Last Day of Freedom

by Amita Basu

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

It was when we returned from Greece that I realised I was headed to prison. The vacation had been Penelope’s goodbye before she dumped me. I had one last stratagem to stop her. A shameful deed, and I knew it would make matters worse. But I had to do it.

Now hiding among the cars, I wonder: What if I got a car? Here’s a cosy little Hyundai disarmingly blue. Penelope has barely registered my shameful deed. She dumped me before that because I wasn’t ambitious. Well, now I’m going in, they’re going to make me work, will-ye-nil-ye, and Clive says he’ll help me up. How often have I stood here watching other men trade up, put cash down, take on more debt? Clive says that’s what a man does. Penelope wants a man? Here I become.

Eventually, I step out. Penelope’s reef-blue eyes glisten with the polite pleasure of meeting an old, slight acquaintance. My heart sinks kneewards in relief. Under her drive, she’s an old-fashioned lady: things have taken their course, and she probably believes that to reproach me for what I did would humiliate her, too.

Clive, clueless, relishes this meeting between acquaintances that his errands have engineered. Thank God for Clive’s blindness, the blinkered blindness of the prison. Anyone else would’ve gasped for air in the butter-thick atmosphere between Penelope and me and called the police on that evidence alone.

Back under the October noon, the chiselled clouds fragmenting in the wind, Clive says, “I renegotiated my EMIs.” My surprised glance he doesn’t meet, but answers, his voice rising: “It’s been a slow year for everyone... That’s precisely why I had to get the Mazda. You’ve got to stay ahead, spend money to make money.”

“Well...”

“Stop-it-Elef, stopping ‘welling’ me,” Clive snaps. “You’ve got your head in the clouds, but even you must’ve heard that our recovery’s slowing. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but the high-ups say they still can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.” He stops short and squares on me mid-street. “You’ve got one chance to do things right. Who knows what’s coming? You’ve got to build yourself up. Understand? And damn your pride, I’m going to help you.”

Inside, he’ll have power over me; of course he’s going to wield it. But in his light eyes, his pupils are tiny and intent and boring through me. This is getting even. But what for? It’s not as if I’ve lorded it over him out here. His stare flickers and I understand.

Softly I stab him: “I’m sorry you had to put off parole.”

He turns zombie-pale, then apocalypse-sunset-red. “You and your parole and your prison and your penitentiary! You’ve got it all backwards.” He’s sputtering. “You’ve never seen anything straight in your life. Now you’re going in there and you know what? You deserve it.”

“Curious choice of words,” I observe. “I ‘deserve’ it? It’s not like prison is a punishment. Is it?”

He looks like he’s going to punch me. He turns and strides away. He’ll forgive me. We always forgive one another. We come from the same place.

The thrill of a task unfinished tickles my spine: the kind of sick tickle that sometimes runs up your spine when your skin is fever-inflamed. I need to go back and choose a jacket. I still don’t know which jacket. I stand staring after Clive.

Would his parents recognise him now? They died in the same plane crash as mine, when we were five. My parents left me a small fortune; my aunt moved in to raise me. Clive’s parents left him only debt, so his 66-year old grandpa was sent back to prison.

Grandpa had collected books of poetry, and cream-leaved handmade notebooks in which he was going to draft his own collection someday. Clive followed Grandma around her garden, making music with the shears, screening pretty weeds from her eye, composing in his head verses to scribble in one of Grandpa’s notebooks on the sly.

Grandpa wasn’t paroled till 75. With so much work, there’s always some for a septuagenarian. Grandma welcomed him home with a tiered red velvet cake. Free at last, Grandpa sat down in the outhouse confronting his bucket list: neatly printed decade by decade behind the sun-faded, wallet-softened receipt for his starter car at seventeen. “Publish a chapbook,” urged the receipt. “Make Clive an adjustable easel. Take Daisy to Spain.”

Grandpa took out a second mortgage, but their holiday kept getting postponed. Grandma was preparing his one-year-free party, packing for Spain at last, when she brought tea to the outhouse and found Grandpa rotating gently from the ceiling, like an R-rated upside-down child’s spinning top.

“Sorry,” said the note paperweighted to the neat stack of still-empty notebooks. “I spent sixty years yearning for freedom. Now I’ve sat staring at the blank page for a year.”

It was after the funeral that Clive quit his shear-music and verse-scribbling, took on his grandparents’ debt, and began bolting instant coffee straight from the sachet. He was fifteen.

In the half-minute it’s taken me to remember, Clive’s become a speck in the crowd. How fast must he march, how loud must he protest that he loves being inside, to outrun his own heritage? You can build all your life a wall of success, keep your nose to the grindstone, and still at seventy-five vanish, not-quite-vanish, leaving twelve stone of evidence that the world defeated you. From yourself there’s no escape. There’s only always running.

That’s why I never argue with my friend Clive.

* * *

I stroll past the Tuscan restaurant that replaced the recreation centre. For penitentiaries, which have their own rec-rooms, protested: if people get recreation for free, why would they pay for penitentiary? Behind the restaurant’s tinted windows, longskirted tables coy their ebony ankles, and low chandeliers glare unblinking, waiting to decapitate with a Murano shard of light a speeding waiter.

The restaurant’s back wall is fuzzy-sharp rainbow layers of graffiti, the pavement strewn with the festering skins and root-ends of onion and fennel and garlic, alive with shabby-coated but genteel-mannered rats deferring to my right of way. A teenage couple have jammed the scullery door shut and are going at it. The girl’s back pounds the door from the outside, a worker’s angry fist from the inside. Downstreet, a man in an oversize olive-gray sweatshirt looks me over to see if I want to buy some fun. A quarter mile away, he’s a better judge of my means than Pamela, Paul, Peter, and Penelope put together; he turns away. My heart falls. A drug-dealer has judged me too poor to break the law.

I resolved when my parents died — and again when Clive’s grandpa died — that I’d never live beyond my means, never get into debt. Still, at forty, on the threshold of prison, my ego waylays me.

I turn around. I stroll back the way Clive brought me. At Taylor & Sons, Pamela honey-eyed in the sun leans chatting with the counter-girl. Her brows rise, surprised I’m back.

“I’d like the jacket, please. The first one you showed me.” My heart’s throbbing in my throat, choking my voice, but squarely I meet her eyes. “The cheap one.”

Pamela’s glance of contempt says, “I was right about you the first time,” but she quickly veils, for this is still a sale. Pamela’s contempt is the medal I carry away, along with the cheap jacket under my arm, as the sun shines on me for the last time.

I stroll past the café where I realised, last September, as the maples were yellowing, that I was going to prison. Penelope and I had returned from our holiday, I knew she was preparing to dump me and, looking into the café after six weeks in Greece, I noticed how expensive everything was. Coffee with fifty ingredients for fifty pounds. I found the small bag of roasted beans for sale: even homemade coffee had slithered beyond my means. That’s when I realised I only had enough money for one last year as a free man.

I conferred with Mahesh, whom I’d ejected from my parents’ house that evening last May, who’d stumbled through the streets and traded his wallet for a gash across his face. By the time I returned from Greece, Mahesh had forgiven me for having wasted my life, for having gained nothing and lost nothing.

I conferred with Martin, who’d forgiven me for having introduced him to the man who’d robbed him of his dream. This man had robbed me, too, years ago, of six months’ food-money. Later he’d come back and promised me that he was in a twelve-step programme, was a new man. I’d wanted to believe him, so I hadn’t told Martin his past, and I’d let Martin trust him. I’d let Martin blindly stake his future on my desperate hope for my friend’s reform. I told Martin afterwards, and Martin forgave me. I’d choked the child for him, he said, and he could always imagine he’d’ve been a successful Artist but for my cockup.

Mahesh and Martin told me to go do what I had to. So I went to see Penelope. At the door she said we were done. I asked her why, though I already knew: she’d decided I was a worthless person because I’d never been in in prison. But she invited me in and explained nicely: ‘We want different things.’

That’s when I did the shameful thing. I grovelled. Don’t dump me, let’s take another holiday, let’s burn through what remains of my money; the fire approaches, let’s leap in. I wouldn’t mind immolation, I wouldn’t even mind working if you were beside me telling me you loved me. Penelope listened very nicely then said goodbye. I returned to Mahesh and Martin. They helped me plan how to stretch out my money. And they told me a snob like that, a consummate blue-piller, would’ve been no life partner.

This August, I began looking for work. There wasn’t much I could do, not having attended university. Why spend your best years gassing, then decades staggering under student loans? Tomorrow I begin my job at a call centre. Fourteen hours a day, because there’s too much work and not enough people, because the birth-rate crisis has sapped pension funds and eroded retirement.

Had I attended university I could be spending fourteen hours a day in a nice office, giving orders instead of receiving them. I’ve lived my life backwards, and I’ll be lucky to see the sun again when I’m 75. Well, they’ve taken my life away, but tomorrow I’ll go in to work in my shabby jacket. They shan’t make me forget that all this is rubbish.