Mr Windsor probes at his gums with his tongue, considering his options. Then he gives a tight smile. ‘Let me see what I can do,’ says Windsor, and hurries away.
Cox lays back down on the floor. He permits himself a smile.
‘Ad astra, per aspera,’ he whispers, for his own amusement.
Through difficulties, to the stars.
SEVEN
Only one windscreen wiper works, and it makes a noise like a seagull in distress as it screeches across the dirty windscreen of the 1978 Mercedes 450SL that used to be Rufus Orton’s favourite possession, and which is now worth less than the monthly premiums on the insurance policy he hasn’t renewed since 2016. The rain isn’t coming down particularly hard yet, but the dark clouds are hanging low: dirty great hammocks of grimy sailcloth obscuring the flat fields of Holderness and making the Gothic bulk of the prison look like something from a Christopher Lee movie. It’s a tall, imposing, red-brick affair, rising out of the billiard-table smoothness of the East Yorkshire landscape. It has the look of a medieval fortress – behind the barbed wire and crenelated walls, soldiers in chainmail might well be stirring vats of boiling oil and nocking arrow to bow string.
Rufus sits in the driving seat, sweating wine and whisky, clothes damp, fringe sticking to his forehead like the casually draped wing of a seabird. He’s late. Hungry. Jittery. He needs a piss. He doesn’t smoke anything other than the occasional joint but right now he’d love a cigarette. There’s a nervous energy coursing through him – he’d be jiggling his feet up and down if he could trust the car not to stall.
A tall man in an ugly luminous jacket lopes across the car park, head tucked into his collar and a soggy dog-end sticking out above his zip. He could be staff, a visitor, or an inmate hurrying back from a disappointing escape.
Rufus winds the window down, feeling the cool air and mist of rain seize his face like a damp fist. His words trip out too fast, as though his tongue has split in two.
‘Sorry … mate, mate … hi, can I park here? Yes hi? I got so turned around. The one on the road that I passed, that’s not this one, no?’
Rufus considers this sentence as the man looks at him as if he might be simple. He grimaces. Tries again. ‘This is HMP Holderness, yes? I’m supposed to be teaching a class?’
The man considers the car. Ignores Rufus’s question. Kicks the front tyre and wrinkles his nose. Rolls the dog-end from one side of his mouth to the other and back again. ‘Would be a nice motor, that, if you took care of it. Give you a ton for it, here and now.’
A laugh escapes Rufus’s lips. He feels a little manic. The journey was hellish. The tyres are completely bald and he skidded half a dozen times on the dark country roads before he made his way to the motorway, and then he found himself in nose-to-tail snarl-ups from Castleford all the way to Goole. The car is too much of a classic to have a functioning radio so he’s had nothing but his own thoughts for company. He’d hoped that sighting the Humber Bridge would inspire some poetry in him: briefly fancied himself a Larkin or an Armitage. He’d felt nothing. The best he could come up with was the vague suggestion that the strings of the bridge with the sun at their back looked a bit like an egg-slicer and an organic yolk. He couldn’t imagine Radio 3 being interested any time soon. Then it had just been muddy water and warehouses, bleak utilitarian flats and houses and chain stores and budget hotels. On, feeling the country grow thinner as it neared its most easterly point: great cargo ships and ferries to his left, a sprawl of cemetery and lorry parks to his right, then he was drifting into the misery of HMP Holderness and watching the sky grow dark as his mood.
‘Sentimental value,’ says Rufus, recovering himself. He’s actually tempted, but he can’t risk selling the old beauty. He doubts he’d be able to find the paperwork and it last had an MOT about three years ago. ‘Thanks though. Anyways, can I park here?’
‘Dunno,’ says the man, shrugging. ‘May as well. What they going to do?’
Rufus considers this. Swings the big old car in a wide arc and squeezes into a space between a powerful Japanese motorcycle and a small silver Toyota. Reaches into the back seat and grabs his battered old satchel. He chucked a couple of his own books in before leaving the house and has a few old copies of Writing magazine to flick through before the afternoon session. Figures there’ll be some exercises in there he can pass off as his own.
‘Reception’s that way,’ says the tall man, who is still waiting in the rain, sucking on a vaping machine. He points with his foot, one hand in his pocket. ‘You’ll want to lock your car up properly. Full of criminals, this place.’
‘Yeah? Even in the car park?’ Rufus smiles, expecting to see it returned.
The man just gawps at him. ‘Aye,’ he says, as if Rufus were a little hard of thinking. ‘Even out here.’
Rufus checks that he’s locked the car, then jogs, painfully, in the direction of the big archway, where big wooden doors occupy the space that would once have housed a portcullis.
‘Bloody hell,’ he mumbles, as something hot twinges in his side and the muscles in his calves do their best impression of old knicker elastic. He needs to get into shape, he knows that. Some mornings he wakes to the sound of distant church bells and ice cream vans, only to trace the high metallic tinkling sound to his own strangled breathing. Were he to take up mud wrestling, the mud would definitely win. There was a time when he
