by M. R. Carey
She’d been moved out of the Whittington by this time into the remand wing at HM Prison Winstanley. The cell was half the size of her room at the hospital, but Jess liked it better. Nobody came near her. Nobody saw her. She was sinking into herself, like someone sinking into quicksand in an old movie. She didn’t welcome interruptions to that process. Well, maybe one interruption. But Brenda was ill. She’d been taken into hospital a week before Jess for multiple herniated discs, and she was still there. Still more or less unable to move. She couldn’t attend the trial and she couldn’t visit, but she’d written a dozen or more letters to Jess to tell her to be brave, to have faith in herself. That was Aunt Brenda’s universal prescription, and Jess loved her for it. It implied that there was something there to have faith in.
She was on suicide watch. Impassive guards watched her closely, like priests, for any signs of incipient despair.
And she had considered suicide. She’d thought about it lots of times, in the way of someone taking stock of all their options. But leaving aside the hurt it would cause to Brenda, it would be so hard to do. She would have to think of something in the bare, featureless cell that could be turned into an implement. She would have to get past her own instincts and her own cowardice. And she would have to do it before the guards noticed what she was up to and came running to stop her. There was no way. If there was a way, they would already have thought of it and put a stop to it.
On the eleventh day, she argued with Brian Pritchard and tried to dismiss him. She wanted to change her plea to guilty. Pritchard told her – almost angry, almost as though he cared – to pull herself together and think it through.
“How can you know whether you’re guilty or not if you don’t remember anything? Give yourself the benefit of the doubt, and give me a little room to work in.” Pritchard had already told Jess his own opinion, which was that John Street’s evidence didn’t hold together. Street was hiding something, and he should be pressed hard until he gave it up.
Jess let her not-guilty plea stand, but Pritchard didn’t get his wish. He started his very robust cross-examination of John Street at 3 p.m. on day twelve. On day thirteen, Street failed to present himself at court. The skin grafts on his hands had delaminated from the healthy tissue surrounding them and he had had to go back into surgery. Pritchard requested that proceedings be suspended, but he was standing in the path of a juggernaut. By that time, nobody in the courtroom believed that Jess was innocent, least of all Jess herself. The judge ruled that Street’s evidence was substantially complete, and that no purpose would be served by a delay. Pritchard glanced at Jess in the dock, saw the resolve in her eyes and let the point go.
The judge’s summing-up to the jury was short and to the point. “The Crown’s opting to try Jessica Moulson for murder may seem puzzling or contentious to you, given that she never intended to kill Alex Beech. The argument is that she formed the intention to kill somebody – her partner, John Adam Street – and therefore that she cannot offer in mitigation the fact that she killed somebody else. Her actions, if you accept that they were her actions, led directly to the wished-for outcome, except that the fire she set consumed the wrong life. There are a great many legal precedents for calling Alex Beech’s death an accidental manslaughter rather than a willed murder. But changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in its most recent incarnation allow the court to frame it as a murder. That is not a paradox. It is the law as it now stands.”
The jury stayed out for the whole of one day and part of the next, but when they came back the verdict was unanimous. Guilty.
Jess was way ahead of them, as far as that went. When the terrible word was spoken, her first thought was, What took you so long?
4
Brian Pritchard came to Jess’s remand cell to say goodbye. She was allowed to receive visitors in her cell because her injuries put her in the category of disabled prisoner. The lawyer sat in the cell’s only chair while his clerk, Levine, had to stand.
Jess was lying on her bunk. She didn’t try to get up. She felt at this stage as though even a slight movement like that was more of a commitment to life than she wanted to make. She was conscious of Levine’s eyes on her the whole time, except when she looked back at him. Then his gaze would shoot away in a random direction. Pritchard hardly looked at her at all: just the occasional glance, after which his eyes would go back to the floor or to his own hands, folded in his lap.
“For the record,” he told her, “I still think we could have won.”
“Really?” Jess asked tonelessly.
“Yes, Ms Moulson, really. With a different jury. With Street chained to the witness stand. With you in a different frame of mind.”
Jess couldn’t sympathise with his regrets. She had none of her own, at least as far as the verdict went. It was hard even to be patient with him. “If justice was served, where’s the problem?” she demanded.
Pritchard tutted. “Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It’s an emergent property of a very complicated system.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jess said wearily.
She was trying to shut the conversation down before it got started, but Pritchard clearly wanted her to understand. He raised his hand, tilting his flat palm to left and right. “It means that it’s neither an ingredient in the pie nor the pie itself. It’s the smell that rises up out of the pie if you’ve cooked it right. We don’t aim for justice, Ms Moulson. We perform our roles and justice happens. You didn’t perform your role very well, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Jess thought she was done with emotion in the same way she was done with words, but anger surged inside her and she couldn’t push it down. Pritchard seemed to blame her for the outcome of the trial – as though everything she’d said and done had been intended purely to inconvenience him. To a lawyer, everything was sideways on and skewed by parallax. There was no point in trying to make him understand how simple this was to her. But the words came out of her anyway.
“I killed a child.”
“You don’t know that,” Pritchard said.
“I do know it. They proved it. And Alex…” That was as far as she got. His name dragged her under, and she had to fight for air. The clerk, Levine, took a step towards her, but there was nothing he could do besides stand there and look concerned.
As an addict, she’d lived for so long in a place where nothing mattered, where she had no anchor. If there was any real feeling in her life at all, it had been that tenuous connection, that futile compassion for the scrawny kid on the stairs who’d barely spoken to her. Killing John would have been bearable. Understandable. Killing Alex Beech was a different thing altogether. There was no coming back from that. She wouldn’t even want to live in a world where you could come back from that.
“Pending your appeal, Ms Moulson,” Pritchard said, “I’d like you to take it as a working assumption that nothing has been proved yet.”
“I’m not making an appeal.”
Another gesture, this time waving the inconvenient words away. “Well, I believe you’ll change your mind on that, once you’ve got past this current crisis of self-loathing. You haven’t seen Fellside yet.”
Fellside was the titan prison up in Yorkshire to which she was now being sent, freeing the remand cell at Winstanley for its next resident. Jess knew nothing about the place apart from its name. Unlike Wormwood Scrubs, say, or Dartmoor, or Pentonville, it was a name that carried no associations for her.
“Is Fellside so terrible?” she asked Pritchard, trying for an ironic tone.
“All prisons are terrible,” Pritchard answered with po-faced seriousness. “High-security prisons are generally more terrible than the rest. And private prisons are the worst of all. Profit and public service make very bad bedfellows.”
He told her a lot more about Fellside – explaining why, to him, it did count as an especially terrible place. Jess barely listened.
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. If Fellsi
de was terrible, Fellside was where she belonged.
Pritchard picked at a loose thread on his jacket, his mouth tugging down at the corners. “It’s your decision in any event,” he said. “I can’t lodge an appeal against your wishes. But it’s my duty as your legal adviser to tell you that you have excellent grounds for an appeal and it would be a mistake not to lodge one.”
“I think my biggest mistake was to let you represent me,” Jess said. She was being rude to make him leave, him and his last-puppy-in-the-pet-shop-window clerk, but it didn’t have any immediate effect.
“We’re not obliged to like one another, Ms Moulson,” the lawyer said. “I’m your legal representative, not your friend. And I’m aware that you didn’t choose me. But I’ll fulfil my role as I see it until such time as you discharge me from—”
“You’re fired,” Jess said. “Thank you. For everything. But now you need to go away.”
“That’s not a decision to make on the spur of the moment,” Pritchard observed.
“I’m not making it on the spur of the moment. I made it when I saw you in court. I don’t want you to be my lawyer any more. If I decide to make an appeal, I’ll go with someone else. A different firm. I won’t use you.”
Pritchard gave a heavy sigh. He stood, still calm but a little on his dignity. “Well then,” he said, “I believe that concludes my business here. But please let me know if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
Levine knocked on the door. He was still darting glances at her. Pritchard bowed his head like a man in prayer as he waited in silence for the guard to come and let them out.
After they were gone, Jess lay very still on the bunk with her eyes closed, trying not to panic. She’d thrown away her parachute deliberately: she didn’t want to be tempted to try to use it. But it was still frightening to lie there in the dark and feel so very much alone.
5
Throughout this time, Jess’s sleep was still disturbed. Whenever she closed her eyes, she felt her tiny cell dissolve away, leaving her lying out in the open in a place that was vast and endless. An unseen multitude moved in front of her closed eyelids: shadows so faint you could barely see them, but so many that they coalesced into an endless darkness. At the limits of her vision, everything broke up into turbulence and chaos.
And still there were the voices. The whispers that had troubled her at the hospital were louder than ever now. She had always assumed they were talking about her, but when she could actually make out the words, she didn’t feature in them at all. They were fragments of wishes, regrets, laments.
I shouldn’t have
if he
my only
never even saw
Jess’s dreamscape contained no actual dreams. The last time she’d dreamed anything she could remember on waking, she must have been six or seven years old. But now her troubled sleep was strewn with the jagged shards of other people’s broken lives.
It was a punishment her subconscious mind had picked out for her, and she knew she deserved it, but it wrought badly on her nerves.
She had one other visitor at Winstanley: her Aunt Brenda, who was to all intents and purposes her only living relative. Her father was out there somewhere, but in so many ways Barry really didn’t count. Brenda came in on two sticks, looking way too big in the narrow cell. The chair creaked ominously as she lowered herself into it. She brought fruit and chocolates, as though Jess was still in hospital rather than in jail, and apologised for not coming sooner.
“There were reporters on my lawn,” she said. “Lots and lots of them. I didn’t want to go out and talk to them about you, so I hunkered down and waited.”
Brenda didn’t bother to mention the other factor – that her surgery had left her still in pain and about as mobile as the average barnacle. She looked older and a lot more tired than when Jess had seen her last, her hair showing streaks of white at the sides and her shoulders slightly stooped. The injury to her back had taken a lot out of her, and the surgery had taken even more.
“It’s okay,” Jess said, hugging her with great care. “I’m glad you’re here now.” Brenda’s friendship, Brenda’s love were precious things to her, and all the more because they weren’t built on any closeness between Brenda and Jess’s mother, Paula. The two sisters had drifted out of touch a long time before Paula died, mostly because of arguments about Barry. You should kick him out. Change the locks. Tell the police the next time he comes around. Brenda took no prisoners and asked for no quarter.
And presumably she had also had to work through her own feelings about her niece accidentally killing an innocent kid. But she tried not to bring that up, the same way you might avoid the word “cancer” in a cancer ward.
“How are you coping?” she asked instead.
“Not all that well,” Jess admitted. She told Brenda about her bad dreams. The whispers in the dark and the sense that she wasn’t alone.
“Like your nightwalks,” Brenda said. Her face creased with concern.
“My what?”
“Your nightwalks. When you were little. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I really don’t. Wait, yes. Do you mean all that crazy stuff I did with Tish?”
Tish had been her imaginary friend. They had wandered together through lots of half-baked fantasy landscapes based on Where the Wild Things Are, One Monster After Another and the Faraway Tree stories. Jess had laboured hard on those adventures, working out the details while she was still awake and trying to carry them with her over the threshold as she dozed off.
Brenda winced visibly. It seemed her back was still giving her problems. “No, no,” she said. “Not Tish. I meant the other times. When you said you could walk into our dreams.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” Jess said.
“Oh, you were adamant about it. When your mum asked for details, you told her you’d seen her on a big ship. She asked you what she was doing on the ship and you said she was shooting a bird with a bow and arrow.”
“That’s from The Ancient Mariner.”
“Yes, it is.” Brenda nodded. “And you had never read that poem. You were only six years old. But Paula was reading it for her Open University course.”
“Then I must have heard her reading it out loud.”
“Perhaps you did. But she was a little shaken up all the same because she’d had a dream about it that night. It was just a coincidence, obviously, but it really did look as though you’d managed to open up her head somehow and take a look inside.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“Well, it happened. And then a few weeks later, when you were staying the night at my house, you did it again. You told me you’d seen me dancing with Gene Kelly.”
“Had we just watched Singin’ in the Rain by any chance?”
Brenda laughed. “We’d watched it a month or so earlier, so I suppose that was a lot less spooky. You used to visit me a lot back then. I don’t know why I dreamed about Gene Kelly that night though. Maybe we talked about him, and that was why he was on both our minds. But then there were your angels.”
“My angels?”
“They stood around your bed at night, you said.”
“Angels stood around my bed?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t exactly that, was it? You had to go and visit them. That was how it worked. They lived in what you called the Other Place. Which was like the seaside except that it was all on fire.”
Jess felt a slight tremor at the back of her mind: a tectonic shift which was small only by virtue of being very far away. She had no recollection of seeing these things but she remembered talking about them. The words had a tautness to them. Some big, submerged memory hung below them like the weight on a plumb line.
“Mum got angry,” she ventured.
“Well, she got scared, I think. This all seemed very real to you, and you were talking about it all the time. About the angels, and about being able to see what was going on in other people’s heads
when they were asleep. You did sound very convincing, I must say. You said you kept losing your way and you were scared you might get stuck there one night in this Other Place. None of us knew what to make of it. Paula took you to a child psychologist in the end. NHS. You were on the list for ages before the appointment came through. With… no, I don’t remember her name.”
Jess did. It had bobbed to the surface of her mind, unlooked for and unwelcome. “Carter. It was Dr Carter.”
Brenda tapped her forehead with one finger, admonishing her poor memory. “That’s right. She saw you loads of times. She was saying at first you might have a… what was it? An incipient psychosis. But she changed her tune. In the end she just said you had a really active imagination and there was nothing to worry about.”
Jess remembered the doctor now: a smiling, grandmotherly type, with her hair in a sugarloaf bun, but she asked about a million questions and the smile stayed on her face no matter what her voice did, so in the end it didn’t mean anything.
She remembered lying. Hiding. Saying what she thought would go down best. Because every kid knows when they’re in trouble just by reading the faces of the adults around them. Every kid gets an instinct for when to lie low. She gave her name, rank and serial number. She said she was okay. She said she made it all up. How could the sea catch fire? That was just crazy talk!
All the while gauging from Dr Carter’s face how this was going down. Triangulating into a sweet spot defined by nods of the head and minute variations in the intensity of that everlasting smile. Dr Carter’s final diagnosis was that Jess’s night-time escapades were signs of mental health rather than mental illness. “When a child’s life hits a crisis of any kind,” she told Paula Moulson briskly, “they’ve got to have a refuge from it. Or if not a refuge, then a workaround. I’m not prying, but has there been something like that going on for Jess recently? Some sort of upheaval?”