Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (25 page)

I remembered it well from that brief visit years ago. The central atrium, the four radiating wings and, you know, right in the middle a great showoff staircase, as if the whole bleeding place is some kind of fancy film set. The choking feeling of the artificial lights, how everyone's skin soon looks grey and strange, as if we're all underwater. The metal pimples along the walls—emergency buttons—how tempting it is to push one yourself, just to get into some trouble, just to bring on an event. It's so frenetic in remand that you almost long to be a lifer, to live on the top floor where things are quiet and regular. We all live for the arrival of the Jolly Trolley, six o'clock, with whatever sweeties we've been allowed by On-site Pharmaceuticals. In my case it's just sleeping tablets, but it's still the highlight of the day.

So, Dad and Annie come to visit me, and bring Gracie. I have a second court date soon, and they're here to “keep my spirits up,” Dad says. He's grey these days; he's nearly fifty. His eyebrows have stayed black and bushy, and with a more solid build, and all that pent-up strength, he looks like he should be twirling up the lather in the Russian baths—but he still has his old sparkle, and he manages to make me laugh, picking on one of the woman screws “built like a brick shit-house,” he says, and looking like Uncle Charlie in drag. Dad laughs—looks shiftily up and down the room—then coughs and heaves, and Annie worriedly pats him on the back.

“Your dad's got to take it easy,” Annie says. “The doctor says.”

He's had a health scare, I gather, his ticker. And—he doesn't tell me this himself, but Annie does, she says it proudly. He's got a stall on the Roman Road. Flowers.

“Blinkin' hell, Dad—don't tell me . . .” I say. “You're not planning to go straight?”

He looks embarrassed, shifts in his seat, says “nah,” and then, catching a sharp look from Annie, shrugs. Gracie sits there, quiet in her jeans and striped top, always watchful. Gracie is ten now, and clever, Annie says, “like you, Queenie.” You know Grace is
listening
and you know that Annie and Dad haven't quite got her measure. Grace could stay in school, even pass her Eleven Plus, the way she's going, according to Annie. Dad swells up a bit, looks proud, when Annie says this. I feel a stab of something fierce, but I say nothing.

“I don't understand how you're back in here,” Annie chats on, not noticing. “Why didn't she sentence you then and there?”

“Oh, it's because they asked for other offenses to be taken into account. Or something. That was just appearing in court to be charged, but, you know, they found out about—well, quite a few other occasions.”

Twenty-two other occasions of hoisting, to be exact. They're so determined to hang that on me, they never even looked around the club. Never sniffed out anything at all; so obsessed with catching this one girl, this hoister; they missed a whole industry.

“So, that woman—the magistrate—she said something about not being able to give me a sentence as long as I deserved. Can you believe that? And they're waiting for further reports or something. I don't know. I think it might be to do with, you know . . .”

“Oh, yeah. How you keeping in yourself?” Annie says, which is her way of asking about the baby. She was there in court. She heard the prison doctor's report read out. Dad looks down, glances at his watch. I know I don't show yet but my hand drifts towards my stomach and since I can't think what to say I just leave it there. A bun in the oven. For some reason I think of Nan.

“Stella's been to see me,” I mutter. Annie replies too quickly: “That's nice.”

“And Bobby.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Not Tony, though.”

“Oh.”

“We had a fight.”

“Well, Queenie, I think our time's up,” Dad says, standing up, looking nervously behind him, as if expecting someone to put their hand on his shoulder. I knew he wasn't listening, but does he have to make it so obvious that he wants to go?

“Isn't this where, you know, that woman was hanged?” Gracie asks, suddenly.

“What?”

“Your dad's right—we oughta be going,” Annie sweeps in, quickly.

“Take care of yourself.” Dad gives Gracie a shove towards the door.

“See you in court on Thursday,” Annie says. “We'll be rooting for you.”

“Thanks,” I say. It comes out small and I clear my throat and try again, more heartily. “Yes. See you Thursday.”

Hard not to wonder how much Annie's rooting is worth. Just as well that as usual, I've made my own plans.

What that magistrate said, about terrible childhoods, has hit home a little, but not in the way she meant. It has made me think about the baby. Never mind
my
childhood, too late to alter that—but there's no way I'm going to have a baby born in prison. Women do, of course, all the time. And not just in novels like
Moll Flanders
, either. I once read a horrible statistic that babies born behind bars—to convicted mothers—had a 50 percent chance of ending up inside themselves, before the age of eighteen. Well,
prison
is not the neighborhood I'd want any child of mine to be raised in.

And then I thought again about Dad going straight, and Annie's shy glance at him when I accused him of it, and what I caught in that look. Hopefulness. Optimism. And Gracie in her stripey t-shirt that she thinks makes her look Parisian but makes me think of a cartoon criminal, you know, carrying a bag of swag. The whole scene makes me angry, and sick. He can do this now, can he, do it for Annie and Gracie but not for me or Bobby, not for Mum? The truth is he's just getting old and fat, lost his nerve, and he's using Annie's nagging as an excuse to give up. It troubles me. It makes me want to get him on his own and shout at him. It makes me want to get hold of Gracie, too, and shake her hard.

So it's a long walk back down the winding stone steps to my cell, past the walls with the scratch marks in them from other desperate prisoners. Grace's comment about Ruth flares up in my mind—last summer, we were standing by the radio at nine o'clock exactly, listening to the pips, and knowing that was the time, the exact minute . . . I crush that thought. If I give birth in there, I know I'll never see my baby again. She'll be adopted out in a jiffy, that's what they always do. I'd serve out the rest of my sentence without her. My dock brief gave me the possibilities and even with a short sentence, that's what I'm looking at. Giving birth in prison.

My cellmate, an old brass called Rita, is waiting for me, wanting to share her squares of chocolate and tell me about her little grandson Thomas, how well he's doing, and all sorts of other crap I'm not interested in. I don't want to think about Gracie with her piano lessons and Eleven Plus and Mummy and Daddy at home, just like in the storybooks. All I know is, no daughter of mine—I don't know why I'm so certain it's a daughter, but I am—is going to start life here. I thrash about on my thin cot, scrunching the blanket up to my ears and listening to the murmur of voices. Of clicky steps and keys jangling outside the door and the racket as the Jolly Trolley passes by. Then at last, a bit of a hush for the evening. The loneliest sounds in the world: the flap lifting and shutting on the spy holes as screws walk the corridors, checking up on us.

I drift off a little but my dreams since being pregnant have been so powerful that I'm not sure I'm sleeping or hallucinating bolt awake. I'm back in that high-castle place, where I visited Mum that day with Gloria. And there she is, as she's been all this time, in her nightie. Crisp packets and fag-ends floating round her feet. Her face one minute vacant and depressed, hopeless; the next alive with spite and rage, as she could be, sometimes. Shall I send ya then, shall I? I'm saying to her, and laughing. Then she's suddenly a girl herself, and giggling, and she has a white horse and flowers in her hair, and she's in Ireland, a place I've never been, and we're girls together now, skipping. We have new names, both of us, little girl names, I think we must be sisters, and I'm saying to her: come with me, don't be left behind, come on to a better place, the one I'm going to with my new life and my new things, lovely things and not the bleak grey fog of your life, not the Docks, not the gutter—no, this place is full of books, everything is rose-pink and white here, full of cherry blossoms. Come with me, why don't you?

But you really want to leave me behind, she says, and in the dream, I know at last. She's dead. The spy hatch opens. I think perhaps I screamed, or shouted. The cell is black again and I can't see Moll's face, she's just a dark shriveled child, a little girl with nothing, and I'm crying now, I know it was my fault. I'm an evil daughter, a bad girl. I took a new name, I took new things, grabbed at things, I
wanted
things. I rejected her, whatever she tried to give me that day I visited. I left her there holed up to rot. She didn't leave me, give me up, as I always felt. I abandoned her.

T
hursday comes and I'm dressed in my normal clothes to go to court, as remand prisoners always are. I'm flanked by two women guards, and they park up on a side street, outside the court. As we go into the building, I ask one of the warders if I can go to the lavatory. I'm lucky, as it's the Mother Hen one, who knows I'm pregnant. She glances at my belly—quite flat actually, but I know she knows—and she nods at me, sort of embarrassed, and says she'll wait outside. So far so good.

I'm inside the lavatory, and I listen quietly by the door. I start counting, I can't help myself. Come on, Stella, come on. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .

Then I hear heels clicking down the corridor outside and Stella's familiar cough, loud enough to let me know she's there. I know she'll be wearing a wig but there's a moment when I think oh my God, maybe someone has recognized her, could they connect us somehow? I step inside a cubicle, lock the door, and stand on the closed toilet seat. The toilet chain dangles from the cistern and gently taps against me, as I lean forward, trying to wedge open the window. It's green with the ivy growing on it outside, and has a stiff little catch at the bottom, encrusted with grease and rust. I prize at this, desperation rising in my stomach.

Keep talking, Stella.

This is my chance, this is it, the only one, I have to grab it now . . . I push and push at the catch, wedging my thumb under it to try and lever it up. It's not locked, it's just stuck with years of locked-down filth. And then—finally—it gives, with a spring, and one nail wobbles loose and drops to the floor with a clatter so loud I think my head will explode. I hold my breath, and heave myself towards the window. An envelope of window. It's slim, but then, despite being four months pregnant, so am I. I push the glass out and upwards, like a door flap. I've taken my shoes off and left them on the lavatory floor, toes pointing outwards so that if Mother Hen looks underneath it might look for a moment as if I'm sitting there. That might give me valuable seconds.

It looks a long way down. There's a couple of bins I can head for to break my fall, which will have to be face first. I've wiggled out far enough to the waist to free my arms and shoulders and find myself where I hoped I would be, in an area that stinks of bad drains—the rear entrance to the court just like Stella described it—and so there's nothing for it but to push myself forward and try to steady myself as I land crashing onto the nearest bin. I wipe my stinging, greasy hands on my slacks and take a couple of heaving breaths, bending double. I try and pull myself together, look around.

Where's the wall Stella thought I could climb over—surely she didn't mean that one? I have to run and throw myself at it and realize with a sickening dread that Stella must have forgotten how short I am, and that I'm four months pregnant, too, and not as nimble as usual. I hurl myself at it again and manage to snatch at the top with the tips of my fingers, bricks scraping under my nails as I haul myself with all my strength—with a strength that surprises me—and sort of fling myself violently over the other side, tearing my slacks and scraping my arm and cheek, but only dimly conscious of any pain, bouncing back onto my feet and half running, half walking down the main road.

Now the next problem—where's the blinkin' motor? Where is Tony? I smooth down my blouse to try and look respectable, praying that no passerby will glance down at my stockinged feet and wonder about me. I think that I can hear voices, blokes' voices, and at any moment I expect to see the silver badge of a police helmet glinting in the sun.

My stomach rushes at me, welling up, and I have to turn towards one of the spiked fences to throw up in someone's geranium boxes. My usual reaction to nerves, made worse by the pregnancy. Surely they will have noticed by now in the court that I'm gone and raised the alarm? How long can Stella keep the screw talking? Tony, where the fuck are you?!

Then at last it's there: the loveliest sight in the world, a car with its engine running and the window open and there inside it is not Tony, but Bobby, my lovely darling brother, in a mohair suit and a spanking new trilby: monkey-faced Bobby, grinning from one blinkin' ear to the other.

The car is spanking new, too. A red Austin-Healey 100, like something from the London Motor Show, one of those sports cars with a cream side panel, just shrieking to be noticed, parked up on Queen Victoria Street with the engine running.

I rush to it, and fling the door open.

“Blimey, Bobby, you flash git—what a motor to pick!”

His foot is on the accelerator before I've even slammed the door shut and his grinning doesn't stop, his mouth is stretched wide.

“Is that all the fucking thanks I get? Thought I'd greet you in style—you know, in the manor . . .”

I lean over and squeeze him, making his hands in their leather gloves wobble on the wheel a bit. He nods towards a bag and I reach over and pick out what he's brought me: a hilarious Bardot wig and a pair of cat's-eye sunglasses—and we're off, squealing up Liverpool Street, our hearts soaring up towards the true blue sky, heading towards Hackney, laughing and shouting: hysterical. I've never loved my brother more.