Death's Jest-Book (4 page)

It would have been all right if I
could have told them the truth about my fellow cons, which was that
to most of them crime was a job like any other, except there was no
unemployment problem. Treating prison as a retraining opportunity is
pointless when you're dealing with people who think of themselves as
out of circulation rather than out of work. Better to spend all that
public money sending them on holidays abroad in the hope they'd get
food poisoning or Legionnaire's. But I knew that advancing such a
theory wasn't going to get me letters after my name, so I dripped out
the usual gunge about socialization and rehabilitation and in the
fullness of time became Francis Roote, MA.

But I was still in the Syke,
though by now I'd hoped to have smoothed my way out to Butlin's,
which is what my ingenious fellow felons called Butler's Low,
Yorkshire's newest and most luxuriously appointed open prison on the
fringe of the Peak District.

I couldn't understand why I
didn't seem to be making any progress in that direction. OK, I played
chess with Polchard, but I wasn't one of his mob in the heavy sense.
I put this to one of the screws I'd sweet-talked into
semi-confidential mode.

'You lot can't keep giving me
black marks for playing chess,' I protested.

He hesitated then said, 'Maybe
it's not us who're giving you the black marks.'

And that was it. But it was
enough.

It was Polchard who was making
sure I didn't get a transfer.

He didn't want to lose the only
guy on the wing, probably in the whole of the Syke, who could give
him a run for his money on the chessboard and all he had to do to
keep me was let the screws know that losing me would make him, and
therefore everyone else, very unhappy.

I could see no way of changing
this, so I had to find a way of countering it.

I needed some big hitters in my
corner. But where to look?

The Governor was too busy
watching his back against political do-gooders to have any time for
individual cases, while the Chaplain was an old-fashioned whisky
priest whose alcoholic amiability was so inclusive he even spoke up
for Dendo Bright, who, thank God, had been transferred to some
distant high-security unit.

As for my obvious choice, the
Prison Psychiatrist, this was a jolly little man with the
unreassuring nickname of Bonkers, whom it was generally agreed you'd
have to be mad to consult. But then came a Home Office inspection,
which led to a temporary improvement in menu and the permanent
removal,under some kind of cloud, of a still-smiling Bonkers.

A short time later all over the
jail ears and other things pricked when it was announced that a new
trick cyclist had been appointed, and that it was a woman!

Professor
Duerden has interrupted me again.

I see now that I misinterpreted
his reaction when he first saw me. He wasn't dismayed to find he was
sharing the Quaestor's Lodging but puzzled to find he was sharing it
with someone he'd never met and never heard of.

An Englishman would have slid
around the subject, and some Americans can be pretty devious too, but
he was of the straight-from-the-shoulder school.

'So where're you working, son?'
he asked me.

'Mid-Yorkshire University’
I replied.

'That so? Now remind me, who's
running your department these days?'

'Mr Dunstan,'I said.

'Dunstan?' He looked puzzled.
'Would that be Tony Dunstan the medievalist?'

'No, it would be Jack Dunstan,
the head gardener,' I said.

Once he got over his surprise,
that really tickled him, and I saw no reason not to be completely
open with him. I explained about being Sam Johnson's pupil and how
Sam had got me a job in the gardens, and how, as well as being Sam's
student, I'd also been a close friend and was, through the good
offices of his sister, his literary executor.

'Sam was scheduled to present a
paper at the conference,' I concluded, 'and when the Programme
Committee contacted me to ask if I would be willing to read his
paper, I felt I owed it to him to accept. I presume my name's been
substituted for his all down the line, which is how I come to be in
the Quaestor's Lodging.'

He said, 'Yeah, that must be it,'
but I suspect he didn't really reckon that even Sam rated high enough
to be his roomy.

In fact, I've
been wondering about this myself and I think I've got it sussed. The
programme says that special thanks are due to Sir Justinian Albacore,
the Dean of St Godric's, under whose auspices we are the guests of
the college. That name rings a bell. Could this be the same J. C.
Albacore whose study of the Gothic psyche,
The Search for
Nepenthe,
you probably know? I've never read it myself, but I
often saw it propping up the broken leg of a sofa in Sam Johnson's
study. For this man was the great hate of Sam's life. According to
Sam, he'd given a lot of help to Albacore when he was writing
Nepenthe,
and the man had shown his gratitude by ripping off
his Beddoes project! Sam got suspicious on finding someone had been
ahead of him when he delved into a couple of rare and apparently
unrelated archives. Finally it emerged that Albacore was also working
on a Beddoes critical biog. to appear in 2003, the bicentenary of
TLB's birth. And not long before his death, Sam was spitting fire at
the news heard on the grapevine that Albacore's publishers intended
to preempt the field by publishing at the end of 2002.

I described myself to Dwight as
Sam's literary executor, which wasn't precisely true. What in fact
occurred, as you probably heard, was that Linda Lupin, MEP, Sam's
half-sister and sole heir, decided out of the generosity of her
spirit to place the reins of Sam's researches into my hands. It
probably won't surprise you to learn that the publisher with whom
Sam's biography was contracted wasn't best pleased.

I can see his point of view. Who
am I, after all? In literary terms, nobody, though my 'colourful'
background was something their sales department felt they might have
been able to use if the field had remained clear. But with Albacore's
book already being hyped around as the 'definitive' biography, their
judgment now was that setting me up to carry on where Sam had left
off was throwing good money after bad.

So, sorry, mate, but no deal for
the big book that Sam was aiming at.

They did however make an
alternative proposal.

Because Beddoes' life is so
thinly documented, Sam had been interlarding his script with what he
clearly labelled 'Imagined Scenes'. These, as he explains in a draft
preface, made no claim to be detailed accounts of actual incidents.
Though some were based on known facts, others were simply imaginative
projections, devised in order to give the reader a sense of the
living reality of Beddoes' existence. Many would, I believe, have
been much modified in or totally expunged from the finished book.

How would I feel, I was asked,
about cutting out most of the hard-core lit. crit. stuff, working up
a few more of these 'Imagined Scenes', well spiced with a sprinkling
of sex and violence, and producing one of those pop-biogs which had
done so well in recent years?

I didn't need the time offered to
think about it.

I told them to get stuffed. I owe
Sam a lot more than that.

But while I was still reeling
from the injustice of it all came this invitation for me to take up
Sam's place at the conference.

I'd taken it on face value as the
programmers paying a posthumous tribute to a valued colleague and at
the same time saving themselves the bother of rejigging their
programme. But this was no explanation of why, instead of being stuck
in a student's pad like the commonalty of lecturers, I was queening
it in the Q's lodging alongside Dwight Duerden. There had to be
another motive and, since seeing Albacore's name, I've been
suspecting he might have hopes of sweet-talking Sam's Beddoes
research database out of me.

Maybe I'm being paranoid. But the
groves of academe are crowded with raptors, so Sam always assured me.
Anyway, I'll be in a better position to judge once I've actually met
the conference organizers, which will be at the Welcome Reception and
Introductory Session in fifteen minutes' time.

Now where was I? Oh yes, the new
female psych. Her name, believe it or not, was Amaryllis Haseen!

Sporting with
Amaryllis in the shade was, you will recall, one of the alternatives
to writing poetry which Milton's most un-Puritanical imagination
suggested to him. My only acquaintance with the flower is the
garishly fleshy specimens that sometimes turn up at Christmas. Well,
by those standards, Ms Haseen lived up to her name and was generally
regarded by most of the sex-starved cons as an early Christmas
prezzie. As one of Polchard's top lads said dreamily, ‘Tart
like that you can tell all your sexual fancies to, it's better than
pulling your plonker over
Women on Top.'

Everyone
developed psychological problems. Ms Haseen was no fool, however. Her
purpose in taking on the Chapel Syke consultancy was to garner
material for a book on the psychology of incarceration, which she
hoped would put more letters after her name and more money in her
bank. (It came out last year, called
Dark Cells,
lots of nice
reviews. I'm Prisoner XR pp. 193-207, by the way.) She quickly sorted
out the wankers from the bankers. When Polchard's lieutenant
complained that he'd been dumped while I'd got a twice-weekly
session, I smiled and said, 'You've got to make 'em feel they can
help you, and that doesn't mean flashing your bone and asking her to
give it the once over like you did!' That made even Polchard smile
and thereafter whenever I came back from a session I had to face a
barrage of obscene questions as to the progress I was making towards
getting into her underwear.

To tell the truth, I think I
might have managed it, but I didn't even try. Even if successful,
what would I have got out of it?

A few top-C's of mindless delight
(no chance in the circumstances for more than a quick knee-trembler)
and a coda of post-coital sadness that might stretch for years!

For I had to be a realist. Even
if Amaryllis could be seduced into enjoying a bit of sport in the
shade, when she walked out into the bright sunshine beyond the Syke's
main gates and thought of her promising career and her happy
marriage, she was going to shudder with shame and fear and pre-empt
any future accusations I might make by marking me down as a dangerous
fantasist. (You think I'm being too cynical? Read on!)

So I set my mind to finding out
what it was that she wanted from me professionally and making sure
that she got it.

There was another danger here.
You see, what she really wanted was to get a clear picture of what
made me tick. And the trouble was that this subject fascinated me
also.

I've always known I'm not quite
the same as other people, but the precise nature of this otherness
eludes me. Is it based on an absence or a presence? Do I have
something others lack, or am I lacking in something that others
possess?

Am I, in other words, a god among
mortals or merely a wolf among sheep?

The temptation to let it all hang
out before her and see what her professional skills made of the
fascinating tangle was great. But the risks were greater. Suppose her
conclusion was that I was an incurable sociopath?

So, regrettably, I felt I had to
postpone the pleasures of complete analytical honesty till such time
as I could pay for it out of my pocket rather than out of my freedom.

Instead I devoted my energies to
letting Amaryllis find what suited us both best - that is, a slightly
fractured personality which would make an interesting paragraph in
her book.

It was good fun. The checkable
facts about my background I was careful to leave intact. But after
that, it was creativity hour as, like Dorothy after the twister, I
stepped out of the black and white world of Kansas into the bright
bold colours of Oz. Like most of these trick cyclists, she was
fixated on my childhood and I had a great time inventing absurd
stories about my dear old dad, who actually vanished from my life so
early that I have no recollection of him whatsoever. You'll find most
of them in her book. I knew I had a talent for fiction long before I
won that short-story competition.

Yet at the same time I was very
aware that Amaryllis was no one's fool. I had to assume she knew that
my agenda was to help myself by apparently helping her. So, as with
my chess games, I needed to play on many levels.

It didn't take many sessions
before I began to think I was truly in control.

Then she took me by surprise. Her
opening was to ask me, 'How do you feel about the people you hold
responsible for putting you in the Syke?'

'Apart from myself?' I said.

This seemed like a good answer,
but she just grinned at me as if to say, 'Come off it!'

So I smiled back and said, 'You
mean the policemen who arrested me and built the case against me?'

'If that's who you think
responsible,' she said.

'I don't feel anything,' I said.
'In fact I've hardly thought about them since the trial.'

'So revenge never enters your
mind? No little fantasies to while your nights away?'

It was funny, I'd been feeding
her lies and half-truths for weeks, and now when I was telling her it
like it is, no prevarication whatsoever, I was getting that
disbelieving grin.

'Read my lips,' I said
distinctly. 'Thoughts of revenge haven't broken my sleep nor troubled
my waking hours. Cross my heart. Kiss the Book. Swear on my father's
grave.'

I meant it, every word. Still do.

'Then how do you explain the
topic you propose for your PhD thesis?' she asked.