Page 27 of The Stranger in Room Six
I’m told I have to work in the kitchen. I’m not allowed to use anything sharp ‘because you’re on a bloody manslaughter charge’ so I’m on washing-up duty, but there’s no dishwasher and there aren’t enough drying-up cloths. The food makes me hungry and sick at the same time.
My cellmate won’t talk to me. When she’s not on her work party (the umbrella name for the different jobs we have to do), she sits on her bed, weeping, with a photograph of a little boy in her hand.
‘Is that your son?’ I ask softly.
She clutches the photograph protectively to her chest. ‘I don’t want you going anywhere near him after what you’ve done.’
I have become a woman I don’t recognize. I am a murderess.
More paperwork comes: Imran has requested permission to visit me. I tick the ‘NO’ box. Of course I want to see him, but what’s the point? What future is there for either of us in this?
Then I receive a message to say that my sentencing date has been brought forward. Before long, I will know my fate.
18
The day of my sentence hearing arrives and I can’t breathe. Until now I’d hoped that someone might somehow say that yes, of course I’d done wrong, but that it was a mistake.
This can’t be happening, but it is.
Chris, who gave me the tampon tea, slaps me on the back as I am led down the corridor, past the officer’s mess and through the double-locked doors of the wing. ‘Good luck with the new place.’
I shrink into my skin. I don’t want people like that to treat me as one of them. Not long ago I was a mother who had dinner ready at 7 p.m. We’d sit round the table, the four of us, discussing our day.
Now Gerald is dead, I am facing ten years and my children are essentially orphans. I have ruined everyone’s lives in two or three mad seconds. It is inconceivable.
As I’m taken into court, I see that both girls are there. Their faces are white and disbelieving. Gerald’s brother is there too. Derek was never close to my husband, but he has his arms around both of my daughters, as if in protection.
I close my eyes as the judge speaks.
‘Belinda Wall, I am sentencing you to fifteen years …’
Fifteen?
The girls will be thirty-one and thirty-three then. They might be married. They might have children. I will have missed so much.
What have I done?
Gillian stares at me. She mouths the words ‘I hate you’. Elspeth buries her head in her uncle’s chest, weeping.
I want to scream, to cry. But my throat has closed up.
Numbly, I am led through a maze of passages to a van outside and taken to another prison. This one is four hours away, according to the driver. How are the girls going to get here to visit? Will they even want to visit? Not Gillian, certainly.
I go through the same entrance procedure as in the holding prison, wincing as someone puts their finger inside my back passage to check I’m not hiding drugs. I am photographed. I have to sign paperwork. I am told that the few possessions I came in with will be given to me when I am released in fifteen years’ time.
Then I’m taken to my new cell.
There’s a woman inside, sitting on the bottom bunk, with hair tied back in a scrawny ponytail, playing loud rap on her radio.
‘Meet Shirley,’ says the guard with exaggerated politeness, as if taking the mickey. ‘Shirley, this is Belinda.’
After he slams the door on us, the woman takes out a toothbrush from under her mattress and starts to chew the end.
‘How many prisons have you been in before?’ she asks between chews.
‘None,’ I say, trying to shout over the music. ‘Well, only the one after they arrested me.’
‘And what are you in for?’
