by Ashe Barker
Shit. Holy fucking shit!
Chapter One
I pulled it off. Mary, Joseph and all the saints, I only fucking did it! Months of planning, sacrifice, sheer desperation and soul-deep tragedy have brought me here. So here’s where I am. At last. Free. Free to start over.
The monotonous asphalt of the M6 heading north rolls in front of me, miles and miles of it. And every mile taking me farther away from—before. Away from ‘Shaz’, away from poverty and violence and doing without, leaving behind my old life jam-packed with nothing much but drudgery, fear, humiliation.
Not that the future looks particularly certain. But at least there’s only me in it.
* * * *
I remember with absolute clarity the moment I knew I was going to be rid of Kenny. It was July thirteenth 2011 at nine sixteen p.m., the moment when the radiologist at Southmead Hospital’s maternity unit at last finished clicking away at her keyboard, swirling her chilly probe through the gunk on my abdomen, looking again at her monitor and once more for good measure before she finally turned to me. She had on her well-trained sad and sympathetic face as she calmly announced that my baby had no heartbeat. No heartbeat! How can a baby have no heartbeat? He’d be dead if he…
The maternity unit staff were kind, caring, but they couldn’t put it right. Nothing, no one could put this right. My baby was dead. Dead because my thug of a boyfriend couldn’t keep his fists to himself. One shove too many, one punch too many, one heavy fall too many, and it was done. My baby, gone. I sobbed. I screamed and kicked and refused to accept. Refused to accept a life lost, wasted through thoughtless cruelty and callousness.
It’s not as though Kenny had even meant to kill my baby. His baby. He just simply hadn’t cared one way or the other. But it was real, this was all real—really happening to me, and eventually my body took over and expelled my tiny, tiny baby son, out onto a cool, clean rubber sheet. Months too early. Dead before his life had even started. Before I’d even looked into his face to say ‘hello’ it was already too late to say ‘goodbye’. The midwife taking care of me—her name was Ann-Marie I think but it’s all something of a blur—scooped him up and out of the way while the young doctor dealt with the afterbirth, and other nurses cleaned me up, made me sanitary and ‘normal’ again.
Ann-Marie brought my baby back, beautifully laid out in a tiny basket, on a pale blue satin cushion. He was so small, his little limbs matchstick thin, and he was a very deep pink, like a little pixie. Not quite human, yet not quite anything else either. Even though I never asked her to—it never even occurred to me—Ann-Marie took a photo of him with a little digital pocket camera they must keep in the maternity unit for this sort of thing. She also took his tiny little handprints and footprints. And she put all those mementos into a little white memorial card that she gave to me.
I have it still. I’ll have it forever. That’s all there is left to show my baby was ever here.
* * * *
And my mother came, rushing down from Gloucester when they phoned her, even though she hadn’t seen me for a year and had had no idea that I was even pregnant. But she came, she hugged me and she wept with me for her lost grandson. We agreed to call him David, after an ‘uncle’ who’d stayed with us for a few years and I’d particularly liked when I was little. And when I was well enough to leave hospital two days later, my mother piled me into her little white Renault Clio and took me back to Gloucester with her.
When we got there we both cried some more and planned David’s funeral. It took place exactly two weeks after he’d died, in a chilly cemetery in Gloucester. There was no vicar. I don’t recall a time I ever believed in God and this latest demonstration of the general cack-handedness of fate certainly wasn’t about to change my mind about the benign intervention of some higher power. No, as far as I could see life was just shit, and only marginally better than the alternative. You accepted that and you got on with it. Or not.
So it was just me and my mother, and a silent, sympathetic undertaker who retrieved David’s little body from Southmead and brought it here in a tiny white coffin. Not even a hearse—he just pulled up at the stillborn babies plot in the cemetery in a black Volvo estate with David’s shoebox of a coffin in the back. He carried the miniature white casket down the stone steps to the pre-dug hole, where two cemetery staff carefully lowered it into the ground. Then the undertaker and the gravediggers stood tactfully back, waiting, patient and respectful and perhaps rather bored, while my mother and I stood, each of us lost in our own thoughts, and we said our silent farewells to the baby I’d known so briefly and my mother not at all.
The following morning Kenny turned up at my mother’s house, demanding to know what the fuck I was doing in bloody Gloucester. Why wasn’t I in Bristol where I belonged? He needed me and all I could do was bloody cry over a kid I hadn’t even really had. And what the fuck did any of it have to do with my mother? She had been nowhere around when we’d needed a bit of cash last year to stop us getting evicted, so we sure as hell didn’t need her now.
I told him I wanted to stay in Gloucester a bit longer. Maybe even stay here for good now. He smashed my mother’s greenhouse windows and threatened to boot her twelve-year-old cat to death. I packed my stuff and left an hour later with him.
Two days later Kenny was arrested for burglary. Apparently an anonymous tip-off through Crimestoppers linked him to a series of ram raids at Co-op stores around the South West. Naturally he denied it, and naturally I provided him with a rock-solid alibi for all the nights in question. The police were struggling to stack up the case, but as luck would have it another anonymous call to Crimestoppers led them to a lock-up where a load of stolen cigarettes and booze was stored. Unfortunately for him, Kenny was never the brightest or tidiest of thieves and his prints were all over the stuff. So that was it. He went down for three years. I stuck to my alibi story, determined not to give him any reason at all to doubt my loyalty. I knew the jury wouldn’t believe me anyway with all the forensic evidence proving Kenny’s guilt so it didn’t really matter what I said.
In the event, though, it did matter, up to a point. I was convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, a year of it to be suspended for two years. But I had to serve six months. I was shocked, stunned even. I think the jury were too. I suppose I caught the judge on a bad day, a day when he was minded to make an example of someone and it turned out to be me. I hadn’t ever considered the prospect of prison, but I gritted my teeth again like I always do and I got on with it. As I knew with absolute certainty by then, worse things could happen. So I set my mind to being a model prisoner.
Three years isn’t long. Kenny would probably be out again within two years. Then he’d come looking for me, expecting to just carry on where we’d left off. And no way was that happening. I’d gone to a lot of trouble and even put up with the inconvenience of time in jail to be rid of him. I wasn’t having him back, not at any price. No way was I returning to that old life. I knew it was no good just going home to my mum’s again. I’d tried that already and I knew he’d react as he had before. He’d come after me to Gloucester and terrorize us both until I gave in. So I needed to get away. Clean away. Somewhere new, somewhere he had no links, no ties. Somewhere he wouldn’t be able to find me.
My mum came to visit me as often as she could while I was locked up, and we talked and planned. While I was growing up it had mostly been just the two of us, with occasional ‘uncles’ coming and going. Nothing too promiscuous, but my mum liked to enjoy herself and really didn’t care what anyone else thought. I was proof of that, the product of a heated summer romance with a Turkish hotel deputy manager during a holiday in Bodrum in 1990.
My mother had fallen for Bajram in a big way, negotiated a sabbatical from her job and stayed on the rest of the season to live with him in his tiny little apartment in the back of the hotel. They’d enjoyed mindless sex and Mediterranean sunshine until the end of the season, and my mother h
ad even stayed with him over the winter. But by the start of the next holiday season the magic had apparently worn thin. Maybe she’d been homesick. Anyway, by May 1991 my mother had decided to come back to the UK. And she’d had an extra passenger on board by then. Just a very tiny one. She’d been eight weeks pregnant, and I’d come screaming into the world in January 1992.
Never one to bother too much about convention, my mother had simply taken some time off work to look after me when I’d been very little then had found a child minder she’d trusted with her precious little princess and had gone back to her job at the council. She had a decent job in the planning department and lived pretty modestly over the years. Consequently, by the time she was sitting across the table from me in the prison visitors room she had about thirty thousand pounds tied up in stocks and shares.
She said she would liquidate it for me, give me the cash so I could move away, maybe somewhere up north, get a job, start again. Unbelievable generosity when I’d brought her nothing but trouble and pain for the last twenty years.
I’d been useless at school, always in trouble and hanging round with yobs and losers. I’d flirted with drugs, though mercifully had never really gotten too far into that. And I’d gotten involved with Kenny by the time I was sixteen. I had been besotted, and left home as soon as I was eighteen to follow him to Bristol. My mother had pleaded with me not to go, tried to warn me, in that way that mothers have. But I loved him, or thought I did, and in any case I knew best. In that way that teenagers have. It was that simple, and I’d gone without a backward glance.
Apart from occasional cards at Christmas and birthdays the next she had really known of me was when the Southmead had called and told her that I was there and that I needed her. And she’d come. She’d just dropped everything and had been there within two hours.
Sitting together in that prison visiting room, I told her she shouldn’t just hand over her life savings to me. Her reply was simple enough.
“Even though your baby’s dead, that doesn’t stop you being a mother now. Thinking like a mother. And so you’ll understand about priorities, about caring for your child more than anything else in the world. You might be grown up, Sharon, but you’re still my baby and you always will be. And my money’s yours, along with anything else I’ve got that’ll help you.”
And I did understand. Perfectly. So I hugged her and thanked her, and together we planned my new life.
I told her I was going to be a photographer. No, scratch that. I told her I already was a photographer. She seemed less surprised than I might have expected. Perhaps it’s in the mother’s DNA to know about their child’s unspoken fantasies. Perhaps she knew that all my life I’d harbored a secret fascination for photography but, up until recently, I’d never had an opportunity to really try it out, really get into it. But then, out of the blue, shortly before I found myself in prison, I’d acquired a camera. A really good, state-of-the-art digital camera.
When I say ‘acquired’, I really mean stole. I didn’t tell my mother the details, but the truth is Kenny, me and a couple of other idiots who used to hang around him had stolen it from a bloke we’d mugged down by the river in Bristol way back. Then I’d stolen it from Kenny. Actually he never even knew I had it because I’d shoved it in my pocket instead of the bag with the rest of the stuff we’d got from that job. I’d kept it hidden and had soon worked out how to use it. And that’s when I became a photographer.
Up until then photography had just been a dream, something others did, people who could afford the expensive gear needed for high-quality pictures. But suddenly, courtesy of that man we’d robbed by the river in Bristol, I had a camera and my dream became reality. Before my enforced four-month sabbatical at Her Majesty’s pleasure I started by taking snaps of anything I saw in the neighborhood around me, the grimmer the better, then I’d go round to a friend’s flat to download my pictures onto her laptop.
Summer, my friend with the computer and a flat, worked in the local library. I’d gone in there looking for books on digital photography, and we’d gotten chatting when I asked her if I was allowed to use their computers to download and edit my pictures. She’d explained she was sorry, but no. Internet research only. Or if I was a student I could do my homework. But no downloading pictures—I might be into porn or God knows what. She’d been grinning as she’d said all this—I doubt anyone could look more innocuous than I did—but rules are rules.
On impulse, though, probably because she’d seen me in there a few times by then and I was a sort of regular, and I seemed harmless, she offered to let me use her laptop. She knew I lived near her because my library account showed my address, a few streets away from her flat. She’d said I could come round and use her place, her equipment. She’d even stand me as much coffee as it took. I’d thought she was crackers—despite appearances to the contrary I could have been a dangerous criminal, the judge clearly thought so—but I accepted her generosity. Summer’s kindness set me on the path toward my dream of becoming a photographer, and for a few weeks she was perhaps the best friend I had. Ever.
She thought I was nuts, taking pictures of drunks in shop doorways, piles of rubbish and litter, burned-out cars, vandalized property, stray dogs. My lovely camera even did black and white shots—that guy we robbed obviously knew quality gear—and that was perfect for my sort of material. Classy. To me that was how my world actually looked and I wanted to record it, my life in all its horrible, brutal reality.
The urban realism stuff fascinated me from the beginning, still does I suppose, but as I sat with my mother explaining how I wanted to rebuild my life, I realized that what I’m really passionate about is landscapes. Rural landscapes, different seasons, different locations, but the wilder, the more untamed, the better. So there began my dream of wanting to be a professional landscape photographer, taking pictures that people would want to buy, to pay good money for, to keep—to display on their walls.
I want to capture the moody, timeless, windswept wilderness of Britain’s hills, dales and moorlands, and translate those into beautiful stylish prints. In my mind’s eye I can already see the glorious reds and golds of autumn, the icy whites and blues of winter, the lush springtime greens and the sleepy summertime yellows, layered and blended onto canvas. I see the variegated patterns, some vibrant, some muted, some speckled with humanity in the form of buildings or livestock, some lonely and uninhabited. And I see my name, printed in the bottom corner, marking the work as mine.
I explained all of this to my mother, and she got it. She really did. She could see the photographer in me too. She believed in me. That was all I needed.
* * * *
Her Majesty was kind enough to offer to chuck me out of HMP Eastwood Park after four months. Naturally I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.
Just one week before I was due to be released I was asked to go to the governor’s office. I went along, not alarmed at all. I was a model prisoner, never in trouble. Too busy studying photography, graphic design and ICT in the prison education unit to get involved in anything dodgy. All my energies at that moment were channeled into preparing for the new beginning I’m crafting for myself, which I was so eager to take up as soon as I was released.
It couldn’t come soon enough for me. I was energized, fired up, so enthusiastic that sometimes I forgot about baby David for hours at a time. I was planning to go to my mother’s first and from there look for a suitable location where we might both resettle, somewhere nice and quiet, in the countryside, a place where I could start building my dream. Reinvent my life. And eventually, when Kenny got bored of looking for me and moved on—probably when he found some other sad, lonely, gullible little kid to bully—we might even be able to go back to Gloucester. Or not, we’d see. Yes, life was looking good as I knocked and went into the governor’s office that blustery day in March.
‘Out of control’, ‘speeding’, ‘drunk possibly’, ‘hit-and-run’, ‘pronounced dead at the scene’. I sat, numb, as the governor ge
ntly explained why my mother wouldn’t be there to meet me at the prison gate the following week for my release. Why I’d have to make my own way to—wherever. Why I was now finally, totally alone.
I was past tears, past thinking, past feeling as I sat there and let his softly spoken words wash over me. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be my mother who’d been hit by a car on her way home from the library that morning, thrown six feet in the air then died of internal bleeding, broken and battered, in the road, surrounded by her scattered and now torn Regency romances. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen, not at ten in the morning on a quiet side road in suburban Gloucester, not to me, not to my mother. It couldn’t be true.
Chapter Two
But it was true, and just two days later I was walking alone, shivering in the late March chilly breeze, down the road leading away from HMP Eastwood Park.
The governor used his discretion and in the circumstances brought my release forward. It was kind of him, but I wasn’t sure if I appreciated that or not as I’d no plans anymore, no idea what to do next. No clear idea where I was going. Guided by a mixture of instinct and autopilot, I found myself hopping on a bus headed for Gloucester town center, then another bus to my mother’s old home. Once there I stood on the front path in drizzling rain, just staring up at the house where I grew up, looking for some sign of life. And I found it in the form of Sadie, my mother’s old cat, sitting on the doorstep yowling pathetically.
Eventually I let the pair of us in, glad I’d kept my door key even though it’d been years since I lived here. I fed the cat, then Sadie followed me as I walked from room to room, each one cold and quiet, but still full of her life. It was as though she had only just left. And I suppose she had. It was only just over a week ago that she’d sat in her favorite chair to watch Coronation Street. Only a few days since she had last stocked up the cupboards with tins. There were vegetables just starting to wrinkle in the rack, bread gone stale but not yet moldy, all evidence that she was here not so very long ago. But not now, no longer, never again.