“I’m fine here,” Jess mumbled.
“Well, I can understand that,” Buller said. “Nice and quiet. Nobody shouting at you. But if you want a word of advice, you should show your face. They’re going to shout at you sooner or later. Then they’re going to lose interest and go and shout at somebody else. Hide your face and you’re probably only feeding the fire.” She glanced across at Jess for a moment, then gave her attention back to George Eliot. “My opinion anyway,” she said.
Jess sat for a while, thinking it over and gathering her strength. Finally she got up and headed for the door.
“Good luck,” Buller muttered as she passed.
Jess got as far as the railing right outside the cell door. She rested her elbows on it and stared down into the ballroom. Gradually one woman after another noticed her and looked up at her until the entire ballroom met her gaze. Everyone in Goodall knew who she was, and that she was coming on-block that day. There was considerable interest in her, some of it hostile, some detached and even a little (mostly because of Shannon McBride’s narrative skills) that was inclined to be positive.
Jess didn’t know about any of that, but her instincts screamed at her to retreat from all this scrutiny, which she couldn’t read and didn’t want. She certainly couldn’t bring herself to go down and mingle. She was stuck out there on the walkway like a soldier in no-man’s-land.
But suddenly she felt a hand slide into hers. She looked down to see Alex Beech standing next to her, his face on a level with the third bar of the railings. He didn’t say anything, but a little strength ran out of him and into Jess, trickling through their clasped hands the way cool water trickles down your throat.
In the infirmary, when he’d first come to her, her fear had shut out all other emotions. Here, where she knew no one, he was the only familiar face and she felt a rush of relief and gratitude to see him.
I didn’t want you to forget me. You thought I was a dream before. I’m not. I’m not a dream and you’ve got to keep your promise.
“I know that.” Jess tried to keep her lips from moving too much when she spoke. She was talking to a ghost who nobody else could see. She knew that instinctively, but it was proved anyway when another inmate went past them, walking right through the boy and barely veering for the woman.
Alex stiffened when the moving body breached the space where he was standing. After it had passed by, a tremor ran through him. His face twisted into a grimace. He didn’t like accidental contact – a fact that made the touch of his hand in Jess’s a little more miraculous than it already was.
“I haven’t forgotten what I promised,” she told him. “And I’m never going to forget.”
You’re going to find out what happened to me.
“Yes.”
You’ll find my friend. And the other girl who hurt me.
“Yes. I’m going to make a start as soon as I can.”
To be with him and to be forgiven. Jess knew that she would do anything in exchange for that. Having already resigned herself once to giving up her life, she found it an easy promise to make, and she meant every word. She came pre-stressed, annealed, ready to do whatever needed to be done.
“Look at her,” Hannah Passmore said to Pauline Royal across the width of one of the board game tables. Po followed Hannah’s glance and saw Moulson up there on the second floor, her head dangling loosely over her folded arms. “Thinks she owns the place.”
Po was peaceable to a fault, but she had to agree. There did seem to be something arrogant about that stance. About how completely Moulson had let her guard down. In a place like Goodall, relaxing was the ultimate show of strength.
“Fucking smirk on her face, look,” Passmore went on. “I’m not putting up with this.”
“Screws are watching, Hannah,” Po warned her. “They know there’s going to be trouble. Use your brain and let someone else make it.”
Passmore saw the sense of this, but she really didn’t like that smile.
There were two more lifers, Doll Paley and Sam Kupperberg, playing draughts at the next table – a strange version they’d made up themselves where each of them alternated black and white moves. Doll looked up from the game. “Why not just leave her alone?” she suggested. “The way I hear it, she didn’t even mean to kill that boy. She didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Only God gets to judge,” Kupperberg agreed. “Nobody else has a right to.”
Passmore had never had much use for God. She let that pious chatter wash right over her. “You know what we should have around here?” she called out, loud enough for everyone to hear. “A barbecue!”
A few women glanced across at her, then saw where she was looking and got the joke. The laughter was thin, but it encouraged Passmore to make a second sally. “Frying tonight!” she shouted. And someone else cried, “Fingerlicking good!”
The screws stepped in quickly, not just down in the ballroom but on the walkways too. They all moved at the same time, which made it pretty obvious that they’d been waiting for anything that looked like trouble. It was the evening shift under Ms Carlisle, so she got to be the voice of authority, telling the hecklers that if they tried to be funny again, they’d be amusing themselves in solitary.
The catcalls subsided into muttering, but the muttering was angry. The women of Goodall had had a lid dropped over them.
Nobody likes that.
34
That first day was indicative of things to come. Jess continued to have problems fitting into the daily life of Goodall wing.
She got beaten up on her second day by some of the other women on her own landing. It wasn’t planned or orchestrated particularly. She just walked past a little group of them in a way that rubbed someone or other up the wrong way. One woman threw a punch and then the rest joined in because it was only civil not to leave a friend out on a limb. Jess got a lot of bruises where they wouldn’t show, but it was a light beating – which in Goodall meant the kind you could walk away from.
The next day she got it a lot worse. Hannah Passmore led a raiding party into her cell and worked on her for a good five minutes while two other women, Chander and Williams, held her down. Buller didn’t intervene, but she told them when enough was enough.
“It’s enough when I say it is,” Passmore grunted, landing another kick.
“You stop now,” Buller said, “or I’m calling a guard.”
Passmore did stop then, but only to glare at Buller.
“You’d snitch for scum like this?” Shamone Williams demanded.
“If it’s that or watch you kill her.”
The three women weighed up their options. Sarah Chander started to haul down her trousers and knickers.
“You piss on her, Sachi,” Buller said, “and you will clean it up. With your left arm, because I will break the right one.”
“Let it go,” Passmore decided. “We’re finished. For now.”
“Thank you,” Jess muttered, when the three women had gone.
“You’re welcome,” Buller told her. “I would have said something earlier, but it’s that same principle. It will happen when it happens and the sooner it happens, the sooner it stops. You need a hand up?”
“I think I’ll just lie here a while.”
“Up to you. You want a chapter of George Eliot?”
And since Jess didn’t, Buller went back to her reading.