by Cerys du Lys
“It’s okay,” he said. “They’ve gone now. It’s okay. Can you stand up?” He reached down, put a hand under her elbow and helped her stand.
“It’s okay,” he said again. “Let’s get you out of here.”
2
Sam. He’d shown her that first spark of sympathy when she arrived. That first hint that maybe there would be a way to get through all this.
He was a stocky guy, not much taller than her five-six. His dark face was wide like a plate, and he had the kind of easy smile that inspired confidence.
Now, he guided Eleanor back to her cell.
All thoughts of evening meal and association were gone now. She just wanted to be in her cell. Wanted him to lock her in. Wanted the security of those four walls.
“You sure you don’t want to be checked out?” he said again. “There’s still a nurse on site.”
Everything felt swollen. Her chest, her face, her battered belly. Her throat felt like it was on fire, every breath hurting.
It was all she could do to walk. She just had to make it to her cell. That was all.
When she reached the doorway, she almost collapsed. She caught herself against the frame, concentrating on breathing and staying on her feet.
Sam gave her a moment, then with that hand under her elbow guided her across to her bunk and helped her sit.
She looked up. Swallowed. Then managed to say, in a very small voice, “Thank you.”
That was when she realized that this was only the beginning.
The look in his eye.
Something different.
Something cold.
“You have to learn,” he said to her. “You have to learn how this place works.”
She watched him, transfixed by those cold eyes, and waited for him to go on.
“Nobody owes you nothin’ in here, babe. You’ve got to earn everything.”
She couldn’t tear her look away.
“An’ right now, babe, you owe me big.”
§
They called it ‘nosh’, she learned later.
Prison slang for food, but also for anything else that goes in your mouth.
Blow jobs for the male officers. Blow jobs for favors, for tobacco and drugs; blow jobs for protection; blow jobs because you’re powerless and if one of the male screws is one of the bad ones he can do just what the fuck he likes.
Nosh.
§
He reached out and buried his fingers in her hair, cupping the side of her head in a hand that was surprisingly big.
With his other hand, he reached for his belt and undid it, then freed the button at his waistband and slid the zipper down. Undone, his pants slid down to bunch at his knees, and he stood there with his pale blue shirt hanging down to his thighs, almost completely covering white shorts, a sharp contrast to his dark skin.
He drew his hand away from her hair and when she looked back up at those cold eyes he was smiling.
He pulled his shirt apart, hooked thumbs into his shorts and pulled them down.
“I...” Her face was throbbing with the pain of her beating, her neck on fire, her mouth still tasting of blood.
“You owe me.”
Freed from its constraints, his fat dick started to fill out and nudge upwards, pointing towards her as it stiffened. As she watched, the foreskin rolled back to reveal a shiny, purple head.
He put his hands to either side of her head, guiding her down on him.
When that wet head came to press against her lips she gasped, opened, and took him in.
The pain was turning to numbness now, as if her jaw had been injected with local anesthetic by a dentist, deadening everything. The same numbness was seeping through her head, dulling her to everything that was happening.
He pulled her towards him, filling her until she started to choke again.
Everything, from the neck up was numb now; everything below that on fire. Every movement sent pains stabbing through her chest and belly.
She closed her eyes.
She just had to get through.
Just had to survive.
Above all, she had to stop thinking. Stop that rush of understanding that this was how it was and how it would be. That this was her punishment, and it was a punishment she deserved.
3
She was stupid to ever believe that Anja would leave it at that.
The big Albanian had marked El out from the beginning, for whatever reasons. El stood out because of her hair and being ‘posh’ as everyone called her. Anja had wanted to befriend her and dominate her because that’s how she was, that was the way she had found to survive. But when she had found out El’s crimes, it had all changed and it had been Anja’s one opportunity in here to find any kind of justice for what had been done to her.
El understood all this, but it didn’t help her one bit.
Understanding gets you nowhere in prison. It’s all about favors earned and debts owed. And about not making it easy for someone who’s out to get you.
§
Four days on the inside was all it took for El to feel as if she’d never been anywhere else.
That six-bedroom mock-Tudor commuter home? The view from the back out over the golf course where Jeremy liked to take his ‘business associates’? A dream, a fantasy. Something from another person’s life.
The designer clothes? The champagne lunches? Distant rumor, no more.
Jeremy? Well he’d always been a fantasy, as it turned out. His respectable life had been a front. Their relationship? She’d only been starting to fathom just what that relationship really was, what it might have become, when he’d been snatched from her.
Now, this life of sheer routine seemed like the only one she’d ever known.
Four days: long enough to relax a little, to stop watching everyone, their every move and reaction.
Sam had come back to her twice in that time. The first time he’d brought her tobacco; the second it was pills that he said were speed. She still had those, saving them for when she really needed to buy favors.
That was how it worked: favors and debts.
She paid for those favors with more ‘nosh’.
She’d learned his signs, his tells. Knew when he was close to pulling back and coming all over her face, as he liked to do. Knew the little things she could do to speed him up, make him come, get it over with. The tongue, just there; the finger, just there; that moment when the sharp press of teeth would take him over the edge.
Favors. That’s all it was.
She had shut down so much of the person she had been.
You had to, in order to get through.
Favors to yourself.
§
After that first assault, El had learned not to walk near doorways, to stick to the middle, the open.
But it had only been a matter of time.
On the inside there really is nowhere you can hide for long. You have to take part in association. You have to do your jobs and your classes. You have to spend time in the exercise yard. You have to use the toilet and shower. And to do any of these things, you have to walk from one place to another.
You can do everything right to protect yourself, but you only have to slip up once.
§
Slip up or be sold down the line, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. Never trust anyone. How many times did she need to remind herself of that?
Sam cornered her in the sports center’s changing room.
El was cleaning there, slopping the floors with a mop and a bucket of soapy water. It was her first real job in the prison, working there with two of the other girls whose names she still did not know. One moment she was squeezing the mop out into the bucket, the next the other girls were out of sight and Sam was standing there, an odd look on his face.
She knew his tells by now, but this wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t the hungry look, the one that told her exactly what he wanted from her.
It wasn’t that strangely patern
al look, the expression she’d first seen on his face when he’d been explaining to her how this place worked and how to keep out of trouble.
It was something different.
“What’s up?” she asked him, and he looked away, and that was when she knew she was in trouble.
Movement, off to one side, and then Anja appeared in the doorway.
Sam glanced at her, then back at El.
“Sam? What’s going on, Sam?” She shook her head a little, then, tossing out her hair in the way she knew he liked.
“Such pretty hair,” said Anja, moving into the changing room.
“Sam?”
He met her look and shrugged.
“Favors,” he said. “It’s all about the favors.”
Anja.
Then he turned and left.
“We were interrupted,” said Anja, taking another step towards El. There was something in her hand, and from only a quick glance El knew what it was.
A shiv. A home-made knife. It looked like a razor blade embedded in something... a toothbrush handle?
§
Prison had changed her. Four days inside and already she was El, not Eleanor.
She had shut down a large part of the woman she had been and become something else.
She knew when to look away, look down, look anywhere but back into the eyes of someone on the edge of going apeshit.
She knew when to accept her punishment from the likes of Sam. When to close her eyes and open her mouth.
And now, she understood, there were times when you have to stand up and be counted or forever be trodden into the dirt.
“You’ve got no fight with me,” she said to Anja.
There were other women in the doorway now, crowding in to watch.
“I’ve always got fight with people like you.”
That phrase again: people like you.
“You get in any more trouble and you’re just letting the bastards win.”
“Trouble? The screws aren’t looking this way. Sam’s making sure of that. Favors.” She spat that last word out.
There was no way out, the entrance barred by watching women.
“So what are you going to do?”
Anja held her shiv in full view now, taunting El with it.
“Gonna cut that pretty hair,” said Anja. “An’ I’m going to mark you, bitch. Going to make you live with it, you hear?”
Four days.
Four days to go from the kind of innocent who would have fainted at this, to...
“You fucking try. Bitch.”
Anja lunged at her, aiming for a quick slash across the face.
El swung back, the blade swinging so close...
Momentum brought Anja another step closer as her swing missed, and El raised her broom and swiped it across the side of the big woman’s head.
Anja squealed, a mix of surprise and pain, and in that instant El followed through, one end of the broom still lodged against the other woman’s skull and now El’s full weight thrown against the shaft, turning it into a lever that flipped Anja off her feet and down into a heap on the floor.
El pulled back and swung, her wrists and arms jarring painfully at the impact of wood on skull.
She sidestepped and swung again, bringing it down in Anja’s face.
This time she didn’t pull away, but instead moved the broom so that the top of the handle came up into the hollow under Anja’s chin, forcing her head back against the floor, trapped against one wall.
She pushed, felt it give, and Anja made an awful retching sound, her arms and legs flailing.
“You listen,” said El. “You try that again and I’ll fucking have you. You hear that?”
Then she turned, reached for her bucket and walked away.
For a moment, the women in the doorway just stared at her, then they stepped back, parting for her so she could leave.
Four days.
Such a short time to make the journey from fearful innocent to a woman capable of bad.
Such a short time to be so brutalized and stripped bare.
Four days. And it only got worse.
4
They moved her to a different wing after that.
Nobody ever explained why. She guessed it might be something to do with Sam realizing he’d misjudged her and that now there was an explosive situation brewing between her and Anja. She rarely saw Sam after that, but she would come to understand that, while he was by no means one of the good guys, he certainly wasn’t one of the worst.
On D Wing the cells were shared. There was no more room, just a pair of bunkbeds where there had been one in her first cell.
Sitting on the top bunk with her knees drawn up as El arrived at her new cell, was a tiny woman in her early twenties. Her hair was black and tied back, her skin a golden Middle Eastern brown, and her dark eyes were wide and almond-shaped.
She nodded as El paused in the doorway. “Hello,” she said. “I am Ash. Short for Ashti, which means ‘peace’.”
El nodded in return, and said, “I’m El. Just El.”
Ash didn’t speak much, and when she did it was with a soft, hesitant voice, her nature true to the meaning of her name.
They spoke awkwardly that evening, neither giving much away. El was wary after her previous experience, reminded not to trust anyone here.
It was a few days before Ash asked the question El had feared.
“So what did you do?” Ash was on her now familiar perch on the top bunk, where she sat like a wary bird. It was lunchtime lock-up, 12.30 to 1.45, the quiet slot after lunch where they were shut away before afternoon activities.
Sometimes it’s the first thing that is asked and in many ways that’s easier to deflect: it’s out there, it’s a conversational gambit that you can deflect and move on. But when it’s held back, it’s a question that usually comes out when the asker actually cares about the answer.
Ash was from somewhere in the Middle East. El knew that much. Had she come to this country illegally? Very probably. In which case, had she been trafficked? What kind of awful depravity had she been put through in order to pay her way?
“My husband was involved in people trafficking,” said El, meeting the small woman’s look full on. “When I found out, I tried to protect him. So, technically, I was a people trafficker, too.”
Ash didn’t flinch away from her look; her gaze didn’t flicker. Instead: “He lied to you?” she said.
El nodded, that simple question somehow breaking through all her defenses so that suddenly she was fighting back tears.
“I was lied to.”
El realized that Ashti’s question had not been about the answer at all: it had been an opener so that the Kurdish woman could talk.
“Who lied?”
“My father’s brother,” said Ash. “He lied to my father, too. I grew up in Arbil in Kurdistan, in what is currently part of northern Iraq. My uncle, he told my father that he had made an arrangement with a security firm that the American soldiers were using. He told him he could get me and my sisters out to a life that was better, and safer.”
El shook her head. Jeremy had been that kind of man, like this girl’s uncle: the man who made deals and smuggled people out and then made them pay.
“It was a life that was better and safer for him. He did not tell my father that my sisters and I were an investment in my uncle’s future. He used us to pay for his own safe passage and then he used us to pay for his living.”
El didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t have to: Ash had clearly been bottling all this up, but now the words were gushing out.
“You,” she said. “You trying to play it tough in here. You have to do that, El. You have to be tough. You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it. That’s how it works... In here, and outside. Life is simple when you understand that.”
“What did you do?” asked El. “What are you inside for?”
Ash peered down at her, and then, after a few seconds, said, “R
evenge.”
After another pause, she went on: “I am imprisoned for revenge, and it was the best feeling I have ever known.”
§
Ashti’s words stuck. They went round and round in El’s head as she worked, they haunted her when she lay awake through the night.
You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it. That’s how it works... In here, and outside. Life is simple when you understand that.
§
Her life with Jeremy had been a sham, a polite façade designed to conceal his criminal activities.
When Jeremy had been killed it was as if two lives had been snatched away from her.
She lost that comfortable, middle-class life they had built, but then she had been losing that already, as soon as she knew that it was built on falsehood. She had never really had that life in the first place.
Worse, she had lost the life that was emerging. She and Jeremy had made a fresh start, one based on an honesty between them. She was discovering the man he really was, not the bottled up polite version he had tried to be. And she was discovering a side of her that had been suppressed, too, a side of her prepared to live with all these aspects of Jeremy that were emerging. A side that was suddenly excited by him.
It had been a strange and precarious thing. A glamorous and exciting life where, even then, she was only barely beginning to understand what he had really been involved with.
There had definitely been something there, though. The man she’d fallen in love with, combined with a dark and exciting man who was just emerging... An extraordinarily intoxicating combination.
And then... gone.
A life barely even started. Stolen from her.
§
Revenge, Ashti had said. It was the best feeling I have ever known.
A couple of nights later El lay on her bunk, staring up at Ash’s mattress above her. Her cell-mate had been moving about, restless, still awake.
“Tell me,” said El.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me about revenge. Tell me how it feels.”
You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it.
El had worked that out, and what she wanted was revenge.
Revenge for losing a life that had never really existed, and for that brief dream of a life barely started that had been snatched away.