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Chapter One

 

The first time I saw Joe, he was defiant, and beautiful. His skin was a tangle of tattoos. Words and images in petrol colours bloomed from his neck up and grew over his face and naked scalp. Twisting track-mark scars cascaded the length of his arms, which finished, shockingly, with the slender fingers of a pianist. For weeks I could not engage him, but then he wrote a story. I submitted it to a competition and when he won, the lashes of his little boy eyes spiked with tears. Afterwards he pulled a tin from his grey prison tracksuit, and I watched the speed with which a rectangle of thin paper and threads of tobacco became a small cigarette, and how he placed it with reverence on the desk in front of him. Now, I pictured those same fingers tearing a bedsheet into lengths to lash to his window bars.

 

He hung himself in his cell on a dreich August morning. I knew he was high risk. We all knew it, and they were supposed to be watching him. The report in a few months would mention failed procedures, someone would be disciplined, and then everyone would forget. In the meantime, nothing could change the fact that Joe was dead. He was twenty-one.

 

An officer, sorrow pasted onto his craggy face, came to the Education Office to let us know. I cried. Everyone expected that. ‘Your star student, Iona,’ the Maths teacher said, trying to put her arm round me, ‘and now he’s in the stars.’ I wanted to punch her.

 

The Head of Offender Learning appeared beside me as I printed worksheets. I pressed the button repeatedly, retrieving the warm sheaves of pigment-sweet paper which I lined up on the desk. She stood tall, offering platitudes in her polished Edinburgh accent. ‘Are you alright to do the workshop, Iona? We can cancel it if you aren’t.’

 

I did not look up, but could sense Moira’s lifted eyebrows and tight smile, and delivered the answer her expression demanded.

 

‘I’m fine, Moira, I’ll do it.’

 

Because life goes on, doesn’t it? Right up until it ends.

 

The woman placed a manicured hand on the rough beige wool of my sweater for the smallest moment before walking off. Her assured, self-satisfied steps echoed away down the concrete corridor.

 

Twelve months ago, I had been a naïve individual in her mid-thirties with her own back-catalogue of trauma; a manic oddity. After a few weeks, the inmates’ blank stares became piecemeal confidences, and then heart-breaking confessions. Before today, the only thing I had taken for granted was hope of a better future for them. The death of this man ended it.

 

Taking my pile of printouts, I waited in the library for the men to file in. They were unusually mute. No one sat in the chair at the end of the long table. That was the place he always chose. The faces were expectant, their attention on me, rather than joshing, jostling with each other.

 

There were times here when I cried, listening to their stories of the abuse inflicted on them by people who should have loved them. The men grinned and called me soppy, yet it seemed to mean something to them. At the start of every workshop now, someone would ask, whose poem’s gonna make Miss blub today? It took new members a couple of weeks to see the joke. But no one said that today.

 

When they first sat down, the men were always inscrutable. Each of them brought tension from their respective wings, and it took a few minutes for the writing to unravel it.

 

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

 

‘Did ye hear, Miss? Joe’s gone an’ topped himself. Wee idiot.’

 

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

 

The men’s gazes were analytical, kind, frightened, angry. I squared my papers on the desk, not trusting my voice to say anything else.

 

There was an older guy. Angus. He sat in the middle, like the Prime Minister in cabinet, and was one of the few people Joe seemed to like. A father figure, maybe. On my side of the bars, I couldn’t pretend to understand prison dynamics, but this grey-haired lag always got first pick at the biscuits I brought for the group. Now, he projected a rigorously composed study of nonchalance.

 

‘Fuckin’ jail’ll do that to ye,’ he said. A couple of the others nodded. ‘Drives us all round the bend, bein’ locked up, no seeing our families ‘n that.’

 

‘I’m really sorry.’ What else was there to say? None of them was an angel, but I was sorry most of them had lives where crime was normal. Sorry society had failed them. Sorry I had freedom, and they didn’t, but most of all I was sorry that every one of them was stalked by the spectre of their own deaths, especially today.

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‘I’m going to miss Joe,’ I said. Trite. And the truth. He had been exceptional.

 

‘Aye,’ said Angus. ‘Stupid wee kid.’

 

Ross, seated as usual on my left, gave a liquid sniff. ‘I’d hug you, Miss,’ he said, ‘but you know I cannae.’

 

‘Thank you, Ross.’ I smiled at him, and glanced over at the officer. The officer sat with his back to the wall on the other side of the library, 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 scissors, pens or workshop tools, but I had seen other civilian staff make drinks. Angus, the only inmate who addressed me as “Iona,” waited by the office door and helped me carry the cups. I put one in front of the screw, who pursed his lips, but still thanked me.

 

I returned to the group. They were spooning sugar from the bag on the table into their mugs. ‘Shall we make a start?’ I said.

 

Despite their tea, they moved slowly. I knew half the men would rather have had an extra gym slot than a place in a creative writing group, because they’d told me. I replied that I’d signed up to teach Art but was asked to do a twice weekly writing workshop instead, so we were even. For the men, gym was favourite, but slots were like gold, acquired from other inmates through fair, and not so fair, means. Most of this group lacked the currency it needed. One told me that getting ripped was to stay safe in prison. Not Angus, though. His reputation seemed all the muscle he needed.

 

I’d seen this sluggish mood many times. Sometimes it happened when there was bad news from home, or worse, no news. Sometimes there had been an incident on the wing with one of the weekend officers. The men wouldn’t share details when there was a screw reading The Sun a few feet away. Today was different. Today, death sat in the chair that Joe had left. I didn’t know whether to name it or ignore it.

 

‘Memory,’ I said. ‘I’d like us to do an exercise called “Being Seven.” Where were you then? What can you see? What did you hear, smell, feel and taste when you were seven years old?’ I told them they had a few minutes to write down some thoughts.

 

The exercise was a good one, but in the past, it had opened up some dark places. With a previous group of inmates, one had asked, Why’d you do it, Miss? I don’t want to remember. It had been a risk, and looking at the men now, I regretted my decision.

 

‘If anyone would rather use a prompt, there are some here.’ Feeling pathetic, I pushed a drawstring bag and a pile of laminated photographs towards the middle of the table.

 

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

 

‘That’s fine.’

 

I took a typed prompt from the bag. I always wrote alongside the men. It blurred the barrier between us and seemed to help them trust me. But today, I just stared at a blank sheet of paper as the men opened their exercise books. The smell of prison entered my consciousness. It had a metallic odour, inevitable in a building full of metal bars, mixed with unwashed skin and hair, cheap disinfectant, and fetid mops. I glanced along the two lines of seated, grey track-suited men. Some of them had leaned over their papers and were writing.

 

Craig, stocky, pockmarked and red-haired, was seated next to Joe’s empty chair. He leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head. ‘He never said he was gonna do it, the wee bawbag. Sorry, Miss.’ He looked around at the other men. ‘An’ they already cleared out his pad. Can ye credit it?’

I thought of Joe’s writing, his books of drawings. The designs had looked like sketches for tattoos.

 

‘What will happen to all his stuff?’

 

Craig shrugged. ‘I dinnae ken. Guvnor’s probably pickin’ it over for his jollies.’

 

A couple of the men exchanged glances, and others shifted awkwardly in their seats. A natural question would have been to ask the men if they knew whether he had family who might want Joe’s belongings, but I knew the answer. He knew no father, and he’d been kicked out by his mum who, Joe said, had never wanted him in the first place. His mother had gone on to have other children that Joe never met. A woman who could take her fertility for granted.

 

Ross cleared his throat. ‘I’m gonna write a poem for the big man. ‘I’m brilliant at poems, me.’

 

We were all familiar with one another, and sensed the invisible subtext of Ross’ statement. It was a knowing self-deprecation with which he intended to break our mood. Angus slapped him on the back with an ‘Aye, right,’ which was a cue for tentative laughter from some of the other men.

Ross succeeded where I failed. I noticed how the men’s shoulders dropped, and the way the group seemed to breathe out as one by one, they scratched words onto paper. As a moment, it had the quality of an orchestral pause.

 

We wrote, and at the end, two of the men offered to read out their pieces. The first was a poem the man had written to a girlfriend, and to their baby. Before he began, he told us that at his partner’s last visit, she’d told him she’d miscarried at fourteen weeks. ‘But ah’m thinkin’ mebbe she went ‘n had an abortion.’ The thought of being a dad had kept him going, and his voice caught as he read.

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

 

It was a pivotal gesture. From then on, song lyrics, short stories, and seven-year-old’s memories soared, like birds released from a box. Joy pressed my heart but in the next second, I thought of Joe, and the stories he’d shared with us. There would be no more. That fact broke me.

 

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. Impossible to whittle into a shiv, and bendy, so that even if a razor blade was attached, the weapon would be useless. The biros were awful to write with too, but even so, I saw Craig disappear a few into his pocket. I wondered if he had some weed. Biro shafts often turned up in makeshift bongs.

 

On my left, Ross ripped a sheet out of his book and crumpled it into a ball. He threw it into the wastepaper basket, saying, ‘Don’t read that, Miss.’ The buzzer sounded, and the officer lined the men up at the library door.

 

When they’d gone, I pulled the crumpled paper from the bin and dropped it into my bag.

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© Geves Lafosse 2024