Читать книгу Jail Bird - Jessie Keane - Страница 20

It was her first day in Holloway. She thought she would choke with terror at the sensation of being hemmed-in, shut away. A prison officer at reception checked and logged her belongings, then allowed her to buy two phone cards with her own private cash.

‘Should be just one,’ said the officer. ‘But as you’re new in, two, okay?’

Then she was strip-searched for the first time, adding indignity to fear, and locked in a room with six other prisoners. Three of them were heroin users, one of which had turned on her violent boyfriend, nearly braining him with a candlestick, and she joked that his head was so hard it had broken the bloody thing, and she was sorry about that because the candlestick had been a gift from her mother.

One of the others was an intimidatingly tall, twenty-stone Jamaican woman with dreadlocks and a bass-baritone voice, called Mercy. She’d been done for importing cocaine and spoke in a fast patois that Lily at first struggled to comprehend. After a while, she developed an ear for it, and could talk to Mercy and understand her fully. Mercy had three kids at home in Jamaica, and had taken the coke with her on her first-ever trip to England because she had been told that if she didn’t, her eleven-year-old son would be killed.

‘Do you know if he’s safe now?’ Lily had asked her later on.

‘He’s in hiding with his grandma,’ said Mercy, and Lily thought then that her own life had been a picnic compared to this poor woman’s. After that, they each had a rudimentary health check and then Lily was pronounced ‘processed’ and was put on D3, the intake wing, in a four-bed dormitory.

Like boarding school, she thought.

‘It true you killed your old man?’ asked one of the heroin junkies in the dorm. The girl had told Lily she’d decided not to sign on to the methadone programme because she said they were all loony-tunes in the hospital wing: she’d tried it before and she wasn’t trying it again. She’d rather go cold turkey.

Lily didn’t answer. She was blank-faced with shock at finding herself here, inside.

The heroin girl took her silence as an admission of guilt. They’d all read about the case in the papers; many of them had been the victims of violent husbands, boyfriends, pimps, and Lily had turned the tables. Struck a blow for the sisterhood.

‘Hey girl – respect,’ said her cellmate with a grin.