‘Yes,’ I say, my voice imbued with something I don’t feel when talking to anybody else. Lightness, maybe.
He visited every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, once I’d accrued enough good behaviour to allow as many visitors as I wanted. It was more than anyone, except Reuben. But Wilf’s were the visits I looked forward to the most, in the end.
‘How is it?’ he says.
I sit on the bed. Is it a different bed? It bounces softly underneath me. No; I’m just used to the harder prison-issue beds. I can’t imagine having a weighty feather duvet against my skin. I stand up again.
‘Weird,’ I say. ‘Indescribably odd.’
‘I bet,’ he says softly.
We talked about all sorts during those visits. Mum and Dad. The way I always used to know where Wilf was during childhood games of hide and seek because I knew him so well. We talked about our first holidays abroad and how we used to close our eyes as the aeroplane took off and pretend we were flying through the sky like birds. Wilf once told me he slept without a duvet over him for three nights running, after he watched Mary Poppins tuck Jane into bed and wanted Mum to do the same thing for him. She never did, he told me wryly.
We talked about what I’d do. Afterwards.
‘You’re so great with people,’ he said to me, one Thursday. ‘Do something with people. You understand them.’ His eyes squinted as he said it. Envy, I guessed. It was the first time he’d expressed such a thing.
On a Tuesday, one and a half years in, he came in looking different. His face was still the same, with the dark beard, and he had his usual purposeful walk. But there was something about his features that was different. His lips curved in a private smile, the kind I used to see on Reuben’s face when I was texting him at boring parties from across the room.
‘What’s going on?’ I said, inching eagerly across to Wilf.
‘It’s dumb,’ he said.
I gestured with a single hand, palm upturned, to the scene around me. ‘You want to see dumb?’
No doubt he could see the carnage of visiting times unfolding behind me. Men and women squabbling and guards hovering nearby, ready to break up any fights. Women saying things like I can’t fucking stand any more of your fucking shite, and men leaving early.
‘Good point,’ he said.
We were just starting to joke about it. Just tentatively, like two children dipping a toe in the freezing cold ocean for the first time before splashing fully in.
‘Well, this wasn’t on my list,’ Wilf admitted. He had become self-deprecating. Another change. ‘Today I was supposed to go to work, see you, then go to my Spanish class.’
A-level Spanish was one of the items on Wilf’s list that year.
‘You can do things not on your list,’ I said. ‘Amazingly, some of us don’t even have lists.’
He looked up then, his eyes catching mine. We both had brown eyes, the exact same shade, but his were big and round, and close together. When we were little, we used to study our eyes, in the bathroom mirror, standing together, jostling, on the lid of the toilet.
‘There was a woman on the train here … I never would have met her, normally,’ he said. ‘A Tuesday afternoon train.’
‘No way,’ I joked. ‘Who is she?’
‘She asked to use my phone. She was …’ He whirled his finger around, giving me the impression of wavy hair. ‘I don’t know – nice. Pretty.’
‘And did she use it?’
‘Yep,’ he said, going to pat his pocket, before remembering he’d had to surrender his phone on the way in, like airport security. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah – she did. She didn’t call anyone. She sent a text.’
‘Right.’
‘I looked. At what she sent.’
‘Stalker,’ I said, and it was like the sun had come out on my life again, however briefly. I tilted my head up to it.
I had missed that sibling banter. The inmates didn’t do it, not this sort of thing. And maybe, I thought, as I tasted it in my mind, maybe I had missed it for longer than my prison stay. Maybe I had missed him, my brother Wilf, for years.
‘True,’ he said. He rubbed his beard, looking wolfish. ‘The thing is …’
‘What?’ I wanted to hurry him up. Visiting hours were so short, like tiny pockets of air in the vacuum of my week, and he was spending them umming and ahhing.
‘I don’t know. She handed it back and then she just gave me this really smiley look. She got off at Charing Cross and I watched her go. She was dressed in a big coat and purple hat, even though it’s …’ He gestured out of the window of the visitors’ centre.
I couldn’t really tell. It looked the same as ever. The sky was a flat, blank white. The only trees were evergreen trees, anyway, and I couldn’t really see them properly.
‘It’s a really mild winter,’ he added.
I liked that he told me. Reuben didn’t tell me; he was embarrassed I didn’t know.
‘And then what?’ I said.
‘She had signed it with her full name – she was late to give a presentation.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Minnie.’
‘And have you googled her?’
‘Maybe. I thought that was – that was odd.’
‘You think she likes you?’
I was feeling desperate not only for the contact with my brother but for other things, too. A story that wasn’t only on the television or in books. Gossip. A titbit. And, maybe most tellingly of all, intimacy. It wasn’t possible during visiting hours, during letters. It was impossible to have all of the things that need to line up to form a relationship. The flash of an eye-roll when crumbs are left on the work surface. The movement of a foot next to another in bed on a Sunday morning. Even a text. Not a formal letter already opened and read by prison staff, but just a missive: a saw this and thought of you. The kind of communication we took for granted. I was craving it. Prison ticked the main boxes; I got the socialization and the hour’s yard time and fresh air every day. I had counselling if I wanted, and I took courses. But … nothing else. There were no impromptu snacks. No giggles over a midnight film with a friend. No break-ups. No train rides with a latte. No impulse pairs of shoes bought during lunch hours. And didn’t I deserve it, that deprivation? Of course I did.
‘Well, I was wondering whether you think I should – say hi?’ Wilf said, and I flushed with pleasure. He leaned forward, his expensive cufflinks hitting the plastic table, and added, ‘You just always know about people. I never know. It’s like people are French and I’m English.’
‘How?’ I said.
‘You know,’ he said quietly.
He didn’t elaborate on it then, but later he told me: he’d always been jealous of me. How naturally things came to me. Not just my perceptiveness, he said, but my intellect, too. He was always working so hard behind the scenes, and there I was, finding it effortless. I was gobsmacked. Had never thought he might be jealous of me. He was amused, too, when I said the same back.
‘Anyway. Her surname’s Tarling. Pretty unusual name. I’ve googled her.’
‘And?’
‘And she’s … she’s nice. She was going to present on law reform. To do with the NHS. How it runs. Lefty stuff,’ he said with a twisted smile, a nod to when he once called Reuben’s job lefty stuff and Reuben’s nostrils flared like a horse’s.
I stared at the ceiling, enjoying the slow, unravelling feeling of my brain waking up again. Not intellectually but – something else. Interpersonally. Not just making friends for self-preservation.
‘As long as you seem normal, I’d be flattered that you were checking me out,’ I said. ‘Most women would be flattered, I think.’ I went to add something self-deprecating like, ‘But then, what would I know?’ but stopped myself.
Alan would say I was good enough. Even with a third-class degree. Even while imprisoned.
My entire life I’d been so bloody frightened of what everybody thought of me and my failed existence and yet, when I failed spectacularly – sank so much lower, so much worse than failing a degree – I realized the truth of it: nobody cares what you think as much as you do. Not even close.
‘What’re you gonna do?’ I asked Wilf.