Chapter Thirty-Three Jade
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jade
Five months later
I’ve always wondered about prisons. If the TV shows are right, and the walls sweat, and the food makes your teeth melt, and the guards are all monsters, and the inmates are all murderous.
The only certainty, from the second the cell door breathes closed behind you, is that you’re not going anywhere but inwards, down through your own layers of fat and guilt and memories.
I’ve had plenty of time to imagine my first moments behind bars, and still, I got everything wrong.
HMP Grangefield, a women’s prison in Hampshire, is neither old nor threatening.
It has the ambience of an airport, with fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like processed ham, and lino floors that squeak.
There’s no clang as I walk in, just a succession of quietly operated security doors and the scent of industrial laundry detergent, sharp enough to sting my eyes.
The first woman I meet – Andrea – turns out the contents of my bag and pockets with the same indifference she might use for unstacking supermarket shelves.
It’s over before I know it. My belongings are documented, bagged, and zipped away.
I’m left with a pair of joggers, my bra, and an ugly blue top that looks like a nurse’s uniform from the 1980s.
I expected the strip search, but not the cold matter-of-factness of a woman who’s seen it all a thousand times over.
Andrea is efficient, even gentle, her hands practised, her voice low as she explains each step with a patience I didn’t know government employees possessed.
‘Raise your arms. Turn around. Open your mouth. Thank you, love.’ There are no jokes, no tension, just the brisk detachment of someone who knows that, by the end of the week, I’ll be little more than another name scribbled on the whiteboard.
After the search, they send me to ‘Medical’, which is a short corridor with four doors and a poster about hepatitis.
The doctor is a Nigerian woman with a gold cross at her neck and no time for pleasantries.
She asks about my mental health, my periods, my history of self-harm.
I lie to her as smoothly as I lied at the police station, but she takes my blood pressure twice and tells me my heart is ‘racing a little’.
‘That’s normal,’ she adds, scribbling a note I can’t read. The nurse – pink-haired, younger – offers me a cup of watery tea and half a bourbon biscuit. She watches me eat it, eyes narrowed, like she’s waiting for me to spit it out.
My stomach feels queasy, but they insist I have a sandwich and a cup of ‘juice’, which tastes of undiluted sugar and some synthetic fruit. I eat and drink with the same impulse that makes people shovel food inside them at funerals.
The nurse informs me that I’m allowed to speak to one of their peer workers from Listeners, a branch of the Samaritans. I take them up on the offer, not because I want to talk to anyone about anything, but because it’s delaying the stomach-churning moment when I’ll be taken to my cell.
The Listener is a heavyset woman in her mid-forties, tattoos lacing her arms. She explains that she’s done nearly two decades inside, mostly for ‘problems with men and money’ – whatever that means – and according to her, the Samaritans trained her to keep people like me from stringing themselves up in the first seventy-two hours.
I don’t know how to respond to that, so I don’t.
‘People assume it’s the violence that’s the worst,’ she continues. ‘Truth is, it’s the loneliness. Gets in your bones.’
I nod and try not to think about my bones, or about Bella’s bones – I don’t even know where they are.
When the police showed up at Bella’s apartment on New Year’s Day, I was sure they had come for me, for Jade. I was convinced they were there to arrest me for my twin’s murder. But that wasn’t the case at all.
I’ve been convicted of tax fraud. Or rather, Bella has. So now I’m in bloody jail for something I didn’t do. Looks like my twin wasn’t the perfect angel I thought she was.
It’s landed me with a conundrum. I could simply admit that I’m not Bella and that I didn’t do what they’ve accused me of, but that would open up a whole new can of worms and could possibly incriminate me for her murder.
And I obviously can’t risk that. So I’m having to suck it up and keep pretending to be her.
The Listener looks me up and down and sniffs. She advises me to keep to myself, at least at first. ‘Don’t borrow anything, don’t offer unsolicited advice, don’t talk about your case, and definitely do not tell anyone you’ve been done for fraud.’
I wonder what she’d think if she knew about my real crime. My heart pounds as she continues talking. I thought this meeting was supposed to make me feel better, not worse.
I discovered from my lawyer that, between March and October last year, Bella submitted a string of false invoices and fraudulently reclaimed over ￡200,000.
I had to go to Crown Court, where I was sentenced to two years and three months for VAT fraud.
Obviously, I knew nothing about any of it, so there wasn’t much I could say in my defence.
To be honest, I barely understood much of what was going on, and my lawyer was shit.
I thought Bella’s parents would have paid for someone top of the line, but they just left me to my own devices.
Never even got in touch to see how I was doing.
I guess they were disappointed in the mess their daughter had made of their once-thriving empire.
The woman is still talking, and I’m trying to focus on all the advice, but my mind keeps wandering. ‘Keep your cell door shut whenever possible, and if anything happens – anything at all – don’t report it, or you’ll risk being labelled a grass. Above all, stay humble, know your place.’
I don’t know why they’re called ‘Listeners’ – all she’s doing is talking. She clearly hasn’t finished her training.
After our chat, a thin, hyperactive officer leads me to my house block.
She points out the showers, the tiny library (‘Don’t expect Booker Prize winners, but at least it’s warm and quiet in there’), and the communal room with a dartboard that has no darts, and a few battered copies of trashy magazines, each with the faces of disintegrating soap stars on the cover.
The room smells like instant coffee, bleach, and feet.
I feel my jaw clench involuntarily, the way it used to when Mum would start on at me about not making up my sofa bed.
I think back longingly to Bella’s beautiful flat and my one perfect, blissful day there.
I later discovered it had a sale agreed before I even arrived on the scene, and I was forced to vacate it after a couple of weeks.
I spent most of that time selling off Bella’s designer gear as she had no money in her bank account and owed thousands on her credit card.
That money gave me enough to stay in a B&B until my court date.
A peer worker with a name badge reading ‘Kirsty’ is waiting for me at the main block. Kirsty has anxious hands but a kind smile. ‘First night is always the worst,’ she says. ‘After that, you kind of . . . flatten out.’
I grit my teeth. I don’t want to flatten out.
I want to scream, to burn the building down, to maybe even swap my fate with the dead girl everyone thinks I am.
But instead, I trail after Kirsty, learning about the timings for showers, the rules about kettles (‘No boiling anything but water – don’t ask’), and the unofficial hierarchy that governs the house block.
Apparently, everything can be traded, from cigarettes to cheese triangles, but only if you know how to keep the IOUs straight.
Tomorrow, I’ll begin the induction process.
This includes meeting with various agencies to assess my needs and going through an orientation to prepare me further for life in prison.
Following this, I’ll commence a well-being week.
I give a grim laugh at the thought of anything in here being labelled ‘well-being’.
I spend my first night on a mattress about the width of a yoga mat, and there’s a brownish-yellow stain on the ceiling, a far cry from Bella’s bedroom with its ornate ceiling rose and crystal chandelier.
I stare at the stain until my eyes water, until my thoughts swirl back to the first moments I learned about Bella’s death, the endless sequence of panicked, improvisational moves I made to keep up the pretence that she was still alive and that I was her.
If I close my eyes, I can picture the plasticine sheen of her face in the Polaroid that Corolla Man sent me as proof.
It would be a lie to say I didn’t feel excitement in that moment, but the excitement was tangled up in a dark kind of horror, one I couldn’t name.
How have I swapped my freedom for this? How did I not see what was happening? How did I believe that Bella was living this charmed life? Even before I came on the scene, her business was failing, and she was on the verge of bankruptcy, desperately trying to turn things around.
I thought she was living the high life without a care in the world, but in reality, she was going to investor meetings, schmoozing with clients, and meeting with her accountant and solicitor, trying to save her business and herself from going to jail.
She was hiding the truth from everyone. Trying to fake the perfect life.
Burying her head in the sand, rather than facing up to her mistakes.
The ironic thing is that my innocuous tip-off to HMRC was probably the nail in her coffin.
I thought it would be just an annoyance, an irritation to add to the string of other irritations I lined up for her.
I never could have imagined that it would lead to Bella being convicted and sentenced. To me being convicted and sentenced.
The whole thing has backfired, and I’m on the hook for all of it.
Mum thinks I’ve gone travelling abroad and has no idea I’m in prison as ‘Bella’.
I can’t contact her because I don’t want to risk anyone discovering what I’ve done.
As it stands, there’s a possibility I could be released after a year, but if the truth got out that I’m actually Jade, I could be convicted of murder.
And then I might never leave this place.
Or I might get sent somewhere worse. My pulse thuds in my wrists at the thought, a constant reminder that the only thing between me and a murder conviction is my own ability to perform.
I’ve always been a decent actor, but being in here will test me.
It looks like Bella’s parents are worse than my mum. I still can’t believe they never showed up to court, never visited. Neither did Bella’s so-called best friend, Tori. Or Reece – so much for us being soulmates. Like rats leaving a sinking ship.
I think when I get out of prison, I’ll go back to my real identity.
Live as Jade again. That way, I’ll have a clean record, and at least I’ll have Mum.
She’ll be happy to see me ‘back from my travels’.
Maybe I’ll go travelling for real this time.
Or try to get accepted on to a college course for something I actually enjoy.
No idea what that might be, but at least I’ve got some time to figure that out.
Apparently, tomorrow I’m having an assessment to determine my educational needs.
Maybe I’ll study while I’m in here. Then, when I get out, I can get some proper qualifications and really make a go of my life.
I try not to think about my twin. I didn’t think getting rid of her would affect me, but I have nightmares about it.
Keep seeing that gruesome proof-of-death photo in my head.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake it.
Especially as it looked just like me. The reality is, I’ll always be haunted by her.
She’s the ghost in my bloodstream, the itch in my scalp, the voice in my head saying, ‘You’ll never be free.
’ I try to block her out, but she always finds a way back in.
Even now, I can’t tell if I regret it or not. I don’t know if I’m sorry, or just sorry I got caught. Maybe that’s the same thing.