Read Alphabet for Free Online

hers, Simon thinks, must smell of empties and ash trays, a high note of oil paints and a good sprinkling of house dust thrown in. She’s someone who will wake up with a thumping head, and not much idea of what she’s said or written the night before. But she’ll keep smart even though she’s going down the drain, freshen up regularly, using some classy kind of soap and a splash of matching perfume. She’ll slap on some lipstick and a bit of jewellery and sit in front of the Dean looking together enough, even though she’s at least half mad . . .
    He’s pretty sure he can work with her, now he’s got over the initial shock and disappointment. She’s desperate and he understands desperation. It’s a force, running through you head to toe. You can struggle to tame it, to resist, to drive it out, but it will probably win because the fight will drain you dry. Or, you use desperation’s energy, to take you where you want: that’s the clever thing to do, and that way the thing that frightened you becomes the thing you need most, and both of you have won.
    What she wants is a feeling of someone on her side: an ear, a hand – but nothing too obvious. He can do that, once he’s found the right way in.

    When he stops in his readings of Vivienne Whilden’s letter, the noise comes back and the heat pushes in, like it’s some kind of thing , a monster you can’t see. Sweat runs down his chest and back. He’s on his feet before he knows it, going for the door with fists and feet:
    â€˜Sort your fucking selves out, won’t you,’ he yells at them.
    â€˜You dumb cunts! You stupid bastards! If you don’t like the job someone else’ll do it!’ He yells it over and over, with variations: ‘Get on yer bikes! Get those fat arses into gear! No one asks you to work in this shithole!’ until his voice gives up, then he lies down again, his heart racing. Nothing happens.
    It’s one hour until supper, fifteen till breakfast. He’s had the letter four days. He was twenty-nine last month. More numbers: he’s served three thousand and eleven days (not counting remand), that is, more than eight years. If he keeps busy and gets tired out it’s OK but that’s a challenge in itself.
When things are slack like this sometimes the bad dreams do come despite the breathing exercises and so on. Afterwards he doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning and says it’s flu.
If he told Barry, he’d get a brownie point, but then he’d have to go over and over it again in the daytime too.
    The door took skin off his knuckles, but the plus side is he’s tired now. He doesn’t move a muscle when he hears the screw pause and look in, move on.
    Six days he’s had the letter by the time conditions return to normal, some promise or other made, and at last he gets to the library, where the same old posters, prisoners themselves, are up in the same old places, fading gradually in the fluorescent glare. A shelf of poetry. Thrillers. Sociology. Law. Romance. A picture of Shakespeare and another one of James Baldwin. The pen is mightier than the sword! Of course it is, hasn’t he seen with his own eyes how a bloke can be stabbed in the kidneys with a ballpoint, and almost die of it? Not that he’d mention this to John Travers, the civvie librarian: if he’s got a sense of humour he doesn’t bring it to work, plus he leaves his bicycle clips on half the time.
    â€˜What else have you got on art?’ Simon asks Travers. He already has the entire stock lined up: someone called Pendez, plus Picasso, Pre-Raphaelites, Rembrandt, Rodin – all oddly close together alphabetically, and all falling to bits. Some kind of job lot.
    â€˜Nothing,’ Travers says. ‘I don’t get art in any more because people cut the pictures out. I can’t be turning every page over to see if anything’s missing. Or