“I haven’t eaten any solid food in fourteen days,” Jess pointed out, her voice weak and a little slurred. “I won’t make trouble. I don’t even remember the recipe for trouble.”
Patience nodded approval. “Then we should be fine,” she said genially. “You’ve probably noticed we’ve got a guard right here too. That’s Ms Andrea Corcoran, and even though you’re weak and sick, she’ll beat you like a carpet if you misbehave.”
The guard was sitting on a fold-down seat at the rear of the ambulance. Stocky and red-headed, she looked like a bouncer at the door of a nightclub. Except that she had a Jilly Cooper novel in her lap and only looked up from it long enough to acknowledge her name. “Whatever DiMarsBar just said is bollocks,” she commented tersely, and went back to the book.
Patience made sure Jess was strapped in, then gave the all-clear to the driver. “D’you want anything to help you sleep?” she asked Jess as the ambulance eased into motion. “It’s a long way, and some of the roads once you get up on to the moors are what they call unadopted. That means they’re mostly rocks and holes.”
“No thanks,” Jess said quickly. She didn’t relish the prospect of bumps and jolts, but she was already spending half of every day asleep and that was more than enough. Bad dreams weren’t a novelty any more, they were her constant companions. Every time she closed her eyes, she’d find herself back in her burning flat looking for Alex, knowing that if she didn’t find him in time, he was going to die. Knowing that if she turned her back, those silent women would be waiting there with their closed eyes and their slack, expressionless faces. No. No more sleep, thank you very much.
Apart from the dreams, she felt as though she was getting better rather than worse. The first few days had been terrible. Her stomach had screamed out for what it was being denied, not letting up for a moment. And that physical discomfort had somehow translated into a sense of panic. The walls of the cell had closed in on her. Her heart had raced and stuttered like a stalling car.
But instead of intensifying, those symptoms had faded. Jess didn’t even feel hungry now, except in a very abstract sense. She remembered food in the way that you might remember a wonderful holiday from a few years ago. She had bad headaches, it was true. She was as weak as a two-year-old, her breath stank like a dead goat and her muscles ached. All of that was bearable.
It was only the nightmares that really got to her. If she could kick those, dying wouldn’t trouble her too much.
Most of the trip was a lot smoother than Patience had suggested. Then once the road did start to get rough and bouncy, the agency nurses released a couple of bolts on the gurney which lifted it up onto shock-absorbers. There was almost no pain.
“It’s a pity you can’t sit up and look out of the windows,” Patience said at one point. “Fellside is quite impressive when you see it from a distance, across the moor. Almost beautiful.”
The guard, Corcoran, who’d been reading Jilly Cooper without a break all the way from London, glanced up a second time at this point. Judging by the look on her face, she might be prepared to take issue with that word.
“What’s it like close up?” Jess asked.
It was meant as a joke, feeble as it was, but Patience took the question seriously. She thought about it, one eyebrow crooked up a little.
“Different,” was all she said.
11
Different was a good word, carefully chosen. Certainly there wasn’t much beauty on display when the ambulance doors opened and Jess saw Fellside for the first time from the inside.
The first thing that registered as the gurney was lowered to the ground was the inside of the prison’s perimeter wall, rearing high above her. Tangles of razor wire stood on the top of it. They looked a lot like birds’ nests, or like birds’ nests might look if birds were made of steel and fed their chicks with rivets.
She was in a vehicle bay of some kind. It was a warm day, but the high wall cut off the sun and plunged the whole place into premature evening. She remembered Pritchard telling her that thousands of women lived here, but at least in this corner of Fellside there was total silence. For all Jess could tell, it might be just the five of them left after some inexplicable holocaust had swallowed up the rest of the human race.
“We’ll take it from here,” Corcoran told the agency nurses. “You swing around by the visitors’ gate, drive up to the barrier and show your passes there. There’s no going out through this one.”
As the ambulance pulled away, the guard turned her attention back to Jess. “Well, since we’re back in the Land of Bad Things…” she said. She unhooked the handcuffs from her belt and used them to fasten Jess’s right wrist to the steel rail of the gurney. It was the first time Jess had been cuffed since her trial. Bile and claustrophobia rose in her throat, but she kept her face expressionless.
“Sorry,” Corcoran said – not to Jess but to DiMarta, whose nostrils had flared a little when the cuffs went on.
“Are we good now?” Patience asked with icy politeness.
“We’re good,” Corcoran said.
The big nurse wheeled the gurney across the bay, out into an open space that allowed Jess to see the prisoner wings for the first time. She could see now that Nurse DiMarta might have a point. The prison’s main buildings were tall and graceful, each painted in a different colour of the rainbow. Knowing what those blocks of concrete and glass really represented, Jess felt a weird sense of dislocation. Their prettiness felt like a calculating lie. The smile on the face of the tiger.
DiMarta steered the gurney through a set of double doors into a corridor painted like the main blocks in joyous primaries and pastels. Corcoran walked alongside, her trashy novel now stowed out of sight in one of the many pockets of her uniform. “Do you want me to take a turn with that thing?” she asked – possibly to make up for the handcuffs, which seemed to have rubbed the nurse up the wrong way.
“Oh, and here she comes again,” Patience said. “Let me push the trolley. Let me bandage that wound. Let me perform the operation. Demarcation, petal. You’ll get me in trouble with the union.” Her face was still a little set, but her tone was bantering. If the handcuffs hadn’t been forgiven, they weren’t going to be an issue between the two women.
They moved Jess through a whole lot of different places, most of which she didn’t get much of a look at because she was on her back and staring at the ceiling.
Processing seemed to go on for ever. Jess’s civilian clothes and effects, taken from her when she was first signed in at Winstanley, now had to be handed over into the care of the Fellside authorities. The clothes, Jess knew, were the ones she’d been wearing on the night of the fire, so if they were ever given back to her, all she was going to do was to throw them in a bin or finish the job and burn what was left of them. What else was in the bag? Her mobile phone, which she now associated with her bad dreams and never wanted to see again. Keys to the ruined shell of her flat. A wallet full of maxed-out credit cards. A Fossil watch, the glass cracked across from the heat or from some unremembered impact.