Death's Jest-Book Read online

  Professor Duerden and most of his luggage have now finally disappeared into his bedroom. If he intends a complete unpacking, he may be some time, so I shall continue.

  Where was I? Oh yes, in the midst of what looks dangerously like becoming a rather tedious philosophical digression, so let me get back to straight narrative.

  The following day, I played Polchard to a draw. I think I could have beaten him, but I wouldn’t like to swear to it. Anyway, a draw seemed best for starters.

  After that we played every day. At first he always had white but after our third draw he turned the board round and thereafter we alternated. The sixth game I won. There was a moment of cenotaph silence in the room, only more in anticipation of sacrifice than remembrance of it, and as I made my way back to my cell, men who’d become quite friendly over the past couple of weeks drew away from me. I paid no heed. They were thinking of Polchard as King Rat, I was thinking of him as Grand Master. There’s no fun playing someone not good enough to beat you, and less in playing someone who’s good enough but too scared. My long-term survival plan depended on establishing equality.

  That was my thinking, but I knew I could be wrong. I dreamt that night I was in that scene in Bergman’s Seventh Seal where the Knight plays Death at chess. I woke up in a muck sweat, thinking I’d made a terrible mistake.

  But next day he was sitting with the board set up and I knew I had been right.

  Now all I had to do was find a way of letting him beat me without him spotting it.

  But not straight off, I thought. That would be too obvious, and for him to catch me losing would be worse than constantly winning. So I played my normal game and planned ahead. Then Polchard made a move three times quicker than usual, and when I studied the board I realized I didn’t need to worry. All that solitary exercise had turned him into a fine defensive player. Well, it’s bound to when you’re resisting attacking gambits you’ve devised yourself. But the bastard had been soaking up the details of the way I played and suddenly he’d gone into full attacking mode and I was in trouble.

  It would have been easy to fold up before his onslaught, but I didn’t. I twisted and turned and weaved and ducked, and when I finally knocked over my king, we both knew he’d beaten me fair and square.

  He smiled as he re-set the pieces. Like a ripple on a dark pool.

  ‘Chess, war, job,’ he said. ‘All the same. Get them thinking one way, go the other.’

  Not a bad game plan I suppose if you’re a career criminal.

  After that I stopped worrying about results.

  Now everyone was my friend again but I played it cool. I wanted to be accepted as an equal not envied as a favourite. I knew as long as I played my cards, and my pieces, right, I’d got a fully paid-up ticket to ride my stretch as comfortably as I could hope.

  But make yourself as comfortable as you like in a noisy stinking overcrowded iron-barred nineteenth-century prison and it’s still a fucking jail.

  Time to turn my energies to my next project, which was to get myself an exeat.

  You can see why I didn’t have any time for the luxury of plotting revenge! I had a delicate balancing act to perform, staying Polchard’s friend and at the same time getting myself a sufficient reputation as a reformed character to get a transfer to a nice open prison. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Powers That Be still have a touching belief in a correlation between education and virtue, so I did an Open University degree, opting for a strong sociological element on the grounds that this would give me the best opportunity to impress the PTB with my revitalized sense of civic responsibility. Also it’s the easiest stuff imaginable. Anyone with half a mind can suss out in ten minutes flat which buttons to press to get your tutors cooing over your essays. Whisk up a froth of soft left sentiments with a stiffening of social deprivation statistics and you’re home and dry, or home and wet as the old unreconstructed Thatcherites would see it. With that out of the way, I started on an MA course on the same lines. My dissertation was on the theme of Crime and Punishment, which gave me the chance to really strut my born-again-citizen stuff. But it was so deadly dull!

  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, ‘a
nd 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 pre-empt 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.

  This took my breath away for two reasons.

  First, how the hell did she know what my proposed thesis topic was?

  And second, how did I explain it?

  The Revenge Theme in the English Drama.

  Could it be that all the time I thought I was coolly, calmly and collectedly planning my future like a rational man, deep down inside me some bitter scheming fury was obsessed with thought of vengeance against you and Mr Dalziel?

  Well, since then I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I can put my hand on my heart and declare with complete honesty that not one thought of you or Mr Dalziel crossed my mind as I chose my thesis topic.