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FORTY-FIVE
I’m shaking as I walk towards the visitor centre, a building just outside the main prison. Squat like a brick outhouse.
Before I left home, I told myself I was doing the right thing. But now I’m not sure.
I didn’t come to see Matty after he was charged. No prison visits, no stilted exchanges across bolted down tables in crowded visitor halls. And yet, passing through the gates now, it feels like I’ve been here before. That a part of me recognises it. A part of me feels I belong.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the woman on reception asks. She sounds bored. ‘Your visiting order?’
I hand over the form I received in the mail, Matty’s details already filled in.
We’re in a little office; beige walls, brown carpet tiles. Someone’s stuck up a poster of Monet’s Water Lily Pond, the corners peeling away from the wall. I don’t know why, but it makes the room look even bleaker.
The receptionist has split ends. Unfortunate teeth. Oversized glasses.
They don’t suit her, I think. Drown her face.
A deflection tactic, Janice would say. Focusing on this woman’s appearance so you don’t have to focus on yourself. What you’re feeling, the spool of thoughts unravelling in your head.
She’d be right.
It’s late afternoon; the sun already dipping, starting to wane. I think of what my mother said about the weather that day on Parliament Hill, right before Matty called to say he was back. Only a few months before the next two bodies were discovered; one of them a runaway, her head partly cut off by a workman’s shovel.
Pathetic fallacy. Put it in your ‘New Words Book’.
It had been such a clear, bright day. A reflection of our mood in that moment perhaps, but not of what was to come.
I give myself a mental shake. Pull it together, Sophie. Jesus.
The past is really closing in today. A skein of crows scenting a kill.
I force myself to focus on the moment, to block out the ghosts. Janice sets me all sorts of meditation and mindfulness exercises. I tell her they help, but the truth is, I never do them. I’m just not into that hippy crap, I’d say if I had the guts. There’s so much I don’t tell her.
I remind myself to breathe, to take in my surroundings.
The smell of burning dust on the fluorescent light strips. The black blotches of dead flies caught inside the cover. The heating cranked up too high, drying the air. Making it thick and hard to breathe.
I’m sweating even more now, the moisture beading under my arms. I must stink, I think, then immediately rebuke myself.
Why do I care how I smell, how I look? I’m not trying to impress Matty. Am I?
No, of course I’m not. I don’t want any chinks in my armour, that’s all. And just as I’m dreading seeing what he’s become, so too am I dreading him seeing what’s become of me.
‘Brains like yours, the world’s your lobster,’ he said after I got my bursary place at the high school. An Only Fools and Horses reference my mother didn’t get.
He was so proud of me that day, told me I could be anything I wanted. I don’t want him to see how far I’ve fallen. To know I didn’t make it to college, that I dropped out of school before even taking my A levels. To guess he’s the reason why.
I don’t want him to have that power over me. Don’t want to give him the satisfaction. And he would be pleased, if he’s the psychopath they say he is.
If. . .
Stop it, I tell myself.
Another deep breath, in and out.
There’s a radio turned on low. An ’80s tune I used to dance to, coming out of the speakers. ‘Karma Chameleon’.
Is this karma? I think. Is meeting Matty, seeing what his life has been reduced to, the price I have to pay for what I did?
