‘Valerie’s all I’ve got left,’ says Diana, swilling the Alka-Seltzer round the glass, watching the tiny white crystals cling to the edge, the vortex of water in the middle. ‘She’s the only one who can . . .’
Edmund spoons the dog’s meat from the tin into the bowl. ‘Who can what?’ It never fails to make him feel very happy, watching the dog eating his breakfast.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Clean slate, that sort of thing. Things that can be said, once and for all.’
Like Monty whining at the door, Edmund wants to get out. Although he and Diana have travelled widely in their three short years of marriage, the past is a country neither of them is particularly comfortable in visiting, the passports to those places hidden deep in drawers that are overfull and difficult to open. Hovering at the back door, he calls his questions through to her: ‘What sort of things?’
‘It’s a very long time ago and you don’t want to hear all that.’
He hugs her. ‘Silly billy,’ he says, ‘And here’s Monty.’ He ruffles the dog’s ears. ‘He doesn’t want you to be sad either, do you, Monty?’
The next day, Diana makes the call, almost as if Valerie is there beside her, sisters in their stockinged feet supporting each other through their memories, and she will say I am sorry and Valerie will say none of it was your fault, it was all his, I believe you. No reply. She has to leave a message because phones are not allowed in prison and Valerie is visiting Solomon.
Chapter Four
On the way from the station to the prison, Valerie sits as she always does, if she can, on the top floor at the front of the bus. The next stop is the shopping centre where the road goes under the walkway from the multi-storey to the supermarket, all the people in the air above her crossing from one side to the other. It seems unreal that your mother should be dead while you’re on the number 52. Through the glass windows of the first floor of the department stores, figures are swimming between racks of clothes like goldfish. She bought her mum a cardigan from there last Christmas, but in the years Paul kept them apart her mother put on weight and it didn’t fit. Finally, the bus picks up speed, out through the town, the drives of the houses getting longer the further out you go. Take Diana. She has the longest drive of all. Valerie smiles to herself. Solomon would say you shouldn’t judge people by the length of their drive.
At HMP Brackington, the ladies’ room is packed. Relatively speaking, she is a new girl at all this but she’ll never become an old hand; Solomon is over half way through already. She puts her pound coin in the locker and is about to close the door when her phone beeps.
‘Can you and Michael come to stay at Wynhope the night after the funeral? Hope so. We can catch up again after all this time. Di.’
Of all the things she is expecting, this is the least likely, but her number is up on the board and she barely has time to process the invitation before she has to start the long, humiliating security process which divides her from Solomon. Through one door. Locked behind you. Feet astride on yellow footprints on the floor, like someone has stood in a great big pot of her Spring Sunshine. Arms outstretched. Sniffer dogs. Another door. Locked behind you. The only time Mikey came with her he said it was a bit like his computer game Lockdown, all about getting to the next level; she should never have brought him, even on a family day. It makes her angry that he should even have to think about prison at his age, that Paul should be free as a bird and Solomon locked up. Anyone who knows what a peaceful man he is would realise that he’d never assault a police officer on a protest march unless the police officer assaulted him first, but who was going to listen to his side of the story? And what about people like Diana’s husband, sitting around sucking his silver spoon and never worshipping anything other than money, never campaigning for anything other than himself? Bet he’s not squeaky clean, but they wouldn’t send him down, would they? She wonders what he is really like, this Edmund. If she says yes to the invitation, she will know soon enough.
When Solomon hears the news about her mum, he cries, even though he’s only met her the once, and Valerie ends up comforting him across the gap between the bolted-down chairs. It is seven years since he’s seen his own mother.
‘My long-lost sister Diana’s invited us to stay the night after the funeral,’ says Valerie. ‘I just got a text.’
‘In her stately home? Well, that’s a yes from me. I’ll apply for a pass right away.’
‘Oh, stop it, Sol.’ Valerie manages to laugh. ‘Why’s she done it, do you think?’
‘After everything you’ve told me about your family, sounds like an olive branch.’
‘I don’t know. Even if it is, she’ll want to be raking over the past.’
Around him, row upon row of visitors and prisoners bend towards each other at the blue plastic tables like chess players. The past and poorly thought-out moves are what have got most of them here in the first place, one way or another.
‘What is the worst that can happen?’ he asks.
They pull their hands apart, clasp them together again under the table. She can feel him turning the ring on her finger. He should be out in three months, the church is keeping his job open for him, the flat will be finished. This is what hope feels like, she thinks, and tells him what she’d seen on television, how it reminded her of Mikey sitting on his shoulders in the park last summer.
‘You know I’d do anything for him,’ says Solomon. ‘If anything ever happened to you, I’d be there for him.’
That evening, hands behind his head, lying on his bed in his cell after lockdown, Solomon’s thoughts are a flickering screen obscuring the prayerfulness he sought. He wants her now, not just for the sex, although he wants that too, but he wants her so he can be someone for someone again, a gentleman for Val, a proper father for Mikey. In the photo he keeps, Mikey is running after a football, the little boy’s face screwed up with determination. He scored, but it was as if the kid didn’t know how to celebrate. Out in the fresh air, he didn’t look as geeky as usual, just frizzy hair and stumpy legs and nine years’ worth of wariness.
Turning to his Text for the Day, Solomon tries to focus: ‘They that visited us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
So Solomon begins to sing quietly to himself. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’
No, comes the reply from the bottom bunk.
‘Were you there when the stone was rolled away?’ Solomon laughs, but he has the good grace to sing silently, only to himself.
On the bus going home, Valerie texts back: ‘Thx Di, Mikey and I would love to stay the night. X Val.’
Chapter Five
On the morning of the funeral Mikey wakes up with the day lying awkward beside him. He hates the idea that school will go on without him, the lining up, the working out, and, even worse, he already hates two days’ time when everyone will look at him and wonder where he’s been, or everyone won’t look at him, like it hasn’t mattered that he hasn’t been there. His mother says staying at his aunty’s is an opportunity to put things right. What things, he doesn’t know. What he does know is that stuff doesn’t often get put right, not overnight.
Downstairs, the cat is waiting to go out. Having found a packet of crisps in the cupboard and the remote down the back of the sofa, he flicks through the channels: a quiz show, a chat show, a stupid cartoon for little kids, a cooking show, a shopping show. Finally, he finds a nature show all filmed underwater where the fish bulge at the camera, silenced thousands of feet below the surface of the sea. Even the voice of the man explaining the fish sounds as though it belongs in a different world, and Mikey finds himself on the side of the fish. The cat comes back, he finds three more jigsaw pieces of Elvis’s boots, eats another packet of crisps and hides the empty packets, and then it is the nine o’clock