He Said/She Said(57)
Yours,
Jamie Balcombe
I thudded on to the stairs so hard my hipbones hurt. The arrogance of the man hit me first; that he had the audacity to talk in terms of things we both knew, when I had been there, when I had seen it. In the confident tone of his letter I sensed again that knife-edge charm. I thought then that he must be in breach of at least one law, to write to a witness. I looked into it later that week, making furtive, expensive phone-box calls to witness care and the probation service, and found that this kind of thing happens a lot more often than you’d think. Writing to a witness is only a crime if there is intimidation, and he was too clever to threaten me outright. He must have known that I was too scared of exposure to take it to the authorities, anyway. Checking outgoing post, I learned, is a random process, and they’re looking for breaches of security – drugs, or escape – rather than talking about the case. I suppose if they censored every convict who protested his innocence, the letters would dry up pretty quickly. Maybe if I had kept all the letters, their frequency and volume might have added up to some kind of harassment or intimidation, but all I wanted then was to get rid of them before Kit could see them.
Back then, I could easily differentiate between Jamie being right, which he technically was, and his righteousness, which I didn’t believe he was entitled to.
I opened the street door and left it on the latch. Tiptoeing in bare feet across the filthy pavements of Clapham Common Southside, I put the letter in a public wastebin, wedging it between an empty Starbucks cup and a newspaper. All weekend, I felt its presence in the street outside. I didn’t relax until the Tuesday morning, when the refuse lorry came at dawn. I watched from my balcony as the men in overalls tipped one bin after another into the dustcart. I convinced myself that I saw the yellow paper, bright as a lie, churning over and over in the rubbish as the maw of the refuse lorry chomped down on the indigestible truth.
Chapter 29
KIT
19 March 2015
After the viral video debacle, I need a gesture, something to appease Laura. The equivalent of coming home with champagne and flowers, the romantic flair I have so often been told I’m sorely lacking. Darren’s film captured my two distinguishing features. The first, my Chile ’91 T-shirt, is now rolled tightly into a side pocket of my rucksack, where it will stay until I go back to London. The second, the ginger beard, makes me instantly recognisable even in this Viking country. Getting rid of it is the best way I can think of to regain my anonymity. That’s how I find myself in Me Time, the Princess Celeste’s on-board beauty parlour. It’s a terrifying, unportholed room that smells of female hair and alien chemicals. There’s a single sink with a shower attachment and one of those dips for your neck that looks like an executioner’s block. An old lady with diamonds on her fingers and orthopaedic shoes on her feet flicks through Hello! magazine under an old-fashioned space-helmet hairdryer.
There’s a price list on the counter and I run my eyes over her list of ‘services’. I don’t need a cut and finish and I don’t need to know what a Hollywood wax is to be sure I don’t want one. I can’t see what I want. I hate going off-menu in any context, but desperate needs call for desperate measures.
‘Can I help you?’ A woman about my mum’s age comes bust-first through a louvre door. Her hair is short, swishy and streaked with plums and burgundies.
‘I don’t suppose you do an old-fashioned wet shave?’
‘Not the old-fashioned kind.’ She smiles kindly. ‘Cut-throat razors and choppy seas aren’t the best combination. If you want to take the fuzz off I can sort you out with the clippers and a safety razor, though.’
‘How much?’
She looks me up and down, clearly sensing my desperation.
‘Thirty pounds.’ Her smile now seems edged with mockery, and instead of the Thirty fucking quid that backs up behind my teeth, I say, ‘Yes please.’
She tucks me into a huge bib and ties a towel under my neck; it would almost be comforting in other circumstances. At the clippers’ touch, coarse red hair floats to the floor. I’m expecting a can of shaving foam but she lathers me up with a shaving brush and soap, so exactly like the one my dad used to use that suddenly I’m back in Chile for the ’91 eclipse. Mac and I were about twelve, with perhaps three whiskers between us but determined to start shaving, and when Dad was passed out on the beach, we went through his sponge bag and helped ourselves to his things. We were half blind with laughter as we lathered up, then used his crappy blunt old razor, still thick with his greying bristles, and cut our baby faces to ribbons.
This memory whirls me along to another; we had a lot of firsts on our travels with Dad, usually while he was out drinking or sleeping off the drink in a hotel room or a beach cabin or a trailer somewhere. The following summer we smoked our first cigarette, stolen from the soft paper packs of American Spirit he used to smoke; the tobacco was organic, which Dad took to mean it was virtually a vitamin pill. We weren’t laughing when we did this; it was deadly serious, a fumbled ritual that then became funny when we realised that if you wanted to light the cigarette you had to actually breathe in at the same time. This accomplished, I took the first drag and nearly fainted. Mac said it went down better than oxygen.
The year after that was Brazil ’94. We were fourteen. Dad made a road trip of it; we drove from the airport in New Mexico all the way down to Brazil, where his old friends were staying. En route we got drunk for the first time, stealing a litre bottle of Whyte and Mackay rum I thought would last us the week. It was gone in half an hour. We both threw up, and only Mac went back for more. I have never touched it since.