The Devil You Know

by Gwen Adshead

  Charlie didn’t comment on my suggestion, and I didn’t push it. Our next session began with her in energetic mode, as she told me with some relish a story from the wing that morning about another prisoner who had got into a screaming row with one of the staff and lost all her privileges as a result. She chuckled as she mimicked the woman’s helpless fury when she found out what trouble she was in, wailing melodramatically, ‘You can’t do this to me!’ I didn’t smile or comment, and an awkward silence fell. ‘What?’ Charlie demanded. ‘You’re laughing,’ I commented, ‘but you’re also describing something that might be painful or scary, aren’t you?’ Charlie’s face reddened and she averted her gaze. ‘I know.’ ‘What did you see when you were watching this happen today, Charlie?’ She let out a deep breath, and then met my eyes. ‘That’s what other people see, isn’t it? They see me like that, don’t they? When I’m all stroppy with the officers, and it isn’t funny, right?’ She was determined to work through this new thought, and I let her run with it, intrigued to see the way her mind was processing it. ‘I was watching her, you know, throwing stuff and howling and trying to kick him, and I was thinking, “What are you like? You’re a grown woman having a bloody tantrum!” And then I thought, “If you’re having a tantrum … you must be a kid. A little bratty kid.” And then …’ She trailed off. ‘And then?’ I nudged.

  ‘And then I thought, the thought came to my head that … I’m not a kid either. I mean, look at me. I’m nearly fifty now, right?’ She stood up, pushing her chair back, unable to keep still, as if the idea that she was an adult was electrifying. ‘My real name is Charlotte, you know, but I’ve been called Charlie since I was a kid. That’s not a grown-up name, is it? And that officer I had the fight with that day, when I smashed my cell? He calls me Charlie too. Worse, he says “Charlie-girl”, like “Take it easy, Charlie-girl.” I think that got right inside my chest.’

  ‘And let the dragon out?’ I said. The dragon metaphor she had used early on had become a code to mean we were working on something important. ‘You know that book you told me to read, that book about those kids on the island? So those boys, there were no grown-ups around to control them, and that was the problem. It got me thinking, maybe if I was a grown-up … I mean, I am one! And if I can control myself when I get mad, you know, instead of losing it, like that silly bitch this morning … like a fucking child.’

  This was a bit of a breakthrough, and I wanted to know if she could expand on it. I asked her what could help her to control herself, so she could feel more grown up – could she think of anything? She didn’t miss a beat. ‘I could call myself my actual name, couldn’t I? Charlotte, not Charlie. And tell everyone else to do it. That would help, right?’ This hadn’t occurred to me, but it showed real insight. I smiled broadly, offering that I could do that too. In a lovely moment of clarity, she shook her head vehemently. ‘No, no, not you. I want to be both Charlie and Charlotte in here. Is that okay?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, very moved. ‘That will be just fine.’

  *

  We came back to Lord of the Flies again in later sessions, and she volunteered that she’d found it quite painful to read. She became tearful when we talked about the excitement the boys in the story felt about killing, and that allowed her to speak more about the ‘rush’ she had experienced when she and the gang had gone after Eddie. The emotional truth of the novel was helping her articulate something like regret, while it offered her a way to express how impossible it had felt back then to defy the will of her peers, without being destroyed herself.

  I had thought of Lord of the Flies in relation to Charlie – or Charlotte – after our first meeting, when I’d seen that she was a reader. Before I’d offered the suggestion, I had debated with myself for some time about whether to risk the upset that this might cause her. Now I was glad. The great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote about poetry as ‘a redemptive handrail’, a beautiful idea which, for me, applies to all great writing and storytelling. It was remarkable to watch Charlotte have the same experience.

  She turned to the nickname of a main character in the novel, Piggy, which clearly bothered her. ‘Why did the writer do that,’ she demanded of me, ‘why didn’t he have a real name? That was fucking stupid, what was he thinking of?’ At first, I was perplexed by what seemed like an inordinate criticism, but as she went on about it, I caught a glimpse of something raw in her anger. On impulse I asked her, ‘How did you come to be called Charlie? When did that start?’ Tears sprang to her eyes, and she had to compose herself before she could answer. She’d always been Charlotte, she told me, when she was a little girl, but then her stepbrothers began teasing her with the nickname Charlie as she entered puberty. They would say she wasn’t a real girl, that she had no tits, that she looked like a boy and should have a boy’s name … ‘And then they started grabbing at me …’ She stumbled and stopped there, clearly uncomfortable. I had a powerful sense that she was reverting to Passive Charlie before my eyes, and when I asked if she wanted to say more, she just said gruffly, ‘That’s it, I’ve been Charlie ever since,’ with one of her little shrugs. ‘But you have a choice about that now,’ I told her. I needed her to see that nobody could give her agency, she had to take it. She looked up at me, startled, and admitted that what I’d said was true. She’d already made the choice to reclaim her given name.

  ‘What’s in a name?’ indeed. The language we use to describe ourselves, including how we wish to be known, is always significant, and it is a topic I return to often in my work. Her childhood associations of ‘Charlie’ had kept her in a traumatic place, where she was at the mercy of others and had no choice but to comply or lash out. Over time, there would be another language change. She gradually reduced her use of cursing as an all-purpose communicator of feeling and began to choose her words more carefully, trying to think of the right way to put something before she spoke. One day, we were talking again about the murder of Eddie, and I encouraged her to try and describe her emotions for me in whatever terms she chose – there was no right or wrong answer. After some thought, she volunteered that she thought his murder had ‘blackened her heart’. Grim though that idea was, the way she expressed it was auspicious. She did not offer the more familiar ‘it broke my heart’, which as a cliché might have lacked honesty. Instead, she had generated this metaphor of internal rot to convey her feelings, prima facie evidence of an engaged mind, of creativity and transformation. Our aim had been to try and see if she could become ‘unstuck’ from the prison system, and now we were seeing that this might require detaching a part of herself, peeling off an old persona that was no longer useful. I left her company that day with some optimism that she would be able to reorder her internal landscape and leave behind aspects of an old identity that did not serve her in adult life.

  She would soon be eligible to apply for parole again, and the content of our final sessions moved on to what she might say for herself at a hearing and what she wanted others to know about our work together, since I would be called on to provide some feedback to the parole board. She said she thought the best way to put it was that she’d ‘grown up’ in therapy, and I agreed. She wanted to ask for more therapy outside the prison environment, if she was allowed to return to the community, to ‘help me manage out there’. We both smiled at this, recognising it meant that she had found her relationship with me to be positive. More importantly, it was a sign of her increased sense of security that she did not think it was a weakness to ask for help. I now thought her failure to progress or become ‘unstuck’ might have been because she had no haven other than prison. I reflected that as a child, each time she thought she’d found a safe harbour it had turned out to be full of danger, and so she would destroy or disrupt her ability to settle in one place. It occurred to me that her repeated recalls from probation and even the tantrum in her cell soon after our first meeting, which I had thought was all about her being thwarted by authority, could also have been a part of this pattern. She might have panicked that working
with me on becoming ‘unstuck’ would set her free and found that to be a terrifying thought.

  Charlotte speculated that she might try to fulfil her ambition of working with disabled people, if possible, or the elderly, venturing that this could be a way to make some reparation ‘for when I killed Eddie’. The fact that she could own the deed in such active language was as encouraging as her metaphor of a ‘blackened heart’. Grasping the idea of making amends and being willing to do so were as important as actually following through, although I hoped she would one day. I wished her all the best as we parted, careful to say, ‘Goodbye, Charlotte.’ I still remember her beaming face.

  NOTES

  1 Prison Reform Trust (2019) ‘Prison: The Facts. Bromley Briefings Summer 2019’. The publication can be found here: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Bromley%20Briefings/Prison%20the%20facts%20Summer%202019.pdf.

  2 More details within same PRT report. See also Baroness Corston’s 2007 report on women in prison: http://criminaljusticealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Corston-report-2007.pdf.

  ZAHRA

  It was a new year, and I enjoyed the sense of a fresh start as I returned to work with the mental health inreach team at the women’s prison after the holidays. Heavy keys jangled on my leather belt as I passed through security and threaded my way through the familiar airlocks and long corridors, stopping to greet colleagues in offices still decorated with bits of tinsel and cards. A check of the diary showed my first appointment that day was with a woman called Zahra, in the prison health care unit (the HCU) in the central wing.

  Approaching the double doors, I was greeted by the sound of raised voices within: loud and furious cursing mixed with a more distant but sustained high-pitched keening, like a widow at a wake. Hasty footsteps and shouts, presumably of staff as they rallied to soothe and restrain people, were underscored by the desperate sound of another person’s ragged sobs. I thought of Dante’s arrival in hell (‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ emblazoned over the gates) and the cacophony of ‘unfamiliar tongues’ and ‘cries of rage’ that greeted him. I imagined how a visitor might feel overwhelmed in the face of this; even though I’d been doing this work for many years, I had not become inured to the anguish of both staff and prisoners in such environments, and I hoped I never would. But while Dante covered his ears and wept as he passed into the underworld, I knew that if I dissolved into tears as I entered the unit, it would help no one.

  The HCU has a remit to provide basic health interventions to prisoners who are too ill to be in their cells. Some of the patients are physically sick, but due to the prevalence of mental illness in our prisons, the unit has to look after acutely mentally unwell prisoners too, many of whom will wait for weeks or months for transfer to a secure psychiatric hospital. The demands on the HCU are often overwhelming and the staff can have the harassed look of mothers who are caring for too many children at once. But the officer in charge who greeted me that day was welcoming and efficient. He introduced himself as Terry and led me away from the reception area to a meeting room he had managed to clear for me.

  As he moved some papers and boxes aside to allow space for me to set up the room, Terry told me that everyone was just glad I’d been able to come, as they had been concerned about the suicide risk of the patient I was there to see. Like Charlotte, she was ‘on the book’, that system for monitoring prisoners who are seen as a suicide risk and are constantly being watched. He handed me an orange cardboard file with Zahra’s name on it. I would write my observations about her in it each time we met, and she would have to carry it around with her when she was back on the wing, in accordance with the prison rules, as a flag to others that she was a risk. ‘I hope she talks to you – she barely says a word to any of us,’ said Terry.

  The woman who joined me in the meeting room a few minutes later didn’t seem obviously distressed. She responded to my hello in a low voice and took my outstretched hand with a grip that was cool and limp. As she took the proffered chair, opposite mine, she glanced at the orange file bearing her name with a flicker of recognition – she clearly knew what it was, but unlike Charlotte, she didn’t seem to have a problem with it. She was unremarkable to look at: slim and slight, with her black hair held in a long plait. I noticed she had a fresh cloth bandage on one arm, peeking out from the sleeve of a loose cardigan. She wore a calf-length skirt, ballet slippers and an air of resignation; her manner suggested that if someone cut in front of her in a queue at the bank, they could be confident she wouldn’t object. She made eye contact when we first sat down, but her gaze was dull, with a kind of blankness that troubled me. People who are severely depressed and at high risk of suicide are more likely to describe themselves as feeling numb and emotionally disconnected, as opposed to having feelings of sadness. I thought the staff were right to be vigilant about this woman. I also noticed that although we had had only the briefest of interactions, I had the sense of being judged or silently criticised.

  I began as always by explaining, with a friendly smile, about confidentiality and my role in the mental health team. She barely responded. Couldn’t she see I was there to help her? It was rare for me to feel a flash of annoyance like that – especially with someone so apparently placid. When I was in training, I had often wrestled with negative feelings like this, and it was only slowly and by making a lot of mistakes and taking them to supervision that I learned to tune in to them and to my patients. This is an acquired skill based on careful listening, much like tuning a musical instrument. ‘Attunement’ develops during the essential therapy we receive in training; it helps us to recognise when our own emotional baggage is intruding into the room and allows us to detach from it. Though she was presenting as blank, there was something in Zahra’s demeanour that was generating antipathy in me. Or was I simply mirroring some antagonism she was hiding?

  I decided to confront this head-on. ‘I’m curious, are you feeling a bit annoyed about this meeting?’ She said nothing, gazing down, lips pressed together as if to prevent a simple yes or no from escaping. My irritation increased, and I was aware of wanting to raise my voice, to wake her. ‘Perhaps not annoyed then. What about really, really pissed off?’ She shook her head vehemently in response, which was better than nothing; at least she was showing some emotion. I assured her that she didn’t have to see me and that nothing terrible would happen if we stopped. I wasn’t there to make her do anything. She didn’t react; it was as if she hadn’t heard me. I reflected that if I were on constant suicide watch like her, it was unlikely it would make me co-operative either. ‘Zahra?’ She glanced up quickly, then down again, and I told her that I understood it wasn’t easy, talking to a stranger like this. She mumbled something I couldn’t catch. ‘Sorry, say again?’ She raised her voice: ‘I just want to die.’

  Zahra had started a fire in her cell a few weeks before the holidays. Thankfully, the smoke set off an alarm and her life was saved. I was interested to hear from her offender manager that this incident had been a direct mirror of her original offence: two years earlier, in the run-up to the Christmas holidays, she had survived a fire she had caused in her flat. Each time she had left notes addressed to her mother declaring her suicidal intent, and in both cases she had been fortunate that due to a rapid response, the worst physical consequences for her had been minor burns and some smoke inhalation. But the fire in her flat had resulted in severe property damage, as well as serious injury to a fireman while he was rescuing her and evacuating the building. The maximum penalty in the UK for deliberate fire-setting (arson) is life in prison, even if nobody is killed as a result, and Zahra was sentenced to fifteen years with a minimum tariff of ten. She had been well behaved during her time in prison so far, until the recent incident in her cell.

  Aside from any material or political motives, arson is not a crime that is well understood, particularly in females, although it is the subject of increasing study.1 Apparently, Zahra’s fire-setting career began when she was seventeen, in h
er bedroom at home, when she tried to set her bed alight. No great damage was done, but her mother reported her to the police and ejected her from the family. She was taken into care until she reached eighteen, when she was left to fend for herself. According to one social worker’s note, she tried to reach out to her parents at that time, but her father had been diagnosed with cancer and her mother did not want her to visit. Her older brothers sent her some money but also kept her at arm’s length, prioritising busy lives and young families. It sounded like she was really on her own, adrift in the world.

  She left her native Leicester and went down to London to find work. She began to set small fires, usually in parks or near hospitals or police stations, as if to make it convenient for the public services to deal with the consequences. She did not attempt to conceal her behaviour and was repeatedly caught in the act – but starting a fire doesn’t equal arson until the police charge it as such. She was eventually charged twice, but her sentences were brief, and she was soon back in the community. Her probation records indicated that she had done well thereafter, finding a flat she liked and a job in a garden centre. She got on well with her boss there, who was kind to her. For nearly two years, it appeared that Zahra did not set any more fires. This kind of pause isn’t unheard of with arsonists, and indeed other types of offenders; it is consistent with a pattern we also see in addiction. If people are at an early stage in their offending, and if they are not antisocial, they may go through periods when they feel less distress or find life more manageable for various reasons. They remain abstinent for a while, until one day something prompts them to act out again. My guess was that those two years were important to Zahra, and for me a hopeful indication that she could be pro-social.