Hush, Little Bird

by Nicole Trope

  I hate being away from Isabel. She’s in her kindergarten year at school and I know that every single day she is learning something new. Last month she wrote me a card that said Miss you, Mum, and she had covered the rest of the page with x’s. When I went into the other place she couldn’t write her name. Kids change so quickly, you have to watch them all the time or you’ll miss it. I’m missing so much. One day she will be smarter than me. Lila told me that she’s already at the top of her class. Nothing makes my body feel peaceful and my heart feel warm like stories about Isabel. Before I was locked up I would count the hours until the end of my workday so that I could go home and be with her. I could watch her for hours, I didn’t need to do anything else. I would watch her and I would feel filled with joy. That’s how Isabel makes me feel—filled with joy.

  Mum didn’t want me to have her. ‘Who do you think is going to land up taking care of the child?’ she said to Lila on the phone. She thought I was asleep but I wasn’t. ‘Don’t you think I’ve had a hard enough time? I know what it’s like to have to raise children alone. Your father ran off and started a whole new life and we never heard from him again. This man doesn’t want anything to do with the baby. I’m the one left to pick up the pieces, as usual.’

  I didn’t know what pieces Mum was talking about. There were no pieces, just me and a baby growing inside me.

  ‘And what if the baby is like her? What if I have to take care of both of them? She hasn’t thought this through, because she can’t think it through, and you’re not helping by telling her to do whatever she wants.’

  I wanted to get out of bed and shout at Mum that my baby wouldn’t be like me. My baby would be clever like her and Lila. I knew it would.

  Lila shouted at Mum for me. Even though I was lying in bed and Lila was on the phone I could hear her because she was so loud. I didn’t know what she was saying but she was very angry.

  ‘Don’t you dare call me selfish, Lila Grace,’ said Mum. ‘You want her to have this child, fine. I’ll be here, but you need to help us with money. God knows you have enough of it.’

  Lila has always helped me. When she knew about Isabel growing inside me she said, ‘Tell me what you want to do.’

  ‘I want to have a baby,’ I said, and she said, ‘Okay then.’

  ‘Birdy, I feel like you’re not with me today,’ says Henrietta, and I remind myself to pay attention.

  ‘Do you know that Rose Winslow came here yesterday?’ I say to Henrietta, because I have nothing else I want to discuss with her. I have to be careful what I say to Henrietta. She doesn’t have to know that Rose Winslow is just about the only thing I can think about right now. I ask her the question like I don’t care about the answer, like it’s something I just read in a magazine, but Henrietta is clever. She sits forward and puts her hands together, and I know that means she thinks she’s onto something.

  She did the same thing when I talked about how my father used to read to me every night at bedtime. I told her that he used to lie next to me on the bed, and she sat forward and said, ‘And did he do anything else except read to you?’ I laughed at her. I couldn’t help it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘He just read to me and then he kissed me goodnight and left.’

  ‘She sees paedophiles under every rock,’ said Jess about Henrietta. Then I had to ask Jess what that word meant. I didn’t know there was a word for it.

  When I laughed at Henrietta about my dad she was disappointed. She really thought she was onto something.

  ‘I do know that she’s been brought here—yes,’ says Henrietta.

  ‘Is she going to be seeing you?’

  ‘You know I can’t discuss that, Birdy. Even in prison, people are entitled to their privacy.’

  ‘Do you think she meant to do it?’

  ‘The jury in her trial seemed to think so. Why are you so concerned about Rose Winslow?’

  ‘It’s just interesting, that’s all. You asked me how my week has been and that’s how it’s been. I looked after the birds and did my laundry and worried about Isabel and someone new arrived.’

  ‘Someone new arrives here just about every week. Why are you so interested in Rose Winslow?’

  I shrug. ‘It’s just interesting because she’s, you know, famous.’ I hope Henrietta can’t hear the bubbling in my stomach. I can hear it.

  ‘Are the others talking about her a lot?’

  I shrug again and Henrietta sits back and sighs. I have irritated her.

  ‘I spoke to your mother yesterday,’ says Henrietta.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about that. I asked you not to contact her.’ I asked her not to but I know that because I’m in prison she can do whatever she wants to do. Henrietta is allowed to speak to other people about me if she thinks it will help ‘open up communication’.

  ‘I know, but I feel that we would be able to move forward if you could just be open to a discussion with her or even to discussing with me what actually happened—and why it happened. I know you told your other therapist that you just got angry and that you were tired, but I think there’s more to it than that.’

  ‘There’s no more,’ I say. ‘You can say it again and again but there is still no more to it.’

  ‘And so I will continue to say, Birdy. People don’t just hit for no reason. There was a reason, and if you can share it with me we can work through what happened and make sure that it never happens again. You don’t have much time left here. Don’t you want to go back out into the world healthy and healed?’

  ‘Oh, fuck you, Henrietta,’ I say, and then I stand up and open the door and walk out of my therapy session. I don’t use that word often. I never used it before I got locked up. It is an electric word. It shocks people. It’s the perfect word when you feel hate. I shouldn’t have used it to Henrietta, but I could feel her trying to get me to tell her my secrets.

  I’ve only said that word to Henrietta twice and I know that I can’t get away with saying it too often, but Henrietta likes me to feel that I can decide when I want to talk to her. I didn’t want to talk to her today. I can’t stand her talking about me getting healthy. She is so pretty and so clever and she has a big diamond ring on her finger. It must be easy to be healthy if you have all that. She wants me to be healthy in my mind and healthy in my body, but I can’t be healthy, not when I have to keep the secret of my bubbling anger and my agenda.

  All I really want is to find out where Rose Winslow is going to spend her days. She’s pretty smart so maybe she’ll choose the library, but if she’s still like I remember her she’ll want to be in the garden. She was always in the garden—the front garden where all the beautiful flowers were.

  One day I counted twenty-five different colours. I didn’t count them alone—she helped me. I didn’t count very well then. She used to wear a large straw hat with plastic flowers on it, and even though he used to laugh at her for it she kept on wearing it. ‘I need to protect my skin,’ she would tell him, and then she would smile. She never got angry with him no matter what he said or did. Never ever.

  It’s time to go back to my unit for breakfast but today I am not feeling hungry. I don’t like seeing Henrietta so early in the morning. Talking to Henrietta makes me feel like I have something in my throat, and it makes me feel tired. I would like to go back to bed but it is time for breakfast and work. I don’t go back to my unit. I go to the gardens instead in case Rose is already there. The gardens are empty.

  ‘Fuck,’ I say, because there’s no one to hear me. Allison doesn’t like us to swear. If Henrietta tells her what I said, Allison will give me a long lecture on behaving appropriately. Appropriately means correctly. I always behave appropriately. I don’t do anything I shouldn’t do but sometimes when the bubbling anger comes I worry that I will not behave appropriately. The bubbling anger makes me afraid of myself. I want it to stop.

  Everyone is still having breakfast. I go back to my unit, where Jess has made toast and tea. We use white bread but it is cut so thin you feel like you are eating ai
r. Jess and I sit on the veranda and I eat and eat while Jess gets through two cigarettes. When I swallow the toast it feels like it will get stuck but it goes down so I keep putting more into my mouth. I don’t know why Jess doesn’t get hungry. She only eats one piece of toast to my four.

  ‘You’re going to be sorry later,’ I say to her when she has pulled off all her crusts.

  ‘I’ll just have another ciggie.’

  ‘Have you got enough to get through until canteen?’

  ‘Just. I’ll have to slow down tomorrow.’

  I don’t smoke but almost everyone else does. Cigarettes are expensive but lots of the women here would rather go without food than without cigarettes. I understand that. Lighting up your own cigarette and taking your own sweet time to smoke it must feel like a little bit of freedom and space every time. I tried to smoke but it made me cough and then my eyes watered and Jess laughed at me.

  After breakfast I go into my bedroom and have three small bites of my Mars bar. I hold them in my cheeks until they have just about disappeared. Isabel does that with her chocolate as well.

  I go back out onto the veranda to wait for muster.

  ‘That dickhead is on today,’ says Jess. She’s talking about Malcolm, who is only rostered on to work when one of the other guards is sick.

  ‘Just ignore him,’ I say, and then I move aside for Maya and Mina so that we can all be on the veranda. That’s what Lila always told me to do when people at school said nasty things to me: ‘Just ignore them.’

  If Lila was there no one said anything. Lila would shout at them and say clever things and the boys wouldn’t know what to say to her. ‘Just ignore them,’ Lila told me. You can ignore some things. You can’t ignore everything.

  We can see Malcolm walking slowly past the units, checking everyone off and talking all the time.

  ‘Malcolm likes to think he’s charming, but he’s just an arsehole,’ says Jess. ‘He doesn’t like it if whoever he talks to doesn’t smile and giggle at the stupid things he says. He’s such a dick.’

  I’ve told Jess that I can make a complaint to Allison if she wants me to. We are allowed to make complaints if we think something is unfair. Malcolm being a dick is unfair, I think. I smile at him anyway. He has a nice smile. ‘Don’t rock the boat, Birdy,’ Jess said when I told her I would complain. ‘He’s only here every now and again. Neither you nor I need to muck up now. One day I may see him out in the real world and then I’ll let him know what we all thought of him.’

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the lovely ladies of unit seven,’ says Malcolm, stopping to mark us off. ‘Jess, you’re looking stunning today. I can see you’ve really gone all out with that flannel shirt and those cute pants.’

  Jess gives Malcolm a smile with thin lips. He knows we don’t choose our clothes.

  ‘Hey, Birdy, Birdy, tweet, tweet,’ he says to me. I also smile.

  He just nods at Mina and Maya and then he walks off. We know he will spend the most time at unit six where Paula is. ‘He’s screwing that girl and make no mistake,’ says Jess as we watch Malcolm lean over the railings of the veranda at unit six.

  ‘He’ll get fired if they catch him,’ I say. The guards aren’t allowed to be friends with the prisoners. That’s in the book of rules we all got. Allison helped me read through it.

  ‘People like him don’t get caught. Only people like us,’ says Jess. ‘Come on, off to work for us.’

  I want to ask Jess if anyone new will be joining us in the gardens, but I can’t think of a way to ask her so that she won’t ask me why I want to know, so I chew my fingernail instead.

  ‘Nothing left to chew, I would imagine,’ says Jess quietly as we make our way towards the gardens.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Not my fingernails,’ says Jess.

  I walk over to the finch cages to get the water dishes. They need a good clean. Mould is beginning to build up on the edges. Mould is bad for finches.

  I’m coming out of the cage holding the first one when I see her. Jess is explaining the gardens to her and she’s nodding. She looks smaller than I remember her, but I suppose that’s what happens when you grow up. When I was a child I thought she was perfect. I thought she could solve every problem I had, and that’s probably why I’m angrier at her than at anyone else.

  She could have helped me if she wanted to.

  She could have saved me if she wanted to.

  Chapter Six

  The gardens here are obviously not really gardens. They are large, overgrown, scruffy vegetable patches. They grow everything from potatoes to corn, and I’m told it’s all used by the cooking school or sold back to inmates through the canteen.

  This morning I shared a nearly silent breakfast of tasteless cereal with Heather and Sal and Linda. Linda takes a long time to eat. She takes a long time to do anything. Halfway through her breakfast she spent a minute just staring into space.

  ‘Linda, you’ll be late,’ said Sal.

  Linda started and went back to eating.

  ‘She’s fried her brain,’ said Sal when Linda left to go to the bathroom. ‘This is the third time she’s been in prison. I think they’re hoping that some time at the Farm will help her do better when she gets out. But nothing will help her. I think she’ll just land up in prison again.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said, and Sal shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘It’s too late for her. It was probably too late after her first hit of ice.’

  ‘How long has she been like this?’

  ‘I don’t know her from before, but she’s only twenty-eight and she says she tried dope at ten, so she’s been high for most of her life, I think.’

  ‘At ten? How awful for her. What must her home life have been like?’

  ‘Everyone’s got their own sad childhood story,’ said Sal and then she looked at me. ‘Well, maybe not everyone.’

  I’m acutely conscious of my difference to the women I am sharing a unit with. Regardless of what I’ve done or not done, most of my life has been lived worlds away from theirs.

  This morning before she took me to the gardens, Allison gave me a password for the computer, which we’re allowed to use once a day for twenty minutes. Simon never liked email, but I used to enjoy keeping in touch with old friends over the internet. I haven’t emailed anyone for many months now. What on earth would I have said?

  ‘Nothing compares to pen and paper, my dear. When you write you are connected with the words in a way that you never can be when you type,’ Simon always said when I offered to teach him how to navigate his way around the computer. He had a computer himself but told me he merely kept it ‘for the look of the thing’. ‘I never go on it if I can help it. I’m not interested in what some child celebrity had for breakfast.’ His computer is still in his study. I would like to check that it has no personal information on it and then throw it away, but I’m almost afraid of what it may contain. It’s possible that he was an expert at using the computer but didn’t want me to know, that he sat in his study all day long navigating his way through some sordid underworld. I now know that when it comes to Simon, absolutely anything is possible. Some days I shake my head at how many questions I have for him now, at how many truths I would demand were it not too late.

  He used to write letters to the girls when we went away without them. Long, rambling missives about the colour of the ocean and the taste of the wine. I think it broke his heart a little when they did not reply in kind. I tried to get them to write to him, but Portia always scoffed at the idea—‘As if I have the bloody time’—and Rosalind promised to do it but never got around to it. ‘They are children of a modern age,’ I consoled Simon.

  People don’t expect much from an email; they’re happy with a few lines about your family and then they return a few lines about theirs. It helps you feel you are still in touch when in reality, I suppose, you’re not in touch at all. I haven’t heard from a lot of people this year—not even over email. Now it brings a smile to my face to
think of typing Hello from prison to the ladies I used to lunch with. The horrible wrong turn my life has taken must be the topic of every lunch date and dinner party in the country, especially those hosted by my ‘friends’.

  I find it remarkable that I’m still here, still living, that I have thus far survived all this. When the rumours about Simon first began I thought that I wouldn’t be able to bear the awful humiliation of people speaking about me, discussing me and dissecting my life. I had little idea of what was to come. Now I know, sadly, that I can survive a great deal more than vicious gossip. Well, I have had to survive it. I have not consciously decided or made a choice about anything that has happened over the last eighteen months. I’ve simply held on as one would to a bolting horse.

  Here at the Farm there is a central room with ten computers in it, and one of the guards walks around and around reading over everyone’s shoulders. There are no secrets in prison. Depriving someone of their freedom is supposed to be the goal here, but I think the greater punishment is the lack of privacy.

  ‘You can only access email,’ said Allison. ‘Everything else is locked, and it’s only unlocked for those studying for things like their HSC.’

  I hope that I will manage to get onto a computer tonight. I really want to let the girls know that I’m all right. I fret about them worrying about me. I would also like to know if Eric’s had any luck with the appeal. It’s inconceivable to me that I will have to stay here for three years. I am unable to conceive of it.

  As Allison walked me to the gardens I noticed one or two heads turn, but I get the feeling that every new arrival is scrutinised the same way. I’m sure everyone eventually blends in together in their ugly shirts and baggy pants, and that is, obviously, the idea. I prefer it that way. I want to blend in and just be left alone. Since it happened I don’t feel like I’ve been alone for a minute. In the weeks before I came here, either Portia or Rosalind was with me constantly, even at night. And the press were, of course, camped outside my house. No matter how many times they were told ‘no comment’ or simply ignored, they never gave up. They are tenacious individuals. I have to admire them for it.