by M. R. Carey
Where did the dead boy get this nonsense from? Jess didn’t know and didn’t care. She thought he had a natural gift. She would have read his stuff, back in her Half the Sky days; she would have shelved it flat so people could see the cover and she would have put a “Try this if you like such and such…” sticker underneath it.
Alex fed on her interest, making up more and more elaborate fictions. Jess could tell they excited him too. His voice changed when he was making things up, filled with a sudden, nervy energy. And he used his hands, exactly the way someone still alive would do, to draw in the air the things he was describing. At these times, he reminded Jess of Shannon McBride, the other candidate for Goodall’s resident storyteller.
He took it too dark, though, especially when you remembered that he was just a kid. A dead kid, yeah, but still.
Hannah meets this man. She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t really know him. Or he’s not who she thinks. No, he is. He is who she thinks, but he changes and he starts to get bigger.
And then he grabs her and he’s got his hand over her face. He’s pulling at it. It’s like her face is a sort of a mask on the front of her head, and it hasn’t been fixed on properly at the edges, so the big man can get his fingers underneath it.
He’s starting to work it loose. And this is the scary bit. Hannah wants to scream. She knows if she screams someone will come and help her. But she can’t because her face has almost all come away now, and her mouth is one of the things that was on her face so she can’t use it any more. You’d think she’d still have a bit of a mouth left behind and she could use that, a hole or something, but she hasn’t. It’s just all smooth back there. If the man pulls her face all the way off, she won’t be able to talk any more, or see, or hear, and she’ll die because she can’t breathe.
So she keeps on fighting and trying to make him stop. But he’s winning, and she remembers him winning before and that makes her weak. She can’t do anything.
The last thing is she tries to cry, but she can’t do that either. She hasn’t got any eyes. And then the man throws her face down on the floor and a dog comes and eats it.
Jess sat up in the dark. It wasn’t perfect dark: there was an orange safety light at one end of the ceiling’s strip light that turned the bunk, the table and the seatless toilet bowl into vague, fluid masses with shadows hanging off them like growths. Alex was visible in a different way, and by his own rules. He looked the same by night as he did by day: perfectly clear and distinct. And he didn’t cast a shadow.
“Was that story about Passmore?” Jess asked him, fully awake now. “Is she the Hannah you mean? The one who hurt me?” She kept her voice to a whisper, although she’d never known Buller to wake before the bell chivvied her up out of her bunk.
Yes, the boy said. Her.
“But… Alex, that’s horrible.”
Yes.
“You shouldn’t…” Jess groped for words. “You don’t have to be angry with her because she hit me. You don’t have to hate her.”
After all, she thought, when all’s said and done, she was putting in a vote for you. With the toe of her boot. Siding with the victim against the woman who burned him.
I don’t hate her.
“Then stop.”
Stop what?
“Stop telling these stories. Or… or give them a happy ending.”
I can’t.
“Yes, you can, Alex.” Jess heard a tremor in her own voice and realised she was shivering. Not from cold, obviously, because this was sweltering summer. It was the sense of his alienness, which she suddenly felt very acutely. That was ridiculous, she knew. She was talking to a ghost and taking that for granted, then getting freaked out because he was telling her scary stories.
But she wanted to protect him. She wanted him to keep his innocence, stuck here among the guilty. He’d brought her back from the abyss, from the mouth of the grave. She owed him everything and he owed her nothing except arguably a life for a life and a tooth for a tooth.
So she tried again. “Make up a story about what happens to Passmore after she gets out of here. Where will she go?”
I don’t know. And she’s not going anywhere. She’s a lifer.
“But you can pretend.”
Alex considered this in solemn silence.
I’m not very good at pretending, he said eventually.
Jess thought he was being way too hard on himself there. “Stories are like wishes, Alex,” she said, aware that she was trying to put something huge into small words. “You should only wish for things that you really want to happen.”
Alex nodded to show he understood, but he looked doubtful – and unhappy, as though in attacking his fantasies, she was attacking him. She was quick to reassure him. “Everybody has moments like that, when they want bad things to happen to people they don’t like. And I suppose, as long as it’s only a story, it does no harm. But it’s better to think about people you love, isn’t it? Wishing for their lives to be happy and full of good things.”
I suppose. Yes.
She still felt she’d hurt him. She opened her mouth to say something else. But right then was when the morning bell sounded. On its first strident yell Buller jumped down in between them, already hawking up mucus from the back of her throat as she headed for the sink. Like a bad wipe in an old movie, she airbrushed Alex Beech out of the room.
36
“I’d say we’re in a good place,” Grace told Devlin, about a week after he first brought Sally to her.
They were in Grace’s cell, and Earnshaw was doing Grace’s hair. Earnshaw was surprisingly good at it, her massive hands working the various stylers and straighteners with exquisite care. Grace was the only one she would ever do it for though. Of course, she was also the only one who dared to ask.
“A very good place,” Devlin agreed. “Sally’s working out great, isn’t he?” Grace only grunted. She’d already given the Devil his due where that was concerned – told him that bringing the doctor in was an excellent idea, and given him a finder’s fee in addition to his usual cut. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life palpating Devlin’s swollen ego.
But her temper stayed sunny for the most part. The hostile takeover of C block was progressing very well. She had hopes that it would be a bloodless coup, apart from the odd drop already spilled here and there.
Dizzy – Ruth Disraeli according to her birth certificate – had been released on 13 May, having served six of the ten years she’d been given for drug offences. Exactly a week before that, there had been an incident in the yard, a fight that got out of hand. Nobody was seriously injured, but two of the women involved, Ajique Hassan and Dominica Weeks, were found to have weapons on them. Hassan had the classic – you could even say stereotypical – shank made from one half of a Wilkinson Sword razor blade stuck in the end of a beheaded toothbrush. Minnie Weeks more imaginatively had a pair of nunchuks made from two sawn-off bits of a chair leg joined together with a length of bedsheet. Both women were given a month’s worth of punitive withdrawal, with the possibility of an official deferment of their parole rights.
Goodall wing had its own yard. The other wings, Curie included, shared a bigger space way over on the other side of the prison and up against the outside wall. It hadn’t been easy for the Devil to arrange that fight, or those finds, in neutral territory. He’d had to lay off payments to two C wing warders and one prisoner, and make the weapons himself, because sourcing them from inside Fellside would have been seven kinds of impossible. Not that people didn’t have them – just that nobody who had one would ever admit it or hand one over to a screw, even a bent screw like Devlin, whatever he promised them. The possible consequences were just too enormous.
But anyway, it had worked. Hassan and Weeks were off the scene, Dizzy was in the wind and Curie’s supply of recreational oblivion was hanging by a thread. Enter Dr Salazar, stage left.
It was simple, and it was elegant. Grace was pleased. Not only was Salazar a perfect mule, h
e was also a known quantity. If he’d ever had it in him to take a stand on a matter of conscience, that time had been long before, and it had ended with his falling back into line completely and unconditionally.
He was very easy to manage now.
The first drop was textbook smooth and went entirely according to plan. Salazar’s phone rang at ten o’clock. A voice he didn’t know told him what to do. “Wait ten minutes. Then open your door. Don’t come out before then. Measure it by your watch.”
Sally lived in a narrow cul-de-sac at the shabbier end of Fletchertown. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go to the window and keep watch, but he listened for the sound of a car engine. In the still, stagnant night, it would have carried a long distance and been impossible to miss.
Nothing. But at the end of the ten minutes, when he opened the door and poked his head out, the package was there on the mat. It was an open cardboard box with an old issue of The Watchtower on top of it, presumably to deter further inspection. Sally picked it up and took it inside, amazed at how light it was.
He kept expecting to come up against something hard and heavy at some point – something solid enough to push off against so he could say no and mean it. But it was just an endless trickle of easy surrenders. Desperately ashamed though he was, and disgusted with himself for going along with Grace and Devlin’s schemes, nothing had been troublesome at all so far. Even the threat against Patience DiMarta had made things easier for him because it allowed him to tell himself he was doing this for her. For her husband, who was a bin man for the county council, and for their three kids, who were the apple of Patience’s eye and the bulk of the contents of her wallet (far more photos than money in there, most days). This wasn’t cowardice, it was selflessness. Philanthropy. Quiet heroism.
Sally set the box down and examined the contents. Inside, under the magazine, he found a smaller container that had once held surgical gloves and looked as though it still could. It didn’t. It held what Sally guessed to be heroin, ketamine and cannabis resin, all in their own zip-locked bags and carefully packed so there was no space wasted. It sat on the table next to him as he ate his dinner of scrambled eggs on toast and frozen Birds Eye peas. Knowing what was in the box made the food taste strange to him, as though it was contaminated. He washed it down with most of a bottle of red wine that had no taste at all.
I’m not going to do this, he told himself again. Trying out the words. Knowing they were lies.
The guards at the checkpoint were meant to search all packages entering or leaving the prison, but as Devlin and Salazar were both aware, they were apt to be fairly casual with people they knew. Mostly they waved staff through and kept their powder dry for visitors.
Sally took out the package and showed it at the checkpoint anyway. The guard there, barely out of his teens, didn’t even seem to want to touch it, maybe out of fear that germs from infectious prisoners might somehow magically be clinging to it even though it was on its way into Fellside rather than out. The doctor had left an obviously used pair of surgical gloves dangling halfway out of the package to foster this response.
Later that day he took his first back and joint clinic in Curie wing. Being a novelty, the clinic was well attended, mostly by older women who had plenty of aches and pains to report and took a certain relish in talking about them. The two hours went by like treacle running down a rope. When they were done, Dr Salazar went down to the meditation room, unlocked the door with a key that Devlin had given him and stepped quickly inside. He left the package inside a hollow wooden dais that was almost but not quite too heavy to lift. He was in there for less than a minute, then he hurried back out, locked the door behind him and was on his way.
He didn’t see anyone waiting or watching, but then he wasn’t intended to.
About half an hour later, Devlin brought word to Grace that the drop had gone to plan. Sally had passed his fieldwork test. That was the phrase he used, and they both had a good chuckle at the thought of the doctor doing his cloak-and-dagger routine.
Sally would have been amazed to learn how much of this production had been mounted for his sole benefit. That package ended up in a wastepaper basket right outside the meditation room, where Jazz Sullivan (one of Grace’s three designated sales agents in Curie) dumped it in spite of being told to take it apart and leave the pieces in three separate places. The whole thing had been a dry run, with talcum powder and builder’s putty in place of actual narcotics, mainly because Grace wanted to see how the doctor handled himself under pressure. He did okay, but then, as the Devil pointed out, he’d had plenty of practice with drug-running on a modest scale back when his wife was dying.
In the normal run of things, Grace’s drugs never went anywhere near that checkpoint. It was just unfeasible, given how often the staff rotas changed at short notice and how many people she would need to keep on payroll in order to make it airtight. She had a completely different system in place, and Sally would be inducted into it – the parts that concerned him anyway – soon enough.
But all things in their season. Around midnight, an envelope dropped on to Dr Salazar’s doormat. He was still awake, listening to a Deutsche Grammophon recording of The Threepenny Opera. In the middle of the “Solomon Song”, with Lotte Lenya satirically mourning the uselessness of beauty, courage and wisdom, he heard it arrive.
He went and opened it. Counted thirty well-used ten-pound notes on to the bookcase in the hall. From a framed photo, dead Leah looked down with an incongruous smile, as though she blessed this illegal pay-off and its suspect source.
Sally had a nightmare that night, which drew its imagery from his Jewish religion. Leah’s religion, rather, since Sally was never observant until he met her and fell in love with her. For Leah’s sake, he went to synagogue on the high holy days, kept milk and meat in their separate corners when he cooked for her and even fasted on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Sally’s dream that night had a Yom Kippur theme to it. There was a point in the service for that day where the rabbi would read aloud from a medieval document known as the “Unetanneh Tokef”. The passage was always the same. It talked about the book up in heaven in which all of God’s decisions are recorded. “Who shall die by fire, and who by water. Who by sword, by famine, and by the depredations of beasts…” And so on, at great length.
It sounded pretty bleak and fatalistic, but Sally and Leah’s rabbi insisted that it really wasn’t. The point of the passage was not that God has got your number, but that he keeps an open mind as long as you do. You seal your fate by your actions. If you repent, if you atone, if you try to throw things in the other scale to balance out the bad stuff you’ve done, then he will keep on giving you the benefit of the doubt. But once you pass the point of no return, once you pile up so many sins that atonement isn’t possible any more, then HaShem will wash his hands of you. One day your name will go in that book and then it will be too late. Nothing you do after that time will make a damn bit of difference.
Sally dreamed that his name was being written in the book. He saw an angel take the volume down off a shelf, carry it over to a table, open it up and riffle to the right page. The angel was crying all this time. Bitter, bitter tears. This was another human soul gone to hell, and the angels hate that. They mourn for what you might have been. But in this case, as she dipped her quill in the ink and wrote Sally’s name, the angel was crying for another reason too.
The angel was Sally’s dead wife, Leah. She was crying because she was never going to see him again.
37
Moulson endured the catcalls and the occasional violence for a little while longer. But then, very suddenly, her situation changed.
For some unexplained reason, across all the wings of Fellside both Friday lunch and Friday dinner were always fish meals. Governor Scratchwell was probably making some kind of religious point – a vague, ecumenical flailing around, because he wasn’t Catholic. Anyway, it won him no friends in G block, where the prevailing opinion was that if y
ou liked the taste of fish, you didn’t have to walk too far to find it.
One Friday lunchtime, only a week or so after Jess Moulson’s arrival on-block, Hannah Passmore pushed her cod fillet aside, stood up and walked the full length of the canteen to the lepers’ corner where Jess was sitting.
Jess had her head down. It was a tactic she used a lot in Goodall’s common spaces, whenever she had no choice but to be there. For a moment or two she didn’t even realise Passmore was there.
When she did, she let her eyes climb up Passmore’s solid form an inch at a time. She stopped when she got to Passmore’s face – which was twisted into a really alarming expression. Passmore was pushing sixty years old, but she was as tough as a twist of wire. You didn’t screw around with her if you had the brains God gave a guinea pig.
“What did you do to me?” she demanded now.
The best Jess could come up with was “I’m sorry?” She didn’t want a scene. More than that, she didn’t want to be beaten up again.
“What did you fucking do to me?” Passmore repeated. She balled her fists and then flexed them out again. Jess could see that she was shaking. Her eyes were too wide. There was a little blood-red mark on her lower lip where she’d been biting it. She went back to biting it now, and a single bead of blood welled up there, trembling on the brink.
“I didn’t do anything,” Jess said. She looked down at her tray again, but that gravity-defying drop of blood drew her gaze back. It trickled downwards now like a shed tear, marking a line down the centre of Passmore’s chin.
“Then why do I keep…?” The older woman shook her head. She couldn’t finish the sentence. She grabbed Jess by the throat. The guards moved in quickly when they saw what was going down, but even the nearest of them had a lot of ground to cover in that crowded room.
Jess’s eyes met Passmore’s eyes across an inch or so of space. Passmore’s eyes had little flecks of red in the whites of them from recently burst blood vessels. Her mouth worked as though she was trying to swallow something down.
