Read by David Mildon
Fry stripped naked while the two of them watched, then got dressed again in the clothes they’d brought on a tray: boxer shorts, socks prised from a lovers’ clinch, black jeans that had been almost new on the day he’d arrived. The shirt was just as he’d left it, lightly folded to minimise creasing. Its freezing fibres billowed round his frame, caricaturing the weight he’d lost. He found his watch shivering in the toe of his left shoe, which rested with its mate atop his bomber jacket.
“Nice,” said Endersby as he watched him shrug the leather on. “Surprised that one didn’t go walkabout.”
There was no mirror, so Fry struck a player’s pose and looked at them both with his eyebrows raised.
Hassan obliged with a wolf-whistle.
“Now remember,” said Endersby, “the magic ends at midnight. If you’re not back by then, you’ll be leaving your knackers in that tray.”
Hassan smiled. “He says that to all the girls.”
“Try and be a good boy now.”
“Yes Boss.” Fry grinned and gave them a thumbs-up. They let him out via the air-lock. Sudden oxygen. A drizzle-flecked carpark dotted with staff wheels. It was a short walk to the barrier, past the HMP logo, then a longer trudge to the bus-stop, where a half-dozen day-releasers were already waiting. Grown men with hardened lives and hardened bodies, joshing like teenagers.
After the bus-ride, a railway carriage. Cooling towers looming over the fields. Civilian commuters clutching at their bags, staring at the floor or out of the window, anywhere but at the day-releasers lolling on adjoining seats, their banter ramped up a notch for the occasion, loving the effect they were having on a world that had shut them up for so long.
He sat with the group, keeping silent. An old lady caught his eye. He shook his head and smiled. She looked away, relieved.
An elbow poked his ribs. “Where you going today, pretty boy?”
It was Gannon. Local lad, from Didcot. Multiple GBH.
“College reunion,” said Fry.
Gannon shook his mangy head and smiled. “Well I’ll be buggered. So am I!”
“Small world,” said Fry.
The pack howled together.
By the time he reached the city centre he was alone, Gannon and the rest having dispersed on the arrivals platform, bound for parts unknown.
The sun was out, filtering down through young leaves, spraying patterns onto the limestone college walls. High walls, built to keep you out, not in. He watched bicycles slipstream each other round a memorial to murdered bishops and thought of Billy MacLeod, the arsonist, with his dewy-eyed nostalgia for the smell of char-grilled human.
The bicycles were piloted by children, children festooned with college colours. Wherever he looked, they were there, the fresh-faced inheritors of his city. His city of speared dreams. Dreams shivved in the prime of life. Dreams running red down a windscreen.
He made his way along the main commercial drag, fighting the tide of bright eyes, youthful smiles and futures still intact. In a small room above a gentlemen’s outfitters he sat in a barber’s chair, praying for a slip of the blade, then went downstairs to hire a dinner suit. He spent the next two hours alone on a bench by the river, dressed in his finery, his other clothes beside him in a carrier bag as he filled his lungs again and again, trying to stay calm.
When he finally moved, the time on the invitation had long since passed. Ten minutes later he was standing before the studded, weather-beaten gate of his own college, soles teetering on the cobbles, the pointed shadows of the railings reaching across to prod at his heels. The place seemed forbiddingly old-school. Nothing like the institution he now called home. More like the Scrubs, or engravings he’d seen of the old Bastille.
Inside, the porter recognised him at once, startling him with the warmth of his greeting. He showed Fry a hatch in the ancient wall where he could leave his rented dinner suit at the end of the night, and promised to see it returned to the shop.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said, shaking Fry’s hand, and pointed to the glow from the dining hall. Fry could hear cutlery duelling above the evening breeze. His face felt strange, as if a sneeze were on the way.
He walked across the grass. In seventeen years, nothing had changed. Candlelit tables ran the length of the room beneath a high ceiling. Poets, prime ministers and a lone bluestocking saviour of humanity smiled from the panelled walls. Voices purred in an ambience lubed by pre-prandial fizz. Fry paused in the doorway to check the seating plan, even though he’d already received it by post and virtually memorised it in his cell.
Pretending he wasn’t still checking for her name.
Pretending it didn’t cause him pain when it still wasn’t there.
It was a joke, of course. All of it.
A joke that the invitation even reached him in prison. A joke that the screw who opened it had seen fit to pass it straight to the Guv. A joke the Guvnor was probably now telling at parties: his prisoner out on day release to attend a gaudy.
Whatever the ins and outs, permission to attend was accorded before he’d even seen the invite. No alcohol, mind, and no staying overnight.
The seating plan had arrived a few weeks later.
If her name had been on it he’d never have dared come.
And yet, since it wasn’t, what had been the point?
Nothing he ever did made sense.
A couple of diners had noticed him now. A hundred more pairs of eyes might turn towards him at any moment. A last upsurge of pride quelled the urge to run.
Take the plunge. You’ve done this before.
Just play it like you did on your very first day.
They’d placed him at the end of one of the tables, an empty seat to his left. An ideal vantage point for surveying the room, which he couldn’t help doing. Eyes met his and darted away. Hands waved and heads turned, smiling, before swivelling back to ask each other if it was really him.
It took a moment or two to recognise each person. The men were slender boys encased in flesh sarcophagi, familiar eyes, chins and noses protruding through a sea of matter. The women, without exception, were almost too beautiful to look at. Beautiful of face, of body and of attire. He found himself looking at them the way he’d looked at girls as a teenager. The way you’d behold an alien or a goddess.
An old college Fellow sat opposite him. Fry introduced himself.
“Ah. You’re the chap who did some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, am I right?”
“Still doing it,” smiled Fry.
The don leant forward with a grin. “Might I ask what you were in for?”
“Philosophy, Politics and Economics,” said Fry.
The old man, a renowned classicist, pounded the table as he laughed. Fry felt himself smile for the first time since the train.
And then he saw her.
Barely three metres away, at the next table, with her back to him. She turned to speak to the man on her right, lips mouthing in profile. He felt his whole body shudder, heard his mind warble “What? What?” before it finally clicked and started running through the seating plan in his head. He caught her first name, then the duplicated surname shared with the guy who sat beside her.
Married. To someone they’d both known. Someone she’d never stopped knowing.
She seemed taller, rangier. Her hair a different colour.
Maybe.
The rest of the meal was lost on him.
“Done a Kidman, hasn’t she?”
He’d drunk the coffee but declined the port. The hall was emptying now but still full enough to keep him hidden, and her close by.
He recognised the person who’d slid in beside him, but couldn’t remember the name. Another chubby face with too much tooth in the grin.
“A Kidman. You know what I mean. Bleached herself, hasn’t she? Started out all flame-haired and rosy-cheeked and ripe, and now… I mean, what the fuck happened to all those freckles? I’m telling you, I don’t even bother watching her films anymore.”
Fry looked from the guy’s fat hand to the butter knife. The wood of the table was soft enough for a proper crucifixion. That’s why all the mess hall surfaces were steel.
She was heading for the exit, her husband’s hand in the small of her back.
“Didn’t you have a thing with her once?”
“Nicole Kidman? No.”
Fry stood up.
He told himself he’d stay till someone uttered the words “vehicular manslaughter”, but no one did. They made him feel welcome, valued and missed. That made him feel bad. He kept missing her in the crowd, telling himself it was just chance.
When he noticed the clock it was gone eleven, and he knew he’d probably miss his train. He retrieved his carrier bag and got changed in a bathroom. As he stashed the DJ in the porter’s hatch he heard his name being called.
She was walking alone by the side of the grass.
“You’re not off, are you?”
Fry nodded.
“Jesus, we haven’t even… d’you have to? One more drink?”
Her eyes. Full on, like yesterday.
Fry gulped and shook his head. “I’m on a rather tight schedule. I take it you know about…?”
She nodded. “Yes. Look, can you wait here? I’ll be one minute, that’s all. Promise.”
He watched her go. The hair. The shoulders. The calves beneath the hem. He began to panic.
She’d lied. Two full minutes went by before she returned, a car key dangling from her index finger.
“Drive you,” she said.
“Yes, but… are you okay to…?”
She nodded. “Haven’t touched a drop all night.”
“Oh. Congratulations.”
She laughed. “Thanks. It’s not official news yet. Hasn’t stopped everyone commenting, of course.”
Her car was a few streets away, a Volvo four-wheel drive with a baby seat in the back. She beeped the doors and bade him get in.
“Won’t be a moment.”
He sat in the front seat looking at the night. He heard the tailgate open, heard her rummaging in the back, felt the quiver of the suspension as she perched on the bumper. The tailgate slammed, the back door opened and the high heeled shoes she’d been wearing landed in the baby seat. Fry swallowed, unsure whether he could handle the sight of her bare toes flexing on the accelerator. He tried to stop himself from glancing down as got in, and when he failed he saw she was wearing running shoes, mud-spattered ones with deep rubber lugs, of the type favoured by fell runners.
The engine fired. So did Adele. The same song Gannon liked to hum when he did crosswords.
Na-na-na-na someone like yoooo-hoo-hoo.
“Sorry,” she said, and killed the stereo.
He hoped he knew why.
They mostly talked about her, which felt right. He didn’t even need to look at her that much. Instead, he thought of the running shoes, saw her contouring at speed along a muddy incline, soles mauling the turf, her bare legs cased in mud, her breath the only sound against the silence of the hills. As she disappeared behind a crag, he waved good-bye.
When they arrived at the barrier the dashboard clock read 12.07.
He nodded towards the silhouetted buildings. “Quick coffee?”
She answered with a stifled laugh and a grin full of mischief. “Probably best get back,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
He watched the tail-lights disappear and rang the outer bell, getting Hassan on a double shift.
“Tut-tut-tut, Fry. Very very tut-tut-tut.”
“Sorry Boss. Won’t happen again.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t. Now get yer jim-jams on and fuck off to bed.”
“Yes Boss,” said Fry, grateful to be home.
(c) Jim Cogan, 2015
Jim Cogan is a freelance copywriter, scriptwriter and filmmaker based in South East London. He has several novels and screenplays in various advanced stages of decomposition and is the go-to guy for making asset management software sound sexy.
David Mildon is an actor and playwright and was a founding member of Liars' League. His stories “Worms’ Feast” and “Red” were performed here and appeared in Arachne Press anthologies London Lies and Weird Lies. His play The Flood was produced at the Hope Theatre Islington in 2014. his short play "Second Skin" will be performed at Theatre 503 on Feb 15th and 16th.
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