Bailey stood under the jet of water, her eyes closed, massaging the prison-issue shower gel over her body, working up a lather. The shower gel smelt cheap and harsh and left her skin feeling dry and sensitive and she made a mental note there and then to check if the prison shop stocked anything of a slightly better quality.
She didn’t particularly enjoy communal showering and had been apprehensive about exposing her scars but knew that she would have no choice in the matter. She was self-conscious about them at the best of times, and in here she didn’t quite know what reaction they would elicit.
The one down the side of her face was what most people saw, if they noticed it beneath her hair, but that was the least of them, for they stretched in an extensive zigzag lattice down across her breasts, shoulders and back, interspersed here and there with a number of small round burn marks.
As it turned out, in the shower she’d got a few glances of interest and several double-takes though no one had actually said anything. Maybe in an environment like prison, scars weren’t such a big deal. If anything, the other inmates had given her a slightly wider berth, and she realised that her disfigurement constituted a useful asset as it seemed to confer on her an aura of criminal credibility that she wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Looking around her, she was amazed by the number of tattoos. She’d never seen so many in one place. Some of the artwork was quite impressive, but for the most part it was pretty tacky, the kind of thing she’d seen on sex workers she’d encountered in the course of upholding the law.
Bailey herself had no tattoos. She’d never seen the point in getting one. Once upon a time, if anyone had asked her why, she’d have responded by saying that tattoos were an identifying feature – not necessarily a good thing if you were an undercover police officer. People remembered things like tattoos, and at some point down the line, on a different job, under a different cover, you might bump into someone from a former job who might otherwise not have recognised you were it not for your distinctive tattoo and who might then realise that you weren’t who you claimed to be. But now she had the scars, all of that seemed immaterial, for they were probably even more of an identifying feature than a tattoo.
The girl next to her, slim and boyish, ran her hands through her bleached blonde hair, slicking it back, and as she did so, Bailey noticed the track marks running along the insides of her forearms. The ugly puncture wounds dotted along the paths of the veins were clear evidence of intravenous hard drug use and they looked recent.
‘What are you looking at?’ said the girl, fixing Bailey with a hostile glare.
‘Oh nothing,’ said Bailey, backing off with a placatory smile. Although she was curious to find out more, the shower probably wasn’t the best place to start asking questions.
She hurriedly finished up, towelled off and headed back to her cell, reminding herself to pick up some decent shower gel from the prison shop.
In the reflection of the small plastic mirror above the sink, she could see Sharon lying on the bunk behind her, engrossed in a Mills & Boon novel.
Bailey had just finished drying her hair, and she now started to apply some moisturiser to her face. As she was doing so, she couldn’t help but notice the beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes. Age crept up on you. A wrinkle here, a wrinkle there. She thought wistfully of the Clarins eye serum she kept in her bathroom cabinet at home. She couldn’t imagine the prison shop stocked it.
Despite these small vanities, she had never been a big one for make-up. A bit of lip gloss was the most she’d stretch to if she wanted to do herself up. And, what with the scars, there seemed even less of a point bothering with that kind of thing these days.
She noticed Sharon watching her from her bunk. Her cellmate had put her book down and was looking at her curiously.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Sharon asked.
Bailey shook her head.
‘Surely there must be someone?’
‘Yeah… there was. But it didn’t work out.’
‘Why not?’
Her last boyfriend had been called Mark. He was a detective in the CID. She’d lived with him for just over two years. He had wanted to settle down, get married and start a family. He’d seemed more concerned with her biological clock than she was. But she wasn’t interested in having children. She valued her independence too much. So it had fallen apart.
More than that, she feared the quiet oppression of suburbia. A pebble-dashed house. Kids. A normal life. A suffocating prison. Worse than a real prison. She’d rather be here than there. And here she was…
‘I guess we wanted different things,’ she said.
‘You probably had incompatible star signs,’ Sharon replied knowledgeably. ‘I’m a big one for star signs. I’m a Virgo myself. What sign are you?’
Bailey met Sharon’s eyes in the mirror. ‘Aren’t Virgos supposed to be intuitive by nature? Why don’t you try and work it out?’
Sharon smiled at the challenge. She scrutinised Bailey’s meagre collection of belongings. Bailey had brought little into the prison – a few books of cryptic crosswords and Sudoku, and an iPod full of eighties power ballads, her one guilty pleasure.
‘Mmm…’ Sharon stroked her chin. ‘Not a lot to go on. You like puzzles. That means you’re analytical. Probably good with numbers. I’d say you were… a Capricorn.’
Sharon was correct.
‘Well done. Not bad at all.’
Sharon grinned proudly. ‘So what kind of guys do you like? Tall, dark and handsome?’
Sharon held up her romance novel for Bailey to see. Bailey glanced over her shoulder to look at it – the cover depicted an airbrushed picture of a tall, dark handsome man with a glistening muscled torso. The novel was called The Billionaire’s Secret Cinderella.
Bailey snorted a laugh.
‘Actually, I prefer blonde hair and blue eyes.’
‘You like the Teutonic look, eh? I’ve got one over there called Seduced by the Surgeon. The bloke in it is this rich blonde doctor. You can borrow it if you want.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Suit yourself. So have you been getting much action since… what was his name?’
Since the end of that relationship, it had been a case of going out every once in a while when the mood took her – putting on a bit of lip gloss and her favourite suede-fringed cowboy jacket, going to a bar, hitting on some guy, bringing him back to her place, and then ejecting him once business was done.
But then she’d got the scars and they had put an end to that. Intimacy was no longer something she felt comfortable with in the wake of that last undercover job. More than that, the wounds from the violations she’d been subjected to went far deeper than any physical injuries she’d suffered, and unlike the scars they were still raw and painful. No – she couldn’t see herself getting intimate with anyone again anytime soon, and perhaps not ever.
Bailey snapped the lid closed on the bottle of moisturiser and placed it back on the shelf by the mirror. She turned around and forced a smile at Sharon.
‘I’ve got some stuff to get done.’
And she turned and left the cell.