“Oh no! Lizzie was how come Naseem got away with it. Lizzie fell in love with Naz. It happened really quickly, but it took a long time for people to realise. Lizzie had been married. She had kids. She’d been straight her whole life. But one look at Naz and she forgot what straight even meant.
“And because she was older than Naz, and had been inside for longer, and was a lifer and everything, she sort of protected Naz. I don’t mean it was… you know…” Shannon made a vague churning gesture. “What you see in films sometimes, where a young con gets protected by an older one because they’re sort of like a toy or a sex slave. It wasn’t like that at all. Naz was in charge. Lizzie loved her so much, she did anything that Naz said. It was, you know, first love. First love changes you all the way to the bottom of your heart.”
“You said Earnshaw had been married,” Jess reminded her.
“Oh, she had,” Shannon said, nodding in vigorous agreement. It seemed to be important to her not to disagree with anyone. “But I think you can have first love any time in your life. You can probably even have it more than once, although that doesn’t sound like it makes any sense. Lizzie was like a teenager tearing up daisies and saying she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not. You’ve seen what kind of a temper she’s got. But when she was with Naz, she was sugar.”
Jess found it hard to imagine the sullen, monolithic Earnshaw in terms of sweeteners. Possibly that scepticism showed on her face, because Shannon hastened to explain.
“It wasn’t like she stopped being angry. She’s angry all the time, about everything. You know what she came in here for? Aggravated assault. A bar fight with three other women. Her sisters-in-law. Nobody knows why they went for Lizzie, but she left one of them quadriplegic. And it didn’t matter that Lizzie had, like, a really low IQ, and her dad used to beat her with a broom handle. They still sent her down for life with eighteen minimum.
“But when she was with Naz, she managed to keep that side of herself locked all the way down. She knew it was in there and she knew when it was starting to come out. She had ways of dealing with it. Just once she hit Naz when they were arguing about something, and Naz cried, and Lizzie swore right then that she would straight-out kill herself if she ever did it again. Just take herself out of the world. And if anyone else hurt Naz, well, it would be the same thing. She’d break them in tiny pieces.”
“Jesus!” Jess murmured.
“Everyone on-block knew that. If you dared to touch Naseem, you were going to have Lizzie to deal with. She punched a warder in the face once when he shoved Naz back into line in the canteen. A warder! So you can imagine what she would have done to an inmate who went near her.
“But someone went ahead and did it all the same. Naz had been talking… said she had dirt on someone, and a friend who was going to get her in to see the governor. Maybe she thought that with Liz on her side she was safe. But she wasn’t.
“One day she turned up dead in the prison showers. Shanked. With toilet paper wrapped around her like a shroud. That’s something they do to narks in Fellside – to say they’re lower than shit.
“Liz just went crazy. She spent four of the next five months in solitary because she was going straight from one fight to the next. She’d fight you if you said hello to her. Because her girl was gone and she couldn’t bring her back. If the world had a throat, I swear she would have ripped it out.”
That sounded like the end of the story, but Shannon leaned forward with conspiratorial fervour and put her hand on Jess’s arm. As though Jess had been about to jump up and leave and miss the best part.
“It looked like Lizzie was going to end up killing herself. Or just go mad and get transferred to Dietrich. But then Grace picked her up, and that saved her.”
“Who is Grace?” Jess asked.
McBride seemed surprised to be asked. “Harriet Grace,” she said, as though the name was an explanation in itself. “You know, as in the state of. What they call G block. She runs everything in here. Anyway, Lizzie works for Grace now, and she follows orders. Which means she stays out of trouble because Grace expects her to. If Liz has still got one wheel on the road, it’s on account of Grace. It’s sort of funny, really. It’s like she can’t go crazy any more because she hasn’t got permission.”
“She looked crazy enough to me on the stairs just now,” Jess said. She told Shannon about her brief encounter with Earnshaw, which had prompted her to ask for the story in the first place.
Shannon laughed out loud. “That wasn’t Lizzie being crazy,” she said. “No, really, Jess, it wasn’t. Look at you!”
“Look at me?”
“Not a bone broken. You’ve still got all your teeth. Both eyes. No, what you got there was Lizzie on the leash.”
35
Jess had written a letter to Brian Pritchard. She told him she had decided to lodge an appeal against her sentence after all. She couldn’t do anything more towards finding answers for Alex’s questions until Pritchard replied to her and set those wheels in motion. In the meantime, she endured.
The business of survival in Fellside was complicated and engrossing. For someone who had recently been trying to be done with life, it was also novel. In the first weeks after her transplantation from the shallows of the infirmary into the reefs of Goodall, just getting by seemed to take up the bulk of Jess’s days.
Her nights, though, were otherwise occupied. That was when Alex would come and visit her.
Lock-up was the hardest and heaviest time in the prison day. It was also the most regimented. The rules were precise and they were followed to the letter. A buzzer sounded at 9.50 p.m. to tell the cons that free association time was over. That meant they had ten minutes to get back to their cells. To be out after ten o’clock was an infraction punishable by solitary.
Warders checked every level simultaneously. They went round each cell and tallied the occupants on a digital clicker. The numbers fed back to the main board at one end of the ballroom, just inside the main door, where the senior on-block would be standing. The senior had to make sure the numbers added up correctly by cell, corridor and level. All the totals were already in the computer, so it was mostly a case of ticking off OK, OK, OK in a bunch of boxes.
Then the warders called clear and the senior turned the master key, which locked all the cell doors at the same time. There were overrides, obviously, so any level or corridor or cell could be locked or unlocked by tapping in a code. But they almost never were. The drill was close up at 10 p.m. and open again at 8.00 in the morning. When those locks clicked shut, the Fellside women knew they were going to spend the next ten hours of their lives in a box they couldn’t get out of. And for nine of those hours, they would be in the dark, because lights went out at eleven.
Alex would usually arrive sometime around lights-out. The stone walls and the closed door, the floor and ceiling were no obstacle to him because he walked along some axis that was at right angles to all of them. He approached Jess through dimensions that she could dimly see because they clung to him for a while after he arrived: the spoor of the night world through which he had once escorted her.
The moment when he came would always fill Jess with an unreasoning fear, a sense that the lid had momentarily opened on a box that was better kept shut. For that moment, the dead boy seemed to be an ambassador from an utterly alien place.
But only until he smiled and spoke her name. Only until he started to talk.
“What was your favourite toy?” she asked him once.
Street Dance MoveMat! he answered with no hesitation at all.
“Which is what, exactly?”
You play the music. And the mat lights up and you have to put your feet and your hands and your bum where the lights are. So you’re dancing. And it gets faster and harder.
“I think I would have loved that,” Jess said. “But I’d never have got any of the boys I knew to play it with me. They were too macho to dance.”
I would have played it with you.