An older motherly inmate, elected by the others, paused nervously by the open door. The Sculptress terrified her but, as the girls kept saying, she was the only one Olive would talk to.
You remind her of her mother, they all said. The idea alarmed her, but she was curious. She watched the huge brooding figure, clumsily rolling a cigarette paper around a meagre sprinkling of tobacco, for several moments before she spoke.
“Hey, Sculptress! Who’s the redhead you’re seeing?”
Except for a brief ifick of her eyes, Olive ignored her.
“Here, have one of mine.” She fished a pack of Silk Cut from her pocket and proffered it. The response was immediate. Like a dog responding to the ringing tap of its dinner plate, Olive shuffled across the floor and took one, secreting it in the folds of her dress somewhere.
“So who’s the redhead?” persisted the other.
“An author. She’s writing a book about me.”
“Christ!” said the older woman in disgust.
“What she want to write about you for? I’m the one got bloody stitched up.”
Olive stared at her.
“Maybe I did, too.”
“Oh, sure,” the other sniggered, tapping her thigh.
“Now pull the other one. It’s got frigging bells on.”
A wheeze of amusement gusted from Olive’s lips.
“Well, you know what they say: you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time…” She paused invitingly.
“But not all of the people all of the time,” the woman finished obligingly. She wagged her finger.
“You haven’t got a prayer.”
Olive’s unblinking eyes held hers.
“So who needs prayers?”
She tapped the side of her head.
“Find yourself a gullible journalist, then use a bit more of this. Even you might get somewhere. She’s an opinion-former. You fool her and she fools everyone else.”
“That stinks!” declared the woman incautiously.
“It’s only the bloody psychos they’re ever interested in. The rest of us poor sods can go hang ourselves for all they care.”
Something rather unpleasant shifted at the back of Olive’s tiny eyes.
“Are you calling me a psycho?”
The woman smiled weakly and retreated a step.
“Hey, Sculptress, it was a slip of the tongue.” She held up her hands.
“OK? No harm done.” She was sweating as she walked away.
Behind her, using her bulk to obscure what she was doing from prying eyes, Olive took the day figure she was working on from her bottom drawer and set her ponderous fingers to moulding the child on its mother’s lap. Whether it was intentional or whether she hadn’t the skill to do it differently, the mother’s crude hands, barely disinterred from the day, seemed to be smothering the life from the baby’s plump, round body.
Olive crooned quietly to herself as she worked. Behind the mother and child, a series of figures, like grey gingerbread men, lined the back of the table. Two or three had lost their heads.
He sat slumped on the steps outside the front door of her block of flats, smelling of beer, his head buried in his hands. Roz stared at him for several seconds, her face blank of expression.
“What are you doing here?”
He had been crying, she saw.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“You never talk to me.”
She didn’t bother to answer. Her ex-husband was very drunk.
There was nothing they could say that hadn’t been said a hundred times before. She was so tired of his messages on her answer phone tired of the letters, tired of the hatred that knotted inside her when she heard his voice or saw his handwriting.
He plucked at her skirt as she tried to pass, clinging to it like a child.
“Please, Roz. I’m too pissed to go home.”
She took him upstairs out of an absurd sense of past duty.
“But you can’t stay,” she told him, pushing him on to the sofa.
“I’ll ring Jessica and get her to come and collect you.”
