by Annette Heys
Now that he’d managed to get her talking, he sat down on the edge of the desk and started to fiddle with the corner of her folder. ‘You know I fancy you, don’t you,’ he began.
Kate felt uneasy, almost afraid of what he would say next. ‘Yes, but you know . . .’
‘Course I do. I know a lot of things, especially when you’re not happy. You need to talk to that husband of yours . . . put things right.’
His words took her by surprise and her response must have told him he’d hit on something. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Just remember I said it, that’s all.’ He looked serious and continued to stare into her eyes as though he was reading her mind. Kate felt a rush of alarm. And then he got up from the table and walked out leaving her wondering if he had some sort of sixth sense because she had told him nothing about her marital problems, or that she’d moved in with her mother.
Soon the lads were back and settled into their work. Kate walked around the classroom overseeing each student and helping where necessary. This part of the lesson seemed to go much slower than the rather noisy, yet interesting debate in the first half.
It was about ten minutes before the end when suddenly the door burst open and two prison officers entered the room and called out Mac’s name. They strode over to him and told him to stand up. Everyone turned to look and Michael looked totally embarrassed. He glanced towards Kate with a pained expression on his face and she watched his body appear to buckle as he was marched out by the officers. She remained watching until they were out of sight.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ Gerry asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Kate replied still staring at the open door as if it might all have been in her imagination.
‘He’s left his canteen,’ someone was quick to notice.
‘I’ll see to it,’ she said, as a hundred questions leapt into her mind, along with a deep sense of fear. She asked herself if this could have anything to do with her missing ring, or that strange conversation they’d had earlier. The office staff knew about the ring. What if they’d asked the officers to make a search and they’d found it in Michael’s cell? She dismissed the idea almost immediately because she knew that Michael would never steal off her. She could see Mark looking at her as she searched for an answer.
‘I bet he’s had a cell search and they’ve found something,’ Mark said.
‘Yeah, they’re ‘avin’ a crack down on drugs. I bet ‘e’ll be the next to be shipped out like Tommy.’
Before it became the second debate of the morning, Kate asked the students to finish off what they were doing and put their work away. The concern she had felt earlier for her mother had been replaced by a feeling of nausea when she thought that whatever was happening with Michael must be reasonably serious by the way he’d been ousted from the classroom. They put their work into their folders and then looked at her for guidance. There were still several excruciating minutes to the end of the lesson and she couldn’t think of one thing to say so she sat down and ran her eyes over the register, making sure she had marked everyone in. She could feel their eyes boring into her and she couldn’t look up. She picked up her pen and poised it over the register, but there was nothing else to fill in and she could feel a burning sensation creeping into her face. She was just about to stand up and let them go when the bell went for the end of class and relief swept over her.
‘Can we go, miss?’someone asked.
‘Yes . . . I’ll see you on Monday.’ She noticed a few smirks on one or two faces as they left and wondered what had been going through their heads in those last few moments.
As soon as everyone had gone from the classroom and the corridor outside was inmate free, the prison officers returned.
‘Can we look inside that bag McKeown gave you?’ one of them asked.
‘He asked me to look after it while he went on his break,’ Kate told them. Though she had nothing to hide, she was sure she looked guilty.
‘Are these for you?’ the same officer asked, showing her two boxes of chocolates.
‘No. I told you, it’s Michael’s canteen; I didn’t even know what was inside. He asked me to look after it for him,’ she repeated. Suddenly, it dawned on her. They were for her. He’d said he would get her something for typing his story. Again, she felt herself blushing and wondered if Michael had said anything to them. She was scared of dropping him in it but at the same time scared of being branded a liar.
‘We’ve reason to believe he bought them for you,’ he persisted.
Just then the head of education came in. A wave of relief hit her for the second time as the officers turned and muttered something to him on the way out.
Mr. Davies came over and asked her to sit down. Kate told him the whole story but impressed upon him that she had no idea that Michael’s canteen was meant for her. He seemed to believe her and promised Kate he would make sure they were given her side of the story.
‘What will happen to Michael?’ she asked. ‘Surely, what he’s done isn’t so terrible.’
‘He knows the rules. Prisoners aren’t supposed to give gifts to anyone. It can be seen as a bribe.’
‘But not Mac; he’s so honest . . .’
‘Maybe he is, and I’m sure this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but it is serious if they’re caught. There’ll be an inquest and hopefully he’ll just get a telling off.’
Kate pictured him being marched out of the classroom, the look on his face as he was ordered to stand up and his retreating figure as he went through the door into the corridor and out of sight as though for the last time. Suddenly, she was fearful for him. ‘I think they should watch him,’ she blurted.
‘Why, do you think he’ll try something?’
‘It was just the look on his face. He was so embarrassed . . .’
‘Right, I’ll mention it. Now, you’d better get off. I’ll pass on what you’ve just told me.’
She was pretty sure he believed her, at least she hoped so. As she picked up her things she could not stop thinking about what had happened. She felt responsible for the whole situation. She should have made it absolutely clear to Mac that she couldn’t . . . wouldn’t accept anything from him. She knew that he would be worrying about having got her into trouble. He was always saying what a trouble he was to her. The whole episode only added to her problems. She told herself things probably weren’t as bad as she imagined and everything would have settled down by Monday. Mac would get a ticking off and maybe lose a few privileges. Surely, it wasn’t such a big deal to give your tutor chocolates as a thank you. If only she could truly believe that were true. It seemed the shadows that had so often darkened huge chunks of her life were never so very far away.
When she got home, Kate could not shake off the incident with Michael. She even thought about ringing the prison that evening; make sure they’d been told of her fears. In the end she talked herself out of it. She imagined the reaction of the person at the other end of the phone, their indignation at someone trying to tell them how to do their job, not to mention what they would make of a female tutor showing so much concern for one of the inmates.
Kate spent the whole weekend sorting through her brother’s possessions which still claimed space in several rooms in the house. It was a way of erasing her worries by substituting a potential tragedy for the real thing. Her brother’s death almost twelve months ago was still painful to her, to them all, which is one reason why no one had found the courage to go through his things. To open cupboards and drawers and see familiar items of clothing or to find something pertaining to one of his hobbies, a camera, golf balls, maps, produced a feeling inside her like no other. There was something sacred about everything she touched and a sense of having to treat everything with reverence. James was there in his photographs and in his diaries. To see him up a mountain or with friends and
family, to read about his daily events and thoughts, brought him back. These inanimate things amounted to a life, one that she recognised was also a part of her and it did not stop being because of death.
Eventually, clothes were sorted and put into bags for charity while everything considered useful was packed into five large boxes and the contents of each labelled. Much of it, she knew, would be distributed among the family to make use of or simply to keep as a memento until such time as the whole process would be repeated at another time by another family member. It was part of the cycle of life.
On Monday morning Kate was awake at six. Unable to sleep in any longer, she arose and got ready for work before preparing a breakfast tray for her mother. She set the gas fire to low in the front room and checked that the remote control was on the table by the side of her chair.
When she had eaten, Kate was about to go and wake her mother when she noticed a figure pass by the front window. The doorbell rang and she wondered who could be calling so early in the morning. She opened the door to find Jim on the doorstep. He looked serious and her immediate thought was Ben. ‘Jim, what is it?’
‘Can I come in? I’m afraid it’s bad news.’
Kate’s heart skipped a beat and her stomach flipped over. Her mind raced on the back of his words telling her she didn’t want any bad news.
Jim stepped inside the door and looked at her solemnly. ‘Michael hanged himself in the early hours of this morning.’
‘No, oh no . . .’ She felt tears springing to her eyes.
‘I’m sorry, Kate. The prison rang . . . I came straight round.’ He reached out and pulled her to him. They stood for a few moments in each other’s arms and she was glad of his strength, his compassion.
‘They said there’s no need to go in today.’ Jim guided her into the living room and sat her down. ‘There’s a prison officer, Luke somebody or other. They said he’s there if you need to talk to someone.’
Kate remained silent trying to take in this latest blow. The events of Friday morning appeared vivid in her mind; her last impression was of Michael being escorted from the room. One of the boxes of chocolates they had let her keep was open on the table in front of her. She stared at it thinking how so innocent a gift could have caused such devastation. ‘I’ve got to go, Jim. I need to find out . . .’
‘Shall I take you?’
‘No. I’ll be OK.’
As Kate got to her feet Jim took her hand. ‘I’ll be here when you get back . . . if you want me to.’ His voice was filled with uncertainty.
‘Yes . . . yes, I would.’ She pulled him to her, remembering that strange conversation with Michael in the classroom.
Within the hour she was at the prison gates. An officer, one she hadn’t seen before, greeted her sympathetically and asked if she would prefer to take a walk with him outside the prison gates, to which she readily agreed. They walked in silence for several minutes. Luke was the first to speak. ‘It’s always upsetting when something like this happens.’
‘I thought he might try something this weekend, especially after Friday.’ Kate explained what had taken place with the chocolates and how embarrassed Michael had seemed about it.
Luke immediately dismissed the idea. ‘That wouldn’t have been the reason. Did you know he’d tried to kill himself before he came into prison?’ he asked.
‘Yes, he told me, but that was because he’d had such a shit life which has a lot to do with why he ended up in here.’
‘Lots of people have shit lives but they don’t all end up murdering someone.’ He looked at her and quickly added, ‘What I mean is . . . well, you’d have to be unstable to do something like that.’
And shit lives make people unstable, Kate thought to herself. She didn’t want to get into a debate about what she knew of Mac’s life or whether it was or wasn’t relevant as to why he committed his crime; it was pointless now. But she did want to know how he’d managed to commit suicide. ‘I did suggest he should be watched over the weekend after what happened in class.’
‘He was on suicide watch but if someone’s determined to do it, no matter how much you try, you can’t stop them.’
‘All the same, if he hadn’t bought me those chocolates. I bet he thought he’d got me into trouble . . . I know he’d have hated that.’
‘He was a very troubled and unhappy young man,’ Luke said softly. ‘I don’t suppose you want to hear this just now but sometimes I think it’s kinder to let someone die than to see them go on suffering. Of course we can’t do that; our job is to prevent them from taking their lives.’
Kate thought for a while. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said, remembering the sadness in Mac’s eyes that time in the hospital and how, ever since, he’d never once let her believe he wanted to live. He didn’t believe in false hope. But she did. She had only seen what she wanted to see. When he smiled or joked, she took that to mean some sort of progress, that he was no longer in despair.
Luke and Kate walked for half an hour or so, their conversation turning to other things, not wanting to dwell on Mac’s death. After all, it must be difficult for everyone if they had any compassion at all, and it was obvious Luke had. He said he’d known Mac when he was on the wings, had always found him civil, no trouble at all really.
Kate thought he hadn’t really known Michael. Who had? Certainly nobody in that prison. And before that? From his letters, it didn’t sound as though anyone knew him at all. He’d drifted in and out of people’s lives, never getting too close to anyone, or letting anyone get too close to him. As for her . . . she’d met someone who was prepared to tell his life to someone who was prepared to listen. The sad thing was that in the end she hadn’t made a scrap of difference.
Kate waited until they were all on the other side of the cemetery gates before stepping out of her car. She had arrived ahead of them all, parked up a short distance from the entrance anxiously waiting for the cortege to arrive. The hearse, when it coursed slowly up to the gates, gleaming and silent, sent a shudder through her. She watched the coffin being offloaded as a couple of cars pulled up behind it. Through the trees, she watched it wheeled to its destination at the far end of the cemetery and, not for the first time, she was overcome by a sense of the surreal. Death was something that was not supposed to happen to people you cared for. Death was the antithesis of anything beautiful in this world.
After a few moments, she slowly followed the mourners to where they had assembled around an open grave. She stopped next to a tall headstone a little way from the group, just out of sight but within earshot. She had no desire to speak with any of those who had come to mourn him. Hers was a personal pilgrimage, a conclusion to a strange and, in some ways, edifying friendship. The experience had made her question the complexities of the human soul and just how much control a person has over his own destiny. She still could not understand how someone could overcome the fear of dying and end their life. To see nothing in one’s life but total hopelessness was impossible for her to comprehend. She had always believed that it was the natural instinct of humans to want to survive.
“ . . . we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life . . .”
A loud sob drowned the next few words and everyone turned to look at a small, middle aged woman. Her head drooped onto her chest as she gently dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Suddenly, a train burned past on the nearby line cutting through her sadness like a jagged knife.
Moments later, the small party turned from the graveside and slowly moved away, trudging silently along the broken paths between the neat rows of headstones, towards the black hearse and waiting cars. They stepped onto the pavement in an orderly fashion, ushered into their vehicles by grim faced undertakers who swung open the doors with deferential automation. The mourners. They would take with them
their sense of bereavement, their loss. But they would never know the torment he had suffered or the mental anguish Kate had endured in the struggle to keep him alive.
She had discovered that Michael had left a suicide note, the only piece of his writing she never got to read and so she could only guess what was in it. The prison chaplain must have read it because he told her she shouldn’t feel in any way responsible as she had helped Michael find some sort of happiness in the last year of his life. Less encouraging was hearing that one of the hospital staff had said they always felt no good would come of her weekly visits, though at the time they told her it was a good thing for Michael to have a regular visitor.
There was probably a lot more said, especially when they found her letters which she knew Mac would not have destroyed. But she didn’t care. They could all think what they liked. What did they know anyway? There are no truths, only interpretations.
Now she was alone and her heart thumped as she moved towards the open grave, stepping over clumps of sodden grass. A heap of black, wet soil lay piled up on one side waiting to be shovelled back into the gaping hole. Mist hung around the graveyard, dank and grey, obscuring headstones, and penetrating through to the bone. She knelt at the edge of the grave and, reaching inside her coat, Kate pulled out a single red rose wrapped in cellophane and dropped it over the side.
As it fell, a series of images flashed through her mind. She remembered the bearded Mac, their first encounter in the classroom and a sense of . . . almost of knowing him, his joining the class and sitting trembling in a seat by the window. She remembered his smile, and the sadness in his eyes as he tried hard not to cry in front of her in the hospital, the look of gratitude when she gave him his story all typed up. And she remembered his final exit from the classroom, unable to look at her, she, half knowing what he might do.
The struggle’s over for you, Mac. You’re free now . . . you’ve paid the price.