The Prison Book Club (2 page)

After that job ended, I had returned to my long-time career as a freelance magazine journalist, while ramping up my assistance to my daughter, who was seeking intensive treatment for her illness, and to my mother, who was dealing with Alzheimer's. I was in my mid-fifties and suddenly more caregiver than writer. Maybe Carol was on to something. I did need a change.

I told Carol right away that, of course, I'd help choose a long list of books for the inmates at Collins Bay. It was an opportunity to help a friend, and my husband and I enjoyed our friendship with her and her husband, Bryan, on many levels, not the least of which was their empathy for our daughter and their efforts to help her find health care resources since we'd moved back from England.

As Carol and I continued along the cemetery paths, we talked about the men's reading level and the books they had read so far.
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt had been the first. I could see how a memoir of a miserable Irish childhood would be perfect for inmates, many of whom likely had experienced hardscrabble upbringings. Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel,
The Road
, had been a hit. Carol could barely get a word in edgewise during that book club meeting. And they'd liked Joseph Boyden's novel
Three Day Road
, about two Cree hunters who enlist to serve in World War I, and Barack Obama's memoir
Dreams from My Father
.

I asked her what other sorts of books they enjoyed.

“Well,” said Carol. “The thing is, you really can't tell what works unless you come into the prison and sit in on one of the book club meetings.” That was when I felt my chest tighten and a hole open up beneath me, like my own ready-made grave right there in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

In my mind, I was back in England in 2002. We had moved to London from Dallas two months earlier for my husband's work. It was a Saturday evening in early September and I had just dropped off my sixteen-year-old daughter at a birthday party for one of her new school friends in St. John's Wood. I was driving a Mercedes fleet car supplied by my husband's employer and was focused on not damaging it. I had grown confident about driving on the left, but still had difficulty parallel parking in Cannon Lane up against the nearly two-metre-high brick garden wall that surrounded our rented property in Hampstead. Our small “maisonette” occupied one wing of a Victorian pile called The Logs. The '80s pop star Boy George occupied the grand south wing. Fans would write in chalk on the brick of his garden wall, plaintive messages like
Looking for love
and their telephone number. On our side of the house, very few pedestrians ever wandered down the lane.

That evening, I came at the parking spot the easiest way. I drove up East Heath Road from South End Green, with the darkness of Hampstead Heath on my right, turned left on Squire's Mount, where cannon barrels were mounted like bollards in the sidewalk, and drove down the walled single-lane chute of Cannon Lane. A jasmine vine spilling over the wall was emitting an exotic, citrusy perfume and as I passed, the scent wafted into the open car window. I inched by the few parked cars in the lane, found the designated parking spot in front of our house, and focused on manoeuvring the car as close to the wall as possible so that other vehicles could squeeze by. Back, forth, back, back, forward a pinch, back again, straighten the steering wheel.

It was only when I stepped out and closed the door that I noticed two tall black men with unusually long coats and tweed flat caps walking toward me. They were staring at me intently. I hesitated for a second and then saw them break into a run—straight toward me. I ran too—as fast as I could with my osteoarthritic left knee— and managed to press the doorbell by the garden door, knowing my husband was in the house on a business call with colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K. Then I felt a hand over my mouth and an arm around my neck, hoisting me into the air.

The feeling of being strangled was not what I expected. Yes, there was the lack of air. But, oddly, no fear. And my lungs weren't bursting. Not yet. I was hanging by my throat from the crook of one man's arm, suspended in a chokehold, strangling under my own weight. The other man tried to grab my feet, which I flailed about in an attempt to kick.

I looked up and saw the light still on in my daughter's bedroom window. I thought of my husband, safely inside, and of my son, safely at university in Canada.
You have to survive for your family
ghosted in as a thought.

What did they want? They had said nothing. They had just silently set upon me. I had instinctively thrown my purse containing my house keys over the garden wall during the pursuit. In my left hand, my cellphone's screen and numbers glowed pale green in the darkness. In my right hand, my car key was clenched tight. I opened my hands to present both as offerings. No takers.

If they didn't want a Mercedes and a cellphone, then they wanted something else. My mind went to other possibilities. Rape. I was perhaps too old: forty-six. Murder. I was only forty-six—too young to die. From where I was struggling, it was about fifteen metres to the densely thicketed and treed border of Hampstead Heath. They would have to cross the two narrow lanes of East Heath Road to get me there. But at that time of the evening, there would be long gaps between passing cars. It was possible to cross and be unseen by anyone.

Then terror set in. I felt panic rising in my chest and my heart slamming against my rib cage. If my throat had been open I would have vomited. My lungs grew hard. I dropped the phone and pulled at the arm around my throat. I kicked, but there was no leverage. My eyes closed and the image of my daughter's window, and the outline of the fuchsia bush against it, remained imprinted on my eyelids.

I pulled once more, and then my husband's voice came through on the garden gate intercom saying, “Ann, is that you?” There was no way to answer. And then I was out of ideas, and surrender to death came floating in like a lazy impulse, as insignificant a decision as looking up from work for a moment. It was my last thought.

I told the story to Carol and she stopped walking, turned to face me and brought her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, Ann. But what happened? Were you just unconscious or did someone resuscitate you?” she asked, her brow furrowed.

I could still see it so clearly. I came to, lying on the road in the darkness, and heard the sound of feet running away. They must have dropped me hard because there was a sharp pain in one elbow. The garden gate was open, so my husband must have remotely released the gate lock and the sound must have scared them off. I stumbled along the pea-gravelled garden walk, hoarsely calling my husband's name. “I've been mugged,” I croaked. He ran up the path to pursue them, but I stopped him. “They're huge. They'll kill you, they'll kill you.”

He hesitated, then, thankfully, turned back.Within five minutes, my husband's boss, who'd been on the conference call with him, and who also lived in Hampstead, arrived at the house. He must have called the police, because they arrived five minutes after that and interviewed me in our living room amid the many moving boxes that we hadn't yet unpacked. I have no recollection of how my daughter got home from the party or how I got to the hospital but those things happened.

“I'm okay these days,” I said to Carol. “It's just that going into Collins Bay might spark the fear again.”

“What was the fear like?”

I was embarrassed sometimes to relate how acute my response had been compared to that of some other women in the neighbourhood who'd been attacked in the same way after driving home alone in a Mercedes. I'd heard of an American woman who'd had her emerald ring stolen in a strangulation robbery in front of her house, just a few blocks away, with her children nearby. Like me, she'd been unconscious, but upon opening her eyes, she stood up, brushed herself off and said, “I've got to get these kids to soccer.”

In contrast, my reaction was intense. I cried unexpectedly and often and didn't leave the house for a week, spending much of it in bed. My husband took that week off to comfort me. My voice was an unrecognizable rasp from the strangling. On the night of the attack, I'd sat in the emergency ward of Hampstead's Royal Free Hospital sobbing, until I had to stop long enough for the specialist to peer down my throat. A detective had been in and taken a DNA swab from my mouth and collected my clothing as evidence. He hoped to match traces of my DNA to that on the clothing of the suspects. I kept thinking one thought: Why wasn't someone
good
in the lane just then? If someone
good
had been in the lane, they would have intervened.

Finally, I decided it was time to get out of the house. I couldn't walk up the lane, the natural route to Hampstead High Street. Even in daylight. So my husband walked with me down a busier set of streets. On the High Street I scanned the faces of the passing men for signs of kindness, needing reassurance that there was goodness in human beings, not evil. Most faces were emotionless, busy. Then I saw a man in his early sixties with wire-rimmed glasses, gentle eyes and greying hair, carrying a book. His gaze was intelligent and open. I pictured him in the lane outside my house, which comforted me. I clutched my purse less tightly then.

We walked home along Well Road, and I looked up the southern end of Cannon Lane. Then I stopped abruptly. I had forgotten that this stretch of our lane contained a tiny one-cell 1730s jail built into the side of a brick wall. Unused now, of course, but still with its original heavily barred lunette windows. It was constructed as a parish lock-up when the adjacent house, known as Cannon Hall, served as a courthouse. An ironic twist, to be accosted at the very doorstep of a jail. Almost as ironic as the security camera mounted on our house: it pointed directly at the crime scene, but was not operational.

I soon discovered that I couldn't walk at night or park in underground parking garages, which made it hard to attend my evening writing classes. Walking home from book club at friends' houses in the neighbourhood was terrifying. I couldn't set foot on Hampstead Heath without a walking companion.

In the weeks that followed I saw an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harley Street, a psychologist in Welbeck Street in Marylebone and an art therapist in Hampstead.The ENT said that no permanent damage had been done to my throat. My voice was still hoarse, though, and I had lost the upper octave of my singing range. He assured me that at least my speaking voice would return to normal, unlike another recent strangulation robbery victim I'd read about who had been rendered permanently mute. The psychologist heard me out and said that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and would have a peripheral startle response for months to come. Anything approaching me from the left or right would trigger it. It was true. I once opened the garden door to step into the lane and the postman was approaching on my right, a few feet away. I screamed involuntarily and slammed the door. I can't imagine what he must have thought. As for the art therapist, she brought oil pastels and paper to the house and encouraged me to deal with my feelings through drawing.

My husband's employer, concerned about an attack on one of its new expats, sent its global head of security, a sympathetic fellow formerly with the London Metropolitan Police, to provide me with a security briefing. It felt like a scene from an early 007 movie. He arrived with a briefcase full of gadgets. First, he pulled out a heavy thirteen-inch aluminum flashlight that could be used as both a defence weapon and an alarm. There was a button for the barking-Doberman sound and another for a police siren. For weeks I was inseparable from that flashlight. For my purse and pockets, he handed me square pocket alarms triggered by grenade-like pull strings. They were eardrum-piercing. The strings tended to catch on things, so I was forever setting them off and frightening people. A spray canister was next. Not mace, but invisible marking spray that only became visible under ultraviolet light. If the police later picked up the marked assailant, he might not even know he'd been tagged.

The security expert also taught me to read and memorize the licence plates of any cars following mine and to take evasive routes home if the same vehicle remained in my rear-view mirror for too long. He coached me to avoid being boxed in by cars at stoplights and warned me never to occupy the middle lane of a three-lane thoroughfare—both standard anti-kidnapping operating procedures. A friend taught me self-defence techniques, including how to scrape the heel of my shoe down the shin of a chokehold robber.And I visited a rescue kennel in search of a Belgian shepherd dog because I had heard that Belgian shepherds would leap walls to come to their owner's defence. I was well equipped for danger and remained on high alert through the remaining three years of our stay in London.

“And did they get the men who did it?”

“I can't talk about that right now,” I said. I hated talking about it still: the fact that they found one man but not the other, that he was charged with numerous similar assaults and pleaded guilty to several, including mine, and that the judge at London's Middlesex Guildhall court, in sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison, had characterized the assaults as having been carried out with “utterly callous and ruthless efficiency,” saying it was lucky that none of the women he attacked had died. I couldn't tell her about the police lineup or the visit to victim services. It made me sick to remember it and for long stretches of time my memory of those experiences, and even of the name of the convicted man, lapsed.

“How dreadful,” she said with empathy in her voice, and we walked in silence for a while, pointing out blue jays and cardinals. “Given all of that, what do you think? Do you think you could come into Collins Bay and visit the men in the book club? Maybe it would even help you.”

“Let me think about it, Carol. In the meantime, I'll get you some book suggestions.” We were back at the car near my father's gravesite. I looked over at his spot. “Bye for now, Dad,” I said softly, and opened the car door for Carol.