I don’t know how anyone can sleep inside a prison cell. It is never quiet. Even in my dreams I hear the murmurs, shouts, and sometimes screams of strangers beyond the gray walls. It’s even noisier when I find myself alone inside my head. The familiar cast of my bad dreams delivered a stellar performance this evening. A standing ovation of insomnia was the only suitable response to the story on the stage of my mind. I won’t get the part in the Fincher movie now, that’s for sure. I’ve lost everything and everyone.
I feel stiff, so I stand and stretch a little, getting a whiff of my own body odor as I raise my arms. The small frosted-glass window in the cell is open just a fraction. As I lean my face against the bars in front of it to gulp the fresh air, I spot a magpie on the lawn outside. I salute the bird, unable to remember when or why I started doing such an odd, superstitious thing.
As Hilary predicted, she has been allowed out for various classes, and to exercise in the yard, but I have been confined to my cell while I wait to be successfully added to the system. I appreciate I haven’t been here long, but I think it’s safe to say that the system is broken. If it weren’t for my cellmate’s generosity, I still wouldn’t have had anything to eat or drink, but luckily Hilary seems to have a never-ending supply of tinned beans and cartons of Ribena. I normally avoid sugary drinks, but I daren’t risk the water coming out of the tap. I’ve already been ill, and having to go to the toilet with nothing but a thin curtain to separate me from a complete stranger is worse than degrading. I keep thinking about the photo of Ben that Hilary showed me on her phone. It wasn’t him. I realize now that the reason I’ve been unable to slot all the pieces of what has happened together, is because they don’t fit. Not that I’ve been able to tell anyone, not that they’d believe me if I did.
I hear the increasingly familiar sound of keys jangling behind the cell door, and I presume that Hilary has been escorted back from her latest excursion. But it isn’t Hilary. It’s a prison guard, the same one who brought me in yesterday. He looks as though he hasn’t slept either. The collection of dandruff has disappeared from one of his shoulders though, and I wonder whether he or someone else brushed it away.
“Well, come on then, I haven’t got all day,” he says in my direction, without actually looking at me.
I get up and follow him out of the cell, retracing the journey we made yesterday. It takes longer than it should, waiting for him to lock each door behind us, before taking a few more steps, then stopping to unlock the next.
“Where are we going?” He doesn’t answer, and my chest starts to feel tight, as though the air has become hard to breathe. “Can you tell me where you are taking me? Please?” As I add the word please, I am reminded of my childhood and of Maggie. I remember how she conditioned me and rationed her love, only ever giving a little at a time. It’s as though she has come back from the dead to haunt me. I stop walking in protest to being ignored, and finally the guard turns around, sighs, then shakes his head as though I have done something far worse than ask a simple question.
“Keep. Moving.”
“Not until you explain where you are taking me.”
He smiles, a twisted shape fracturing his facial features, which were already so unpleasantly arranged. “I don’t know or care who it is you think you were on the outside. In here, you are nothing. You are nobody.”
His words have an undesirable effect on me. I used to think that I was nobody, I still do, but not in the way he means. I think we’re all nobodies, but I won’t have some jobsworth in a cheap uniform, with an overinflated sense of empowerment, and a bad case of halitosis, speak to me that way. Sometimes you have to fall hard enough for it to hurt, to know when to pick yourself up. You can’t start to put yourself back together if you don’t even know that you’re broken. I lift my head a little higher and take a step closer before giving him my reply.
“And I don’t care about you losing your job, your home, your pet porn collection—from your appearance I doubt very much you have a wife—if I have to make a formal complaint and have your arse fired from this establishment. I know people who can end you with one phone call.”
He glares at me through narrowed eyes. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“I’m not a fucking secretary. See for yourself.”
He opens another door and I see her there, sitting at a desk waiting for me.
“Sit down,” says Detective Alex Croft.
I stay exactly where I am. I’m a little tired of people giving me orders.
“Please, take a seat. I’d like to talk to you.”
“I did not kill my husband,” I say, fully aware that I must sound like a broken record.
She nods, leans back in her chair, and folds her arms. “I know.”