“Yeah, and you would probably have won, too. I danced like a drunken hippo.”
Lorraine Buller’s rumbling snore was the backdrop to these conversations. She never woke. But then Jess was only forming the words with her lips, not speaking them aloud. Alex could always hear her.
Once the fear wore off, she appreciated the company. She still wasn’t all the way back to her normal weight. Her body ached if she lay in any position for too long, and the wafer-thin prison mattress didn’t help at all, so she slept shallowly and intermittently. Some nights, her bony hips felt as though they’d been jammed into her torso upside down and sideways, and her shoulders were more like a rack she was tied to than something that belonged to her. She was feeling the tug of her addiction again, too, reasserting itself as she retreated from death’s door. Alex’s voice was a thread that drew her through the darkness to the morning bell.
Even by day, though, he would sometimes visit her – although he said the light hurt his eyes and made it hard for him to see. It also made it harder for Jess to see him, but she would feel that slender hand slip into hers as she leaned against the fence in the yard, or sat in the ballroom, and his voice would murmur in her ear – asking her questions about anything that was going on around her, no matter how trivial or dull it was, so her words could fill the gaps in his perceptions.
The gaps were enormous and surprising. Alex was far from blind but his vision was weirdly selective. He could see some things perfectly clearly, possibly in a greater level of detail than Jess herself. He watched Shamone Williams sculpting a horse out of a piece of cedar wood. She did it by rubbing the wood with different grades of sandpaper, because otherwise she could only work on it during the three hours a week she was allowed into the workshop with access to tools, so that horse was coming on slower than arthritis. Alex was fascinated by the work in progress. He talked about the horse’s tail – about how it looked like a real tail whisking in the wind, with all the hairs separate and distinct. Another time, he saw a shank Big Carol Loomis was carrying in her pocket, and he pointed to it and asked Jess what it was. It’s like a spike with bandages wrapped around it… And Jess stared at Big Carol for a second too long and almost got herself another beating. She didn’t see the shank herself but she knew what it was from Alex’s description. She didn’t doubt that he could really see it.
Other things it seemed he couldn’t make out at all. He had very little sense of the layout of a room or the placement of its walls and furniture. He would stand and talk to her with his phantom body partially bisected by a table or an open door, completely oblivious. He had a much better sense of where people were, and would usually move around them rather than through them. When they walked through him, he stiffened and shuddered as though he’d stepped in a puddle of cold water.
There was nothing wrong with his memory, that was for sure. He was endlessly interested in the minutiae of prison life, and he picked up and hoarded every nugget of information he came across. Within a week, he was referring to all the Goodall inmates – most of them women whose faces Jess couldn’t even call to mind – by their given names or nicknames.
It was easier for him, of course. Jess kept herself to herself for very good reasons: if she tried to start a conversation, she was rolling a dice where a lot of the outcomes had her being punched in the mouth. So sitting around quietly and minding her own business was her baseline strategy. Buller was cordial enough, and would talk to her about uncontroversial things. Some of the other women on the corridor would give her a nod. One of them, Sam Kupperberg, had even invited her to come to a meeting of “Moving Forward”, the self-help group she ran on alternate Tuesdays. But in the ballroom, Jess still had to keep her head down and her shoulders drawn in.
Invisible and invulnerable, Alex indulged his curiosity without any inhibitions at all. Jess was his epicentre, his tether, but he ran around her in wide circles and drank in as much as he could find.
Actually, that wasn’t right. He didn’t run, exactly. In fact Jess barely ever saw him move. He was with her when she was still, chatting incessantly in a conspiratorial undertone. When she stood up to leave, he stayed behind, watching her recede. But wherever she was going he would arrive before her, be waiting for her, and would take up the conversation from where he’d left off.
So it was a bit of a mystery to Jess how and when he got to meet the other women and watch what they were up to. She just had to accept that he did – and that he was telling the truth when he talked about all these people whose names meant more or less nothing to her. Yolanda Woods was crying in her cell. Kath Nickell had a picture of a man kissing another man. Amit Liu’s bum had broken through the mesh links of her bed-frame and now hung halfway down to the floor when she was asleep.
Right. Fine.
Then Alex got tired of the truth, or outran it, and started to tell her stories of a different flavour. Jess missed the moment when that started. It was probably during one of their lights-out conversations when Buller was impregnably asleep in the upper bunk and Jess was drifting.
The cast was the same – the women of Goodall wing. But instead of detailing the trivia of their days, he made them the inhabitants of a second, secret world that changed according to his whims. Woods was a forester now, improbably dressed in high-heeled boots and a white leather waistcoat as she built tree-houses in a jungle that went on for ever. Maybe that was just Alex riffing on her name, but some of the other connections were more obscure. Nickell wanted windows, more and more windows, but every time she put a new one in, it broke. Liu had cats, but she couldn’t get too close to them, because if she did, she started to turn into a cat herself and it scared her.
Where did the dead boy get this nonsense from? Jess didn’t know and didn’t care. She thought he had a natural gift. She would have read his stuff, back in her Half the Sky days; she would have shelved it flat so people could see the cover and she would have put a “Try this if you like such and such…” sticker underneath it.
Alex fed on her interest, making up more and more elaborate fictions. Jess could tell they excited him too. His voice changed when he was making things up, filled with a sudden, nervy energy. And he used his hands, exactly the way someone still alive would do, to draw in the air the things he was describing. At these times, he reminded Jess of Shannon McBride, the other candidate for Goodall’s resident storyteller.
He took it too dark, though, especially when you remembered that he was just a kid. A dead kid, yeah, but still.
Hannah meets this man. She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t really know him. Or he’s not who she thinks. No, he is. He is who she thinks, but he changes and he starts to get bigger.
And then he grabs her and he’s got his hand over her face. He’s pulling at it. It’s like her face is a sort of a mask on the front of her head, and it hasn’t been fixed on properly at the edges, so the big man can get his fingers underneath it.
He’s starting to work it loose. And this is the scary bit. Hannah wants to scream. She knows if she screams someone will come and help her. But she can’t because her face has almost all come away now, and her mouth is one of the things that was on her face so she can’t use it any more. You’d think she’d still have a bit of a mouth left behind and she could use that, a hole or something, but she hasn’t. It’s just all smooth back there. If the man pulls her face all the way off, she won’t be able to talk any more, or see, or hear, and she’ll die because she can’t breathe.