To Take a Quiet Breath

Excerpt

To Take a Quiet Breath
Fearne Hill © 2021
All Rights Reserved

GUILLAUME

The man from the ministry was not at all what I expected. Although I knew him to be in his midthirties, his pale skin was unlined, and he had the gaucheness of a younger man. He had also dressed that morning without the benefit of a mirror. The brown tweed jacket, with a red fleck, while old and comfortably worn, neither complemented the blue flowery shirt nor the dark grey chinos.

Notwithstanding, the whole package worked.

He was oddly out of breath, too, full pink lips slightly parted as if he’d climbed a flight of stairs, even though the visitors’ room was located on the ground floor. After unwrapping a multicoloured striped scarf from around his neck, he perched his slender frame on the edge of the uncomfortable orange plastic chair across from mine, then leaned forwards and breathily introduced himself.

“Monsieur, so good of you to agree to meet me. I’m Marcel Giresse.”

I couldn’t recall the last time anyone had called me monsieur—prisoners weren’t afforded that luxury. As we shook hands across the table, his hand smaller than mine, soft and cool, his blue eyes studied me owlishly from behind wire-framed spectacles. In spite of myself, and not entirely sure why, I was mildly intrigued by him. Possibly, it was his slightly flustered air or the way he curled the edge of the scarf around his fingers. Or perhaps because his pale face with its delicate features, framed by haphazardly cut glossy black hair, was extremely pretty. Even so, I had no intention of making this easy for him. I acknowledged his polite greeting with a curt nod.

“Guillaume Guilbaud, how do you do. I’ve been incarcerated for fourteen years, eight months, and three days. Before answering any of your questions, I have some of my own. Why has the Ministry of Justice sent its director of finance to visit me?”

My tone pitched somewhere between accusatory and defiant. I wasn’t the most intimidating inmate in here—far from it—but outsiders were generally wary, and my criminal record spoke for itself. Yet this guy only fidgeted some more on the unforgiving plastic seat and surprised me with a delighted, genuine smile.

“Oh, we’re starting with the easy questions!”

In a conspiratorial fashion, he leaned even closer. “It’s a rather odd one this. Let me explain. I spend an awful amount of time with my niece, Clara, who is eight, by the way, and super bright. She quite rightly pointed out to me recently, ‘Uncle Marcel, how can you possibly allocate the budget appropriately if you’ve never actually met any of the prisoners? After all, they will know more than anyone where the money is needed the most.’”

He relayed this in a high-pitched, little-girl voice, which threw me slightly. Thankfully, he quickly returned to his own deeper, refined tones.

“And do you know, Monsieur? It occurred to me she was absolutely correct. But, let’s keep that little bit of truthfulness between us, yes? It can’t get out that I make national policy decisions based on the insight of my eight-year-old niece.”

Hitching his glasses up his nose, he continued, “Mind you, perhaps I should consult her more often as, let’s be frank, she’s come up with a more sensible proposal than I’ve heard at any of the dreary board meetings I’ve had to attend. Don’t you agree?”

Whoa, who the hell was this guy? I’d been anticipating a nervous pen-pusher in a dull suit, clutching a clipboard, not some anti-establishment beatnik with startlingly clear blue-grey eyes. And he was still talking.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise right now for the sheer arrogance of all my predecessors in assuming they can make decisions about you, without you! And you have my assurance that I have instructed my juniors to pay visits to other long-term inmates over the coming months, at a variety of penitentiaries around the country, so that I’ll have a range of views prior to making my recommendations. Not only your personal insight, though I sense that yours will be as valuable as anyone’s.”

Was that the end of the spiel? Could I get a word in edgeways? Seemingly not.

He paused, only very briefly, in order to hitch his glasses up his nose again with the knuckle of his left hand.

“So, on seeking the prison governor’s recommendation regarding whom to visit, he suggested you immediately because a) you hardly have visitors, b) you have been stuck here a dreadfully long time, and c) because—ah…his words, not mine, so forgive the rather indelicate use of language—because you…are…ah, ‘one of the few fucking blokes in here who can hold a decent conversation, and that includes the staff too’.”

The profanity sounded so wrong coming out of his pretty mouth, and he winced as he said it. After he’d listed each point, reeling them off on his fingers, he then added apologetically, “But I have to say, the prison officer who showed me in seemed awfully pleasant and quite capable of chatting, albeit on a superficial level.”

His speech came to an end, and he sat back, seemingly exhausted.

Somewhere in between leaving his plush Paris office and travelling down to the island, he must have lost the memo on political evasiveness. I hadn’t needed to look up to see which officer had shown him in and was observing us with interest from the doorway—Antoine always had an eye for pretty men, despite being married with two children. Something I knew as well as anyone. Slightly off my stride, I had a further question for him.

“Your surname is Giresse. Are you related to Alain Giresse?”

He wouldn’t have been expecting that curve ball, but still, he displayed neither surprise nor wariness. I must have lost my touch; I could strike the fear of God into some of the newer inmates with only a firm stare.

“Now, Guillaume. Ah…may I call you Guillaume? You must call me Marcel. Monsieur Giresse has me imagining the ghost of my dead father looming over my shoulder.”

I found myself nodding in acquiescence, slightly bewildered.

“This is more interesting. Alain Giresse. Hmm. My aforementioned father has an extensive family tree, plotted back to circa 1800, which I can draw for you if you would like me to, at least, branching out to the first cousin of each generation. Any further, and I confess I would have to consult the copy in my desk drawer. But I’m afraid, unless I’m mistaken, which would be unusual to say the least because my memory rarely fails me, your friend Alain and I are not closely linked. So, no, I conclude that this particular Giresse and I are not related.”

“He’s not my friend,” I pointed out. “He’s a famous footballer, three times French player of the year in the 1980s, and an attacking midfielder for Marseilles. I asked because your surname isn’t that common, that’s all.”

Having planned my surly opening gambit, my even surlier follow-up responses, and several sarcastic put-downs smattered in between, I was rapidly losing control of the conversation. He regarded me apologetically.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry for my ignorance; I don’t know anything about football. Never even watched a match from start to finish, I don’t think. But I’m happy to give it a try if you think it will assist me in understanding you better.”

A further adjustment of the glasses up his nose, accompanied by a hamster-like twitch and another guileless smile. Determined to regain the upper hand, I tried a different tack.

“I’m wary of visitors, Marcel Giresse, so I’ve done my homework on you. Thirty-six years old and born near Versailles, you are the youngest person since 1945 to hold such a senior position in the French civil service. Your wealthy parents, now deceased, educated you at Eton in England, where you excelled, thus ensuring you were trilingual from an early age as your mother was of German descent. You then completed a degree at the Sorbonne in what can only be described as rather tricky sums, gaining the highest score ever recorded in the final paper before winning a scholarship to study economics—some even trickier sums I imagine—at Harvard, where you also won the academic prize before BNP and Amundi headhunted you. You declined both offers, taking up a position with Intrexis in London instead.

“After five years—during which time you were credited with increasing the value of Intrexis’s worth by 200 per cent when they floated on the London Stock Exchange, securing yourself a small fortune in the process—you turned your back on the financial markets and took up a position within the civil service, where you steadily climbed to your current lofty heights. Not surprisingly, on your present trajectory, you are tipped to be Head of the Civil Service before you reach forty. You have never married and have no children. Your academic citations are lengthy and frequently quoted by others. Congratulations, Marcel Giresse, on being dealt such an exceedingly good hand in life.”

If he was at all shocked by my background checks on him, and my withering put-down at the end, he hid it well.

“Oh, I love these sorts of games, Guillaume! My turn!”

Wriggling in his seat as if settling in, accompanied by another push of the glasses, he continued.

“You, Monsieur, are Guillaume Guilbaud, aged thirty-eight. You were born and brought up in L’Estaque district of Marseilles by your mother, Claire, who is half-Moroccan. Your Tunisian father left home when you were three, and I believe you haven’t had any contact with him since. Your older cousin, Bruno, took you to the local football club from an early age, where you quickly excelled, eventually leaving school at sixteen to play for second division Nîmes Olympique. You had trials for Olympique de Marseilles, which, I have learned, is a prominent first division club. On the cusp of signing a three-year contract, you returned home from training one day to find your mother’s boyfriend allegedly raping your youngest sister, who was only fourteen. The following day, you killed him with a blow to the head and subsequent strangulation. There were witnesses to your attack; the rape was difficult to prove as your sister has learning difficulties, and you were sentenced to fifteen years in prison for first-degree murder.”

He smiled at me gently. “Did I leave out anything important?”

This stranger, with his soft breathy voice and delicate features, was unlike anyone I had ever encountered. In three simple sentences, he had summarised the single, most defining event of my life. Without a trace of accusation, pity, hatred, or even fear at being in the presence of a cold-blooded killer. He could have been recounting my professional career highlights, as I had done to him.

Returning his smile with a faint one of my own, my voice broke slightly as I answered his question.

“No, Monsieur Giresse. I think you have…succinctly covered everything.”

“Then I am so terribly, terribly sorry that, in contrast to me, you have been dealt such an exceedingly bad hand in life, Guillaume. While it is too late for you, as your sentence is nearly at an end, I hope very much to do everything within my power to improve the lot of many others who have been dealt such a bad hand. That when they have served their time and paid their dues, the French state does all it can to ensure they re-enter the world equipped to forge competent, law-abiding lives.”

If it were only that simple.

“Why have you come all this way to ask me my views on failings in the French penitentiary system? Could you not have picked someone in a prison closer to home?”

He laughed easily. “Any closer to home and you would be living on my front doorstep!”

My confusion no doubt showed on my face. I had been informed that morning that a very senior figure from the Ministry of Justice was coming from Paris to talk to me. Why the point of where he lived was bothering me more than the fact that he was here at all was as strange as the whole situation. As if reading my mind, he explained further.

“My home is here on the island, about a ten-minute walk from the prison, though I have to commute up to Paris fairly frequently. Those infernally dull board meetings I mentioned.”

He smiled at my raised eyebrows. “It is unusual, I know, but I am given…ah…a degree of leeway, probably on account of my uncanny ability to perform those really tricky sums you alluded to better than anyone else. And also because of my, ah…uncanny disability.”

I found myself smiling back, even if I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what his disability could be, and I was damned if I was going to ask. He’d walked into the room unaided, and his ears and eyes appeared to be in excellent working order, especially his eyes, which were a hypnotically brilliant blue-grey behind the thin glass lenses. And his brain was obviously tip-top too.

“So what do you want to know?” I asked coolly.

He laughed. “Oh, my goodness, where do I start? You are the expert on failings in the French justice system, not me.”

I was no less immune to flattery as the next man, particularly when the flatterer was so pretty. I endeavoured not to show it, but I hadn’t set eyes on a man as cute as him since my friend Reuben graced the prison cells. Buying myself a few seconds of thinking time, I let my gaze roam the visitors’ room.

“Okay, Monsieur Giresse. Why don’t we start here, in this room? You were right when you mentioned that I don’t receive many visitors. We’ll come to that in a moment. But the man sitting to our right—” I pointed to a young Somalian prisoner at the next table gesticulating wildly to a nervous-looking woman opposite him. She balanced a grizzling baby on her lap while a grubby toddler of indeterminate sex crawled at her feet.

“That man is named Asad. He is the father of three children. His family live less than an hour away and would like to visit him more often. Whatever bad he has done, he would like to be a part of their lives; he loves his children. Pictures of them cover the walls of his cell; he phones whenever he can. He is entitled to three visits per week, each lasting up to an hour, in addition to a six-hour private visit in a family room three times a year. So far in the last twelve months, he has had one four-hour stay in a family room—supervised by a guard and not private—and his wife has been allowed to come here once a week. Did you know that only 22 per cent of prisoners achieve their allocated visiting hours?”

I sat back, folding my arms, eyeing him. Once again, if my aggressive approach flustered him, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he leaned forwards and frowned slightly.

“If I’m not mistaken, you have taken your figures from the 2016 report by the European Prison Observatory; I have access to the more up-to-date ones—not yet published—which show the data to be much worse, I’m afraid.”

He adjusted his glasses before continuing. “The reasons for the decline are multifactorial, which is an explanation but not an excuse. Believe me, I am not here to make excuses.”

After jotting something on a lined pad in indecipherable loopy handwriting, he looked up at me.

“I think the reason you don’t have visitors is multifactorial, too, but I’m guessing one major inhibitor is that your mother lives 850 kilometres away and is now in her late sixties. Am I wrong?”

Staring at him, I debated how to respond. Should I continue with polite verbal sparring and pretend some of this would make a difference? Or should I terminate the interview and walk away? Because it just became a little too personal, and to survive somewhere like this, personal is not up for discussion. But this sweetly odd man, with his kind eyes and lofty ambition, was a world apart from the guys in here, and I’d probably never see him again anyway.

“Monsieur Giresse, there are many men like me. Over a quarter of sentenced prisoners are housed more than 100 kilometres from family. And when your family is already a smidgen ashamed of you, to say the least, an expensive journey across France to spend an hour sitting with someone you thought you knew but obviously didn’t, and having a total stranger monitor your conversation anyway, well, it all becomes a bit of an effort. My family abandoned me several years ago.”

He regarded me carefully for a moment, the bitterness in my voice all too apparent.

“Monsieur, I cannot even begin to imagine how that must feel, how you must feel, after all this time. And I am sorry your family no longer wishes to see you. But I want you to help me to try to understand so I may help others. Like Asad over there, for instance.”

Mentioning my family, my mother especially, had been too much. I stood abruptly. Feelings I’d pushed aside for so many years threatened to surface.

“Can we continue some other time? I’m…I’m done for today.”

He stood, too, putting out his hand for me to shake again. “It would be my pleasure, Guillaume. You have given me much food for thought.”

I held his hand a little longer than necessary, wanting a last look at those eyes and that mouth. Now the interview was over, I was sorry I’d terminated it. He hitched his glasses up awkwardly.

“You…ah, you…you’re not as…ah, rough as I was expecting,” he blurted, and his cheeks turned a delicate shade of pink. “Sorry, that sounded dreadfully rude.”

I winked at him. “I can be rougher if that’s how you like it?”

Fuck, where did that come from? I didn’t wink at blokes, especially posh blokes from the Ministry of Justice. And I certainly didn’t come out with lines like that! If he was blushing before, it was nothing compared to the positively crimson flush on his face now. I made a desperate attempt to cover my tracks.

“What I mean is we’re not all rough. Don’t assume that because we’re criminals. My mum didn’t have much money, but she brought us up right. I nearly didn’t play football professionally at all; I was planning on college until Nîmes wanted me.”

Even to my own ears, I sounded lame. Why the fuck did I feel the need to explain myself to this posh stranger? I carried on anyway.

“My upbringing isn’t to blame for…for what I did. That was all me. And only me.”

A lump of shame in my throat prevented me saying anything further. Without a backwards glance, I strode away.

*

Predictably, Antoine was waiting for me as I returned to my cell, all leery smiles and nudge-nudge wink-wink. He was an attractive man—tall and trim, with an easy smile. He’d been a guard here for around four years, and most of the time, I was quite pleased to see him. Already having got rid of the guy with whom I was currently sharing, he locked the door firmly behind both of us.

“Not quite my type, Guille, but I know your tastes by now. That posh bloke ticks all your boxes. Fancy sucking me off to get rid of that build-up of sexual tension?”

That’s not what Antoine wanted at all; I knew him too well. My strange meeting with the peculiar Monsieur Giresse, however, had left me in an equally peculiar mood and, yes, vaguely turned on. I decided to indulge him.

“How about, Antoine, you kneel at my feet, and I let you choose your current favourite scenario?”

Sometimes I wondered how the hell I had got involved with Antoine, and then I reminded myself that he gave truly excellent head. If, in order to receive it, I had to growl at him in my most evil, criminal voice that he was a very bad boy and should be at home with his wife and kids, then so be it. It was a harmless kink, and one to which I was usually amenable, although achieving maximum pleasure while simultaneously fake reprimanding a grown man was sometimes a challenge.

Today we were playing naughty vicars. Shit, not one of my favourites. Theology and homosexuality weren’t natural bedfellows.

I pushed my jeans down as he knelt at my feet and got to it.

“You pretend to be the bishop, Guille,” he breathed around his licking and coaxing. God, this man has a good tongue. “I’ll be a young verger that you caught pinching money from the collection box.”

Christ, whatever. Having given his instructions, Antoine stopped talking and concentrated on the job at hand, going deep effortlessly. The hectoring words fell easily from my lips as he expertly started bringing me to climax, his own hand flying over his cock.

“You know what I do to naughty, thieving vergers, don’t you?” I began in my most spiteful voice, cringing even as my balls tightened. In these weird moments, I found it helpful to channel my inner brute. “I strip them and whip their naked arses with the leather belt of my cassock until they cry out my name and beg me to stop.”

I was only peripherally aware of Antoine’s responding moans of ecstasy around my cock. To be fair, we’d done this scene a few times, and I’d honed my script, so I could mostly switch off and concentrate on the fabulous feel of my shaft in his hot, slippery mouth. The one thing they can’t control in prison is your thoughts; I used to drum that into Reuben. Which was a good thing because, right now, the head bobbing up and down on my cock didn’t belong to a pleasant yet sexually confused blond prison officer but to a sharp-eyed, breathy, slender civil servant wearing mismatching clothes and a shy smile.

Antoine hung around for a while afterwards, which was unusual. Sitting on the bed, he fidgeted while I cleaned up.

“You all right?” I asked when it was clear he wasn’t going to leave any time soon.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Thanks, that was perfect. Particularly when you threatened to tie me up with a bell rope.”

He coughed nervously. “I…er…I wanted to ask you something.”

I raised my eyebrows expectantly. We’d chatted over the years about this and that, nothing in particular. I knew he was bisexual, although I was uncertain anyone else did, and I knew he was unhappy in his marriage and wanted out. In his turn, he knew I missed Reuben, had lost touch with my family in Marseilles, and didn’t have a clue what I was going to do when I was released.

“There’s a coaching job for you at Saint-Martin football club if you want it. When you get your marching orders. The men’s team. A couple of the guys who work here suggested I ask you.”

The main town on the island, Saint-Martin, was still very small, and the prison stood at the edge of it. Our inmate football team had thrashed the local men’s team. I sat down on the opposite bed and rested my elbows on my knees. We avoided eye contact.

“And my cousin runs the PMU bar on the port front. He could get you a few shifts there too. Between us, we could easily find you somewhere to live.”

I said nothing for a moment. So far, my plans after my release extended to visiting Reuben for a couple of weeks and, afterwards, perhaps heading back to Marseilles. Or maybe another big city. Staying here on the island hadn’t occurred to me.

“Can I think about it?”

He looked relieved. “Yeah, sure, take your time.”