Work started at 6:00am. I was one of the lucky ones. I had a job in what we called ‘Industry.’ It was eight hours a day, five days a week, and it was hard fucking work. I was one of the inmates involved in processing the linen for our prison, surrounding prisons and the local hospitals and other government institutions.

  Now, they called it a job, and technically it was a job, but most of the time it like modern day forced labour.

  Sometimes I’d imagine being a member of a chain-gang, back in the old days, somewhere in the deep south of America, breaking rocks in the hot sun, with a ball and chain round my ankle.

  The good thing about the work was that sometimes, when I was really lost in the washing, drying, starching, pressing drudgery that I had to take part in, I could just imagine that I was a cog in a huge machine. Not a human being, just a tiny part of an inhuman construction.

  Again, I’m aware that that doesn’t sound so great. But believe me, it was better than facing up to the truth of the situation. And I developed a weird pride in my work. There was nothing else to fucking do, you gotta understand. So when some linen came out fresh, soft and beautifully well pressed, it gave me a little flutter of excitement that was hard to get any other time in prison.

  I was lucky to get paid, too. And not the £12.50 a month pittance that most of the prisoners got. No, because I was working in industry, I received a whopping £50 a month from my job.

  I know, sounds like a lot when you’re not paying for your room and board, right?

  Well, it works out as 75 pence an hour.

  Yeah, minimum wage doesn’t really apply to prisoners so much. But at least it allowed me to save up some cash for when I got out. I didn’t spend too much of the money I earned while I was inside. I wanted to have a chance of some kind of life when I got out. It hadn’t worked out so well for me so far though.

  Lunch was noon every day. I had to go down to the chow hall to eat, and let me tell you, it wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t have lots of friends inside the prison, and truthfully, the majority of the people I met in there weren’t exactly friend material.

  The food, of course was shit. I don’t think I ever really understood the colour brown until I went to prison. There were some days that every fucking thing on the menu for lunch was brown. Even things that weren’t meant to be brown they somehow managed to make brown. Stuff like carrots, green beans, garden peas. All cooked for so long that all the brightness and freshness was totally gone. You’d be left with this generic brown sludge that somehow managed to taste even worse than it looked.

  Sometimes you’d get served something that was just described as ‘meat fried rice’. No indication of what type of meat it was at all. We used to call it ‘rat fried rice’. Most of our meat products were like that. Only on days like Christmas would you get ‘turkey casserole’.

  The worst thing is that we didn’t even get any extra salt and pepper to add to our food. It was all bland, bland, bland.

  Even so, I found myself looking forward to each meal as a small break in the grind of the day.

  The thing that TV and the movies just don’t get across about prison life is just how lonely and boring it is. Sure, there’s gangsters, violence and other nasty stuff. But the vast majority of the time is spent just dreaming about being out, mourning for the time you’ve lost to the system, wishing that things were different. I was lucky in a way that my loved ones had, for the most part, past on already.

  I know it sounds dumb to say you’re lucky not to have any family, but to be honest I couldn’t miss them any more in prison than I already did outside of prison.

  Between 1:00pm and 2:00pm I’d have a break from work, so I’d have the chance to get outside, maybe see the sun, go for a jog. From time to time I’d just beat some laps of the track out with someone I actually got on with. My best friend was a guy called Grant. He’d helped me adjust to prison life to begin with, and we’d remained close ever since I’d been a bunk-mate of his.

  It had been good to have Grant as a friend inside, but it was hard to shift the feeling that if we weren’t literally locked up together, we’d never really have been friends.

  After my little break it was back to the hard physical work of the laundry, and then back down to the fucking chow-hall for dinner at five. I know I’ve been stressing just how crappy the food was, but you’ve got to understand I’d never have considered skipping a meal, not even once.

  I always lucky in a way that I’ve got some interests in life besides crime and the television, which were the main hobbies that my fellow inmates seemed interested in. I spent a lot of my free time reading. Art history, world literature, some trashy stuff too. I’ve got a soft spot for queer romance, actually. Although I used to keep that quiet from the other prisoners.

  Basically, I’d read whatever I could get the prison librarian to order in for me. In the evening, the majority of the rest of the prisoners would either bicker about to watch in the few communal spaces with televisions, or they’d just sit in their cells, staring at the wall, waiting for the day to end.

  That’s really when I started to understand what people meant by ‘doing my time’. It was an active process, doing nothing until a period of time was up, just waiting, waiting, waiting for your a section of your life to pass. The worst thing about it was that I had to actually spend time with myself. I was forced to self-reflect, which let me tell you, was like torture. But again, I’m lucky, in that the victim of my crime had deserved what he got.

  But lots of others in the prison weren’t that lucky.

  Like Grant. He used to tell me that it was the hardest thing, knowing how he’d victimised so many people. Not just the people who were the actual technical victims of his crimes. Their families, too. His family. The police who’d had to deal with him. The courts, the jury, everyone involved. He’d imposed his horrible acts on so many people. And so had I, in a way. But for what that arsehole did to me, I’d do it all again, a thousand times. No, a million fucking times.

  So now, I’m home, free to do whatever I want, my debt to society paid off in full, but all I can fucking do is to think about my time in prison.

  It’s at times like this that I feel like I’m still in prison, still working myself to the bone cleaning laundry, still wishing I was free. The prison wasn’t just the bars around me, it was the bars I’d built in my own mind.

  I think that’s why those art classes were so important to me. Once every two weeks, on a Wednesday afternoon, it as though the whole world was open to me again.

  I’ll never forget the first piece of advice Clark gave to me.

  He was walking round to each prisoner one by one, giving them tips on their work. You could tell the rest of the guys trying to game him, the soft art teacher who was a little too effeminate to be totally straight. If there hadn’t been a guard in the room at the time, they’d have been all over him.

  He finally got round to me. We’d been drawing these mannequins he’d brought in, so that we could learn about human anatomy, you know, how big a head is in proportion to the arms and legs and torso and shit like that. I’d scribbled what I thought was a pretty good approximation of a body. Clark looked at the sketch and the mannequin.

  ‘Learning to draw is actually just learning to see.’

  My first thought was ‘what a crock of meaningless shit’. I already knew how to fucking see, thank you very much. How did he think I’d drawn the sketch I had?

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ he replied, ‘maybe that’s a pretty nebulous way to say that. What I mean is…you’ve got to be honest with how you see, and how you look. You’re obviously a talented drawer. I can see that. The sketch you’ve done, it feels like if I’d asked you to draw what a mannequin looks like without actually showing you a picture of a mannequin, you might have come up with something like this sketch.’

  When I thought about it, I realised he was right. I’d barely looked at the mannequin as I’d sketched it. I just drew what I thought it looked like.

  ‘So what I want you to do,’ he said, ‘is do it again, and this time, forget that you’re drawing a mannequin. You have to forget what it is, to really understand what it looks like. And that applies to whatever it is you’re drawing.’

  I think that’s when I really started to fall for him, because I looked at him the way he wanted me to look at the mannequin. And I like maybe I was seeing a man for the first time.

  The lines of his face. The pale, magical colour of his skin. The way his eyelashes stuck together a touch as he blinked. The perfect imperfections of his skin. The deep blue of his eyes. A tiny scar on the tip of his nose.

  And then I really got it. I stopped thinking about what his features were. I just imagined the energy of his form, passing through the air, carried by light from the sun and reflected into my eyes, translated in my brain. He was surfaces of colour and texture, and without me to see him, he’d have no form at all.

  It was pretty fucking intense.

  ‘I think I understand,’ I said. My heart was fucking pounding in my chest, like I was having some kind of medical emergency. He must have noticed something was wrong because he gave me this freaky look and then said, ‘Are you OK?’

  For a moment, it looked as though he was going to put a hand on my shoulder. I think he really was. But then he must have remembered that you’re not meant to touch or feed the animals, and he flinched back. It was his turn to look embarrassed.

  The sketch that I ended up doing was much better than my first attempt. Amazingly, by forgetting what I was drawing, I managed to draw it much more accurately.

  It ended up being a kind of coping mechanism for time inside the prison, too. If I tried to forget the fact I was in prison and just concentrated on the things I was doing — eating, working, reading, trying to exercise — life didn’t seem that bad overall.

  I’ve spent so long thinking about the past this morning that a couple of hours have gone by. First thing in the morning, it had been cloudy, but now I look out of my window, over the bustling crowds of King’s Cross, and see that the day is pretty sweet now.

  An idea strikes me.

  I head out of my block of flats and walk down the street to the local corner shop. It’s a tiny shop, but the guy who manages it is always nice to me.

  ‘Good morning Mr. Logan,’ he says, in a heavy foreign accent.

  I buy a basic notebook and a scratchy ball-point pen and make my way to a small local park. Amazingly, the snow looks like it’s in no danger of melting, even though the sun’s shining brightly from above. The blue sky is clear and crisp, like a cool drink of water.

  I can’t remember a winter quite like this, but I’ve got to say I’m enjoying it. Nothing like central London in the snow.

  The park is a small square, just large enough for someone really determined to exercise a dog or go for a short jog. But I’m not here because of its size. There’s a tree, growing alongside a path, that I’ve always found interesting. Its trunk twists round in such a way that I’ve always thought it looks like the body of a man. Its branches are arms, its rough bark as tough and warm as a man’s. With snow on its arms today it looks beautiful. So I sit on a bench and really look at the tree.

  A long time must go by, because by the time I’d finished, the sun is almost down and snow clouds are crowding the sky again.

  I pack up the stuff I’ve been using to draw and make my way back home. I’m starving, having forgotten to eat all day long, so I quickly throw together some mac and cheese and tuck in.

  Ah, the life of a bachelor.

  It’s quite a while before I realise there’s a message on my voicemail.

  It’s from a number I don’t recognise, and when I hear who it is, my heart starts pounding again, just like it had those years before at the prison.

  Clark.

  He must have gotten my number from Tom, that sneaky fucker.

  The message is short, with him just was asking me to call him. ‘I just think we should talk,’ he says at the end of the message.

  It feel so strange to hear him on my voicemail. I almost feel as though it isn’t real, like someone’s pranking me. I go to sit on the couch and let the news sink in, and I catch sight of the sketch I produced earlier in the day.

  It’s a tree, sure, but there’s something about the way I’ve drawn it that reminds me exactly of Clark. The way it’s growing, the way its branches frame the trunk. I’ve even drawn swirls in the bark that look almost exactly like his eyes, smiling at me. Then, I blink, and it’s just a tree, inked in scratchy biro pen, badly sketched on cheap lined paper.

  13

  CLARK

  * * *

  OK. I know that it was a bad idea to leave a voicemail on Logan’s phone. I know that maybe it’s not the greatest plan in the world to try and get him to model for me. And yes, I admit that maybe I’ve been thinking with a part of me that’s below my waist, rather than with my brain, but goddamn, I want to paint him.

  It doesn’t have to be sexual, does it? All I want is for him to come to my house, take his clothes off and let me stare at his body. There’s nothing even remotely sexual about that. What could possibly go wrong?

  ‘No, seriously, Clark,’ I say to myself as I slip a t-shirt over my shoulders, ‘you are an artist, and you need to be serious about your art. You have every right to ask someone to model for you. People have been doing it for centuries.’

  That’s right, and people have been sleeping with their models for just as long.

  ‘Anyway,’ I continue, externalising my interior monologue for God-knows what reason, ‘there’s no way he’s going to agree to your crazy idea.

  My plan had been to explain on the phone exactly what it is that I want Logan to do, but in the end, I lost my nerve and left a generic message. ‘I just think we need to talk,’ I said.

  I mean, that’s enough of a cliché to make me want to bury myself.

  When he finally returns my call, I’m on my lunch break. I’ve had to close the shop, of course, because I don’t have anyone to cover for me while I eat. I hadn’t really been expecting him to get in touch, so when I see his number flash up on my mobile, I nearly jump out of my skin.

  I adjust my fringe, like he might be able to see me (what a dweeb), then pick up the phone.

  ‘Logan?’ I say.

  ‘Yep,’ he replies. It’s good to hear his voice, and I smile — I can’t help it. It doesn’t sound as though he is particularly excited to be speaking to me. He sounds just as gruff as always. He stays silent for a moment and I’m about to say something. I open my mouth but as I’m forming my first words, he gets in there first.

  ‘I’m not sorry for kissing you,’ he blurts out. ‘If you called me to get an apology I’m not doing it.’

  He doesn’t sound happy at all. In fact he sounds kinda mad.

  He keeps talking. ‘It didn’t feel wrong to me. I wanted to do it. You wanted me to do it. I know you did. So I did it. I kissed you.’

  ‘Logan,’ I say, stopping him from digging himself any more of a hole, ‘I’m not calling you to get you to apologise. I get it. Fine. You’re not sorry.’

  ‘And I’m not coming back to the shop, either,’ he says, ‘I’m bad news. You don’t want someone like me hanging around. All I’d do is fuck off the customers. And soon enough you’d get fucked off with me. And then that would be that.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m calling either,’ I counter.

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m here,’ he says. ‘I was waiting for you talk. I figured I guessed wrong twice. I’d at least have the decency to not put words into your mouth a third time.’

  That’s nice. I guess.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘just so you know, to get everything out in the open, I think that kissing you was a mistake. But that’s not why I’m calling. I just think I needed to say that. It’s not that I don’t find you attractive,’ my mouth is moving at a thousand miles an hour now, ‘it’s just that you’re a staff member and look I don’t want you getting the wrong idea here, it’s not that I find you attractive exactly but you know I’m saying I just don’t think it’s appropriate for us to start a relationship and even if it was I think that you’re exactly the type of guy I shouldn’t be with what with my track record and the things I’ve been through-’

  Thank goodness Logan stops me talking.

  ‘Woah, woah, woah!’ He laughs sardonically. ‘Slow down. I’m having a hard time taking all this babbling in.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I take a deep breath. I’m going to say something that might jog his memory. Would he realise that we have seen each other before, that in fact we’ve been up close in prison, as teacher and pupil? ‘I wanted to ask you something. You see, as well as running the art supply, I actually used to teach art. And besides that, I actually paint, myself. I’ve got aspirations you see.’

  Aspirations? Lordy lord, who speaks like that?

  ‘Me too,’ he mumbles, quietly.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I say, slowly. Surely he must remember me? This is getting ridiculous. ‘The thing is,’ I continue, ‘there’s something about you. Something about the way you look, and something about your personality that I find interesting. It’s made me think that I really want to paint you.’

  His response is not what I was expecting. He lets out a loud, delighted-sounding laugh.

  ‘You want to what?’

  ‘I want to paint you.’

  ‘You want to paint me, like one of your French girls?’

  What’s he talking about? It takes me a second to remember that line. It’s from a movie. But which one? Oh yeah, that’s it, Titanic. A sentimental film about a doomed romance. Hmm, doesn’t give me much hope.

  ‘I didn’t take you for a romantic.’

  ‘Yeah well, I’m full of surprises,’ he replies.

  Something about the way he says that reminds me of something he said back in the shop, about feeling like he had a purpose.

 

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