by Susan Hill
Brian. Lemon-yellow trainers scuffed and with odd laces, one grey, one white.
‘Morning. Welcome to the newcomers. We have six. I’m George Prentiss, I’m a senior psychotherapist. On my left is Helen Granger, also a psychotherapist, and Andy Mutton, staff member.
‘Couple of notices – Kev Cameron is ill, recovering from an emergency appendicitis, as some of you may already know, so drama therapy this week has been cancelled but we’re getting a visiting therapist for next. Sorry for those of you who are finding this a real positive in the programme but good drama therapists aren’t thick on the ground. One other thing – complaints about the state of the showers. This will be dealt with by maintenance of course, but when you use the showers please try and leave them in a decent state. It’s not anyone’s favourite on the duty roster but it has to be done – least everyone else can do is make sure they clean up properly after themselves. Sorry to talk to you like teenagers but there it is.’
They sat obediently, taking the stuff in, nodding, crossing and recrossing their legs. School-assembly notices about communal living were dealt with swiftly and efficiently.
How much of a shock must it be for men who had served five or ten years in a normal prison to hear this?
‘OK.’ George Prentiss put the paper with the notices on the floor beside him, leaned back, crossed his arms. ‘Newcomers, as you can see, we mix you up with longer-term residents … other places would keep you all separate, like school students at the start of a course. But this sort of therapy doesn’t have the same beginning, middle and end, and by having some here who are a couple of months in, you get to understand the whole process. And one of the points of these groups is that you don’t get taught things by people like me, you learn primarily from yourself and the others. We’re just here to facilitate that, provide a bit of guidance, occasionally some interpretation – we’re not teachers or lecturers or medics telling you to take the tablets three times a day.
‘For the old hands, this is the first time you’ve been grouped with your equal number in newcomers. New experience. You don’t have all the answers any more than I do but you can help them … as you help each other outside of this room. All I ask you to be aware of is that you were starting off in therapy not so long ago.
‘Right. This is a two-hour session and this is round one – call it the intro. Any probs?’
A man with long greasy hair and maroon prison-issue tracksuit had a prob.
‘Are we going to be forced to repeat everything just for the newcomers? I don’t want to go over and over the same stuff every time.’
‘No. When it comes to your turn carry on where you left off last time, but if you want to recap for their benefit, you can. Or not. Up to you, Kane. You have any prob with that?’
Kane slumped in his chair, barely shaking his head.
‘Right. From the left. Len?’
‘What?’
‘You start.’
‘What with?’
It was immediately clear that anyone spoke as they wanted to, no one waited to be invited. The therapist was not the teacher.
‘For fuck’s sake, Len, why don’t you ever bloody listen? You heard him.’
‘No need to bloody swear, I’m trying to clear me head.’
He was probably sixty to sixty-five, grey hair, overweight, scruffy beard and moustache. He leaned forward, hands dangling between his wide-apart legs. Looking at the floor. His fingers twitched.
‘I’m Len. You know what this is all about. I’ve done this before.’ He sighed.
‘Yeah, well, you gotta do it again. Get over it – we’ve all got to.’
‘Stop bloody harassing me, will you? Did I say I wouldn’t?’
‘Give him a minute.’
‘Right, start again. I’m Len. I’ve been in here four months. I waited to come here four years. No other option. I’m fifty-four. I’ve served seven years of a twelve-year sentence but I’m looking at three off for good behaviour. So I’m looking at two years and I need to sort myself out. Two years ain’t long.’
His hands were still dangling between his legs and he went on staring at the floor. A few shuffled their feet but no one interrupted again.
‘My index is sexual offences against underage girls.’
He leaned back. He was sweating.
‘Thanks, Len. Spike?’
Spike might have been twelve years old. Small. Skinny. Bad skin. Smart trainers. Frayed jeans. He sat up straight.
‘Spike – my real name’s Pete McKinnon. I’m twenty-four. Been here nine months and it’s bloody fantastic. I was self-harming, I was stashing pills away, I was working out how you hanged yourself, I was a fucking mess. I got beaten up, I got me head down the toilet and crap pushed into me mouth, I got me skull bust open, I got boiling water poured on me hands. I’ve served three of a five-year and before that I’d been in juvenile. And I was thinking there wasn’t any point and then I got told about this place and I got on the list and it’s fuckin’ fantastic. It does your head in, you’re like a bag turned inside out. You wait. Only I’ve stopped having the dreams, I’ve stopped – well, nearly – having the – thoughts.’
‘What do you mean, thoughts?’ Brian. ‘Like fantasies – daydreaming?’
‘Yeah. We all have them. You talk to anyone. You do. I do. What you done, you daydream about it, then you have like plays in your head where you’re doing it again. I did it all the time. I had a job and I got sacked because it’s what I did, I couldn’t do anything else. And it’s stopping. I’m like clean inside my head. Well, almost. Nearly clean. Bit of a way to go but my aim is stick this out, work it out, and I’m aiming on getting parole and getting out and being all right, done with it all. Makes me sick to think.’
He looked around. He wants applause, Simon thought. He’s cheeky. He’s pleased with himself. He’s cocky.
‘You haven’t said anything about your index.’
‘Kids. It started when my sister had her baby, she was fourteen, she had a baby, girl, and I was sixteen, and when it was … Index offence, child molesting.’
Spike glanced around again, pert, gloating. He caught Simon’s eye, and then quite suddenly put his hands in front of his face and burst into loud, howling tears. Simon felt the tension rise around him. Spike could not stop crying until the therapist brought him up with ‘OK, thanks, well done, Spike. Take some deep breaths. Moving on now. Duncan?’
Child molesting.
Rape.
Sex with underage girls. Boys.
Sex with small girls. Boys.
Rape and murder.
They sat, some uncomfortable in their seats, shifting their feet, twisting their hands, others stock-still, staring ahead, no emotion, no facial expression.
‘Will?’
Simon sat, arms folded. Don’t react. He’s no more to you than the rest. He glanced at Fernley. Glanced away.
‘Will Fernley. I’m forty. Served five years of an eight-year sentence. I’ve been here at Stitchford for just over a year of an eighteen-month term. It’s made a massive difference to me – to the way I think about myself and my mindset, to the way I feel about my offences. Everything. This is a remarkable place. I wouldn’t have believed how big an impact it’s had on me. I feel I’m becoming fully prepared to be rehabilitated into the community and quite safely, which I most certainly was not before I came here.’
He tried to soften his accent but the fluency with which he spoke singled him out as a public-school-educated, public-school-confident man. Once or twice he ran his hand over his hair but otherwise sat easily, one leg crossed over the other like several of the others. Plausible. Easy charm. An apparent openness. Serrailler took him in again, knowing that what they were being presented with was all gloss and surface, carefully honed.
‘So just to the newcomers – stick with it because it works. I never thought I’d say that. Oh, sorry – yes. Index offence, child molestation … and related issues.’
There was a general murmur o
f protest.
‘Sorry, sorry … I don’t know how much detail is required at this point. Offences relating to obtaining and downloading child pornography and to organising and running a pornographic Internet, erm, group.’
‘Ring,’ someone muttered. ‘Say it how it is.’
‘Yes. Sorry. Ring. But it does amount to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ He glanced round with a smile at the interrupter.
‘This is where it starts,’ the therapist said, ‘and it starts pretty easily. Basic info, index offence. Then you’re going to fill in with some detail, about your offences but mainly where you stand right now in relation to them – your feelings about them and about yourself, then about the victims … and we’ll come to the past. In time, people in this room will know as much about your life as you do, maybe more … about childhood and schooling and adolescence and family and the gradual emergence of the inclinations which led to the offences you committed. But there’s a long way to go before you get to those … This isn’t any sort of a quick fix as I’m sure you now realise. Just a reminder – say what you think and feel, about yourself and about each other, no holds barred, but this whole therapeutic community runs on the basis of mutual respect, so no offensive remarks, no aggression, no verbal abuse. And one other simple but very important rule – you stay seated. Anyone want to say anything before we listen to the new guys?’
‘Just, like – good luck. And we’re here to support you.’
‘Thanks, Malc. Important to hear that. Sorry, one more thing – whole community meeting tomorrow at eleven fifteen. This is a weekly thing – occasionally we have an emergency special, but only if some issue really blows up, and that’s rare.’
‘Not so rare as all that. What you trying to say, George?’
Laughter from the old hands.
‘And the WCM isn’t optional. Nobody misses it unless they’re at death’s door.’
‘Or stoned.’
‘Not funny.’ The skinny boy Spike. Serrailler wondered how much of a problem drugs really were, in spite of what the governor had said. Some would still be daft or desperate enough to risk getting them in somehow, in spite of the one-strike rule.
He looked around again, trying to reconcile what he saw – ordinary men of different ages, in different states from scruffy and without any obvious sense of personal pride, to clean and smart and would-be cool. An average mixture – thin, fat, dark, fair, shaven or not – there were several moustaches and goatees. Cross section.
Then think of what each of them had done. Think of the room full of sadistic, abusive, violent crimes.
‘OK, let’s start – from the right again. Tell us who you are.’
Brian did not realise for several seconds that he was the one, and in the silence, he half glanced round, looked back. The therapist nodded to him.
Brian’s face flushed and then, as quickly, went very pale. He coughed, sat very still, head down.
‘It’s OK, take a deep breath and just talk.’
Brian looked round again. ‘I’m …’ His voice came out as a croak; he cleared his throat twice. ‘Brian Field. I’m Brian Field. Sorry. I come from Manchester. I’m thirty-seven.’
Simon was surprised. The man could have been fifty.
‘I was – I had five brothers and four of them died in a house fire when I was nine … my dad died in a work accident. My mam worked as a barmaid and left us on our own a lot – I suppose she had to – but there was always a bloke somewhere and she married one of them … then he left, then I was coming up teenage and I ran off – no money, nowhere to go … stole some cash from my mam and then a couple of purses and that was it. Petty crime just to get by … but I’d always had – had these funny thoughts … that one day I’d kill somebody. Not a voice or anything … I just knew I would. It was like a weird sort of thing I carried round – like a superstition or … I dunno. I liked girls. I’d always liked girls … I mean, not liked … I was interested in girls, know what I mean? How they were – shaped, what they wore under their skirts, what they looked like without clothes. I’d never had a sister, maybe that was it, I dunno. This feeling … it was always there. I couldn’t get rid of it. I didn’t go out with girls, didn’t even chat them up because I felt I’d be tempted … I’d be some sort of danger to them. I got a warehouse job, which was all blokes Even then, I kept away from other people. I just stayed on my own and had the odd mate to have a pint with, that was all. Carried on like that for a long time – then I was on the beach at Southport … and this girl was there. It was late on, not the summer season, and the sea was miles out, which is what it does at Southport, and there was just her … I saw her and I knew what I would do … it was like the time had come. It all, like, boiled up … I followed her. She didn’t look round. She went to the sand dunes and I followed her all the way. That was it.’
He stopped speaking. Everyone was silent, waiting.
More silence. No one wanted to stop him by asking any questions. The old hands were giving him every chance.
Silence.
‘Listen, Brian …’ Will Fernley leaned forward and gave the man a warm, encouraging smile. ‘You shouldn’t stop there – maybe just give us the basics – what happened – say what your index offence is, you don’t have to go into more detail now. You’re doing so well.’
Brian shrugged about inside his clothes, as if he had a violent skin itch. He did not look at Will, and he seemed to have come to a stop and gone into a frozen state.
‘Brian?’ The therapist.
Brian took a deep breath, then said, ‘My index crime is murder – and rape. I raped her and then I strangled her and then I buried her in the dunes.’
No one made any comment. There were no sharp intakes of breath. No one stared at Brian. Serrailler’s heart was thumping. He had spent a working lifetime in the presence of men, and women, who had murdered, assaulted with appalling violence, who had raped, abused, used knives, shotguns, ropes and their bare hands. He had always been required to remain calm and focused, not to express disgust or anger, let alone any desire for vengeance. He had fulfilled all those requirements but it had been made easier because he had been in authority over the criminals, had followed them and arrested and charged them and sometimes given evidence in court which had helped to send them down for life. He was trained not to react, to stay on the level emotionally, to be a professional and in control of himself at all times. Brian’s statement was nothing new. What was new was the requirement to sit still, listen, take in and empathise, because he was a fellow murderer and abuser, a partner in the therapeutic process.
From now on, he must treat Brian, and every other man in this room, ‘with respect’, and without aggression of any form, possibly even of thought.
He saw the leg of his neighbour on the left, jeans torn at the knee, black trainers with stark white laces. He gave off a faint smell of deodorant and aftershave. His equal in murder or violent sexual assault of some kind.
He took the deep breaths the therapist had advised for Spike.
‘Thank you, Brian. It’s tough – everyone knows how tough it is – and it will get worse. Therapy tears you apart and it’s a while before you begin to put yourself back together again. Yes – you. I don’t do it for you, no one else in this room does it for you. The programme doesn’t even do it. You do it, with assistance from the programme and support from the rest.’
The therapist glanced quickly at his watch.
‘Anyone want a break? There’s water and cups on the table. Five-minute toilet break.’
Two men went to the drinks jug. Brian followed after a moment. No one left the room. People got up and stretched, swung their arms about a bit. Sat down. Brian returned to his seat, sweating heavily. The room settled again.
The therapist looked at Simon.
‘Johnno Miles,’ he said. ‘Your turn.’
Twenty-three
‘If you go to the police you’ll be treated like dirt.’
‘They won’t believe
you.’
‘I tell you now, Shell, the minute you say it’s someone you already know, they’ll just assume you had a few too many and led him on.’
‘Talk sense, Shelley, who are the police going to believe, you or Dr Richard Serrailler?’
‘The police will make you feel like a slapper. They’re not very nice to women over this sort of thing.’
Of course Tim had said other things. He had believed her, even if he also believed she had had more to drink than she’d owned up to, and he had been upset on her behalf, had comforted her and told her it made no difference at all to how he thought of her or loved her. But he had also told her over and over again not to go to the police.
But it wasn’t like that. It hadn’t been like that from the moment she had walked up to the front desk in the police station. Thank God it had been quiet, no one waiting, no eyes staring and no ears trying to make out what she said.
From that first minute, when she had been shaking so much and her throat had gone dry and closed, and he had said, ‘Take your time, there’s no rush,’ from the second she had first heard the sergeant’s quiet tone of voice, even though she could not stop shaking, she had realised that it was not going to be as Tim had said. It was going to be all right.
It was all right.
The desk sergeant. The small side room and the cup of coffee. The woman officer. ‘My name is Lois Dancer.’ Everything.
‘Let me run you through your first options, Shelley. This is really important. You can remain here, and we’ll get a police doctor – and it will be a woman doctor – to come in and see you and do an examination, or you can go over to Bevham, to the centre. Do you know about St Catherine’s?’
She had never heard of St Catherine’s.
‘Right. It’s in the old town hall building, not far from the bus station. It’s a centre for rape victims and one or two other related crimes. It’s not police-operated but police – Bevham, us, and a couple of other forces – refer rape victims there. It’s staffed by doctors and specially trained counsellors. Basically, you tell your story on tape, so that they, and we, have a full detailed record of exactly what happened to you. Then you have a full physical examination. The centre is entirely staffed by women. You talk to one of their counsellors and you can make appointments to see her again and she would support you if you decide you want to press charges and be with you through the whole process, especially if the case does go to court. We work closely with St Catherine’s and so do the legal teams and you wouldn’t be alone making decisions or giving statements or whatever. I really recommend that you go there, Shelley. As I said, you can choose to stay here and we’ll call the doctor, but honestly, we don’t have the surroundings and facilities they do, and also you might have to wait several hours. The doctor will make it a priority but she does have her other work. At St Catherine’s, you won’t have to wait long. Can I get you another coffee while you think it through?’