Evil Relations (41 page)

I stop after leaving his office, needing a long piss. I remember to wipe my shoes on the backs of my perfect trousers. I’m nervous as hell, but keep telling myself that she didn’t have to come, it would have been easier for her to stay at home – the visit must mean something.

Dad and my probation officer stand at the end of the corridor. Everything is seconds away. I want the loo again but forget that when the hospital screw tells me that my visit will last an hour. He explains that he has to check on me from time to time, but promises to knock first. Then he opens the door.

Maureen sits in front of a table with an empty chair beside her. A small pile of cigarettes lies in the ashtray.
Jesus, I thought I’d never see you, girl
. . .

I get to her before she can stand and kiss her as she rises from the chair. She’s dressed to perfection in clothes I haven’t seen before and her make-up is flawless. But it’s her scent that fills my head. I can’t get enough of it: perfumed, clean and female.

The visit is frantic, verbally. I want to know everything: the boys, the house, her daily existence.
God, I’ve missed you so much, Maureen
. We forgive everything that was done and said between us and she tells me I must never hurt myself again. She shakes her head, she’s sorry, she never wanted that to happen in a thousand years . . .

We hold hands and light cigarettes, smoking them down to the filter. She kisses me halfway through a sentence, cutting off the words, and I can’t help doing the same. We tell each other how well we look and we cry, tearing ourselves apart with apologies. I kiss her neck repeatedly, lingeringly, secretly breathing in her scent, tasting it.

The screw knocks discreetly every ten minutes, popping his head around the door and asking if I’m all right.
Fine, boss
, I answer, while the tears roll down my face and hers,
never been better
.

We discuss and agree on a future together, faithfully promising many changes – two especially, in our own interest as a couple: Tom must go and so must Dad.

The screw knocks and peers in: ‘Fifteen minutes left, Smith.’ He grins widely and gives me a knowing, manly wink. ‘I won’t knock again now until time’s up.’

I think:
thanks, boss, but the last thing I feel like at the moment is a quick bunk-up.

Maureen agrees to write and visit more often and I tell her I’m definitely coming off protection so that our visits can be more like this. She begs me not to, for my own safety, but I shake my head and tell her it’s something I’ve got to do. We kiss and cry again because time is running out. Then we stand up and she tells me to take care and look after myself. I tell her to do the same.

One last, hard kiss, nothing soft and gentle about it; we share tongues and hold it for as long as we can, and then it’s over, gone for ever and I leave the room.

The boss gives me one more minute so that I can talk to Dad. Quietly, I explain the situation to him and he replies, eyes watering, that he already knew that and moved out a week ago. We part quietly, Dad walking away with his head bent low, resigned to the change in all our lives.

In my hospital cell, I sit and look outside at the sex cases walking the line. Tomorrow I’ll be back with them, and part of the old routine of a 23-hours-a-day lock-up, just as if I’ve never been away. But not for long; I’ve got to come off protection, I’ve got to do ‘the right thing’. And I’m convinced that this
is
the right thing, and the only way of saving my marriage to Maureen.

A fortnight later, when my visiting order has gone out to Maureen, I’m told to go to the doctor’s office.

I stand at his desk, frowning, looking at the letter he holds away from him as if it’s on fire.

‘I’m afraid you’ve got some bad news, David. Your wife has left you.’

He glances down at the letter, adding in a heavy voice, ‘And the children have been taken into care.’

Every drop of blood in my body instantly turns to ice.

‘Your wife has returned your visiting order with her letter. Do you want to accept it or would you like me to put you down for the Welfare Officer or the priest?’

I hear myself speaking from the frozen wasteland inside my head.
No thanks
, the sub-zero voice tells the doctor,
I’d rather not read the letter, and as for the Welfare and the priest . . . I’ve been there before
.

When I walk back to my cell, it’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other, and when I go inside and sit on my bunk, I try to feel something to remind myself that I’m still alive, but there’s nothing.

Nothing at all.

*

Joyce visits me alone, telling me that she was
so
sad to hear about Maureen abandoning the kids and moving in with Tom. She didn’t know what was going on, she assures me, but I notice she can’t meet my eyes. We’re on a ‘closed’ visit, which means no contact, yet even with the thick, tall glass between us, I can smell her perfume. As she leaves, we kiss through the glass and she smiles at me.

‘You’re not black, you know.’

It’s the last time I ever see her.

In my cell, I sit and think. The numbness has gone, but the pain I expected to replace it doesn’t come; I concentrate my energies on finding out how the boys are getting on and that alone seems to hold the pain at bay. Dad visits, full of promises, telling me this is in some way a good thing, that we can make a fresh start properly now that Maureen has gone. I want to believe him, but I can’t – I feel too cut off from everyone and the situation still seems hopeless. The only feeling I have is for the boys. Nothing else matters to me.

The strange thing is that although I don’t know it yet, somewhere in the background my new life is beginning without me, carried slowly in the heart of a 14-year-old girl.

Maureen’s neglect of her children had its roots in deep unhappiness and isolation. Increasingly seeking solace in alcohol, she spent her nights at the Moss Side shebeens with Tom, leaving the three boys – Paul was the eldest at six years old – to fend for themselves. Jack Smith was not at home; when he returned from work to find Maureen absent and the children alone, he was outraged, and never more so than the morning when he encountered Maureen in the street with Tom, the two of them still drunk and stoned from the night before. A furious row ensued, and Jack stormed out to stay with a close friend in Hyde. Maureen’s mental state deteriorated rapidly and the situation soon came to the attention of the Welfare Department. Maureen admitted she could no longer cope alone and arrangements were made to take the children into care; they were seriously underweight, riddled with lice and had been sleeping on sheets that hadn’t been changed for months. When their case worker, Mrs Delaney, arrived at Ruskin Avenue to collect the children, Maureen wasn’t there, but the door was open. Mrs Delaney promptly removed the three boys to the Acorns, a reputable care home within a large Victorian property in nearby Fallowfield. Paul, David and John instantly became favourites of Nurse Josephine, one of the younger carers at the Acorns, and their health and spirits rapidly improved.

In Walton Gaol, David was visited by his probation officer, Mr Potter, and given a full explanation of what had taken place at Ruskin Avenue. Mr Potter spared no details about the brutality of the neglect but assured him that the boys were now making excellent progress in a warm, safe place with constant supervision. Within days, David began receiving regular letters from the Welfare Department, keeping him informed of his sons’ well-being, along with up-to-date photographs, and he was delighted when the three boys were given special permission to visit him in prison with Mrs Delaney.

Maureen, meanwhile, found a one-bedroom flat and a job at a department store, abandoning the house in Ruskin Avenue. The council boarded it up, but Jack Smith hired a skip and emptied it of all the rubbish that had piled up during his absence, and put anything he felt worth salvaging into storage. When it was empty, he returned to his friend Martin Flaherty in Hyde, remaining there for several weeks.

In prison, David focused on one thought alone: building a new life for himself and his children.

* * *

My head is clearer than it has been in a very long time.

Dad visits often, diagnosed recently with cancer but seemingly coping well with his illness. The boys are in brilliant form; I see them on a monthly basis and am beginning to remember how it feels to be happy again. Dad talks a lot about my release, insisting that the council will re-house us and that we should buy new furniture for the boys’ return home. Everything is given a positive spin, and although privately I remain apprehensive about the future, some of Dad’s optimism rubs off on me. I play my guitar as often as I can in my cell, learning new songs from the sheet music that Dad brings in as my treat. I’m even managing to tolerate the sex cases on my wing better, and enjoying my nightly game of chess with the screws more. It’s at night, in my bunk, that I think about my rapidly approaching EDR (earliest date of release) and have to swallow the fear about what it might bring. I try to concentrate instead on the practicalities of creating a new and stable home for the boys.

But it isn’t always easy to be upbeat. I wish the past hadn’t happened; I wish my life had been normal and that my failures or triumphs had been my own. I feel bitter in these moments and it hurts. I blame Ian, I blame Myra, and in my worst moments of spiralling loneliness I blame God. I try to imagine a world without my sister-in-law and her thin-lipped boyfriend and find myself selfishly picturing someone else bringing their crimes to the attention of the police. Why did it have to be me? I wanted to be Tom Sawyer or James Dean, living in a yellow submarine under marmalade skies, growing old content and at peace with myself. But here I am.

I make an effort not to be bitter, and most of the time I succeed, but it saddens me that people choose to believe that I am what the two most hated people in the country say I am. The horror of what took place is already history for everyone but the victims’ families; nonetheless, I still have nightmares about Myra Hindley. Ian is no worse and no better than half of the men on my wing, but to my mind Myra is evil in its purest form. It might not seem that way to the people who are already beginning to defend her as a woman who simply did what her lover told her, or those who say she would have gone on to become a normal wife and mother had she not met him, but they don’t know her as I did. If they had seen what I had seen, how would they cope with the truth of her depravity? She haunts me, and will possess my nights forever more.

The time is very close now and I’m scared.

I’ve said goodbye to my cellmates, leaving them my precious chess set, and I’ve shook hands with the screws, too. As I walk through the wing for the very last time, a tremendous din erupts, as all the inmates bang their cups against the doors in a communal goodbye. I shake my head:
fuck the lot of you, beasts.
I’ve got my bag in one hand and my guitar on its strap over my shoulder. The big door is only a few feet away.

Close to the exit, a gate screw approaches, clipboard in hand. One final formality:

‘806713 Smith, sir.’

He nods and gives me a tight smile. ‘Good lad. On your way, then.’

And the door swings open.

Well, Be-Bop-A-Fucking-Lula, this is it. A taxi is waiting – good old Dad – so it’s
Lime Street Station, please,
and off we go. The prison walls speed by and the car seems to sprout wings, as it flies through the city.

‘How was it, mate?’ asks the taxi driver, and I grin at him: ‘Oh, I’m not complaining.’ And I’m not. After life in a tiny cell, the streets appear seriously overpopulated. The driver prattles away and I give him monosyllabic replies, thinking about the new house Dad’s managed to get for us. I picture the boys and my heart aches with the need to be near them.

At the railway station, the pressure of my newfound freedom begins to overwhelm me. People rush about in vast numbers and the noise is ear-splitting. I buy cigarettes that feel the size of cigars after the ones I’ve been used to smoking in prison. I stand on the platform feeling lost. Then a smile sneaks onto my face: I can’t believe how high girls’ hemlines have risen since I’ve been inside. But I feel like a complete moron in my flares, flower-power shirt, leather jacket, tennis pumps and guitar – not forgetting my brand new ‘I’ve just been released’ haircut. Jimmy Dean I ain’t.

On the train I sit tucked up in a corner, imagining my journey will take me to Manchester and no further. But this is the first leg of a very long trip indeed; my train will roll for many years, each roll of its wheels taking me closer to something quietly waiting for me, something I’ve never experienced before: a future.

I watch the fields slide by, clutching my guitar and box of prison letters. In my head I hear John Lennon singing about changing the scene and doing the best that he can; his words always speak to me, and never more than right this minute, heading home on my first day out of prison.

Manchester’s familiar and unmistakeable skyline looms into view. Before I know it, I’m stepping down onto the platform, sniffing the city air and glancing about. I spot Dad as I cross the bridge, but to my amusement he walks straight past me in his hurry to meet the train. I call him back; we hug and he cries buckets. At barely 50 years of age, he’s suddenly become an old man. Cancer is getting the better of him, and his emotions are transparent. We sit together in the tearoom and he talks non-stop about the boys and our new home, where all the furniture he’s been buying from auctions has already been delivered. As we climb into a taxi, he tells me that my future is in Moss Side and my stomach somersaults in despair, given what happened with Maureen there.

My fears become reality when we arrive in Acorn Street and stop outside a large, red Victorian house. I remember walking past these tall terraces as a boy with Mum. In those days, the Irish were starting to move out and black families were moving in. Moss Side is the home of the happy-boys – the Jamaicans – and a real inner-city, northern ghetto. I stand on the doorstep with my guitar and bag, conspicuous white trash just out of prison. Then I glance down and smile: there is a cast-iron coal-grid outside the front door, indicating that the house has a large cellar, big enough for a shebeen. I shake my head: how many times have I heard Otis Redding blasting out from beneath a grid like that?