Sam Kupperberg, founder member of the “Moving Forward group”, looked across at them from the next table. “Hannah had her troubles,” she observed to the room at large. “Had them long before now. It’s not like this is her first time.”
“That’s right,” McBride confirmed, recovering some of her lost traction. “It was her kid. The baby. The one that had something wrong with his brain. He had a fit or something, and they thought he was going to die. The governor turned Hannah down for compassionate. And then the kid did die. That was when she tried to kill herself. She made a rope out of her sheets, like a lot of people do, but then—”
“I was there, Shan,” Po said quietly. “Not really keen to go there again.”
Moulson muttered, “Thanks,” and walked away fast. All the women there could see that something about the conversation had really got to her. “Almost like she’s mixed up in this in some way,” Po suggested darkly.
No takers. Not even McBride.
53
Jess went out into the exercise yard. She found herself a bench where nobody else was sitting, mostly because of the waist-high nettles growing through the fence behind it. She sat down in the blinding sunshine and waited.
For Alex.
But Alex didn’t show.
Please, Jess said inside her mind. You said I just had to think about you. I’m thinking about you now, so please come.
Nothing for a long time, but she waited him out. Eventually the ghost boy came trudging through the fence and through the nettles, which didn’t move at his passing, to stand beside her.
What? he asked. His tone was guarded – picking up, Jess thought, on the thoughts she was trying to keep out of her mind. Hannah Passmore with her twisted bedsheet. Hannah Passmore with her wrists bitten through. I didn’t bite her.
“I know that,” Jess murmured, glancing at him once and then looking down at her hands – trying to give the impression, if anyone was looking, that she was lost in her own thoughts. “But did you do something else to her, Alex?”
Like what? What can I do?
“I don’t know. But she was afraid of me. She looked at me like I was a monster. And she said she was sorry for hurting me.”
Good. It was mean of her to do that.
“Alex, didn’t you ever say sorry for something just because you’d been made to? Because someone told you you’d be punished if you didn’t?”
No.
“Really? Never?”
Maybe once.
“Well, that’s what it felt like when Hannah said sorry to me. She didn’t mean she was really sorry; she meant ‘if I say I’m sorry, will you please not do anything bad to me?’ Only I didn’t. I didn’t touch her. So did you?”
Alex put his hand on Moulson’s and then through it, making her shiver a little despite the sweltering heat. She felt the contact much more vividly than she would have expected, like ice water splashing on her skin.
“I know, I get it,” she said, shooting the boy a reproachful glance. “You can’t touch her in that way. But did you go into her mind, Alex? Did you touch her from the inside?” He said nothing but there was enough of an acknowledgement in his face to make her press on. “That night when you… when we walked together, what we were walking through was other people’s dreams. I said I was scared because it was all so shapeless. And you said you could make it be any shape you wanted. What did you mean?”
Nothing.
“It wasn’t nothing, Alex. Tell me the truth!”
Across the yard, Harriet Grace was sunning herself in one of her favoured spots, behind the refectory, where cooking smells sweetened the air and the projecting wall of the admin block created a windbreak. She had her usual entourage with her. For some reason, Moulson caught her attention. Maybe it was because Moulson’s face still bore the marks of the smacks and punches she’d got from Liz and Carol, and this in turn reminded her of Moulson’s misbehaviour. For whatever reason, she watched for long enough to be certain that Moulson’s lips were moving.
“That crazy little bitch is talking to herself,” she remarked.
Loomis and Earnshaw both looked across at Moulson. Big Carol shrugged and glanced away again, but Liz kept on looking.
“No good her praying,” Big Carol said. “God’s a bit more choosy than that.”
“God’s blind, deaf and dumb,” Grace scoffed. “Or else he’s worse than we are. Liz, what’s the matter?”
Liz was still staring, her eyes narrowed against the slanting autumn sunlight. She looked like someone trying to add up a long column of figures and not quite making it.
“Nothing,” she said, slumping back against the wall and folding her arms. “I thought I saw something.”
Moulson was definitely remonstrating with the empty air now, her hands moving as she talked to the vacancy beside her.
In fact she was still pushing, asking Alex to tell her the truth. But the dead child had fallen into a sulky silence, and finally he faded from her sight. She felt he was still there though. Still within range of her voice.
“Please, Alex,” she said. “I don’t think Passmore deserves to die because she hit me in the face a few times. But what really matters is that you shouldn’t be the one who kills her. Don’t you see that? You’re just a little boy. If you start hurting people just because you can, then…”
Then what? He was dead. The worst had already happened. But Moulson’s mind recoiled from the thought of him being at Fellside for eternity, corrupted and degraded more and more by the things he had to see here.
Because of her. Because she’d killed him, even if she hadn’t meant to. Even if the mean girl had got her digs in first, she’d killed him. And then she’d gone like a pearl diver through the land of dreams to the land of the dead, and brought him right back again.
54
It was the second anniversary of Naseem’s death.
Two years without her.
Grace had told Earnshaw, right afterwards, that the pain would fade in time. “That’s the way it works, pet. You won’t stop remembering her, but you’ll remember the good times and you’ll smile. What you’re feeling now… that will go. It’s the love that will stay.”
And the love had stayed. It still humbled Lizzie, brought her almost to her knees, that Naseem had even looked at her. They’d been together for no time at all but really it was all the time there was. Her whole life, squeezed into eleven months. Since then: nothing.
On Valentine’s Day, the only one they’d had together, Naz had given her a card. A red heart, made out of crêpe paper, glued into a folded order of service from the prison chapel. Lizzie had turned it upside down, then the right way up again, looking for a message. The only words she could read were “HYMN: O GOD OUR HELP IN AGES PAST. SERMON FROM PASTOR SARAH AFANASY. GUIDED PRAYER AND MEDIT”.
“What’s this?”
“You’re my heart,” Naz told her. “And my religion.”
Love like that couldn’t be earned. It was a miracle that fell on you out of nowhere. It would be with her for ever. But the pain had stayed too. It hadn’t moved. It hadn’t lessened.
On a day like this, death was uppermost in Lizzie’s mind. Perhaps that was why she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, at Moulson’s right hand, a shifting and contradictory shape. Just for a second, dazzling in the sunlight, so tall and attenuated it was like a shaft of sunlight itself.
Why would Moulson of all people have a guardian angel?
55
Alex came to Jess in her cell that night, while Buller snored peacefully away in the bunk above.
All right, he said.
All right what, Alex?
I scared her. I didn’t hurt her, I just scared her. I did it so she’d think it was you that was scary and stay away from you.
How? How did you scare her?
I showed her some things. It was because of what you said, Jess, about stories being like wishes. I was wishing for her to leave you alone. You said it was all right to wish for things that I really wanted to happen.
Jess sat up in bed, wincing as her bruised limbs protested at being made to move. “What things did you show her?” she whispered.