your parents alive?’
‘Yeah, but my dad left when I was a baby so now there’s just my mother. Who, just in case you want to write it down in your notebook, is the one person in my family still talking to me.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said, looking as if she was trying her level best not to ask why the others now had nothing to do with him.
‘And where do you live?’
‘When I get out? As they’d say in your paper, I’m currently of ‘no fixed abode’. My mam’s sofa, if I’m lucky.’
‘What about grandparents? Any still living?’
He saw her suddenly bite her tongue, as if she knew she’d gone too far and was beginning to sound nosey.
‘You really need to go into that much detail for your series?’ Jake grinned cheekily across at her.
‘Sorry, no of course not. But if you didn’t mind, would you be able to tell me a little bit about yourself? You know, like how you pass the time in here? I know you study, so you must read a lot, but I wondered if you’d any other interest or hobbies, like sports? Maybe even … playing a musical instrument?’
And so he went along with it and humoured her, even though she kept using the word ‘why’ so much that it gave him a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, not unlike when he was being interrogated by police. A memory he’d actively been trying to tune out for a long time.
‘Oh and another thing, why do you keep changing your name?’ she threw in suddenly. Like this was a particular niggle that really tried her patience.
‘You know about that?’
‘Well, yeah … From the governor.’
He nodded, not really believing her. That slight tell she had of looking to the left, again giving her away.
‘Okay, then let me put it to you this way. If you ever had the kind of characters coming after you that I’ve had to put up with over the past few years, believe me, you’d start calling yourself Mary Smith and you’d emigrate to New Zealand on a one-way ticket, leaving a cloud of dust behind you.’
She gave a broad grin at that, which softened her whole face and knocked years off her, he thought distractedly.
‘And I’m sorry, but I have to ask you this. Why William Goldsmith?’
‘Easy. She Stoops to Conquer is one of my favourite plays,’ he shrugged back at her. ‘And when I saw the statue of Oliver Goldsmith outside Trinity College, I though it’d be a good idea to take Goldsmith as my surname and William after William Blake, another writer I love.’
She nodded, again looking impressed by the fact that he’d actually read the classics.
‘But then what about Bill O’Casey? Where did that one come from?’
‘Kind of people I used to hang round with would never call me William, it was always either Bill or Billy and O’ Casey was after Sean O’Casey. I’d been reading Shadow of a Gunman at the time and loved it.’
Another half-smile.
‘But then … James Archer?’
‘Ah, now you mightn’t like this one, but I was reading a fair bit of Jeffrey Archer at the time. A writer who gets slagged off mercilessly, but you can’t deny he writes a great page-turner.’
‘Okay, but what about Oscar Butler then? Hang on, let me hazard a wild guess; you’d been reading Oscar Wilde at the time,’ she said dryly, but he noticed her mouth twisted down into a smile again.
He shrugged and nodded.
‘So basically, every false identity you’ve ever had has been in homage to a writer, either living or dead?’
‘Something like that,’ he told her, armed folded, sitting well back, ostensibly taking her in, but his mind was miles away. What was it to her? Why did she even care? And what was really going on here?
On and on she went with all her questions, almost as though she was carrying some kind of image in her head of what he should be like, how he should behave, and was trying to make him fit that same identikit picture. And it certainly sounded like she’d already done her homework. Because this one was thorough. Seemed to know as much about him as his own mother did.
He was wrong there though, because just as she was wrapping up to leave, it looked like there was still one question she was burning up to ask him.
‘So, emm,’ she began, picking her words carefully. ‘One last thing, if that’s okay?
‘Fire ahead.’
‘Well … Can I ask you what your plans are once you get back outside? Do you plan to finish the degree course you started, maybe even get a decent job out of it?’
The implication was there, hanging in the air between them. Jake had got very good at reading the unspoken.
Did he intend going straight after he got out?
But he couldn’t give her a straight answer to that one.
Because at this particular point in time, it was a question there was just no answer to.
Chapter Six
One month later and to Jake’s utter astonishment, Ms. Eloise Elliot had been as good as her word. Surprising absolutely no one but himself, he sailed through his parole hearing and following one kick-up-the-arse pep talk from his parole officer along the lines of I’ll-be-watching-you-and-don’t-think-I-won’t, he found himself a free man for the first time in two long, long years.
He had nowhere to stay of course, only his mam’s, but he didn’t want to go there. At least not yet. It would be too easy for them to find him, too easy to get sucked back in. And if there was one thing he was certain of, it was this; there was no going back for him. Not now, not after everything he’d been through. And he knew of old that it could all happen so frighteningly easily, a phone call here, a recalled favour there and next thing he knew he’d end up right back where he’d started.
Not long before his release date, Eloise called to visit a second time, to ask him a few more questions, again under the pretext of commissioning a feature for her paper.
She couldn’t stay for long she said, as she had to get back to work, even though it was a Sunday and he figured she’d take a day off, like anyone else. No, she told him, no such thing as a day off in her gig, the news didn’t stop and so therefore neither could she. It struck him as funny that even though it was ostensibly the weekend (ostensibly was his new word for that day, he loved the sound of it, loved the way it rolled off his tongue), here was Eloise still dressed head to toe in black, in one of those interchangeable power suits she seemed so fond of. Neat, structured, minimalist cut, no frills or ornamentation of any kind; almost a bit like how a bloke would dress.
The apparel oft proclaimeth the man, Jake thought, looking through the grille at her. (He’d been reading Hamlet
