by Adele Parks
We would go to restaurants, not trendy loud ones, that’s never been my thing. Most often an intimate place that served good pasta, somewhere where the waiters would shave parmesan over the dishes into satisfying mounds, rather than delicate sprinkles. I’ve always been a woman who appreciates carbs. Sometimes, we would be talking so much – laughing, joking about something or other – that we’d fail to notice that the other customers had dripped away, called it a night. More than once, tired waiters would start to sweep the floor around us, basically pushing us out of the door. We’d apologetically leave an over-generous tip and grab our coats, dash for the door.
‘Grab your coat, you’ve pulled,’ he’d say. It was a catchphrase, a long time ago. Simon used it frequently, whenever we left anywhere, as we left my mum and dad’s house after a Sunday tea, or if he picked me up from school. He’d put his head around the staffroom door and say, ‘Grab your coat, you’ve pulled.’ Not caring if the headmistress was sat there, sipping her tea, dunking her biscuits. It always made me giggle.
From our very first date we held hands in public. That was the thing that made me trust him. I’d dated enough shady men, who had multiple women on the go and couldn’t risk public displays of affection. He used to make me feel safe. I used to believe in him. The ghosts of that happy couple seem to be dancing around our table. Haunting us. In prison they don’t let you hold hands, it’s in the rule list we were sent. I studied the list, as I used to study the rules for Millie’s recitals that were sent from the dance school. I don’t like breaking rules. Not that I want to hold Simon’s hand. But if I did, I couldn’t. I could be passing him something. A blade maybe. Would a wife do that? Pass her husband a blade? I suppose she might. If he was desperate enough. If she was. Although I don’t know how such a thing would get past the entry searches. Most likely they are worried about passing drugs. There are certainly wives that would do that. Keen to provide a high, still.
I am not able to cheer him. That’s not why I’ve come, although I think he hopes it might be. I don’t know what to say to him anymore, nor does he know what to say to me. Too much has gone unsaid. I hate it here. I hate sitting amongst these violent men: thieves, rapists, murderers. I know there is violence and cruelty everywhere, but they are clustered here and that sickens me. It’s squalid, frightening. By extension, I hate him for bringing this place into my life. The visit is painful, punctuated with silences and unvoiced accusations, reprisals, apologies. A swell of conflicting emotions that threaten to drown us both.
‘I’m sorry, Daisy. This is hard for me.’ He blurts suddenly. Hard for him! I look away from him: blink rapidly, fight back tears. ‘Oh God, sorry. Now I’ve made you angry.’ I shake my head. He upweights his comment. ‘Furious?’
Maybe, or maybe I’m shocked, sad. I don’t know what I feel. My heart is slamming against my ribcage. My breath seems stuck. It’s too much. I feel too much. Loss, regret, fear, pain. None of it good. I want to find the words. I want to tell him about Daryll. Everything about Daryll. I never wanted to trick him into being Millie’s Daddy. I just didn’t know how to tell him the truth. And now we are here and I can’t tell him that or anything. We became strangers long ago. We don’t know each other anymore.
In a low, almost inaudible voice he leans towards me and confesses, ‘I don’t like getting visitors.’ I snap my gaze towards his. Appalled.
‘Don’t you? I would have thought you did. Connie gives up her time to come and see you. Don’t you appreciate that?’ I sound shrill and pious. I wish I didn’t. Honestly, her visiting him is between them. The truth is, his confession that he doesn’t like visitors offends me. I’m here and he’s telling me he doesn’t like visitors. And yet, what right do I have to be offended? After all this time.
He rushes on, lamenting his truthfulness almost the moment it falls between us. ‘Well I do, yes but… It’s complicated. I look forward to Connie’s visits, but I dread them too.’ He runs his hands through his hair. A deliberate, forceful move. ‘After she’s left, the comedown knocks me back for days. They’re two very different worlds. The world I was in on the outside and the world I am in now. I’m required to be two entirely different people. A visit is like a collision of those different worlds.’
Simon flinches, instantly regretting his use of the word collision. It had been an innocent word before, now it is full of potency and doom.
He shuffles uncomfortably. ‘And you visiting, I’ve longed for it, but I’m terrified of it too.’
I stare at him but say nothing. He thinks I’m judging him. That I believe he has no right to be moaning. After all, he is in here to be punished. Punishments are supposed to be uncomfortable, hard. But I’m not judging. I’m lost. Scared. I didn’t come here expecting to learn that he has been longing to see me. We are over. We are finished. We are impossible. But.
‘After today, I’ll spend days wondering how you feel it went. How you are. And I’ll worry about it,’ he says.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I lie, coldly.
‘Will you? Are you?’ Simon stares into my eyes, desperate. I don’t add anything. Eventually he mutters, ‘In here, everything is different. Well, that’s bloody obvious.’ His voice shudders. It is costing him, articulating this, saying anything at all, probably. ‘I’ve had to build some sort of wall around myself, you know? A barrier to keep me sane and safe.’
I nod slowly. I understand barriers. Walls. But it is impossible to know how far my sympathy should extend. ‘There were walls before,’ I point out. ‘The drink.’
‘I’m not drinking, Daisy.’
‘Well, you can’t. You can’t get to any.’
‘I’m not going to drink on the outside either.’
I’d heard him say ‘never again’ at noon when he woke up after a bender and then at 5 p.m. he’d ask, ‘Is it too early? The sun has set over the horizon somewhere, right? I just need the hair of the dog.’ He probably sees my doubt, he must recall the endless empty promises.
He sighs. He can’t want this level of emotional honesty. ‘Yes. Yes, I know you’ve heard it all before.’ He snaps impatiently. ‘I’m just trying to explain that I struggle to bring down those walls and be the person I was on the outside.’
I don’t mean to, it’s instinctive, but my face curls into an involuntary sneer of disgust. ‘I don’t want that person,’ I whisper, angrily.
‘No, no understandably not. I didn’t mean the man I was immediately before the accident.’ I glare at him. ‘I mean, I’m trying to find the old me. I’m trying to be the old me, Daisy. The person I was before I started drinking. I am apologising for not being that person. I’d like to be him again.’ Simon stops speaking. His gaze drops from mine to the floor. After an age, he pulls his eyes back to mine. I can see doing so requires a huge effort, like pulling a cartload of bricks up a hill. ‘Wouldn’t you want to see that person again?’
It’s a blow. It feels like someone has kicked me in the gut and left me doubled in pain because seeing him like this reminds me of when we first met. When we were awash with hope, shyness and possibility. When we struggled to articulate our fleeting, intimate thoughts because we believed we’d be understood and communication mattered. I see now that he is not drinking, he’s an entire man again. His mind and heart seem clearer. Beautiful.
I take a deep breath and say, ‘I want a divorce, Simon.’
41
Chapter 41, Simon
Simon hardly remembered walking back to his cell. He followed the line of slumped-shouldered men, who were battling the gloom of the fact that visiting time was over for another week. He put one foot in front of another. Hot with humiliation and disappointment. Burning with frustration. Sweat trickled down his back, pain shuddered through his being. She wanted a divorce. After all this time. True, Daisy hadn’t visited in the three years since he’d been locked up, but he’d chosen to interpret that as a good thing. He’d told himself she didn’t want to see him inside, so that they had a chance of continuing on the outside. Not
quite an uninterrupted timeline but a pause rather than a full stop. He wasn’t an idiot, he knew they were losing time, that he was. But he had thought that when he returned, sober and better, she’d want him back. That’s what he’d believed.
Or at least hoped. It was one of the things he told himself to survive.
Maybe he was an idiot.
A spark of anger sizzled inside him. He swallowed hard. Tried to control it. Not allow it to burn through him. He knew pain, regret, fury could cremate a man.
He’d gone through so much here. The withdrawal had been hideous and yet he’d accepted it, welcomed it. The minute he woke up in that police station cell, the night after the horrible accident, he’d known that he’d never ever get sober on the outside. Maybe he had realised as much the moment Millie’s body struck against the car and then flew into the sky, landing splat, crack on the road. He felt the thud clatter through his own body and knew he’d hit rock bottom. It hadn’t been a logical, thought-out thing. It was instinct. Instinct as a father and a husband. He realised that prison could save him. Save them. It was their only chance. The instinct of a survivor, he supposed.
Withdrawal had been a process where he’d accepted and absorbed pain. Physical and mental. He vomited for so long and hard that his stomach retched until finally he was vomiting up blood. He shook and sweated, his heart almost beat out of his chest, his blood pressure soared. The headaches were severe enough to make him cry out. He actually screamed. On the outside he’d have been given an injection of Librium to ease the symptoms. Inside he was given a plastic bowl to vomit in.
A few days without alcohol, and he’d started to experience profound confusion and disorientation. It was terrifying as he struggled to differentiate between what was happening and what was in his head. It was hard enough that he was in a cell, arrested, a criminal. An alien situation, it was impossible to compute without the crutch of drink. Then came the hallucinations. Gruesome. He saw his daughter march into his cell, then a car came through the wall and crashed into her, mowed her down, flattened her. Blood and guts flew about, drenching his clothes, splattering his face. It was horrifying. He’d pulled himself into a tight ball and begged someone, anyone, to make it stop. He’d been unsure what was real, what was a nightmare. Hard to know, as he was living in a nightmare and steeped in paranoia, shame, grief.
Then, prison life. He’d dealt with the day-in, day-out humiliations: crapping in a room with another bloke watching; having to ask for access to a telephone, a visitor, or a bar of soap; making fucking hairnets. And the things he’d seen, heard, had done to him. He’d done his best to go unnoticed, stay beneath the cons’ radar. Vanish. Still, he’d seen things, heard things; disturbing, scarring, cruel things that he would never quite be able to forget.
He’d endured the monotony, the waste, and the terrible food. He’d done it all for her but now she wanted a divorce.
He punched the wall. Fuck, that hurt. He’d probably broken his hand, but it felt good too. A relief. He punched it again. And again.
‘Stop, stop it man,’ Leon was up on his feet and dragging him away from the wall. Leon was skinny but towered above Simon. Normally, he maintained an air of passivity, calmness; he didn’t give much away, but seeing Simon’s outburst had riled him. ‘We don’t want any trouble. You can’t mess up the cell,’ he spat out the words. In fact, Simon hadn’t damaged the wall, only his hand. It throbbed. Simon could hardly focus on what Leon was saying. He didn’t care if he got into trouble. Or even if he got Leon into trouble. He couldn’t care anymore.
‘I need a drink,’ he yelled.
‘What? Man, no, no you don’t.’
Since he’d arrived, he’d heard stories of inmates who stockpiled orange juice and sugar, marmite, sometimes a bit of fresh fruit if they could get hold of it. They fermented it into hooch. It sounded OK to him. He’d been warned that these ingredients were the most sanitised version of illegal juice, sometimes ketchup or bread, milk, jelly or cake frosting were used. Whatever they could get their hands on. Plastic bags of gunk would swell, balloon under beds, the stench not quite trapped by dirty towels or laundry bags. Sometimes there were floating colonies of mould. It was squalid and desperate. Everything about addiction was. He didn’t care, he’d take some if he could.
‘I’m going to talk to the Dale brothers. They brew, and I need a drink.’
‘No, no, you’re not thinking straight. You don’t want to get involved with the Dales. Nasty crew. Dangerous. Sit down, tell me what happened.’ Leon practically pushed Simon back into the small plastic desk chair, then he sat down on the bottom bunk bed opposite, the only other place to sit. ‘Come on, what happened?’ Simon turned his head away. ‘You might as well tell me, there isn’t exactly a queue of sympathetic ears in this place,’ Leon insisted.
Leon and Simon were now friends, or as close as a person got to having a friend in here. Simon had to talk to someone. He couldn’t look at Leon but kept his eyes on the dirty floor and muttered, ‘Daisy wants a divorce.’
‘Oh, sorry man.’ Leon didn’t sound particularly surprised. Simon found that annoying, offensive. His head shot up, and he glared at his cellmate but his anger was met with a shrug. ‘Most of them do. The decent wives. Why would they want to stay with men like us? It’s only the skanks and the desperate that stay with cons,’ Leon explained.
‘No,’ said Simon firmly. ‘Some very decent women stand by their men.’ Even as he said the words he realised they were wholly inadequate. The domain of the wives of faithless politicians, or 1960s country and western singers.
Leon looked thoughtful. On the outside, he would have been recognised as emotionally intelligent. ‘But would you really want her to? I mean really. If you love her you should let her go. If she’s a decent woman, she deserves a decent man, not a con.’
Was that it? Simon wondered. Another man? He supposed it was an option. She’d betrayed him before. But it wasn’t how he’d thought things were going to be. He’d imagined a different ending. ‘Why would she ask for a divorce now?’ he demanded.
‘Well, you’ll be out soon,’ replied Leon. ‘Think of it from her point of view. You’re an OK bloke. I know that. You’ve been good to me. But you nearly killed your kid because you like getting pissed, and when you are on the outside, you’ll be able to get pissed again. You’ll stop being a decent bloke again. I mean, right now, yeah, you had a setback and the first thing you want is a drink. What will you be like on the outside?’
Simon gazed at Leon. It was hard to hear him. All he could think about was getting a drink. Getting out of this conversation and drinking until he couldn’t remember any of it.
Leon seemed insistent on drawing attention to the harsh realities. ‘There will be setbacks out there. You won’t be able to get a job. Or someone will say something. Rub you up the wrong way. And you are going to reach for the bottle straightaway. If you love your wife then you should divorce her, let her get on with her life. You owe her that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yeah, you sort of do.’
‘No. I don’t,’ repeated Simon firmly. Then slowly, with a hint of menace he added, ‘She owes me.’
Leon squinted. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t nearly kill our daughter. She did.’
‘What?’
‘I just took the blame.’ The air crackled with Simon’s revelation.
‘What the fuck? What are you saying?’
‘She was driving. Not me.’ Simon’s voice quivered under the strain of the disclosure. It was so big. So dreadful. Leon squinted at him. Took a moment to see if he’d heard properly, if he’d understood.
‘She was driving? Your wife was?’
‘Yes.’ Simon paused. ‘Look, I’m not blameless. I know that. I mean, we were fighting. I was drunk and distracting. I kept lunging for the radio. I wanted to turn it up louder. I was singing at the top of my lungs and she was worried about the neighbours, so she kept trying to turn it down again. She to
ok her eyes off the road.’
‘Shit.’ Leon wiped his mouth, shook his head but continued to stare at his cellmate. Simon understood. He knew Leon was weighing it up. Judging him, deciding whether to believe him or not. Simon did his best to remain open and readable. It was hard, after years of trying to hide, lie and bury the truth. Tentatively, in his head, he crawled back into the moment, again this was something he’d tried to avoid doing. It was too much. Too pitiless. Remembering was cruel.
‘She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt,’ he muttered. ‘That was so unlike her. She’s normally all, “safety first”, but earlier I had tried to get in the driving seat of the car. We stopped at a garage to get some water and stuff. I was still pissed and trying to annoy her. I said I wanted to drive. I’m not even sure I did. I was just being a pain in the arse. You know? She’d had to push me out the way and then she set off driving in a fluster, so she didn’t put on her belt.’
The words swirled around the cell. Trapped, like the two men. Real and raw. Leon looked frightened, concerned. He still didn’t know what to believe. Everyone inside said they were innocent, banged up unjustly. Simon could be bullshitting. Yet there was something about the way he was telling the story – sorrowful, hopeless – that made Leon believe him, or at least made him want to listen to more.
‘We were almost home. Just coming around the corner into our street. Music blaring, like I said. Daisy was cross about that, distracted. Millie just ran in front of the car. As quick as a flash. It was done in a second. Daisy swerved but hit a tree.’
‘Fuck.’
‘The impact was hard. She hit her head on the windscreen. She was out of it. Concussed.’ Simon breathed in deeply, slowly. He’d buried these memories for so long, choked back the words a hundred times, they scratched his throat now as he made this confession and gave the truth life. ‘I jumped out of the car. Checked on Millie first. Luckily, I wasn’t so far gone as I’d drowned that instinct.’ Simon shook his head, sad. Weary. ‘You know, I’ve lost nearly every night I ever drank, so it was easy to pretend I’d lost that one too, but I never have. It’s been in my head ever since. Banging away at my brain. Every last detail. Torturing me. I called the ambulance. I knew it was bad. I thought she was dead.’
