Page 115 of The Dead Ex
‘No,’ she snaps.
Then I head for Paddington and catch the first off-peak train, desperately hoping, as my credit card slides into the machine, that I haven’t exceeded my limit.
Part of me wonders why David had her address in the first place. Is it possible he still has feelings for her?
Once more I think of that woman with red hair who’dgiven David a mouthful on the other side of the restaurant window soon after I’d started at the Goudman Corporation. She’d seemed like a force to be reckoned with.
The journey takes hours. Outside, the trees are bowed with the storm. The train rocks from side to side, making me feel a bit sick. So many boring fields! Mile after mile of nothing. The trolley rattles by, but everything is expensive.I make do with the bottle of tap water I’d had the foresight to bring and try to ignore my rumbling stomach.
By mid-afternoon, we finally get there. ‘Welcome to Penzance’ says the sign at the station. My heart starts to pound in my chest. It feels unreal to be so close after all this time.
There’s a line of taxis outside. ‘Could you tell me where this road is?’ I ask a driver, showing him theaddress which I’d got from David’s office.
‘Ten-minute walk, love. Just hop in.’
I make an apologetic face. ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t afford you.’
A London cabbie might have driven off, but this one is good enough to give me specific directions. I walk along the seafront past some massive open-air swimming pool. A bird swoops down, landing in front of me to peck at a bread roll which someonehas left. I go down a side street and pause briefly outside an art gallery. ‘Photographic exhibition. Free entry.’ At any other time, I’d have gone in. But I’ve got a job to do. Then I find myself in an amazing park with all these palm trees and weird-looking plants. There are quite a few people here, sitting on benches or just walking past. I scan their faces. None bears anobvious resemblanceto the picture in my pocket (taken from the internet), although it is a rather old likeness. I’m passing a library now, although it could be a museum. According to the map on my phone, I’m nearly there.
But my legs are wobbling. The old doubts come back. What exactly am I going to do when I get there? It’s taken so long to achieve my goal that somehow I’ve neglected to work out a plan. So I goback into town and find a cosy coffee shop on the corner of the high street and order a peppermint tea. Then I try to think.
Yet by the time dusk is falling, I am still no clearer. I’m the only customer left. The waitress is hovering. That’s enough, I need to get on with it. So I retrace my steps but this time I force myself to take that final left and right. I stop outside a big house with agable roof. Looking around – no one seems to be watching – I walk up the path. There’s a series of names outside the front door, suggesting the house is actually several flats with different entrances round the side. My throat tightens as I take in the first.Vicki Goudman. Aromatherapist.
Finally.
47
Vicki
4 July 2018
For the rest of the week I think of nothing else but Patrick. I’m on the gardening work party now. We’re picking carrots, which were planted earlier in the year. Many prisons grow their own produce for inmates to eat. When I was governor, I used to encourage this. It always amazes me that great things can come from small seeds. All you need are the right conditions and acertain amount of care.
By the time my solicitor visits again the following week, I am ready.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you about my baby.’
It was a wet, windy start to the new year in 2013. I was four months pregnant. So exciting and yet also daunting, given David’s unpredictable behaviour. Maybe he was scared, deep down, of being a father.
Meanwhile, Christmas had left the women witha deep sense of injustice. Whatever they’d done, surely they deserved to be with their families? I felt for them. But at the same time, as I reminded myself, each one of them had hurt someone else on the Outside, and all the victims had families too.
Ironically, visits made it worse. ‘My kids kept telling me what a great time they’d had and all the presents they’dgot from my bloody ex,’ saidone mother. ‘It’s like they didn’t miss me at all.’
Patrick was holding extra therapy sessions called ‘Moving On’. But the rumblings and moanings in the wings had become louder. ‘It’s like being a bloody battery hen,’ yelled one woman from inside her cell. It sounded like Zelda’s voice.
‘What does she expect?’ pointed out Jackie, not unreasonably. ‘It’s a prison.’
Mind you, I could see thewomen’s point of view. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being unable to breathe the outside air. No wonder they all lived for their hour’s exercise every day. But we were down on staff thanks to a flu virus that was doing the rounds, so it was suggested that the afternoon exercise walk round the courtyard outside was rescheduled for 5 p.m., when the evening officers arrived.
‘It’s darkthen,’ pointed out Patrick at the morning briefing when this was announced. ‘The women need their Vitamin D intake.’
‘Then give them some bloody tablets,’ muttered one of the officers.
Patrick’s lips had tightened. ‘It’s not the same, and besides, I thought we had a budget.’
He’d turned to me for help, but what could I do? ‘It’s a question of safety,’ I replied. Dissatisfaction with the situationcaused me to be abrupt. So too did my pregnancy hormone levels, which made me want to cry one minute and laugh the next. On top of that was the added anxiety about David. He hadn’t returned my calls for six days now. According to Tanya, he was still away on a US business trip, which was meant to have been a quick visit.
I could feel the odd ‘baby flutter’ now and then. I should be sharing thiswith my husband instead of being here.
