Glory had been going to the prison long enough to recognize that different days had different atmospheres, depending on the composition of visitors.
Weekends were the liveliest. This was when families with more than one relative in prison would double or triple up, expanding a single visit quota from three adults to six or nine, plus any children. The group would often occupy a corner of the visiting hall, food and drink overflowing from tables and children running between them.
But weekends were also fraught with visits from those estranged from the prisoner in question: disappointed mothers who pressed tissue to drawn faces; shy children brought along by a resentful ex-partner.
Glory had chosen to visit on a Sunday morning because it would be the quietest. She was with a handful of others in the windowless waiting room. This was usually the room where the patience of all wore thin, the room where the clock seemed to tick the quickest, each passing minute eating into the hour assigned. Here, people would get agitated, shouting “Come on!” at the locked door while the frustrated mumbles of others turned into a low drone.
When they were finally let into the hall, the wait continued. The air buzzed with quiet desperation as cups of tea and coffee cooled on tables, and heads turned expectantly toward the door behind the empty command station. A woman walked up to the officer who had escorted the group in and asked what was happening.
“Will we still get an hour?”
The hall was so quiet, Glory could hear their conversation echoing across the space.
“Let me see what’s going on.”
The officer was gone for a while. Eventually two others came out, then one by one the prisoners began to trickle in. Relief flowed from table to table as the occupants stood to receive the man they were waiting for.
Victor came out toward the end. He pressed his finger on the scanner mounted to the side of the command station and handed over his white slip. Glory rose to greet him, searching his face before he reached the table. They hugged briefly.
“What happened?” she asked as they took their seats.
“Incident on another wing,” he said gruffly. “I think someone was having a bad reaction to some spice or something.”
“Are they OK?”
Victor shrugged, completely uninterested.
“So it’s just you today then?”
“Yeah, we all went to a traditional last night, Tabitha’s, do you remember her?”
Victor shook his head.
“Mum and Faith are still recovering and, anyway, I wanted to see you by myself.”
Victor nodded.
“How’s work and that?” he asked.
“Work’s work. They pay me on time, that’s what matters. How are you doing though?”
“I’m alive, innit.”
Victor looked down, his restless fingers shredding the napkin in front of him. Glory watched his fingers move and then she noticed his knuckles. They were grazed and scabbed over.
“Have you been fighting again?” she asked him.
“What? No,” he said sullenly.
“What happened to your knuckles?”
Victor started to pull his hands off the table, but Glory reached out and grabbed one of them in a tight grip. The scabs were fresh, the dark crust of skin only partially covering bloody pink flesh underneath.
Victor kissed his teeth and yanked his hand out of her grip.
“It’s minor.”
“What happened? Did you fall?”
“Fall? I’m not a kid,” Victor said with that new bitter laugh that came too easily to him.
“So?” Glory pressed.
“I was stressed, innit . . .” he said, examining his knuckles for himself and leaving Glory to figure out the rest.
Glory felt sick, then she remembered the fine web of scars she’d noticed across his hands and wrist the first time she had visited him and felt sicker still.
“You, like, punched a wall or something?”
Victor grunted.
“Did you do the, erm, marks on your wrists and your hands too?”
Victor looked at her for a moment, not reacting, but then turned his palms to the sky, stretching his arms out so that his wrists revealed themselves from the long sleeves of his top.
“They’ve almost gone,” he said casually, finally looking at Glory with an expression that she read as defiance. Glory drummed her fingers against the table.
“Chill out,” Victor eventually said with a dark smile. “I’m not trying to kill myself or anything. It just helps with the stress. Better than getting into a fight and getting an IEP.”
“Do you cut anywhere else?” Glory asked him and she watched his hands instinctively travel to his upper arms, almost protectively.
“Shit, Victor!” she exclaimed, trying not to scold him but needing to direct her anger somewhere. “Why don’t you speak to that counselor you mentioned?”
“Because I’m not tapped!” Victor spat back. “I’m not mad in the head like some man you see in here! I’m just stressed!”
“Stress can kill, Vic,” Glory said, her voice softer than before. She thought of what her mother had told her the night before about stress and pressure, then she thought of her father waking up one morning only to drop dead.
“You’re funny, Glory,” Victor said, trying to deflect. “There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just stress! If I weren’t in here, I’d be fine, you know this.”
“But you are here, that’s the problem!” she said, frustration pushing its way back into her voice. “I was reading this thing about PTSD in young men who grow up in ends, you know with witnessing so much violence and that—”
“Why were you reading that?”
“Just something happened to a friend of a friend, but my friend’s been acting off since then. But anyway, I was thinking about you and like, I know you didn’t do anything, but everything that you’ve been through, from the party until now—”
“Who?”
“What do you mean who? You!” Glory snapped.
“No, who’s your friend?”
“Oh, I dunno if you remember him—Julian? Old, old family friend. He owns Pharaoh’s Barbershop on Southampton Way.”
“You mean your man?”
“Who told you he’s my man?”
“Why else would he be trying to get me to talk to you if he wasn't your man?”
“What are you on about?”
“He didn’t tell you?” Victor laughed.
“No! What did he do?”
“When I was still airing your letters and that, he must have got in touch through Délé and his sister, innit. Basically trying to convince me to stop ignoring you.”
“Did it work?”
“You’re sitting here aren’t you?”
Guilt made Glory pause for a second.
“Well, he was my man,” she said with uncertainty. “But we got into it last night, so right now? Who knows.”
Glory gathered the shredded tissue into a pile, squeezing it tight into a ball.
“Got into it how?”
“I don’t even know! It started over something stupid and then it ended with me saying fuck you.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“He was proper riding for you when I spoke with him.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
Victor picked up a new napkin and began shredding it.
“It was probably your fault, still,” he said.
Glory flicked the paper ball in her brother’s direction.
“How the hell do you know it’s my fault? You don’t even know what’s happened! Why can’t you be on my side for once? First Michael, now you’re backing it for Julian—you don’t even know him!”
“I know you, Glory. You put up all these fronts and shit. No guy wants to be in a relationship with another guy.”
“Why is it the girl who has to be emotional? Why don’t you lot know how to talk about your emotions instead of getting offended over something small because you’re bottling up the stuff that’s really bothering you?” Or cutting your body into shreds, she wanted to add, but of course she didn’t.
“Well, all I’m saying is if you want to stay with him, apologize for telling him to fuck off, innit.”
“I didn’t tell him to fuck off, I said fuck you.”
“Even worse.”
Glory felt blood rush to her face.
“Anyway, the only reason I even started talking about this, is because I’m worried about you. Even if you don’t want to talk to someone in here, talk to me. I know we’re not good at talking about stuff as a family, but we have to do better going forward. Please, Vic?”
“You ain’t exactly an open communicator.”
“I know and that’s what I’m trying to change—ask me anything, I’m an open book!”
Victor looked amused, then thoughtful.
“OK. How could you be out in LA just chilling for all that time, when we were going through so much shit here? Didn’t you think about us at all?” Victor delivered his question dispassionately, but he might as well have shouted in Glory’s face.
“Oh, Vic . . .” she began, her voice weak. “I thought about you all the time, it wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking about you guys, it’s just . . .”
She stopped, ignoring the excuses that flooded her mind instinctively.
“I made a selfish decision—it was dumb and I should have come straight away, but I made that decision and it became easier to go along with it, telling myself that everything would work out instead of seeing that it was a wrong decision to make and doing what I should have done immediately. As soon as I knew your case was going to trial, I should have come home. I wanted to stay because I didn’t want to be wrong and it was easier to believe that I wasn’t wrong if I just stuck with the stupid decision I’d made in the first place. Does that make sense?”
Victor had been watching Glory carefully, and he watched her for a few seconds more, letting her sit in her discomfort.
“No,” he eventually said. “It doesn’t make sense, but I understand what you meant.”
Glory hadn’t realized that she had stopped breathing until she exhaled in relief.
“Now that I’m here, I can’t imagine leaving again. Even if things got worse after I turned up! Anything else you want to ask me?”
Victor shook his head.
“I’m sure I’ll think of something though. So what’s going on? What’s new?”
Glory jumped up suddenly.
“That’s even why I came to see you!” she said excitedly, remembering what her mission had been before Victor’s knuckles distracted her. “I found Hope!”
“You’re lying.” Victor smirked.
“No! And she had been looking for us too! Well, I don’t know if she knows about us, but she’d been looking for Mummy and Daddy. I’ve got her number, so I called and left a message.”
“That’s good.”
Victor held out his hand for Glory to shake and Glory obliged the clumsy little gesture.
“I even told Mummy last night and she was so calm about it. I thought she’d be angry or something but she wasn’t. But, you know when I tell Faith, she’s going to freak out.”
“She really will.”
“So what do I do?”
“Try and see it from her point of view.”
“I’m not gonna stop now! I’ve come too far,” Glory said quickly.
“No one’s telling you to do what she says, just understand where she’s coming from, then you’ll know how to respond when she reacts.”
“When did you turn wise, baby brother?” Glory asked, reaching out to tug at his cheeks. Victor ducked and dodged her fingers, pushing her hands onto the table and looking around.
“I think a lot. All you’ve got to do in here is think, or smoke, or eat, or work out, or fight over bullshit prison politics. The food’s shit, I’m not really trying to fight anyone, and I trade all the tobacco on my canteen for mackerel.”
Glory nodded, but she had nothing to add to that. She watched Victor roll up the ripped strips of paper into more balls and line them up in a row, neatly spaced apart.
“You were right about something else too,” she said.
“About what?”
“Family’s all we’ve got.”
He looked up from the table directly at Glory.
“It is though.”
“I know, but I get it now.”
Victor smiled, only slightly, then looked back down, trying to hide the satisfied look settling on his face.
Before Glory knew it, an officer was walking around the hall telling everyone to finish up. She checked the clock and pulled a face, sure the hour couldn’t be over already, but after she squeezed her brother tight, she almost floated out of the hall.
At the visitors’ center she opened up her locker and collected her bag, turning her phone on as she walked toward the bus stop. An alert pinged through: one new voicemail. The stumbling voice in the message had a Midlands lilt to it.
“Hello, I’m looking for Glory? I’m trying to get in touch with Glory—I mean, hi. I’m just returning your call. You left a message a while back, so I’m just returning your call. It’s—oh, God! This is so bloody weird . . .” The voice took a deep breath, air escaping directly into the mouthpiece, “Hi, it’s Hope. Please call me back.”
Glory nearly dropped the phone. She wanted to scream and stamp her feet and run back to the visit hall and shake Victor so hard he would be forced to break into the kind of smile that would show all his teeth. But instead she dropped the phone into her bag while her heart skipped a few beats, and focused on walking in a straight line toward the bus stop.