The Guilty Couple(4)
‘I’d better go.’ I make a move for the door.
‘Thank you, Olivia,’ Theresa says. ‘I owe you.’
‘Yeah, you do.’ I squeeze her hand in goodbye. ‘Stay safe, okay?’
‘Well?’ Smithy reaches a lazy arm over her bunk and ruffles the top of my hair. ‘Have you decided what you’ll have yet? McDonald’s, KFC or Nando’s?’
Food is something Kelly Smith has talked about at great length over the last three years we’ve been padmates. I spent my first two years in prison sharing with an older woman called Barbara who’d been convicted of GBH. She looked like she worked in a charity shop or a library but she had a mean right hook. Ninety-five percent of the time she was pleasant enough but if someone crossed her and she lost her temper she’d smash up our cell. On the one, and only, occasion I tried to stop her she broke my nose.
After she was moved on Smithy moved in. She appeared in the doorway of my cell and looked me up and down, her thin, mousey hair pulled back into a loose ponytail with a straggly halo of escaped strands framing her hard, angular face. I’d heard from one of the other girls on the wing that she was a thief so I was on my guard.
‘I’m pretty easy to get on with,’ I told her as she slid inside, a clear plastic bag containing her belongings in her hand. ‘But if you nick my stuff we’re going to have a problem.’
She looked at me from beneath sparse untidy eyebrows, her pupils pinpricks in sharp green eyes, and I readied myself for a row. There aren’t that many fights in a female prison but a new cellmate is always an unknown quantity. For all I knew she could be a psychopath as well as a thief.
‘All right your Majesty,’ she said, her thin lips breaking into an amused grin, her throaty East London voice filling the small room.
Queenie. Posh Bird. Chelsea. I’d been called it all by the other girls. I’d never thought of myself as posh. I was from Brighton, the daughter of a nurse, but I went to Exeter to study Art History and polished up my accent to try and fit in. It stuck, even after I moved to London when I finished my degree. Not that many of the other inmates knew that about me. To them I was ‘the posh blonde who tried to have her husband killed’. By the time Smithy turned up I’d long since given up correcting them, on the poshness or my guilt.
The only thing that’s been keeping me going for the last five years is the thought of seeing my daughter again. Grace is seven in the only photo I have with me: she’s sitting on a bench in Hyde Park in the sunshine, a 99 ice-cream in her hand and such a look of joy on her face it’s as though all her dreams have come true. She was such a mummy’s girl back then. She’d go to Dominic for a bit of rough and tumble (she loved being flipped upside down and spun around and around) but it was me she came to for cuddles. Aged seven she was already a keen artist and a straight talker. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t and she wouldn’t hold back if I bought a painting she thought was ugly. Every Sunday we had ‘art and craft afternoon’ when we’d sit around the kitchen table and paint pictures, sculpt air-drying clay or make necklaces and bracelets with beads. We’d read together every night before bed. I’d read part of a chapter and she’d read the rest. Afterwards she’d shout down the stairs, ‘Make sure you put it in my reading record, Mum.’
On my first night in prison I stuck Grace’s photo on the wall of my bunk with toothpaste. That way her face was the last thing I saw before lights out and the first thing I saw in the morning. She’s twelve now and I don’t even know what she looks like. The last time her grandparents brought her to see me she was ten. I’ve called George and Esther, I’ve written to them – my friend Ayesha even visited them to beg them to please bring Grace in to see me – but they always said the same thing: Grace doesn’t want to visit me anymore and they can’t force her to come. I don’t know why she’s changed her mind about seeing me. The last time I saw her she was sullen and withdrawn but I put that down to a hard week at school or a bad night’s sleep. Afterwards there was a tiny, terrified part of me that was worried Dominic had succeeded in turning her against me. If I’d known that would be the last time I’d see her for two years, I’d have hugged her like I’d never let her go.
‘Present for ya,’ Smithy says now, reaching under her pillow. She pulls out a thin, battered paperback; the pages are browned and wrinkled with age and several of the corners are turned down where she’s bookmarked a page that she likes.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I can’t take that.’
‘Course you can.’ She waggles it in my face. ‘I want you to have it.’
The book in her hand is The Right Way to Do Wrong by Harry Houdini. It’s partly about the magic he did and the secrets of sideshow circus acts but it’s also about the methods of deception involved in burglary, pickpocketing and various swindles. Smithy found it in the bottom of a rucksack she nicked and it’s been her talisman ever since.
‘It’ll bring you good luck,’ she says, hitting me on the arm with it until I snatch it out of her hand.
‘Will it give me the last five years of my life back too?’
She laughs loudly, exposing the large gap between her front teeth. ‘It’s not a fuckin’ time machine, Liv. I told you, mate, you’ll drive yourself mental with what ifs and if onlys. You gotta look to the future, not the past. That’s long gone.’