All my worldly goods, she thought. Pity I never made a will.
Fellside’s induction process didn’t bend to accommodate the new inmate’s special circumstances. Despite the fact that she was wearing nothing but a hospital gown, Jess was thoroughly frisked. Then she was wheeled into a smaller room, where a female guard put on a pair of latex gloves and gave her a cavity search with the aid of a plastic speculum. They hadn’t felt the need to search her bodily orifices at Winstanley: perhaps they’d already done it back at the Whittington Hospital while she was still unconscious. The guard did her best to be gentle, but the humiliation was more or less total. Her right arm pinned in place by the handcuffs, Jess had to lie on her side on the gurney with her pelvis raised and her legs awkwardly spread like a baby having its nappy changed. Except that a nappy change was non-invasive. DiMarta stood by through this process with her muscular arms tightly folded, radiating disapproval.
“You do know she’s come in from another prison?” she asked the guard.
“It’s standard procedure, Patience.”
“It’s stupid, that’s what it is.”
They kept Jess parked in the little room for a while longer. After a few minutes, they wheeled in a TV on a big portable stand and plugged it in. Apparently there was a video all newcomers were meant to watch, and Jess had to watch it, the head end of the gurney ratcheted up to a comfortable forty-five degrees. It showed the view she’d failed to see as she was driven here – the prison from the other side of the moor, perched on the dizzying edge of Sharne Fell with the rock escarpments falling away from the base of its walls like the folds of a dress. The brightly coloured towers of the prisoner blocks rose over the sparse moorland like some lost suburb of Disneyland.
A gravelly, avuncular voice extolled the virtues of the N-fold corporation and its extensive contributions to human happiness. “The Fellside Correctional Facility for Women stands on the edge of the North York Moors National Park, in the valley of the River Leven – a place of great scenic beauty. Against this idyllic backdrop, three thousand women form a community committed to a practical ideal of rehabilitation.”
“I hate the voiceover so much,” Corcoran said gloomily. “If I ever meet that smarmy bastard, I swear I’ll do time for him. Probably right here.”
Jess mostly let the words wash over her, but she marvelled at the perfect dislocation of form and content. This was like videos she’d seen for timeshare apartments, full of staged shots that oozed insincerity. Smiling inmates reading books, working in kitchen gardens, turning pots. A craft village behind a fortress wall. Where do I sign up?
“Our prisoner wings commemorate women’s achievements in a range of fields, from science to politics. Designed by award-winning architect Roger Lawley, they foster a sense of space and freedom rather than confinement. The centrepiece of each building is the commons, an open space of four thousand cubic metres which serves as both a recreation room and an assembly point.”
“It’s not called that,” Corcoran muttered, clearly still resentful about having to sit through the video.
“What?” Jess asked.
“It’s not called the commons. Ever. They’ve all got their own names for it. In Franklin they call it the farmyard. In Elion it’s the bucket. In Goodall, where you’re going, it’s the ballroom.”
“Why the ballroom?” Jess queried. She could see that Corcoran wanted to be asked.
“First day the place was open, someone tore a pair of pink pompoms off a hat and threw them down from the fourth-floor walkway. They got stuck in the anti-suicide nets, and someone said they looked like a pair of testicles dangling there. Hence, the ballroom.”
The video was showing each of the blocks in turn now in a free-flowing montage of serious but deeply content faces.
“Blackwell wing…”
“Butlins,” Corcoran translated.
“Curie…”
“Cunt House.”
“Dietrich…”
“Daffy Duck. That’s the psychiatric wing.”
“Elion…”
“Hellhole.”
“Franklin…”
“Wanklin.”
“… and our maximum-security wing, Goodall.”
“The State of Grace.”
“That one sounds okay,” Jess murmured.
The guard shook her head slowly, leaning forward to turn the sound down as the credits rolled. “You haven’t met her yet.”
“Haven’t met who?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Corcoran said. “You’ll find out.”
After that, there was a visit from the governor. Ordinarily Jess would have been taken to his office, Corcoran told her, but the gurney presented logistical problems, so he came to her. He stepped into the room right after the induction video ended, as though he was the next item on the bill, and stood in stiff silence until Corcoran realised what he wanted and relinquished her chair to him.
Governor Scratchwell was a tall, gaunt man with high cheekbones hollowed out underneath, so his face was a visual mnemonic for the prison itself – perched up on a precarious cliff, remote from the world. His welcome speech to Jess, though, was all about engagement. Moral rearmament. The importance of faith in a wide, shallow, almost meaningless sense where the articles of faith never had to be stated. Jess was aware of the governor’s unease at being in the same room with her. He seemed to be using the dry, abstract words as bargepoles to fend her off with.
“My door will always be open to you,” he assured her. “I want you to believe that the most important barriers here are the ones you’ve built within yourself, and we will work with you to break them down.”
Jess had no idea what that meant, but Scratchwell didn’t invite questions. He just made his speech and left.
It seemed that the formalities were finally over. Jess was grateful for that. After the cavity search, she was half afraid she might be due for a cold shower and a delousing.
Instead she was taken up to the infirmary in the service lift, which was as big as a room. Once the lift doors closed, Corcoran took out her key and undid the cuffs.
“Now that it’s just us girls,” she said.
The infirmary was on the fourth floor of the admin block, and took up more than half of it. It looked and felt like a hospital A & E. White light from overhead strips fell on white tiles and beige linoleum. The only primary colours were in the posters on the walls: WHEN YOU SEE THIS, WASH YOUR HANDS. GET SERIOUS ABOUT YOUR HEART. CROSSING YOUR FINGERS WON’T STOP GONORRHOEA.
The reception area was also a consulting room. A meds cart was parked against one wall and steel-fronted cabinets lined two more. Handwritten sticky labels listed the contents in a neat, meticulous script that was way too small for Jess to decipher.
The place was deserted. DiMarta looked all around as though she expected it not to be. She frowned.
“Can I leave you to it?” Corcoran asked.
“Did you look at the paperwork?” DiMarta shot back, answering a question with a question. “This prisoner is high security.” Glancing at Jess, she added, “Sorry, petal, but you are. Sylvie was meant to be here, but I suppose she was called away. My shift ends in ten minutes and I can’t stay on without a chit. You’ll have to hang on until she comes back.” DiMarta had seemed pretty cavalier about the rules earlier, but apparently this one actually meant something.
Corcoran shrugged. “Still got my book,” she said. “I’ll survive. If Dennis comes after me though, you better back me up.”
DiMarta wheeled Jess through into the main ward (not the quarantine ward, as the governor had instructed – that memo had got lost in transit somewhere) and transferred her quickly and expertly from the gurney to a bed. She wrote up Jess’s chart, offered her some pain relief again, was refused again and made her exit.