Authors: Julie Parsons
She picked up a ruler and drew neat lines between them all. Backwards and forwards across the city they zigzagged in bright red. Then she picked up another pen. This time it was blue.
Amy’s colour. The blue of her favourite dress, the one she was wearing the last time she saw her. Not the faded, washed-out blue of the shirts that the prison officers wore, or the dull blue
of the sky above the prison roofs, filtered through the city’s pollution. She marked the hospital where she had given birth to her. The house where they had lived. The house where Amy lived
now with her foster-family. She found her schools too. The little national school where Rachel had taken her every morning for her first year, kissing her goodbye at the classroom door, waiting
outside to take her home again at lunch-time. And she found the other schools Amy had attended. She had memorized the names that the probation officer had told her.
You have a right to be kept informed of your daughter’s progress. You know that, don’t you? We can arrange for you to see her outside, not in here. You know that, you do know
that, Rachel?
But she had refused. She could not bear it. She had seen the way that Amy had begun to cling to the woman who was now waking her in the morning and putting her to bed at night. How could she
compete with that daily contact?
I’m your mother
, she had whispered in her daughter’s crumpled ear those first few times that Amy had come to the prison to see her. She had held her on her knee and breathed
in the sweetness of her child smell. Rested her cheek on Amy’s fine brown hair. Kissed the little folds of softness around the nape of her neck. She wanted to take off all her
daughter’s clothes and look at her body. So she could remember. This was the way it once was, this was the way it was to be a mother. To be able to touch her, hold her, kiss her round belly,
stroke the curve of her backbone. Memorize this child in her entirety, this child who had once been as much a part of Rachel as her own hand, arm, leg, breast, face.
In the past, that was. Not, she realized, despair knocking the breath from her body, not in the future.
I’m your mother
, she had said, and Amy had nodded and sucked down hard on her thumb.
My mother
, she had repeated, and said,
Come home, Mumma, come home with me now.
Her eyes had shifted to the door to the outside, and she had begun to fret, one hand twisting
through her hair, her small body tensing, then wriggling with anxiety.
I want to go home. Now
, she whined.
I don’t like it here.
She stamped her foot on the floor, the buckles of her sandals making a tiny ringing sound. New shoes, Rachel noticed, like the rest of Amy’s clothes. She had outgrown the dresses,
dungarees, sweaters, blouses, that Rachel had bought for her. Now she wore nothing that Rachel had chosen. She had shed the skin that Rachel had provided. And when time was up and the foster-mother
came in to collect her, Amy lifted her arms and clutched at her heavy thighs. Rachel had met the woman’s eyes over her daughter’s head. They were kindly, concerned, loving. And they
were winning.
Now she drew the straight, careful lines between them all. Somewhere out there she would have to find her own place. But there could be no rest for her until she had fulfilled the promise that
she had made to herself that day when the judge had passed sentence.
This is not the way this will end. This is just the beginning. And no matter what happens, I will see this through. I will never let go.
She watched the woman with the grey hair and the thin face walk towards her through the crowd of lunchtime shoppers in the department store. She moved slowly and carefully as
if she had just woken up and she wasn’t quite sure that her body was as yet her own. She was wearing a white shirt and faded denim jeans, with a grey cardigan, unbuttoned and sagging from her
shoulders. Her arms hung awkwardly at her sides and as Rachel watched she slid her hands up her forearms until they were grasping her upper arms just above the bend of the elbow. Then she stopped
and closed her dark brown eyes. Her head drooped on to her chest. Her shoulders shook and sobs burst from her throat. She took three more steps forward, then leaned her ruined face against
Rachel’s in the full-length mirror in front of her. Rachel felt the cold glass against her cheek. She opened her eyes and looked at the woman she had become, trying to find herself in the
reflection. Tears poured down her face. She turned to the younger woman standing beside her, who had reached out a hand to offer her comfort.
Please, Jackie, I’ve had enough. I want to go back. Now.
It was to be her big day. Her first day out. The first step in the re-socialization programme which the Sentence Review Group had recommended. She had been given a date, two
weeks’ notice.
Something to look forward to, Jackie had said cheerfully. She had bought her new clothes, paid for out of her ‘grat’, the savings Rachel had put together down through the years. A
pair of grey trousers, straight-legged with a sharp crease down the front. And a grey jacket to match. Shoes too, real leather, slip-ons with a pointed toe and a neat heel. Rachel’s feet felt
huge in them. She tried walking up and down in her cell, hearing the little click as the leather soles met the tiled floor. She was used to runners, soft shoes that were silent, with plenty of room
for toes. She tried on her clothes, gingerly, carefully, reluctant to shed her familiar prison wear.
Jackie had bought her make-up too.
Come on, Rachel. Try some of this. You remember how, I’m sure. Don’t you?
She handed it all over in a small plastic bag, with a zip and blue flowers printed on the outside. Rachel sat at her desk with her pocket mirror propped up on top of her radio. She spread out
the bag’s contents. Foundation in a tube. Lipstick in a silver metal case. Mascara, eyeliner, brown eyeshadow. Even blusher, a dark rosy pink with a translucent shine. She rubbed the tip of
her index finger across it, then smeared it on the back of her hand. It glowed and shone like skin after a day in the sun.
She picked up the tube and squeezed a pale brown worm-like twist of it on to her palm. She began to smooth it across her face. Up and over her forehead, down the centre of her nose and across
her chin. She stretched up her throat so the skin was taut and smeared it over and around, from one distended tendon to the other. She wiped her fingers on a piece of toilet paper, then opened the
little bottle of eyeliner. She dipped the fine brush that had come with it into the black liquid. She painted precisely around the outline of first her right eye, then her left. She unscrewed the
mascara and swivelled the barrel, jerking out the stiff bristles. Her eyelashes lifted and separated as she coated them with a shiny black covering. She filled in the deep hollow between lid and
socket with dark powder, so her eyes sank back into her head. Then she picked up the lipstick, turning it upside down to read its name. Crimson poppy, the label said. She twisted the silver barrel
and the pointed nose cone of red poked out. She held the mirror carefully with her left hand. Her own lips looked palely back at her. She moistened them with her tongue. They gleamed now in the
dull overhead light. She pressed them to the reflection in the mirror, feeling the cold glass push against her teeth. She hadn’t kissed anyone else for years. Sucked and licked and teased
with her tongue the hidden lips of other women in here. But she had never kissed their mouths. She did not want to look into their eyes or let them look into hers. She was keeping that for some
other time. Now she drew the outline of her mouth with the thick red nib, then filled it in, rubbing the lipstick backwards and forwards, caking it thickly over her lips. She could smell its
perfume and taste its synthetic sweetness.
Martin had hated her wearing lipstick.
You don’t need it
, he had said to her.
You have a beautiful mouth without it. I like its paleness. I like the way, when I kiss you and kiss
you, it gets darker and darker.
She remembered the first time she had gone to his flat he had taken her into the bathroom and wiped the make-up from her with his face cloth.
Look
, he had said, showing her the smears of
brown and red that stuck to its towelling ridges.
See how ugly it is. Look how much more beautiful you are without it.
And he had bitten her lips, gently nipping the delicate skin between his front teeth so they had reddened, almost to purple. The colour of membranes suffused with blood. The special skin of dark
and secret places.
Now she sat back and looked at the face in the mirror. It wasn’t hers. She angled the glass so she could see her body. The grey jacket and trousers, the neat black shoes with the pointed
toes and the small heel. A shiver of revulsion ran through her. She kicked the shoes from her feet, tearing at the wool which held her arms and legs tightly, ripping the clothes off and flinging
them in a pile in the corner by the toilet. She pointed the mirror at her naked body, moving it up and down. Her ribs were clearly visible, her stomach, concave. The skin of her hips was ridged
with silvery streaks, like satin frayed by the point of a scissors. Her breasts were as small as ever, but now they drooped and flattened, accentuating the bones of her sternum and upper chest. She
ran her hand over her pubic hair. It curled around her fingers, clinging closely, as black as always. She squatted down and looked at her face again in the mirror. The skin of her body was pale,
but above it loomed the fake brown of the make-up on her face, the black around her eyes, and the livid red of her mouth. She stood up and went to the basin in the corner. She ran her hands under
the hot water and picked up the soap. She lathered it thickly, feeling the burn and sting as it crept into her eyes. She bent her face to the water, then lathered again, scrubbing with her fingers,
until the water ran dark. Her breath came quickly. She buried her face in the rough surface of her towel, then picked up the mirror again. Smears of black still clung to her eyelashes, and faint
traces of red marked the fine lines around her mouth. She whimpered and ran fresh, steaming water into the small basin, washing, rinsing and washing again, until her face was clean and pale.
As pale as the face she saw reflected in the side mirror of Jackie’s car as they inched through the traffic towards the North Circular Road.
I can’t do this
, she said.
I can never do this again. I won’t be able to leave the prison when the time comes. Please, Jackie, don’t make me.
And why won’t you? The voice inside her asked. And the voice inside her answered. Because then I’ll have to face what happened, and I’ll have to find a way to make it right
again. And now, after all these years, I don’t think I can do it. Ever.
I
T WAS AN
interesting case, the Rachel Beckett case, Andrew Bowen thought as he got up from his desk and walked across the corridor to the kitchen to
make the first of the day’s cups of coffee. It was a rare event in the mundane world of a probation officer to get a lifer on your books. It had only happened twice before in his career. And
he’d never had to deal with a woman. Of course he’d had women sitting here in his office who’d killed. Quite a number of them. Killed their husbands or boyfriends, killed their
children. But they had been judged to have killed on the spur of the moment. Out of fear, in self-defence, responding to aggression, reacting in anger or madness. Never the way the prosecution said
Rachel Beckett had killed. Slowly, deliberately, precisely. With foreknowledge and premeditation. And now the Department of Justice, in its wisdom, had decided that she had shown due remorse and
recognition of her crime and it was time they let her out. On licence of course. And at nine o’clock this morning, 10th May, she was coming to see him.
Remorse, now there was an interesting concept. From the Latin verb
remordere
, to bite again. A second bite of the cherry, a second chance. An opportunity to make good the bad that had
been done in the past. Or was it? He had always wondered about instances of remorse. He thought of the energy that went into denying the crime that had been committed. The elaborate defence that
was put together for the court, expert witnesses produced and paid for, tearful delivery of evidence, hand-on-heart denials of wrongdoing. And then, somehow or other, years later, after the reality
of prison life had begun to sink in, along came Mr Remordere, fresh and bright, and new, and good as gold.
Please, sir, I didn’t mean to do it.
Please, sir, I did it all right, but it was a mistake, an accident. I didn’t want it to be like this.
Please, sir. OK, I admit it. I did it. I planned it. I thought it through, but let me out and I’ll be good, I promise.
It was quiet in the kitchen at this early hour of the morning. He stood still for a moment and listened. He was alone. His other colleagues invariably drifted in a good hour after he had already
made a start. They blamed their lateness on the traffic. He attributed his punctuality to the same traffic. He got up an hour and a half earlier to beat it, he said, and they all looked at him as
if he had a screw loose. He didn’t care. They could manage their days whatever way they chose. Nominally he was in charge, but they all knew what kind of a boss he was. Benign to the point of
disinterest. And that was fine by everyone. An easy life, that’s what they all wanted. And who was he to argue with that?
He filled a glass Cona jug with water, and tipped ground coffee, Colombian, his favourite, into a new paper filter. He lifted the jug high, then poured the water down in one smooth movement,
quickly placing the empty container underneath. He waited, listening to the faint hum of the machine, then walked around the small pine table to look at the noticeboard beside the window. The soles
of his shoes peeled off the lino underfoot with a satisfyingly sticky sound. He straightened the various notices pinned haphazardly into the cork. There was a lecture series on young offenders
beginning soon in UCD. It was part of their extramural programme. Night courses for adults. He noticed his own name next to two of the sessions. ‘Young Offenders – The Therapeutic
Approach’ and ‘Young Offenders – Identification and Treatment’. Christ, he’d forgotten he’d agreed to take part. It would be awkward. He’d have to get
someone in to sit with Clare. She didn’t like it when he went out at night. She was happy enough on her own at home all day. Especially as he had washed her and fed her and left her with
everything she could possibly need within arm’s length before he went to work in the morning. But nighttimes were different, she was always telling him. She couldn’t bear the dark on
her own.