In order to appreciate the full scope of the calamity, we must first understand that Neville Claude Aggot had undergone certain changes during his eight-year tenure at the Butterfly Lodge Enhanced Security Custodial Environment for the Differently Sane. No longer was he the scrawny, dishevelled, relatively lovable figure he had been at the time of his conviction for the Baker slayings. Eight years inside had done bad things to his potential appeal to a mass audience. For one thing he had cut off both his own ears. He had entirely shaved his skull. He had carved a selection of sexually frank tattoos into his freak-white flesh with biro ink. Eight solid years of chin-ups, push-ups and sit-ups had lent his pale quiet-loner’s torso a distasteful resemblance to a hard-on.
His personality too had undergone a marked decline. At an early stage of his confinement he had decided to turn himself into an intellectual, partly with a view to becoming his own lawyer. Accordingly, he had enrolled himself in a battery of literacy and higher learning programmes, and had begun frowning his way through the contents of the Lodge’s superbly stocked library. His tattered borrower’s card bore the title of many a thick classic that had sounded as if it might be connected with his preferred themes: Vile Bodies, The Naked and the Dead, Nightwood, Lamia and Other Poems, The Annals of Imperial Rome, More Pricks than Kicks, Trois Contes, Mister Johnson, Ecce Homo, Of Human Bondage, Basic Greek, Intermediate Greek, Greek Made Easy, The Artemis Anthology of Erotic Prose by Lesbians, Homer and the Oral Tradition, Sodome et Gomorrhe. Most of these works had comprehensively failed to deliver the goods, and Aggot had vandalised them beyond repair. But the kookier portions of Ecce Homo had struck a sinister chord with the crazed bookworm. In Nietzsche’s apocalyptic prose Aggot heard, or thought he heard, a welcome and rousing blend of deep thought and incitement to homicide. He kept the book beside his bed, and gazed for hours on end at the brooding, colossally moustachioed portrait of Nietzsche on the front cover. He got a fellow inmate known for his drawing skills to tattoo a likeness of the philosopher’s head into the brawn of his right shoulder.
In Aggot’s conduct and prose style, moreover, a strange Nietzschean flavour had begun to assert itself. The letters he kept sending to public figures and to the extended Baker family grew increasingly polemical in tone; they began to feature cryptic references to Kant, and herds of asses, and mountain spas. He began to think and speak of himself as a superior man. He applied for, and duly received, a pair of highbrow spectacles with wire rims. When news of this upgrade leaked to the surviving members of the Baker family, they complained to their local Member of Parliament, who raised the matter in the House. “Can the Minister for Corrective Services,” he had famously asked, “assure the people of this State that he is running a prisons system, and not a chain of optical boutiques?” The Minister, not wishing to appear soft on law and order, had reacted swiftly and unequivocally. Aggot was forcibly deprived of the controversial new frames: and issued with a large, square, brutally functional replacement set, of the kind worn by ghastly old-school comedians in the death-throes of their careers. Aggot carved a peace symbol into his own forehead in protest. A social worker said that it looked like a no-smoking sign. Aggot broke the man’s nose with Volume I of The History of Sexuality.
When SNARBY took up Aggot’s cause at around this time, the authorities at Butterfly Lodge had been caught entirely by surprise. Never before had they found themselves obliged to deal with a concerted campaign to set one of their clients free. The thing was entirely lacking in precedent; there were no protocols or procedures for it, no established framework for determining the correct response. The authorities were not, of course, about to accede to SNARBY’s central demand and put Aggot back out on the streets. That wasn’t in their power, for one thing. Moreover, even the most liberal of the Lodge’s employees considered it a staggeringly bad idea. But in the hope of making Pamela Scratch go away forever, Lodge officials did ease the conditions of Aggot’s confinement in a number of substantial ways. They reduced, from two to one, the quantity of armed carers who accompanied him whenever he left his cell. They undertook to relobby the Minister on the matter of his spectacle frames. They began to grant him regular supervised access to hardcore pornography. They even let him join the client rugby league team – a privilege heretofore reserved for residents far less likely to maim members of the staff line-up.
But these small concessions only intensified Pamela Scratch’s pursuit of her overarching dream – the prime-time TV special in which she would sit earnestly forward on her revolving chair, brandishing a series of damning documents and stating the case for Aggot’s liberation with searing articulacy; this to be intercut with footage of Aggot himself sitting wretchedly in his tiny cell, uttering softly spoken words of gratitude for SNARBY’s efforts while generally looking eminently oppressed and releasable.
And then one day the most desperate of the TV networks had embraced the concept, and the dream had moved towards fruition with dizzying speed. High-ranking politicians were approached, hobnobbed with, offered prime-time specials of their own; doors were opened, red tape slashed; and soon enough Butterfly Lodge’s staunch resistance to the idea was firmly countermanded from above. Hands were shaken. Releases were signed. Network heads assigned the project to their best-looking female reporter – a sure token of their seriousness. An ad campaign was launched promising the most “edgy” and “confronting” television programme of the year. A few days before the scheduled air date, the good-looking female reporter and Pamela Scratch sat down in a television studio made up to look like someone’s lounge room, and pre-taped a wide-ranging and at times incendiary interview. This ended on a contentious note when Pamela, asked whether SNARBY was more interested in trivial grandstanding than in a mature and substantive consideration of the issues, overturned first a glass of water, then an ashtray, and finally a divan before storming out of the studio altogether.
The signs were all good, then.
And then the programme went to air.
And for starters, Pamela Scratch wasn’t in it. The incendiary interview, in its entirety, was gone. The whole thing, even the bit where she stormed out, had been consigned to the cutting-room floor. But that was the smallest of SNARBY’s worries. That was the least of the P.R. nightmare. The truly regrettable thing, from SNARBY’s perspective, wasn’t the absence from the programme of Pamela Scratch. It was the presence in it of Neville Claude Aggot.
First there was a placard warning that the contents of the following interview were likely to cause deep offence. Then a black screen. Then a slow fade-up into a barren holding room of some kind, with nothing in it except a metal chair which appeared to be bolted to the floor. An array of leather straps dangled from its arms and legs. The grave chords of some Slavic death march swelled over the soundtrack. And then – in sensationalised slow-motion – Neville Claude Aggot walked in through the room’s only door, escorted by a pair of grim-looking armed guards. As they strapped him into the chair – one strap for each wrist and shin, and one for the midriff as wide as a championship belt – Aggot sat eerily still, staring horribly down the barrel of the camera. He wore nothing but a pair of deep-green Lodge-issue shorts. His veins and sinews writhed under his pale skin like an independently living thing. His forehead still bore the livid imprint of the attempted peace symbol. Tattoos covered his torso and limbs like doodles on an envelope. Most of these, having apparently been deemed too nasty for transmission, were obscured by a squadron of computer-generated blurs, which moved with the tattoos wherever they went. In consequence Aggot came across as a dynamic if massively restrained bluish smudge, with a pair of tight green shorts in the middle of it and a bald and lumpy skull floating around at the top. Only two of his tattoos made it fully to air: the twin portraits of his fellow intellectuals that adorned his upper arms. The one with a moustache the size of a scotch terrier was evidently meant to be Nietzsche, although it could just as easily have been John Newcombe. The other one was a strikingly good likeness of Ian Fleming wearing some bathing trunks.
Before he had even said a word, then, Aggot already posed a serious challenge to the maxim that all publicity is good publicity.
And then the interview began. Precisely where the really hot female reporter was sitting in relation to Aggot was difficult to determine, because the two of them never seemed to appear together in the same shot. Cynics would later allege that the pair had at no point been sitting in the same room at the same time. In any case, the fine-looking reporter got things under way by asking Aggot what life was like on the inside. Aggot, in a soft-spoken and almost childlike manner, replied by asking her whether her nipples were brown ones or red ones. This at any rate was the gist of his response. The bulk of its actual wording was suppressed by a series of high-pitched bleeps. As the interview proceeded, this measure was applied so frequently that at times Aggot seemed to be communicating in morse code. At one point, the fine-looking reporter tried to stamp her style on the proceedings by doing a flirtatious thing with her eyelashes – a thing that in the past had charmed many a revelation out of politicians, corrupt policemen, and rock stars alike. Aggot’s depraved riposte was obliterated by a bleep that lasted an unbroken fifteen seconds. This was supplemented by a tactical blurring of the image in the area of his green shorts – and also over his mouth, so that even lip-readers would be spared the full specifics of his phallocentrism. The two armed guards, who had never left his side, were visibly traumatised by the outburst. If the fine-looking reporter appeared unflustered by it, this only fuelled the rumours that she was never actually there.
Those of Aggot’s comments that did make it to air went well beyond the edgy and confronting. Asked to comment on the Baker killings, he defended them as a philosophically justified acte gratuit. Furthermore, he seemed – although his frequent misapplication of big words left room for doubt – he seemed to declare an intention, if freed, to hunt down and torture to death every surviving member of the extended Baker family. Invited to clarify this point, he gave a long and wanton speech that drew freely on the writings of Nietzsche, Machiavelli and Tom Sharpe, and culminated in an obscure prophecy that seemed to involve either himself or Zarathustra, or possibly both of them, eating a raw goat. Asked to comment on the activities of Pamela Scratch, he stuck out his tongue and – no ambiguity here – permitted it to describe a frank lapping motion.
Well before the special was over, then, it had become painfully clear that the chances of Aggot’s surfing to freedom on an attendant wave of viewer sympathy were small. Not even Pamela Scratch harboured any remaining hopes of that. To her, the finished programme was a betrayal, a bitter illustration of the media’s capacity to take an important and complex issue and reduce it to a puerile circus. As a contribution to serious Aggot debate, its value was clearly nil. If anything, it took the debate backwards. If anyone gained from it, it was the ill-informed scaremongers of the anti-Aggot right.
From one small segment of the viewership, however, Aggot’s performance elicited a curious kind of endorsement. In the days following the broadcast, Neville Claude Aggot received written proposals of marriage from no fewer than eight different women. In fat printing with open dots over the i’s they offered him their hands. Some of them quoted verses from modern translations of the Bible. Several enclosed photographs of themselves. In most cases it was hard to see why they had done this. Many of them were non-starters even by Aggot’s standards. But one of them, who evidently went by the name of Raylene Sneed, looked remarkably okay for a woman offering herself through the mail to an unrepentant thrill-killer. Neither fat nor egregiously bespectacled nor simpering red-headedly under a lapful of cats, she was pictured standing on a beach wearing one piece of a two-piece swimsuit. This was more than enough for Aggot. By the next outgoing mail, before she could change her mind, he accepted her proposal, and furnished her with a list of dates on which the Lodge authorities were prepared to make the grounds available for a formal ceremony.
Now, the girl in the photograph was not, strictly speaking, Raylene Sneed herself. It was Raylene Sneed’s cousin. But Raylene Sneed had taken the photograph – and was indeed partially present in it, in the form of a blimpy camera-wielding shadow on the sand. She planned, if Aggot should ever challenge her on the point, to claim that she had enclosed the picture merely as a sample of her photographic abilities.
But when the day of the nuptials arrived, Aggot was way too tranquillised to perceive the discrepancy. The ceremony took place amid falling leaves and the shadows of razor wire. The bride wore frisbee-sized glasses and a capacious white gown paid for by the leading women’s magazine to which she had sold the exclusive rights to her story. The profoundly medicated groom wore a white tuxedo, elaborate leg irons, and an electric-blue cummerbund and bow tie. Two client-management professionals held him upright through the brief and traditional rites. A lady journalist from the women’s magazine acted as maid of honour; its photographer served as Aggot’s best man. A celebrant who declined to be photographed administered the vows. On the advice of several experts in criminal psychology, there was no kiss. At the conclusion of the formalities Aggot was borne brusquely back to his cell, while his plump bride set off, plumply, for a week-long solo honeymoon in Bali, again at the plump expense of the magazine. The journalist and photographer accompanied her to the airport in a taxi with some beer cans tied to its back bumper. They extracted a brief interview from her on the way, for which she would receive close to eight hundred dollars a word. She made reference to the Good Book. She proposed that Christ, during his brief spell on earth, had been reviled almost as universally as Neville Claude Aggot was. She pointed out that Aggot was currently the same age that Christ had been when he was thirty. The possibility that Aggot actually was Christ was not one she was willing to rule out. If Neville ever got freed, she said, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. One day, she said, the world would get a chance to see she was right.
Nobody knew, just yet, quite what she meant by that.