GARRY’S JUSTICE

They say that the one thing prisoners are happy to dec;are is their innocence...

The doors slammed on Garry Newbolt, first of all his own cell door and then others they had passed as the officer who had led him to the remand cell walked away.

This was it, then, He was a jailbird, a prisoner, and as far as he was concerned he’d not done one thing to deserve it unless loving someone was a mistake, and he couldn’t for the life of him see how it could be.

“I was expecting you,” grunted a weasel of a man sitting on one of the two bunks that occupied most of the floor space of the cell.

“Expecting me? You were?” he asked, surprised and the weasel grimaced at him.

“The news,” he said, indicating his portable radio. “You were all over the news. You’ve been a bad boy, if you believe everything they say about you!”

“I.. I haven’t,” he replied, and through his mind went the certainty that for the remainder of his days he’d be known as the man who had slaughtered the most wonderful woman he had ever known, and that he’d be an apologist for something that should never have been put at his door.

“I know” grinned the weasel, “I’m Todd, by the way, and there’s no need to tell me how you never did it because I know you didn’t. Nobody in this dump has ever done what they’ve been accused of. So cheer up and tell me all about what you never did!”

“I’d rather not,” Garry said, hoping he’d put enough determination in his voice for this Todd character to think twice of asking him again.

“Fair enough if you don’t mind me explaining just how innocent I am,” growled Todd, and he giggled. “Instead we can talk about the weather. Because there ain’t much else to discuss once important things like innocence are off the agenda.”

“Then I’ll keep schtum,” almost spat out Garry.

“There’s no need to be like that! We’re in here together you know You with your innocence and me with mine.” said Todd, sounding almost wounded.

“Shurrup!” concluded Garry, and for a few minutes silence reigned in the cell.

Todd know something about silence that Garry was yet to learn. There can be no silence as loud as the silence of unspoken words between two men who have too much on their minds to release into the world and know the folly of letting it out.

“I honestly never lay a hand on her,” muttered Garry when the silence was threatening to deafen him.

“I know,” growled Todd.

“It was all made to look like I had,” whispered Garry.

“I know,” muttered Todd, and the silence was given space and time to become deafening once again.

There’s nothing like that kind of silence to concentrate mental images and give them form and shape and that was another lesson that Garry started learning from scratch.

“I worshipped her,” he mused, loud enough for Todd to hear but not so loud as to be offensive in the quiet loneliness of a small stone room with two people doing their best to be alone.

But the actual real truth was that he had worshipped her. Sonia had been the perfect partner any man could ever want. She understood him. He knew that as completely as he knew his own name.

After a pause that was almost too long Todd breathed, “I know you did, mate.”

“She was everything to me,” whispered Garry to himself.

“Megan was the same to me,” agreed Todd as if they were talking in subdued tones about the same woman. “You can meet her at visiting if you like.”

Then the silence resumed itself as Garry worked out that even though he might meet the aforementioned Megan some time allocated to visitors, but Todd would never meet Sonia. He wanted to say why, address the elephant in the room so directly that all future pain would go away once it was said, but couldn’t.

How could he name her? Because in naming her he would be expounding the whole truth and exploding the myth of his own innocence. But it wasn’t a myth, was it? He had worshipped the woman, right up to when she had…

“...she kissed the postman.”

There it was. The huge, catastrophic beast that hovered just beyond his vision was suddenly, with those four words, released for this Todd man to see.

The silence returned and remained once again for almost too long, and Todd said, “women do, when he brings them good news…”

It all had to fill the room now. Enough had sneaked out to make the rest inevitable. Garry looked at Todd and knew what was going through the man’s mind. He was judging him with the same forensic criticism as the magistrate in court had.

“She had been to night school,” he breathed, “studying something I didn’t understand, about babies and birth and all that stuff, woman stuff, and the results came through the post…”

And hadn’t Sonia been waiting to hear how she’d done! Of course she had!

For weeks she’d gone off to the local college and sat at a desk like kids at school sit at desks, and put her hand up to be excused if she wanted a wee, just like girls in his class had done when he’d been a nipper,.And he had once or twice put his own hand up to be excused and gone to the boys’ toilets because Ozzy wanted to show him his willy secretly and had made a sign to him behind the teacher’s back, but yes, only once or twice. Ozzy did things like that, or had once upon a time when he was little. Ozzy was a big brusque copper now, a sergeant, and all that kind of thing was forgotten.

“She was sometimes quite late back home,” he whispered.

And she had been. Sometimes, but not so often, it had been after the pubs shut and she said she’d been to the local, The Red Fox, with this or that girl friend on their way home from college.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” she’d said.

“Of course I don’t,” he’d told her, but wondering inside his head exactly who she’d been to the pub with. She might have told the truth when she’d said it was Rosie, but Rosie had a brother, didn’t she, single, unattached and if he was any judge of things, not bad looking. What was his name? Vernon? Yes, that was it. Vernon.

“Is Vernon okay?” he’d asked out of the blue on one occasion when she was late.

“Who?” she’d asked with a puzzled frown,

“You know, Rosie’s brother?”

“How would I know?” she’d responded. Not a yes or a no but an avoidance of the question. Had that meant anything? Did anything mean anything any more?

“She was popular,” he murmured to Todd, and from the look on his face Todd understood.

“Is that why you killed her?” he asked.

“I never!”

The silence was due to return before the truth exploded into a fiery burst of angry memories, flames of vindictive fury searing the cell and breaking a friendship before it was formed.

“If I could have five minutes with her,” whispered Garry when the atmosphere of silence needed some relief, “if only,” he added.

“What was it?” asked Todd, “I mean, how did you do it, not that anyone could possibly blame you…”

“I don’t know.” The uncertainty was like an arrow ricocheting round the cell.

“But you must,” smiled Todd, who did know because in his head he’d reconstructed a scene he’d never actually seen.

It was then that there was the approaching rattle of keys, the barking of authority, the sudden hush as anyone making a sound was silenced by an authority beyond authority.

“Now what?” whispered Todd.

Their cell door opened and a woman pushed past a warder, and flung herself at Garry.

“What have they done to you, precious?” she asked, “why have they put you in here… with this man…” she added, indicating Todd.

“But… but… but… I killed you… they told me so…” stammered Garry.

“Cor, what a corker!” gasped Todd.

“There’s been a mistake,” put in the most important of the men in the cell doorway. “I’m afraid, Mr Newbolt, someone has made a grievous mistake…”

“Grievous mistake?” snapped Sonia, “I should cocoa! The postman reported me as missing… he told the police he was quite sure that Garry here had actually done away with me, as if he’d ever do such a thing! I was only at my mother’s because she was dying… not lying around being a corpse wating for my husband to be charged with doing the impossible, as if the softy would do anything of the sort…”

“I didn’t?” asked Garry weakly, “I knew I hadn’t, but they said, the police and everyone ... I was almost convinced that I had…”

“Oh, you darling, darling man…”

And Sonia was crying real tears as her husband tried to make sense of confusion.

© Peter Rogerson 31.03.23