poor Jennifer and all the people that I've met and talked about in these pages, they seem to me all in their way like that little boy in the Tesco aisle. They seem part of a great biological accident: viz., that the defining human faculty that of self-awareness is a faulty one, at best partial and frustrating, at worst utterly misleading.

It's as though we discovered that hawks' famous eyesight didn't really work or that all hounds secretly have a duff sense of smell. The failure of any other faculty we could bear with patience, even with humour, but not the failure of the one that distinguished us from all previous species. That is beyond irony, beyond cruelty.

What I fear most of all is that when I die, my consciousness won't be extinguished but will survive to be reborn in a small boy in a striplit supermarket; and I will have to go home with that exhausted violent mother, and will go through this struggle of life all again, caught in an eternal loop of return.

Scientists now believe that my sense of self is an illusion generated by the chemical activity of the brain; that there is no such thing as 'mind', that there is only matter, but that over the successful h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens years the idea of self has become a 'necessary fiction'. We think that some small grey bits of brain, following a random inaccuracy in cell duplication many years ago, began in one individual and his offspring to generate an illusion of mind; and that, in history, the chance mutation that allowed them this chimera had side effects so helpful to the species that its possessors were naturally selected, to the extent that we are all now descended from them mutants every one of us, whose key mutation is a fib. years the idea of self has become a 'necessary fiction'. We think that some small grey bits of brain, following a random inaccuracy in cell duplication many years ago, began in one individual and his offspring to generate an illusion of mind; and that, in history, the chance mutation that allowed them this chimera had side effects so helpful to the species that its possessors were naturally selected, to the extent that we are all now descended from them mutants every one of us, whose key mutation is a fib.

If that current thinking is right and consequently there is no self, then my consciousness is so biochemically similar to that of the small boy in the supermarket as to be functionally indistinguishable. Therefore 'I', since I am not an individual ent.i.ty, cannot cease to be, but am doomed to exist for ever until or unless some new freak mutation finds favour with the powers of natural selection, and human consciousness, like the bat's blind eye, falls back into disuse, deselected, along with the other hopeful monsters back into the welcoming void whence it came.

Naturally, I try not to think about that that too much. too much.

There are things to do here that keep your mind off it. I used to go to 'group therapy', which was of limited use since many of the group were mad. Some of them were at least coherent and wanted to talk about their crimes; they wondered what had made them rape small children or set fire to their own houses. A lot of them sat staring straight ahead, stunned by drugs or anomie.

Few of them had the smallest interest in the remainder of the group, though I remember the otherwise silent Benny Frost perking up one day when it transpired that one of the others had cancer. Benny sat forward and took a close interest. Was this person going to die? What were his chances? Benny is very frightened of death, so frightened that he killed three men, very slowly, hoping to learn something self-protective from their experience of dying.

For a while, I used to go to church. There is a fine Victorian chapel, rather like the one in Jennifer's old college where Anne made her impa.s.sioned address from the pulpit. I liked the stories from the Bible, but the music was unendurable, particularly Frank Usborne on the tambourine. After some bell, book and candle ritual, the chapel briefly went interfaith to accommodate the Muslims, of whom we have a growing number. Now they have their own miniature mosque, a former punishment room outside which you sometimes see a row of laceless shoes. Inside, it's done up like the carpet shop at Harrods.

There is no synagogue because Jews don't do murder. What about Cain? you're thinking. But he wasn't a Jew because the Jews didn't start till Abraham, and if the Garden of Eden was where we think it was, Cain, like his parents, was probably from Mesopotamia, which was on the site of modern Iraq. And on the sixth day, G.o.d created... an Iraqi. Of course, the children of Abraham did then do a lot of killing on their own account, but the modern British Jew doesn't. When Jennifer Turner first told me this, it made my head spin for days. Nature-nurture, culture, religion, genes, schizo, psycho... In the end, I gave up; my thoughts seemed no more conclusive than those provoked by the 'modern' painting in Stellings's drawing room all those years ago.

For years I also did a course in 'social skills'. Much of this focussed on how to approach the opposite s.e.x, and for this purpose we were allowed to mix with women patients. There was a good deal of 'role play', much of it taped on video for our later delight. Somewhere in the archive is a film of me pretending to be queuing outside a cinema and 'striking up a conversation' with Lizzie 'the Hatchet' Rockwell that culminates in me asking her if she would like to join me for a drink later. In the rushes I saw, it doesn't, to be honest, look as though my heart is really in it.

And then of course there was teaching. There are paid instructors in any number of crafts and trades, from tinsmith to bookbinder, but some men also wanted to do school work. When I arrived, this was under the supervision of a patient with a degree from Oxford in Cla.s.sics, though he always referred to it as 'Greats'. Under prompting from Dr Turner, I eventually volunteered to help. I was paid for my work, and it secured my owners.h.i.+p of the envied parole card that gives me freedom to roam. I had a cla.s.s of half a dozen for GCSE Maths and Physics, three for History and English, while one year I taught Geography A level by keeping one step ahead in the book. I didn't give it much of a socialist slant, as my old moral tutor Dr Townsend might have done, but my candidate secured a B-grade in the exam and I believe it helped him get released back into the world. Such are the consolations we teachers cling to.

I stuck at the pedagoguery for several years, though not as long as Mug Benson, who, the Chatfield Year Book Chatfield Year Book yes, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tracked me down again, or perhaps they just bicycle a copy up the slope informs me is still grinding out irregular verbs in the valley. Our exam results kept on improving. Johnnie Johnston, who to my certain knowledge, couldn't count from one to five without ten minutes' hard digital labour, applied to do Maths GCSE one year. It was uphill work for him, me and the rest of the cla.s.s, but he was adamant that the transmitter signals from Redruth were giving him the all-clear. In August, he brought me a piece of paper that reported he had scored an A-star. The thrill rather went out of it for me after that. yes, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tracked me down again, or perhaps they just bicycle a copy up the slope informs me is still grinding out irregular verbs in the valley. Our exam results kept on improving. Johnnie Johnston, who to my certain knowledge, couldn't count from one to five without ten minutes' hard digital labour, applied to do Maths GCSE one year. It was uphill work for him, me and the rest of the cla.s.s, but he was adamant that the transmitter signals from Redruth were giving him the all-clear. In August, he brought me a piece of paper that reported he had scored an A-star. The thrill rather went out of it for me after that.

I don't do much these days, but I find listening to music helps distract me. I'm allowed a radio and CD player in my room and I've been hearing one or two of the old records I used to like at university. What I'm looking for is songs that buy into the human illusion in a really simple way, but have just a touch of comfort in them. Old Dylan, for instance: It ain't no use a-turnin' on your light, babe, It ain't no use a-turnin' on your light, babe, The light I never knowed; The light I never knowed; It ain't no use turnin' on your light, babe, It ain't no use turnin' on your light, babe, I'm on the dark side of the road. I'm on the dark side of the road.

He just tells the girl she wasted his 'precious time', but it doesn't really matter, so, 'Don't think twice, it's all right.' That's a good att.i.tude, there's something n.o.ble about it and outside its time; I guess that's what's good about folk music: when it's good it can have an eternal ring.

'Girl From the North Country' makes me think of Jennifer, sitting in the firelit circle in Ireland.

If you go when snowflakes storm, If you go when snowflakes storm, When rivers freeze and summer ends, When rivers freeze and summer ends, Please see she has a coat so warm Please see she has a coat so warm To keep her from the howling winds. To keep her from the howling winds.

It's the simplicity of the old folk tune he adapted overnight from 'scarborough Fair' that makes it almost intolerably poignant to listen to. That, and the use of 'storm' as an intransitive verb.