excerpt
He still won’t talk about Nick, he won’t talk about Tanya, his own dear
mini-model girl, his lost dream. He is fatter; and insists on wearing a regulation
striped shirt and one of Her Majesty’s grey jackets. Pauline chides him for
showing off.
“They’re good, these porridge-jackets. Cult collectables, as soon as I get
back in the business. ” But he won’t say what business, or discuss concluded
business, except in general terms. He smiles wrily at the thin brown curtains,
the broken Dansette record player, a chaos of books and one small picture, a
last retrieved treasure, on the damp wall —an ancient engraving of a bearded
man holding a complex structure, like triangulations of spherical retorts, radiating
light. She asks him about it —an old alchemist, a cabbalist or whatever?
She has to say something. He forces a hollow laugh and taps the dusty glass.
“I’m told it’s by Paulus Ricius, Augsburg 1516. Beautiful, isn’t it? God
knows what it means. All my alchemists turned to fool’s gold. At one point, I
had a guy with a PhD. brewing pure acid for me, I had two guys specialising in
THC oil, and they all turned rotten on me, turned Queen’s Evidence. You
wouldn’t believe I had a gold Ford Thunderbird, and whole wardrobes of
money . . . I could have given you enough bread to ransom Lucas three times
over.”
But in Larry’s professional opinion, Lucas hasn’t been kidnapped. The boy
might be on a little caper, perhaps, he’s at an age when the nerves are good. But
he’ll be back, give him a chance. Larry believes that Lucas is more stable than
Nick.
“It’s your civilising influence,” he says softly, with a slow smile that transforms
his rough-cast mock-up of a face. She wonders if he’s remembering
their distant dark-age act of hurried unbuttoning, A tiny moment swirling into
non-being. She’s let go. But has he? “That’s the trouble with inside—no
women. Just piles of demented men.”
She hopes he’s going to say more about Nick and Lucas but he’s back to a
re-run of prison life. It was a monastery with real mediaeval penances. This
vicar was a nonce who spanked young choirboys, so they made him run
around barking on all fours with a burning blue paper up his arse. Branded on
the bum, as old Geoffrey Chaucer puts it.
“Larry, I really need your help . . .” She goes into explicatory overload, the
whole construct sounding more and more implausible as her words fill the
dingy room and the clock ticks.
Manolis Aligizakis 