by Clare Fisher
I don’t know what she’ll be wearing or whether she’ll have her hair short or long.
What I do know is that she’ll sit down opposite me and her heart will be beating too hard and her palms will be sweating and part of her will just want to run away and another part will be telling her she’s a bad thing, but somehow –
Because what is it? What really is it that keeps us going?
She’ll fight it off. She’ll look me in the eye. She might just smile.
‘Hello,’ she’ll say.
‘Hi.’
And then we’ll talk. We’ll talk about everything that happened and everything that didn’t happen. We’ll sigh. We’ll laugh. We’ll breathe the same words and the same silence. We’ll let our stories grow.
Now, I hear footsteps. The scrape of the key in the lock. So I’m saying goodbye. I’ll sleep with this notebook under my pillow, right next to my new one. I don’t know what I’ll write in it yet; all I know is, it will be good. Not always easy, but definitely, 100%, no arguing, good.
‘Mitchell!’
Now I really am letting go of this pen.
It’s time.
Acknowledgements
Books aren’t finished without readers, so thank you so much for being one of them.
Thanks to my agent, Zoe Waldie, for your on-going wisdom, faith and honesty, both on and off the page. Thanks, Venetia Butterfield, for believing in Beth from the beginning and for your editorial brilliance. Thanks to everyone else at RCW and Viking for providing a warm and nourishing home for both me and my work.
Thanks to everyone who helped me research women in prison, in particular Lucy Baldwin and everyone at HMP New Hall education department.
Thank you to my writer-friends for sharing your time, shoulders, brains and words: thank you, Rosa, Rachel, Raquel, Sophie and Alice; thank you, Drusilla; thanks to Anna and David for becoming readers when called; thanks to everyone at WordLab and to the Failed Novelists.
Thank you, Laura and everyone at Spread the Word for giving me all sorts of opportunities to develop as a writer. Thanks to my MA tutor, Francis Spufford, for taking me seriously before I took myself seriously as either a writer or a person.
Thank you to all my friends and family for showing me, in your own strange and wonderful ways, how to get better at being here.
Thank you to my runner-friends and in particular the veggie runners. Thank you, Dea and thank you, Nicola.
Thanks to my parents, Anna and Jethro.
Thank you, David, for everything.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in 2017
Copyright © Clare Fisher, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97810-8