by M. R. Carey
What sense of belonging she did have came from two directions: Alex and her Aunt Brenda. Alex was close at hand; her aunt far away – and she hadn’t responded at all to Jess’s letter about her change of heart. That might mean Brenda had finally washed her hands of her, which would be bad enough but hardly surprising. Worse would be if she was ill again and hadn’t got the letter. She might think Jess was already dead. Thinking Jess was dead might even be what had made her ill.
Jess tried phoning, many times. Paul Levine had topped up her commissary credit for precisely this purpose. She could withdraw up to two pounds a day in coins for the payphone – enough to make contact at least, if not to chat. She stood in line for one of the three phones in G block’s prisoner services room. Let it ring as long as she could. Then when Brenda didn’t answer, she went to the back of the line and waited all over again.
But even in the line she kept on reading. She didn’t have the luxury of standing around doing nothing.
She came back, again and again, to the autopsy report. She thought it had to be the key to everything else, if she could only see it. Cause of death: inhalation of smoke and carbon monoxide due to fire. Global charring. Significant quantity of carbon deposits in tracheobronchial tree. Soft tissues of face are largely absent, with exposure of partially heat-destroyed underlying bony structures. Pulmonary oedema extensive and marked…
She looked in vain for injuries that didn’t come down to the simple summary: he breathed smoke, suffocated and burned. She didn’t find any, but she learned enough along the way to realise they could still have been there. A body that had been incinerated to that extent might still show deep-tissue injury, but cuts to the skin could be confused with damage due to natural drying and cracking of the burned tissue. It wouldn’t always be possible to tell what came before from what came after.
Alex Beech stood at her shoulder, showing solidarity every so often by touching the tips of his fingers to her cheek, her neck, the back of her hand. Had he been so patient and uncomplaining when he was alive, or did death do that to you? Either way she was grateful. When she was running on empty, each of those fleeting touches flooded her with a little short-lived energy. Alex was like a car battery, jump-starting her again and again.
At night, though, he had mostly got into the habit of doing his own thing. Jess was sleeping more regularly now and Alex never slept at all, so he got bored and wandered. Sometimes she’d wake and find him missing, always with an ache of dismay.
It scared her how much she would come to need him in so short a time. How much she relied on his being there. She was profoundly alone in Fellside – or felt she was. She might have reached out now and got a very different response from the one she had received a few weeks before, but she didn’t know that. And most of the time her isolation didn’t trouble her: it was a lot better than the beatings had been. But the more withdrawn she was from the life of the prison, which boiled all around her like soup in a pressure cooker, the more she needed the dead boy as a featherweight counterbalance.
The third night after the documents arrived, with four days still to go before her hearing, she asked Alex to tell her everything he could remember about his friend. Partly she was looking for clues to what might have happened to him on the night of the fire, but mostly, she knew, she was just trying to keep him by her bedside.
She was nice to me. She loved me.
“Was she the same age as you? Older?” She had asked him this question before, but his answer had been vague.
Older. I think.
“What did she look like?”
I don’t remember.
“Did she live with you? Or close by? Somewhere else in Orchard Court?”
He thought about this for a long time. I think she lived with me. Or stayed with me. At least sometimes. I remember falling asleep with her. Her hair smelled nice. We curled around each other. I was on the inside because I was smaller.
“But you don’t remember her name?”
No.
“Or what she looked like?”
No.
“Anything you can tell me might help me find her, Alex. Even a very little thing.”
She was clutching at straws, she knew. There hadn’t been so much as a whiff of this at her trial. The nice girl. The nasty girl. Alex had been a ten-year-old boy with no sisters or cousins. There weren’t that many girls in his life. A girl who was used to staying over, and who shared a bed with their son on the night of his death, ought to have got a mention somewhere. If she didn’t, it might be because she was part of a bigger story that the Beeches had decided not to share.
Maybe the psycho with the sharp implements was in that story too.
“Anything,” Jess said again, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “Anything at all.”
She wasn’t scared of the nasty girl.
“No?”
No.
“Why not, Alex?”
She was very brave. Always. And she told me to be brave too. She said nothing could ever hurt me because she’d be there watching.
And that had ended well. “So she knew the nasty girl?” Jess pursued.
She… yes… yes. She did. I think she did. But she always said that, about not worrying. That I had to never be scared because nobody would ever get past her to get to me. She always wanted to give me presents. Making me not be scared was one of them.
“Pretend she’s here now,” Jess suggested.
Why?
“Because it’s nice. It was nice to be with her, wasn’t it?”
Yes.
“Then pretend. Close your eyes and think about her.”
Alex met her gaze for a moment, looking unhappy and almost suspicious. Had he been tricked once with that kids’ joke where you told someone to close their eyes, hold out their hands and make a wish – and then dumped something disgusting into their cupped palms or else just punched them and ran away?
He closed his eyes. He sat there in perfect silence, his lips tightly pursed, his forehead furrowed.
“Is she there?” Jess asked at last. Keeping her voice low, trying to impinge on his thoughts as little as possible.
No.
“Then try to—”
But I remember what it was like. Being with her.
What was it like, Alex? This time she didn’t speak at all. She just let the words form in her mind. Email for the dead.
It was like being a baby again. She was so much bigger and stronger than me. She could have hurt me, but she never did. She held me as though she was afraid of letting me fall.
This time Jess waited out the silence. It was hard. She was fine with keeping her mouth shut, but she was trying not to think at Alex too – trying to keep her thoughts from hardening into words and distracting him.
People thought she was stupid because she didn’t talk. They didn’t know her. Nobody knew her except me.
And you loved her.
Of course I did. Better than anyone.
Better than your mum and dad, even?
Much better.
Because she was so kind to you.
Yes.
And it was like being with your mother, when she… when she held you?
Alex’s eyes opened and he stared at Jess hard.
No. She wasn’t like my mum even a little bit.
“But you said—”
No, I didn’t. I didn’t say she was like my mum. I wouldn’t say it because it wasn’t true.
“All right.”
And you shouldn’t say it either.
“I won’t,” Jess assured him quickly. “I won’t say it again, I promise.” It was the most emotion he’d shown since the night they talked about Hannah Passmore and the stories he made up, and once again it was anger, anger at her. She’d hurt him somehow with that comparison. She’d walked right through whatever card tower of memories he’d been building, and now it was gone. Blown away.
And a second later, Alex was gone too.
44
> The day before Moulson’s preliminary hearing, Big Carol and Liz Earnshaw paid her a visit in her cell.
It had been a while since she’d taken a beating, and she’d got out of the habit. She cringed back into the angle of the bunk and the wall, making herself as small a target as she could, covered her face with her hands and braced herself for the storm.
Earnshaw watched all this with her usual poker face, but Big Carol found it highly amusing. “We’re not here to hurt you, you daft mare,” she chuckled. “Get up out of there.”
But Jess stayed where she was so Big Carol had to squat down, with a grunt of effort, to talk to her. “You’re off to court tomorrow for your preliminary hearing,” she said. “Oxford Row in Leeds. Mr Justice Foulkes. Nod if you’re getting this.”
Jess nodded.
“Well, while you’re there, you can do us a little favour. There’s a package needs picking up and bringing back. Stand up. Come on. I want to show you something.”
Jess did as she was told, but she was tensing to run or fight if this turned into something worse than a beating. Nobody had tried to kill her yet, but she knew it was a possibility, and these two huge, burly women had something of an executioner’s look about them. The story about picking up a parcel could be just that – a story to keep her docile and unsuspecting until the shank went in.
Big Carol lifted up Jess’s shirt, and Earnshaw handed over something she’d been holding down at her side – a bulky zip-lock bag about six inches by seven. It had a criss-cross of duct tape across it, the four loose ends sticking out about two inches from the sides. Carol pressed the bag against Jess’s stomach. Jess flinched a little: the big woman’s hands were unexpectedly cold.
Carol smoothed down the duct tape tabs and stepped back.
“Tuck your shirt in again,” she said.
Jess did. She could feel the package hugging her stomach, the tug of the stretched tape, but nobody looking at her would have been able to tell it was there.
“Skinny as a stick,” Carol said approvingly. “That’s what a hunger strike does for you. Weight Watchers should get onto that. Okay, up again.”
Jess raised her shirt. When Carol peeled the tape off, it hurt a little, but less than she was expecting: the slick of sweat on her skin had kept it from adhering tightly.
“And that’s all there is to it,” Carol told her. “Any questions?”
“No,” Jess said.
Carol gave her a smack across the head. Not too hard, but like a teacher disciplining an unsatisfactory pupil. “Have another think, eh?”
“What’s going to be in the package?” Jess asked.
Carol shook her head brusquely. “No. Keep going.”
“Wh-where do I pick it up from?”
“There you go. It’s going to be in the women’s toilets behind the courtroom – the one that’s just for guards and prisoners. You ask if you can take a piss. Do it right at the end of the day, just before they take you back to the van. In the toilet, go to the middle cubicle. If it’s being used, go into the next one and wait until the middle one’s free. You’ll find the package behind the cistern, taped to the back of it. You’ll have to stand on the seat and reach up from underneath. You won’t be able to see it, but you’ll feel a bit of tape holding it there. You peel the tape off and then just pull it down.”
“What’s in the package?”
“Then when you get back here, the first thing you do is come over to my cell, which is three-twenty, or Lizzie’s, which is four-fourteen, and hand it over. Me or Lizzie here, nobody else. If we’re not there, you wait until we are.”
“But what’s going to be in the—?”
The third time was the charm. Carol looked at Liz, arched an eyebrow and a second later the wall hit Jess hard in the back. Earnshaw’s left arm was pinning her in place and in Earnshaw’s right hand, an inch or so from Jess’s eye, was one of those stereotypical shanks. A wafer of razor blade tucked into the end of – in this case – a paintbrush handle sawn off just below where the metal neck that held the brush would once have gripped.
And behind the blade, Earnshaw’s belligerent face. Earnshaw’s twisted mouth, her bared teeth. “You stupid?” she demanded. They were the first words she’d spoken. Simple but eloquent.
“No,” Jess whispered.
The blade whisked back and forth. Pointed at her left eye, then her right. Earnshaw’s gaze went with it, left to right like a metronome. Big Carol sighed and looked at the ground. The expression on her face said, This is out of my hands now. You went there.
The blade grazed Jess’s cheek just under her left eyelid. The hand that held it shook a little, but somehow the tremor didn’t pass itself along the slender shaft to the business end. There was no give or drift in that cold touch.
Something hot filled Jess’s body and then drained away again, from the crown of her head down to her stomach.
“Hey,” Big Carol said at last. “Lizzie.” Her tone was almost gentle.
“Fucking behave,” Earnshaw growled, still glaring right into Jess’s eyes.
Her hand dropped to her side and a second later there was no sign of the shank at all. She stepped back. Jess’s legs, suddenly taking her full weight again, buckled under her and she slid down the wall, halfway to collapsing. Her eyes flooded instantly with tears, as though they were trying to flush the wicked little blade away now that it was already gone.
“There isn’t much I can add to my learned colleague’s remarks,” Loomis said laconically. “You did get that, yes? About behaving?”
“Yes,” Jess muttered. She wanted to wipe away the tears but she was afraid to reach up and touch her eye in case she found a wound there. In case some of what was trickling down her face was blood.
“You’re fine,” Big Carol assured her, patting her on the head. “Don’t be crying. You’re a big girl now. You do as you’re told and nobody’s going to hurt you. Right, Lizzie?”
Earnshaw just stared at Jess with mute animosity. Her hatred was so vast and so sincere, Jess wondered what had stopped her from using the shank. It was as though she was a trained animal, set on by the other woman’s nod and checked again with a word.
“Oh Jesus,” Carol said now, looking down at the floor. Jess looked too. The puddle at her feet didn’t mean anything for a second. Then she realised what it was, and dismay and shame filled her.
“You’d better clean that up,” Carol told her, stepping back from the spreading pool. “And have a word with yourself. If you take a piss in the courtroom, no one’s going to believe you need to go again later, are they? Come on, Lizzie.”
The two women left, taking the dummy package with them. Jess closed the door with shaking hands and did what she could to clean up the puddle with paper towels. The towels filled the wastepaper basket before she’d finished. She took it along to the shower room and emptied it, grateful for once that nobody was going to step up and ask her what she was doing.
While she was there, she stripped off and showered. At that time of the day it was against the rules, but she didn’t care. Punitive withdrawal didn’t mean much to someone who was already living like a nun in a closed order. She rinsed off her tracksuit bottoms too and hung them over the cubicle door to air a little.
Alex appeared while she was drying herself and asked her what was wrong. Flustered, she turned away from him and wrapped the towel around her body. She knew by then that he didn’t really see the things that were in front of him. If anything, he seemed to see what other people saw, or what they thought about, as though their attention was a searchlight that guided his eyes. Still, she was ashamed right then to be naked in front of him. The emotions sloshing around her insides felt like nakedness enough.
“Go away, Alex,” she muttered. “Come back later.”
What’s the matter?
“Nothing.”
Yes, there is. You’re crying.
“I’m not crying.”
But you were just before. You’re thinking about it.<
br />
“I’ll think about something else.”
Did somebody hurt you? If somebody hurt you, I’ll hurt them back!
“No. They didn’t.” And that was the truth, more or less. They’d only threatened her. It had been a performance, even when Liz Earnshaw had put the knife to her face. A performance intended to make her obey.
The ghost boy’s presence calmed her. His willingness to be indignant on her behalf. She had to reassure him, and in doing that she reassured herself. “Nobody hurt me,” she said. “It was just an argument and it made me upset. I’m fine now.”
Are you?
“Yes. Look.” She gave him a smile that was halfway convincing. “Someone wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do, that was all. We got into an argument about it.”
Something bad?
“I suppose so. Yes. Something bad.”
You should tell them no.
“I will,” Jess assured him.
It was meant to be a lie, but once the words were out, they were suddenly the truth. Pastor Afanasy’s words came back to her.
You can’t make up for something bad you’ve done by killing yourself. You’ve got to try to do good things going forward.
45
Dr Salazar fell into his new routine. Self-hatred and despair were a big part of it, but they were invisible. On the surface, things were going fine.
Every Thursday morning, Carol Loomis would stroll into the infirmary and announce in a bored voice that she had a touch of the usual problem. Salazar would put the screens up so she could undress, and behind that cover she’d slip the regular package (picked up earlier in the week by one of Grace’s busy little bees) into the drawer underneath the medicine cabinet that was mainly used for dressings and sticking plasters.
Then Salazar would make a show of listening to her heartbeat and her breathing before telling her she should keep up the exercises. Big Carol would say, “Thanks, doc,” put her kit back on and hit the road. All of this was for the benefit of whichever nurses were on duty, and if any of them suspected there was more going on, they didn’t say anything. Possibly they thought Salazar might be banging Big Carol, which few of them would have begrudged him.
