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SIXTY
Matty didn’t phone the first few weeks he was in prison. It takes time to get put on the ‘officially approved’ contacts list, as I found out later. I also learned that prison staff would likely be listening in to his conversations and recording his calls. I recall he was rather outraged about that.
‘I’m entitled to privacy,’ he told my mother.
‘Apparently not,’ she replied.
She acted tough when she spoke to him, didn’t want him to know she was falling apart.
‘I can’t bear for him to think less of me.’
‘Isn’t what you think of him more relevant?’ I asked.
‘When did you become so hard, Sophie?’
I considered suggesting that perhaps she should try being a bit harder too, but thought better of it. Linda had warned me she was fragile, that I needed to handle her carefully or she might break.
‘Just be nice, Sophie. Cut her some slack.’
As if it was my fault she was crying all the time, that she could never seem to get stoned enough. That she tortured herself with a never-ending loop of questions: Who do you think called the police? Do you reckon he thinks it was me? You don’t believe that, do you?
‘It’s the phone calls,’ I said. ‘They’re killing her. She says he’s going to die in there. That it’s all because of her.’
‘How’s she figure that?’
I shrugged up to my ears.
‘Hell, if I know.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
I shook my head.
‘Nope.’
I tried persuading her to take a break from speaking to Matty.
‘You need to stop accepting his calls. Can’t you see what they’re doing to you?’
She’d just ended yet another conversation with him, Niagara Falls down her face.
‘It’s all I have left,’ she said.
‘All you have left of him, you mean?’
‘What?’
‘Because you know, I’m still here.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, but she clearly didn’t.
She was so tightly blindfolded by grief, the rest of the world had ceased to exist. Me included. Some days she’d look at me as if surprised to see me sitting there. More than once she seemed to forget my name.
‘You’ve got to put a stop to this, for both our sakes.’
She began to sob, shoulders shaking. I touched her and she flinched.
‘I can’t stop. I need him. He makes me feel so loved.’
