Authors: Julie Parsons
‘And then,’ he cleared his throat, ‘if all is working out well, we can consider after a year or so reducing your visits to once a fortnight, eventually once a month. And then,
who knows?’ He paused, and rested the index finger of his left hand flat against his upper lip. ‘Who knows, someone in your position is, of course, never entirely without supervision,
but all going well, this can become more of an informal arrangement. A phone call every month or so, perhaps a visit every six months. Notification if you’re planning to change your place of
work, move flats or get involved in a relationship. That sort of thing. Who knows how it will work out for you in the future? But I’m sure we both want everything to go well, isn’t that
right, Rachel?’
She nodded dumbly, unable to speak, suddenly aware of the reality of her life through his eyes. She stood up. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Mr Bowen, I’m sure it
will all be perfectly all right.’
‘Wait.’ His voice was suddenly loud. ‘Just before you go. Let me remind you of the conditions of your temporary release. So we have a clear understanding. So we know
what’s what.
‘Number one. You will not associate with anyone who you knew in prison. Is that clear?
‘Number two. You will make no attempt to communicate with anyone who was involved in any way with the victim of your crime. In particular any member of his family. Is that clear?
‘Number three. You will remain within the law at all times. Failure to comply with these conditions will result in your detention and your immediate return to prison. Is that clear?
‘And number four. You will respect your daughter’s wishes. You will not attempt to make contact with her without her prior agreement. Understood?’
His words drummed in her head. Orders, commands, restrictions, limits. Her responsibility now. Her duty. She was trapped, filled with panic. She turned away before he finished speaking and
walked quickly to the door. She opened it. The stairway lay before her, a dark tunnel. She ran, outside and along the main street, dodging people and cars, her heart pounding, her breath catching
in her throat. She didn’t stop until she was back inside her room, her precious bunch of keys locking the door behind her. Sweat drenched her body, dripping down between her breasts. The
window lay before her, the view glowing in the morning sunshine. She backed slowly away from it and looked around. The room was far too big. It wouldn’t do. She paced out the dimensions
again. Ninety square feet. All she needed. She began to move the furniture, the small single bed, the table and two chairs, the heavy wardrobe with the door that wouldn’t shut, the bookcase,
the cupboard with her mug, plate and bowl, her knife, fork and spoon, her two saucepans and one frying pan. And the cardboard box that had come with her from the prison, that contained her
scrapbook, her few photographs of Amy, of her mother and father, of Martin, and the folder of official letters she had accumulated. The records of her case.
Now she bent down and tugged at the large rectangular rug, grunting with the effort, the dust making her sneeze, until she had pulled it away from its neat centre position, and revealed
floorboards, unpainted underneath where it usually lay. She pushed and shoved and hauled until everything was in the necessary space, ten feet by nine feet. The last thing she moved was her map,
the one she had brought with her from the prison. She carefully pulled it from the wall and, kneeling on her bed, lined it up where she could touch it easily. Then she lay down. She had been about
to go for a walk by the sea, perhaps as far as the little beach at Sandycove. Dig her toes into the fine white sand. Watch the mothers and their children playing in the gentle wavelets that lapped
around her ankles. Remember the days when she had taken Amy by the hand and led her into the sea, held her floating body gently against her own. But now she couldn’t go there. The thought of
all that open space and the sea stretching off to the horizon made her skin crawl. Memories crowded against her closed eyelids, so she pressed her fingers hard against them until all was
blackness.
She lay curled tightly into a ball until her breathing slowed. Then she reached up and touched the smooth, stiff paper of the map. She had added a few other places to it since she had left the
prison. She had used a black felt pen. But now she was worn out. She pulled the sheet over her head. It was almost dark, like the nights in the prison. Almost dark but not quite.
T
EN DAYS SINCE
she had been released and still she woke at seven-thirty every morning. Listening, waiting, trying to understand the sounds that rose up
through the floors of this old house. Nearly the same age as the prison, she thought, built with the same materials. Stone, wood, plaster. But the prison had a hard shell laid on top of it. Tiles,
concrete, metal. Making it ring like a series of bells of different dimensions enclosed in an echo chamber.
She shifted cautiously underneath her nest of blankets, moving her arms and legs tentatively. It was so quiet she could hear nothing but her own breath and the whistle from the water tank above
her head in the attic. Someone must be up, she thought. There were five other bedsits in the house. She had passed some of the other tenants going up and down the wide staircase. They all seemed to
be young, much younger than she. Except for the elderly lady with the yapping mongrel who lived in the room across the landing, which looked out over the front door. There was a girl and boy in the
room directly beneath her. She could hear the sound from their television and the music they played filtering up through the cracks in the floorboards. She had woken suddenly two nights ago and
heard voices raised. Shouts and screams, then silence and loud sobs. Later on there was laughter and the unmistakable climactic shriek of lovemaking. She had put her fingers in her ears and wrapped
the blankets around her head, but even that didn’t stop it. You didn’t hear sounds like that in prison, she thought. The walls between the cells were too thick, and even though the
doors were open most of the day, the women had perfected the art of the silent orgasm.
She had caught the smell of dope from the couple’s room too. She had stopped on the landing, resting against the stained wallpaper, and savoured it. In prison she had her own regular
supply. She was a reliable customer. She paid her dues and she was good for favours. Besides which she was different, special. She’d been in prison for as long as most of the regulars could
remember. She’d watched them grow up, have children, fall in and out of love and in and out of relationships. She’d given them a shoulder to cry on and listened to their stories of
beatings, of exploitation, of self-destruction.
‘Write my letter for me, Rachel,’ they’d say. ‘Tell me what to say to my brief. Social welfare are going to take the kids away from my mother and put them in care.
What’ll I do? Tell me, Rachel,’ they had pleaded. ‘Give me the words to say.’
And she had told them what to do and how to do it, translating their language into the language of the hierarchy. She wondered how they all were now without her as she stood on the landing and
smelled the couple’s spliffs, and remembered the way the same smell had hung on the landings in the stale prison air. Then the door had opened and the girl had stuck her head out.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Do you want something?’
‘No.’ Rachel shook her head, remembering the conditions of her probation. ‘No, I was just feeling a bit tired. These stairs are a bit much.’
‘Yeah, right.’ The girl looked at her without curiosity and walked back inside, slamming the door.
She would be about Amy’s age, Rachel thought. Seventeen, eighteen. But Amy wouldn’t look like her with her pierced nose and naval, her hair in thick matted ringlets, her fingernails
painted in different colours. Nor would Amy be living with her boyfriend in a cramped bedsit in a rundown house in Dun Laoghaire, getting by on social welfare and a bit of dealing on the side.
Or would she? Rachel walked slowly up the rest of the stairs, her bag of shopping a dead weight in her hand, the smell of the dry-cleaning chemicals clinging to her skin and hair. They gave off
a strong, pungent smell, which disgusted her so much that she filled the bath with hot water and lay soaping herself until the skin on her fingers had risen into white ridges and a grey scum of
soap floated around her.
It was nearly a year since she had last seen her daughter. It was the day before Amy’s seventeenth birthday. Amy had made it clear that she didn’t want a visit on the day itself. She
had other plans, a party with her foster-family and her friends from school.
‘And do you have a boyfriend?’ Rachel had asked her.
Amy had shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘Is he nice?’
‘What do you think?’
They had met in a neutral venue. A convent to the west of the city, virtually empty now except for the small group of elderly nuns who still clung on to the building and their traditions. Rachel
had waited in the long, dark hall, pacing up and down on the cream and red tiles. She stared down at them as the minutes passed, as she placed each foot neatly in front of the other. Every tenth
tile was decorated with a small black crucifix. The two officers who had come with her watched her carefully.
‘What’re you doing, Rachel, playing hopscotch?’
She didn’t answer. She’d given up on conversation with screws. She no longer had anything to say to them.
When Amy and her foster-mother finally arrived, Rachel asked if they could go out into the garden.
‘It’s a bit cold, isn’t it?’ The foster-mother, Pat was her name, stepped forward protectively. ‘Amy’s just got over the flu.’
Mother and daughter sat in silence, facing each other across the polished mahogany table. Rachel put out her hand. As her fingers inched across the shiny wood Amy stood up.
‘There’s something I want to say to you.’
Rachel looked at her. Her hair had been fine and floppy, light brown, when she was small. Rachel had pulled it back into a little ponytail and tied it with a ribbon. Now she was very dark. Her
hair was cropped like a boy’s. It suited her. Her skin was dark too, but her eyes were a light grey, just like her father’s.
Rachel waited. Amy cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders. She was small, but very straight and she looked very fit. Rachel had seen the photographs. Amy winning the one-hundred
metres sprint at school. Amy winning the high jump. Amy taking part in the gym display. Amy running cross-country for her athletics club.
‘I just want to tell you that I’ve decided— It’s my decision, it has nothing to do with my mother,’ she paused, ‘with Pat or the social worker or anyone else.
I have decided I don’t want to see you any more.’
Rachel let her eyes drift past Amy’s face to the French windows behind. They gave out onto a paved terrace with a small stone bird table. Blue tits were feeding. She noticed the way their
little heads jerked up and down, watching, listening, alert for danger as she should have been.
‘I’m sorry.’ She heard her daughter’s voice as if in the distance. ‘I know this is painful for you. But I have to think of myself, and my future. After all,’
she paused again and when she spoke her voice was high pitched, on the edge of hysteria, ‘you only thought about yourself all those years ago. You didn’t think about me, and what effect
everything would have on my life, did you? How I would feel growing up with my mother in prison for killing my father. What that would be like for me. Did you? Did you?’
She had begun to cry, her face turning red, tears bursting from her eyes as they had, Rachel remembered, when she was small and she had stubbed her toe or scraped her knee or lost her favourite
teddy. Rachel got up. She walked around the table and stood beside her daughter. She took her hand and turned it over. She kissed her palm and closed her fingers on it. Then she walked to the doors
to the garden and opened them. The birds flew up in a panic as she approached, shouting their displeasure in loud clicks and whistles. Amy’s foster-mother had been right, it was cold outside.
Too cold. If Rachel had been a real mother herself she would have known and done the best for her child.
Her child. Amy was still her child. The first thought that came to her when she woke, the last that stayed with her until sleep. And nothing and no one could ever change that.
She crawled slowly from beneath the blankets and began to dress. Today was her morning off. She had been told she need not come to work until one-thirty.
‘Because it’s late closing tonight, we’re open until nine. I’ll need you here until then. OK?’ The woman in charge of the dry-cleaner’s, the owner’s
wife, Rachel had quickly realized, looked her up and down.
‘We’ll be very busy. You’ll be on your own. No skiving off for cups of coffee. I’ll be in at nine to get the takings and to lock up. Do you hear me?’ Rachel had
heard her, loud and clear. She recognized her type. A bully. In the same mould as the bitch Macken in the prison. Her mouth tightening and drawing downwards, her hands balling themselves into fists
as she spoke.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was barely eight. She made tea and drank it quickly. The hot liquid scalded her mouth. She spat it out, and gulped down a glass of cold water. She
couldn’t get used to the tea she made herself. Prison tea was always lukewarm. Like the rest of the food. Cooled on the walk from the queue at the kitchen door to the cells where each
prisoner ate on their own. Locked in. The heavy clang of metal on metal as the doors banged shut. Their Grace at mealtimes, their cue to lift their plastic knives and forks. She pulled on the
clothes she had put out the night before. Leaving everything ready so she wouldn’t have to make any choice in the morning. Denim jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a denim jacket. The same kind
of clothes she had worn inside. Her uniform. Her security. She cleaned her teeth and brushed her hair. She put money in her pocket. She picked up the bunch of keys. She bent down and looked at the
map. She traced her route with her finger. It would not be hard to find. But she needed to hurry. If she was to get to see Amy, she needed to hurry.