The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  The girl, whose name I didn’t know, led me towards the room set aside for make-up. But then the director blocked her way. He leant down and whispered something in her ear. It seemed to go on for a long time. She swung round and stared at me, frowning.

  I turned, to move away, but a light blocked my path. I must have bumped into it; the metal column rocked.

  A hand touched my arm. I swung round.

  ‘Miss Julia Sampson?’

  I looked at one of the cops, but it wasn’t him talking. It was another man. He wore a tie and a navy blue jacket.

  ‘Could you step this way?’ he asked.

  He was an actor, one I hadn’t seen before. I suddenly realised, perfectly clearly, what he wanted to do. He wanted to hear my lines.

  I followed him out to the lobby. ‘I feel so stupid,’ I twittered. ‘So embarrassed.’

  He stood at the top of the stairs. There weren’t so many people out here.

  ‘My big scene too!’ I laughed.

  He took something out of his inner pocket and showed it to me. He did it discreetly, like a pickpocket showing me a stolen watch.

  ‘Detective John Ermelli,’ he said.

  I looked up. Another man had appeared beside him. Now where had he been all this time?

  The first man took out a piece of card.

  ‘You are under arrest for the murder of Trevor Parsons,’ he said. ‘You have the right to remain silent . . .’

  The hand held my arm, gently but firmly. He seemed to be supporting me.

  ‘Watch out!’ I chortled. ‘I’m the physio. I should be doing that!’

  We seemed to be walking down the stairs, the three of us.

  ‘. . . you can speak if you choose,’ he said, ‘but anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .’

  ‘I don’t know what to say!’ I giggled. ‘I’ve forgotten my lines!’

  HERE

  One

  ONE OF THE showers is broken. They’ve blocked it off with a chair. I’ve reported it to the CO, that’s the corrections officer, but nothing gets done. It’s been out of order for days.

  I had to wait in a queue for the other one. It’s a laborious business here, keeping yourself clean. Everything’s a laborious business. There’s so many rules; so many lists. Shower lists, gym lists, yard lists. Bits of paper. ‘You got your blue slip, lady?’ ‘Got your ID?’ ‘Got your buysheet signed? No? Go to the end of the line.’

  I try to take two showers a day. The other inmates think there’s something wrong with me. They think I’m Lady Macbeth. ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’

  They don’t, actually. They don’t even notice. Most women here, like I told you, they’re pretty incurious. Some of them resemble the people I saw in atriums, mouthing at the rubber plants. They’re like those film stars who simply learn their own lines in a script, scoring them with a luminous marker, Me-me-me, in orange.

  This is even though Lila was locked up with them here, for several months. Even though both our cases made the headlines. I have to admit, there was some hostility towards me at the beginning, but it’s mostly died down now. In some strange way, they’re more interested in the stars on the TV. They watch the soaps; they call them their ‘stories’. ‘That bitch!’ they say, jabbing their fingers at the screen. ‘She’s the worst!’ They know them better than they know each other, than they know themselves. ‘Go for it, Belle! Go get him!’ Soaps, sitcoms, whatever. Roseanne Barr, it’s like she’s their nearest and dearest. It’s a terrible, one-way intimacy. Once you know them better than you know yourself, that’s when the trouble starts. I should know. It’s the most dangerous intimacy there is.

  Perhaps my status would rise if Lila came to visit me. I’ve been here three months now, and she’s only come once. I don’t blame her, really. I read about her, of course. Her new toyboy; her new film. Roly comes; he’s been surprisingly supportive, through all this. He’s become a sort of father figure to me. My mother’s been; she flew over to see me.

  She sends me postcards, too. I’ve pinned them up in my cell. They’re pretty picture postcards of England – rolling hills, churches, half-timbered pubs. That sort of thing. I know I sneered at them once: a never-never land preserved in aspic for American tourists; a Ralph Lauren theme park. But I find them comforting, now. That Britain, it exists for me. It has become a Kodachrome series of snapshots, like my childhood, fixed for ever.

  My cell is 10 foot by 6’a but at least it’s mine all mine. I wash its floor every day, with Joy liquid detergent. I have a bed, a metal locker, and a rail for my clothes which I’ve covered with a flowery curtain. Eight blouses, we’re allowed. Two sweatshirts. Nothing with blue in it, even blue dots, because the COs wear blue and we might try to escape, ho ho. Six pairs of shoes. It’s near enough all the clothes I had in Belsize Park, anyway. I’ve walked through those walk-in closets, those rows of Bill Blass, and right out the other side. Quick dissolve, and here I am!

  I have a toilet. Like everybody else I cover it with a chair, and I’ve laid a patterned bathmat over that. We rig up our small euphemisms. They’re not small here, they’re necessary. Roly sends me books and I keep them stacked along the floor. I’m always on the lookout for pieces of wood; then I’ll make shelves.

  There’s not much to read, on our unit. At the end of the corridor there’s a recreation room, overlooked by a raised desk, it’s called a ‘bubble’, where the COs sit. There are a few books in the rec, but they’re mainly encyclopedias and religious tracts. There are scruffy armchairs, and ashtrays made from empty tuna cans. There’s a TV, but with sixty women to one set everybody squabbles over what channel to watch. Yesterday I wanted to watch The Philadelphia Story, it was the afternoon movie, but all these women were glued to the shopping channel. The screen sparkled with ‘a-designer-inspired diamondique necklet, only $90’. They send off for things; they get the Penneys mail-order catalogue.

  I have a window, in my cell. It’s just a narrow strip, with glass slats that I can open on hinges like mouths. Through it can see a wall, a patch of grass and a strip of sky. It’s timeless and seasonless here. During the spring, some blossoms lay strewn on the grass, blown in from the free trees. Of course I see the surrounding woods, when I walk from one building to the next. The trees are heavy now. I know their rises and dips so well, and the solid clots of the evergreens. I make up imaginary walks for myself, over the lip of the hill. In my mind I can make the woods go on for ever, I can dream up vast landscapes to explore, even though I know it’s just commuter-land over there, and the bow-fronted toytown of Bedford Hills. Housewives must be walking in and out of Jeni’s Boutique, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  I’ve only seen this place twice, from the outside. The first time was when I came here to visit Lila. The second time was when they brought me here from Rikers Island, in the sheriff’s car. I was shackled. Hands, waist, ankles. They do it to everyone. ‘Sorry about this, lady,’ said the officer. That’s what they call us here, ‘ladies’. I’m a lady for life. Well, fifteen-years-to-life. That’s what they gave me. A longer sentence than Lila’s, but that was to be expected.

  Some of the inmates, they make their cells really homely. They stick up photos of their kids; blurred photos of birthday parties, year after year, from which they themselves have been excluded. They see their children grow in Polaroid snapshots. I’m glad, now, that I never had kids. They wallpaper their cells with mismatched floral strips. A white girl, down my corridor, she’s in for homicide. She’s painted this mural, a tree full of birds of paradise. She’s really talented.

  When we’re banged up, at night, the door closes with an electronic sigh. They control it from the bubble. There’s a tiny window, in the door. We have several counts a day, and one at night, to make sure we’re still here. At night we have to put our hand against the glass as proof of our continuing existence. Good night, sweet ladies. Along the corridor t
here’s a heavy gate that clangs shut. The clanging gates, they punctuate my dreams like that manhole cover down in the street, way back in New York.

  The other noise at night, it comes from the next cell. There’s a woman in there called Rita Salgado. Sometimes she throws her furniture around. She has seizures; she tries to mutilate herself. Sometimes they haul her off to the psychiatric wing. She killed her boyfriend, that’s why she’s here. ‘I came in the room,’ she says, ‘this motherfucker’s raping my daughter. Next thing, I was stabbing him in the neck with my kitchen scissors.’

  She’s in thrall to a big black dyke called Sadie, who’s built like a meat-packer and has a whole harem of women here. In exchange for sex and cigarettes she offers them protection. All relationships are trade-offs, aren’t they? Sadie has what’s called a personality disorder, but then that’s what they said about me.

  Know what this shrink said, at my trial? He said I’m suffering from ‘a severe schizoid personality with psychopathic tendencies. Denial of love at an early age has resulted in a blocking-off of the normal channels of emotion. This patient can neither give nor receive love. She has retreated into a powerful, at times uncontrollable, fantasy life. Playing a role triggers another personality that takes over her functioning self.’

  I wanted to shout: But I’m an actress! That’s what I’m supposed to do!

  As I said, Rita mutilates herself. She tattoos herself with pins and cigarette ash; she punishes her flesh. Her arms are a network of scars.

  That’s how they got me; my scar.

  It happened like this. I’ve pieced it together from what I’ve been told, and the state’s witnesses at my trial.

  Courtney Wilson, the coffee-coloured doorman, was watching the Marv Winfield Show. He was sitting in the lobby at Central Park West, watching it on the portable TV, and he saw me on the screen. First he saw me holding up my hand. Then he heard that I had been Lila Dune’s stand-in.

  Something puzzled him. So when the day staff arrived, the next morning, he asked the captain if Miss Dune had a scar on her hand. The captain said she hadn’t.

  So off Courtney went to his father’s apartment and he looked at the autograph. He went back to Central Park West and compared it with her signature on some service charge contract. The signatures didn’t quite match.

  He thought, maybe he was being fanciful. Maybe they’d laugh at him. Maybe her writing was different because she was upset. For Christ’s sake, she’d just killed a guy! Her hand was shaking.

  Finally, however, he went to the police. A handwriting expert was called in, who confirmed that the two signatures were not written by the same person.

  From that moment, things moved fast. A detective came here, to Bedford Hills, to question Lila. How had I behaved, that night? What had I been wearing? Was there any way I could have gained access to her apartment?

  Over and over, I’ve imagined Lila’s reaction to this. The slow realisation; the sickening sense of my betrayal. At some point she must have remembered that I had never returned her keys. I don’t want to think about it.

  They searched my apartment, that evening when I was with Roly. They found the keys to Lila’s place. I had kept them, you see. It might sound silly, but I couldn’t throw them away. They were my prize, my medallion, for the best performance of my life. I needed to give myself some recognition. The police also found, bundled into the bottom of one of my suitcases, the blue denim blouse which Lila had described me wearing that evening. I hadn’t been able to wear it again, or even touch it, actually. I had simply bundled it away. When they took it for analysis they discovered traces of the paint in Trevor’s lobby. When the coat was half-off my shoulders he had pushed me against the door.

  Ironic, isn’t it? Undone by my moment of fame. Convicted by the TV screen. There’s a moral there, somewhere.

  The cops were smart. They near-enough reconstructed what had happened. They had the evidence, but no motive. During their search they had found no trace of any connection between Trev and myself – I had even thrown away his postcards. Via the British police they could have investigated my life in London but there was a risk that I might get wind of it, and it was vitally important not to arouse my suspicions.

  So they decided to use Lila. They got her to lure me to visit her, lure me with lies, and they hid a tape-recording device inside her blouse.

  And I bumbled blindly into her net, just as she had bumbled blindly into mine.

  I’ve had to stop for a while. First I’ve had to report for work, then I had lunch. We eat in this big brick mess hall. Lunch is ridiculously early, at twelve, as if we’re in hospital. Remember, I wondered what had happened to rissoles? They’re here; that’s what. Today I ate baked franks, rissole potatoes and beans, followed by Jello. Kids’ party food. After twenty minutes, whether you’ve finished or not, you have to get up, scrape your garbage into a bin, and leave. It’s the rules. So’s not having blue dots on your clothes, or more than one ring with a stone in it. We’re locked into some insane, endlessly repeating production. Our director is a megalomaniac; he turns us into puppets. He pulls the strings, he choreographs our clanging entrances and exits. He’s working on a mammoth production here, with a cast of eight hundred, and this one will run and run. A maximum security epic. There’s no escape. Literally no escape. We are trapped in the present tense, we cannot get out to continue our lives. We’re locked into the endless repeats of our past dramas, growing ever more stale with the telling. You, the audience, can get up and go home. Rummage for your car keys, step into the breezy and now unimaginable street. Decide to go this way, or that. Stop for a coffee.

  A lot of the women here, they’re philosophical about it. ‘You play, you pay,’ that’s what they say. Jodie, who’s becoming a friend, she says, ‘This place, it’s a warehouse. They’re keeping us in storage. All they’ve gotta do is scrape the mould off us, from time to time.’ Like most of the women, she’s here for drug offences. She used to make $1,000 a day, selling crack. She earned nearly as much as Lila. When she’s released, she’ll start selling it all over again.

  I’ve started drama workshops in the evenings. I’ve got groups of women to work together, exploring their feelings, using improvisation and role-reversal. ‘Change places,’ I tell them, ‘and now begin all over again.’ I’m a bit of an expert in that. I use some of the exercises from when I worked on an Afro-Asian project in Tottenham, in my community theatre days. At least I can do something. And if I get above myself, Serena, she’s a huge, cheerful woman, she nudges me in the ribs. ‘Listen, you whiteass honky cunt,’ she chuckles. ‘You just remember. You’s just a number, same as us.’

  Serena’s training to be a cosmetologist. She does hair relaxing, cold wave, frosting. They used to be unfamiliar terms but I’m learning things, here. She’s been longing to get her hands on my honky hair, which has reverted to mouse. She wants to dye it blonde. She says she’ll do it for free if I can get Roly to send her Bette Midler’s autograph.

  Such things, she tells me about her past. Incest, rape, abandonment. It’s like The Color Purple re-set in the Bronx. No wonder she likes to lose herself in her TV stories. I’m the other side, now. I can see what we have been manufacturing, behind the bright lights; those necessary dreams.

  It’s simpler on the TV screen, just as it’s simpler in prison. Locked in together, these women construct whole new families for themselves, replacing the families they never possessed. Someone is ‘Mommy’, someone else is ‘Aunty’, someone else is even ‘Dad’. She might be the only Dad they have ever known; I’m not the only one with an absent father. We re-create each other, just as we re-create dramas of our pasts. And mine is no more, or less, believable than the rest.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Lila today. I’m at the commissary – we’re allowed there once a fortnight – and I’m standing in line at the wire grille. You show your ID card and then you push your buysheet through, with the items marked. You write a disbursement, the money is deducted from yo
ur fund account. Like film stars we are imprisoned in a perpetual never-never land, a childish place free of responsibility.

  I’m buying some packs of Winstons ($1.24), some roach disks for my cell ($3.10) and some raisin bran ($i.6g) for my digestive system. By now I know the buysheet by heart, I hum the items as I wait.

  Prolene Hair Food,

  Pomade, Dixie Peach,

  Hair Spray, Spritz,

  Cocoa Oil Hair Cond.

  The soap says Caress to me, the shampoo says Agree. The deodorants whisper to me Sure and Secret. The list of junk food always reminds me of Lila’s hoards, stuffed away in her trailer and her cupboards at home. Black Cherry Soda (18¢), Cinnamon Pop Tart ($1.32), Tootsie Roll Pops (5¢). ‘I’m a junk-food junkie,’ she said, smiling at me, the first time we met.

  I’m standing here, behind the broad back of Aunty Carmel, and I’ve suddenly realised: Lila and I, we’ve both shared this. Nobody else has; nobody in the outside world. Even Trevor’s body was shared by other women. But this place is ours; ours alone.

  Two

  THE LAST TIME I saw Lila, it was when she came to visit me. It was way back in February, and I had recently arrived. I figured she would come, even if it was just to gloat. I figured she wold be too curious to resist it.

  Everyone’s heads turned, when she entered the visiting room. She wasn’t just a film star, she was an ex-inmate! She wore her red fox fur, dark glasses and high-heeled boots. She stopped to greet one of the COs as if she were a long-lost friend. Then she rushed up to various prisoners, hugging them.

  ‘Hi Joanie, how’re ya doing?’ she called gaily, as if she were at a première.

  I waited for her, shaky with nerves. Our positions were now reversed. It was me who wore the green slacks now, the white blouse and green pullover – you have to wear the regulation outfit, for visitors. Maybe it was the very same set of clothes she herself had worn; after all, we were near enough the same size. That’s how the whole damn thing had begun.