Grace lay still for a moment, her small body curled up inside her mother’s arms, her back against her mum’s chest, almost as if she was still in the womb. The grey woollen blanket was scratchy against her skin. She lay half-asleep, thinking about playing in the caged yard later with the other kids. If they were good, they might get permission to go into the vegetable garden. Her seed might have started to grow, its green shoots reaching out of the black earth.
Soon Warden Kane would unlock their door, ‘the swishy’ as Grace called it, because of the sound it made. Usually her mother was up by now and making a cup of tea with the little kettle that Grace wasn’t allowed to touch. When the steam came out of the spout and rose up towards the window, Grace imagined what it would be like to float up into the air, out of the unit, beyond the walls, to see what life was really like out there.
Out There. Too big, too scary, too many people on the other side of the wall. There would be men too. Did all men wear uniform Out There, like the male wardens did?
She could hear Lottie, Remy’s mum, singing in the cell next door. She felt safe here with the women, even though they sometimes screamed and shouted, either at each other or at the kids. Sometimes they even fought. The kids could be mean. But not Remy. Remy was never mean.
He’d still be sprawled in the narrow bed next door but it wouldn’t be long until they were in class. He’d try to make her laugh and she would tell him to behave. She was only five but she already knew all her letters.
Remy was a year older. He’d be leaving soon. The rule was that if you had nowhere else to go, you could stay with your mother until your seventh birthday. Then they packed you off to state boarding school. But Lottie only had six months left of her sentence, so Remy wouldn’t be separated from her.
Grace’s mother had reassured her many times that they too would stay together. The idea of being parted from her mum, even for a night, terrified her. It had always been just the two of them. Thick as thieves, her mother would say, and laugh. Sometimes, what choice had they had but to steal? It wasn’t wrong, it was survival.
Her mother never sang like Lottie did, but her laughter always made Grace feel happy, like everything was going to be okay.
But things didn’t feel okay today. In fact, something felt odd. The room, the bed – everything felt so still.
Grace took a deep breath and turned around to face her mother.
People didn’t sleep with their eyes open, did they? They looked weird, too much blue, the pupils tiny black dots.
‘Mum…?’
She touched her mother’s cheek with her finger and shuddered.
‘Mummy, wake up.’
Grace turned to the door as it swished open.
‘Morning, pet,’ Warden Kane said before halting in her tracks. Without taking her eyes from Grace’s mother, she called out ‘Lottie!’ with a strange lilt to her voice Grace had never heard before.
‘Coming, Warden,’ Lottie’s singsong voice rang out in the corridor, before she turned into the room and stopped dead, her eyes widening.
‘Take the child,’ commanded Kane quietly.
‘Remy’s been asking for you,’ Lottie said, lifting Grace from the bed. Her mother’s arm flopped heavily onto the blanket.
But Grace knew that Remy always slept in.
‘He has something to show you,’ she said, wrapping Grace in her soft, fleshy embrace and moving towards the door. ‘It’s a spider, Gracie, the biggest one in the block, but you have to hurry or it’ll run away.’
Warden Kane began barking into her radio.
Medics? Weren’t they the ones who took Jai’s mum away when she’d been screaming all night?
Lottie set Grace down in her room and went back out again. Remy lifted his head up from the pillow, his hair ruffled, his face creased like the sheet he lay on.
‘What’s up?’ One of his eyes was still shut. He sat up on the bed with his back against the wall and pulled his knees up towards him.
The alarm was sounding, echoing Lottie’s wailing. Through the open door, Grace could see the women congregating in the corridor.
Remy rubbed his face and then patted the bed. Grace clambered up, snuggled next to him, and he wrapped his blanket around the pair of them.
It was when she felt the warmth of his body that it began to dawn on her.
She closed her eyes and tried to close her mind to her worries about her mother, the shouts of the women in the corridor, the silence that fell as the medics – more men in uniform – arrived on the scene.
Sometime later, Grace didn’t know if it had been minutes or hours, Lottie came back and knelt down in front of the two children huddling on the bed. ‘There’s nothing they could do, babe,’ she said tearfully. ‘Already gone. They couldn’t save her.’
Grace looked to Remy for an explanation, his grey eyes wise in his young face.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll look after you now, Gracie. I’ll never let anyone hurt you and you’ll never be on your own.’
But all Grace could hear was the words that burned deeply into her mind.
Couldn’t save her.