Last Day of Freedom
by Amita Basu
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
“How’s this one?” The assistant stands back, leaving me monopolising the mirror in the men’s section of Taylor & Sons on Goodstone Street.
The side view is all right. The suit-jacket’s sleeves expose half-an-inch of shirt-cuffs. That’s the right length, I hear. I face the mirror, fingering the collar, which is obstinately askew. I imagine dressing every morning, assessing myself with other people’s eyes. A shadow, like fog drenching a mountainside, drenches my mind. All my future smells of this shop: pungent polyester and rose-lemon room freshener constricting my lungs. I drop my shrug. The fabric follows, pulling and bunching; the shoulders are overlarge.
“Our tailor can adjust that.” Has the assistant just waited for me to find the fault? Commissions are only conditionally contingent on honesty. Her milk-chocolate-brown eyes beam.
Even I know shoulder adjustments are tricky. “Maybe as a last resort, Pamela.”
I’ve not had to ask her name, and she’s not had the right to refuse it. Economists find that sales conversion is higher when reps are name-tagged, employee attrition lower when co-workers are name-tagged. So everyone is name-tagged, for everything the economists say goes, for humanity’s ailment is economic.
“May I see another?”
Pamela’s face falls. Nothing else in my budget. Could I stretch a little? Well, no harm looking. Striding sharp-heeled through the harshly lit, shadowless expanse of steel racks and parquet flooring, Pamela finds me a less plasticky-feeling jacket. But my eyes wander to a suede jacket, misplaced on these low- to middle-range racks.
I’m gliding into the suede jacket. The lining is cool silk. It fits me like my skin. I hug it around myself, not minding looking effete. Her eyes in the mirror betraying her admiration, Pamela tells me about EMIs: easy-monthly-installments. Pay a little every month and you can buy the sky.
I meet her gaze. “Today’s my last day of freedom,” I blurt. I tell her I’m going to prison tomorrow for the first time.
“Oh.” Pamela looks me over, lips pursing. I’m forty, and look thirty; today, it’s a rare 25-year old who’s never been to prison, even if he’s been to penitentiary and hidden there as long as they’ll let him. Professionalism reclaims Pamela’s face. “I’ve heard about this backwards trend. Good on you, keeping free so long! This jacket would set you up.” Unless you’ve done something hideous, modern prisons let you bring your own clothes.
I shrug and twist and bow. The suede jacket works with me, quiet and self-effacing, like a healthy organ. I picture entering prison in this. They don’t care who you were outside, only who you’re going to be inside. This jacket would set me up to be somebody. Pamela’s eyes glisten of cocoa over a winter fireplace. I picture coming home on prison furlough in this jacket to a pretty woman.
The blood rushes to my head and blinds me and pours down my forehead in sweat. Stance cowboyed to keep upright, I fumble out of the jacket. I mumble Pamela an apology. I stumble out of Taylor & Sons.
* * *
Sunlight. I throw my shoulders back and readjust my trousers-waist but still can’t catch my breath. I walk. My steam-engine heart slows. P. B. Shelley’s west wind fans from me the panic of winter coming.
I raise my face cloudwards. Where they face the sun — or face you, the sun’s day-guest, through the airplane’s double window — the clouds are chiselled marble. Gilt-edged, coma-white, articulated like BBC accents. To us down below, the clouds present an unfinished gray-blue: the slum-facing backsides of splendid-fronted mansions. We down below always get the backsides.
Feet steadying, I lean outside the café where I realised last September I was going to prison. No, I didn’t do anything wrong, I just did what I had to, what lots of people do. But why should you believe a convict?
A towheaded toddler runs through Grove Park, dragging a log on a rope. His maniacal squeals of laughter as he makes the log rattle are exclamation points cluttering the October morning’s austere prose. The log is an innocuous corpse dragged behind a chariot-racer who’s yet to learn that winning is everything. The sun weaves between leaves to grope the child’s matted head. He pauses to catch his breath and I finally catch mine. This, I remember, inhaling the crisp morning, this is the real world. The chestnut that’s kept its green long past its mates sheds a few crimson tears in perfunctory sympathy with summer’s mourners.
Next January, Grove Park will be locked up; only residents in a mile’s radius will get keys. People waved banners and chanted slogans. Now they rush about their work and their leisure under the blue sky, past life crimson-mustard-brown-and-green.
I must go back and choose a jacket to wear to prison tomorrow. My heart races again.
* * *
“Elef!”
I turn. Clive comes striding downstreet. Hands in trousers pockets, jacket-skirt bunched, artfully negligent. His suit is fine linen, the colour of oatmeal: warm and soft, like when you were a child, like when all the world was your book of dreams. But the suit’s cut is sibilant-sharp. Clive’s girlfriend has taste.
It’s Clive who hailed me, but his hands are still pocketed, knotting into fists, and his lips are pursing; he regards me like a crack in the pavement that’s tripped him. My shirt is unironed, my hair is unbrushed, my skin is tanned, and my comfort prickles Clive. I say how-d’ye-do. He nods, whiplike. His mouth opens and I lean in to catch his 180mph monotone. “Errands-care-to-join?”
Clive knows I always have time for a friend, but he always asks. I’ll pick a jacket later: I have twenty hours of “later” left. Clive marches off, as if rushing away from me. Half-jogging, I keep up.
Clive is on furlough. He’s spent nineteen years in a prison very different from where I’m going. Now he’s got errands, then a few hours with his girlfriend, then back, nose to grindstone. I know the grades of Clive’s rushing and this one is joyful anticipation: parole, then wedding. He likes to time his own good news, so I wait to congratulate him.
Humanity’s plague is debt, so they’ve reinstituted debtors’ prisons. Marshalsea gave Dickens his trauma and the world Dickens. Debtors’ prisons today are humane: no shame, only the opportunity to work, produce, and get debt-free. They don’t just let you work, they make you. Our prisons are record-breakingly productive and humanity is hurtling towards getting debt-free.
“How-come-up-and-about-so-early?” says Clive, his feet rushing, trying at one step per syllable. Clive still hasn’t learned you can’t stride both long and fast. “Aren’t you scheduled to nap in the library, or chat up an MFA at gallery-of-the-month?” Clive’s got a sense of humour: he knows I rise early and detest naps.
I glance at the corner where, behind tinted glass among fragrant shelves under gold lights, sack-dressed women balance gobletfuls of spirulina coolers and hardbound books heavier than themselves. “The library’s a First Folio now, Clive. A top-end bookshop wouldn’t admit me as I am.” As for art, ever since I watched Martin in Bhutan, artists fascinate me. “I am catching an opening at the Chisenhale this evening. But now I’ve got errands, too.”
Clive meets my eyes briefly. “I know. I’m glad I ran into you.” He quickens his pace. Has he come just to see me off? We swing into a Halkine and I know he has, for there’s a Halkine by his flat.
A youth, name-tagged Paul, with eyelashes so dense I wonder if it’s eyeliner, shows Clive professional coffee-makers. Clive tells me I should’ve attended penitentiary with him: “Then you wouldn’t be heading to that hellhole now.”
Many people voluntarily attend penitentiary when they’re young, so that when they stumble later the authorities know they started out meaning well. I shrug. “I didn’t fancy squandering my best years. Now it doesn’t much matter where I go.”
“You’re-barely-forty!” Clive cries. “Don’t-you-even-care-about-your-own-future?” He shuts his eyes and deep-breathes. Anger saps productivity, so anger must be shut-eyed and exhaled away. He bears down on me. He knows my warden, he says. “Chap owes me a favour: his son who’s with us lost his head last year. The usual ailment. I interceded... I’ll put in a word for you.”
“No, Clive, I made my own bed, I’ll lie on it.” Clive’s cannon-hole gapes as he loads another missile, inhales the espresso Paul is brewing to demo a machine, and shuts itself. “Remember,” I tease, “those instant-coffee sachets you’d down back in sixth form?” That was after Clive’s grandpa died. “Now you’re shopping gourmet coffee-makers. When did you acquire a palate?”
Clive sighs. His eyes dart around. Paul discreetly retreats. Clive mutters, “I’d live on mac-and-cheese if I could. But I have important people walking into my office now.” And aloud, “Listen-Elef. If-you’re-too-proud to accept help, fine. But buckle down. You could do well in there, pull yourself out and get transferred somewhere respectable.”
I’ve nothing to say, so I merely look mild, so Clive continues lecturing. Freedom is overrated, he says. “It’s work that makes us human.”
What can I say? Prison has become Clive’s real world. He enjoys life inside, but methinks he protesteth too loud. Besides, we’ve had this debate before. So I admire aloud the glossy brushed-steel gizmos bristling with enough nozzles and knobs to manufacture a mini-Martian. A quarter-hour comparing criteria, wearing the connoisseur’s frown, then Clive picks the most expensive machine, and leaves lovely-lashed Paul his shipping address. Then back outdoors, still lecturing: I’m a child, discipline will make a man of me, etc.
* * *
A whistle and a clap. I turn and wave back to Mahesh behind his pakora and chaat cart. Clive stares, nodding tentatively. Seventy meters off, all these months later, the gash across Mahesh’s face shines sick, like a rare steak. My stomach churns and I can barely meet his eyes.
We three grew up together. At eighteen, when Clive left for penitentiary, I spent a year helping Mahesh with his food-cart. We developed batters that’d work with his makeshift tawa. We customised spice mixes for his market segments: morning commuters, after-school adolescents, and tourists who seek in Indian food purgatory from ears to anus.
We doubled Mahesh’s net profits; he wanted to treat me to dinner at Silver Spork; I said the treat I wanted was for him to take the weekend off, for overwork was making him snappish. Over milk-tea in Mahesh’s dingy rooms, I learned about saris, for that’s all his mother wore after forty years in Britain.
I was Mahesh’s best man. I learned how to engage his children in the kitchen without half-pulped strawberries seedily anointing the ceiling. When Mahesh upgraded to a food van, I taught him to drive. And last year, during his divorce, I put him up and fed him and listened; he’d always been taciturn and now began a lifetime’s whingeing.
He was untidy and irregular and utterly selfish in his grief, which the lawyers were drawing out like a blockbuster’s unplanned sequel. Month by month Mahesh wore my patience to a gnawed-off thumb, raw red with the white poking out.
The evening before the final custody hearing, he snapped. ‘What have you to show for your life?’ he demanded. It was he who’d struggled always; it wasn’t he who should’ve lost everything. His family, his little investments, his chance at early parole.
Laughing, I reached for his vodka bottle, my bottle, and he’d stopped asking, “May I?” and stopped offering to pay. He kept the bottle and kept abusing me, feet steady, eyes cold, waving the bottle. A fifth bottle, thick strong glass and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
Before returning to his customers, Mahesh calls me an invite to a last dinner: in his dingy old rooms, back where he started 23 years ago. Clive shudders as we turn away. Well, Mahesh has forgiven me. Friends forgive one another, but society would collapse if it let offenders walk free.
* * *
At Brocade & Spacesilk, Peter with eyes flickering multi-green, like a willow-shaded algae-grown forest pond, shows Clive neckties. We contemplate in the mirror Clive’s dexterous fingers, knotting ties, all cravat-wide this season.
The gold globe of the ceiling light shatters into a constellation at Clive’s feet. The marble floor is so smooth I’m afraid I’ll slip standing. The air smells of perfume so finely blended, I can identify no ingredients but money.
A microfibre tie, cobalt fleur-de-lis embroidered on pearl-gray, monopolises Clive’s attention and interrupts his lecture. This tie must be for his wedding, which his girlfriend’s been planning. Soon he’ll be free, gliding around in his new Mercedes.
Standing behind him, in my clothes suddenly shabby, surreptitiously finger-combing my hair, I wonder if I really have got it backwards. If I’d buckled down at 18, I’d have my own car, girlfriend, flat, and coffee-maker now. I picture the cobalt-and-gray tie around my throat, the suede jacket that Pamela showed me — the misplaced secret jacket, the jacket that’s still there if I want it — and Pamela on tiptoes smoothing my shoulders. I’ve been good all these years: I’ve earned the suede jacket. I’ve failed myself after all these years: the suede jacket is all I deserve. What if Pamela’s sold it to someone else?
Panicking, I turn on Clive. “And you, Clive? You haven’t told me when you’re getting free and getting hitched.”
Clive’s fingers fumble briefly, then jerk the knot into place. “Those’re both off... Pick your jaw off the floor, don’t pretend you’re not thrilled.”
“Why would I be thrilled at your bad news?”
Clive peers at me. “No, I was wrong. Forgive me. I’m used to being inside. All vultures inside, cackling and flocking if you so much as stumble.” To Peter: “Any metallics?”
“But what happened?” Last we spoke, this summer, Clive was all paid off, had his nest egg, and was preparing for parole.
Clive shrugs. “Can’t stay paid off. Got promoted... I swear they sniff out when someone’s about to get free, they reel him back in... Not gold, for God’s sake, Peter. Got any pewter?” To me again: “Got the corner office. And I’m walking into rooms. The world’s top companies, Clive, the men who have those names, I’m across the table from them.” He pauses. He refuses to say it, and I see it: he’s put off his parole. I try to keep my face neutral. “I couldn’t get out, don’t you see! Surely you’re not colour-blind, Peter! This is bronze, not pewter.”
Peter apologises, turns the rich yellow light off, the unglamorous white light on. The bronze tie turns pewter. Clive looks stricken, perhaps that he’s been rude, perhaps that he’s been caught red-handed as a shopper inexperienced with colour constancy under top-end shop lights. But of course he can’t apologise to an assistant.
“But your girlfriend, Clive? She was so excited about the wedding.”
“Too excited. Couldn’t wait. Tired of waiting for me to get free. Wanted a wedding, must’ve found someone to stand in my place... Yes, Peter, this will do.”
Clive strides counterwards. “I’m sorry,” I call, half-jogging after him. A coffee-maker and a necktie, however fly, don’t set you back enough to keep you in. Either Clive really enjoys his work as much as he protesteth, or he’s burying his heartache in it.
“Don’t-be-sorry.” The register’s ring jolts Clive upright. He turns on me imperious eyes. “Listen, I’m getting you transferred out of that dump. Wager I could get you in with us. You’ll work your way up, and I’ll mind you.”
“No, Clive, thanks.” Prison’s prison, I remind him.
“How-can-you-say-that!” His fist slams the counter, and the counter-girl starts, but Clive’s bought a necktie that’d feed a family for a month, so it’s she who looks apologetic. “How can you take things so lightly, and you a... and you’re” — he searches my hair for white, my skin for gray, my eyes for clouds — “still living in your parents’ house. Don’t you want something to call your own? What’ve you got to show for forty years on earth?”
Clive into Mahesh morphing, my fists clenching, is that a bottle I see before me floating? I turn away trembling, begging, “Let’s not do this.” Clive continues berating me. I walk away. This startles him enough that he follows.
Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu
