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Authors: Patrick Gale
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where, among the lovers’ litter, she suddenly changed her mind and her successful seduction of him became his violent rape of her.
Had he murdered her, strangled her with her tights and pushed her into the flooded quarry nearby perhaps or even driven her side of the car into oncoming traffic, he might have escaped with only his soul in peril but he was no more a murderer than, calmly eating toast with his family that morning, he had been a rapist. So he handed her tissues for her tears and wet wipes for the rest of her, drove her back to the end of her street, apologizing the while, and dropped her off.
He had handed over her photographs to the police, thinking their sluttishness would weigh against her but, of course, everyone assumed he had stolen them from her locker, which meant they had the reverse effect from the one he had expected. The evidence, which included his DNA on her skirt, was plentiful and damning and it soon emerged that her lazy cleverness had ushered her into a class a year older than her, so the charge was not just rape but rape of a minor. And in the eyes of the local rag and his colleagues and family he was suddenly not just an unfaithful idiot who had abused a position of trust, but a paedophile. Although he was actually no more a paedophile than he was a murderer or, habitually, a rapist.
In prison, where he was utterly isolated for his own protection and through others’ disgust, he shaved off his neat little beard and then his hair, so that his large head was quite egglike and, he fancied, monastic. His only comfort were books – with which the prison kept him well supplied because it was easier than talking to him – and food, of which he ate all he could until he appeared the demon of everyone’s imaginings.
On his release, married no longer and apparently no longer a father either, he used his release travel pass to buy a ticket to Portsmouth. After several years with all privilege of choice suspended, the sudden presentation of seemingly endless possibility was overwhelming. So he let the station destination displays do the deciding for him. Wherever he went would have to be a terminus, he decided. Portsmouth Harbour was the destination of the next train due in. It was either that or London, and London frightened him. He had reread the works of Jane Austen on the inside, soothed as much by her moral rectitude as by the elegant plainness of her cadences, and her references to Portsmouth aroused his curiosity to see a place he had never visited.
At once it seemed to him a terrible city, blighted first by the bombs of the Blitz then by the steady erosion of its raison d’être and naval pride and lastly by the steady flight of the middle class, but its grimness, its failure, suited his new sense of himself and the blasts of sea air, the scents of salt and car ferry, were a joy after the stale air of his cell.
To his probation officer to whom he was bound to continue to report regularly at first, he remained Maurice Carver, of course, but to the world at large he became Modest Carlsson, product of a Russian/Swedish union, his parents music lovers murdered for their principles, his wife and child dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in the only accommodation he could afford them.
He had not wasted his time in prison. Obviously he was far more highly educated than most, if not all his fellow inmates, so he did not sign up for GCSE courses, but he encouraged visits from a writer in residence attached to the prison, a novelist, who was a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fiction. The novelist was keen he should write about his childhood and family, which he duly did, albeit making most of it up, and that he seek to give his own pain and isolation a context by imagining and describing the pain and isolation of others. And it was from these exercises that Modest Carlsson and his lugubrious history emerged.
He had enjoyed few opportunities to rehearse this story in prison but he
Had he murdered her, strangled her with her tights and pushed her into the flooded quarry nearby perhaps or even driven her side of the car into oncoming traffic, he might have escaped with only his soul in peril but he was no more a murderer than, calmly eating toast with his family that morning, he had been a rapist. So he handed her tissues for her tears and wet wipes for the rest of her, drove her back to the end of her street, apologizing the while, and dropped her off.
He had handed over her photographs to the police, thinking their sluttishness would weigh against her but, of course, everyone assumed he had stolen them from her locker, which meant they had the reverse effect from the one he had expected. The evidence, which included his DNA on her skirt, was plentiful and damning and it soon emerged that her lazy cleverness had ushered her into a class a year older than her, so the charge was not just rape but rape of a minor. And in the eyes of the local rag and his colleagues and family he was suddenly not just an unfaithful idiot who had abused a position of trust, but a paedophile. Although he was actually no more a paedophile than he was a murderer or, habitually, a rapist.
In prison, where he was utterly isolated for his own protection and through others’ disgust, he shaved off his neat little beard and then his hair, so that his large head was quite egglike and, he fancied, monastic. His only comfort were books – with which the prison kept him well supplied because it was easier than talking to him – and food, of which he ate all he could until he appeared the demon of everyone’s imaginings.
On his release, married no longer and apparently no longer a father either, he used his release travel pass to buy a ticket to Portsmouth. After several years with all privilege of choice suspended, the sudden presentation of seemingly endless possibility was overwhelming. So he let the station destination displays do the deciding for him. Wherever he went would have to be a terminus, he decided. Portsmouth Harbour was the destination of the next train due in. It was either that or London, and London frightened him. He had reread the works of Jane Austen on the inside, soothed as much by her moral rectitude as by the elegant plainness of her cadences, and her references to Portsmouth aroused his curiosity to see a place he had never visited.
At once it seemed to him a terrible city, blighted first by the bombs of the Blitz then by the steady erosion of its raison d’être and naval pride and lastly by the steady flight of the middle class, but its grimness, its failure, suited his new sense of himself and the blasts of sea air, the scents of salt and car ferry, were a joy after the stale air of his cell.
To his probation officer to whom he was bound to continue to report regularly at first, he remained Maurice Carver, of course, but to the world at large he became Modest Carlsson, product of a Russian/Swedish union, his parents music lovers murdered for their principles, his wife and child dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in the only accommodation he could afford them.
He had not wasted his time in prison. Obviously he was far more highly educated than most, if not all his fellow inmates, so he did not sign up for GCSE courses, but he encouraged visits from a writer in residence attached to the prison, a novelist, who was a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fiction. The novelist was keen he should write about his childhood and family, which he duly did, albeit making most of it up, and that he seek to give his own pain and isolation a context by imagining and describing the pain and isolation of others. And it was from these exercises that Modest Carlsson and his lugubrious history emerged.
He had enjoyed few opportunities to rehearse this story in prison but he
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