Joe hung himself in his cell on a bleak August morning. Everyone knew he was high risk, and they were supposed to be watching him. A report might pinpoint failed procedures and changes proposed, but then everyone would forget. Today, nothing could alter the fact that Joe was dead. He was twenty-one.

 

Words and images in petrol colours bloomed from the skin of Joe’s throat and uncoiled over his face and head. Cascading the length of his arms were the addict’s track mark scars which ended, shockingly, in the slender fingers of a pianist. Joe’s body had been loud, but at our first meeting he was mute. Then he started to write. I submitted the pages for an Art in Prison award and when he won, the lashes of his little-boy eyes spiked with tears. He pulled a tin from his grey tracksuit, and I watched a square of thin paper and threads of tobacco become a small cigarette which he placed with reverence on the desk in front of him. Now I pictured those same hands tearing a bedsheet into lengths to lash to his window bars.

 

One of the older screws came to the Education Office to let us know, sorrow pasted onto his craggy face. The Maths teacher tried to put her arm around me. ‘Your star student,’ she said, ‘and now he’s in the stars.’ To quash the image of my bunched fist hitting her cheek, I took myself to the photocopying room and printed warm, pigment-sweet materials for my class. I was creating neat piles of these when someone came in.

 

‘Sad news, Iona, but are you still alright to do the writing workshop? I’d rather not cancel it.’ Usually my manager’s voice was Edinburgh, genial, emanating from a form softened by many pregnancies. Today, her impatience prickled like static.

 

‘It’s fine, Helen,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage.’ Because life goes on, I thought. Unless it doesn’t.

 

‘This is your first prison death, is it not?’ she said. ‘If you stick it out, it won’t be your last.’ She placed a manicured hand briefly on the rough beige wool of my sweater before walking off, her assured steps echoing down the concrete corridor.

​

I tucked the printouts under my arm. That way I’d have two hands to dig keys from the black leather pouch around my waist. There were nine locked gates and doors between the Education wing and the library, and I knew this because I’d counted them.

 

When I first arrived here twelve months ago, the act of holding keys and locking doors had felt alien, sharply delineating my freedom, and the inmates’ lack of it. I thought of the person I was then, running from my own trauma list into a vault of other people’s. I must have seemed a manic, middle-class oddity but after a few weeks, the prisoners’ hostile stares gave way to small confidences, and then, through the writing, to open-hearted disclosures of all they had lived. Some of their stories made me weep. I’d taken for granted the simple hope of a better future for these inmates. With the brightest of them now dead, I felt stupidly naïve.

 

I sat in the library, beside the rows of real-life crime paperbacks that were amongst the most browsed and most borrowed of all our books, trying not to cry. I’d shed tears in this spot many times, listening. If they noticed, the men grinned and called me “soppy.” It became their custom at the start of every session to ask, “Whose poem’s gunna make Miss blub today?” It took new members a couple of weeks to see the joke, but I wasn’t expecting jokes this morning.

 

 They straggled in and took their seats, leaving Joe’s favourite chair empty at the end of the table. The men were always distinct units of the tension they brought from their respective wings, until the writing unravelled it, but today they were unusually quiet, watching me rather than indulging in the testosterone-fuelled joshing with one another to which we were all used.

 

I scanned the turned faces, pulling my mouth into a smile. ‘How are you all doing?’ I said.

 

The skinny young man beside me had clearly taken blunt scissors to his hair since last time. Uneven tufts now covered his head. ‘Did ye hear Miss, Joe’s gone an’ topped himself.’

 

‘I know, Ross’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I squared my papers on the desk, not trusting my voice to say anything else.

 

Angus occupied the table’s middle seat, like the Prime Minister in cabinet. He was a lot older than the others, and Joe had liked him. From the earliest sessions I asked the inmates to use my first name. Most of them couldn’t get past “Miss,” but Angus was like someone’s grandfather and the only one who called me “Iona.” He was also the group’s barometer, and at the moment he projected nonchalance.

 

‘Fuckin’ jail,’ he said. ‘’Scuse my language but it drives us all round the bend, bein’ locked up, no seeing our families ‘n that.’

 

‘I’m really sorry.’ What else could I say? I knew Angus was no angel and nor were the others, but I was sorry they had lives where crime was the norm, sorry to be part of a society that failed them as children, and sorry that I had the privilege of freedom while they did not. ‘I’m going to miss Joe,’ I said. Trite. And the truth.

 

‘Aye,’ said Angus. ‘Stupid wee bawbag. Sorry Iona.’

 

Ross gave a liquid sniff. ‘I’d hug you, Miss,’ he said, ‘but you know I cannae.’

 

‘Thanks, Ross.’ I smiled at him, and glanced to the other side of the room. An officer sat with his back to the wall, meaty hands holding the limp pages of a red-top daily paper. He did not look up.

 

‘Brew, anyone?’ It was against the rules. Off their wings, the prison didn’t trust them with hot water and mugs, any more than they trusted them with sharp scissors, pens or workshop tools, but I’d seen other civilian staff make drinks. Angus waited at the kitchen door and helped me carry the cups. I put one in front of the officer, who pursed his lips, but thanked me.

 

The inmates spooned sugar into their drinks from the bag I’d put on the table. I knew most of them would rather have had an extra gym session than be in a creative writing group, because they’d told me. My response was that I’d signed up to teach Art but got collared to do twice weekly writing instead, so we were even. Gym slots were rare. They were acquired from other prisoners through fair means, or foul, because having muscle in prison could unpin the target on your back.

 

The men moved slowly. I’d seen this sluggish mood before. Sometimes it happened when there was bad news from home or worse, no news. Sometimes there’d been an incident on the wing with one of the weekend officers. The men never shared details of these when there was a screw reading The Sun a few feet away. Today was different. Today death sat in Joe’s empty chair, and I didn’t know whether to acknowledge or ignore it.

 

‘Memory,’ I said, my voice unnaturally high. ‘I thought we could do an exercise called “Being Seven.” Where were you when you were seven years old? What can you see? What did you hear, smell, feel and taste at that age?’ I gave them a few minutes to write down some thoughts.

 

The exercise had always worked as an icebreaker. The reduction to childhood seemed to free them. Often there was laughter at the shared memory of a gleaming shell suit, or a particular cartoon, but then I remembered times when the writing had opened some darker places. “Why did you do it, Miss?” an old group member had once asked. “I just don’t want to remember any of it.”

 

I pushed a pile of laminated photographs towards the middle of the table. ‘But if anyone would rather use a prompt, there are plenty here.’

 

Ross sniffed again. ‘I’m just gunna write a letter, Miss.’

 

‘That’s fine too.’

 

I took a picture from the pile. Since the earliest days of the workshop, I had written alongside the men.

Collaborator felt comfortable, teacher did not. I held the image in my hand. It was of a street scene in fifties New York in which a well-dressed woman looked greedily at a jewellery shop display. The composition left my imagination cold.

 

Some way down the table a man cleared his throat. ‘Ah dinnae understand why Joe did it. He never said he was gunna.’ It was Craig, a compact, ruddy-faced and red-haired young man who rarely made eye contact. His hands were spread uneasily on the table. ‘An’ ma mate on C-Wing said they’ve already cleared oot his pad. Can ye credit it?’

 

I thought of Joe’s writing, his books of drawings that looked like ideas for more tattoos. I guessed that normally a family would want these, but not Joe’s. His mother had kicked him out when he was eleven, saying, so Joe told us, that she’d never wanted him in the first place. Joe had never mentioned a dad. ‘So, what happens to his stuff?’

​

Angus shrugged. ‘Guvnor’ll probably pick it over for his jollies.’

 

A couple of the men exchanged glances, pushing deeper into their seats.

 

Ross gave a huge sigh. ‘Changed ma mind. Ah’m gunna write a poem for the big man. Ah’m brilliant at poems, me.’

 

‘Aye right, ya wally,’ said Angus. He leaned along to slap Ross on the back, and there was laughter. From my side of the bars, I couldn’t pretend to understand prison dynamics. All I knew was that Angus got first pick of the biscuits I brought for the group, and that after his comment, the men relaxed. I imagined a collective outbreath as one by one they picked up biros, and began writing. The next few minutes had the quality of an orchestral pause.

 

I looked again at the picture I’d chosen, trying to kickstart a story, but the image was so at odds with where I was sitting. Echoing shouts came from the corridors beyond the library, but more than that, I could smell the prison. It was primarily metallic, but had undertones of unwashed skin and hair, and of mops that never dried out. In the image, the woman’s face made me think of looting, and eventually I wrote a few lacklustre sentences.

 

At the end of the time, two of the group offered to read out their pieces. The first was a poem one man had written to his girlfriend and their baby. In an earlier session the man had confided that the thought of being a dad had kept him going, but during his partner’s last visit, she told him she’d miscarried at thirteen weeks. ‘But ah’m thinkin’ mebbe she went ‘n had an abortion, cuz ah’m in here.’ His hands shook as he read out the poem.

Palm downwards, Angus stretched a scarred and liver-spotted hand across the table towards the man. ‘Sorry, pal,’ he said.

​

From this gesture onwards, song lyrics, short stories, and seven-year-olds’ memories soared, like butterflies released from a box. I thought of Joe, the words he’d shared with us, and that there would be no more.

 

I was aware of the men’s noise as the officer approached our table. ‘Mass move in five, lads,’ he said, and though a couple were still writing, most shut their books and biros were handed back to me. I was supposed to count them. They were the only pens inmates were allowed. Tricky to whittle into a shiv, and flexible, so that even if a razor blade were attached, the weapon would not be useful. The biros were awful to write with too, but even so, I saw Craig disappear a couple into his pocket. I wondered if he’d managed to procure some weed. Biro shafts often turned up in makeshift bongs.

 

On my left, Ross ripped out a sheet from his book and screwed it into a ball. He threw it into the wastepaper basket. The buzzer sounded, and the officer lined the men up at the library door.

 

After they’d filed out, I retrieved the crumpled paper from the bin and dropped it into my bag.