Jail Bird

Lily King…?

No. Not her.

‘I think he’s dead,’ said Alice, and she started to cry in earnest.

The woman came up close, and put an arm around Alice’s bony shoulders. ‘He is, Alice. I’m afraid he is. And you wish you were with him, don’t you?’

Alice nodded. Oh, to be with Leo. They’d had such fun. Such fun. She looked at the woman. She knew the woman’s face.

‘I know you…don’t I?’ she asked uncertainly.

‘Don’t worry about that now, Alice. You know what? You can be with him,’ said the woman comfortingly.

‘How? Can you tell me how?’ Alice asked her desperately.

‘I’ll show you,’ said the woman, and bent and picked up a handful of stones.

Now Alice wept again, this time with gratitude.

44

Lily could see it on their faces, as soon as she entered the restaurant, as soon as she approached the table where they were sitting, waiting. Becks and Mary and another woman she didn’t know. But then Becks and Mary had had twelve years to make new friendships. No Maeve, thank God. And no Adrienne; Becks had taken note of what she’d said on the phone.

What she saw on their faces was curiosity. They were looking at her as you might look at a two-headed dog or a dinosaur brought back to life after a million years in a peat bog. She was a freak, and this was a freak show.

‘Lils!’ Becks stood up and got a smile on her face. She leaned over and air-kissed Lily.

Little dark-haired Mary did the same.

‘Good to see you again, girl,’ said Mary, going a bit red in the face. Mary had never visited her inside–but Lily understood. She’d have been intimidated by visiting an inmate in prison if she’d been in Mary’s shoes. Only bolder souls like Becks would tough it out.

‘You too,’ Lily told Mary with a smile.

‘And this is Vanda,’ said Becks, and Vanda, a snooty-faced ultra-skinny blonde stood up and greeted her politely. ‘Vanda, this is Lily.’

‘Hi Vanda,’ said Lily. Vanda nodded frostily, as if someone had just given her a dog turd for a present.

Lily’s conviction that this was a mistake deepened as they ordered. Vanda kept shooting odd looks at her, and Mary seemed uneasy. Becks was babbling nineteen-to-the-dozen, trying to keep it light, but the atmosphere at the table was tainted, and Lily quickly realized that it was her who had tainted it, simply by showing up. She was out of place here among the girls, stuck here like an interesting exhibit in a tent at a funfair.

Roll up, roll up. Come and see the amazing Jail Bird, fresh out of prison!

The starters came, and the wine, and they ate and drank, the others talking about inconsequential things: hemlines, Botox, the latest decorating trend, who was sleeping with who. By the time the mains arrived, Lily was wishing she’d never pushed for this. And when Vanda turned to her and opened her mouth, she just knew that she shouldn’t have done it.

‘So…I hope you don’t mind my asking…but what’s it like? Inside, I mean.’

Lily’d been waiting for the question. It had been simmering under the surface of all the other conversation for a while now, and here it was, finally, bursting to the surface, boiling over at last like lava.

She sipped her wine and looked around at their faces. At Vanda’s, coldly curious. At Mary’s, embarrassed but curious too. At Becks, who looked back at her with a hint of desperation in her eyes as if to say, Hey, this was your idea. I didn’t want to do it.

‘Only I heard,’ Vanda was going on, ‘that the culture shock of coming out–particularly after a long sentence–is so intense, so hard to cope with, that many–no, most–people who come out go back inside within a year. Did you know that?’

‘But that ain’t going to happen to you, is it, Lils?’ said Becks quickly, with a nervous little laugh. ‘Because you didn’t do it–right?’

‘Yeah, but even so. All that time in there,’ said Mary, her dark eyes, fringed with thick black lash extensions, resting on Lily’s face. ‘Must have been awful.’

Lily pursed her lips and looked around the three of them. Reminded herself that they meant no harm, and that their reaction was probably a natural one. ‘It’s a big adjustment,’ she said.

‘And you’re back at home now,’ said Becks. ‘With the girls. Jesus, I bet Maeve was happy about that.’

‘Seems like she couldn’t have her own kids, so she was keen to have yours instead,’ said Mary.

Lily gave a thin smile. ‘She only had ’em on loan,’ she said.

‘Oh fuck, talk of the devil…’ said Becks, her eyes on the big window at the front of the restaurant, beside the pavement. They all turned and looked. Maeve King was walking by, strutting with her usual bossy little fat woman’s walk, her flicked-up blonde hairdo catching the sun. She glanced into the darkness of the restaurant as she went past, and probably saw nothing because of the reflections of the cars passing by in the big sheet of glass, but the expression on her face was pure poison. She knew they were in there. Knew Lily was there with them.

‘Oh shit,’ said Mary.

Lily looked at Becks. ‘Does she know we’re meeting up today?’

Becks shrugged awkwardly. ‘I had to tell her you’d be here. Couldn’t just let her show up, now could I?’

‘And she said…?’ prompted Lily.

‘She said,’ Becks sighed, ‘no way would she want to come if you were here.’

‘And I bet that’s the polite version.’

‘It’s difficult, Lils,’ said Becks, her expression unhappy. ‘I got to try to keep Maeve sweet, you know that. Joe does work for Si sometimes, I can’t rock the boat too much.’

‘Looks like you’re rocking it now.’

‘Yeah, but…I can’t do it too much or too often, Lils. You’re my best mate and I love you, but I can’t. Sorry’

There was a tight silence.

‘Your daughters must have grown very attached to Maeve,’ piped up Vanda. ‘It was good of her to step in. For twelve years, after all.’

Twelve years was time enough to turn an impressionable young brain any way you wanted it to go, Lily knew that. She sat there and wondered how often in the course of a day Maeve had bad-mouthed her to the girls. How often they’d been told Mummy was a killer, Mummy didn’t love them, Mummy never remembered their birthdays or Christmas or any fucking thing, that she was in jail with scum and that was where she belonged because she was scum too.

Lily had switched her attention from Becks to Vanda. ‘You close to Maeve?’ she asked.

‘We’re all friends of Maeve’s,’ jumped in Becks quickly. Her pale blue eyes held Lily’s and said, Please Lils, don’tstart anything. ‘We’re friends of yours too, Lils. Me and Mary anyway. Vanda don’t know you.’

Yeah, and she ain’t going to know me either, thought Lily, who had taken against the chilly-looking woman big-style.

‘It’s hard, Lily,’ Becks went on. ‘We’re all friends, and this feud between you and Maeve is awkward for us.’

And you might have to pick sides? Lily wondered, looking around the table at them. They all dropped their eyes, got busy with cutlery, napkins, any fucking thing. Well, Vanda was already on the Maeve team of cheerleaders: that much was obvious. But she had thought that Becks–and Mary–would be on her side. Maybe she was wrong about that.

Maybe she was wrong about a lot of things.

Suddenly she felt like even another mouthful of food would choke her. She threw her fork down on the plate