by Graham Swift
He kept to the slow lane. Indicated for the exit to “Terminals 1, 2 and 3.”
Even so, even so. Things can still happen, they can turn right round at the last minute. And there was always Plan B: that they’d pass through the departure gates together—as always intended. They’d flash their boarding cards and be gone. Why should he have driven anything but steadily and calmly if that was the plan?
The link-road from the motorway to the airport entrance. The roar of a low jet.
In my bones I knew it, they were going to part. The way the black Saab seemed to drive as gravely as a hearse, down into the tunnel under the runways, as if there was no way out.
Part of me—my bones only?—must have rejoiced. The rest of me begging to be wrong.
40
When you go to visit someone in prison it’s like a small rehearsal of the real thing, a small taste of punishment. Doors close behind you. A system—a smell—swallows you, you’re searched and counted and marked. You wonder vaguely if they’ll let you out. Then, when your time’s up, a small miracle occurs. You go back—it’s okay—the way you came. You take that simple step which for those who stay inside isn’t simple or even thinkable at all.
Everyone ought to be made to do it perhaps. A kind of education, a privilege. To know what it’s like to leave the world then be put back in it again.
I join the line at the Gate. There’s a brand-new Visitors’ Centre, just across the way, but it’s not yet up and running so we huddle like people without a home.
Familiar faces. Always the sprinkling of kids, kids without their mums, minded by someone else. Some nods, quick smiles. By and large, we’re a silent bunch—except for the kids. We haven’t come to meet each other, and it’s only by accident that we look like some special, picked group, a chosen few.
The high brick wall rears above us. There’s a hunching of shoulders, a shifting of feet—an impatience, to be let into a prison. But while we shiver in the shadows, the brickwork up above glows like the crust of a just-baked loaf. For the sun it’s no problem either—that simple step that isn’t so simple—it can just float over a prison wall.
A privilege, a chosen few. All the shuffling queues.
Except for me the privilege is in the wrong direction. The most precious moments of my life. As if I might say, when they send us out: Can’t I stay? Do I have to go? I’d gladly stay if you could find a reason, an excuse. Isn’t there something you can pin on me?
Except, small snag, this is a women’s prison. No matter what you did to get a permanent pass, you couldn’t find a way round that.
Five past three. It’s time. They open up. We edge forward, and though it’s the new, the unfamiliar faces they’re watching out for, my stomach goes, as always, into a knot. As if they might stop me, as if there’d be the stern look, the finger pointing, then flicking away. No, not you. Not you today.
My stomach tightens. But, as always, I don’t forget to fill my lungs. It’s become a ritual, a superstition, an essential preliminary. Like a diver. A lungful of free air.
As if I could hold it for all the time it takes to get through the doors and checks and searches and into the Visits Room, and only release it when our lips meet.
As if we’re allowed to kiss on the lips …
The screws say, “Hello, George.” You have to leave your stuff in the lockers. Pockets turned out. It’s like old times in the cop-shop. No wallets, keys, money in notes, cigarettes. They look in your shoes, they look in your mouth. Sometimes they bring in the dogs.
They frisk me quickly, more by habit than purpose, not touching certain parts. We’ve got past the jokes about allover massage, but part of the smell of prison, there’s no doubt about it, is the smell of sex. Sex without sex.
Though it can’t be as strong, I suppose, as in a male prison. The reek of perfume at visiting time, the dolling up. The best that can be done.
Like my clients—some of them. Wafts of signals being given off. Rita sniffs them, eyes them, then lets them in. And there are all the questions you can’t ask, though you do (and they know it) in your head, and sometimes—sometimes surprisingly quickly—they answer them anyway.
You still sleep with your husband? When was the last time…? So you still have sex with him, but you know, by the way he …?
It’s the same when the screws feel you up: a little flurry of unspoken questions.
The last time? There hasn’t been a first.
They look at you. Well it takes all sorts.
And you’re still holding your breath.
My screw’s name is Bridget (I know some of the names). She’s firmly built and forty, and looks like a female judo expert. There must be men who fancy female prison officers. Like men (I knew some) who fancy policewomen. Women in uniform, screwardesses. A touch of discipline.
Me? I’m more teachers, these days.
Bridget says, “Hello, George. How are we?” as she pats me and I lift my arms. These days, it’s true, we’re past the silent-question stage. She looks at me these days with a sort of respect.
“Nice day out there,” she says.
And I wonder if she knows, if they all know, if they keep a special log. This was the day.
“But cold,” I say.
Just a step. But it’s another country, another world. And if you’ve come to live in it, you have to survive. There are all kinds of ways, but one way is to accept it, to want it utterly—is there anywhere else you should be? You’ve done wrong (the worst kind of wrong) and shouldn’t you be punished? Once upon a time—not so long ago—they wouldn’t even have let you live.
Wanting to be locked away. Wanting to forget that you ever walked about in that other world, far away, just beyond a wall. It never existed, you were never really there.
She used to hate me, at first. I could see it—it was terrible—in her eyes. She hated me: this outsider, this intruder—this reminder—this breaker into her space. For the first three months, in fact, she refused to see me, refused to call, though they can call. The prisoner decides, their one bit of power, the prisoner invites. Come to my place.
And of course, I feared. A crime like hers, they’d put you on close watch.
Feared, and doubted? My own feet turning cold? “Off her trolley,” Marsh had said. Feared, and couldn’t believe. Could she believe it? That it was happening. An old cop, and I’d thought, as if I didn’t know the law: she can’t get life, not life.
Letters only, my dumb letters. Letters only one way. Then one day a reply. I stared at it. Then one day that magic thing, that concession: a Visiting Order. But even when she did see me, let me see her: the look in her eyes! As if I was dead to her, she was dead to me.
He’ll stop, he’ll give this up, I’ll make him. Then I’ll be alone, then I can turn completely to stone.
I said to myself: Keep going, hold on. What did you expect? To be welcomed, rewarded, made to feel good?
I don’t want your pity, George, I don’t want your fucking charity.
It’s not what you’re fucking getting.
Me with my lungfuls of air, me about to burst. Me with the one bit of news she didn’t want to hear: whatever happened, whatever happens, you’re still you.
Keep going.
And I wasn’t blind. I knew about prison, what it does to people. It turns them into people they never thought they were. On conviction, they go to the hospital wing. That numbness in her eyes: some of it sheer shock. Sweetheart. I wasn’t naive. It used to be my job once, my duty, to send people to prison. Now look at me, banging on the door myself.
I thought of how I’d gone to see Patel. Off the danger list. I’d wanted forgiveness. As if I’d stuck that knife in his chest myself.
Don’t give up. This will pass, it will pass. It’s only natural. Only natural: to kill the man you love—love? loved?—then to want to be dead yourself.
Not prison but burial. As if she were in that grave with him. I couldn’t drag her out. I couldn’t smuggle out earth, I could
only carry in air. How many lungfuls, how many deliveries—a whole cellful?—before the hatred started to die? Before she came back to me. And back to herself.
Back to being you.
There are times, there always will be, when you still wish you weren’t, you’d never been you. Or when you could almost believe it really was some other person, not you—how could it have been you?—who did what you’re supposed to have done.
But on this day, of all days, the anniversary of the day you did it, you know you can’t believe that.
41
The Saab came up out of the entrance tunnel and took the lane to Terminal2. I was three cars behind. When I moved into the same lane I reduced the gap to two. Five past six. The sudden urgency of an airport.
They followed the sign for “Short Stay Car Park—Terminal2.” Short stay? A brief slow-down, then we both swung into the multi-storey and began the spiralling ascent. On the fourth level there were spaces and when the Saab pulled into one I drove by, turned back on the far side and parked where I could watch.
Almost a minute passed before either of them got out. The last moment at which there might have been a change of plan? Of heart? He still had the key in the ignition. She was still sitting beside him.
Though what was the plan? “Short Stay”: that might mean nothing. The car might just stay there, till somebody asked questions, till Sarah had to deal with it—with that too. An expensive decoy, a top-of-the-range Saab, if that was the plan—but only a small part of everything he’d be leaving behind.
You take a step, you cross a line.
But people do weirder things. And some people, he might have thought, like this woman still there beside him, don’t get to choose. They turn their backs and life explodes behind them.
His excuse: she was his example? Why play safe? The world doesn’t.
And she was sitting there now, perhaps, waiting. Watching him waver, watching him sweat. It was up to him.
I couldn’t make them out, behind the glints and shadows. The Saab was parked facing away from me. It might already have been empty, except (wavering, sweating?) he hadn’t yet switched off his lights.
“Missing Persons …” They’d often start with an abandoned car. In a multi-storey car park, say. The point of departure. The point where somebody hoped, for one reason or another, that they might become somebody else, they might walk right out of their own life.
Missing Persons: my bread and butter these days too. Missing Persons and Matrimonial Work: they sometimes amount to the same.
He switched off his lights at last. She got out first. His door opened, more slowly. Yes, she was taking the lead. She was coaxing him through this as if he might have been some stumbling invalid. She was the one who took command in a crisis.
And, yes, as she moved ahead of him, towards the back of the car, I saw something you might have wanted, if you were the right man in the right place, to obey and follow like some dumb dog. Dark pools of eyes. Her skin, in the harsh light, drained of blood.
He opened the boot as if acting under silent instruction. He took out the two suitcases—just the two, the same two. He might have been simply her driver, dealing with the luggage, anticipating a tip, except that when he put the suitcases down his hands went up, as if to something much more in need of handling, to the sides of her face. As if to some vase perched on a shelf.
I opened my car door. A rush of chill air. The roar of planes and the smell, keen but vaguely stomach-turning, of aviation fuel, mingling with the cold-petrol smell of parked cars. The scent—there is one—of emergency.
She took his hands from her face. Gently, firmly. Some yards away, near the lift, was a stack of luggage trolleys, and she walked across—deliberate strides—to get one.
A destitute student. In that sleek black suit that stood out against all this dingy concrete? You wouldn’t have believed it.
She wheeled back the trolley. He was waiting with her coat. He put the suitcases and her carry-on bag on the trolley. He shut the boot and locked the car, then took the handle of the trolley and began to push.
I grabbed my own coat. Now their backs were turned, I got out and walked, like them, towards the lift.
It was a temptation, of course, a big temptation. To have stood with them while the lift came—to have stepped in with them. And how would they have known? A temptation: a breach of the rules. Never risk having your presence noted. Keep on your side of the line.
But now I wish I had. Entered—just for that brief journey down—their space. I’d have read all the signals close-up, in the bright light of the lift. Scented the scents. I might even have given that quick meaningless smile a stranger gives in a lift. As if I didn’t have a clue.
I’d have looked at her, at him. He’d have looked at me. I’d always know that we’d looked each other in the eye.
I veered past them, took the stairs. A more-than-professional tact? The lift to themselves: those few seconds down to departure level. But every second, perhaps …
There’s a word I’ve learnt about from Sarah, that goes with the closeness of people. “Aura.” It’s Latin or maybe Greek—like “gynaecologist.” It means “breath, “breeze,” “shimmer.”
I’d have been in their aura. Kristina’s aura.
Sarah’s aura.
I took the stairs slowly. When I reached the walkway to the terminal they’d already emerged and were several yards ahead.
In airports there are channels and slots and filters like being in a production line. A great grinding system that takes away aura or—by the same token—makes it stand out. So many departures, so many arrivals: you can’t tell the simple goodbyes from the agonies, the lovers from the friends. People get excited, they hug, they cling, they kiss. What do those wet eyes mean? See you next Saturday? I’ll never see you again?
All this intimacy in public. But here it’s not unusual, it’s almost the done thing.
And, by the same token, it’s a detective’s dream. You’re part of the crowd, you won’t be noticed—even if you should brush right by.
And, anyway, it doesn’t take a detective. Something in the blood. Who hasn’t done it—stood, sat at the edge of some big milling space, and watched? And who hasn’t, just for the sake of it, picked out, like a spy, some single figure, some couple, followed their every move and gesture, tried to read their lips? Wondered: what’s their story?
That couple there, for example—that striking girl (Italian?) with the handsome but anxious-looking older man.
Arrivals and Departures. Check-in was a level below—they’d missed a sign. I followed them down, watched them find their way to a line. Flight 837 for Geneva. So? A longish queue.
So little time left now (if that was how it was): to have to spend it in a queue. She was the steadier. He kept looking at his watch. The nervousness of a man about to be condemned? Or about to abscond? His hand kept going to her waist, her arm, her shoulder, sliding through her hair to the nape of her neck.
They shuffled forward. Perhaps this was more terrible than either of them had imagined. She was the steadier—almost a grimness, as if one of them had to hold on. They’d said they’d go through with it, he’d said they’d go through with it. But now, at the barrier, he was starting to crumble, back down, he was slipping away from her.
If that was how it was.
Shouldn’t a gynaecologist have learnt to stay calm?
Two tickets or one? I still couldn’t be sure. Those suitcases could mean anything—all part of the decoy perhaps. People walk out of their lives with next to nothing, with just the clothes they’re wearing. His hand on her neck.
To lose, to have the one you love. To love isn’t to have, to keep.
I still didn’t know.
42
Her eyes seem to stare through me today as if at someone else in the distance.
She says, “You went?”
“Of course. I took flowers. Roses. It’s a beautiful day out there.”
And that see
ms wrong, of course—both to say it and the fact. Today, of all days, a beautiful day.
How does she get through this day?
There’s a little hard knot in her brow, tight as a question-mark. She stares into my face. At the same time there’s a sort of shame in her eyes, a shy twist at the corner of her mouth, as if she’s saying, I know this is absurd, George, I know I’m being silly, but—
And maybe she’s thinking, like I’m thinking: this is how it was two years ago. Me with my mission, her waiting to be told.
What can I say? There isn’t any message, I’m not his messenger. I’m just your visitor, like any other day.
“It all looked—good. It all looked—just the same.”
What can I say? That he hasn’t budged? Not going anywhere. That he said he’d always be waiting, too?
And I know she doesn’t believe in ghosts. At least on any other day.
“ ‘Haunted,’ George?” she said once. “That’s too simple a word. That’s not how it is …”
But I know she’s been with him, she’s told me, in dreams. With Bob in dreams, even though he’s dead, even though she killed him. That seems just an incidental point, until she wakes up.
And I’ve been with Sarah in dreams—my dreams and hers (she’s told me)—even though she’s here in prison, which seems incidental too, where we can hardly touch.
In dreams there aren’t any locked doors.
I say, “I stood there, sweetheart. I can’t speak for him. And he can’t speak.”
It seems almost cruel, like explaining something dreadful to a child. And she’s my teacher, usually—I’m the kid, turning up at this special school.
“I stood there quite a while.”
(I gave him time, I gave him his chance.)
And I know well enough the word she wants to hear—or something near it, just the promise, the glimmer of it. And she knows, well enough, she can’t have it.
And, God knows, though some people might say she blew away that possibility completely (and what crime did he commit?), she’s forgiven him.