THE DAY ALFRED DUNHILL FOUND JESUS

A life-time of incarceration might numb a man to reality

The day that Alfred Dunhill found Jesus they raised the flags at Pukeback Jail and set him free, though not necessarily in that order. They had to, it was, they said, all part of the agreement way back at the end of the trial when Judge MacReady had told Alfred he'd be in jail until the day he died or reached a hundred, and Alfred had snarled and said see if he cared.

So they locked him up and that was that.

He lived most of his life in that jail. Considered to be too dangerous to move around the country from jail to jail he stayed in his single cell which he never shared with anyone and set about being as terrifying as he could be.

He made himself a blood-red mask and nobody could make him take it off. He wore it to conceal the fact that his face often bled from little incisions he made in it when he felt like it, using a secret razor blade. It wasn't that he was a deliberate self-mutilator, just that he wasn't so keen on his face and thought he might make some improvements in his spare time, of which he had ages.

His crime had been one of passion. He'd killed his girl-friend when he suspected her of infidelity, and he never saw the irony of it when it was pointed out that he slept with anything that had a pulse, and she didn't. She had made just the one mistake, with the vicar of all people, and she had to die horribly for it.

He actually skinned her alive and tried to use her skin to make a light-shade like he'd read the Nazis had in the war, but it was messy and fiddly and he failed, which didn't best please him. And, of course, she died. In unbelievable pain, though Alfred didn't care. He couldn't feel it, so what did it matter to him?

I've never heard of a more callous and cruel act in all my years as a judge, said Judge MacReady, sentencing him to life. And that's got to mean life, he added, it's got to mean for the remainder of your natural, even if you live to be a hundred, which you won't, not in jail, not with what'll happen to you in there, buggered one day, threatened the next and beaten up on the third...

None of those things happened to him, though, because everyone knew what an animal he was and how cruel he could be and consequently nobody wanted to cross him. He was unapproachable. He was beyond the limit, he was out of bounds.

The years passed like years do. He grew older. His attempts at rearranging his face continued until, underneath the mask, he was no more than one big scab.

He grew older.

He even became feeble. Or more feeble. The gangs in jail could quite easily have beaten him up or buggered him but he'd been there for so long nobody knew what he'd done wrong to deserve such a sentence. Prisoners move on. Old stories get distorted, then forgotten. The life and times of Alfred Dunhill fell off the grapevine. Only the prison governor knew what he'd done, and he didn't believe the half of it.

Then Alfred reached his hundredth birthday and received a congratulatory telegram from the queen. It shows how long he'd been incarcerated if you recall that when he'd skinned his lover it had been a king on the throne.

That birthday, though, put certain things in motion.

The judge's sentence about him staying in jail until he reached a hundred popped up on a computer monitor somewhere. The words were looked at and interpreted, and sage lawyers made declarations and the upshot of it was Alfred Dunhill was released. It was his hundredth birthday and the long deceased judge had said....

So he was pushed out into the world, still wearing his bright red mask and wearing a suit that had slowly become out of fashion, and being a hundred he staggered quite a lot and felt remarkably dazed at all the sunlight.

Everything was quite confusing. And not nearly as noisy as it should be. There were flash cars everywhere, brightly coloured little tins on wheels, and you could barely hear them as they whispered along.

Something unexpected was bound to happen. And it did.

He hadn't walked above a dozen paces when he was knocked down by a huge lorry, the sort he knew nothing about, and killed stone dead.

Some might say serve him right, but a small girl, one who happened to be on her way home from school at precisely that moment, saw and screamed and pointed.

That man's found Jesus... she wept.