They say visiting time lasts for two hours but I often hear inmates shouting from their cells about how they only get an hour and a half and their (insert a female name here) has had to travel seven hours to visit them. Elaine was my first visitor so I have no idea if the hour and a half we spent together was normal or not, but I could have done with the time being halved. In the end she gave up trying to ask me about the case and began one of the polite conversations I’d heard her have too many times with neighbours and shopkeepers. I couldn’t bear that and almost wished we could go back to talking about what I’d done. It felt like I was falling away from her eyes, as if the more she looked at me the less she could see me, so all she could think to say was how awful the fog was and what did they serve for Christmas dinner in here?
As soon as Elaine left I wished I’d been brave enough to tell her what I really thought: V had married Angus because she believed herself to be in love with him because of the pain I’d caused her with Carly. She thought I didn’t love her any more and made herself believe she was in love with Angus. It is even possible that she still doubts my love, which would explain why she is accusing me of assault: because she can’t believe I meant it when I kissed her. She didn’t want Angus dead, but she didn’t want to remain married to him and she needed my help to achieve this, help she asked for in a way only I would be able to interpret.
If only I could write to V or speak to her just once on the phone. I want to soothe her mind and lay my reassurances all over her fears. I know V inside out and I know how she works and what she thinks. She isn’t as strong as she likes to make out and she isn’t particularly sure of herself. I can’t bear to think of her out in the world by herself without me and if that means enclosing her in a concrete box for a few years, then that is the kindest thing to do. We will both be in our protective cells, and that is a comforting thought. Once the trial is over Xander says we will be allowed to write to each other and I plan to do so every day, throwing my love at her until she realises I absolutely do mean it. I will remind her how she once told Suzi she found the idea of writing letters romantic. We will have years of letters, letters we can tie together with ribbon and keep forever.
After I got back from seeing Elaine I read my mother’s article and my first thought was to set it on fire, but in the end I just threw it away. My mother, Michelle Hayes, forty-eight, now lives in Bermondsey with Darren Hatton, forty-one, and their nine-year-old daughter Kimberley. She has ‘been saved’. She regrets my upbringing, but I was a very difficult child. She thinks Verity looks like a nasty piece of work. I’m not a murderer, not her son, no. I must have been persuaded to do it somehow, there’s no way she’ll ever believe otherwise.
A photograph accompanied the article but I didn’t see any point in keeping it either because I don’t know anybody in it. I stared at it for a long time before I threw it away, but I can’t even be sure if the woman in the picture was really my mother. She was sitting on a beige leather sofa in a room with large purple flowers on the wall, in front of a window looking into a garden. The wall was bedecked with photographs in frames which spelt the word ‘LOVE’ or ‘FAMILY’. The floor was carpeted and you could see the corner of a television and a painting on the wall. She had her arm around a podgy little girl with long brown hair, wearing a Justin Bieber T-shirt. Darren was sitting on the other side of the girl with his arm against my mother’s shoulders. Darren might have always been on the large side, but my mother had definitely put on weight. You could see a roll of flab which had been exposed by her jeans, highlighted by the pink of her T-shirt. Her hair was now dyed a soft blond and her make-up looked professional, probably done for the paper. I looked at her hands cupped round Kimberley and I saw her nails were neatly filed and painted a pink which matched her T-shirt. She had a few rings on her fingers and a bracelet round her wrist. I wondered if they were all naturally mournful people or if the photographer had told them to look sad; the latter I suspect.
Even though she is now in the bin I find myself hoping that in reality she smiles more. That she has found the happiness she proclaims. Wouldn’t it be good for us both to have finally found love, to have finally found what we were unable to give to each other.
Christmas is a dismal affair in prison. There is something about seeing a line of men wearing coloured paper hats, queuing with their plastic trays for a meal you know will taste of sawdust, that makes you want to jump out of a window. And I know I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. The day had a febrile atmosphere to it, as if the tension existed in electronic waves which zoomed through the air. Men threw punches and shouted, the guards drew their weapons, a small man jumped on the metal netting between the floors and rolled around, someone got a snooker pole wrapped round his head and the blood wasn’t cleaned up properly. Terry spent the day with his hand down his trousers watching telly and I lay on my bunk and thought of V.
‘You never meet birds like that, do you,’ Terry said towards the end of the night when our cell was fogged with twisted desire.
I leant over my bunk and looked at the woman he was pointing at on the telly. She was shouting at someone, her Barbie body encased in a shimmering, sparkling suit which loved her like a second skin. Impossible, Kaitlyn-like heels were on her feet and her breasts were as round and large as two watermelons. Her hair was platinum blond and her face looked painted on, like a modern-day geisha, her ballooning lips a bright, shocking red, her eyes ringed in thick, smoky black. Her skin was the colour of yoghurt and I wasn’t sure she was human.
‘Bet she’s fucking filthy an’ all,’ Terry said, slapping his hands together and rubbing them with ever-increasing motion. ‘God, I tell you, if I got my hands on her she wouldn’t know what’d hit her. I’d give her a right good seeing-to, I would, and she’d fucking love it. Be begging for more.’ He laughed and it lapsed into his deep smoker’s cough.
‘Bet you had birds like that flocking round you with your fucking loadsa money,’ he said, but I had rolled on to my back. ‘Go on, give us a Chrissie present and tell us about them.’ I lay still. If it came to it I’d be happy to beat Terry to a sorry version of himself, but I didn’t want to. ‘Fucking killjoy,’ he said beneath me.
I read somewhere that the reason humans are so tragic is because we are only one half of a whole and most of us spend all our lives desperately searching for that missing person to make us complete. But because the universe finds it amusing to watch us suffer, most of us never meet our elusive other half because they have been born on the other side of the world. But you keep searching, not even knowing what you’re looking for, or even that you’re searching, because that is your biological imperative. And then you start to panic, because you feel this massive gaping hole inside and you know you either have to fill it or die. Some turn to drink or drugs or gambling or TV, anything really to make them forget they are hurtling through life on a lonely, never-ending path to death. Others take a more conventional route and convince themselves that the person they always dismissed as being too boring/fat/ugly/inadequate/bad in bed/smelly/violent/psychotic is actually ‘the one’. The one person in this world who will stop them slitting their wrists next New Year’s Eve. But of course they’re not, so they’re left with a life of recriminations and regrets which ends up in the same place as if they’d missed out the middle section and gone straight to the drugs, drink or TV. There is no one perfect out there, you hear people say, because for the large majority that is the truth. Your perfection is living on the edge of a mountain in Outer Mongolia and your paths are never going to cross.
Except that isn’t true of V and me. We found each other. And not just that, it wasn’t even hard. We met in the way all those other not-quite-right people meet, except we didn’t have to ignore the nagging doubt in the dusty basement of our minds. We just were, are, right. We fit together in every way and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. You could send us to America and fry us in the electric chair and still this would be our truth. Still nothing could change this fact.