Transmission

The author is a handsome man, charming, witty and modest, highly approachable and always available to meet for dinner. Has a keen interest in history, travel and engineering – on all scales. No one ever felt worse for learning about the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge or the Marie Antoinette Watch. His favourite animal is the African Honey Badger.

And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a Millennium such as never was before – hardly in the dreams of Bedlam.

Thomas Carlyle

Mark Heisenberg

Transmission

Copyright © Mark Heisenberg (2018)

The right of Mark Heisenberg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788231725 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788231732 (E-Book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2018)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

1. Monkeys

It was an undeniable fact that there were more female hormones than male in the genetic make-up of one Maximilian Sampson Donato. Everything about Max was feminine – his appearance, his mannerisms, his speech. Everything about Max was round – his face, his short body, his hands, his chubby fingers, his glasses, and the short curls of his brown hair. He had two round chins, a larger round one that encompassed from ear to ear a smaller round one that didn’t quite jut out where it should have.

Another truism about Max was that, although he didn’t always, he always seemed to be wearing at least one layer of foundation upon the fat flesh of his largely featureless face. Put a pair of earrings on Max, and you’d swear he was someone’s slightly sinister, least favourite aunt. Oddly, despite this blatant and overt femininity, Max was blissfully unaware of the image he projected. Perhaps it was his middle name that over the formative years of his life had engendered in him the delusion of one who is strong, manly and powerful. After all, you can never underestimate the power of self-delusion.

Max worked in a prison library. And whether this work to him was vocational or it was simply that he enjoyed being surrounded by sexually frustrated men is open to debate. But that is where he worked. And from behind those thick, black, Bakelite glasses of his, from behind his fortress desk, his hungry unfulfilled eyes would roam over the hard bodies and faces of the unsuspecting around him. Max, though, was not gay. Oh no. It is true that his sexual preference was indeed for men – the very thought of a woman’s soft body made him shudder – but Max would only ever indulge in sex outside of work, and only ever as his alter ago, Maxine.

Should you ever care to look, you will find Maxine cruising languidly the rain-soaked pavements of Old Compton Street, or sitting in the spunk-soaked seats of smoky cinemas in Soho engaged in debauchery. Her particular preference is for anything with a dick that will use and abuse her and allow her to use and abuse in return.

This though was different. This was love. Neither Max nor Maxine had ever felt this way before. Not about anyone. As Maxine removed her make-up in front of her bedroom mirror and became Max once again, thoughts of Vic flowed through his imagination and flooded his mind. The way the sun came in through the tall south-facing library windows in the afternoon and fell in columns across the nape of his neck where it faded gradually with his blond hair as he sorted out the Newtons from the Nevilles and the Johns from the Johnstons. A chopped-in prison haircut had never looked so good on anyone. And the clean lines of his youthful face were always enough to initiate the desired response. Max finished with the cleanser and retired to his king-sized bed, as hard as teak.

***

At the very same time as Max fantasized about Vic, Vic was reading the letter he’d received earlier that day from his girlfriend, Kelly. It was the fifth time he’d read it. In the dim glow of the night light he traced the text of her handwriting with a forefinger. The letter read:

Dear Vic,

Hi darling, hope this letter finds you well. It was great to see you Saturday. You looked very fit, the way you always did, the way you did the first time I saw you at Cream. Do you remember, when I wanted to wrap you up and take you to bed and fuck you forever? You always had that effect on me, and I suppose you always will. Is there any news on the court case? I can’t tell you how worried I am about it. I know it was an accident and not your fault and everything, but the thought of you being convicted and sentenced to life in there is more than I can bear. It really is. I love you so much. I know you tell me you need me to be strong for you, and I am Vic, really I am, but there are times, like now, when the thought of not seeing you for the next God knows how many years literally terrifies me. I’m sorry, darling, I can’t go on with this now. Just know that I will always be here for you, and that no one will ever love you like I do,

K

Vic folded up the letter and put it back in its envelope. He put the envelope under his pillow, got up and closed the stiff cell window through the bars. Then he undressed, got into bed and eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

Max woke actually aware of the fact he was smiling. He tried to retain the clarity of the dream, and replay its most lurid images before it disappeared into the ether, as it had so many times before. Needless to say it involved Vic, needless to say he was hard, needless to say he wouldn’t be getting up just yet. At the age of forty-six, Max, unsurprisingly, lived alone. And always had done. There was a time, in fact there had been several times, when he was younger, when he would dearly have loved to have had a proper relationship and settle down with the right man; because at one time or another what old spinster didn’t have the desire to be looked after? But the sad truth was that the erstwhile objects of Max’s desires had found him just too weird to entertain. These days he was resigned to his loneliness and solitude; content to find his happiness and pleasures in the perverted corridors of his twisted mind. Besides, he had his all-encompassing obsession with Vic now to fill the void that had opened up and swallowed him whole years ago.

He finally dragged himself out of bed and went through to his en suite bathroom to shower. Afterwards, as he dressed in front of the full-length adjustable mirror back in his bedroom, he rued the fact that he’d had the misfortune to be born into the wrong body. In his mind’s eye he was a giant, a colossus – he’d been with Conrad at the mast; taken Asia Minor with Alexander; flown with Leonardo and rode the El Neno... He finished dressing, left his bachelor apartment in Hampstead and went to work.

Kelly woke, for the second morning running, with severe depression. Why had she sent Vic that letter? A letter in which she crumbled before him. She would be no use to him like this, weak and unable to deal with the reality of the situation. She reached over and took a box of Nembutal off the bedside cabinet. The bed was too big without him. She downed two of the pills with a mouthful of Evian, rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. She could not face the day. Not just yet.

Vic, as usual, had been awake since five a.m., when the sun rose and shone directly in through the cell’s east-facing window and fell across his face like an unwanted, unasked for, senseless alarm call. Curtains were not permitted in the prison. Three hours later his cell door was opened so that he could go to work. Quite why the librarian had offered him the job, and why he had been so adamant that he should take it, he had no idea. There was a certain oddness to the procedure that had never been fully explained to him. ‘Oh,’ the chubby librarian had said, ‘you’ll enjoy it, Victor. At least it’ll get you out of that beastly cell during the day, won’t it?’ Vic had replied that that was true, and had thanked him very much. After all, to work in the prison library was undoubtedly a privileged position, and... he would be surrounded by books. Besides, what other distractions were there? None.

As usual he was escorted to work and arrived at the library a good hour before Max got there himself. Max would usually appear around nine. Max didn’t need the money the job paid. Fifteen hundred a month was pin money to him – perhaps enough to pay for that pair of diamanté disc and drop earrings he had his eye on, or the Vivian Westwood A-line mini dress with a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes. Fuck all. For Max came from old money. The bachelor pad had been bought and paid for out of a not inconsiderable inheritance after both his parents met their end flying a Cessna light aircraft into the Mendip Hills when he was nineteen. After laying out three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand for the Hampstead apartment, and paying almost another two-hundred-and-fifty in inheritance tax, Max’s balance at the bank was still upwards of eight-hundred thousand. No, Max had no financial problems. None at all. His only surviving relative was a grandmother who was safely tucked away in a home for the deaf somewhere in Kent.

Vic put the kettle on and prepared two cups of actual coffee – not the spray-dried stuff you got one sachet a week of on the wing. There were perks to being the assistant librarian. ‘Two sugars, Wilf?’ he asked the ageing prison officer, who’d let him in and was the library’s full time attendant.

‘Yes please, Vic. Thank you, son.’

As Vic prepared the cups and waited for the kettle to boil, his mind wandered off to Kelly. He couldn’t help but worry about her. Usually she was so strong and positive, but in her last letter she’d sounded so down and depressed and all but fell apart on the page like a teardrop exploding. Was she cracking under the pressure? Would she stay the distance? In prison Vic had heard so many stories of lifers getting Dear Johns from women who’d been closer to them at one time than thieves, twins or lovers. He blinked rapidly and shook himself from where his thoughts were taking him. He hadn’t even been convicted yet. And there was a chance, a good chance, that he may not be either. His thoughts, though, like a magnet, like the gravitational pull of a happier star, returned to Kelly, ‘...the first time I saw you at Cream. Do you remember?’ Kelly was the best dancer Vic had ever seen. She danced alone, at the back of the crowd as they massed around the speakers, in just a sports dress and trainers, guys occasionally getting up the courage to dance with her, to try to compete against the music for her attention. They could not get it. She’d just smile at them and carry on dancing. The girls, being brighter, knew better than to try – Kelly loved to dance. She never looked happier to Vic than when she was dancing on her own, unfettered and free. And boy could she move. The night they met, Vic had been standing quietly in a corner just watching her, and you could’ve knocked him over with a feather when she came over, took him by the hand and insisted he dance with her. Her mouth moved but no words came out – 60,000 watts is hard to be heard above. But the look in her eyes and the smile on her face told him all that he needed to know. ‘...I wanted to wrap you up and take you to bed and fuck you forever.’

‘Morning, Wilf. Morning, Vic. Ooh, you do look tired, Vic. Did you sleep all right last night?’

Vic felt the pull of dry land and a hand on his shoulder. ‘Morning, Max,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please, that’d be super. Wilf, is it me or is it getting nippy out there? Did you feel it this morning? Did you?’ Max twittered, and without waiting for an answer addressed Vic as if he was still on the same sentence. ‘Now Vic, we really need to sort this place out today. The alphabetizing is all over the place, and it does need sorting out. Will you be able to work through lunch today? Wilf, will he be able to work through lunch today?’

Wilf nodded and sipped his coffee. ‘That okay with you, Vic?’ Max asked.

‘Yes, Max, that will be fine.’

Kelly finally rose shortly before midday. With an extraordinary headache. It was so severe she could not open her eyes. She had to sit back down on the bed.

The flat she shared with Vic was small and basic but clean. They’d moved into it almost a year ago exactly, shortly after having met at Cream in Camden, eight months before the events that saw him now facing a murder charge. She reached over and took a couple of aspirins from a bottle on the bed. She took them and lay back down, waiting for the headache to subside. As she waited for this miracle to occur, she replayed the events of that day in her mind for the hundredth time.

Travelling back from Strawberry Sundae at Vauxhall on the tube, shortly after seven on a Sunday morning, the pair of them a spent force, heading home to the flat in Forest Gate after six hours of dancing on a cocktail of nothing more than water, pills and love. She remembers how he seemed to be shining, actually shining, as he kissed her on the mouth then once on each eye. Then the madness began... the sliding door at the end of the carriage, a carriage that until then they’d been alone in, opened and in walked half a dozen black youths – Kelly tries hard to picture the details of the faces of each, the four males and two females, but cannot, only the one who died – ‘Yo! dis yo bitch?’ he’d said, high on God knows what, addressing Vic as the others goaded him on. She can’t remember the exact dialogue, but she remembers with crystal clarity the glazed look in his eyes – ‘Das a nice watch, white boy,’ he’d said when Vic ignored his first comment – ‘gimme d watch.’ He hadn’t liked being ignored again, so went into the pocket of his combat trousers and pulled out a flick knife – ‘Yo gimme d watch,’ he insisted. The others moved in closer, eager to see how this would turn out – ‘Give man d watch, anya not get urt,’ one of the others had said in a thick Jamaican accent. It didn’t take Vic long to weigh up the odds. He unclipped his watch and handed it to the youth – ‘Enjoy it,’ he’d said with a smile, hoping that this would be an end to the matter. It wasn’t – ‘Dis one pretty girl,’ the one with the knife said, turning his attention to Kelly now. Vic sat up straighter in his seat. The others moved in closer still, surrounding the two of them as he drew the blade of the knife across the thin material of Kelly’s sports dress where it covered her left breast – ‘it not tek much t ‘git dis little girl’s dress uf ur...’ Sounds of encouragement coming loud and fast from the others – ‘Yo! Yo! Boooya!’ from the males, and Kelly can still hear clearly the voice of the girl who’d shouted – ‘Yo Ghost, yo, fuck dat white bitch inna ass.’ She remembers how she was frozen with fear. Couldn’t move. The next scene happened very quickly. A pair of hands grabbed her roughly by the upper arms and tried to turn her over. A flurry of activity to her right and Vic was no longer in his seat. She remembers the wind whistling past her face and the dull thud as some part of him made contact with the chest of whoever it was who’d grabbed her. She fell back in her seat and for a moment the scene before her