Simon Tolkien - The King of Diamonds

David regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Sipping his beer, he felt more warmly disposed to Eddie than ever before at that moment and he had no wish to rock the boat or give him offence. But he needn’t have worried. Eddie had a very thick skin.

‘Yes, taking care of what you look like’s important too. Of course it is, like I said before,’ said Eddie, refusing to be put out of his stride. ‘It’s like my old auntie used to say when I was a kid — take care of your skin if you want to feel comfortable in it.’

David had begun to notice in recent days how Eddie’s aunt, like Elizabeth Taylor, was becoming an increasingly frequent visitor to their conversations.

But it wasn’t all Eddie. He knew how to listen too, and perhaps it was this quality more than any other that drew David to his new cellmate. David had two years of anger and frustration built up inside him, and it helped to let some of it out. Or rather he thought it helped. Talking about Katya and Ethan had seemed like a relief to begin with. He’d not been able to talk to anyone about how he felt until now. People didn’t discuss personal stuff in prison. It was one of the unwritten rules. But Eddie was different. He wanted to know about what had happened, every last detail of it.

Lying on their bunks after lights-out, they had long, whispered conversation into the small hours. Their positions, one on top of each other, so close and yet invisible to each other, disembodied voices in the semi-darkness, made it easier to talk somehow. And so David had told Eddie his story, or his version of it at least — about how Katya had thrown him over and how that made him feel, about Ethan, and about Katya’s coming to court and reading out his letters one after the other, looking over at him in the dock with such hatred in her eyes.

And Eddie was sympathetic, so sympathetic in fact that his words of comfort made the pain worse, not better, turning David’s slow-burning anger into rage so that he couldn’t sleep at night for the thought of Katya and what she had done to him.

Sometimes, waking up in the pale light of day, David did draw breath and wonder why Eddie seemed to care so much, but then Eddie himself provided the explanation. David’s experience with Katya fitted in with Eddie’s whole view of the opposite sex. It was another proof for his well-developed theory that women were the root of all evil. He made an exception for his dead aunt and a screen goddess or two, but the rest of them were all the same. They teased men with their tight skirts and their painted faces, promising paradise with a look of the eye or a turn of the hip, and then, once they had their victims hooked, they turned them loose just to watch their pain.

‘For the fun of it, just for the fucking fun of it,’ said Eddie, whose first experience of evil women had been his tart of a mother who had abandoned him at his grandmother’s so she could carry on with the life of debauchery that her pregnancy had briefly interrupted. And then the grandmother had not been much better, beating Eddie with her stick whenever he came home late from school and dosing him with horrible homemade medications to keep his insides clean. Only his great aunt, his grandmother’s younger sister, had shown him a little kindness, but that was only when the old woman’s back was turned, and it hadn’t been enough to stop him running away at the first opportunity. He’d gone to his mother but she wouldn’t have him. And from there he’d begun a series of relationships that all ended in disaster, culminating in marriage to a cook in one of the colleges, who’d turned him in to the police when she found out he was using the basement of the matrimonial home as a warehouse for fencing stolen goods.

‘Fucking bitch. The only thing I miss about her is her apple pie,’ said Eddie, who then promptly turned and spat out the unwanted memory into a corner of the exercise yard. The night was over, giving way to a cold, miserable morning with the sun lost behind a thick blanket of grey clouds, and the prisoners of A Wing had been turfed out into the open after an unappetizing breakfast of overcooked porridge and dried toast. David shivered, wishing he’d brought his coat from the cell.

‘Visit; visit for Earle!’

One of the screws was shouting down at them from the top of the staircase leading up to the new building over beyond B Wing, the one housing the rec room and the gym.

‘Aren’t you the lucky one? That’s your second in a week,’ said David, unable to keep the envy out of his voice. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a visit. His mother was too ashamed to come and his friends all seemed to have forgotten him. Out of sight; out of mind.

‘It’s business, Davy. I told you that before,’ said Eddie, clapping David on the shoulder as he turned to go. ‘Just because I’m banged up in here doesn’t mean I ain’t got things going on on the outside; things I need to hear about from time to time.’

Left on his own to make a final circuit of the yard, David lit his last cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs in an effort to blot out his frustration. Eddie had business on the outside because he was going to be getting out in a year or two. He had something to look forward to, unlike David, who had a lifetime of barbed wire and prison walls in front of him. Like being buried alive, he thought bitterly.

On the way back to A Wing he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned round to find his ex-cellmate, O’Brien, towering above his head. He looked thinner than before and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. D Block had clearly not agreed with him.

‘You got a new cellmate, I hear,’ said O’Brien as they approached the white wrought-iron stairs leading up to the landings above.

‘Yeah, Earle; Eddie Earle. He’s all right,’ said David defensively. It wasn’t his fault O’Brien had had to move out.

‘No, he’s not all right. I know him. He’d sell your bloody grandmother if he had the chance,’ said O’Brien. There was an urgency in his voice and a wild look in his eye that David found alarming.

O’Brien moved away as they reached his landing, but, turning round, had time for one last warning before he went into his cell: ‘You watch your back, Swain, you hear me. Or he’ll have you.’

Back in his own cell, David felt unnerved by his encounter. O’Brien did seem a little crazy, but then again why should he be so worried about Eddie? The question gnawed at David for the rest of the afternoon, partly because he too had his doubts about his new cellmate. Why was he so friendly? Why was he so interested in David’s life story? Why did he seem to care so much? David needed answers. And the only way of getting them was to ask Eddie himself.

‘Good visit?’ asked David, looking up from jesus for prisoners as Eddie was let back into the cell an hour later.

‘Yeah, all right. What you been doing?’

‘Nothing much. Talking to O’Brien.’

‘Who?’

‘Irish guy who was in here before you. Big guy, into Jesus, got a temper. He doesn’t like you.’ ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, says I ought to watch my back.’

‘And so you should, Davy. So you should. Anyone who doesn’t do that in here’s a fucking idiot.’

David couldn’t see Eddie’s expression. He had his back to the bunks, doing something over by the shelves.

‘Do you know him?’ David asked

‘Yeah, I think I know who you mean, if it’s the same guy. Jesus Joe he was called when I last saw him. Down in Winchester nick a couple of years back. We’ve crossed paths once or twice. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him. That’s all. Nothing to write home about.’

There was a casual note in Eddie’s voice that sounded forced somehow. It was like he knew more than he was saying.