Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

  The time has come, he said, for you to admit your crime. You’ve been here for too long for your own good. Your sentence was reviewed after seven years by the Sentence Review Group. It was reviewed the following year and the year after that. They decided against probation. And do you know why?

  She nodded.

  Of course you do. You’re not stupid. But you’re too clever to be here still. Next time you’re looking in the mirror think about what you see. Think about the lines on your face, the grey in your hair and the wrinkles on your hands. Think for once about your future. Then ask to see the Governor. Tell him you’re ready to accept responsibility for killing your husband. You’re ready to admit your guilt and that you now feel genuine remorse. And as you say the words they will transform you. They will make you worthy of pity and redemption. And maybe not tomorrow or the next day or the next, but some day in the still-to-come, those words will release you. Now go away and think about what I have said.

  The Governor had sent for her. Told her he had good news. That the Sentence Review Group had made a recommendation. She was to be made ready for temporary release. Or perhaps she should think of it as release on licence.

  You understand, don’t you, Rachel? Your life sentence will always remain. But if you behave yourself, follow the rules, you will be able to live once again as others. Well, almost as others.

  She was to learn how to shop and cook, handle money, use public transport, pay bills, look after herself once again. That twelve years after surrendering her life to the institutions of the State, they had now decided to return it to her.

  Did she want it? She lay on her bed at night, securely locked in, and let her eyes wander over the familiar marks on the walls and stains on the ceiling. She had been in this same cell for nine years, eleven months and two days. It was on the top landing, in the corner nearest the road. Not that she could see beyond the walls during the day. But at night it was different. At night she could see the lights of the airport, and the planes as they landed and took off. By day they were insignificant smudges, an occasional flash as sunlight glanced off a metal wing or superstructure. But at night she could follow with her eyes their lights as they rose through the air, up and up and up. And she could go with them. To London or New York. To Paris or Rome. To all those cities she had once visited, all those years ago. And she would summon up from her memory, the names of the streets, the buildings she had studied, analysed, wondered about, admired, and she could smell the air, feel the warmth of the sun on her arms, the light dazzling her eyes. Now she stood and went to the window, pushing it open through the bars as far as it would go. It was cold, but she didn’t care. She raised her eyes to the blue-black sky. The moon was in its dying phase. She could clearly see the Copernicus crater and the crater named after Kepler. Martin had loved the moon. He had shown her through his binoculars the seas and craters and named them for her.

  One of the things that fascinates me about it, he had said, is the way it’s always there, even during the day. You can’t see it because of the light from the sun, but it’s always out there, waiting till night comes, and then it can reveal its face again. It’s the way a good surveillance officer should be. So carefully concealed and camouflaged that none of the people you’re watching can see you, until you want them to. He had said it to her in the days when he still talked to her, shared his work with her. Told her everything.

  Jackie the probation officer, the one she had known the longest, said to her today, You must have some friends, some family, someone you can re-establish contact with. You’re going to need them now, when you’re out. It’s very hard to get by on your own. I know you’ve been lonely in here but loneliness on the outside is a completely different kettle of fish.

  Had she been lonely in here? She tried to remember, to compare the way she felt now with what had gone before. All around her she heard voices. Women’s voices. She knew them all, their names, their ages, their crimes. She had sat with them in the dust of the yard and listened as they told the stories of their lives. She had told them stories too, the stories her mother had read to her when she was a child, which she in turn had passed on to her own daughter. The Princess and the Frog, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, the Princess and the Pea. She watched how their faces softened and their eyes closed as they lolled against each other and dreamed. Now she heard them calling out through their windows to the men behind the grey walls of the prison across the yard. Brothers, boyfriends, husbands. Men she had come to know through the letters she had helped their women write. Puzzling over the words, fingers clumsy with biro or pencil.

  Dear Johnny, I love you. I can’t wait to get out of this kip and be with you again.

  Dear Mikey, how’s it going? Are you any better? Are you going to the hospital and taking your tablets like I told you?

  Dear Pat, I’m sending you all my kisses and hugs. I miss you. Do you miss me?

  Are you listening? The women shouted now. Are you listening?

  Sometimes she felt like joining in, even though she had no one of her own behind the barred windows opposite. But sometimes she just wanted to hear the sound of her own voice, calling out, waiting for an answer.

  Who would she call to now?

  Are you listening, outside world? I’m coming back. Are you listening?

  She had asked them if she could have a map of the city, the biggest they could find. The assistant chief officer, a middle-aged man called Dave Brady, brought one in from his car and held it out to her.

  Here, Rachel, you can have this, he said and smiled. He had a lovely smile. Genuine and kind. He was a favourite with the women. They teased him and slagged him off. And he just shrugged and laughed, and let it roll all over his lanky frame and greying hair.

  When she put the map’s shiny cardboard cover to her nose, she could smell wax or polish, dust, a faint tinge of petrol. It was tacky, clinging to her fingers. She smelled again. Lollipop, maybe. Wine gums, possibly. Mr Brady was always talking about his kids. They were nearly grown up now. Two at university, and the oldest was working in Silicon Valley in California. So Mr Brady said. Rachel couldn’t imagine a place with a name like that. She could barely imagine California. Or even Dublin, for that matter. Now.

  That was why she wanted the map. She opened it out fully and stuck it to her wall with Blu-tack, pressing her thumb hard down, feeling the surface of the stiff paper smooth against the rough plaster beneath. Then she sat back on her bed and looked at it. Her whole life was contained within its boundaries. Everything of importance that had ever happened to her had happened within its confines. She stood up and peered at the criss-crossing rows of streets. She found the hospital where she was born, the house in which she had lived as a child. She picked out her school, the university where she had studied architecture, the crooked arms of the harbour at Dun Laoghaire where she had learned to sail. She saw the places she had gone with Martin, the church in which they had married, the arc of the cul-de-sac where once they had lived. Where he had died, and she had grieved for him.

  For years now she had refused to think of what lay beyond the prison. She had imagined herself in a desert or a forest. Isolated, depopulated, living outside the limits of time and space. There was nothing real out there, especially since she had stopped going to see Amy. Even to think of her name made her feel sick. She pushed the memory back, deep down, hidden where it could do her no harm. And she looked again at the map and picked a red felt pen out of the jar on her little table. She began to mark the map with small round dots. Red was for everything connected with her punishment. She found the prison and outlined it first, then coloured it in so it was unmistakable. She picked out the Garda station in which she had been questioned, the Four Courts where she had been sentenced. She found the Department of Justice and the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Somewhere in those buildings were all the files that related to her and her case. She could imagine the filing cabinet and the buff-coloured folders. T
hey had refused her leave to appeal. They had sentenced her to life. She wondered who they were, those men and women who had made all those decisions. Did they think about her now, remember who she was? She supposed they did not.

  She picked up a ruler and drew neat lines between them all. Backwards and forwards across the city they zigzagged in bright red. Then she picked up another pen. This time it was blue. Amy’s colour. The blue of her favourite dress, the one she was wearing the last time she saw her. Not the faded, washed-out blue of the shirts that the prison officers wore, or the dull blue of the sky above the prison roofs, filtered through the city’s pollution. She marked the hospital where she had given birth to her. The house where they had lived. The house where Amy lived now with her foster-family. She found her schools too. The little national school where Rachel had taken her every morning for her first year, kissing her goodbye at the classroom door, waiting outside to take her home again at lunch-time. And she found the other schools Amy had attended. She had memorized the names that the probation officer had told her.

  You have a right to be kept informed of your daughter’s progress. You know that, don’t you? We can arrange for you to see her outside, not in here. You know that, you do know that, Rachel?

  But she had refused. She could not bear it. She had seen the way that Amy had begun to cling to the woman who was now waking her in the morning and putting her to bed at night. How could she compete with that daily contact?

  I’m your mother, she had whispered in her daughter’s crumpled ear those first few times that Amy had come to the prison to see her. She had held her on her knee and breathed in the sweetness of her child smell. Rested her cheek on Amy’s fine brown hair. Kissed the little folds of softness around the nape of her neck. She wanted to take off all her daughter’s clothes and look at her body. So she could remember. This was the way it once was, this was the way it was to be a mother. To be able to touch her, hold her, kiss her round belly, stroke the curve of her backbone. Memorize this child in her entirety, this child who had once been as much a part of Rachel as her own hand, arm, leg, breast, face.

  In the past, that was. Not, she realized, despair knocking the breath from her body, not in the future.

  I’m your mother, she had said, and Amy had nodded and sucked down hard on her thumb.

  My mother, she had repeated, and said, Come home, Mumma, come home with me now. Her eyes had shifted to the door to the outside, and she had begun to fret, one hand twisting through her hair, her small body tensing, then wriggling with anxiety.

  I want to go home. Now, she whined. I don’t like it here.

  She stamped her foot on the floor, the buckles of her sandals making a tiny ringing sound. New shoes, Rachel noticed, like the rest of Amy’s clothes. She had outgrown the dresses, dungarees, sweaters, blouses, that Rachel had bought for her. Now she wore nothing that Rachel had chosen. She had shed the skin that Rachel had provided. And when time was up and the foster-mother came in to collect her, Amy lifted her arms and clutched at her heavy thighs. Rachel had met the woman’s eyes over her daughter’s head. They were kindly, concerned, loving. And they were winning.

  Now she drew the straight, careful lines between them all. Somewhere out there she would have to find her own place. But there could be no rest for her until she had fulfilled the promise that she had made to herself that day when the judge had passed sentence.

  This is not the way this will end. This is just the beginning. And no matter what happens, I will see this through. I will never let go.

  She watched the woman with the grey hair and the thin face walk towards her through the crowd of lunchtime shoppers in the department store. She moved slowly and carefully as if she had just woken up and she wasn’t quite sure that her body was as yet her own. She was wearing a white shirt and faded denim jeans, with a grey cardigan, unbuttoned and sagging from her shoulders. Her arms hung awkwardly at her sides and as Rachel watched she slid her hands up her forearms until they were grasping her upper arms just above the bend of the elbow. Then she stopped and closed her dark brown eyes. Her head drooped on to her chest. Her shoulders shook and sobs burst from her throat. She took three more steps forward, then leaned her ruined face against Rachel’s in the full-length mirror in front of her. Rachel felt the cold glass against her cheek. She opened her eyes and looked at the woman she had become, trying to find herself in the reflection. Tears poured down her face. She turned to the younger woman standing beside her, who had reached out a hand to offer her comfort.

  Please, Jackie, I’ve had enough. I want to go back. Now.

  It was to be her big day. Her first day out. The first step in the re-socialization programme which the Sentence Review Group had recommended. She had been given a date, two weeks’ notice.

  Something to look forward to, Jackie had said cheerfully. She had bought her new clothes, paid for out of her ‘grat’, the savings Rachel had put together down through the years. A pair of grey trousers, straight-legged with a sharp crease down the front. And a grey jacket to match. Shoes too, real leather, slip-ons with a pointed toe and a neat heel. Rachel’s feet felt huge in them. She tried walking up and down in her cell, hearing the little click as the leather soles met the tiled floor. She was used to runners, soft shoes that were silent, with plenty of room for toes. She tried on her clothes, gingerly, carefully, reluctant to shed her familiar prison wear.

  Jackie had bought her make-up too.

  Come on, Rachel. Try some of this. You remember how, I’m sure. Don’t you?

  She handed it all over in a small plastic bag, with a zip and blue flowers printed on the outside. Rachel sat at her desk with her pocket mirror propped up on top of her radio. She spread out the bag’s contents. Foundation in a tube. Lipstick in a silver metal case. Mascara, eyeliner, brown eyeshadow. Even blusher, a dark rosy pink with a translucent shine. She rubbed the tip of her index finger across it, then smeared it on the back of her hand. It glowed and shone like skin after a day in the sun.

  She picked up the tube and squeezed a pale brown worm-like twist of it on to her palm. She began to smooth it across her face. Up and over her forehead, down the centre of her nose and across her chin. She stretched up her throat so the skin was taut and smeared it over and around, from one distended tendon to the other. She wiped her fingers on a piece of toilet paper, then opened the little bottle of eyeliner. She dipped the fine brush that had come with it into the black liquid. She painted precisely around the outline of first her right eye, then her left. She unscrewed the mascara and swivelled the barrel, jerking out the stiff bristles. Her eyelashes lifted and separated as she coated them with a shiny black covering. She filled in the deep hollow between lid and socket with dark powder, so her eyes sank back into her head. Then she picked up the lipstick, turning it upside down to read its name. Crimson poppy, the label said. She twisted the silver barrel and the pointed nose cone of red poked out. She held the mirror carefully with her left hand. Her own lips looked palely back at her. She moistened them with her tongue. They gleamed now in the dull overhead light. She pressed them to the reflection in the mirror, feeling the cold glass push against her teeth. She hadn’t kissed anyone else for years. Sucked and licked and teased with her tongue the hidden lips of other women in here. But she had never kissed their mouths. She did not want to look into their eyes or let them look into hers. She was keeping that for some other time. Now she drew the outline of her mouth with the thick red nib, then filled it in, rubbing the lipstick backwards and forwards, caking it thickly over her lips. She could smell its perfume and taste its synthetic sweetness.

  Martin had hated her wearing lipstick. You don’t need it, he had said to her. You have a beautiful mouth without it. I like its paleness. I like the way, when I kiss you and kiss you, it gets darker and darker.

  She remembered the first time she had gone to his flat he had taken her into the bathroom and wiped the make-up from her with his face cloth. Look, he had said, showing her the smears of brown and red
that stuck to its towelling ridges. See how ugly it is. Look how much more beautiful you are without it.

  And he had bitten her lips, gently nipping the delicate skin between his front teeth so they had reddened, almost to purple. The colour of membranes suffused with blood. The special skin of dark and secret places.

  Now she sat back and looked at the face in the mirror. It wasn’t hers. She angled the glass so she could see her body. The grey jacket and trousers, the neat black shoes with the pointed toes and the small heel. A shiver of revulsion ran through her. She kicked the shoes from her feet, tearing at the wool which held her arms and legs tightly, ripping the clothes off and flinging them in a pile in the corner by the toilet. She pointed the mirror at her naked body, moving it up and down. Her ribs were clearly visible, her stomach, concave. The skin of her hips was ridged with silvery streaks, like satin frayed by the point of a scissors. Her breasts were as small as ever, but now they drooped and flattened, accentuating the bones of her sternum and upper chest. She ran her hand over her pubic hair. It curled around her fingers, clinging closely, as black as always. She squatted down and looked at her face again in the mirror. The skin of her body was pale, but above it loomed the fake brown of the make-up on her face, the black around her eyes, and the livid red of her mouth. She stood up and went to the basin in the corner. She ran her hands under the hot water and picked up the soap. She lathered it thickly, feeling the burn and sting as it crept into her eyes. She bent her face to the water, then lathered again, scrubbing with her fingers, until the water ran dark. Her breath came quickly. She buried her face in the rough surface of her towel, then picked up the mirror again. Smears of black still clung to her eyelashes, and faint traces of red marked the fine lines around her mouth. She whimpered and ran fresh, steaming water into the small basin, washing, rinsing and washing again, until her face was clean and pale.