The woman breathed out through her mouth: a heavy, world-weary sigh. Then she went on down the stairs, her bony shoulder slamming into Jess’s chest as she passed by.
Jess carried on up to her own level and into the cell. Buller was lying on the top bunk, not reading this time but writing a letter. Her tongue sat on her lower lip as she wrote.
“Can I ask you a question?” Jess ventured.
Buller grunted. “If it’s a short one.”
“A very tall woman who… who may have something missing. Dark hair, bad skin, bare arms…”
“Liz Earnshaw.”
“Does she?”
“Does she what, love?”
“Have something missing?”
Buller put her notepad down.
“Oh,” Jess said. “I don’t want to disturb you.”
“But now that you have,” Buller said, “you may as well listen. Stay away from Lizzie. She’s a troubled soul, but she’s also very dangerous. Has she got something missing? Yes, she has. But probably not in the way you mean.”
“What’s the story?” Jess asked. “I mean, if it’s something you can talk about.” She wasn’t even sure why she was asking. There was just something about the tall woman that had stayed with her. Something that frightened her but fascinated her at the same time.
“I don’t do stories.”
“Do you know anybody who does?”
Buller laughed shortly. “Oh yes.”
Jess visited Shannon McBride in her cell because she only had the cell number to go on (Buller didn’t do descriptions either, or introductions). But as soon as she stepped inside, she knew she’d seen the young woman with the anxious bleached-out features before.
McBride knew Jess too, and was thrilled to receive the visit. “I was the first person in Fellside who even saw you,” she said once they were both sitting down – Shannon on the bunk, Jess in the place of honour on the chair. “The first prisoner, I mean. Obviously some of the guards saw you. And some of the nurses. But nobody else. Do you remember that you sang to me?”
Jess didn’t. That had gone, along with most of the memories of her first days in Fellside, lost to the meds and the near-coma she’d gone into afterwards. But Shannon didn’t mind. In fact she was very happy to fill that gap and told Jess the whole story, repeating some parts of it out of a sincere conviction that once wasn’t enough.
“I heard your voice through the pain,” she said. “It was so soft, and so gentle. It was like you had a magic power.”
“I don’t,” Jess said quickly. “I don’t at all. But I’m glad I was able to help.”
“And now you want to know about Lizzie Earnshaw. So you come to me.” Shannon’s hands were clasped to her knees. She was practically hugging herself. “Of course! Of course I’ll tell you! But I can only tell you about Liz if I tell you about Naseem Suresh too. It’s like they’re two halves of the same story.”
Naz had been the youngest woman on the wing, Shannon said, and in many ways the most trouble. She was only there at all because Fellside had landed a contract for dealing with female prisoners who were due to be deported after they’d finished their sentence – mostly trafficked women, but in a few cases asylum seekers who’d blotted their copybooks while their status was still pending. Naz didn’t fit either of those categories, but her parents were illegals and her mother had given birth to her in the course of a two-year odyssey from Uttar Pradesh to the British Midlands. She had spent her whole life in the UK, but she was officially stateless. When she was caught in a raid on an East London brothel, she made the mistake of clocking a police officer and running for it. Only an eighteen-month sentence, but she was automatically classed as maximum security because of the flight risk.
“She was cheeky,” Shannon said. “Cheeky to everybody. That sounds like a little thing, but in here, respect is very important. Naz didn’t have any time for that. She was fearless. If she saw something she didn’t like, she just came right out and said it. Which got a lot of people’s backs up. The lifers especially.” There was envy in McBride’s voice. Jess guessed that her own personality tended a lot more towards compromise, and that she wished she could be different.
“So was Earnshaw one of the people Naseem rubbed up the wrong way?” she asked. It seemed to be an obvious inference.
“Oh no! Lizzie was how come Naseem got away with it. Lizzie fell in love with Naz. It happened really quickly, but it took a long time for people to realise. Lizzie had been married. She had kids. She’d been straight her whole life. But one look at Naz and she forgot what straight even meant.
“And because she was older than Naz, and had been inside for longer, and was a lifer and everything, she sort of protected Naz. I don’t mean it was… you know…” Shannon made a vague churning gesture. “What you see in films sometimes, where a young con gets protected by an older one because they’re sort of like a toy or a sex slave. It wasn’t like that at all. Naz was in charge. Lizzie loved her so much, she did anything that Naz said. It was, you know, first love. First love changes you all the way to the bottom of your heart.”
“You said Earnshaw had been married,” Jess reminded her.
“Oh, she had,” Shannon said, nodding in vigorous agreement. It seemed to be important to her not to disagree with anyone. “But I think you can have first love any time in your life. You can probably even have it more than once, although that doesn’t sound like it makes any sense. Lizzie was like a teenager tearing up daisies and saying she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not. You’ve seen what kind of a temper she’s got. But when she was with Naz, she was sugar.”
Jess found it hard to imagine the sullen, monolithic Earnshaw in terms of sweeteners. Possibly that scepticism showed on her face, because Shannon hastened to explain.
“It wasn’t like she stopped being angry. She’s angry all the time, about everything. You know what she came in here for? Aggravated assault. A bar fight with three other women. Her sisters-in-law. Nobody knows why they went for Lizzie, but she left one of them quadriplegic. And it didn’t matter that Lizzie had, like, a really low IQ, and her dad used to beat her with a broom handle. They still sent her down for life with eighteen minimum.
“But when she was with Naz, she managed to keep that side of herself locked all the way down. She knew it was in there and she knew when it was starting to come out. She had ways of dealing with it. Just once she hit Naz when they were arguing about something, and Naz cried, and Lizzie swore right then that she would straight-out kill herself if she ever did it again. Just take herself out of the world. And if anyone else hurt Naz, well, it would be the same thing. She’d break them in tiny pieces.”
“Jesus!” Jess murmured.
“Everyone on-block knew that. If you dared to touch Naseem, you were going to have Lizzie to deal with. She punched a warder in the face once when he shoved Naz back into line in the canteen. A warder! So you can imagine what she would have done to an inmate who went near her.
“But someone went ahead and did it all the same. Naz had been talking… said she had dirt on someone, and a friend who was going to get her in to see the governor. Maybe she thought that with Liz on her side she was safe. But she wasn’t.
“One day she turned up dead in the prison showers. Shanked. With toilet paper wrapped around her like a shroud. That’s something they do to narks in Fellside – to say they’re lower than shit.
“Liz just went crazy. She spent four of the next five months in solitary because she was going straight from one fight to the next. She’d fight you if you said hello to her. Because her girl was gone and she couldn’t bring her back. If the world had a throat, I swear she would have ripped it out.”
That sounded like the end of the story, but Shannon leaned forward with conspiratorial fervour and put her hand on Jess’s arm. As though Jess had been about to jump up and leave and miss the best part.
“It looked like Lizzie was going to end up killing herself. Or just go mad and get transferred to Dietrich. But
then Grace picked her up, and that saved her.”
“Who is Grace?” Jess asked.
McBride seemed surprised to be asked. “Harriet Grace,” she said, as though the name was an explanation in itself. “You know, as in the state of. What they call G block. She runs everything in here. Anyway, Lizzie works for Grace now, and she follows orders. Which means she stays out of trouble because Grace expects her to. If Liz has still got one wheel on the road, it’s on account of Grace. It’s sort of funny, really. It’s like she can’t go crazy any more because she hasn’t got permission.”
“She looked crazy enough to me on the stairs just now,” Jess said. She told Shannon about her brief encounter with Earnshaw, which had prompted her to ask for the story in the first place.
Shannon laughed out loud. “That wasn’t Lizzie being crazy,” she said. “No, really, Jess, it wasn’t. Look at you!”
“Look at me?”
“Not a bone broken. You’ve still got all your teeth. Both eyes. No, what you got there was Lizzie on the leash.”
35
Jess had written a letter to Brian Pritchard. She told him she had decided to lodge an appeal against her sentence after all. She couldn’t do anything more towards finding answers for Alex’s questions until Pritchard replied to her and set those wheels in motion. In the meantime, she endured.
The business of survival in Fellside was complicated and engrossing. For someone who had recently been trying to be done with life, it was also novel. In the first weeks after her transplantation from the shallows of the infirmary into the reefs of Goodall, just getting by seemed to take up the bulk of Jess’s days.
Her nights, though, were otherwise occupied. That was when Alex would come and visit her.
Lock-up was the hardest and heaviest time in the prison day. It was also the most regimented. The rules were precise and they were followed to the letter. A buzzer sounded at 9.50 p.m. to tell the cons that free association time was over. That meant they had ten minutes to get back to their cells. To be out after ten o’clock was an infraction punishable by solitary.
Warders checked every level simultaneously. They went round each cell and tallied the occupants on a digital clicker. The numbers fed back to the main board at one end of the ballroom, just inside the main door, where the senior on-block would be standing. The senior had to make sure the numbers added up correctly by cell, corridor and level. All the totals were already in the computer, so it was mostly a case of ticking off OK, OK, OK in a bunch of boxes.
Then the warders called clear and the senior turned the master key, which locked all the cell doors at the same time. There were overrides, obviously, so any level or corridor or cell could be locked or unlocked by tapping in a code. But they almost never were. The drill was close up at 10 p.m. and open again at 8.00 in the morning. When those locks clicked shut, the Fellside women knew they were going to spend the next ten hours of their lives in a box they couldn’t get out of. And for nine of those hours, they would be in the dark, because lights went out at eleven.
Alex would usually arrive sometime around lights-out. The stone walls and the closed door, the floor and ceiling were no obstacle to him because he walked along some axis that was at right angles to all of them. He approached Jess through dimensions that she could dimly see because they clung to him for a while after he arrived: the spoor of the night world through which he had once escorted her.
The moment when he came would always fill Jess with an unreasoning fear, a sense that the lid had momentarily opened on a box that was better kept shut. For that moment, the dead boy seemed to be an ambassador from an utterly alien place.
But only until he smiled and spoke her name. Only until he started to talk.
“What was your favourite toy?” she asked him once.
Street Dance MoveMat! he answered with no hesitation at all.
“Which is what, exactly?”
You play the music. And the mat lights up and you have to put your feet and your hands and your bum where the lights are. So you’re dancing. And it gets faster and harder.
“I think I would have loved that,” Jess said. “But I’d never have got any of the boys I knew to play it with me. They were too macho to dance.”
I would have played it with you.
“Yeah, and you would probably have won, too. I danced like a drunken hippo.”
Lorraine Buller’s rumbling snore was the backdrop to these conversations. She never woke. But then Jess was only forming the words with her lips, not speaking them aloud. Alex could always hear her.
Once the fear wore off, she appreciated the company. She still wasn’t all the way back to her normal weight. Her body ached if she lay in any position for too long, and the wafer-thin prison mattress didn’t help at all, so she slept shallowly and intermittently. Some nights, her bony hips felt as though they’d been jammed into her torso upside down and sideways, and her shoulders were more like a rack she was tied to than something that belonged to her. She was feeling the tug of her addiction again, too, reasserting itself as she retreated from death’s door. Alex’s voice was a thread that drew her through the darkness to the morning bell.
Even by day, though, he would sometimes visit her – although he said the light hurt his eyes and made it hard for him to see. It also made it harder for Jess to see him, but she would feel that slender hand slip into hers as she leaned against the fence in the yard, or sat in the ballroom, and his voice would murmur in her ear – asking her questions about anything that was going on around her, no matter how trivial or dull it was, so her words could fill the gaps in his perceptions.
The gaps were enormous and surprising. Alex was far from blind but his vision was weirdly selective. He could see some things perfectly clearly, possibly in a greater level of detail than Jess herself. He watched Shamone Williams sculpting a horse out of a piece of cedar wood. She did it by rubbing the wood with different grades of sandpaper, because otherwise she could only work on it during the three hours a week she was allowed into the workshop with access to tools, so that horse was coming on slower than arthritis. Alex was fascinated by the work in progress. He talked about the horse’s tail – about how it looked like a real tail whisking in the wind, with all the hairs separate and distinct. Another time, he saw a shank Big Carol Loomis was carrying in her pocket, and he pointed to it and asked Jess what it was. It’s like a spike with bandages wrapped around it… And Jess stared at Big Carol for a second too long and almost got herself another beating. She didn’t see the shank herself but she knew what it was from Alex’s description. She didn’t doubt that he could really see it.
Other things it seemed he couldn’t make out at all. He had very little sense of the layout of a room or the placement of its walls and furniture. He would stand and talk to her with his phantom body partially bisected by a table or an open door, completely oblivious. He had a much better sense of where people were, and would usually move around them rather than through them. When they walked through him, he stiffened and shuddered as though he’d stepped in a puddle of cold water.
There was nothing wrong with his memory, that was for sure. He was endlessly interested in the minutiae of prison life, and he picked up and hoarded every nugget of information he came across. Within a week, he was referring to all the Goodall inmates – most of them women whose faces Jess couldn’t even call to mind – by their given names or nicknames.
It was easier for him, of course. Jess kept herself to herself for very good reasons: if she tried to start a conversation, she was rolling a dice where a lot of the outcomes had her being punched in the mouth. So sitting around quietly and minding her own business was her baseline strategy. Buller was cordial enough, and would talk to her about uncontroversial things. Some of the other women on the corridor would give her a nod. One of them, Sam Kupperberg, had even invited her to come to a meeting of “Moving Forward”, the self-help group she ran on alternate Tuesdays. But in the ballroom, Jess still had to keep her head down an
d her shoulders drawn in.
Invisible and invulnerable, Alex indulged his curiosity without any inhibitions at all. Jess was his epicentre, his tether, but he ran around her in wide circles and drank in as much as he could find.
Actually, that wasn’t right. He didn’t run, exactly. In fact Jess barely ever saw him move. He was with her when she was still, chatting incessantly in a conspiratorial undertone. When she stood up to leave, he stayed behind, watching her recede. But wherever she was going he would arrive before her, be waiting for her, and would take up the conversation from where he’d left off.
So it was a bit of a mystery to Jess how and when he got to meet the other women and watch what they were up to. She just had to accept that he did – and that he was telling the truth when he talked about all these people whose names meant more or less nothing to her. Yolanda Woods was crying in her cell. Kath Nickell had a picture of a man kissing another man. Amit Liu’s bum had broken through the mesh links of her bed-frame and now hung halfway down to the floor when she was asleep.
Right. Fine.
Then Alex got tired of the truth, or outran it, and started to tell her stories of a different flavour. Jess missed the moment when that started. It was probably during one of their lights-out conversations when Buller was impregnably asleep in the upper bunk and Jess was drifting.
The cast was the same – the women of Goodall wing. But instead of detailing the trivia of their days, he made them the inhabitants of a second, secret world that changed according to his whims. Woods was a forester now, improbably dressed in high-heeled boots and a white leather waistcoat as she built tree-houses in a jungle that went on for ever. Maybe that was just Alex riffing on her name, but some of the other connections were more obscure. Nickell wanted windows, more and more windows, but every time she put a new one in, it broke. Liu had cats, but she couldn’t get too close to them, because if she did, she started to turn into a cat herself and it scared her.