Rodney paced as he waited for the phone.
Dan had been gone a couple of hours, and he was used to the slow drag of time, but this was the call he’d been dreading for twenty years.
He was in a corridor close to the rooms where the guards sat when they weren’t walking the wings. The phone was the cause of many fights, as prisoners used it for too long, tensions boiling as people waited to make calls. Prison is about patience, waiting for those moments that break the monotony. A phone call is one of those things, and delays test everyone.
He wondered about those wasted years as he waited. Had they been wasted years? He’d received enough advice, with calls from lawyers hoping to make a name from his case.
He wasn’t interested in that. They were after making their name, not his. Ken Goodman had been his lawyer throughout his time. He was incompetent, but he’d served his purpose.
Dan Grant was different, because Dan hadn’t been interested in him but only ever about his own client.
If Rodney wanted legal advice, there were always plenty of self-taught prison-wing experts to ask. That was the nature of prison. There was time to fill. Long days that stretched into nothing and the only thing to occupy his mind was what was going on outside. Memories of the people he would no longer see, and fear of the threats he faced along the wings.
It was the threats he hated, from those prisoners who saw attacking him as somehow atoning for their own sins. They’d ruined lives too, but it didn’t give them special rights. On the outside, they were bad people, ones to avoid, but on the inside? Why did they get to hold the moral compass?
The noises too. Shouting, banging, sometimes screams. On the quiet nights, sobs could be heard, the gasping sorrow of the new arrivals, not yet acclimatised to the utter tedium.
It was different for him, he knew that. He was on a protected wing, to keep the monsters locked away, even if it was for their own protection. A cell to himself. A television. He could read and while his hours away, provided he could endure the scorn of the guards. Not for him the shared cell, the bunks, the perpetually open doors, always waiting for an attack from one of the inmates who thought that the only reputation worth having was a bad one.
And then there were the perverts.
He didn’t mean the lovers, those men who found solace in each other. Who was he to judge anyone? No, it was those who loathed their yearnings, who saw the terror in someone else’s eyes as a turn-on, because it was all about power in the end. One thing he’d learned in prison was that there were some humans who didn’t deserve to be free, alive even, whose wires had got jumbled along the way and posed nothing but a threat.
There were enough of those people on his wing, but for all the press talk of them being monsters, beasts, most were pathetic. They didn’t socialise, make for idle chat. They stayed as loners, knowing that they were where they ought to be.
Being on a protected wing kept him safe and alone. Rodney could deal with that.
The queue for the phone wasn’t too long. Being a protected prisoner had its advantages. A squat man in round glasses had called his mother, sobbing as he spoke, always saying he was sorry, as if it would somehow get his release. The children he’d abused were still prisoners to what he’d done.
Then there was the tall, skinny man who called his wife, who must have forgiven him for the rapes he’d committed because she’d taken the call, and Rodney had listened to him bleating how it was her fault in the end, because he had needs, dammit.
Rodney kept his gaze on the floor. He despised these people.
The ex-copper was next, but his call was brief, apologising as he turned and wiped his eyes and trudged back to his cell.
Rodney felt for him. He wasn’t evil. He’d just trapped himself into debt and tried to blackmail his way out of it. Bad judgement shouldn’t condemn him, but he was a target for many, those serving their time as part of their rehabilitation still seeing it as a battle of the trenches. There were sides to be taken, lines to be drawn. Cops and robbers.
The sorrow would pass and the ex-copper would learn to watch the days go by. He’d leave prison eventually. Not for Rodney. He knew he’d never feel the brisk winter of Brampton again. He thought of it often, but he couldn’t dream too hard. He’d put himself in prison. His decision. His actions.
The phone became free. He paused with the receiver in his hand, his head in the small booth designed to give him privacy. He took a deep breath. This was a phone call he didn’t want to make, but he had no choice.
He pressed the digits, the number etched on his mind, sent to him in correspondence and memorised, just in case his letters were ever shredded.
He closed his eyes as it rang out. He imagined her on the other end, wondering whether to answer. He never rang, and he didn’t know how it would show up on her phone, but she’d asked often enough. All those letters, telling him how much she loved him, imploring him to call.
Had he misinterpreted them?
Someone answered.
‘Leoni?’
There was silence on the other end, until a woman’s voice said, ‘Dad?’
A sob broke through and he wanted to say so much, how he’d missed her, was desperate to see her, all those years passed, but instead he steeled himself and said, ‘Tell me about David Green.’
Leoni’s voice had seemed timid, scared almost, when she’d first answered. When she replied, ‘David Green? Oh, he was just an old boyfriend. It was really sad,’ her voice changed, but he could sense something in it more than hiding a bad memory. She was faking emotion.
She started to tell him, but he didn’t want to hear. Tears ran down his cheeks as he put the receiver back as she was still talking.
As he made his way back to his cell, his mind was made up. He knew what he had to do.