The Life Inside by Andy West

Author:Andy West [West, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2021-12-17T17:00:00+00:00

Looking

The gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it.

OCEAN VUONG

Forty years after leaving Auschwitz, Primo Levi published an essay called Shame, in which he went to a friend for help in making sense of why it was that he had survived the Lager when others had not. His friend told him he had lived so he could ‘bear witness’ to what the others went through.

Twenty-five years ago, when Mum and I were visiting Jason in prison, our time ran out and the officers took him back to his cell. Mum and I went through the exit and stepped outside into the car park. I felt there was something wrong that I was getting to leave and Jason wasn’t. Mum and I got in the car and pulled away. I turned around, knelt on the seat and stared out the back window at the prison. Mum told me to sit down and face the front, but I couldn’t look away.

This morning, I’m walking down the landing and I hear a scream behind me. I turn around and see a man who doesn’t look much older than twenty being escorted by six officers. They’re holding him by the arms. He struggles to break free and his long black hair falls across one of their faces.

‘He was wanking at me,’ the man shouts.

He has a bloodied cheekbone and the V-neck of his white T-shirt is torn. There is wild rage in his eyes.

‘Wanking in my fucking face!’

The officers carry him down the landing towards the segregation unit to calm him down.

An officer called Fowler tells me that Jonesy – the man escorted to the seg – had a new cellmate move in last night. This morning, Jonesy woke up to his cellmate masturbating in his face. Jonesy jumped out of bed and pushed him against the wall. The other man fought back, his erection poking out. Security had to break them up.

‘Oh my god,’ I say.

Fowler laughs nervously. A few men on the landing are jeering at Jonesy and making a wanking gesture with their hands. An officer shouts, ‘Free flow.’ Fowler leaves to assume his position.

I stand and watch the officers carrying Jonesy down the stairs to the seg.

Levi tried to bear witness as best he could, but it didn’t make him feel any less troubled about the fact he was alive. The very fact that he was able to observe others’ suffering reminded him that he had survived while others hadn’t. Bearing witness only multiplied his shame.

After I finish work, I’m sat on the train that’s waiting on the platform. Each time I blink, I picture the torn neckline of Jonesy’s white T-shirt. I clench my jaw.

The train pulls away and the atoms holding reality together come apart. The conductor walks through the carriage but my brain can’t put together how he is moving forward just by putting his legs one after the other. He goes through the automatic doors, which open with an exaggerated ‘whoosh’, like a sound effect on a cheap movie set.

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