by Sarah Hilary
‘It’s beautiful.’ The sea curved, a tender palmful of umber and plum. After a day of looking at the haunted faces of strangers, Noah was glad to rest his eyes on the painting. He leaned across the table to study the artwork. ‘Show me your other favourites?’
Dan separated the prints as respectfully as if they were first editions. He singled out a painting of a half-open window cross-hatched by glimpses of sky, the room a warm contrast to the bleak blue outside. ‘Fear of Freedom. And this one,’ the print of a charcoal drawing, smudged ellipses interlinked at intervals like chain mail. ‘Heart.’
‘Wow.’ Noah took the print from Dan, holding it at the edges. Not chain mail, it was softer than that, like the layering of feathers, very simple and intimate, a thumbprint in each ellipsis. Noah couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a picture with so much soul.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Dan slipped an arm around Noah’s waist, resting into him easily. ‘How much talent’s going to waste in these places. Most of these men never took an art class in their lives before they ended up behind bars. We’d never have known they had this talent. Unless of course it was being in prison that gave them the impetus to start drawing, or painting.’
Dan wasn’t talking about inmates like Michael Vokey, or prisons like Cloverton. He was talking about category D prisoners. Low risk, long sentence, places where art classes were intended to help offenders work through the emotions and actions that had put them in prison. Art as escapism. For Dan, and for Noah too, art was about engaging with reality, not running away from it. Reaching out at the risk of being rejected, inviting raw emotion. Pain, elation, fear, loss. But it wasn’t like that for most inmates. The recurring themes in prisoner art were vertical lines and visions of freedom, wide beaches soaring into blue skies. Unsophisticated but all the better for it, primal and urgent. Making art was a basic human need. The best of this work bore witness to that.
Noah hadn’t liked the idea of Dan spending time inside, albeit with men like John, not men like Michael Vokey. But it was working out. ‘You’re still enjoying it?’
‘Loving it.’ Dan smiled.
What would Sol draw, if he were to attend one of Dan’s classes? Noah couldn’t imagine his brother’s art. Unless— A few of the prints on the kitchen table were angry or evasive. But most were candid, and emotional. Most were wonderful.
‘I think this is my favourite after Sea.’ Noah reached for a cityscape in tepid shades of grey, pewter and dove. Lavender in the stoop of the sky, all the places it touched the rise and fall of the city. Spires and domes, scaffolding and cranes, each reflective surface filled with a different shade of the same silvered smoke.
‘You have great taste.’ Dan kissed the side of his neck.
‘Mmm.’ Noah dropped the print, concentrating on Dan’s mouth. ‘And not just in art.’
The flat was quiet. Marnie’s first thought was that Ed had been held up in the office, or called out to an emergency. His work in Victim Support was made of emergencies, much like her own work. She dropped her keys into the bowl by the front door and stood listening to the silence until she could separate out the soft sound of the shower running. Ed was home. She smiled in quick relief.
In the flat’s tiny kitchen, she ran the cold tap and filled a glass, drinking the water as she opened the morning’s post. Roast chicken soup was warming in the slow cooker. Between them, Marnie and Ed had mastered a week’s worth of recipes for the slow cooker, which had been their best investment since the Gaggia that belted out hot coffee all hours of the day and night. She reached for one of its cups now, in case of a late call from the station. Ed had pinned a note to the fridge, warning he might be home after her tonight. Amongst many things, she loved him for his optimism. Other couples, she was sure, had family photos on the fridge. Ed had two takeaway menus, an unfinished game of noughts and crosses, three Pokémon cards, and a magnet that said, ‘This is a Fridge Magnet’.
It was nearly two years since she’d moved in. In twenty-two months of cohabiting, they’d acquired the slow cooker and the Gaggia, but resisted taking couple selfies. Marnie’s horror of having her photo taken dated to a time when her father had wanted memories of their modern family, Marnie and her new brother. Then the press coverage of Stephen’s trial, a daily battery of camera shutters like guns, her face in the papers, on the news. She’d come to dread cameras.
She reached out and straightened the fridge magnet. The blue paper wallet of photos was tucked in the bottom of her bag. Each night she expected to be ready to share its contents with Ed, knowing he’d offer sympathy and support, whatever she needed. Each night she left the photos in her bag. It was seven weeks since she’d taken the film from her father’s camera to the chemist, paying for the blue wallet of prints before walking the short distance to her car. Seven weeks since she’d sat in silence looking at the evidence Stephen had warned her she’d find on the film: snaps taken at her parents’ house in the days before it became a crime scene. Before he killed them. The last days of her parents’ lives. She knew she should put the wallet away, deep in a drawer or high on a shelf. Carrying it around with her was nonsensical, and it was dangerous, threatening to undermine her hard-won equanimity. On bad days, she heard the evidence crying out to her, demanding to be acknowledged.
The sound of sirens in the street brought her back to the flat, to this moment. She left the paper wallet at the bottom of her bag, going to the bedroom to undress.
Out of habit, she sniffed the cuffs of her shirt and the collar of her jacket, to judge how much of the prison was clinging to her clothes. She had dark suits and white shirts for every day of the week, but dry-cleaning wasn’t cheap and the visits to the hospital weren’t helping, adding a sickly odour of their own. How many more hours was she to spend in prisons or at the sides of hospital beds, with guards who patted her down, leaving their heavy thumbprints on her phone and keys, and on her clothes? She hung her suit and shirt on separate hangers; she’d steam the suit in Ed’s tiny bathroom while she showered off the day. Naked, she considered herself in the mirror, reading her tattoos, the reversed words like hieroglyphs on her skin. At her right hip: elixE fo secalP.
Places of exile. Places like the room where Aidan shook soot from his hair, and the prison where Noah’s brother Sol was held on remand. The house on the Edmonton estate where Julie was trying to keep her child safe, the hospital where Ted Elms and Stephen Keele were fighting for their lives. Her parents’ house, and Noah’s family home from which he’d been temporarily exiled. It made her sad to think of his parents siding with Sol against Noah. She hadn’t seen enough of Sol to judge the likely extent of his innocence or guilt, but she knew Noah. Valued and admired his honesty and courage, felt how much the exile hurt him. Harry Kennedy hoped to persuade Sol to give evidence against a gang which was bringing guns and drugs into London. Knowing Harry, Marnie guessed he hated being the one to compound Noah’s problems, but there was little sign so far of Sol playing ball.
Families were an impossible puzzle. Take Michael and his sister Alyson, or young Finn Duffy with his father Aidan in jail, his mother declared unfit for the task. ‘She does damage,’ Aidan had said, ‘you know?’ Marnie did know. Stephen’s mother had damaged her birth son so badly he’d been taken from her and given to Greg and Lisa Rome when he was eight years old, an act of necessity and kindness which had condemned Marnie’s parents to a brutal and bloody death.
The light altered and she blinked again at her reflection in the glass, elixE fo secalP—
‘Hey.’ Ed’s hands were warm from the shower, his lips soft at her shoulder where water trailed from his towel-dried curls. ‘How long’ve you been back?’
‘Not long.’ She smiled at him in the mirror, seeing his arms snake round to cover her tattoos. ‘Missed the shower by a matter of minutes.’
‘I rationed the hot water.’ He rubbed his cheek catlike at hers. ‘In case that happened.’
Much later, she woke to hear Ed moving away from her, away
from the bed. It was dark, the middle of the night. She hadn’t heard his phone ring, but it had to be a call-out. Someone needing Victim Support. Ed was at the top of his game, the head of a department who nevertheless insisted on getting his hands dirty, working one-on-one with the people who needed him most. There was never enough Ed to go round. She pushed upright on one elbow, watching the sweep of his shoulders half in shadow. The smoothness of his skin made her think of Harry’s scars, and of the words inked on her own body. There wasn’t a mark on Ed, anywhere. He was getting dressed, shrugging his hips into the frayed jeans she’d kicked to the floor earlier.
‘You’re going out?’ she said.
He turned his head. ‘Yes, sorry.’ He finished dressing and stood.
She kept the sheet against her chest. He stayed in shadow, his face out of focus. ‘Call me,’ she said stupidly. ‘To let me know you’re okay.’
He came back to the bed, sitting beside her. ‘Are you okay?’ He straightened a strand of her hair with his fingers, but it sprang back into a curl when he released it.
‘Yes, sorry. I was dreaming. Go. I’ll be fine.’
He leaned down and kissed her, tasting of the wine they’d shared after the shower. Then he straightened and went, closing doors in his wake, locking the last one.
Places of exile.
Marnie curled on her side and sought sleep as a refuge from the nagging of her skin, the stiffening of the day’s small bruises, and all the tender places he’d smoothed with his lips.
11
‘What do you look like, darling? Send me a photo back, please! I’ve sent so many of myself. I’ve seen your face in the papers, of course, but I know it’s not you. What do you look like, really?’
I’ll tell you what Mickey Vokey looks like, but it will only be true for those few seconds while I’m telling you. It won’t last because he changes, all the time. You’re welcome to my first impression as long as you understand it has a sell-by date and that date, like him, is long gone.
‘Ted, this’s your new friend, Michael. Michael, this is Ted. Play nicely.’
That was Armitage (the man we called Shanks before Bayer hit his stride), one of the few guards over the age of twenty-two. Daz Quayle looked up to Armitage, until he fell under Mickey’s spell.
‘Hi, Michael,’ I say, willing to give this my best shot, and because he looks like trouble.
That’s my first impression: He’s trouble.
He doesn’t respond, standing with his arms folded like a chieftain, his face carved deep with disgust, as if the sight of me sitting on the bottom bunk trimming my bonsai ligustrum is too much to bear. A ponytail of brown hair drawn back from his widow’s peak reaches to the flat pad of muscle between his shoulder blades. Tied with a ratted leather lace, it looks out of place on his head, as if he’s wearing someone’s scalp, a trophy taken in battle. He’s neither tall nor fat. He has small feet which he plants apart on the floor, marking his territory. His smell fills the cell, cheap soap, scalded water, and a fleshy, fatty stink that makes me see butchers’ windows. For a second I’m a kid again, pushing sawdust into a pyramid with the toe of my shoe as I wait for Mum to finish haggling over the Sunday joint. The butcher’s shop was always cold, smelling rustily of raw meat, sausages slung in greying loops from a steel hook, knuckled slabs of beef squeezed into stiff collars of fat, pickled eggs peering like eyes from jars filled with brackish water. These are Mickey’s colours. The colours of things once living, now dead. He isn’t a large man, but he seems to grow as you look at him. Five eight and leanly built. The way he looks at you, though. He sneers, not just with his mouth and eyes, with everything he has. The sneer redraws his face, the way a nylon stocking smears a bank robber’s. He likes to show his teeth. I’m not going to call it a smile.
Armitage says, ‘Ted’s okay. He’ll show you the ropes.’ He nods at me. ‘Right, Ted?’
‘Sure,’ I say.
Mickey isn’t looking at me, or Armitage. He’s looking at my pruning scissors, wondering what bargain I struck to be allowed them in here. Good behaviour and an over-eager officer; he’s too new to know how things work in HMP Cloverton. He’s eyeing up the bottom bunk like he’s deciding which way round he’ll sleep on it. As soon as Armitage leaves, he says, ‘I’ll have those.’ The pruning scissors.
I shake my head. ‘No need. You can get your own, from Aidan.’
He doesn’t ask, ‘Who’s Aidan?’ but he does look at me, finally. His eyes are like those butcher’s eggs, moving in their vinegary water.
I carry on pruning, pleased with the noise the scissors make, each snip separate and distinct. I’ve built up a nice rhythm and I don’t appreciate being interrupted. Armitage understands, it’s why he went on his way so quickly. Unless he didn’t want to spend longer than he had to with Mickey. I can see how that might have been part of the incentive.
‘I’ll have that too.’ He’s nodding at my bunk, the shadow of his head swinging on the floor.
I can’t tell him to ask Aidan for a bottom bunk. Aidan’s good, but that’d stretch even his powers.
‘I can’t sleep near the ceiling,’ I explain. ‘I get migraines.’
‘You can get migraines anywhere.’
It doesn’t sound like a threat, the way he puts it. Just a fact.
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘this’s my bunk. That’s yours.’ I nod at the one above me.
‘No.’ Again, just a fact. As if I got it wrong and it’s his job to set me straight.
He walks over to the cabinet. Except walks is an exaggeration, because the cell’s so small. He steps over to the cabinet, stands staring at my cacti. ‘What’s this then?’
‘Fishhook barrel cactus from Arizona. Horse crippler. Devil’s head.’ I nod at each in turn.
He twists his head to look at me.
‘You asked.’ I shrug.
He bends over the horse crippler. ‘What’s that stink?’
‘Chicken grit.’
He straightens. ‘From Duffy?’ So he knows about Aidan already, that was fast work on someone’s part. Aidan’s, probably. Did he roll out the red carpet for Vokey because he’s heard good things, or bad things? Aidan’s the cleverest bastard in here, or so he likes to think.
‘From Duffy?’ He nods at the horse crippler.
‘Aidan. He prefers Aidan.’
‘He can get me bolt cutters,’ Mickey says. ‘And petrol, and he can get me paints.’
He drops onto the bottom bunk, his weight see-sawing me, making the scissors snip at a part of the tree I hadn’t wanted to trim, not today. I blink to clear the anger from my eyes. He’s so close I can feel the heat lifting off him. Plants are a lot like people. I’m supposed to believe that, being interested in botany. Some flowers look beautiful but are full of poison. Cacti are ugly as sin but they’re life givers, all that goodness stored inside. You can deform people, the way he’s made me deform my ligustrum. You can twist them into different shapes, force them to grow the wrong way. I’m wondering about Mickey’s mother, you see, right from our first meeting.
‘Duffy can get me paints.’ He shifts on the bunk, swinging his legs like a little kid.
‘Chicken grit,’ I say. ‘And builder’s sand. That’s what I use. It’s low maintenance so you don’t need to change it very often.’
‘Like your clothes,’ he sniffs. ‘Like you.’
‘Like all of us. Why d’you think Aidan does such a good line in aftershaves?’
He sends the breath out between his teeth. I catch a whiff of sweet, ripe rot.
‘This is mine.’ He leans back on my bunk. ‘You can sleep up there. It’ll be okay. You get a migraine, I’ll ask Duffy for aspirin.’
‘Aidan.’ As if this is the important part of everything he’s got wrong. ‘He prefers Aidan.’
‘I’ll take that cabinet too.’ He nods to the horse crippler. ‘You can have the other one.’
There’s no natural light in here, so I can’t argue that one of the cabinets is better than the other
for the purposes of growing cacti. But it’s the principle of the thing. You’d be the same if you had to organise eight feet by six into living and sleeping quarters. It’s the principle.
‘You’ll want to move these.’ He nods at my pages from the seed catalogue, taped to the wall by my bunk. ‘I’ve got my own pictures to put up.’
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t being awkward or bullying. He was simply playing by the rules of the place. Survival of the fittest. You lay down your laws on day one, and you stick to them.
‘You can have the cabinet, but I’m keeping the bunk.’
And the scissors, I think. I see right away he’s not to be trusted with scissors. You asked for my first impression, that was it. Mickey’s not to be trusted with scissors, not even ones with blades no longer than the tip of your little finger.
The next morning I wake with the ceiling light spitting in my eyes. Just for a second, I think they’ve moved him out, given me someone new to share with. Because he looks so different in the morning. Different to how he was yesterday, and different to the shape I’d watched in the night, lying below me in my bunk, squeaking his fingers at the photos he’d taped to my wall. Faces, female. I’d guessed right away they weren’t family.
That was just the start of it, the first night. I adjusted to most of it and quickly, because who would I be kidding otherwise? I got used to calling him Mickey not Michael, handing him what he wanted without putting up a fight or wasting my breath on words. But I didn’t ever get used to how different he looked each time I saw him. As if there was something wrong with my eyes or a tumour was growing in my brain, pressing on a subtly different spot each day so that sometimes I saw a man and sometimes a hollow tree trunk, or a slab of meat, or a lounging silverback gorilla.