Tench

Now I have to pay attention, thought Jonathan. Now.
It’s starting now. He laid his trembling hands on his lap
and rubbed the middle of his left thumb with his right in the
hope that it would calm him down. It was his last morning in
jail. Like always, he was alone in his cell. The cell the others,
the guards, called his room. He was sitting on the bed waiting,
staring at the wall. He didn’t know what time it was. It was
early, he knew that much. The first strip of sunlight had just
forced its way through the split in the too-thin curtains. Halffive,
maybe six o’clock. It didn’t make any difference to him
today. I’ve got time, he thought. From now on I’ve got plenty
of time. They’ll come when they come. When they think it’s
the right time, they’ll come. I can’t do anything about that. No
earlier, no later. I’ll see.
Until they came he would watch the morning light push
further into his cell and slowly, imperturbably, move across the
walls in its own orbit, ignoring everybody. It had been ages
since he’d known exactly what time it was. The first night here
he’d immediately fiddled the batteries out of the wall clock. He
couldn’t stand the ticking. Plus the clock didn’t tell him anything
that was any use to him. Day activities weren’t compulsory and
he didn’t sign up for any of them. Walking in circles, education,
sport. Work. If you didn’t smoke, eat sweets or buy expensive
clothes, you didn’t need any money here.
He preferred to watch the position of the sun, the fullness
of the light, the way it caught the clouds drifting over the
watchtowers. That told him how much longer it was going to
last, how long till dark. How much longer he’d have to put up
with the racket: men’s voices creeping up from the exercise
yard, music through the walls. Shadows across the floor of his
cell, across the bed and the small table. But now it was going
to be different. “Everything will be different,” he whispered.
He waited. It was still quiet outside. After a while he stood
up, walked from the bed to his table, from the table to the
window, stood there for a moment and went back to his bed.
He sat down again, knees creaking quietly, then stood up once
more. He paused in the middle of his cell, then went back
to the table and looked down at it. On it were his therapy
workbook, his exercise book, pencils and pens. The bookmark
his mother had sent him. He sat down at the table again,
his back straight, and opened the exercise book. A beautiful,
blank page. He used both hands to smooth it out, arranged
it in the exact middle of the table, unscrewed the lid of his
pen and thought for a moment. After what seemed like ages it
turned out he couldn’t think of anything sensible to write. He
nibbled at the inside of his cheek. Why not? Why should he
run dry today?
He stood up again and clenched his fists. Walked from his
table to the window, from the window to the table and back
again. He sat down on the chair. “Nothing,” he wrote. And then,
“Never.” Followed by, “No!” He banged the exercise book shut.
The rest would come tonight when he was back home. He’d do
the next therapy assignment then. A little later he opened the
exercise book again, stared at what he’d written and crossed it
out. “Different,” he wrote beneath it, then drew a line through
that too. “Better.”
He rolled up the exercise book, picked up his pens and pencils
one at a time and put them in his pencil case, and slipped the
workbook into his bag with the rest. Then he sat down on the
bed, hands trembling on his lap, and waited for the moment
when the guard would unlock the door.
Now I have to pay attention, thought Jonathan. Now. It’s starting
now. He was sitting next to the last window, at the back of
the bus to the village. There weren’t any other passengers, but
he’d still walked past the empty seats. There was quite a bit of
morning left to go: the sun was still rising, but it was already
terribly hot. A drop slid out from his hair, slowly, down his neck.
All the way to the small of his back. He shifted on the seat. He
had his bag on his lap, holding it close. He was sweating under
his arms too. The bag was heavy on his knees. He would have
preferred to put it down on the floor, but somehow it seemed
safer like this, his fingers tightly intertwined. He sighed.
Between him and the world was the glass and behind the
glass the coastal landscape. The most beautiful country he knew.
The place where he had crawled out of his mother’s womb on
a nondescript Sunday morning some thirty years ago. A place
he would never leave. He looked at the landscape with brandnew
eyes. Not a single detail escaped him. He saw the tops of
the pine trees and the way the sun was very precisely spotlighting
the last row of sandhills, the grass on the side of the road
and the water of the small pools in the distance. The light slid
along the road with the bus, heating the asphalt. It was so hot
it wouldn’t have surprised him to see the tar bursting open in
front of him, starting to crack and melting from the inside out.
Soft, sticky lumps like mud on the soles of his shoes.
He closed his eyes for a moment, reopened them and looked
at the sky again. The light was almost painful, such a glaring
white.
Past the water tower, the bus curved off and down to the
right before slowly climbing again after the next bend. He
knew it all by heart, able to predict every twist and bump in
the road. Just a couple of minutes to the harbour, he thought,
and then the village. He could smell the slight stink of the sea
air through the open roof hatch. Fish, oil, decay, seaweed.
Rope.
This afternoon he would be out walking in these dunes,
maybe within an hour. At last. People didn’t like him; they never
had. But nature accepted him as he was. He squeezed one hand
with the other, held it like that, then stretched the fingers one at
a time until he heard the knuckles crack. His mother would be
home waiting for him. Sitting on the sofa, where else, watching
morning TV. He could almost hear the sound of the set that
had been about to give up the ghost for years now. All those
nights sitting next to her on his regular chair, the smell of the
dog in the room. Her hands clasped together and resting just
under her bosom. Often he’d be reading Nature magazine but
unable to keep his mind on the words, the TV voices stabbing
into his thoughts. Then he’d let the magazine slip down to his
lap and watch her watch TV.
He thought about the little things, the things he knew so
well. The way the fingers of her right hand curled together and
slowly, absently reached for the thin chain of her necklace, the
way she took the silver cross between thumb and index finger
and began to rub it. That meant that something on TV had
aroused her interest and she was about to draw his attention to
it. The way she let the rosary beads glide through her fingers
when she was praying at night.
His hands were clammy. He felt the warmth of the engine
rumbling away inside the bus. Now and then he looked at his
nails, tugging at little bits of skin. Sometimes he raised himself
up slightly to get a better look into the distance, squinting against
the glare, then sitting down again.
He watched the seagulls gliding through the sky with their
beaks open. Sometimes they hung motionless for a moment as
if frozen in place. He thought of the birds whose flight he had
watched through his cell window. As long as he could. The
powerful beating of their wings. When they sailed past close
to his window, he imagined he could hear the wind whooshing
across their quills. In the back of his exercise book he kept a
list of unusual birds. Kittiwake gulls, lesser black-backed gulls,
fulmars, a guillemot. Tallying them gave him some peace of
mind amid the racket, the endless suffocation. It was unbearable.
Especially the proximity of all those men. The nauseating
smell of food.
But it was over now, as suddenly as it had begun. Despite
everything it had felt sudden. Last week was the umpteenth
hearing: the whole day in the docks, his lawyer’s words going
straight over his head like always.
And yesterday afternoon the official letter from the court
arrived. He had been acquitted on appeal. After all. Despite his
worst fears. That cancelled out everything: the prison sentence,
the therapy, the psychiatric hospital. There wasn’t enough
evidence. They hadn’t been able to find the T-shirt on which,
in the words of the prosecutor, incriminating traces could be
found according to the victim’s statements. “The prosecution
can still appeal,” his lawyer explained, “but I don’t expect
them to.” The case would only be reopened if they could dig
up some more evidence. But that was anyone’s guess. For the
time being he was free.