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‘I’m not sure a teacher sitting with a student in the library counts as suspicious?’ says Father, and my head feels like it might pop.
It isn’t just any teacher. It isn’t just any student. If Georgia has been spending extra time with Jenna, then she’s up to no good. There just isn’t any other explanation.
But Father clears his throat. ‘Perhaps we should put away the fruitcake until after dinner? Shall we at least say grace? We have quite a bit to be thankful for and I’m not letting a silly little girl starve my family.’
I rub my temples. ‘I’m calling the police.’
Father rolls his eyes, Mother grabs her beads, Ash and Ava look sideways at each other but Tristan squeezes my arm. I feel like a petulant child. Thank God for Tristan.
I hurry into the foyer before anyone can stop me. I’m about to press call when my phone vibrates with a Mumsnet notification. I open up a new direct message and my heart stutters.
Yummummy25: Georgia Smith is poison. She hurt my little girl. STAY AWAY!
32
AFTER
I let out a single ‘huh’ and then it’s done. The man with muscles like knotted rope and a bat tattoo behind his ear withdraws, zips up and walks down the corridor, never turning to look back at me.
It’s incredible how quickly and quietly the act of love can be executed in times of necessity, and I can assure you that in prison the need is great.
I return to my cell after cleaning up. My cellmate Deandra smirks.
‘Someone I know?’ she asks, rolling over and dropping her book to her pillow.
I smile. ‘Not as well as I do.’
She laughs. ‘When I grow up, I want to be you.’
The new place suits me rather well. The beds are softer, the food is more varied and the opportunities for sexual encounters are exponentially increased by the presence of so many angry young men, even if we only mix for an hour or so each day. Thank God for hippies. I can’t know, but who else would come up with a co-ed prison?
Sex isn’t love, but it’ll do.
Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever ached inside for human connection so hard that it becomes the whole of you?
If your answer is no, feel free to stop reading because you’re either a liar or an imbecile.
We’re all alone.
From beginning to end.
It sits inside us all. When it rises to the surface, you realise it’s been there all along, coiled and waiting.
In prison, there’s no missing the great big billboard signs of loneliness. But outside, it can be subtle, insidious.
You’re never more alone than when in the tight embrace of a rotten family, where those you trust put on great shows of love to distract from their neglect and manipulation.
Watching Jenna, all teary-eyed over a little bit of navel-gazing breakdown music, her loneliness drowning the whole room, I had a vision of the future. The Beaufort-Bradleys had made me bad and Jenna weak. Some day, the Beaufort-Bradleys were going to kill Jenna.
I became her perfect teacher. I would sit planning lessons for one student alone in my dad’s new home, a one-bed bungalow at Oakridge Nursing Village, while he mumbled at the TV. His hawkish nose had grown longer. His fingers still tapped out the notes to whatever soundtrack was playing.
I remembered him begging for forgiveness when he was still lost in a fog the first time I saw him in hospital. I wondered if, now he was more lucid, he would ask for it again. But still he grew confused if we discussed anything beyond his career or theatre or what he wanted to eat that day.
One evening, he became upset that he was stuck in Oakridge when he should have been at Trevethan House, where we had lived, with my mother, and I snapped.
‘You never even loved her,’ I said.
‘Your mother is the only woman I have ever loved,’ he said, his gaze suddenly sharp.
