Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner
AFTERWARDS
HMP Bowood
20 November 2019
Dear Helen,
I know you asked me not to write to you again. But you need to know the truth, even if, after all this time, your hands are still clamped over your ears. What did you do that day, after I was taken down? After the knock of the hammer, the soft swish of silk and cotton, as everyone else stood up? I looked for you, wanting to find your face. But when my eyes caught on the blue check of your coat, and I saw that you were staring at the ground, I knew then, as sure as the sound of a door slamming shut. There was no way back.
Do you remember, when they took me away, how just for a moment everything was quiet, and my footsteps were the only sound? I have often wondered what you did after that, while I was jolted against the side of that windowless van. Where you went, what you ate. Who you spoke to. How your life carried on, after I was taken out of it.
When I think of you, as I often do, I always picture you in your kitchen, holding a mug with both hands, staring out of the window into your garden. I close my eyes sometimes, so I can conjure it exactly. I dress you in your green jumper, your hair twisted up on top of your head. Your parents’ paintings on the walls, the crack over the French doors, little pools of light on the worktop where your oil and vinegar bottles sit. I make everything the same, just as I remember. Are there birds in your magnolia tree? Are the roses in bloom? In my dream, they are. I hope so.
I think you would find the food here the hardest thing. The forks are plastic. They snap off in the grey lumps of meat, the piles of powder-made potato. Some days the warders will give you another, if you ask. Other days they won’t, and we have to eat with our hands. I know it is a small thing, but when your life has shrunk as much as mine has, small things take up more space than they should.
I find it difficult, sometimes, to believe I am really here. A danger, someone who is not to be trusted. But then, no one really thinks they are bad, do they? Whoever we are, whatever we’ve done. We all have our reasons, if anyone can be bothered to listen.
Perhaps you’ll never read this letter anyway. Tear it up as soon as you see the postmark, toss it into the fire. I don’t think so, though. It’s always been too much for you, hasn’t it, Helen? The temptation of a sealed envelope. If it weren’t, perhaps we wouldn’t have ended up where we did.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you are to blame. Whatever you did, you didn’t deserve what happened next. I hope you know I never meant for things to end the way they did. I suppose I just lost control. Lately, I’ve been trying to trace it back, a trail of breadcrumbs in my mind. Trying to work out where it all began, where it all started going wrong. And I suppose the real answer is it started years before you could have ever imagined it did.
I wonder if you had any sense then, when you were in it, what that day would come to mean. Don’t be cross, but I always had this sense that your memory of that day had taken on a sort of invented quality. I almost asked you, once, when you were talking about it. Had it really been like that? The sun so warm, the scent of the grass so sweet? Are you sure, Helen? Are you sure?
I wonder if you knew that those technicolour memories could ruin you, forever, with their perfection. That they could cast so many other things in shadow.
I hope you didn’t. I hope you didn’t know then that nothing would ever be quite the same again, however hard you tried. And I’m glad you didn’t know the truth about that day. I suppose I hoped you never would.
But you need to hear it now, Helen. So here it is.
24 WEEKS
HELEN
At the top of the beer-stained carpet, a sellotaped sign on the door reads NATIONAL CHILDBIRTH TRUST. The doorknob feels like it might fall off if I turn it too hard. Inside there is a semicircle of chairs. A flipchart. Trestle tables with juice and biscuits. The sash windows are jammed shut.
Three other couples are here already. I am the only one on my own. We smile politely at each other, then sit in silence, too hot and uncomfortable for small talk. One bearded husband tries to yank a window open, but after a few attempts, sits down with a defeated shrug. I smile back, sympathetically, fanning myself with the baby first-aid leaflet I found on a chair. We teeter like bowling pins, our swollen bellies resting on our laps, arching our backs, our knees apart, grimacing.
As the room fills, I glance at the clock on the wall. Gone six thirty. Where are they? I keep looking at my phone, waiting for the flash of response to my messages. But nobody replies.
I’d peeled away from the office early, wanting to get here on time. I hadn’t been the only one. The air conditioning has been broken for days. By this afternoon the place had been half empty, just a few desk fans still whirring limply into the flushed faces of middle-aged men.
When I picked up my bag and flicked my screen off, I had glanced at Tom, but he’d been hunched on a call to building services, complaining about the temperature for the third time that day. I’d tried to catch his eye with a sort of awkward half-wave, but he’d barely acknowledged me, gesturing me away with a sideways glance at my belly, his other hand still clutching the phone to his ear. I think he’d forgotten today was my last day.
Unable to face the slow suffocation of the Tube, I’d decided to walk instead. The glare had been blinding. Heat bounced off pavements and zebra crossings, shimmered between cars and buses. Horns honked in sweaty frustration. It is all anyone is talking about, the heatwave. No one can remember a summer like it. We are constantly reminded to stay in the shade, carry a bottle of water. It hasn’t rained for weeks. Shops are selling out of fans, ice packs, garden umbrellas. There is talk of a hosepipe ban.