“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Cole continued.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Tabitha. “It didn’t go the way I expected.”
“You’re planning to defend yourself?”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“If you want to destroy yourself, that’s none of my business. What is my business is what goes on in this prison.” Cole pushed her chair back and looked up at the ceiling. She took another deep breath, as if she was forcing herself to stay calm. “I don’t think you understand your position.”
Tabitha was also trying to stay calm. “In what way?”
“You think because you’re on remand that you’re somehow not a normal prisoner, that the rules don’t apply to you. Well, they do. You’ve committed an act of vandalism.”
“It was not an act of vandalism,” said Tabitha. “That shower has never worked. You have to bang it to get it to work. I banged it and it still didn’t work. I hit it and pulled at it and then it came off the wall.”
Cole looked past Tabitha at the warden. Tabitha couldn’t see how the warden responded.
“I’m tempted to give you a week or two in solitary confinement,” said Cole. “It might give you a chance to reflect on things.”
“You can’t put me in solitary confinement.”
Cole’s lips tightened. “Really?” she said. “And why not?”
“If I’m doing my own defense, I’m going to need help. I’m going to need a place to work.”
There was a silence only broken when Cole started drumming her fingers lightly on her desk. When she spoke, it was slowly and distinctly.
“Don’t you ever try to tell me what I can and what I can’t do.”
Tabitha felt her heart beating fast, so fast that it almost hurt. She could feel the blood racing through her veins, bulging. She was breathing faster, her eyes flickering from side to side. She saw a very slight shift in the governor’s expression, a wince of concern. She understood that she was just very slightly wary of what Tabitha might do next. Was she going to fly at her? Was she going to say something reckless? It felt like a battle of wills and then Tabitha realized, almost with an ache, that it was a battle she could only lose.
“I’m sorry,” she said, untruthfully. “Things have been difficult. It’s been a strange day. I didn’t mean to damage the shower.” Again, untruthful. “But I’m sorry that it happened.” She swallowed hard. She hated saying this. “I want to be cooperative.”
Cole’s expression was unchanged. “It’s not about cooperating. It’s about obeying the rules.” She paused again. “Consider this a warning. I’m making allowances. I won’t do it again.”
“Thank you,” said Tabitha.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said a voice behind her.
Tabitha looked round.
“You address the governor as ‘ma’am,’” said Mary Guy.
“Ma’am?” she said. She turned to Deborah Cole and she had a terrible impulse to laugh at the ridiculous theater of it all and then it made her so angry that she could hardly think. This woman was sitting in her nice office wanting to be called “ma’am” while a few corridors away there were women finding places to cut themselves where it wouldn’t show and someone, somewhere, was looking for a way to end it all.
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said.
She pushed open the door expecting to walk into a scene of wreckage but instead it was as if the past hour had been a violent dream. All her things were back on the table, in the same positions as they had been before. She pulled open the drawers of her chest. Her clothes had been folded and replaced and as far as Tabitha could remember they were exactly as they had been. Ingrid’s clothes were folded and laid on top of her bed, which had been made.
She sat down with a little grunt and rubbed her eyes. The door opened and Michaela came in.
“Did you do all this?” asked Tabitha.
Michaela shrugged. “Things need to be kept neat in such a small space,” she said.
“You’ve made it identical to how it was.”
“I thought that was best.”
She’d noticed everything, thought Tabitha: how she rolled her tee shirts; where she put her deodorant, her toothbrush; what order her books were stacked; how she attached her pens to her notebook by the clip on their lids.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to say anything.”
Twenty
Tabitha sat at the table in the library and opened the brown notebook that Shona had bought for her. She smoothed the page flat with the palm of her hand. She took the cap off the top of the blue ballpoint pen and stared at the blank paper. She had absolutely no idea where to begin.
Yesterday, the judge had instructed the prosecution to hand over all the evidence, and she vaguely remembered something about timetables and stages. After she had stepped down from the dock, legs weak as water, she had given a young man her prison details so that they could keep in touch with her. But until that happened, was she supposed to sit and wait?
She wrote “Friday, December 21” at the top of her page and underlined it. She drew a snowflake beside it. Perhaps she should begin with everything she could remember about her movements that day. “Cold, sleety, wet, never properly light,” she wrote. She tried to recall what she had told Mora about the day—that she had woken early, but not got out of bed at once; that she had started to make herself porridge, but had run out of milk; that she had gone to the village shop; that she had made herself swim in the inhospitable sea, but she didn’t know at what time; that she thought she might have met people but couldn’t be sure; that Andy had come round when it was already dark, and that was when Stuart’s body had been found.
She wrote each item down beside a bullet point. The trouble was, it was simply a memory of what she had told Mora, which presumably was itself
