Fellside

by M. R. Carey

  “Yes,” he assured her.

  “Then…?”

  “I’d… like some details.”

  I won’t do it, Sally told her in the safety of his mind. Talk all you like, it won’t make any difference.

  But as he shouted that discreet defiance, his thoughts hit an image that momentarily derailed them. Water. Blood. Toilet paper. One upturned eye, whiter than bleached cotton, fixing him with a stare of reproach or warning. His throat constricted. He winced and closed his eyes, trying to drive the awful memory away. Grace and Devlin didn’t seem to notice.

  Devlin was saying now that Sally’s drop-offs should be piggybacked on a weekly clinic in Curie – either a new one or one of the existing ones. “I like that,” Grace agreed. “But it shouldn’t be a straight handover.”

  “Why not?” Devlin asked. “Why complicate things?”

  You can’t make me, Salazar thought.

  “If our dealers sign up for the clinic, week after week, their names are on a list. There’s a paper trail. And as an added complication, Sally – no disrespect, doctor – gets to see who he’s delivering to. Much better if he leaves the package somewhere for them to pick up later. Double blind means nobody is compromised. Nobody can trick up anybody else if they get caught themselves.”

  I won’t do it.

  “What about the meditation room?”

  “Nice. I think we can make that work.”

  They ignored Sally for a while, talking over his head about weights and dates and logistics. He waited to be dismissed, and in due course Grace told him he could go.

  “Just one final point, doctor,” she said when he was halfway to the door. The Columbo moment. He wanted to be gone, to get the complicated process of fleeing underway, but he had to stop and turn around.

  “Yes?”

  “That previous time that we were talking about, when you tried to make trouble for me. You remember how it came out?”

  “Of course.”

  “You were still alive when it was all over. Not everybody was that lucky.”

  “I said I remember.” A tiny, forlorn flash of irritation, gone as soon as it arrived. “I do, Grace. I remember.”

  She nodded, unperturbed. “Well, the same thing would happen this time too. If you let me down again. The exact same thing.”

  Salazar didn’t understand for a moment what it was she was saying. “But,” he said, “there isn’t anyone…”

  “No. Nobody who’s directly involved. But I’m told that you and Nurse DiMarta have a nice little platonic friendship going. So I’d probably start with her.”

  Salazar went back to the infirmary. It was empty that day: Moulson had been discharged the same morning. He sat at his desk with his hands in his lap, silent and still, as his mind fitted itself around the contours of his new role and terms of employment.

  It was funny, in a way. If his life were a comedy, ending up as a drug mule was the one beat nobody would see coming.

  And if it were a tragedy, likewise.

  33

  Jess was released into gen pop with as little fanfare as could be managed. A screw collected her from the infirmary and walked her across the rec yard to Goodall. It was Corcoran, the guard who had escorted her in the ambulance from Winstanley. She cautiously congratulated Jess on still being alive.

  “Not according to plan, right? But there are some things you can’t really plan for until they happen. Or don’t happen. You know what I mean?” They walked along in silence for a few moments, then Corcoran said, “The truth is, this place can be awful if you make enemies. And IMHO, the worst enemy you can make is yourself.”

  Jess was still purging the tramadol out of her system. She was as shaky on her feet as a two-year-old. She responded to this homespun wisdom with a weak nod of acknowledgement. She got the point. But that ship had probably sailed.

  The usual way into the block was via the ballroom, but Corcoran’s brief was to ease Moulson into her new quarters without raising a ripple. She unlocked a door at the back of the building and they went in through a service corridor that led directly to the east stairwell. A sign on the door read: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT EXCEPT IN CASE OF FIRE.

  Goodall wing had a bouquet which, after the antiseptic purity of the infirmary, was so rich and complex it was disconcerting. Jess tried to work out its ingredients. Air freshener. Institutional food. The hot-iron tang of sweat just before it turns sour and awful. Old sheets left folded for years at the back of an airing cupboard. People. Overwhelmingly it was the smell of people shut in together, rubbing each other smooth year after year like stones in a sack.

  Corcoran held a door open for Jess, pointing the way up a metal staircase. The centre of each tread had been worn smooth and slightly concave by thousands of feet. Pritchard had said that Fellside was a recent build, but people were like oceans. When oceans set to work, mountains fall and are broken down to make beaches.

  A babel of voices assailed Jess’s ears as they ascended, but Corcoran had worked out their approach with a view to stealth. Though close at hand, the ballroom was invisible. Only that wash of voices told Jess how near she was to a new universe.

  Corcoran took her up to the second floor and along an open walkway. The ballroom was on their left, but they stayed close to the wall on the right. They stopped at a door marked 239, Lorraine Buller’s cell. Buller’s old roommate, Cyndi Souk, had been downgraded from high to medium security and transferred to Curie wing. “Might happen to you some day,” Corcoran told Jess. “If you keep your nose clean. Nice life in Curie. Unlimited visits. Access to the farm and the plant nursery. Even conjugals.”

  Having painted this idyll on the noisy air, she said goodbye and good luck and left Jess to make her own introductions. Jess went into the cell, not sure if she should knock. A middle-aged woman with a blonde buzz cut was stretched out on the top bunk with the Penguin Classics edition of Middlemarch in her hands. She was dressed in the same yellow and black tracksuit that Jess was now wearing. Her heavily lined face looked like an artist’s rough sketch that had been overworked, every spare inch shaded in or cross-hatched. The pale blue lines of old tattoos peeped out at her wrists.

  She glanced up from the book and gave Jess a nod, civil but distant.

  “Moulson? I’m Buller. You’re bottom-bunking. And I get the sink first in the morning. I’ve got three years on you and that’s the way it works. I don’t like singing when I’m trying to read, and I don’t like bad farts that come without a warning. If there’s anything you don’t like, you’d better tell me now.”

  Jess shook her head.

  “What, there’s nothing you don’t like? Nothing at all? It was a serious question, love.”

  “People laughing at their own jokes,” Jess hazarded. That had been John Street’s prejudice rather than hers, but it was something to say and it seemed to be acceptable. Buller made a face that translated as each to her own and returned to her reading. Jess sat down on the cell’s only chair, slowly and carefully so as to reduce the jarring impact when she settled herself on the mottled plastic seat.

  “This is free association time,” Buller said. “Just so you know. It’s the one time when you don’t have to stick in the cell. You can go out on the yard or sit in the ballroom.”

  “I’m fine here,” Jess mumbled.

  “Well, I can understand that,” Buller said. “Nice and quiet. Nobody shouting at you. But if you want a word of advice, you should show your face. They’re going to shout at you sooner or later. Then they’re going to lose interest and go and shout at somebody else. Hide your face and you’re probably only feeding the fire.” She glanced across at Jess for a moment, then gave her attention back to George Eliot. “My opinion anyway,” she said.

  Jess sat for a while, thinking it over and gathering her strength. Finally she got up and headed for the door.

  “Good luck,” Buller muttered as she passed.

  Jess got as far as the railing right outside the cell door. She rested her elbows on
it and stared down into the ballroom. Gradually one woman after another noticed her and looked up at her until the entire ballroom met her gaze. Everyone in Goodall knew who she was, and that she was coming on-block that day. There was considerable interest in her, some of it hostile, some detached and even a little (mostly because of Shannon McBride’s narrative skills) that was inclined to be positive.

  Jess didn’t know about any of that, but her instincts screamed at her to retreat from all this scrutiny, which she couldn’t read and didn’t want. She certainly couldn’t bring herself to go down and mingle. She was stuck out there on the walkway like a soldier in no-man’s-land.

  But suddenly she felt a hand slide into hers. She looked down to see Alex Beech standing next to her, his face on a level with the third bar of the railings. He didn’t say anything, but a little strength ran out of him and into Jess, trickling through their clasped hands the way cool water trickles down your throat.

  In the infirmary, when he’d first come to her, her fear had shut out all other emotions. Here, where she knew no one, he was the only familiar face and she felt a rush of relief and gratitude to see him.

  I didn’t want you to forget me. You thought I was a dream before. I’m not. I’m not a dream and you’ve got to keep your promise.

  “I know that.” Jess tried to keep her lips from moving too much when she spoke. She was talking to a ghost who nobody else could see. She knew that instinctively, but it was proved anyway when another inmate went past them, walking right through the boy and barely veering for the woman.

  Alex stiffened when the moving body breached the space where he was standing. After it had passed by, a tremor ran through him. His face twisted into a grimace. He didn’t like accidental contact – a fact that made the touch of his hand in Jess’s a little more miraculous than it already was.

  “I haven’t forgotten what I promised,” she told him. “And I’m never going to forget.”

  You’re going to find out what happened to me.

  “Yes.”

  You’ll find my friend. And the other girl who hurt me.

  “Yes. I’m going to make a start as soon as I can.”

  To be with him and to be forgiven. Jess knew that she would do anything in exchange for that. Having already resigned herself once to giving up her life, she found it an easy promise to make, and she meant every word. She came pre-stressed, annealed, ready to do whatever needed to be done.

  “Look at her,” Hannah Passmore said to Pauline Royal across the width of one of the board game tables. Po followed Hannah’s glance and saw Moulson up there on the second floor, her head dangling loosely over her folded arms. “Thinks she owns the place.”

  Po was peaceable to a fault, but she had to agree. There did seem to be something arrogant about that stance. About how completely Moulson had let her guard down. In a place like Goodall, relaxing was the ultimate show of strength.

  “Fucking smirk on her face, look,” Passmore went on. “I’m not putting up with this.”

  “Screws are watching, Hannah,” Po warned her. “They know there’s going to be trouble. Use your brain and let someone else make it.”

  Passmore saw the sense of this, but she really didn’t like that smile.

  There were two more lifers, Doll Paley and Sam Kupperberg, playing draughts at the next table – a strange version they’d made up themselves where each of them alternated black and white moves. Doll looked up from the game. “Why not just leave her alone?” she suggested. “The way I hear it, she didn’t even mean to kill that boy. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “Only God gets to judge,” Kupperberg agreed. “Nobody else has a right to.”

  Passmore had never had much use for God. She let that pious chatter wash right over her. “You know what we should have around here?” she called out, loud enough for everyone to hear. “A barbecue!”

  A few women glanced across at her, then saw where she was looking and got the joke. The laughter was thin, but it encouraged Passmore to make a second sally. “Frying tonight!” she shouted. And someone else cried, “Fingerlicking good!”

  The screws stepped in quickly, not just down in the ballroom but on the walkways too. They all moved at the same time, which made it pretty obvious that they’d been waiting for anything that looked like trouble. It was the evening shift under Ms Carlisle, so she got to be the voice of authority, telling the hecklers that if they tried to be funny again, they’d be amusing themselves in solitary.

  The catcalls subsided into muttering, but the muttering was angry. The women of Goodall had had a lid dropped over them.

  Nobody likes that.

  34

  That first day was indicative of things to come. Jess continued to have problems fitting into the daily life of Goodall wing.

  She got beaten up on her second day by some of the other women on her own landing. It wasn’t planned or orchestrated particularly. She just walked past a little group of them in a way that rubbed someone or other up the wrong way. One woman threw a punch and then the rest joined in because it was only civil not to leave a friend out on a limb. Jess got a lot of bruises where they wouldn’t show, but it was a light beating – which in Goodall meant the kind you could walk away from.

  The next day she got it a lot worse. Hannah Passmore led a raiding party into her cell and worked on her for a good five minutes while two other women, Chander and Williams, held her down. Buller didn’t intervene, but she told them when enough was enough.

  “It’s enough when I say it is,” Passmore grunted, landing another kick.

  “You stop now,” Buller said, “or I’m calling a guard.”

  Passmore did stop then, but only to glare at Buller.

  “You’d snitch for scum like this?” Shamone Williams demanded.

  “If it’s that or watch you kill her.”

  The three women weighed up their options. Sarah Chander started to haul down her trousers and knickers.

  “You piss on her, Sachi,” Buller said, “and you will clean it up. With your left arm, because I will break the right one.”

  “Let it go,” Passmore decided. “We’re finished. For now.”

  “Thank you,” Jess muttered, when the three women had gone.

  “You’re welcome,” Buller told her. “I would have said something earlier, but it’s that same principle. It will happen when it happens and the sooner it happens, the sooner it stops. You need a hand up?”

  “I think I’ll just lie here a while.”

  “Up to you. You want a chapter of George Eliot?”

  And since Jess didn’t, Buller went back to her reading.

  That was about as bad as it got. There wasn’t any sustained vendetta against Jess, which was what Governor Scratchwell had been afraid of. It was only too easy, he knew, for a group of people crowded into an inadequate space and kettled up together for years on end to find themselves all thinking the same thing at the same time, and then all doing it. That was how riots kicked off. One person cracks but everyone else is ready and waiting, right there and totally up for it when the moment comes.

  With Moulson, though, there was a collective distaste rather than a collective hatred. It would have been different if she’d abused Alex Beech for fun or profit, but she hadn’t. She’d burned him up when she burned her own life up, and that was different. Many of the Goodall women thought she was a piece of shit. A whole lot more of them thought she was a screw-up who deserved their pity, or that losing her face and being banged up in Fellside had gone some way to balancing the scales for what she did. Nobody had warm feelings for her, but nobody had much of an axe to grind.

  Well, almost nobody. Hannah Passmore was still taking Moulson personally, and found more than one occasion to slip in a smack or a shove. There were a few other women who followed her lead, although with less venom. And there were a few more who catcalled when they saw Moulson in the commissary or the ballroom.

  And one day, ascending one of the stairwells, she
met a woman coming down who filled the narrow space and blocked her way completely. The two of them stopped dead, and neither spoke.

  The other woman was very tall, with long, rangy limbs and badly mottled skin. Older than Jess, but not by much. The lines on her weathered face seemed to have been carved there by temperament rather than time. She had cut the sleeves off her prison-issue tracksuit top, which was a violation and would have got most women written up. The muscles on her arms moved over one another as she flexed her big hands.

  Jess stood aside to let this apparition walk on by. She certainly wasn’t going to try to push past her. But the other woman didn’t move at all. “You go ahead,” Jess said at last. When that got no answer, she made an “after you” gesture. She couldn’t even tell if the woman was looking at her. Her eyes seemed weirdly unfocused.

  “That’s a fucking ugly face,” the woman said at last. She forced the words out between her teeth, which stayed clenched together.

  “I was… burned,” Jess faltered. “There was a fire.”

  “A fire?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence. “I used to like sitting by the fire,” the woman said at last. “In the summer.”

  “In the winter,” Jess corrected automatically. The woman’s eyes came back from the horizon to fix on her. “Summer,” she said. “In the summer. We had a barbecue. Were you there?”

  “N-no,” Jess stammered. “I don’t even know your—”

  The woman’s face was suddenly an inch away from hers, the eyes boring into her own, slightly sour breath hot against her cheek. “Then don’t tell me when it was,” she growled. “All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t know you’re born, do you? Don’t know to put yourself out when you’re on fire. How fucking stupid is that?”

  Jess said nothing. The woman’s anger had come from nowhere. It didn’t seem to have any object; it had just bumped up against her because she was there. If she was very still, maybe it would roll on by and bump against something else.