The Dead Ex(66)

‘Don’t leave it too late, lass. I’d like to be a grandad one day.’

To be honest, I had never felt much of a maternal stirring. But then, at the new prison, I discovered the MBU. The mother-and-baby unit.

Of course, we’d covered this in my training. Women prisoners were allowed to keep their babies until they were eighteen months old. After that, they were either brought up by a member of the family or fostered or adopted according to the stark, easy-to-revise lines which had been part of the written exam.

But now the reality was in front of me with bright blue and pink pastel murals of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs lining the corridor. At the far end was the ‘play area’, where twenty or so women sat about in ordinary jeans and baggy tops while the children played with an assortment of toys. Several had arms around each other. Women prisoners, I’d already noted, were more tactile with each other than they were Outside. But those two over there, scrapping over a push-along toy train, looked like they could kill each other.

‘That’s my Jimmie’s,’ snapped one. Her thin arms bore a large tattoo of a bluebird on one and a heart on the other.

‘He’s just pinched it from our Alice,’ hissed another with a shaved head.

‘No he bloody didn’t.’

‘What’s going on here?’ This was the prison officer who’d been assigned to show me round.

The shaved-headed woman pointed to the other. ‘She’s always hogging all the best stuff from the cupboard. Just cos she’s going to lose him before I have to give up my Alice, she wants him to have the best.’

‘BITCH!’

The tattooed arms flailed. Then the pair were sprawling on the ground. ‘She’s scratching me. Get her off.’

We took one each. I found myself with the tattooed woman.

‘In the cooler, both of you.’

‘Actually,’ I butted in, ‘I’d like to talk to this one privately.’

The prison officer gave me a stony look. Tough. I was the superior here. I addressed the young girl with the tattoo. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Sam.’

‘Well, Sam. Shall we chat in your pad along with your Jimmie?’

The room was only just big enough for a single bed down one side and a cot on the other. Baby stuff littered the floor. Packets of nappies. Rusks, some of them half-eaten. A pair of small denim dungarees. And toys. Lots of them.

‘Do all these belong to you?’

The young girl nodded, protectively hugging the small boy in her arms. He sneezed, producing a large lump of snot, which Sam tenderly wiped away with her sleeve.

‘I thought you were only allowed to have a certain number of personal items in your room?’

‘I’ve borrowed some of them.’

‘So you were lying just then.’

There was a shrug.

The little boy wriggled out of his mother’s grasp and began walking uncertainly towards me. He was actually clambering onto my lap!

What if I dropped him?

‘There’s no one in my family what can have him.’ The girl’s voice was tearful. ‘Only me sister but she’s done time, and they say she’s not responsible enough. So he’s going to be fostered or maybe adopted. He’ll grow up without me.’

The boy was playing with the buttons on my jacket. I could smell him; a mixture of biscuits and milk. ‘How long have you got?’

‘Ten years.’

Something serious, then. It wasn’t ‘done’ to ask what someone’s offence was, but the question lay there, hovering.

‘I killed the bastard.’

‘Who?’

She looks down at the ground. ‘My uncle. Said my mother had dishonoured the family name by going out with this bloke he didn’t approve of. So he slashed her throat.’

She says this with such matter-of-factness that I almost wonder if I’ve heard correctly.

‘How terrible.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s why I killed him. Life was too good for him.’

Maybe. But even so, you couldn’t just go round taking the law into your own hands or the world would be even more anarchic than it was already.

‘You might be out early with good behaviour.’

There was a sniff. ‘I’ve got into trouble already.’

Jimmie was now playing with my keys instead.

‘I was pregnant when I came inside. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I’d have got through. And now they’re taking him away.’

Tears were streaming down her face. As if sensing his mother’s distress, Jimmie began to cry too. ‘When?’ I asked quietly.

‘Next month.’

The girl reached out and clutched my hands. ‘You’re important here, aren’t you? Do something. Please. He likes you.’

The child was staring up at me, through his tears. Such long dark lashes!

‘I’ll look into it,’ I said, handing back the little boy to his mother. ‘But I can’t change the rules. Do you have a counsellor to talk to?’

‘Just the other girls. And they’re in the same situation. We’re the forgotten island. That’s what some of us call the MBU.’

I spoke stiffly to hide my feelings. ‘I’ll do my best.’