After exercise in the tree-lined yard of the old gaol,  I am returned to my cell, clutching a fallen twig of oak. Yellow eyes doesn’t seem to mind this simple addition to the contents of my room, and lets me keep it.

“They will fade and crumble soon,” he mutters, as though the judgment carries enough negative weight against the idea of keeping them. “You can sweep up your own bits when they do . . .”

This simple exchange sums up our current relationship. His initial venom towards me, and relish at my incarceration within his ‘care’, is giving way to the beginning of what I perceive as a process of grinding down my soul. The reference to the certainty of the fading oak leaves being a case in point; the leaves will decay – this is inevitable, and Yellow Eye sees himself as an agent of the inevitable . . .

Perhaps he would be happy if I lost hope and simply joined in the world of the negatively inevitable?  I play with the words and come up with an amalgam: innegitable. Its a simple act of rebellion, but it makes me smile. Through the metal slats in the door, he directs a snarling look at my smile as he slams the metal leaves firmly shut.

But my leaves are not metal; they are living things, which, although disconnected from their source, are still alive; though they may be. innegitably, dying. I sit on my bed and examine them, letting my attention rove over their surface, absorbing their features and contours, feeling their delicate veins with the tips of my fingers, putting them over my top lip and letting the smell of the outside, the free, fill my nostrils. It may simply be that being locked up increases the attention to what is there? There is so little here that anything in the field of view becomes the subject of intense scrutiny – with all the senses.

Without my realising it, an hour has passed in this reverie which is not sleep. I know because the eleven o’clock bell starts to ring. This is my only means of telling the time – apart from the growing or fading light. I am not allowed a watch, though there is a rather nice one in a sealed bag of my possessions somewhere not too far from here. The bells remind me of life on a ship, and I wonder at the local customs of this place, and how far they are permitted to bend the normal rules of life in a prison. Derbyshire is an ancient and mysterious land; its folklore is deep and vibrantly alive. Some of this shared sense of archaic culture is the local motive for my harsh treatment, I am sure.

But I pray that, somewhere in this ordeal, there will come into my enclosed life someone who appreciates what we were trying to do; what we succeeded in doing, though its tenure may be fleeting. Someone who can see that our respect for this land was total and hence the motive to return to its rightful place a living and powerful symbol of that link with the ancient past.

I can hope . . . But, certainly that person is not Yellow Eyes . . .

Before me is my notebook and my annotated copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.  I look again at the two inscriptions on the inside cover, which I know to be from my dear friends:

“There would be no point coming into Being if nothing happened.”

“Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side.”

I have to smile at Don’s dark but conspiratorial humour in the first. “It’ll be fine,” I say to the still air of the cell, mirroring his favourite form of reassurance as he pushes me out of the next speeding car.

To the second sentiment, from Wen, I say nothing. Holding the opened book to my heart and thinking of the many happy hours the three of us have shared in our joint madness of the soul.

But death, indeed; or at least a form of death, seems to be the only way forward . . .

———————————————————–< to be continued-

Ben’s Bit is a continuing first-person narrative of the character created by Stuart France and Sue Vincent, which may bear some relation to the author of this blog, Steve Tanham, their fellow director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.  In the latest of their books, Scions of Albion, Ben is arrested for his overly enthusiastic part in a mad escapade, and the other two are nowhere to be seen . . .  For more, enjoy their Doomsday series of books, and the new series (Lands of Exile) beginning soon. Click here for details.

I’ve done it again – drifted off, fully conscious; somewhere else. I do not know how long I’ve been staring at the Bakewell Gazette (see part one), absorbing their celebratory levity at my incarceration. ‘Local Businessman’? Well, stretching a point, but I know what they mean – certainly born among Northern hills very much like the beauty around Bakewell. ‘Businessman’? Definitely, until the recent, long-awaited stepping away from the IT world, after a working life at the helm of a software company; so that I could do the mystical stuff I’d always wanted to devote myself to. 

A crime of ‘Absolute precision’? Well, thank you; but emphasised here to show how the fates were on their side in the apprehension of the ‘prime perpetrator’ of this foul deed. And the precision was not mine, of course . . . though that needs to remain unsaid.

Most of what she does carries the stamp of precision with it – Wen that is; with the added calmness of Don’s gentle but deep oversight and his ability to pour oil on troubled waters, a gift that has kept the corporate wheels on many times. In a momentary lapse of generosity, I mentally repeat the word ‘corporate’.

Wheels . . . my lovely BMW, a retirement present to myself after twenty-odd years at the helm, lies pining somewhere under a dust cover in a justice system storage facility, no doubt.

I can see why they hate me, I really do understand. I am truly friendless in this dark place . . . but, a ‘M’lud’ I am most certainly not. I want to take them back to 1950s Bolton; to the sloping terrace of working-class houses, lined up the hill in uniform rows; one at each side of the river of cobbles – the place where, in a downstairs and makeshift bedroom, I came into the world . . . You take it from there, I want to shout, see what you make of it . . .

But this is getting maudlin, and I have to beware the edge of that deadly chasm. The recurring presence of Yellow Eyes is good for that – constantly reminding me never to show a weakness when he’s around; since he spends his time minutely studying my reactions, looking for the gaps into the soft underbelly . . . which he knows is there.

And I do, too – so the contest will be interesting, even if the dice are dreadfully loaded in his favour. There comes the single shutter movement again in the inset rectangle of the door’s spy panel, and, briefly, his glaring eyes are visible through the slits. Then his face disappears, leaving me to my introspection.

Time . . . that’s the killer. He can always come back and try again tomorrow. They have arranged the evidence to show conspiracy, even though the other perpetrators are yet to be caught; and I’m sure my period of remand will culminate in an utterly disproportionate custodial sentence from a local judge based on an overwhelming body of circumstantial evidence . . . so Yellow Eyes has all the time in the world to watch and hate.

And hate he does – deeply lidded, yellow hate . . . hate that you can taste and smell.

I don’t want to look at the red book on my little table yet. It promises to be the highlight of the day, and I want to savour it. So, once more, I pace my cell. One step, two, half of three – stopping in the panic spot and forcing myself to breathe.  Then, four, five . . . Looking down at the faded redness on the table top, just visible beneath the Gazette. It’s an old book; the spine is worn, as though it ended its working life as a well-thumbed library volume.

The silence is dreadful as I pick it up, pulling it from beneath the local rag. The fact that it has come from my mother gives it a warmth that is hard to express.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol was Oscar Wilde’s last book. Until now, I have never owned a copy, but I know it is said to be his greatest work. Beneath those red covers the man’s dancing and gay wit is replaced by a sober poetic ballad; a narrative of the hard and merciless truth of life behind those savage bars, including the execution by hanging of a fellow prisoner. This much I know. There will be more in the introduction, but for now, my eyes linger on the inside cover, where, in her lovely curly handwriting, my mother, one of the other occupants of that far-away and far-awhen Bolton terrace, has written out three lines:

“There would be no point coming into Being if nothing happened.”

“Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky, Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour. Do it now.”

The third line is a row of three kisses. This is from my mother; the other two are not . . .

I can feel my heart hammering as I realise that my dear friends and co-conspirators in the perceived ‘attack’ on the mysterious and ancient stone have found a way to communicate with me, albeit cryptically and probably for just this time. I know, now, that their flight to safety took them via Bolton, if only for this purpose. The first line bears the hallmark of Don’s humour; the second I recognise as a quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi and would be from Wen.

My eyes fill at the third line of kisses. I turn the page, anxious not to give anything away to they who may watch. Before me is the first verse of the Ballad of Reading Gaol:

“He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.”

I did not know that coughs could sound happy; but the one from the still open inspection grill does so. It’s a kind of chortled grunt; followed immediately by the turning of the key in the lock. The door swings wide and his grinning face enters ahead of the huge body, carrying the requested notebook and pencil, which he places, without the usual ceremony of me having to move back, on my small table.

Smiling at the wet streaks on my cheeks, he nods to me. “It can be hard at first, but you’ll get used to it,” He beams with a sympathy that is false and calculated.

“After all, you’ll likely be here for some time . . .”

———————————————————–< to be continued-

Ben’s Bit is a continuing first-person narrative of the character created by Stuart France and Sue Vincent, which may bear some relation to the author of this blog, Steve Tanham, their fellow director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.  In the latest of their books, Scions of Albion, Ben is arrested for his overly enthusiastic part in a mad escapade, and the other two are nowhere to be seen . . .  For more, enjoy their Doomsday series of books, and the new series (Lands of Exile) beginning soon. Click here for details.