The Blueprint (35 page)

The crimson
flush in her cheeks turned a shade darker. Were such a thing
possible, I would’ve thought she was indignant. She opened and
closed her mouth a few times, as though daring herself to say
something, but that something never managed to force its way
out.

‘So is that
all you came here for?’ I asked. ‘To show me an essay and to invite
me to your wedding? Because unless you’re planning on a
twenty-five-year-long engagement, I’d imagine I’ll be busy that
weekend.’

She shook her
head, and then - very suddenly, as though she was trying to slip it
past a blockade – blurted out:

‘Don’t rat me
out.’

No sooner had
she said it than the hand had gripped the chair and the eyes gone
darting around her face. Even her neck, this time, forced itself
free of composure. The guard noticed. He didn’t come over, but the
slight and momentary angling of his eyebrows told me that from that
moment on he would be trying to mentally filter out all of the
other white noise in the room and hone in on our conversation. It
struck me once more that what I chose as my next sentence could
determine whether ‘Jennifer Green’ left this building in custody or
as a free woman. Judging by her eyes, she knew it too.

The
innocent have nothing to fear from the truth
, I thought to
myself.
But, then again, neither do those who’ve already been
found guilty.

I raised the
volume of my voice just a fraction, and said:

‘You’re not
very good with prisons, are you, Ms. Green?’

I held her
gaze very deliberately, so that she wouldn’t succumb to the urge to
turn and look at the guard. She shook her head. As though
disconnected from her thoughts, her hand grabbed her pen and
scribbled something down in her notebook. I let my eyes fall down
to the pages, and saw that they were plastered with tight, neat
handwriting. Had she been writing the entire time? Or, more
accurately, was she transcribing a different conversation, a
fictitious interview with a convicted murderer, conducted by an
innocent student? Even then, when she was finally giving into
emotion, had she managed to confine it to her face and the hand
gripping the chair? Was her writing hand still keeping up the
act?

‘I would’ve
thought the answer to that question was obvious,’ I continued,
making sure not to let my pupils flick towards the guard I knew to
be watching us, even for an instant. ‘I’ve been in this prison for
far longer than I knew any of the people who were part of the
robbery. If I haven’t grassed any of them up by now, the conclusion
is clear; I’m not going to. It doesn’t matter if that’s because I
don’t know their identities or because I want to protect them.’

In my
peripheries, I watched the blurred figure of the guard reluctantly
moving out of earshot. She watched me watching him go, and when my
facial expression indicated that he was on the far side of the
room, she asked:

‘Was that
answer for his benefit or mine?’

‘I haven’t
decided, yet,’ I replied. ‘But, like I said, that type of thing
never seemed to worry you before.’

‘It worries me
now. Fucking hell, Sundance, look at my eyes!’ she hissed. I did.
There was a wild, uncaged desperation gleaming out from her irises,
accentuated by the black circles on the lids and the inflamed
capillaries crawling over the orbs that encased them. ‘I haven’t
slept since he asked me to marry him, because I know that one day
you’re going to come along and take away everything that I’ve spent
the last year building up. My fiancée thinks I’m about to call the
wedding off!’

‘And why
shouldn’t I?’ I contested, at the same time trying to figure out
what exactly it was that she thought I had on her. ‘I took away
everything Sid had spent his life building, and I’m damn sure you
didn’t give a second thought to the guy you killed, whatever his
name was.’

‘Simon
something,’ she answered, dully.

‘Why do you
get a chance, and not him?’ I probed. ‘Why not me, for that matter?
I might’ve escaped if you hadn’t pulled that shit with my phone.’ I
was still racking my brains, trying to uncover what evidence I
could’ve used against her.
She wouldn’t have lured me into
police custody if she knew I could prove who she was. It must be
something she’d overlooked until later. It has to be something only
I could know, and not Freddy or Charlie. Then again, maybe she’s
just getting paranoid in her old age.

‘I figured
you’d appreciate the irony,’ she shrugged.

‘I figured
you’d just kill me, instead of waiting five years to come back and
play on my heartstrings. If you wanted to bury the past so badly, I
doubt throwing one more body in the hole would’ve made that much of
an impression on you.’

The malevolent
shadow slipped back down over her features. For just a moment, I
could see Phoebe staring back at me.

‘You don’t
know the first thing about my past,’ she hissed, through gritted
teeth. ‘At least I’ve got good reason for wanting to bury mine;
you’re just a poor little rich boy whose mummy told him he was
special, who then threw a tantrum when he found out the world
didn’t agree. If you knew
half
of what I’ve…’ She seemed to
lose the thread of the point she was making. She stopped and
regathered her thoughts, and then muttered: ‘I was never given a
chance, until now. Do I not at least deserve that?’

‘Fuck
deserve
,’ I spat back at her. ‘Maybe you were just a product
of your environment. Maybe someone else wrote the blueprint for
what you grew up to be. But maybe that’s the case for me, too.
Maybe we’re all just helpless clusters of atoms being drop-kicked
towards the heat-death of the universe.’

‘So you’re
going to rat on me?’ she asked, with feeble acceptance in her
voice.

‘Even if I say
“no” now, what’s to say I won’t wake up tomorrow and feel
different?’

‘I guess I’ll
never know,’ she conceded.

‘Unless I’ve
read this wrong, and what you’re really asking me is to kill myself
to put your mind at rest?’

I examined her
features, looking for the answer that I knew her lips would never
let past, but couldn’t find it. Eventually, she lifted her face up
to meet my own, and I saw that tears had begun to swell up in her
eyes.

‘I just don’t
want you to hate me, that’s all,’ she whispered. I couldn’t prevent
a snort of laughter from leaping out of my nose. This mocking snort
only served to squeeze the tears out onto her cheeks. Then it
didn’t seem very funny. We fell into silence.

‘I never hated
you,’ I told her, eventually. ‘I actually quite
liked
you -
that was what always concerned me.’

Another
silence fell down over us. This time it was her who broke it.

‘Sorry I
called you a poor little rich boy.’

‘It’s hardly
the worst thing you’ve ever done.’

‘I guess
not.’

‘So you’ve
finally found a life worth keeping?’

‘I guess
so.’

‘Tell me about
it.’

And she did. For the
first time since she sat down, she spoke without falter or script.
The pen even fell onto the table. She told me of how she struck up
a conversation with a classically handsome, bespectacled man with
the idea of making him her next stooge; how when he asked what she
did for a living and where she was from she was struck by a strange
compulsion to tell him the truth, or at least a small part of it;
how when he asked what she
wanted
to do for a living and
where she wanted to go, she couldn’t find an answer; how she’d
confessed on her first date that she didn’t have anywhere to stay
the night, and she couldn’t work out whether it was a ploy or a
plea; how he’d still asked her to move in with him, despite the
fact that she’d been sleeping on his apartment sofa for the
previous month; how she’d woken up beside him in the early hours of
the morning after one of the increasingly frequent nightmares in
which I played the role of the bad guy, and tried to sneak away,
never to see him again; how the downstairs light has sprung on as
she turned the key in the back door; how he wasn’t angry, but
understanding; how she’d confessed that she’d spent the best part
of the previous decade moving from place to place, subsisting on
whatever she could con or steal; how he’d asked her what he life
was like before that decade, and what she had fled that made such a
life preferable; how he’d asked her again what she wanted to do
with her life, and how he’d helped her work out the answer.

After too long
anger caused my attention to waver, little bubbles of it
effervescing in my sinuses, sending prickling pains into the bone
behind my brow. Initially, I wondered if these were the symptoms of
jealousy; that, after enduring months of teasing dreams of
domestication, to have this stranger come to boast at me about her
happy life was like watching a sibling eat an ice cream after I’ve
just dropped my own. And yet as I sank down, involuntarily, into my
chair and the pain began to recede, I realised that it wasn't anger
or jealousy, it was sadness. Or perhaps it was disappointment; I'd
been running on hate for so long that it was becoming difficult to
recognise the other emotions when they hit me. I was telling the
truth when I said that, despite everything, I liked Phoebe. Now all
that was left of her was that wistful, nostalgic scent, and the
rest had been replaced by that perfectly amiable creature, who I
had nothing against, but whose company, even after five years of
isolation, couldn’t keep the loneliness out for more than ten
minutes.

When her
monologue was cut short by the striking of the clock, we parted
ways; her back to her life and me back to my cell. I noticed that
the guard’s eyes flickered over her as she passed, and I wondered
whether he would pursue that moment of suspicion to its conclusion.
The classic trope: the criminal who can’t resist going back to the
scene of the crime. It’s been the undoing of many a fictitious
character. I hoped it wouldn’t be hers.

Perhaps I
should’ve ended this story a few paragraphs earlier, when I asked
her to tell me about her new, happy life; It might’ve even made me
look noble, in a strange kind of way, as though I’d sacrificed my
own freedom, my own happiness, for hers. I could even have slipped
in a witty aside about how ironic it was that she’d been
rehabilitated, while the yocorrective system had turned me into a
monster. However, I think I’ve given enough evidence over the
course of this tale to counter any accusations of nobility.

I began that
course by asking for your sympathy, but, now that I’ve reached its
end, I’m not sure that I want it. I’m not a victim. My past didn’t
make me do the things I did. I chose to do them. Because of those
choices, I no longer have a family, and I no longer have friends,
and I no longer have a girlfriend. But can I still have a
future?

That night, as I lay there staring up at the
underside of my cellmate’s bunk, I played through the old jailbreak
movies I used to watch with my dad, back in my teens. Slowly but
surely, a plan began to form inside my head.