Engleby

  She was biting her lip, still looking down.

  I smiled. ‘Got a boyfriend, Jules?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Marry him. Be happy. Have babies.’

  She kept nodding, dumbly.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Julie.’

  ‘Oh, Mike.’

  After I’d got over the disappointment of not being released, I felt that I’d gained a new perspective on my life and its events. Having not written a word in the 1990s, I began to pick up my pen again and jot down the odd thought. I found that I had a certain clarity.

  Baynes, for instance. I had clear recall and a consistent point of view on all that. I didn’t plan to kill him, but I did plan to hurt him badly; I wanted to break his legs. I knew he spent hours practising his goal-kicking on a distant pitch. In his final term he had no lesson to rush back to (he had a ‘private study’ period) so could carry on till it was dark. I simply doubled back from the food shop where I’d gone after my own rugby game and waited for him. The bridge over the stream that divided two large areas of playing fields was concrete with scaffolding poles for handrails. Nearby, I’d noticed lumps of loose concrete, roughly mixed, full of pebbles, and a length of rusted broken pole. I hid beneath the bridge until I heard his studs clattering towards me. I caught him from behind with the pole and he went down. I lifted the pole and brought it down with all my might across his tibia. I heard it crack. I dragged him to the edge of the bridge and rubbed the wound on the back of his head into the rough edge of the concrete. Then I chucked the weapons into the stream and jogged back to the main school. He was groaning as I left and I knew it wouldn’t be long till he was found. Dr Benbow would have examined him in his usual perfunctory manner when he was brought in, implying that he was wasting everyone’s time. The leg was cleanly broken and he was well enough to take his Oxford exams a few weeks later. What I didn’t know at the time was how hard I had hit his head. In fact, I hit it more than once, and it gave me pleasure to do so. I didn’t mention it at the time in what Dr Exley called my ‘journal/narrative’ in case it was seen by someone.

  The case of Gudrun Abendroth is more complicated. My time in Longdale has enabled me, as I said, to recall the Baynes incident clearly. I even feel a degree of remorse for his orphaned children, even though in my view they’re better off without him. Fräulein Abendroth, though, is a different matter.

  To put it simply: I still don’t know if I killed her or not; and that single fact, that not-knowing, is what persuades me – more than Baynes, more even than Jen – that Longdale is the right place for me. I followed a woman who looked like her from a Graham Parker gig to a house in Tournay Road. That much I wrote at the time. I have subsequently remembered for sure that I went back there on at least one occasion. I followed her. She went to a pub called the Cock on North End Road and I lurked at the other end of the bar, watching her. But why would I want to kill her when I didn’t even know her?

  If I did, I must be like Peter Sutcliffe or someone, but I don’t think I am. Or perhaps I did get to know her, albeit briefly. And in that space of time, perhaps she posed a threat to the ‘integrity’ of my ‘narcissistic self’ so great that violence was my only self-defence.

  The Exley theory, however, can’t really be stretched to include amnesia on my part: he was rather strict on that point. ‘snapshot’ memory, including partial forgetfulness, he could live with, but a complete blank he thought suspect. I suppose the only way Exley could be brought onside is if we beefed up the theory of ‘pathological defences’ so much that they annexed the memory function. It seems a bit far-fetched, though, doesn’t it?

  So, I’m inclined to acquit myself.

  On the other hand, it smells a bit. Who else might have killed her? And the killer had what the Roman plods of Fulham called a modus operandi similar to mine: several blows to cranium; no sexual interference; deep grave.

  But if I did kill her, yet can’t remember doing so (compare Sutcliffe’s detailed recall of his victims in court), how many more might there be?

  At this time, I just don’t know; and there are some things in the past that may have happened and some that may not have happened. But the reality of their happening or not happening then has no weight now.

  Until we can navigate in time, I’m not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

  Back live, as they still say.

  I remember that conversation with Stellings in the Indian restaurant in which he – insanely, I thought – predicted the imminent end of the Cold War, the sex war, apartheid and so on.

  He was right, though, wasn’t he? He might have added architecture too, which was then embedded in a desperate impasse. Either you built ‘modern’ – witless rectangular towers with metal-framed windows in which people rushed to kill themselves – or you built mock-Palladian (itself a classical pastiche). The two camps detested one another with pitiless venom. Now I look in the papers and I see buildings of light and air, glass and steel and uncovered brick. They look really nice. (I wonder if I’ll ever be free to go inside one.)

  Suggesting, back then, that using strong materials and good design might be a way forward would have earned you contempt from both the Legomen and the Pasticheurs. Like the way all British politicians are Social Democrats now, but back then holding such beliefs was derided as ‘having no policies’.

  (Don’t you love politicians? I think what I like best is their sublimely self-serving insistence that their ‘private life’ is nothing whatever to do with their ‘public life’. So that the decision to shaft their secretary over the conference table five minutes before the cabinet meeting or to spend the night face down in a bathhouse cubicle taking on all comers is reached by a different person, or a different brain, from the one who, a few minutes later, decides to vote for family tax credits or the death penalty. God, if only!)

  Anyway, these changes in society look all right to me, though of course in most ways things haven’t changed at all. I remember my student questions.

  ‘Got a cure for the common cold yet? Have you? Thought not. How’s your 2003 world, then? A few wars? Some genocide? Some terrorism? Drugs? Abuse of children? High crime rate? Materialistic obsessions? More cars? Blah-blah pop music? Vulgar newspapers? Porn? Still wearing jeans?’

  Stellings’s specific optimism was right, but so was my less hopeful overview.

  And other things are worse than even I foresaw.

  For instance: my country recently invaded another country.

  That’s not something anyone could have foreseen. Invading other countries was what Hitler or Kaiser Wilhelm or the kamikaze Japanese did.

  Not invading other countries: that was our thing. It more or less defined who we were. America likewise. Obviously there were those CIA things (Guatemala, Iran and so on) but they were unofficial: when we begged the American government to join us in our European World War Two, prim Mr Roosevelt said No: the US has not been attacked, so it wouldn’t be proper. Then the Japanese bombed them at Pearl Harbor and it was OK.

  This Blair guy, though. My age, Oxford-educated, looks and sounds quite reasonable. You’d have thought that he’d understand his own country’s recent past, wouldn’t you? Apparently not. They sent inspectors to find weapons and the inspectors came back empty-handed; they sent spies, and the spies returned with nothing.

  Never mind, said Mr Blair, I don’t care: if we can’t find the weapons then he must be hiding them, and in half an hour or so he could attack us. We must get him first.

  My old friend Peter Mandelson came on the radio. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘saddam’s got a supermarket.’ He pronounced it ‘shoopermarket’. ‘saddam’s got a shoopermarket selling deadly weapons. We must invade.’ Peter had seemed rather a sophisticated man, I thought, when I’d met him during that General Election. Why was he now talking this crap about a giant Asda in Tikrit?

  The funny thing was that almost no one outside Westminster believed it. For instance, no one in Longdale believed it.


  ‘Paranoid’ Pete Smith on my corridor never thought we’d find hidden weapons, yet Paranoid is someone who rolls an orange under his bed each night to check there’s no one there.

  Johnnie Johnston wouldn’t give the time of day to that ‘intelligence’ dossier, and Johnnie is a man who believes his own thoughts are controlled by the BBC Radio 4 long-wave transmitter at Redruth.

  Not much has happened in Longdale in the last seventeen years. There have been some improvements in the kitchen – twice a week you can hold it down – and in the gardens and the workshops.

  I am no longer under the control of Dr Braithwaite (retired) or Dr Turner (moved on, alas). My ‘case officer’ (sounds like M16, but it isn’t) is now Dr Vidushi Sen, a severe young woman in her first senior appointment in the exciting world of Special Hospitals. She has more than her fair share of old lags like me, poor thing; the senior doctors bag the newer patients because there’s more hope of an outcome.

  They stopped giving me drugs because everyone could see they did no good. Take drugs away from a patient and he may improve; at least he’ll stop experiencing the side effects. But take drugs away from a shrink and all she has left is chat.

  Dr Vidushi Sen is a very poor chatter. She sits opposite me with her shiny black hair tightly drawn back and pinned, in her pretty cotton shift worn over trousers that taper and button at the ankle. She blinks over her shallow black-framed glasses, clipboard in hand, and waits for me to spout.

  I don’t think Dr Sen subscribes to the Exley theory of ‘personality disorder’. There’s a nasty mix there of nature and nurture, of a ‘biological substrate’ and plain bad behaviour. All a bit murky for her, I think. Am I meant to be mad or bad? The Exley answer, which essentially says ‘a bit of both’ is not to Dr Sen’s taste. And since I don’t really fit into any category of mental illness in either the American or European handbooks, of which there have been several new editions since I’ve been in Longdale, all of which she’s studied dutifully, Dr Sen is left with the conclusion that I am bad.

  She thinks I am a very nasty man indeed and should really be banged up in Strangeways or Winson Green with the robbers and the ‘sane’ killers and the nonces. She believes I’m far too lucid, too well controlled and too reasonable to be mad. She’d like to say too well educated, too, but, in a way so convoluted one can barely follow it, that would be incorrect, politically.

  Dr Sen would never actually say that I am bad. She’s very hot on ‘blame’ and ‘guilt’: absence of need for, destructive effects of.

  Another thing she’s very hot on is me being gay. She hasn’t said as much, because it’s not her way to suggest things; but she’s always leaving the pink door ajar, hoping that one day I’ll sidle through. I’m dreading that in desperation she’ll order up another ‘penile seismograph’ or whatever the thing’s called, but instead of looking at some forlorn toms with their legs apart, I’ll be staring at Master Meat the Butcher’s Boy.

  She’s a keen student of my journal and reveals a good deal about herself by the passages she chooses for our delectation. Those concerning Margaret and my relationship with her are of particular interest.

  ‘You called her “candid, optimistic and polite”.’

  ‘So?’

  She says nothing, merely raises a shaped eyebrow. I know what she means: that these are the terms in which you might describe your chartered accountant, not your lover. I don’t say so; I just give her rather boring justifications of each adjective in turn.

  She echoes Exley’s comment on my restrained description of the first time Margaret and I had it off together; I point out that I wasn’t writing to titillate. She also draws attention to my repeated references to sodomy and fisting in Her Majesty’s prisons, presumably wishing to imply that my obvious distaste is – oh, toiling paradox! – a concealed desire. I hear her big feet coming from the next valley.

  ‘And this boy “Rough”, the one who became so good at squash because he had gay desires . . .’

  ‘What about him?’

  Again the raised eyebrow. She is at the very least implying that his name, as in Trade, is another throttled longing on my part.

  ‘Dr Sen, as you probably know, there is a huge amount of homosexual activity in this hospital. Two men in my block are virtually married, with the blessing of the supervising psychiatrist. They share a room. They have a standing order for condoms and KY from the hospital shop. Their relationship is said to have helped them both to earthly joy and the prospect of an early release. What’s to hide? Being gay would only make things better for me.’

  Dr Sen seldom pushes things. She’s young, maybe thirty-two, and it’s against her training to suggest. You must also remember that Longdale is a maximum-security institution. Although we have confidentiality for our tête-à-têtes, the door of the consulting room is unlockable and I sit nearer to it, so that if a rescue has to be made I am easy to get at. The wall behind me is half glass and gives onto the corridor where a male nurse patrols, never more than a few paces away. There can suddenly be an undertow of danger. I see her sense it. Sometimes I see fear in her wide dark eyes: the dilating black pupils almost cover the brown iris.

  Her view – I know, because she is transparent, so much better at self-disclosure than I am – is that I am a furious misogynist whose hatred of women springs from a violently suppressed homosexuality.

  She also thinks I am a racist, and this is delicate because even though she’s as English as I am, with a similar regional accent, her family is originally from southern India. (Her first name, Vidushi, incidentally, means ‘Learned’ in Hindi, which tells you about her pushy parents in Maidenhead. I looked it up in hinduism.about.com on the Internet on the heavily firewalled computer in the day room.)

  When she asked me about a passage I wrote many years ago on immigration, I repeated that I merely felt pity for the West Indians who were given a false prospectus and found Britain cold and inhospitable, and sorry that for the many people from the Asian subcontintent who traded in their beautiful country for the grey rain of Catford and Lewisham.

  She didn’t look convinced. She also brought up my description of Shireen Nazawi as ‘EFL-speaking’.

  I conceded that it was ungallant – but true: English wasn’t Shireen’s first language, and she struggled with it, as, consequently, did the readers of her articles.

  Dr Sen didn’t push too hard here, I must admit, because although racism was an important part of her view of Engleby as Utter Shit, it wasn’t central to her assessment of why I killed Jennifer Arkland.

  For misogyny, she relied on my description of the wine bar in Knightsbridge, suggesting I implied that all women were basically prostitutes, and on my ‘fascination’ for the street tarts in Paddington.

  Obviously, I had no difficulty batting those two away.

  More difficult was a sort of experimental undergrad riff that went: ‘Anne, Molly and Jennifer are, like all women, weirdly obsessed by appearances – looks, colours, fashion, surfaces; they have no interest in ideas or deeper truths, only “style” and status and the rapacious purchase of goods to underline them. Their cordiality conceals a sense of bitter rivalry that they’ll carry to their death, without ever acknowledging it. They’re really machines for surviving in the competition for resources. Carrying the species in their wombs, they have to be.’

  She didn’t remember the exact words, but I was able to fill her in.

  I then explained, as in a Dr Gerald Stanley supervision, that context is all. This wasn’t necessarily ‘my’ view; it was a view that had been offered as a corrective to a romanticised depiction of the girl students’ lives that had preceded it. It was a squirt of lemon in the eye to defuse the charge of ‘sentimentality’.

  Dr Sen did have one powerful argument for misogyny in my case, and we both knew what it was. To her credit, it was six months or more before, under provocation from me, she brought it up.

  As I recall, I was irritated by her refusal ever to pass judgement on me
for what I’d done. She never seemed able to express even so much as a mild disapproval.

  ‘You’re like Bill Clinton,’ I said, knowing the comparison would appal her. ‘He took the intern as his girlfriend, then denied it. He screwed her and he lied and lied and lied. But in the end when he coughed up he couldn’t say that he’d done wrong, he’d only say what he’d done was “inappropriate”.’

  ‘I don’t believe the idea of blame is helpful,’ said Dr Sen, as always.

  ‘With no blame there’s no shame. A human society can’t exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It’s a central human attribute. In fact, it’s the first human quality ever recorded.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.’

  Dr Sen coughed and rearranged her notes. ‘I was merely thinking it might be worthwhile for you to think again about your attitude to women.’

  ‘Why again? I’ve thought about it so many times. You seem to think that everything can be explained by it. You see significance even in the fact that I once stole a girl’s bike when I was at school. It wasn’t an insult to worldwide womanhood. It was because I needed transport for the gin and whisky I was stealing, so I could make money. It was about cash, not women. If there’d been a boy’s bike to hand, I’d have stolen that instead.’

  She stopped looking down at her notes and met my exasperated gaze, quite calmly.

  ‘But you stole a woman’s bike again, in Cambridge, didn’t you?’

  ‘What have bicycles got to do with misogyny?’

  ‘That’s your word, not mine. I’ve never said you are misogynistic. But if anyone wanted to find evidence for that in your character, they needn’t look far, need they? After all, by your own admission, you violently killed a young woman.’

  She’d gone too far, and she knew it. She blushed a little, which gave her cheek a most beautiful colour, of rose under gold.