CHAPTER 74 Simone
Simone
It’s the day of Simone’s arraignment, which is at two o’clock.
She wakes up with curdled guts, has diarrhoea immediately on the aeroplane toilet the second her eyes open.
The cell smells bad afterwards. She tells herself later, as she showers under a tepid communal water spout, that twenty or forty are just the same, really.
That no one can count down twenty years. But she doesn’t believe it.
Visiting hours at ten o’clock, and today is Lucy’s day, not Damien’s: Lucy negotiated two days to his one, said she needed to see Simone more than he did. Simone still has wet hair as she walks down to – today – the main Visitors’ Centre.
Well, good. There will be no screen separating them, no phone handset to speak into.
They aren’t permitted to touch, but they are permitted to just be, across a table from one another.
Simone can close her eyes and pretend it’s someplace else.
It doesn’t smell or feel like home, but it feels like something.
A meeting place. An exam hall. Not a jail, not necessarily, jumpsuit notwithstanding.
Besides, she can’t see herself. She sits on her hands, to hide the striped fabric from herself, and looks, instead, at the empty chair in front of her.
Lucy isn’t there yet, but Simone is distracted momentarily by what she is quite sure is a drugs exchange.
A visitor, female, messing with something in the palm of her hand.
Both visitor and prisoner have their eyes on it; it’s so obvious, and Simone wonders if she would always have known this or if this has come from some awful forced life experience.
Maybe it isn’t drugs, she tells herself.
Maybe she only thinks it is because she herself carried drugs.
She loses sleep, sometimes, about where those brown-paper bars went, and whose lives they affected. Did the police take them, or …?
Lucy is late. Or Lucy isn’t here yet. Simone looks at the clock.
It’s five past ten, then ten past. Lucy’s never once been late.
This is the last chance for Simone to see her in this jail before she is sentenced, moved elsewhere, and everything begins from there, a water wheel that gets going slowly and then races.
Lucy will move back to England eventually.
They will keep in touch by letter. And, after that, just time.
Maybe it was Damien’s turn? Or Lucy thought it was, mistaken?
No. They had said.
And an eerie feeling settles across her. Maybe it’s just that she’s cold, hair wet against her neck from the shower. Maybe she’s getting sick. But it feels like something else: that ever-present ubiquitous thing. Maternal instinct.
Where is she?
Quarter past ten, twenty past. Soon, she has been sitting there for a full hour, and visiting time is over.
Nobody checks in with her, or says anything, and so Simone leaves reluctantly at eleven, walking past the friendly guard who told her about Moody.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Is there any way I can make a call?’
‘No,’ he answers, as simple as that. ‘Not until telephone night.’ This is how things are referred to in jail: pizza night, telephone night, visiting hours, yard time.
Things that don’t need names are given names, nominalized, to participate in the farce that structure can be created out of wasted lives.
‘No – it’s just, my daughter didn’t show, and …’
‘Whatever the reason, if I let you, I have to let everyone, and then my life is hell,’ he says, the jaded tone of voice of somebody on the receiving end of unreasonable requests all the time.
‘Well, can you get a message to someone?’ she asks him. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘You have to put a request in formally.’
‘Isn’t that what I’m doing?’ she asks, and he turns his eyes to her then, and she shrinks back, thinking anything she does now could add time, more and more and more of it.
‘Sorry,’ she tells him. ‘I’m just worried.
I’m really worried about my daughter,’ and as she says it, she realizes how true it is.
Lucy is so identifiable now, still in hiding but for different reasons, for media reasons.
She’s gone from being anonymous to being infamous.
‘Why?’
‘Didn’t show for visiting hours. I need to tell someone. I need to contact her dad and see if she’s OK.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, a long, drawn-out, prevaricating noise. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Let me see what I can do.’
‘I’m due in court soon. Please do it quickly.’
‘Lady, I’m going as fast as I can,’ he says, his tone jovial. He has misunderstood. Perhaps inmates regularly have these sorts of dramas, but Simone doesn’t.
‘The hearing is at two.’
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll see her then,’ he tells her, and Simone has no phone, no way of contacting a soul until then, the arraignment and sentencing, when the rest of her life is supposed to begin. Or end, depending on which way you look at it.
Simone is moved like an animal from cell to corridor to prison van with just the briefest flash, in between, of outside air. Hot, blinding, but fresh, too, like downing a glass of homemade lemonade. There has been no word from the guard.
She and four other women are being taken to court for their hearings, but all Simone can think about is Lucy. All she wants to do is find Moody and get him to call her.
Their transport looks like a regular coach except that all its passengers are handcuffed. The shades are down except on only one window, at the back, which is a perfect blue square.
Something about it feels to Simone like a cruel amalgamation of everything: the coach to Mexico, Lucy’s bound wrists, the lot.
She stares down at her hands. She’d never seen a pair of handcuffs until these past few weeks, and now she’s familiar with them.
The way the metal rests on her skin, firm and cool at first and then warm.
The link in the middle. The way they open, when permitted, like a hook.
The coach doesn’t rumble like in the UK. Electric engine, smooth roads, no potholes or rain-cracked pavements.
The journey isn’t long, twenty minutes, and Simone ought to feel more nervous than she does, but instead she feels a kind of resigned something. Pessimism? She isn’t sure. Mostly, worry for Lucy.
The courthouse looms into view, huge and white and stately, lawn so neon green and tidy it looks fake, and they pass it and head to the rear.
They’re processed through an entrance exclusively for criminals, not something Simone would’ve disagreed with in principle, but which she finds offensive now, as though they think they might start brawling if they walk through the coffee-scented foyer with the things that they miss: nice drinks, sure, but also people, perfume, fashion, overheard gossip.
Things that don’t seem important but are.
Her handcuffs are opened and she is attached to a security guard who smells of Lynx Africa and burgers.
They walk in through a 1960s-style door that looks so unexpectedly British in the clean lines of the Texan architecture that Simone wants to linger there, tethered to a man she’s never met.
The bottom half is wooden, the top threaded glass, squares like graph paper.
Vintage Britain, like every single comprehensive school she’s ever seen, every council leisure centre, every back office and every church hall she took Lucy to when she was a toddler and they went to stay and plays.
She stares at that door as the guard opens it for them, she slides in, and then it’s gone, and everything is American again: polished floors, sweeping corridors, the accents.
She’s led to a new cell with open bars, and Simone is embarrassed and ashamed to observe that she feels a small note of pleasure at this, like a perfect chord played.
The toilet is in a different place. No bed – just a long, wooden bench.
Simone reaches out and touches the cool iron of the bars.
There are people passing, staff. There are smells here, civilized smells, not the smells of jail – stale sweat, urine, old dinners, floppy pizzas – but instead laundry detergent, and proper wood polish, and the light, the light.
The guard leaves, and it isn’t long until Moody arrives, looking dishevelled and grumpy. The first thing he says is, ‘Is there anything I can do to change your mind?’ but Simone quickly displaces this with her own question.
‘Is Lucy here? Have you seen her? She missed visiting.’
‘I haven’t seen her.’
‘Can you go and look? Is Damien here?’
Moody holds her gaze for a second, checks his watch, then leaves the cell without saying anything else.