A Traitor to Memory

Noreen McKay glanced over at the bar, where her colleagues were downing pints of Guinness. The pub door opened, and three more employees of the prison walked in, all of them women in uniforms similar to the deputy warden's. Two of them called out to her and looked as if they were considering a saunter over for an introduction to McKay's companion. Noreen turned from them abruptly and said in a low voice, “This is impossible. I shouldn't have … We've got to get out of here.”


“You running out wouldn't look so good,” Nkata murmured. “Especially when I jump up and start shouting your name. But yeses and nos, and I'm gone, Miss McKay. Quiet as a mouse and you c'n tell them I'm anyone. Truant officer come to talk about your kids. Scout for Manchester United interested in the boy. I don't care. Just yeses and nos, and you got your life back, whatever it is.”

“You don't know what it is.”

“'Course. Like I said. Whatever it is.”

She stared at him for a moment before saying, “All right. Ask.”

“Was she with you three nights ago?”

“Yes.”

“Between ten and midnight?”

“Yes.”

“What time d'she leave?”

“We said yeses or nos.”

“Right. Yeah. She leave before midnight?”

“No.”

“She arrive before ten?”

“Yes.”

“She come alone?”

“Yes.”

“Missus Edwards know where she was?”

Noreen McKay moved her gaze at this question, but it didn't appear to be because she was about to lie. “No,” she said.

“And last night?”

“What about last night?”

“Katja Wolff with you last night? Say, after her solicitor left?”

Noreen McKay looked back at him. “Yes.”

“She stay? Was she there round half eleven, midnight?”

“Yes. She left…. It was probably half past one when she left.”

“You know Missus Edwards?”

Her gaze moved again. He saw a muscle tighten in her jaw. She said, “Yes. Yes, I know Yasmin Edwards. She served most of her time in Holloway.”

“You know she and Katja—”

“Yes.”

“Then what're you doing mixed up with them?” he asked abruptly, abjuring the previous yeses and nos in a sudden need for weapons, a personal need that he could barely acknowledge let alone begin to understand. “You got some sort of plan, you and Katja? You two using her and her boy for some reason?”

She looked at him but did not reply.

He said, “These're people, Miss McKay. They got lives and they got feelings. If you and Katja're planning to put something down to Yasmin, like laying a trail to her door, making her look bad, putting her at risk—”

Noreen snapped forward, saying in a hiss, “Isn't it obvious that just the opposite has happened? I look bad. I'm at risk. And why? Because I love her, Constable. That's my sin. You think this is about quirky sex, don't you? The abuse of power. Coercion leading to perversion, and nauseating scenes of desperate women with dildos strapped to their hips mounting desperate women behind bars. But what you don't think is that this is complicated, that it has to do with loving someone but not being able to love her openly so loving her the only way I can and having to know that on the nights we're apart—which are far more than we're together, believe me—she's with someone else, loving someone else, or at least playing at it because that's what I want. And every argument we ever have has no solution because both of us are right in the choices we've made. I can't give her what she wants from me, and I can't accept what she wants to give. So she gives it elsewhere and I take scraps from her and she takes scraps from me, and that's how it is, no matter what she says about how and when and for whom things will change.” She leaned back in her chair after the speech, her breath coming jerkily as she fumbled her way into her navy coat once more. She got to her feet and headed for the door.

Nkata followed her. Outside, the wind was blowing ferociously, and Noreen McKay was standing in it. She was breathing like a runner in the light from a streetlamp, one hand curled round the pole. She was looking at Holloway Prison across the street.

She appeared to feel rather than to see Nkata come up next to her. She didn't look at him when she spoke. “At first, I was just curious about her. They put her in the medical unit after her trial, which is where I was assigned back then. She was on suicide watch. But I could tell that she had no intention of harming herself. There was this resolve about her, this knowing completely who she was. And I found that attractive, compelling really, because while I knew who I was as well, I'd never been able to admit it to myself. Then she went to the pregnancy unit and she could have gone to the mother-and-baby unit after the child was born, but she didn't want that, she didn't want him, and I found that I needed to know what she wanted and what she was made of that she could exist so sure and so alone.”