Chapter 1
In the darkness, Joan Ferguson lay with her eyes open.
She wasn’t looking. She didn’t look much any more, or listen, taste, touch or smell if she could help it. Still, she was aware of the darkness, its many shades and textures. At this hour there was no sign of the gouged plaster and cement that made up her world now, but those things were there all the same, beyond the darkness and within it. Even in the pitch black, you couldn’t pretend your way out of this place. You couldn’t tell yourself you were gazing up at a moonless sky. The darkness in here was more like what you’d find inside a car boot, or a closed fist.
Still, the darkness was manageable. The light was harder: that white tube in its metal cage, too high for her to smash, that hummed and throbbed and watched her for fifteen merciless hours a day.
(Was it fifteen? She recalled how the timetables used to work, but what if they’d changed? At first she’d tried to figure time out by the buzzers, the pills, the microwaved slop on plastic trays. The glass brick of a window was set too high to see out, and gave few clues. Then she’d begun to wonder if they were tricking her, switching the times. They could be slowing her days down or speeding them up, just for fun. Or as an experiment, maybe – it wouldn’t be the first time prisoners and lunatics had been used for that sort of thing. For a while she’d tried outsmarting them, counting time by her own heartbeat. But that was hard to maintain when she could no longer remember why it mattered.)
Mostly she lay on the bed or sat at the edge of the mattress, her thoughts and functions shut down to the minimum necessary. Back in General, when they’d been friends (a strange notion, that she could have had a friend once, and in this place), Kaz had called it her screensaver mode.
‘It’s like you’re asleep with your eyes open,’ Kaz had said, but that was incorrect. Joan was awake, she was here, she just wasn’t present. She was like a guard in another room watching the prisoner Ferguson in her isolation cell, the CCTV whirring away on an endless loop. She had always been able to slip away like this when necessary, and in here it was always necessary.
But she hadn’t realised the danger: that a person in that state might slip too far away to return. Might slip so far that she could no longer comprehend why that was a danger.
The old part of Joan – the part that thought and fought and schemed and survived and never, ever gave up – knew this wasn’t right. That old Joan clawed at her chest sometimes, howled at her to think, to do something. To remember that this wasn’t over, that Nils was gone, that Smith’s death wasn’t her fault, that the new charges were farcical and she hadn't been to court yet – that there were still ways, even in here, to take back control.
There were always ways to do that.
But that old version of herself was standing on a receding shore, her shouts carried off by the wind. Was it even worth trying to listen? After all she’d done – the months of incarceration, degradation, pain and filth. Months spent waiting and planning and pacing in cells, eating, sleeping and shitting under a camera’s gaze; months of standing in line with society’s refuse, blank indifference plastered across her face to keep reality at bay. Months of tunnel vision – don’t stop, don’t look, don’t care, don’t feel – of tolerating whatever she had to and doing whatever she had to, suffocating herself in order to survive – and for what? Where had it got her? Ten seconds in Bea Smith’s arms, and then back in here.
Why bother listening to the old Joan? Why not switch to screensaver mode and stay there?
There was a sound in the corridor outside.
She didn’t hear it; she was merely aware of it. Footsteps, like the neat tapping of a hammer. Her brain registered: an officer, then. A woman.
The footsteps moved at a leisurely pace. Most of the guards hurried past her door, as if afraid of contagion. As well they might be; plenty of them had overstepped the line now and then in the course of their work. Did the sight of one of their own now locked in a concrete box scare them? The sour stink of her unwashed body and matted hair, the black glass of her gaze? There but for the grace of God…
Maybe not. Most of her former staff were not what you’d call thoughtful people. Probably they’d just been warned off associating with her, because she was so very, very dangerous.
The tapping grew louder. Joan lay limp, her face unchanging – but her sluggish pulse quickened, a tiny flame warming her chest. Could it be…?
Of course it couldn’t. Since they’d charged her and brought her back here in the butcher’s van, Vera hadn’t been to see her once. No threats, no gloating, no more tedious talk of justice. Just … absence.
Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered. But as the footsteps approached, Joan felt something like a giant hook fasten itself in her ribcage and give a mighty tug. Now, without intending it, she was sitting upright.
There was another sound out there: a soft, metallic shiver. Joan sat taller. For the first time in weeks, she wasn’t just conscious; she was listening.
Jangle-clump. Jangle-clump. A lazy rhythm.
Someone was tossing a set of keys from hand to hand.