Rhinoceros 15
The darkest season continued about its random business each day, fussing over piles of litter at the underpass, sending squalls of rain so that unfit businessmen waddled to their cars with their folders clamped to their heads, and generally making seasonal mockeries of everyone's outlook on life and living.
But Alan didn’t mind any more. He had a purpose. There was a reason, however apprehensive he felt, for brushing his teeth, introducing a comb to his thinning hair, and sliding his arms into the torn lining of that familiar jacket.
Today was a mission. Uncertain in its outcome, yes, possibly foolhardy, but nevertheless with aims and objectives. The first of which was to find the Young Offenders Institute. Despite his close study of the Sheffield A to Z, and the circumstantial fact that he lived within five miles of the Unit, the journey there involved several diversions and frantic winding down of his window adjacent to baffled passers-by. Alan was getting flustered and late as he tried a leafy drive between stone built ex-farmhouses and converted barns on the outskirts of Sheffield. The lane wound up and over sharp folds in the landscape and then, under a nave of mature trees, he saw the sign. He pulled up to a bland, brick building, clean and modern. Walls reared up without windows, and fences, impossibly tall, surrounded all but the entrance block. Alan pressed a key pad and had to explain twice the purpose of his visit to a tinny voice emanating from a plastic mesh by the door. There was a pause as Alan felt the stare of a camera above his head; enough time to consider feeling guilty about being there, before Alan found himself being buzzed in to the initial segment of the building complex.
Another camera monitored his progress, and Alan had the opportunity to relect on his own secretive monitoring of the actions of others. For a moment he even had a flash of righteousness, before quickly realising that there was not really much of a comparison between the two. But, Alan concluded, in these difficult times these ethical considerations inevitably became more tenuous. Morality had to be squeezed from each unlikely situation, in order to avoid the self chastisement of thorny twigs. There was an inevitable smugness, Alan realised, in his god-like view of his misdemeanours. Like he was ironing out, through sheer rationalisation, right and wrong.
In the outer reception, as it was apparently called, he sat on a plastic seat cocooned in a stillness suggestive of thick walls, triple glazing, and an extraordinary staff-to-inmate ratio. There was ample time to consider ways of opening a conversation with Ryon. ‘How are you?’ seemed obvious, and yet also contentious. ‘Where’s the camera?’ on the other hand, presented as somewhat direct. Even ‘What’s the food like?’ was based on an erroneous cliché. A bland picture of mist, trees and a low, hazy sun faced him, reminiscent of supermarket music, water biscuits and The People’s Friend.
Alan heard a keypad being prodded and a door consequentially opened with a solid movement and swoosh of secure air. “Mr Scope. Sorry to keep you waiting, come through.” An orderly, with no redeeming or expressive features, silently walked ahead of him through a further security door, where he was divested of his phone and wallet, and finally into a kind of refectory, with the shutters down. Here Alan was left to his own devices. Should he sit at a table or stand expectantly? These are the tiny but anxious decisions that modern life constantly throws up, Alan thought.
Eventually a tall, square-built man with a fringe blown to one side by an unseen gale and eyebrows like weasels strode in and proffered his arm. “Hello,” he boomed, “Frank. I’ve been working very closely with Ryon and so I’ve got to hear quite a bit about you.”
“Should I be worried?”
Frank laughed. “Hardly. He seems to respect you, despite the messages he probably gave you over the years.”
“Well, I guess we go back a long way.”
“I think there’s more to it than that. But anyway, I’ll bring him in. You’ve got up to an hour. I’m going to leave you together, but I or someone else will be directly behind that door. Not to eavesdrop, you understand.”
“Fine.” Alan rubbed his hands together and exhaled.
Frank patted him on the back. “Don’t worry, he’s been asking to see you from the day he got here.”
Alan sat on one of the seats. They were attached to the tables by a system of poles, presumably for easy folding, and Alan spent an anxious minute trying different configurations for his legs and the furniture.
Then he tried to look as neutral as possible.
Ryon sauntered in. As the door closed Alan caught a nod and an encouraging smile from Frank.
He still had that rolling gait, Alan noticed, but it was more confident, less intimidating. Alan had always believed, through his cynicism and world-weariness, that there was always hope, that even the teenagers he taught, in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, could transform themselves. But he very rarely saw it happen.
Ryon slumped onto a seat and seemed to have the same debate as Alan about the placement of his legs. “You’re gonna ask me what it’s like.”
Alan smiled, and relaxed visibly. “It’s funny, I was pondering on the first thing to ask you. How about this: what treasured object have you brought with you?”
“Nothing really. I never had much anyway. It’s a kind of fresh start here.”
“A bit like me when I moved into the flat.” Alan panicked suddenly: “Not that I’m saying moving into the flat was anything like – “
“It’s OK. I like it here. Best thing that ever happened to me.” It was unclear from Ryon's monumentally fixed features how much hyperbole was contained in this statement.
This gave Alan pause for thought, but he was aware of the limited time they had. “How so?”
“Dunno. I wrote it down somewhere. I just know where I am here. Everything is crystal clear suddenly, each day has a…”
“Format? Routine?”
“Summat like that. Things matter here.”
“Matter?”
“I can think straight for the first time. Make decisions. Plan. That sort of thing.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“I’m getting help an’ all.”
“Well, some of us at Greenlands, wanted to help as much as we were able, you know.”
“You were OK. But it was still a school, with its idiots and spazzes and fights and boring work and school rules and someone being petty about a reward you thought you’d earned but then you suddenly hadn’t, and someone else having to show off ‘cause they’d got new trainers or their big brother had been released or something.”
“That bad, eh?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, perhaps a few memories will stick. Good ones, I mean.”
“Hmm.” Ryon looked distant, thoughtful for a while. Alan didn’t want to spoil the moment, but he was hoping Ryon would catch the train of his thought quickly. Luckily, he did, but with a non sequetur.
“You ever driven over Cooks Wood Road?”
“What? Oh, yes, the one above the ski-slope?”
“Sort of. Well, as you head over the top of the hill you look across the whole city. It’s there below you, layers of hills and tower blocks and rows of houses until it fades away to the horizon. You see it from the bus, or when you’re stuck in a queue trying to get to Pitsmoor. Once, when I was in primary school, we did an art project. You got a sheet of tracing paper and drew some hills and shaded them in. Then you put another sheet over the top and added more hills, and so on. And as you added layers of tracing paper with buildings and trees and hills and whatever, the ones underneath faded away, so that they looked like they were a long way off. And the effect was amazing, to me at least. Just like the view from Cooks Wood Road. And I spent ages getting the effect of distance with mine, and when it was done the teacher put it in a paper frame and stuck it on the wall. So everyday I went into school it was there. I’d look for it – but secretly, like, ‘cause even then I didn’t want them to think I cared. But it stayed there for ages, until the teacher put a new display up. So I went up to the teacher and asked her for my picture back so’s I could take it home, like. She looked at me gone out: she couldn’t even remember I’d done it. And then she stalled, said something quick, like she’d find it. And then the next day I asked again, and she said she’d forgot, and I knew she hadn’t. So I asked her again and again and again, even though I knew the truth. And I asked her so many times she told me to stop. She was pissed off by then and she said, ‘It’s only a bloody picture.’ And that was that.”
Ryon paused, and Alan waited. He hoped above all that his stomach wouldn’t grumble at this point, or anything else interfere with the delicious tension in the room.
Ryon scratched his head and looked into Alan’s eyes. “Anyways, you asked me about a treasured possession. Well, that’s it. At odd moments in life I return to that picture that I did. It’s here in my head always, in its paper frame on the wall. It’s there whenever I want it, and no-one can take it away.”
Alan sat transfixed. He was aware of his own heightened act of breathing. Heavens, he thought, five year’s worth of speech stored up, condensed, and delivered in one mighty expectoration within five minutes. “I wish I could see it, too,” he said, quietly.
“You want to know why I did it.”
Alan was thrown on the backfoot again. “Did what?”
“Your flat, you idiot.”
Alan took a deep breath. “I didn’t even get a good look at you. I just kind of knew. But then I didn’t know what to do. Not because of the camera – that doesn’t matter – but the…what I’d used it for…”
“You were too easy, how could I not?”
“You’re a very tidy burglar, by the way. It looked neater after you left, if anything.”
Ryon smiled slightly, but really he didn’t seem to want a jovial run through events. There was a darker, more confessionary, tone to his words. “I knew what a saddo you are. I didn’t even expect you to have much – although I thought you might at least have a telly for fucks sake. Anyway, the Mitchelsons were after small stuff – they couldn’t get enough of them. Everyone on the estate wanted an iPod or a camera or whatever. I knew you were as forgetful as fuck and that your flat would be about as secure as a tent. How could I not?”
“You did have a choice.”
Ryon suddenly flared up, a nerve touched. “Don’t give me that choices shit.”
The door opened and Frank’s square and comforting face appeared. “All OK?”
Ryon rolled his eyes, but Alan was impatient to hear more, so he hurriedly said, “Just a vigorous discussion,” and the door slowly closed.
Ryon sighed. “All I had was choices, choices, choices at Greenlands. ‘You have a choice, Ryon.’ ‘This is chosen behaviour, Ryon.’ ‘Make the right choice, Ryon.’ As if I had any proper choices. Here’s the only choices I had: one – go to school or stay in bed. Two – nick some stuff or get battered to a pulp by the Mitchelsons. Three – act hard or get called a pussy. Four – eat mouldy bread in the stinking house or nick a cake from Spar. Five – sit at home with a suicidal mum freezing my fucking nuts off all night or go out, get high and forget about how shit my life is for a few hours. There’s five choices most kids don’t even get. But I got ‘em. Lucky me. Trouble is, the choices other kids get had somehow run out when I was born. ‘Sorry, Ryon, you wanted a proper dad? Shelves are empty, mate. But have this shit one out of a skip instead.’ Bollocks to choices.”
“Sorry.”
“God, man, it’s not even your fault. You did what you could, in your own forgetful, confused sort of way. But even your options were limited. Or at least I thought they were until I heard about what was on the camera.”
“How do you mean?” Alan frowned, unsure whether he wanted to hear the answer.
“It’s genius. And you’ve got to admit the Head had it coming. I thought to myself, at last, Scopey’s got a backbone. He’s gonna actually do something himself rather than talk about it. So well done to you, sir.”
“It was a ridiculous, farcical, embarrassing thing to do, Ryon. And wrong.”
“What’s so wrong about it when you’re putting right a bigger wrong? Think about it. You’d have kept your wife if you’d gone about acting like that all along. That’s the kind of stuff that lets the hero shag the fit bird in films.”
“I doubt that very much, Ryon.”
“I can’t believe you! You have the chance to dob the Head in after all the grief he’s given you and you go all moralistic when it comes to the crunch. Get real, for fuck’s sake. You wanna be a doormat for the rest of your life?”
“You’re beginning to sound like my ex-wife.” Alan looked around the room. It was bright and airy. This must be where they eat, he thought, probably inmates and staff sat together, a low hum of shared endeavours. Different to the battles at dinnertime in Greenlands. Interesting place to work, though, Alan mused, which set up a train of associated thoughts which trailed away like a vapour trail in the dome of his mind.
“I hear you met the Mitchelsons.”
“We had what is euphemistically called a free and frank discussion.”
“I bet it hurt.” Ryon did smile this time.
“Amongst the many stupid things I’ve done recently in my life, that one tops the list.”
“So how did you find them?”
“Their names came up at a meeting about you – “ Alan held up his hands, “ – yeah I know, I know, confidentiality and all that. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d dug myself into a hole and I panicked.”
“You went and shot the films, though, you selected the angles, edited them down – that’s the sort of stuff a man thinking straight would do.” Ryon looked hard at Alan.
What was Ryon’s real motive for this meeting? Was it to draw a line under the past? Or put Alan on trial? Hold him to account, perhaps, for his contribution to Ryon’s downfall. Alan’s mind flickered around the events he’s instigated, and the ones he only vaguely knew about, like a moth in a room of lights. But Ryon seemed happy; happier than he’d ever known him to be. Alan sensed the edge to the meeting, like a hidden flick-knife. Where are we going?
“You’re saying it wouldn’t stand up in court.”
“Court doesn’t come into it. Do the Mitchelsons ever use the courts to sort out their problems? You have to play their games their rules. Or impose your own…”
“I can’t do that, Ryon. I’m a responsible pillar of society, as it where. A public servant. Or at least I was.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, I didn’t come here to moan about me. It’s not that important, anyway.”
“You lost your job?” Ryon was grinning even more now, not with malice, but simple delight, as though everything was going to plan. “That’s very interesting. VERY interesting.”
“In what way?”
Ryon just continued smiling, and gazed towards the healthy eating posters on the wall over the closed serving hatch. “That’ll change,” he muttered.
Alan felt the shift again. Is something else happening in his life that he was unaware of? How was it that things occurred as if by some secret plan by those around him? Was he the victim of a conspiracy led by his colleagues, pupils and ex-wife? “Have I missed something?” Alan said, frowning. But he didn’t want to appear pathetic, even though he felt that he had been lulled into a position of dependency on Ryon.
The door opened and Frank strode in. “I’m sorry, folks, but Ryon has a further appointment.”
Alan was flustered by the speed of change. “No rest for the…well, not that I’m suggesting…”
“C’mon, Ryon, you’re in demand.” And Frank slapped him on the back, a ubiquitous gesture suggestive of urgent compliance.
“I ain’t got no appointment,” Ryon frowned.
“You have now.” And Ryon was expertly, firmly and yet jovially guided towards the door.
Just before Ryon disappeared from view, he turned towards Alan. His face was assuredly amused. It was the face of an adult reassuring a child that everything would be alright. “It’s sorted,” he grinned, “they’ve all been put on YouTube.”
And Alan was suddenly alone, in a strange room, in a strange world, the main feature of which seemed to be an understanding that the future could hold almost anything except the events that Alan had considered possible. Any sense of Alan being an active agent in his own life crumpled into balls of litter and dispersed on a brisk westerly. The helpful posters on the walls dribbled into melted blotches of colour, and the air turned heavy, like a dense fog. As he was procedurally ejected from the secure unit in calibrated stages, he dreamily went through the motions of existence, collected his belongings, signed some kind of receipt, and fumbled for his car keys. The car, in collusion with his limbs, drove itself along the country lanes while his mind, in a dreamy distortion of reality, ranged around worlds of pain, injury, infamy, prison, mockery, even death.
