Till We Meet Again (31 page)

There was utter silence for a moment or two. Then she heard Susan exhale. ‘You poor bitch,’ she murmured. ‘I never imagined anything like that.’

Suddenly she was clasping Beth tightly, her face buried in her hair, and Beth could feel the wetness of her tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Beth,’ she whispered. ‘But you should have told me.’

They stayed locked together for some moments, Susan rocking Beth in her arms, neither of them caring that if the officer outside the door should look in it would seem very odd. It was the way Serena had held Beth sometimes when she was just a little girl and it felt so safe and comforting.

‘I couldn’t, it was too awful,’ Beth said eventually and disengaged herself to blow her nose. She was embarrassed now, not so much by her revelations, but by being so unprofessional in a place that demanded she should be cool and collected.

Susan kissed her forehead and went to sit down again. She looked winded, all the fight which had been in her such a short time ago, gone.

Beth told her then how it was for her afterwards, without even her brother and sister knowing. ‘I was jealous of you,’ she blurted out. ‘I imagined you safe at home with your lovely parents, everything so clean, so bright and nice. My home was a tip, my father a pompous bully, my mother pathetic. I’d hidden all that from you, and it seemed best to move on so you’d never know about it, or about the rape.’

‘You know, I was jealous of you too,’ Susan admitted. ‘You might have seen my home as bright and shining, but I wasn’t like that, and that is exactly how I saw you. You were what I wanted to be – brave, clever, tall and elegant. What was I? A short, fat girl with a moon face and no personality. Even if mother hadn’t had the stroke, I would never have set the world alight. I’d have stayed at home, got some dull little office job, and married the first man that asked me.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Beth said stoutly, even though she knew it was probably true.

Susan grimaced at her. ‘Oh Beth, don’t feel you’ve got to bolster me up. It took me a long time to come to terms with what I really was. I didn’t truly find out until Annabel was born. I was born to be a mother, nothing more. But in those four years with her I saw that as the greatest of roles, true fulfilment. I used to think about you, imagine you in a wig and gown, and all the envy was gone. Everything, hanging her nappies out on the line, playing with toys on the floor, cutting little sandwiches into animal shapes for her, was all so lovely. Motherhood is a true vocation, Beth. But I had to be punished and she was taken from me.’

Beth had watched her face as she spoke, saw the tender light in her eyes, her mouth curling into a smile, and felt a lump come up in her throat at the injustice of Susan being robbed of her one joy.

‘Why did you think you had to be punished?’ she asked curiously.

Susan shrugged and looked away.

‘Why, Susan?’ Beth repeated when her friend didn’t answer. Beth felt she’d made that remark in an unguarded moment for Susan suddenly looked shifty.

‘For being glad when my parents died. For not waiting for the right man to come along,’ Susan said hastily. ‘I lied to you about Liam being so wonderful, he was just a waster, and I was lonely. I knew it wouldn’t really work.’

Beth knew their time was up, and she felt they had gone as far as they could for one day. ‘I have to go now,’ she said, standing up, and she held out her arms instinctively.

Susan rushed into them and held her tightly, leaning into Beth’s shoulder as a child would. ‘That policeman is a good man, even if he does seem to hope I’m a serial killer,’ she murmured. ‘I hope he’s going to make things right for you.’

‘I’m not seeing him for a while,’ Beth said.

‘Why?’ Susan asked. ‘Because of me?’

Beth suddenly realized she couldn’t bring herself to admit that. It would frighten Susan into thinking Roy really did imagine she was a serial killer. ‘No, of course not. I’ve got to work on myself for a while. I can’t expect any man to free me from my past, only I can do that.’

‘I’m sorry I was rough on you,’ Susan said with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t want you to come here again, Beth. Not until all this is over.’

‘If that’s what you really want,’ Beth said. She thought Susan meant prison was tougher still when you kept being reminded of what might have been. ‘Just tell Steven if you change your mind.’

As Susan walked back to her wing, waiting at each door for it to be unlocked by an officer, all her thoughts were with Beth. In a way it was like having a previously locked door opened and seeing another room for the first time. Everything made sense now – the change in Beth’s letters, the absence of real news, all the old humour gone. Maybe if Susan hadn’t been so wrapped up in her own family problems she would have realized something terrible must have happened to her friend.

A vivid picture came into her mind of Beth swimming in the river that last summer they spent together. Susan had watched from the bank as Beth did a faultless dive into the water; she was wearing a red swimming costume, her slender body so lithe and graceful.

Susan couldn’t dive, she was afraid to go in head first, she didn’t even like jumping in, but lowered herself from the bank inch by inch. That seemed now to sum up the differences in their characters. Beth plunged into everything with gusto, she liked challenge and even danger. Susan couldn’t leap into anything, she approached anything new with caution, and usually backed away, overcome by fear.

Yet she had learned after her parents died that she was capable of recklessness, that she could banish fear when circumstances demanded it. But poor Beth had that wonderful, inspiring spark in her, snuffed out by those evil men. It had clearly tainted her whole life, and as Susan walked back to her cell, she wept for her friend.

Chapter sixteen

Frankie was lying on the top bunk smoking a cigarette when Susan got back to their cell. Susan’s heart sank at the sight of the other woman, for she had hoped she’d be working. It meant she would get an interrogation, just when she was least able to cope with it.

‘More agro wif yer brief?’ Frankie asked, her small dark eyes scanning Susan’s face for tear stains or anything that might suggest some kind of drama.

‘No, not at all,’ Susan replied, struggling to compose herself. She had learned to her cost not to tell anyone in here anything that was important to her. She had believed when she told Julie about Annabel that she would keep it to herself, but by the next day it was right round the prison. At first everyone was kinder to her, but it didn’t last. She knew now that information about fellow prisoners was like a drug to most of these women, and they came back for more and more, getting nastier and nastier if they couldn’t get it.

Susan also knew now that because she was middle-class, naive and with no previous convictions, she was seen as an oddity. Everyone wanted to break her down, take her apart to see what she was made of. ‘Don’t make out you’re simple’ was something she had said to her almost every day. But she supposed she
was
simple. She had always believed what people told her, whether it was her father stating he’d put her mother in a home if she left; Liam telling her he loved her; or Dr Wetherall insisting Annabel only had a virus.

She supposed that being loyal was perceived as being simple too. She had never told tales on anyone in her entire life, and even though everyone in Eastwood Park passed on everyone else’s secrets, she wasn’t going to join them.

She had known right away when the police came back with more questions that it was Beth’s doing, and she just couldn’t understand how her friend could do such a thing. But simple she must be, because now after Beth’s visit she was convinced her friend had no choice. She also felt completely gutted by her revelations, and heart-sick that she hadn’t been given any opportunity to try to help her.

Maybe she was cut off from the real world by being at home with her mother, but she would still have understood the horror and devastation of rape. She would have asked her parents if Beth could come and live with them, and she knew they would have agreed once she told them how awful Mr Powell had been about it.

It was no wonder that Beth had lost that sparkle she used to have. To have to keep such a monstrous secret locked inside her was enough to send anyone mad. Susan knew the agony of hiding things herself, forcing herself to act as if she was untroubled by anything, when in fact her mind was a seething whirlpool of past mistakes and hideous memories. She lived in fear that one day they would all be discovered, slapped down in front of her and she would be compelled to explain them all.

It would be such a relief to let it all out to someone who cared enough about her just to listen and maybe hold her. There were plenty of people in here who would like her to think they were that person. They lay in wait like jackals for prisoners coming back from a visit with their solicitor or family member, hoping to be the recipients of some juicy morsel. How those women would love it if she was to reveal that the police were trying to pin more murders on her! Such succulent information would get a place saved for her at meal-times, they’d be offering her shampoo, hand cream, and drugs too. It would stop her being the butt of all the jokes for a couple of days.

Prison was a living nightmare, never knowing when the next nasty trick would be played on her, or when someone would attack her, physically or verbally. She couldn’t eat – after a couple of mouthfuls she just felt sick – and she was constantly having to keep herself in check so that she didn’t show how repelled she was by the personal habits of her fellow prisoners. The ignorance, the swearing, the wickedness some of them were capable of was very hard to bear. She ached to be able to walk outside, to feel the wind in her hair, the rain on her face, to have silence.

‘What did he want then?’ Frankie’s voice called her back to the present. She had sat up now and in her black sleeveless tee-shirt and jeans, with her inch-long spiky hair, she looked just like a man. Her huge muscular biceps with the barbed-wire tattoos around them stretched ominously as she moved.

‘Oh, just verifying something my brother told him,’ Susan said airily. She wasn’t so simple that she hadn’t learned to lie since she’d been in here. Telling the truth just got you into worse situations. She had believed living in Hill House had prepared her for most things, but not this place. Sometimes it felt as if she’d accidentally fallen down through a man-hole cover and discovered a whole new stratum of life. It wasn’t just the crimes they’d committed, drug-dealing, fraud, thieving or prostitution, they were a different class of animal altogether, and all so explosive and violent.

Frankie was typical of the women who dominated the place – ugly to look at, foul-mouthed, evil-minded, vicious and unpredictable. She got her kicks out of first befriending and protecting new prisoners, then bending their will to hers. Susan was already passing over her tobacco and her phone card to her. That was because Frankie stopped the woman who gave her the black eyes from hurting her again. Susan didn’t care about either as she didn’t smoke and had no one to phone, so she might have given them to Frankie anyway. But she did resent the constant grilling that ‘a minder’ subjected her to. She couldn’t have a conversation with anyone without the woman expecting her to pass on every last detail.

‘Verify what?’ Frankie asked.

‘The value of my parents’ house,’ Susan lied. ‘It was sold for two hundred thousand, I suppose you want to know that too?’

The sarcasm in her voice didn’t go unnoticed. Frankie was down off her bunk like a flash. Standing in front of Susan, her arms folded belligerently across her big chest, she said, ‘Don’t get funny wif me. I look after you’s and you’d better remember it.’

‘I’m just tired,’ Susan said, lying down on her bunk and hoping that by feigning sleep she would be left alone.

‘Move over, I’ll just lay down wif you’s,’ Frankie said, and prodded her. ‘You’re gettin’ real skinny. I like that.’

Susan shuddered inwardly. She knew Frankie was a lesbian, she made no secret of that, but until now all her romantic interests had lain with MacAllister, a prison officer. Other women on the wing had said this was the reason Frankie often got out of working, because left alone in the cell, she and this officer could make love.

That had seemed ridiculous to Susan when she first came to the prison. She had believed prison officers had too much integrity for such things. She certainly couldn’t imagine that MacAllister, a softly spoken Scotswoman with a kindly manner, would have anything to do with anyone as ugly or rough as Frankie.

But Susan knew now that taboos in place on the outside vanished in here. Married women with several children who had been heterosexual all their lives would suddenly embark on an affair, sometimes even refusing to go down for a visit with their husbands. Young girls who when they first got here sobbed their hearts out for their boyfriends were almost immediately lured into relationships with older women. In association time she saw women openly kissing and fondling one another.

The lesbian prison officers were in a way the most despicable, for they had purposely chosen a job where they could dominate other women. Countless times Susan had seen one of them keep a girl behind in the showers, or in a cell, and punishments were meted out if their wishes were not complied with. Susan didn’t think all the prisoners who went that way were real lesbians, she was sure they were only coerced into it because they were hungry for affection. But she wasn’t: that hungry herself, and until now she hadn’t ever been the object of anyone’s desire.

‘Please leave me to have a nap,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m not feeling well.’

‘Don’t come all that Lady of the Manor bit wif me,’ Frankie snarled at her. ‘If I want to touch you up I will.’

Susan closed her eyes dismissively. ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ she said sharply. ‘Go and find one of your own kind to touch up.’

The slap across her face took her by surprise, but when her eyes shot open and she saw Frankie grinning maliciously and unzipping her jeans, the rage she’d been struggling to control for weeks, the anger she felt about Beth’s rape, all suddenly erupted and she knew she must fight back.

Without saying a word in warning, she leapt off the bed and caught Frankie by the throat, pushing her back towards the wall by the lavatory. It was the speed of her attack which gave her the advantage, Frankie was several inches taller than her and very much stronger, but she’d been caught unawares.

‘I’m sick of you,’ Susan hissed at her, knowing she had to use brute force to hold the woman. ‘Sick of your endless questions, your filthy language, the stink of your body and your bullying. Now you suggest you have the right to touch me up! You are odious. If we were the only two people left on this bloody planet, I’d top myself rather than be stuck with you.’

She tightened her fingers on Frankie’s throat, using all the strength in her body to push the woman back against the wall and prevent her kicking out at her. ‘I want to kill you,’ she roared at her, banging her head back hard against it. She couldn’t control her rage any longer for in her mind Frankie was just like the men who had raped Beth, and a representation of all the people who had contributed to her present predicament.

As she tightened her fingers around the woman’s throat and saw Frankie’s small dark eyes almost pop out of her head, she felt powerful. Close up she could see blackheads on her face, smell the onions from the shepherd’s pie they’d had for dinner on her breath, and that nauseated her still more. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she said, banging her head back again and again.

She had no idea how many times she banged Frankie’s head against the wall, it felt as if she were just a big doll she wanted to smash. She didn’t hear the door open or the two officers come charging in, she only knew they were there when they grabbed her arms. ‘Let her go, Fellows,’ one shouted. ‘Let her go.’

As Susan was dragged out of the cell to the punishment block, at least she had the satisfaction of seeing Frankie slumped on the floor, unconscious.

Susan didn’t come out of her own shock for some time. She remembered one of the officers admonishing her and saying she was shocked and appalled at her behaviour, then asking what Frankie had done to her. Susan hadn’t bothered to answer, she was pretty certain they knew enough about the woman to guess. All she felt then was relief that she could be alone for at least twenty-four hours without anyone speaking to her.

It didn’t matter to her that the punishment cell was bare of everything but a rubber-covered mattress and a blanket. By closing her eyes she could try to drift away somewhere beautiful.

She tried her old trick of imagining the sea, but that only made her aware of gurgling noises in the water pipes. She tried to turn the clonking sound of one of the prison officers’ heavy shoes out in the corridor into the sound of horses’ hooves on cobbles, but try as she might she couldn’t visualize a sun-filled stable yard with fields beyond.

But then her mind flitted to Luddington, and she pictured herself on her bike, picking up speed as she went down the slight incline from the green opposite the church. Mentally she turned into the path down to the lock behind her old home, bumping over the pot-holes, and suddenly she could see Beth riding beside her, whooping as she splashed through a puddle.

Of all the places she and Beth liked to go in their first couple of summers together, the lock was their particular favourite. All at once she was right there again, it was a warm summer’s day and they were sitting side by side at the lock waiting for a boat to come along.

They loved the sound of the rushing water when the lock gates were opened, seeing the swans and ducks heaving themselves up on to the river banks to take a rest, the sunshine on the water and looking down at themselves reflected in it, distorted images like crazy mirrors at the fun-fair.

If they helped people with the lock gates, sweets or fruit were often thrown up to them. But the real fascination for them was the glimpse into family holidays. Neither of them had ever been away on real holidays with both their parents. Beth would talk of days out in Hastings with her mother or brother and sister; Susan had only ever been to relatives in Bristol. It was a curious concept to them both that some families hired a boat, taking all the children and even the dog, and slept and cooked on it for as long as two weeks.

‘We could do it too, when we’re grown up,’ Beth said once, as she saw two teenage girls in bikinis sunbathing side by side on the bows of a cabin cruiser. ‘We could just keep going and going until the end of the river. Maybe we’d find some wonderful place where we could get jobs in a shop or something, and we’d stay there for ever.’

The noise of wailing from another cell dragged Susan back to reality. She wanted to imagine lying on the deck of one of those boats, the sun burning into her skin, slowly chugging down the river. But someone was pounding on their cell door with their feet or fists. It was only then that she remembered with a jolt what she had done to Frankie.

It seemed incredible to her that she’d lashed out like that, with nothing but her bare hands. She’d never hit anyone in her life before, not even at school. It was amazing to her that she’d managed to inflict pain on Frankie, who was bigger and far stronger than herself.

The thought made her smile. At last she’d stood up for herself. Perhaps the other women would treat her with caution from now on.

The following morning Beth took a cup of coffee into Steven’s office after she’d heard him saying goodbye to his client.

‘Refreshments,’ she said, putting the mug down on his cluttered desk. ‘And I just wondered when you are going in to see Susan again.’

‘I had arranged to go in today, but now it’s tomorrow,’ he said, shuffling a pile of papers together and putting them into a folder. He looked up at Beth with a worried expression.