Hannah
They sat at the table, eyes anywhere but on each other, the quiet devastation of an untouched breakfast before them.
The last forty-eight hours felt like a cruel joke. A taste of what might have been. Hannah wondered if it would have been better not to have experienced it at all; that way they wouldn’t know what they were missing.
‘Two weeks,’ said Jem eventually. ‘You’re sure?’ Slouched in the chair, his usual poise was gone. He seemed smaller, his spine squashed.
‘I need to call and get the finer details, but that’s what he said.’
‘So we’ll only see each other . . . ?’
‘Once a week. It’s a mandatory part of the restorative justice programme, but you’ll have visiting orders on top of that.’
‘And the baby?’
‘I’ll bring them with me of course.’
‘Maybe Missy will come good on the appeal? How long do these things take? We might only be apart a matter of months.’
Again, they reverted to silence, both conjuring the next twenty years in their heads.
The silence was broken by Hannah’s phone. Dr Hess’s secretary calling to book her in for an appointment.
‘I see here we already have your details on the system. You’ve seen Dr Hess before?’
‘He consulted on my IVF treatment, years ago now.’
The woman was quiet and Hannah could hear the clack of a keyboard.
‘Yes, I see that.’ She typed some more. ‘And can I ask, will you be self-paying again or will your health insurance cover it?’
‘I’ll be paying.’ She went to grab her purse and credit card to secure the appointment, then stopped. ‘What do you mean, again? When I saw Dr Hess the first time it was covered by my husband’s insurance, as was our IVF.’
The woman clacked the keys some more.
‘Not according to my records. All bills were self-paying, settled in full each time by a Mr John Cavey.’
‘Self-paying?’ She thought of the final bill for their IVF. It had run into the tens of thousands. ‘He paid for all the appointments, all the procedures himself. You’re sure?’
‘I have the receipts here on my screen,’ the secretary said, chippy now. She didn’t like being questioned. ‘It’s all there in black and white.’
After ending the call, Hannah steadied herself against the counter.
The most generous gift you could give someone was one they had no idea was a gift in the first place.
John had known how badly she’d wanted a baby. Him too. And so when he’d discovered his health insurance didn’t cover their IVF he must have decided not to tell her, to swallow the cost himself and fall deeper and deeper into debt.
She picked up the plates and dumped the pancakes in the waste disposal.
‘Suppose I should head back in there,’ said Jem and went over to the cell.
Hannah grabbed the key from the hook.
Only once he was behind bars, door locked, did they look at each other.
Their stares were punctuated by the soft, slow blinks of those who know when they are beaten.
Jem
I check in on the Tarkers every week. For months there is nothing and then one night I click on Mrs Tarker’s Facebook and there it is, a picture of Lucas in a hospital bed. He’s thin, his reddy-brown hair gone. A link to a GoFundMe page below.
He’s sick.
Aggressive advanced sarcoma that has spread to various parts of his body including his liver.
He is twenty-three years old.
They’re raising money to take him to a hospital in San Diego for specialist gene therapy treatment not available on the NHS. The cost of the treatment including travel is £80,000. So far, they’ve raised nearly £17,000.
They finish off the post with a plea for people to help in any way they can.
Every morning as soon as I wake up I click on Lucas’s GoFundMe page.
The donations are trickling in but after ten days they’ve only managed to raise another £400.
The donations stall. Ten quid here, five quid there. Then nothing for days. Another ten quid.
After a few weeks of watching the total barely move I make a decision.
I’m going to steal one of the bar’s bitcoin drives.
I’ll take it and then I’ll funnel however much money is on there into Lucas’s GoFundMe. Keep the whole thing anonymous. The Tarkers never need to know where the cash came from.
Hopefully it will be enough to help him on his way to America, to the treatment he needs.
Hannah
The next few days passed slowly. Hannah spent less and less time in the kitchen. Meals were eaten in silence or with the smallest of talk and they ceased all physical contact. She knew she should be making the most of what they had left, that she should treasure these last private moments, but she was also trying to protect herself, hoping that if she started the process of letting go now it would be less of a shock when the time came for him to actually leave.
She had tried to reverse the Foster Host request. Surely, she had asked her lawyer, it was up to her as to whether the prisoner should be transferred? Their response was firm. It was too late, everything was in motion, there was nothing they could do. Besides, they wondered, wasn’t this what she’d wanted right from the beginning?
With eleven days to go, Hannah cleared away the breakfast things and set about rustling up a batch of brownies to take next door to Pru.
She was about to pop them in the oven when her phone rang.
Missy Cunningham.
‘I’ve just heard,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Could you put Jem on?’
Hannah handed the phone through the bars.
‘Your lawyer.’
He took a breath and put the mobile to his ear.
‘Missy?’
At first his eyebrows were high, his eyes wide, but then as she told him the news his features dropped and he put his hand over his face.
‘Thanks for trying, I appreciate it.’
He handed Hannah back the phone.
‘They denied you leave to appeal,’ she said, beating him to the punch.
‘They did.’ His words were flat and quiet.
Next door Hannah was surprised to be greeted not by Pru but by Annabel, her daughter.
Pristine in a white cashmere cowl-necked sweater and grey wide-legged trousers, Annabel spoke a weird hybrid of French and English that Hannah was sure must irritate most people (Annabel was English, she only lived in Paris) but which she herself found extremely charming.
‘Salut! Come on in,’ she said, leaving Hannah to close the door. ‘I’ve got a pan of milk on the boil.’
Hannah had called Annabel and Christopher after the pond incident and let them know what had happened. They’d been concerned and Annabel had said she would organise for the fence to be made higher and harder to scale when she came to stay for the holidays. Hannah had thought she would have gone by now.
In the kitchen, Annabel poured the hot milk into a bowl, sprinkled in a handful of grated chocolate and whisked.
Through the wall they heard the dull falsetto of Jem singing along to the radio. They looked at each other, Annabel waiting for Hannah to acknowledge the sound.
‘How’s it going?’ she said, when Hannah kept her silence.
‘He’s being transferred to a Foster Host. Next Friday.’
‘You must be relieved?’ The chocolate melted, she lifted the bowl to her mouth with both hands.
‘Yep,’ said Hannah, her voice hollow. ‘I’m very lucky.’
The song reached its crescendo and they heard Jem try to match it note for note, then it ended and the low DJ burble took over.
‘I was supposed to go back to Paris tomorrow,’ Annabel said, wiping her mouth. ‘But Mum is worse than I thought so I’ve asked for a few more weeks off work. Just until I can get things sorted.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s going to have me locked up.’ Hannah turned to
see Pru in a dressing gown and slippers, swimming goggles atop her head. ‘She thinks I can’t hear her, on the phone, asking about meal plans and the size of the grounds.’
Annabel finished the last of her chocolat chaud. Her upper lip was moustachioed brown but she seemed not to have realised.
‘No one is locking anyone up,’ she said, and Hannah got the sense they’d had this argument many times before. ‘We just want to make sure you’re safe.’
Pru narrowed her eyes and humphed, unconvinced. She turned to Hannah.
‘Cake?’
Hannah held out the tin of brownies.
‘Your dad won’t stand for it,’ she said, helping herself to the biggest square she could find. ‘Just you wait.’
‘I’m going out for a bit,’ said Annabel, reaching for Pru’s panic alarm. ‘Put this on, please?’ She wiped her top lip clean and as her arm swung down to her hip her wrist left a brown smear on her white cashmere. ‘Au revoir, Hannah,’ she said, heading for the door, ‘nice seeing you.’
Pru waited, listening for a good minute, and then, once she was certain Annabel wasn’t coming back, she went to the French doors and tried to open them. They were locked. She pressed down on the handle and rattled it, then stepped back, defeated. Hannah caught a flash of swimsuit under her dressing gown.
‘I can’t even go and look at the water anymore.’
‘Is that all you want,’ said Hannah, smiling, ‘to look?’
Pru tried to maintain her grump but a tiny smirk showed through, like sun behind a cloud, and she came to console herself with another brownie.
‘Ted had a favourite poem,’ she said through a mouth of chocolate rubble. ‘It was written by a Greek, I can’t recall his name. It’s about how some people come to a point when they have to decide on a great Yes or a great No.’ Hannah frowned. She couldn’t tell if Pru was lucid. She was talking about Ted in the past tense but she also seemed paranoid, whispering and glancing toward the doorway in case Annabel should return. ‘The final few lines talk about saying No to something, even if it’s the right thing to do. The right No can drag a person down for the rest of their life.’
She stopped, waiting to make sure Hannah had understood.
‘If I can’t be near the water I don’t want to be here. As soon as Ted comes home I’m going to tell him, we need to go now, while we still can.’
Hannah noted the shift back to the present tense.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Hannah.
Jem
I watch and wait.
Chickie is right. Every Wednesday the slicked-back hair boss guy arrives around 6 p.m., stays for ten minutes and when he leaves he has Monty’s fob round his neck and the drive is gone from the office, presumably in his bag along with the PIN.
Then a day later Monty will appear wearing a fresh fob and the whole process starts again.
The fact Monty keeps the PIN and the fob on his person at all times – Maya told us he even keeps the fob on to sleep – is to my advantage. It means that, when his boss realises the money is not there, everyone else will be above suspicion.
That there can only be one possible culprit.
Monty.
I source a hard drive identical to the ones Monty uses, then I buy the same type of pager as he wears round his neck. Both are standard and so easy to find. Then every Wednesday, when I know there’s going to be a drive full of bitcoin ready for collection, I make sure to bring them into work.
I’m ready. All I need now is opportunity.
It comes toward the end of the month. It’s been raining all day and the roof is leaking. Monty is distracted. Up and down stepladders, on the phone to builders.
I switch the drives first.
Cleaning the office is one of my duties and so no one bats an eyelid when I go in there to mop. Monty keeps the drive in open view, next to the laptop on the desk. The size of a paperback, its metal sides are stickered with barcodes and numbers. It’s worthless without the corresponding codes and so he sees no need to lock it away. I substitute the one on the desk for the drive in my apron pocket, deposit it in my backpack, and then I move onto the hard part.
Getting the PIN and the fob from Monty.
I take his wallet first. Slip it out from his back pocket while he’s at the till behind the bar. Then I go to the toilets and lock the door. The code – a twelve-digit sequence of numbers and letters – is embossed on a kind of metal dog-tag he keeps wedged next to his debit card. I copy down the code onto a Post-it and stash it inside my travelcard in my back jeans pocket. When I come out, Monty is still by the till, jabbing at the screen. I squeeze past him, a crate of Britvic under one arm, and then I pretend to stumble. When he turns to catch the crate I slip the wallet back in his front trouser pocket.
Finally, I steal the fob.
I wait until he’s up a stepladder, squinting at a yellow water stain in the ceiling, then I set to work taking the chairs down off the nearby tables. His phone rings, a roofer getting back to him with a quote, and he retreats to ground level. As soon as he’s off the phone I pounce, asking about my rota for the following week, and then when he’s halfway through his reply I pretend to see another damp patch in the ceiling.
‘I think I see a second leak?’
‘Where?’ he says, squinting, and so I reach across his body and point and with my other hand I unclip the little plastic clasp at the back of the rope and slip the fob away and into my apron. Then I point to the floor where I’ve dropped an identical replacement.
‘Is that yours?’ I say, already moving away.
He squints into the gloom.
I finish my shift as normal and head home on the Tube. I’m excited, hopeful. As soon as I get in I’ll plug the drive into my laptop, type in the passcodes and set about funnelling money into Lucas’s GoFundMe page.
Monty has no clue anything is amiss. The boss arrived around 6 p.m. as usual. They went into the office, he handed everything over, he left.
But when I get back to my house in Tooting the front door is open, the brick awash with the blue swoop of a police siren.
Panic. Monty knows what I did and has sent them here to arrest me. I’m about to turn and run when one of my housemates appears. The police are here because there’s been a break in. The burglars finally found a way.
Upstairs I find my room ransacked. Living in a houseshare with people I hardly know I keep my valuables hidden, and so even though the place is a mess I’m optimistic.
I go to the shelf where my rent money lies hidden inside the pages of a Murakami, only to realise they’ve tipped all my books onto the floor and that the envelope of cash I’ve been accruing for this month’s rent, due Friday, is gone. My mattress is pulled out a little from the wall, seesawing up and down on the divan. Still I search my hiding spot underneath, hoping to feel the slim metal of my laptop. Nothing.
Comparing notes with my housemates I discover we’re in the same boat, that all our respective hiding places proved useless, that everyone except for Suhail, who kept his weed stashed inside one of the loose ceiling tiles in his box room, has been thoroughly cleaned out.
Once the police have left I sit on the edge of my bed with the drive in my hands. I can’t transfer the money tonight; I have no computer and I won’t be able to get another one sorted for a few days (there’s no way I want to risk doing this in an internet cafe or on a borrowed machine), so where am I going to keep it? I can’t take it with me to work. Once Monty finds out about the missing money he’ll be on the warpath and I wouldn’t put it past him to search our bags, and there’s no way I feel comfortable leaving the drive in the house when we could get burgled again.
My room is small, so I’ve had to put most of my stuff in social storage, which is a fraction of the price of those big warehouses. My things are currently holed up in the loft of a Brixton terrace. I’ll go there first thing, stash the drive in the boxes.
As for the PIN inside my travelcard holder and the fob – Monty migh
t get away with searching our bags but even he couldn’t get away with a strip search. I’ll keep them both on me at all times; that way they’ll be safe, secure.
Hannah
Hannah returned home and charged down the stairs to the kitchen. Jem was lying on his bed, reading, but as she entered the room he sensed the change in her and quickly got to his feet.
She hovered there a moment, her breath quick, eyes flicking, calculating, then she ran outside to the bottom of the garden. At the top of the steps she looked down to the shore and across the water.
Yes or No?
While we still can.
She imagined going to Aisling with her idea. Even now, her reflex was to tell her friend everything, to ask her advice. She knew Aisling would have told her to go for it, to seize the day.
Back in the kitchen she stood facing Jem on the other side of the bars, close enough to kiss. She reached through and took his hands in hers.
‘The code for the back fence is valid till next Wednesday.’
Jem took a tiny step back.
‘It was fun, being out there in the boat, but I don’t think we should do it again.’ He nodded at her stomach. ‘Too much at stake.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘Everything is at stake. Our whole lives.’
Jem shook his head, trying to recalibrate his understanding of the last few minutes.
‘Hannah, what’s going on?’
‘We’re going to take the chance while we still can.’ Her eyes glittered, her pupils glossy, but her breath had slowed and the words that followed were low and constant, like a prayer. ‘We can’t appeal your conviction, so we’re going to get you out of here another way. Before the code expires we’re going to turn off the fence, get in the boat and row across the pond. Then we’re going to keep going.’ She pulled him closer and their wrists banged against the steel bars. ‘We’re going to escape.’
Jem was dead against it. He said they’d get caught, that they’d both end up in prison, their baby taken away.
The Captive Page 23