Jake said nothing, but just listening to her filled him with an utterly unfamiliar sensation. Hard to put a name on, but when he analysed it later on back in his cell, he knew exactly what it was. It was hope, plain and simple. No two ways about it, she was offering him a lifeline.
And he’d have been a fool not to grab at it like a sinking man about to be saved.
So this was it then, this was freedom. For the first time in two years, Jake had no one to answer to only himself. And it was – no other word for it – intoxicating. Delirious enough to get high on, if he hadn’t sworn off all that years ago. He felt invincible, like William Wallace at the end of the movie Braveheart, as played by Mel Gibson with a faceful of Avatar-blue paint all over him, where he just wanted to yell out at the top of his lungs over and over again, that one delicious word … freedom.
Astonishing the things you missed when you’d been away. Ask any of the lads inside, and they’d all tell a different tale: some missed their wives, girlfriends, kids, others the little things like being able to stroll into a pub on a Sunday afternoon, order a pint, read the paper, maybe watch a match on telly. But for Jake, what he’d missed most was that rare thing, privacy. Never for one second were you left alone inside, even in the showers you were supervised, always being watched. It was a thing he vowed never to take for granted again, not as long as he lived.
And now here he was, Jake Keane, living the life of a respectable man. It was like some kind of strange, surrealist dream come true and in his darker moments – of which there were many – he worried about the tap on his shoulder, the unwanted phone call, or the midnight hammering on his hall door that would land him right back at square one. But he tried his best to tune those thoughts out and instead to focus on the positives. God knows, for once in his life, there were an abundance of them to choose from.
He owed Eloise so much, and Jake was a proud man, unused to either being helped altruistically or being under a compliment. Particularly to someone who’d just brush all his badly articulated expressions of heartfelt thanks aside. But if it was the last thing he ever did, he swore that somehow he’d find a way to pay Eloise back.
For starters, there was this gorgeous flat he now had the run of, for a reasonable rent he could just about afford. It was tiny, admittedly, a one-bedroom apartment just off the main Sandymount Road, in one of those new developments that had shot up like mushrooms during the property boom. Course now half of the apartments in block after block were little more than negative equity millstones round the neck of owners who had taken a punt on them in better times, and now they just lay empty and deserted. Kind of like living in a ghost town, with very few neighbours and even fewer lights dotted round the block whenever it got dark.
But to Jake, it was like crashing out in the penthouse suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Sheer, unimagined luxury. And here, in his own tiny little space, he was finally, finally free.
He could do as he pleased, when he pleased. Go out for long solitary walks down Sandymount Strand any time it suited him, with no one’s permission to ask. No sirens blaring that heralded a fight breaking out in some far-away wing, meaning lockdown for one and all, no lights-out at a time when you could still hear small kids out playing on the still sunlit streets, no handcuffs, no iron security gates to pass through every five metres, no clinking of keys … There was just him and him alone and there were times he thought he was drunk on the sheer high of it.
He felt like a proper adult, with a normal life all ahead of him, something he’d scarcely dreamt of only a few weeks back.
And all he had to do was not f**k it up.
Eloise continued to astonish him with her random acts of kindness, all done in her usual brusque, businesslike manner. He’d actually never expected to see her again. As soon as he’d moved into the flat and given her a month’s rent plus a deposit upfront for her sister, that technically should have heralded the end of all her dealings with him. And yet still she kept coming back. Just for friendly chats, just to see how he was doing. Lately she’d taken to dropping in on him at the oddest times, like very late at night when she’d just have finished up work for the day, or early on weekend mornings, when again, she was only about to start her day’s work.
Initially, she never stayed for more than half an hour at a time, just long enough for her to check what work he’d done on his CVand which language schools he was applying off to. Like a teacher looking for progress reports, he thought. As if she hadn’t done enough for him, she’d even helped him out there too. She’d glossed up his resumé for him and had added on loads of embellishments he’d never even thought of. All the skills that he’d learned in Wheatfield, she’d pounced on, made an asset of.
And so now, under ‘outside interests and hobbies’, he had listed a not-unimpressive array of accomplishments, from carpentry to cooking. She’d even thrown in metalwork. Fleshes it all out a bit, she’d told him, makes you sound more interesting, more three-dimensional. Spoken with all the authority of a woman who’d not only scanned through thousands of CVs in her time, but who could also freely quote – in some cases dating from years back – examples from the ones that had impressed her and horror stories from the ones that arrived on her desk stained with coffee mug rings all around them.
‘Photographic memory?’ he’d asked her at the time, wryly grinning at her from the corner of his mouth.
‘Comes in very handy in my gig, believe me,’ she grinned back and as ever, it astonished him how approximately ten years fell off her face when she allowed herself to crack even the tiniest smile.
Not only that, but she’d encouraged him to open up a library account too, so he could borrow all the English and psychology books he needed to study for his Open University exams, which were only round the corner. She’d even earmarked a couple of language schools in town that she’d heard on the grapevine were stuffed to the gills with students and suggested he apply off to those first. Chances were they could do with having a few substitute teachers on their roster.
Jake gladly took her advice and was astonished to find that in no time at all, his days had become far fuller and busier than he ever could have anticipated. He would get up early each morning, cook a proper breakfast (cooking came easily after a spell inside; everyone was required to spend at least three months of the year working in the prison kitchens and what you’d learned stayed with you), then start into the books, which he loved far more than he could ever hope to put into words.
For hour after hour, he’d sit at the tiny desk in the one-roomed studio flat and pore over his course texts, cup of coffee beside him, feeling like a real, proper student. Feeling so very deeply privileged; as though all the chances he’d never had as a kid, or as a teenager, all the opportunities that he’d missed out on, had by some boomerang of a miracle, come back to him.
As it happened, he was studying Pygmalion by one of his favourite writers, George Bernard Shaw, for his English exam. And he found it ironic and funny at the same time, that a guy like him, an ex-con, a criminal with a past who’d been in and out of correctional facilities all his youth, could relate so easily to a character like Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with a rough background whose main problem in life was that she said ‘cuppa tae’ instead of cup of tea and yelled obscenities at racehorses on Ascot opening day.
And yet in spite of everything, he could all too easily identify with this character. He’d even written a bit about the subject in one of the essays he’d had to hand in to his course tutor. He and Eliza Dolittle both despised where they’d come from and didn’t want to get sucked back. They both wanted more out of life, without being dragged back into the past any more. The past was another country, Jake had learned, one he never, ever intended revisiting.
Enter Eloise Elliot, like a female Henry Higgins in a black power suit and high heels, who was good enough to provide a halfway house for him, all the time encouraging him onwards and upwards. And education, she impressed on him time and again, was the key to the unlocked low door in the wall, the one that led to a better life.
His mam