And the rest. The stuff a past me would have avoided thinking about. That, sometimes, I was actually happy in there. That you have to be. You can’t stay miserable for two years, not really. Not all the time. And Reuben saw that, and he wondered about me. I know he did. I need to ask him about it. Soon. There’s lots I need to ask him, but I consider what the counselor said: that I cared so much about other people’s opinions that they came to construct me. And, when I removed them all—at my sentencing hearing, when I was metaphorically stripped down—there was nothing left. We found my sense of self together, me and Alan, in that prison.
There was a lot of truth in what he said. And so I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly as Reuben takes the roundabout. Second gear, to third, signals left to leave the roundabout. I will talk to him soon.
I get the Post-it note out of the pocket of my jogging bottoms and open it. On it are three numbers, collected over the last few months as the girls left before me. I key them into the phone, laboriously. It takes ages.
Reuben’s eyes land on my hands a few times, but he says nothing.
I text the first number, Elle’s. Almost immediately, I am added to their WhatsApp group. It’s called “Outsiders.” I’m the last one out.
I tap out a reply. When I look up, I realize Reuben has been watching, but he turns his head away as if he hasn’t.
* * *
—
The plants have gone. That’s the first thing I notice. The flat looks smaller and shabbier than I remember, which doesn’t make any sense, because surely everything is salubrious compared to Her Majesty’s pleasure.
I look around. There’s the living room. The lights are off, of course, but I can still just about make out the glossy wooden floor, the neutral-colored rug.
“All right?” Reuben says, smiling politely like he’s a bellboy showing me to my room.
I nod quickly. My phone is vibrating nearly constantly in my pocket. I wish I had a room to escape to, to look at it in private.
We descend the steps, and as we do so, a neighbor pops out. I’m delighted to see it is Edith. I had thought of her, randomly, about a month into my sentence, considering that I would likely never see her again. But here she is, one hundred and four years old. She waves as if nothing has happened.
Reuben looks at me. “The dogs died,” he says, and I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.
The flat is immaculate. That’s the first thing I notice. I wonder how he’s been affording the rent by himself. I don’t know, of course. This kind of intimacy, this everyday mundanity, is impossible in prison.
The sofa is different. Black leather. I don’t like leather sofas; I find it sticks to my skin, cold in winter and slimy in summer. He didn’t tell me about it. Why not? It looks masculine, oppressive in the living room.
“Oh,” I say, speaking before taking it properly in.
On the side of the cupboard is our blackboard. We were halfway through the list of films. They’re still there, all listed. I reach over and touch the chalk with my fingertip. He’s gone over the titles; their edges are blurred in places, as though I have double vision. They must have faded repeatedly, and he’s retraced them.
“Wow.”
Reuben nods. “I thought you’d want to resume. I’ve not watched any of them,” he says.
I turn and look at him. I haven’t been able to see him properly in the visitors’ center. The fluorescent lights made everybody look weird, their eye sockets in shadow. He didn’t look like himself, anyway. He dressed more smartly than usual, and his body language was directed even more inward, like a turtle. I wonder what he’s been doing. He hasn’t really said, except “the usual,” with a wave of his hand. He hasn’t wanted, I suppose, to eclipse my problems with his. Typical. Has he been seeing friends? Has he been lonely?
It’s as good a time as any to try to open the conversation up. The counselor said to do it as soon as possible.
“So this is your life. This has been your life,” I say, turning away from the board where I’ve accidentally rubbed away the stem of the f on The Godfather.
“Yes,” Reuben says, flapping his arms at his sides, slightly self-consciously.
“Hard to just—fit back in,” I say with a small laugh. I look at the cupboards. I open the mugs cupboard and find plates inside. I can’t see the kettle. It’s not out on the work surface. The kitchen is fastidiously neat, more so than when we lived together. Not a thing out. Scrubbed clean.
“Where’s the kettle?” I say without thinking.
“Oh,” Reuben says, and then, to my astonishment, he pulls it down from a cupboard. “I got a wireless one. Less clutter,” he says, filling it at the sink and flicking it on.
“Doesn’t it wreck the cupboard when you put it away?” I say, instead of saying the things I want to say.
Reuben stops, then looks at me. “It’s fine,” he says stiffly, like he is my landlord and I am his lodger.
I scrutinize the cupboard. Bloody hell. Imagine putting it away every time. This is what happens when a neat freak lives on their own for two years.
“We’re not seriously going to just resume the greatest movies of all time, are we?” I say.
He turns to me in surprise. Perhaps my tone—it’s more direct these days—sounds too harsh. “Why not?” he asks.
And I think of what Alan says: Is Reuben really always right? Is anyone? He sounds like he can be a little immature to me; he sees things in black and white, maybe? And Laura, too?
I walk out of the living room and into our bedroom. The bed’s the same. The duvet has the same blue-and-white checks that I chose once in Next.
The bedroom has been kept clean. So clean that as I look out onto the shabby garden above, running my finger along the window ledge, it doesn’t catch any dust. It’s pristine as I withdraw it. Already, I can feel the adjustment. I should be pleased I have a bedroom, privacy, freedom, a smartphone in my hand again, a clean, private shower in the room next door but one. The ability to do whatever I like. The pub or the cinema or anything, really. But I don’t. I feel sad for the lack of my cell, even though I had to use a chair to climb up onto my bunk. I am uneasy, a small ball of snakes in my stomach, not doing anything, but just wanting me to know that they’re there. And I feel curious. No, more than curious. Suspicious. Of myself.
Finally, the nightmare is over. As over as it ever will be, anyway. It’ll always be on some record, somewhere. It may be considered spent one day, but it is too violent for me never to disclose. And yet. I’m not relaxed, happy. I’m . . . what? Homesick? Could it be? Maybe I will be better when I am no longer out on license.
“It’s Friday,” Reuben says, walking into the bedroom. “Friday night tonight.”
Friday night was always film and takeaway night. But Fridays in HMP Bronzefield were the only day on which we weren’t allowed visitors. Ninety-three Fridays later and I hate them. I shudder.
“Is it?” I say, hoping I sound convincing.
It’s impossible to mark time without the beat of the Monday to Friday, without the seasons. We were allowed in the yard for an hour a day, but it was impossible to really feel the weather without the punctuation of daily life. What is a blue sky, or rain, or high or low temperatures without the other things from those seasons? A first barbecue, or an office disgruntled by snow at the end of March, or the light traffic during the school holidays, or an ice lolly on my lunch hour? They were contextless, my seasons.
Reuben leaves me to it, and I get out my phone and see he has organized it so that my contacts are already in there. I find Wilf’s name and press dial.
He answers on the first ring, and I smile. It wasn’t always this way, after all. Some good things have happened.
“Why, is that Joanna Oliva—a free woman?” he says.
“Yes,” I say, my voice imbued with something I don’t feel when t
alking to anybody else. Lightness, maybe.
He visited every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, once I’d accrued enough good behavior to allow as many visitors as I wanted. It was more than anyone, except Reuben. But Wilf’s were the visits I looked forward to the most, in the end.
“How is it?” he says.
I sit on the bed. Is it a different bed? It bounces softly underneath me. No; I’m just used to the harder prison-issue beds. I can’t imagine having a weighty feather duvet against my skin. I stand up again.
“Weird,” I say. “Indescribably odd.”
“I bet,” he says softly.
We talked about all sorts during those visits. Mum and Dad. The way I always used to know where Wilf was during childhood games of hide-and-seek because I knew him so well. We talked about our first holidays abroad and how we used to close our eyes as the airplane took off and pretend we were flying through the sky like birds. Wilf once told me he slept without a duvet over him for three nights running, after he watched Mary Poppins tuck Jane into bed and wanted Mum to do the same thing for him. She never did, he told me wryly.
We talked about what I’d do. Afterward.
“You’re so great with people,” he said to me one Thursday. “Do something with people. You understand them.” His eyes squinted as he said it. Envy, I guessed. It was the first time he’d expressed such a thing.
On a Tuesday, one and a half years in, he came in looking different. His face was still the same, with the dark beard, and he had his usual purposeful walk. But there was something about his features that was different. His lips curved in a private smile, the kind I used to see on Reuben’s face when I was texting him at boring parties from across the room.
“What’s going on?” I said, inching eagerly across to Wilf.
“It’s dumb,” he said.
I gestured with a single hand, palm upturned, to the scene around me. “You want to see dumb?”
No doubt he could see the carnage of visiting times unfolding behind me. Men and women squabbling and guards hovering nearby, ready to break up any fights. Women saying things like “I can’t fucking stand any more of your fucking shit,” and men leaving early.
“Good point,” he said.
We were just starting to joke about it. Just tentatively, like two children dipping a toe in the freezing-cold ocean for the first time before splashing fully in.
“Well, this wasn’t on my list,” Wilf admitted. He had become self-deprecating. Another change. “Today I was supposed to go to work, see you, then go to my Spanish class.”
A-level Spanish was one of the items on Wilf’s list that year.
“You can do things not on your list,” I said. “Amazingly, some of us don’t even have lists.”
He looked up then, his eyes catching mine. We both had brown eyes, the exact same shade, but his were big and round and close together. When we were little, we used to study our eyes in the bathroom mirror, standing together, jostling, on the lid of the toilet.
“There was a woman on the train here . . . I never would have met her, normally,” he said. “A Tuesday afternoon train.”
“No way,” I joked. “Who is she?”
“She asked to use my phone. She was . . .” He whirled his finger around, giving me the impression of wavy hair. “I don’t know—nice. Pretty.”
“And did she use it?”
“Yep,” he said, going to pat his pocket before remembering he’d had to surrender his phone on the way in, like airport security. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah—she did. She didn’t call anyone. She sent a text.”
“Right.”
“I looked. At what she sent.”
“Stalker,” I said, and it was like the sun had come out on my life again, however briefly. I tilted my head up to it.
I had missed that sibling banter. The inmates didn’t do it, not this sort of thing. And maybe, I thought, as I tasted it in my mind, maybe I had missed it for longer than my prison stay. Maybe I had missed him, my brother, Wilf, for years.
“True,” he said. He rubbed his beard, looking wolfish. “The thing is . . .”
“What?” I wanted to hurry him up. Visiting hours were so short, like tiny pockets of air in the vacuum of my week, and he was spending them umming and aahing.
“I don’t know. She handed it back and then she just gave me this really smiley look. She got off at Charing Cross and I watched her go. She was dressed in a big coat and purple hat, even though it’s . . .” He gestured out of the window of the visitors’ center.
I couldn’t really tell. It looked the same as ever. The sky was a flat, blank white. The only trees were evergreen trees, anyway, and I couldn’t really see them properly.
“It’s a really mild winter,” he added.
I liked that he told me. Reuben didn’t tell me; he was embarrassed I didn’t know.
“And then what?” I said.
“She had signed it with her full name—she was late to give a presentation.”
“What’s her name?”
“Minnie.”
“And have you googled her?”
“Maybe. I thought that was—that was odd.”
“You think she likes you?”
I was feeling desperate not only for the contact with my brother but for other things, too. A story that wasn’t only on the television or in books. Gossip. A tidbit. And, maybe most tellingly of all, intimacy. It wasn’t possible during visiting hours, during letters. It was impossible to have all the things that need to line up to form a relationship. The flash of an eye roll when crumbs are left on the work surface. The movement of a foot next to another in bed on a Sunday morning. Even a text. Not a formal letter already opened and read by prison staff, but just a missive: a saw this and thought of you. The kind of communication we took for granted. I was craving it. Prison ticked the main boxes; I got the socialization and the hour’s yard time and fresh air every day. I had counseling if I wanted, and I took courses. But . . . nothing else. There were no impromptu snacks. No giggles over a midnight film with a friend. No breakups. No train rides with a latte. No impulse pairs of shoes bought during lunch hours. And didn’t I deserve it, that deprivation? Of course I did.
“Well, I was wondering whether you think I should—say hi?” Wilf said, and I flushed with pleasure. He leaned forward, his expensive cuff links hitting the plastic table, and added, “You just always know about people. I never know. It’s like people are French and I’m English.”
“How?” I said.
“You know,” he said quietly.
He didn’t elaborate on it then, but later he told me: He’d always been jealous of me. How naturally things came to me. Not just my perceptiveness, he said, but my intellect, too. He was always working so hard behind the scenes, and there I was, finding it effortless. I was gobsmacked. Had never thought he might be jealous of me. He was amused, too, when I said the same back.
“Anyway. Her surname’s Tarling. Pretty unusual name. I’ve googled her.”
“And?”
“And she’s . . . she’s nice. She was going to present on law reform. To do with the NHS. How it runs. Lefty stuff,” he said with a twisted smile, a nod to when he once called Reuben’s job lefty stuff and Reuben’s nostrils flared like a horse’s.
I stared at the ceiling, enjoying the slow, unraveling feeling of my brain waking up again. Not intellectually, but—something else. Interpersonally. Not just making friends for self-preservation.
“As long as you seem normal, I’d be flattered that you were checking me out,” I said. “Most women would be flattered, I think.” I went to add something self-deprecating like, “But then, what would I know?” but stopped myself.
Alan would say I was good enough. Even with a third-class degree. Even while imprisoned.
My entire life I’d been so bloody frightened of what everybody
thought of me and my failed existence, and yet, when I failed spectacularly—sank so much lower, so much worse than failing a degree—I realized the truth of it: Nobody cares what you think as much as you do. Not even close.
“What’re you gonna do?” I asked Wilf.
“I thought—well, I thought I might Facebook her? If you don’t think that’s nuts?”
“Tell me about the smile,” I said.
“She was waiting—I think. Just looking at me and smiling widely, her eyes all lit up. Like she was coaxing me to do something.”
“Yeah—Facebook her.”
Wilf’s persistence was nothing like Sadiq’s. Here was true, happy chivalry.
“Consider it done,” he said.
We talked of other stuff then. Of the counseling diploma I was doing. Who my friends were. How Reuben and I were managing. I didn’t get to find out what happened with Minnie until the next visit. Prison was a serialization of my social life.
Now, at home again—wherever that is—I tell Wilf I’ll see him as soon as I can, and hang up. I can no longer avoid thinking about the difference between Wilf’s and Reuben’s visits. Wilf’s eyes had always been squarely on mine, as though I was a person who had lost a leg and it was his job not to look at the stump, to make me feel as normal as possible. Reuben’s eyes had drifted around. To other prisoners. To the guards. Lingering on the multiple locks, the procedures they went through in a closed prison to ensure the dangerous prisoners—me—did not get out.
I wander down the hallway and into the bathroom. I could run a steaming bath, my first in years. Grab a book. The freedom doesn’t feel glorious; it feels frightening. How does anybody ever decide what to do?
I wander farther inside. It smells of bleach, which tangs my nostrils.
There’s a tiled windowsill that is empty apart from one shower gel and what looks like a flyer, folded in four. It must have come out of Reuben’s pocket. Tentatively, wanting to know more about this man I’m living with after two years, I unfold it.
The Choice Page 24
