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I sit at the low table and push the red packet pile towards the women gathering around me. I’m so generous. I’m so kind. They give me small smiles that reassure me this favour will one day be repaid. Yes, it’s lucky they only know the name of my offense, rather than the details.
It’s unusual for women to be classed as Category A prisoners, but my judge was the kind of woman who, after my own heart, didn’t believe in half-measures. When she learned the full context of my case, her eyebrows rode right up high on her head.
It’s also unusual for a Category A prisoner, whose escape would be considered highly dangerous to the public, to be so quickly downgraded to a Restricted Status prisoner, and then further down to Closed Conditions, which doesn’t require maximum security.
But it’s very, very unusual to find a prisoner who is happy to be in prison, or will cover a range of classes for teachers who quit unexpectedly, or help you fill out an application for the job you really want and get the hell out of the Escher/Kafka/Bad Girls-mind-fuck that is the UK’s prison service.
I am all of those things. Coming inside has been such a relief.
On the outside I was never very good at remembering to eat. I kept myself clean, but only when I was going to see people. Yes, I was good at getting jobs and keeping them and networking and laughing at people’s jokes in the right places, and I cared – cared deeply – about my students.
But all of my adult relationships were transactional.
I realise now this wasn’t because I was single-minded in my pursuit of bettering the nation’s next generation of leaders, but because I have deep-seated and, in all honesty, utterly debilitating trust issues. With my peers.
Apart from Neil Whitlow, perhaps. It started out that way – me not trusting him, like always – but then something shifted. And now, of course, I’ll never see him again.
I met him the morning after seeing my dad again for the first time in almost two decades. I waited outside his office, disbelieving of my luck that Port Emblyn School had an unexpected mid-term opening. I was fairly certain all of my old friends would have sent their children to our alma mater, and I was a shoo-in for the job with my credentials and my previous boss’s recommendation. High-calibre teachers are rarely available mid-term.
But I also knew once given the job, it was likely to be taken away quite rapidly, considering the very visible face of the PTA was my once-best-friend Frances Beaufort-Bradley.
But there was no harm in trying.
I had trimmed my fringe that morning, a little wonky to add a touch of vulnerability and approachable charm, just like my mother, and when Mr Whitlow welcomed me in I noted the broad shoulders and broad cheeks and rugged stubble.
This was one useful person I wasn’t going to mind making use of, thoroughly and frequently and perhaps a little experimentally.
I pictured him naked, before me on his desk, papers pushed to the side, and as I smiled at him I allowed myself to blush.
I’m pleased to report he had the good sense to quickly avert his gaze, but I saw the rise of his chest under that white shirt like his body was trying to get to me.
He asked about my Acting Up programme. I was always happy to talk about it. I used it to target my favourites, the troubled children who were just waiting for a wing to be taken under.
He asked about my literacy outreach programme, whereby I took rich teenagers into poor primary schools to mentor eight-year-olds with no books at home.
He asked why I’d moved from state to private, and I told him about Furo Adeyemi. And as I remembered that smart boy’s sad face, the holes in the cuffs of his school jumper, I suddenly found myself crying.
I’m an accomplished actress. I don’t lose control. When I talk about Furo in interviews, I do allow myself a certain degree of emotion, because interviewers like to see my integrity, my passion. But this wasn’t that.
The tears I allowed to spring into my eyes spilled over until they were freely flowing.
At first I told myself I was just angry. I had had a good thing going at Redmoor and it had been cut short. Things had got out of hand. I made a mistake I couldn’t repair.
Yes, there had been a third reason, beyond my sick dad and my desire for revenge, for me leaving Redmoor College; for one last date with the headteacher. Very simply, my time was up. Of course, the head tried to find a way for me to stay, but it was too complicated, and it was better to leave under a cloud of mystery than stay and take on a fight.
But that wasn’t why I was crying in an interview like some rom-com ditz. I couldn’t stop seeing my father’s face, so withered from when I’d last seen it, his shoulders stooped, his lips slackened.
He hadn’t known me at first. No spark of recognition. But then suddenly he was grasping for me with his weak hands. ‘Forgive me, Gee. Please, you have to forgive me.’
Because that was yet another reason I’d come back, wasn’t it? The deepest, most secret reason.
I wanted to see him. I wanted a father again. I wanted to forgive.
And the tears wouldn’t stop.
I have to say, though, that was the quickest I’ve ever got into a headteacher’s pants.
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