Our House(102)

Lyon, 9.30 p.m.

He’s settled in his room in another insipid chain hotel, his second within twelve hours. Tomorrow he will find something semi-permanent. On the desk, there is the standard-issue directory of local attractions and accommodation, as well as a map of the city, and he studies both. He decides to try an aparthotel on Rue du Dauphiné that boasts discounted weekly rates for smoking units with a kitchenette, cleaning service, and free WiFi.

He won’t need the WiFi.

He tears the page from the directory and stores it in his wallet for the morning. Masochism, or maybe even sentimentality, prompts him to extract Mike’s printout from the same place. He pauses before unfolding it, pauses a second time before reading the title:

Deaths in Prison Custody 1978, England and Wales





There are approximately sixty names on the list. A bleak tally of souls. His eye finds the one he recognizes about a dozen lines down and absorbs the given facts:

Surname: Lawson

Name: RL

Sex: Male

Age: 34

Date of death: 24/07/1978

Establishment: Brixton

Classification: Self-inflicted by hanging





The prison authorities had forwarded a letter to his mother that he’d never been permitted to read, but which had been summarized by her for his young ears. ‘He thought it was better for us this way. He was convinced it would be easier for you if he wasn’t here to bring more shame on you.’

Privately, sharing nothing with his mother or, later, Fi, he’d done what research he could. There’d been a rise in suicides in British prisons in the 1970s, an increase in excess of the rate of rise in prison population and put down to overcrowding and mental health problems like depression and anxiety, factors that had got far worse since. It wasn’t easy to discover details of his father’s case, but he’d found someone who’d been at Brixton at the same time and had known his father’s cellmate. Lawson had been agitated from arrival and unable to adjust. There’d been an inmate with a neighbourhood connection to the elderly woman he’d injured and this had resulted in bullying. (‘He got a kicking most days.’) He’d begged to be moved, but this was never facilitated. He’d hanged himself with a bed sheet in the night, had had no pulse when he was found and cut down.

Bram feels a sharp smack of pain through his centre, followed by the one feeling he’s been craving all day – longer than that, for weeks, months, years: the knowledge that the final destination he has chosen for himself is utterly right.

Not just for him, for all of them.





51


Friday, 13 January 2017

London, 9.30 p.m.

The temperature has plummeted and it’s deathly cold now. Rage insulates her only so far and she digs into her coat pockets for the gloves and hat she used in Winchester. Before putting them on, she bundles them to her face and inhales the scents of yesterday, of cathedral and woodland and ancient cobbled alleys. Of a lifestyle – a life – that’s gone.

It takes a moment to figure out where she is. There’s a bus stop on the main road and she sees that she is several stops south of Alder Rise, with no service due in the next fifteen minutes. Her mind churns. Faster to walk? Or wait for a taxi? Can she afford one, now everything is lost? Where is the money? What has Bram done? What will Toby do? Will he turn back and come after her, dish out some of the violence that was all too implicit in the car?

She walks. When she reaches Baby Deco, the building is alight with Friday night humanity, people whose lives have been improved by the arrival of the weekend, a laughable notion if it didn’t make her want to sob. She takes the stairs to the second floor. She’s moving strangely, sluggishly, and the light times out before she reaches the door. Any other time, she’d be unnerved by the dark, the hollow silence of a stairwell, but tonight she embraces it for what it is, a respite from scrutiny, exposure.

When she opens the door to the flat, she actually stumbles back out again. The whole unit, barring the kitchen area immediately inside the door, is crammed with heavy-duty removals boxes, a ceiling-high rock face of brown, stamped with the blue of a brand logo. The glazed doors to the balcony can be seen only through a single fractured line, though a wider gorge has been created to allow access to the bathroom. The bed must be hidden under the boxes, while, thoughtfully, the two grey armchairs have been relocated to the kitchen area.

Her fingers probe the items on the kitchen worktop as if her eyes are no longer to be trusted: Bram’s keys to the flat; a yellow A4 sheet, which proves to be the paid invoice for a self-storage company in Beckenham that she guesses contains her furniture; also, inexplicably, Harry’s little blue spelling book. What was going through Bram’s mind, she wonders, to cheat his family on such a scale and yet think to pull aside a school exercise book? When did he last speak to the boys? Did he prepare them for this trauma? Can he really have said goodbye to them and intended it to be the final time?

There is no note, nor any details of bank accounts, but she had not expected that. This is not a puzzle set by Bram for her edification; this is the last act of a desperate man.

With no true instinct as to what to do next, she dislodges the nearest of the boxes and looks inside. Ornaments, photographs, books: all from the Trinity Avenue living room. The next three contain more books from the same room. The fifth holds items from the study, including files and documents from the cabinet, a lucky find so early – if anything can be described as lucky on this most diabolical of days – because she’ll need financial documents for her meeting with the solicitor on Monday. When she pulls herself together, with her parents’ help, she’ll need them to prove her ownership of the house. She starts to sift, removing anything useful, including the blue plastic folder that contains the family’s passports. She is stunned to find Bram’s, untouched, intact, so stunned that she sits for a moment to think.