Chapter 10

Sovereignty and transcendence

A pastel orange winter sun, cheerful in its hue, rose no more than thirty-degrees from the easterly crust of the earth’s surface. Shimmering through the greenhouse haze, typical of London, it warmed the wretched face of each man in the yard, but was not strong enough to remove the blue from his cheeks or to warm the blue face of the planet. It was one of those awe-inspiring mornings that lets you know beyond all reasonable doubt that the world did not evolve per chance from an incidental big bang, but is the subject of the guiding hand of the Supreme.

It was a day that caused Noxie to reminisce about the many crisp days on which he played football for his school on Hackney Marshes, the Mecca of amateur football, with the life of each breath manifesting in a short-lived dry vaporous cloud. Back in the present, the warmth of the sun continued to kiss his face while the curtness of the raw easterly wind, upon which a solitary seagull soared in a cloudless sky, explicitly told him the time of year.

Exercise! Noxie scoffed at the term the prison system used for a bunch of grown men wondering aimlessly in circles, around and around the 60-by-50-meter concrete parallelogram, trying to keep body warm and spirits high. The several layers of clothing aided the former, while the prisoner’s mind created the latter by fanciful daydreams of past pleasures and future joys. Alone in thought and against the stiff wind, he scarcely noticed the scene before him: Attentive warders, some handling German Shepherds, clans and brotherhoods, and informal gatherings of men. They shared a smoke and a joke and, who knows, perhaps some coke—the kind that doesn’t come in decorative cans or bottles. Exposed in his lonely, aimless trudge, anxious for the whistle that would signal a release from the pointless monotony, he became self-conscious of his loneliness. Were those eyes in the faceless gatherings fixed on him or simply gazing at nothing in particular? Were the incessant whispers and occasional cracks of laughter at his expense or at nothing in particular? Suddenly, out of the nothingness appeared a familiar friendly face. It was that of Graham Barrington-Smythe, the 52-year-old consultant doctor whom he had conversed with during yesterday’s exercise. Graham made even Noxie seem like a regular homeboy-inmate. Exceptionally well groomed, he had a humongous plum in his mouth and was extremely guarded about sharing even an acknowledging glance.

He was going through something of a mid-life crisis. He and his wife, Charlotte, were archetypical Jones’. As well as his annual income of £200,000, he enjoyed company-funded medical and life insurance for the family and a generous non-contributory pension scheme. Charlotte refused to work. She retired from work as a housewife when the last of three children left for King’s College, Cambridge two years ago to study archaeology and anthropology, unlike her siblings who were upholding the family tradition as doctors. Charlotte was bored and had expensive addictions, namely drinking, smoking and particularly "comfort shopping." Their main residence was valued at £750,000, with its £500,000 mortgage a huge encumbrance upon their finances. The holiday home in the South of France was purchased last year for £250,000 with a bank mortgage of £200,000. The Barrington-Smythe’s were living well beyond their means. Poor old Graham carried the stress of it all while his ever so charming wife found a cure for her boredom in the arms of another man. Graham found out and threatened to kick her out. She showed sufficient remorse to secure a reconciliation and life went on much as it had before—two people alone together.

Graham had considered (though not very seriously) selling their two properties and using the £300,000 equity to secure something more in keeping with their means. Peer pressure and Charlotte’s wrath were two incumbent reasons why he dared not.

One day in his confused thinking, a symptom of his stress, he dreamt up a quick fix solution to his angst, "An opportunity to cash in on his position" as he himself had put it. His cunning plan involved the excessive over-prescription of valium, methadone and heroin to a long-term outpatient known to be a small time drug dealer. They would share the profits of street sales. The plan relied on the apathy (and perhaps even stupidity) of the dispensing pharmacist. It was pathetic and doomed to fail. It was so pathetic that Noxie could not help but chuckle to himself despite the genuine sympathy he felt for Graham. The chuckle became an audible laugh when Noxie thought what his probation officer would make of Graham’s story; clearly a cry for help from the closet gay. "Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"What’s that, Noxie?"
"Um, I said, what will you do when you get out?"
"God knows, but I’d like to get rid of the wife."
"Will you?"
"Nah, too ruddy expensive. Her solicitor would take me to the cleaners. I should have divorced the bitch when I found out about the affair."
"How do you know it’s over?"
"Trust, I guess, or maybe necessity. Truth be known, I dread the thought of being alone after 27 years of marriage. Not sure I’d cope."
"We do when we have to, you know. Take this experience now. A year ago I bet you would never have believed that you could cope with prison life."
"I’m not sure I can now, but I see what you mean."
"We tend to build a mental monolithic façade which we fill with thoughts, all negative, about how awful something is going to be. The whole thing becomes overbearing, one’s monomania. It is so insidious that before long it is all pervading, inescapable. We exist in the darkness of its shadow. The monolith, now brimming over with negative thoughts, has become a radio tower receiving more and more negative energy about The Awful Thing, which it transmits to others as our fear of The Thing. I suppose two obvious examples for most people would be death and public speaking, and not necessarily in that order. We would do almost anything to avoid The Thing we fear most. In your case it may be loneliness. To avoid it you have been prepared to tolerate years in a dysfunctional relationship and endure enormous emotional torment, which sought a release that has landed you here.
"The thing is, it doesn’t always end in tears. Some people summon the courage. They get fed-up with being fed-up. Something snaps. They leave the wife, tell the boss to shove her job, seek opportunity in spite of risk—sometimes, even because of it—as a sort of gung-ho ‘you’ll never take me alive’ knee-jerk reaction to their burden of fear.
"And what do you know? The Thing they feared most is of monumental insignificance. A transient affliction. A passing emotion. Fear of The Thing is much more harmful than The Thing itself. Facing The Thing is life enhancing. It will give you power. Rather like the flea that unwittingly discovered a much larger universe than the dog it had just fallen from, we learn to play in pastures we could not have imagined existed for us. In doing so we strip away a layer of illusion reserved exclusively for those who live in fear and behave according to its dictate. Unfettered by the weight of emotional baggage, we see our world with more clarity than before."
"Noxie, you should have been a poet, prophet or a philosopher." The comment pleased Noxie since he, to some extent, saw himself as all three. Undaunted by the ever-watchful warders or the faceless eyes, the pair of them laughed huge, uninhibited belly laughs.

A warder’s whistle shrilled the prisoners to attention. The chill of the easterly wind was again noticeable. The surfing sun on the horizon was not responsible for the glow on the prisoners’ faces. That was entirely attributable to the carefree banter which momentary escape encouraged during the not-so-pointless daily exercise.

Back in the solitude of his cell, a niggling preponderant thought was welling, formulating into a "why?" question of substance in the extremities of Noxie’s mind. "Why," he asked himself, "Is Barrington-Smythe so trapped? He knows his problems and how to solve them, yet an insidious inertia keeps him from dealing with them in a righteous way, one that bypasses incarceration on the monopoly-board of life. For all intents and purposes he is alone. Why not sod the peer pressure and scale things down in spite of the unloving wife? Would he really burden himself with the emotional pain and anguish of it all just for the sake of status and prestige?"

Noxie thought on. "Umm, the unloving wife." He became fixated on this particular aspect of Graham’s problems. "Why continue to tolerate her behavior? It takes two to tango. There are two sides to every story. So what, then, had Graham not revealed? What power kept him in his place? GUILT? Yes, Guilt. That’s it!" Just as Noxie had been kept in his place, ensnared in pub management through guilt born of ignorance of his true principles, Graham was similarly trapped.

"But what are you guilty of Graham? Something for which you are punishing yourself? Is that why you bare the pain and anguish of circumstances you do not care for?" Noxie was only too well aware that the soul always demanded retribution. The conscience of the sane does not permit one to carry a sin without the infliction of some suitable punishment. "What are you guilty of Barrington-Smythe? Aha! The career-focused doctor who forsook wife and children for professional advancement. He was absent even when present. She had to do it all alone, without the affection and attention a loving wife—whom once she must have been—would crave. He now, subconsciously, assumed full responsibility for the flaws in her character. They are of his own making, his own neglect. He must shoulder their burden. By doing so there is retribution for the soul—his soul—and suitable punishment is dispensed by the conscience—his conscience."

Noxie’s heart reached further out to Graham with this new insight, for he too knew the crushing burden of guilt upon the soul, a self-meted justice for past sins too long gone to put right. And this time he was not thinking of Amanda.