Hannah
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
She never stopped saying it. It never worked.
Eight years, announced to gasps of shock in the courtroom.
Six weeks after a man who had beaten his wife to death with a breezeblock in the garden of their home had been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to seven – in the very same courtroom and by the very same judge.
Hannah was encouraged to appeal but any time she’d shave off her sentence would be replaced with media attention; every extra day she spent in court, she was also in the papers, discussed on the airwaves and savaged on social media.
The attention was unrelenting and felt like having a blowtorch aimed at her face.
This was her life, but also an irresistible story.
She was the Fling, the Mistake, the One-night Stand (she wasn’t even the Mistress any more, shorter was better now) driven crazy (see what they did there?) by her Happily Married Man after he realized the errors of his ways.
And that’s what he was now, evidently. Happily married.
They’d come back from Australia to testify in person, even though video evidence would’ve been allowed.
They’d held hands in court and outside it, standing beside their barrister as he read out a victory speech.
The next morning, on the front of at least two newspapers, Erin beamed up at Jason with tightly pressed lips, somehow looking angrily supportive.
For Hannah, the shame was like a virus, replicating, infecting, destroying, before it jumped to a new host and set about destroying them too.
Her mother and brother and other relatives.
The few friends that were left. Her employees, her customers.
Everyone who’d ever believed in her, it felt like.
Gone in the two seconds between her pressing the accelerator and the brake.
It kept taking her breath away, how quickly things fell apart.
Prison wasn’t anything like she’d expected and also, somehow, exactly what she’d feared.
The first few days and weeks were a slow suffocation she was sure she wouldn’t survive.
She only stopped crying when she was too exhausted to continue and, after that, all she did was sleep.
But slowly, eventually, the easier option became to go along with it, to get on with it, to try to kill each day as it came.
For much of the first year, Hannah found herself fixating on how insane it was that someone had decided that she didn’t get to be free, that she had no right to live out there in the world with everyone else.
She was lucky she’d been sent to the Dóchas Centre in Mountjoy, a prison built for women, and not Limerick, where a men’s prison had been commandeered.
This meant she wasn’t in a cell but a room that looked no worse than budget student accommodation.
A pair of bunk beds, a wardrobe, one desk, two chairs, an ensuite bathroom.
She didn’t always have to share, but she mostly did, and she learned not to mind it, but instead to appreciate the company.
The walls were pockmarked with the scratchings of other people’s pain and covered in strips of missing paint that taped-up photographs had taken away with them.
The women had keys to their own doors, but they had to be behind them from seven thirty every evening.
When they were allowed out again in the morning, they could go into the kitchen and make their own coffee.
They had TVs, a hairdresser, a gym – and the newspapers loved saying so.
But what they didn’t have was the most important thing: freedom.
That was the punishment.
Everyone has a limited time on this earth, and twelve strangers and a judge had decided that Hannah had to spend it here, locked up and separated, while, outside, time continued to pass and the world turned and everything went on without her.
She had been disappeared, and the people in her life were happy to play along.
Aside from her legal team, she only ever had two visitors, her mother – who could barely speak over her extreme mortification at even being in such a place, let alone being there to face her own daughter – and Jill, who spent most of her allotted time looking around wide-eyed and asking questions about prison life that were clearly influenced by too much TV.
Neither of them ever came again. Hannah wrote some letters, but never got any replies.
She stopped writing when the hoping for one became too painful.
Six months in, she was finding ways to pass the time.
Just hours at first, then days and weeks, until one day she realized she’d mastered the art of making a month go by.
She worked her way through the library. Took classes and courses in the most random subjects.
Made friends. Took advantage of counselling services.
Tried desperately to hold on to her mind when losing it became a real possibility, especially in those first couple of years.
No day ever felt shorter than the one before, but each year went by quicker than the last.
She got through one. Then two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
And after that, a sudden rush, the months and weeks and then days dwindling dangerously down towards what had become an oddly terrifying prospect: getting out.
But to go where?
To be who?
And with what?
Release was like opening the door of a fallout shelter and discovering that the bomb had gone off. Hannah’s world was in ruins, a desolate, unfriendly place of dark skies and empty vistas. She had lost everything and had no idea how to get any of it back.
When her mother found Hannah on her doorstep, she lunged forward, grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her inside.
Instead of what might have been the normal questions – How are you?
What do you need? Shower? Food? To sleep, because this is all so overwhelming?
– she demanded a second-by-second account of Hannah’s walk from the bus stop.
Who had she seen? More importantly, who had seen her?
While Hannah did her best to answer, her mother hurried around, yanking every pair of curtains closed.
‘You have to go,’ she told Hannah. ‘You can’t stay here.’
She made it sound as if the decision were out of her hands – this was just how the world worked – and acted as if her bungalow would spontaneously burst into flames if Hannah stayed a single minute longer.
But where else could she go? Her brother and his wife had no interest in seeing her, and the feeling was mutual.
There were no friendships to rekindle. Her mother was drawing a state pension; she didn’t have cash to spare. And Hannah had none at all.
But there was the mobile home.
Her mother had bought it with her father’s life-insurance payout and leased a pitch in a park on the Wexford coast. The park would shutter for the off-season at the end of September, but that would give Hannah a fortnight, give or take, to figure things out.
Before dawn the following morning, her mother drove her down there, wearing a headscarf and sunglasses like some kind of starlet.
After an awkward hug, she left Hannah with two bags of groceries, a box of old clothes, a new pay-as-you-go phone, a plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the Virgin Mary and an envelope of cash.
The notes were crisp and bundled neatly, freshly withdrawn.
The plan was to start again, from scratch, which was also a necessity.
Any savings had been used on Hannah’s legal defence and Curated had been liquidated long before the trial had even begun.
But how to do it without anyone knowing who she was, what she’d done?
She couldn’t bear the shame of people knowing, but there was also the more practical reason of how they might treat her after they found out where she’d been.
She’d survived three nuclear blasts of media coverage: arrest, the trial and sentencing.
No one bothered to cover her release; by then Hannah Flynn was old news.
She looked very different now, without the habits and potions she’d enjoyed in her freedom, and with seven years of living inside limiting the light on her skin and dimming the light in her eyes.
She wasn’t worried about being recognized or even remembered.
The problem was the all-knowing, never-forgetting Google and every single person having quick access to it in the palm of their hand.
The problem was her name.
She genuinely thought it’d be relatively straightforward to use a fake one.
Not in a secret-identity, forged-documents way, but just day-to-day.
If you were surrounded by strangers, you could tell them your name was whatever you liked.
The challenge was to avoid situations where what you’d told them would get contradicted.
The only challenge, Hannah thought.
She’d played out scenarios in her head. She moves to a rural area, because it’ll be cheaper to live there.
A village is too small and a city too challenging, so let’s say a town.
She finds someone looking for a casual lodger and equally casual work.
She tells everyone she meets that her name is whatever.
But then she goes to the bank, or the post office, or the doctor, where she has to admit that her name is something else.
Maybe they type it into a computer that flashes up where she’s been.
The person behind the desk knows her landlord.
Or maybe it’s the person waiting behind her in the queue who overhears.
Bureaucracy equalled exposure, so the only way to preserve anonymity was to avoid official things.
She vowed not to apply for so much as a library card.
This wouldn’t work in the long term, of course, but she just wanted to buy herself some time, a little space to rebuild herself in private.
She’d been planning to stay where she was, on the Wexford coast, at least for that first winter. Become someone’s lodger. Clean other people’s houses. Save some money, if at all possible, and then, come the spring, figure out next steps.
Until, one rainy afternoon in the second week of her stay, her mother called to say that a solicitor had been trying to get in touch.
Hannah couldn’t believe it: she was a homeowner. Had been, this entire time. Nearly ten years ago, she’d purchased a two-bedroom house at 1 Delaney Row, off Dundrum’s Main Street, with cash.
Except she hadn’t.
Jason had. And put it in her name.
She’d presumed it was an attempt to keep it out of the divorce he’d been planning. This was easier to think about than his ringfencing it for them, the notion that he might have thought there wouldn’t be a problem because she’d end up living there too.
But how had it happened?
The solicitor was cagey, understandably reluctant to accuse any of his peers of forgery, fraud or worse; Jason’s original solicitor had since retired and this guy had just inherited the problem.
If he knew where she’d been for most of the last decade, he was either too polite to mention it or didn’t care.
He had bigger problems: the house was currently for sale.
There was a lot of surely come to some agreement and parties want to resolve this amicably and please accept our unequivocal apologies, but Hannah wasn’t in a forgiving mood.
She was a broke ex-con living in a mobile home she was about to be kicked out of and Jason had ruined her life.
Deirdre Harrington tried to persuade her to go ahead with the sale anyway, but Hannah told her to withdraw it immediately.
Then she packed up what little she had and took a bus to Dublin to collect the keys.
She spent one night in a grotty youth hostel before, first thing the following morning, taking another bus to Dundrum.
It was the first time she’d been back to the scene of the crime since the night it had happened. As Hannah steered her suitcase around a puddle of muddy rainwater, she paused outside number one to catch her breath.
It was not how she’d pictured moving into the first home she’d ever owned.
She wasn’t how she’d pictured either. Alone, in the waning months of being able to claim that she was in her early forties, and able to fit everything else she owned into a single suitcase because she’d just got out of prison.
And dragging that case into this house.