The Woman Before Me

by Ruth Dugdall

  I’m writing this in my cell now, sitting cross-legged on the bed. The bed is so small that with my back to the wall my knees reach the sides of the mattress. The cell door is locked, but I can hear the officers talking in the corridor. We inmates listen, quiet as mice, straining our ears for information. We know who’s sleeping with who, who has family trouble, who’s ill. All their secrets and lies. We know more about the screws than they know about us. Being in control isn’t just about who wears a uniform.

  When the corridor is silent I know the shifts have changed. It’s the night shift now, and there’s only one officer on duty. They’re supposed to do an hourly check of the cells but they never do. There are often women on ‘suicide watch,’ and they need close observation since there are many ways to kill yourself, and it looks bad on the prison record if a shoelace wasn’t confiscated, if the syringe wasn’t found. Prisons are frightening places, and some inmates prefer death.

  If you want to survive in here you follow the rules—someone gobbing in your food is the least trouble you can expect. I tell the new girls this:

  For God’s sake, don’t borrow, no matter how badly you need that phone card to call and wish your mum happy birthday, and never deal drugs no matter how much you need that fix. You’ll have to pay it back, but double, and then you’ll borrow again and the debt will rise until you’re on the wrong end of a sock with batteries in it. Or worse. Some girls have razors and, when they’re not cutting their own arms they’ll go for you, especially if you’re pretty, and boiling water hurts like hell, scarring you for life.

  Best to learn quickly. It’s dog eat dog in here. One girl with HIV threatens with a needle, so don’t mess with her. In fact, don’t mess with anyone unless you want your cheek cut open. Find someone to look out for you. Someone like me, who knows the ropes. The screws aren’t going to do it, especially not at night and that’s when a lot of bullying happens. If you’re new you’ll be asked to sing or face punishment the next day. The screw on night duty will sleep or watch TV, so don’t expect them to take care of you. Night shifts are an easy ride. Unless they’re on suicide watch, they’re being paid to dream, only disturbed when the day staff arrive at 8 a.m.

  I go to my window and push open the thin rectangle of unbreakable glass. It’s small but the air comes in fresh and warm, and I breathe it in. From here I can see the block opposite, women standing, as I am, at barred windows. Some have sheets, which they have wound into ropes, using them to swing notes and stuff between each other’s windows. One woman swings a small bundle across, probably cigs or chocolate, friendship or fear making her give away her supply.

  I can’t see my own neighbours, but I know who’s in each cell. I can hear them whispering the gossip. Sometimes I just listen, but not today.

  “Janie?” I hiss.

  She immediately squeaks back, “Here, Rose,” like a pupil at registration.

  “Did you do it?”

  “Yes. I didn’t find much.”

  Janie often gets on my nerves, brown-nosing the officers, but I was still glad when she was also transferred to Bishop’s Hill. Janie’s someone I like having around, we get on and I can ask her for favours. We’re friends, as much as anyone can be in prison. She’s one of those unlucky women who wouldn’t be in prison if she hadn’t fallen in with the wrong sort. But then what other sort would choose Janie as a friend? She’s small and forgettable, perfect for any number of crimes. She would be a loyal lookout, an ideal burglar.

  Janie had fallen in with a gang led by a woman who was assistant manager at a jewellers. She passed on the addresses of customers who had bought valuable jewellery and a burglary would follow. Unfortunately for them, on the last job, Janie was so nervous she shat herself. Left a pile of evidence on the grassy verge.

  The problem with Janie is that she’s weak. She’s can’t resist pressure; she’s a tell-tale. That’s why she’s with us on the rule. Suicides and snitches, the bullied and the notorious. We all need to be protected, either from other people or from ourselves. D wing is our special place, the inmates in the kitchens will spit in our food; we’re despised.

  After the police checked the feces for DNA, Janie was arrested. To get a lighter sentence she spilled the names of every gang member as well as the assistant manager at the jewellery shop. Grassing on that scale means she’ll always have to watch her back.

  Janie has some power with us, because she’s an orderly. The officers, recognising her obedience, appointed her to this prized position. She cleans the admin block, the rooms of the psychologist and governor, dusts the filing cabinets where precious files are kept. She’s a good cleaner; she would scrub a toilet with a toothbrush if they asked, she’s that type. But being submissive is also a flaw. What makes her a good orderly also makes her a good informant. Today she cleaned the new probation officer’s room.

  “Tell me what you found.”

  “Well, it’s a small office, just a desk and a chair really.”

  “Did you check the desk drawers?”

  “Yup. There was an open pack of custard creams, so I took some.” She sniggers at her own daring.

  “What else?”

  “There was a notepad. With your name on it.”

  “What else was written on it?”

  “I’m not sure. Nothing much.”

  I curse Janie for not being able to read very well. I’ll have to get her to steal Cate’s notes to know what she’s written about me.

  “And there was a photo of a little girl on the desk. Real pretty. Hair in bunches. Licking an ice cream.”

  “That’ll be her daughter. How old did she look?”

  “Four or five, I reckon. There was a picture on the wall, y’know a kid’s drawing, with her name on it.”

  “You know the girl’s name?”

  “Yeah, it was on the picture. In big letters. A—M—E—L—I—A.”

  “Amelia.”

  Janie has risked a lot for me. If she were caught snooping she’d lose her cleaning job and probably be sent to segregation. She put herself in danger, for my sake.

  “Good girl, Janie. You’ve done really well. Now you need to find out if Cate Austin has a man.” I breathe in the free air and smile into the night.

  Nights are so hard, Jason. I can’t sleep. Do you still sleep with your body splayed in total submission? I would watch you at night, as you dreamed, amazed that you were mine.

  I’ll tell you a story now, write it down for you in my black book, which I’ll give to you one day. It’s more about a girl named Rose who lived by the sea.

  My life before you met me, made me what I am.

  9

  Black Book Entry

  I was brought up in Suffolk, in a seaside town where my family owned a shop. Lowestoft had seen better days and the once-grand town houses along the front were now split into flats and lived in by single mums and teenagers on benefit. There were four of us: me, my mum and dad, and Peter. He was two years older than me, a beast of a boy with piggy eyes in a pale, podgy face and a brain the size of a pea. He had my mother’s pale colouring but none of her delicacy. He used to bully me endlessly, as older brothers do, but Mum said I had to make allowances because Peter was ‘special,’ meaning he was stupid.

  Our shop was by the beach, the type of seaside convenience store that sells everything and Mum was supposed to look after Peter and me but she went through periods when she just couldn’t handle us and would stay in bed. When she was well, she’d be full of fun, taking us swimming in the sea, letting me play with her long sunshine hair. But those days would be suddenly eclipsed by her ‘loony spells’, as Dad called it, when her hair would be greasy and her eyes dull.

  I was just a child and didn’t know much, but I’d noticed that one of the customers, Mrs. Carron, popped in the shop a lot. She was a flouncy woman with musky perfume and pink lips. Lots of the housewives in the terraces would come in for loaves of bread or packets of biscuits most days. My dad was friendly with them all, and if he was even fr
iendlier with the Mrs. Pink-lips, that seemed okay. Why should I think anything of him joking with her or staring at her bottom when she walked away? He was a man, after all, and she was one of those women who dolled herself up and laughed like a spoon in a glass, so it all seemed normal, nothing strange or bad. But Mum didn’t think so.

  I heard her shouting about it, and knew the words were bad even if I didn’t know what ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ really meant, and my father shouting back, saying ‘shut up!’ and then calling her a mad woman and finally saying, ‘well, who could blame me?’ That was when she would cry. After these arguments she’d go to bed and Dad would go out. He never said where to, but he’d come back smelling of musk with pink lipstick on his cheek.

  After arguing with my father, Mum looked different, angry and sad. She’d hold herself as if she had a heavy weight to carry and her mouth would be pulled down at the sides, she wouldn’t laugh, like she did when she was well. I rode the roller-coaster of her moods. She could be warm and loving, when we would do exciting things. But on her ‘loony’ days, she’d look at me like I was a stranger.

  When Mum was ill, Peter and I would have to stay in the shop and not get under anyone’s feet. There were comics on sale and we would try to sneak a look but Dad would tell us not to touch, and we got bored. Peter would poke me, booming insults in his bass voice, nick my book away or tease me for being fat. Sometimes he would go with his mates to the beach, and I would be glad.

  I didn’t want to be in the shop. I wanted to be with Mum. I sneaked into her room and climbed onto the bed, snuggling under her duvet and playing at dens.

  The blackbirds were back, building their nests. In the rain.

  I could see them from my mother’s bed, flying in the grey-torn sky and darting to a bush. The slash of dark wings against lime and yellow, disappearing into the shrub, one going in, the other coming out, over and over. Wet feathers. Dripping leaves. The beaked grip on thin brown wood, the unlikely angle of the head as the twig slid into place. The black beady eye. A single jet feather lifted by the wind. I watched and shivered.

  The window shook, but I was safe from the weather in my duvet den.

  I cuddled close and Mum kissed my head. My nest, her bed. They wanted a home, those birds, a place for eggs, for chicks to hatch. “Oh my, just look,” she said, so soft, “how they keep on and on. They believe in their little nest . . . and it’s pouring now. How did they learn to be so determined?” She nestled in the downy pillow, and the exhaustion of speaking made her close her eyes.

  A shameful thought: not like her. She never had any determination, always so tired.

  Push it away.

  I kissed her hand, light as a feather, and so cold. “Oh, Rosie,” she said, her eyes still closed, “just to see them makes me so tired. Over and over, until the nest’s built, and then the waiting . . .”

  I knew about waiting. The sitting and being still and waiting until she was well again, until she was up and I was safe and could breathe again, and she was my mother.

  The rain didn’t stop.

  Elaeagnus. “El—ae—ag—nus” she said the next day, sounding it out for me. That tree. That shrub, so thick and wide, outside the window. Yellow and small, white flowers that smelled of lime even stronger after the rain. I knew—I’d been there, before school. If only she would open a window. Since the sky was dried out, all wrung. But she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. It was her nest. Days she stayed in there. Days and days.

  We watched, after school. Me in blue gingham and her in a white nightdress. She watched the blackbirds and I watched her for signs that she was ready to get up. To be well. More comings and goings from the blackbird nest, but only one this time, “The male. You can tell from the orange beak,” she whispered, as if he might hear and be disturbed, “and it’s bigger too.”

  What was bigger, when there was only one? Nothing to measure it against. How do you know what’s big, what’s right, what’s wrong, if you’ve nothing to compare it with? But its beak, sure enough, was orange. Full, too, not with twigs anymore, but with worms and grubs and I thought the chicks must be hatched. The bird was so quick, keeping on and on. “My chick,” she said, stroking my arm, “my Rosie.”

  I thought of Peter, downstairs. Her clumsy, stupid other chick, who only came to see her when Dad made him. “Go say goodnight to your mum.” Not like me, who couldn’t stay away and was always getting told off by Dad for disturbing her.

  I thought of Dad, working downstairs in the shop, and how he foraged like the blackbird each meal time while Mum was in her nest.

  “I wish,” she said, and I held my breath, not having known her to wish for anything, so knowing it was important. “I wish I could look in that nest.” She surprised me. “Climb up, into the Elaeagnus—no, fly up there like a bird and peer in to see how many chicks, how many preciously thin, hollowed-boned babies are waiting, mouths wide for food.”

  She wasn’t talking to me. It was to herself, to the air. To the birds outside that she envied. “I wish I could make them strong and healthy and able one day to leave. To fly away.”

  She started to cry, like always, and I didn’t know how to comfort her. How to stop her open mouth, which was crying out for something that I couldn’t give her, because I didn’t know what it was she needed, to make her strong. I had no comparison, to know what was wrong.

  When I arrived home after school I would be tired and hungry but I would have to sit in the shop until closing time, my head resting on crossed arms as my eyes blinked away sleep. The regulars got to know me, and would joke about me being the youngest shop assistant in Lowestoft. My favourite place in the whole shop was on a wooden stool beneath the row of glass jars full of sweets: pink peppermint rock, square yellow pineapple chunks that made your mouth sore, shiny brown cola bottles you could spend ages sucking the sugar off, sherbet lemons the colour of mum’s hair and— my favourite—those sticky toffee bon bons covered in icing sugar which dusted your fingers.

  The shelf was too high for me to reach, even from the stool, so they tempted me every day. Peter could reach, and he would get a sticky toffee, taunting me. “Not getting any for you. You’re fat enough already!”

  “Please, Peter.”

  “Get stuffed.”

  He’d chew his toffee loudly, with an open mouth, wide open, showing me the sticky mess inside, until I wanted to slap him but if I did he’d go crying to Dad and I’d get told off, since Peter was a bit ‘special,’ meaning he was retarded. He was in a learningsupport class in school and the books he brought home I’d read at infant school.

  The only thing Peter and me had in common was that we both loved penny sweets. We called them that because each Saturday Dad would give us ten pence to spend, and we would buy a bag, one penny for each sweet we chose. I spent hours planning how I was going to spend it.

  Peter would eat his sweets immediately, but I would squirrel mine away in an empty ice cream tub. Through the week I’d allow myself one or two, a bon bon or liquorice bootlace, but most would be hoarded, and soon my secret stash grew quite large. Each week, his bag empty, Peter would steal handfuls from my box. I learnt to offer him some for favours: to have him reach me things, to borrow his personal stereo.

  I took such pleasure in my horde that I would often tip them from the box, just to look. My mother had coloured sweets too, in little glass bottles with tops that didn’t ever come off when I tried to open them. She kept them in her bedside cupboard and would eat them when she was ill. I sometimes offered her one of mine, but she would always refuse.

  That summer, when school finished and I was nearing my eleventh birthday, the days in the shop seemed to drag on and on forever. I willed Mum to get better so we could go out somewhere, but she had been ill for ages and hardly left her bedroom. At least we had the blackbirds to watch, and she let me go to her each evening once the shop was closed. Together we saw the yellow ball of the sun change to red and die. The moon replaced it, beautiful and large and shining on us, turning
her nightdress to white sand, her skin to millions of pearly shells. The air was thick and warm and smelt of salt. It was safe up there. Downstairs, Peter would be into something he shouldn’t be or scoffing sweets. Dad would be working, stocking shelves and ordering, and then cooking our tea with the TV blaring out, but in Mum’s room it was peaceful.

  Dad didn’t go up to Mum anymore, but slept in a chair in the lounge, and I thought it must be normal, mustn’t it? Since Mum was ill and Dad worked so hard. But I worried about the pretty laughing ladies and wondered if he would fly away if he could, leaving Peter and me alone in the nest.

  I thought he was a good man, but I couldn’t be sure. I had no comparison.

  10

  Black Book Entry

  My Dad’s shop was so small that even three customers made it seem packed, and it was always busy after school, when the bell above the door rang over and over like the collar bell on a cat that won’t go away, but stays at the door waiting for milk. There were quiet times during the day, but after school the shop was busy with children in blue and white gingham dresses, or grey trousers and navy blazers, swapping silver coins for sherbet fountains or strawberry laces. The women squeezed the bread, sniffed the cheese, tested a grape. Dad smiled at them, ran a hand through his blueblack hair, shiny with wax.

  Dad liked Mrs. Carron. He stroked his hair even more when she was around, and she was always running out of things and having to pop in. If Mum asked who’d been in the shop that day I knew better than to say Mrs. Carron’s name. Not since the time Dad had to tell Mrs. Carron to fasten her blouse because a button was undone, and she looked but the button was gone. Her blouse was gaping open at the neck, and I even saw her red bra! I thought it was funny, and Dad laughed, and so did Mrs. Carron, but when I told Mum about it she frowned, and her hands started to pluck at the sheet. I said, “but a red bra, mum!” thinking it was a funny thing, because I’d only seen them in white or flesh-colour. Mum didn’t smile. She asked where Dad had been just before Mrs. Carron noticed her button was gone. That was easy, since I knew he’d been in the storeroom out back to see if he had any Earl Grey tea that Mrs. Carron said was the best. I’d stayed in the shop, watching the till. Mum asked where Mrs. Carron was, and I said she’d gone out back to make sure Dad knew which tea to look for. She came back to the shop all smiles so they must have found what she wanted.