‘Thought he was talking about you.’
Pendel rode himself still harder.
‘Only, your prison here, Andy, it’s a bit more prison than what it is back home, I’ll put it that way. Which is not to put down the home variety, not by any means. Only what they did, you see, was they banged Mickie up with a large quantity of not very sensitive long-term criminals, twelve to a cell or more, and every now and then they’d move him to another cell, if you follow me, which didn’t do a lot for Mickie’s health, on account of him being what you might call a handsome young man in his day,’ he ended awkwardly. And he allowed a moment of silence, which Osnard had the tact not to interrupt, to commemorate Mickie’s lost beauty. ‘Plus they beat him senseless a few times, for annoying them,’ he added.
‘Look him up at all?’ Osnard enquired carelessly.
‘In prison, Andy? Yes. Yes, I did.’
‘Must have made a change, being t’other side o’ the bars.’
Mickie scarecrow thin, face lopsided from a beating, eyes still fresh from hell. Mickie in frayed orange rags, no bespoke tailor available. Wet red blisters round his ankles, more round his wrists. A man in chains must learn not to writhe while he is beaten but learning this takes time. Mickie mumbling: ‘Harry, I swear to God, give me your hand, Harry, as I love you, get me out of here.’ Pendel whispering: ‘Mickie, listen to me, you’ve got to drucken yourself, lad, don’t look them in the eye.’ Neither man hearing the other. Nothing to be said except hullo and see you soon.
‘So What’s he up to now?’ Osnard asked, as if the subject had already lost its interest for him. ‘Apart from drinking himself to death and being a bloody nuisance around the place?’
‘Mickie?’ Pendel asked.
‘Who d’you think?’
And suddenly the same imp that had obliged Pendel to make a scallywag of Delgado obliged him also to make a modern hero of Abraxas: If this Osnard thinks he can write Mickie off, then he’s got another think coming, hasn’t he? Mickie’s my friend, my winger, my oppo, my cellmate. Mickie had his fingers broken and his balls crushed. Mickie was gangbanged by bad convicts while you were playing leapfrog in your nice English public school.
Pendel shot a furtive glance round the dining room in case they were being overheard. At the next table a bullet-headed man was accepting a large white portable telephone from the head waiter. He spoke, the head waiter removed the phone, only to bestow it like a loving cup on another needy guest.
‘Mickie’s still at it, Andy,’ Pendel murmured under his breath. ‘What you see isn’t what you get, not with Mickie, not by a long chalk, never was and isn’t now, I’ll put it that way.’
What was he doing? What was he saying? He hardly knew himself. He was a muddler. Somewhere in his over-worked mind was an idea that he could make a gift of love to Mickie, build him into something he could never be, a Mickie redux, dried out, shining bright, militant and courageous.
‘Still at what? Don’t follow you. Talking code again.’
‘He’s in there.’
‘In where?’
‘With the Silent Opposition,’ said Pendel, in the manner of a mediaeval warrior who hurls his colours into the enemy ranks before plunging in to win them back.
‘The what?’
‘Silently opposing. Him and his tightly-knit group of fellow believers.’
‘Believers in what, Christ’s sake?’
‘The sham, Andy. The veneer. The beneath the surface, put it that way,’ Pendel insisted, giddily ascending to hitherto unsealed heights of fantasy. Half-remembered recent dialogues with Marta were speeding to his aid. ‘The phoney democracy that is the new squeaky-clean Panama, ha ha. It’s all a pretence. That’s what he was telling you. You heard him. Cheat. Conspire. Lie. Pretend. Draw aside the curtain and it’s the same boys that owned We-Know-Who waiting to take back the reins.’
Osnard’s pinhole eyes continued to hold Pendel in their black beam. It’s my range, thought Pendel, already protecting himself from the consequences of his rashness. That’s all he wants to hear. Not my accuracy, my range. He doesn’t care whether I’m reading notes or playing from memory or improvising. He’s probably not even listening, not as such.