“What did you fucking do to me?” Passmore repeated. She balled her fists and then flexed them out again. Jess could see that she was shaking. Her eyes were too wide. There was a little blood-red mark on her lower lip where she’d been biting it. She went back to biting it now, and a single bead of blood welled up there, trembling on the brink.
“I didn’t do anything,” Jess said. She looked down at her tray again, but that gravity-defying drop of blood drew her gaze back. It trickled downwards now like a shed tear, marking a line down the centre of Passmore’s chin.
“Then why do I keep…?” The older woman shook her head. She couldn’t finish the sentence. She grabbed Jess by the throat. The guards moved in quickly when they saw what was going down, but even the nearest of them had a lot of ground to cover in that crowded room.
Jess’s eyes met Passmore’s eyes across an inch or so of space. Passmore’s eyes had little flecks of red in the whites of them from recently burst blood vessels. Her mouth worked as though she was trying to swallow something down.
But she wasn’t. She was trying to spit it up. “I’m sorry,” she said to Jess, her voice loud and hard. “I’m sorry I hit you. Okay? Just… leave me alone!”
And then she turned and walked away, passing the guards, who’d slowed to a dead stop, becalmed by the lack of violence.
She walked all the way back to where she’d been sitting. Her shoulders were hunched and she was crying – shuddering, strangled sobs. Even after she sat down, there wasn’t another sound in the big, busy room, so everyone heard her. But some of them had seen her face too, and that was the biggest shock. Passmore wasn’t angry, she was scared. And underneath that she was bewildered, as though she didn’t know what was happening to her and she didn’t know why.
It wasn’t as though that was an unusual combination of emotions in Fellside. But it wasn’t one anyone had seen Hannah Passmore, or any of the lifers, wear before. It was a “first offence” kind of face – the face of someone who hadn’t realised until that moment how bad things could get.
In free association that evening, Shannon McBride regaled a large and varied audience with the story of Passmore’s crime and punishment. “She robbed a bank. Robbed a bank with a plastic gun she made up out of a kit and painted to look real. Then when they caught her she chatted to the police while her husband slipped out into the shed and burned all the cash. They only got her because money ash is different from regular ash.”
“Is this story going anywhere?” Pauline Royal demanded. As Hannah’s former cellmate and good friend, she was standing by to make sure that nothing disrespectful got said.
McBride raised her hands with the palms out to indicate a general openness and obligation to the truth. “You know what Hannah’s like, Po,” she said. “You all know. You wouldn’t think she’d ever been scared of anything in her life. But she was scared today. That’s where the story is going, all right?”
Po gave a terse shrug, but she didn’t disagree. She had been worried about Hannah after that outburst in the lunch queue and had gone looking for her in free association. She’d found her friend in the library, holding an X-Men comic and pretending to read it. She was still distraught, and Po had done her best to talk her down. But Hannah wouldn’t say one word about what Moulson had done to take the wind out of her sails. Actually, she wasn’t saying much at all, and what she did say made no sense. She talked about a dog, and a dead baby, and Moulson waiting for her at night. Or someone waiting anyway: the pronoun shifted from he to she and back again pretty freely. “I don’t want to see it,” Passmore kept saying, her voice hoarse, her eyes wet and wide. “I don’t want to see it any more.”
That day marked a turning point in terms of the way G block looked on Jess Moulson and interacted with her. There was the odd incident afterwards from time to time. A jostle in the refectory line, or some catcalls on the yard. But Jess didn’t catch another beating. Not for a good long while, and not from that direction.
38
When you’re getting yourself right with the world, you start by paying off all the old debts you can think of.
Jess wrote to her Aunt Brenda to ask about how she was recovering, but mainly to apologise for not being a better niece. I was selfish when I tried to kill myself, the same way I’ve been selfish about everything else that mattered, she wrote. I knew it would make you unhappy but I couldn’t see past my own guilt and misery. The guilt is still there, but I’m working on it in a different way.
Brenda, you’ve always been there when I needed you. After Mum died, you were the only person left who I cared about. Sometimes it felt like you were the only person left who I even knew. And you were so good to me. You did everything you could for me. You always have. Please don’t think that the way I turned out is any reflection on you. It was just me. It was always just me. I still don’t think you should come up here. It’s a long way out across the moors and the journey would half kill you. But more importantly, you’re here already – in my heart.
She was going to leave it at that, but she wanted to explain why she had changed her mind. She wanted Brenda to understand that she hadn’t been thoughtless or capricious, either when she decided to die or when she veered back at the last moment towards life. Alex came to me in a dream, she wrote. He asked me to help him. I can’t really explain, and I know it sounds completely crazy, but I really think I can do it. I think I have to. This is what I’m for, Auntie B. This is why I’m still alive. Don’t be afraid for me, and don’t be sad for me. I’ve made you sad enough already. As long as I can, I’ll write and tell you how this goes.
She wrote to John Street too. It wasn’t that she felt any weight of guilt about the injuries to his hands. He’d put her through enough pain when they were together to more than offset that. But she had a dim sense of how these things worked. His life must have stopped at around about the same time hers had. When you get caught up in events that loom so big in the world’s eye, you’re pinned to them for ever. She wrote an equivocal letter to him, saying she hoped they could forgive each other and indicating that she’d made some progress on her side of that equation.
The answer, when it came, wasn’t from Street at all. It was from Nicola Saunders, her former work colleague and sometime pusher, who had known Street longer than Jess had and had introduced them in the first place. She and Street were living together now, Nicola said, and she would take it as a favour on Jess’s part if she just stayed out of John’s life and maybe finished the job she’d started with her hunger strike. He told me some of what you put him through. And you talk about forgiving him? That’s the sickest joke I’ve ever heard. He won’t ever forgive you, Jess. But he survived you. That was a feat in itself.
There were other letters, but not all that many. If you took Alex Beech out of the mix, Jess wasn’t left with many relationships where karmic balance was an issue. Or many relationships at all, for that matter. First do no harm isn’t a big ask if you don’t do anything.
What had she been? She could barely get her head around the question, let alone answer it. What did it say about her life if it had been so empty that a simple addiction filled it to capacity?
It was the other way around, of course. She knew that really. Heroin works the way a cuckoo chick works. It tumbles all the other eggs out of the nest to make sure it gets all your attention all the time.
She had something else to obsess her now, and she was a little bit afraid that that was all she was doing. That she’d taken on this impossible quest on Alex’s behalf because her life, that empty nest, needed something else to fill it.
But mostly she only had those doubts when Alex wasn’t with her. When he was there, he became the only thing that mattered. Fellside was the illusion and he was the reality, the bedrock. What was the point of worrying about the purity of her own motives? There had never been anything pure about her in the first place.
39