Never one to bother too much about convention, my mother had simply taken some time off work to look after me when I’d been very little then had found a child minder she’d trusted with her precious little princess and had gone back to her job at the council. She had a decent job in the planning department and lived pretty modestly over the years. Consequently, by the time she was sitting across the table from me in the prison visitors room she had about thirty thousand pounds tied up in stocks and shares.
She said she would liquidate it for me, give me the cash so I could move away, maybe somewhere up north, get a job, start again. Unbelievable generosity when I’d brought her nothing but trouble and pain for the last twenty years.
I’d been useless at school, always in trouble and hanging round with yobs and losers. I’d flirted with drugs, though mercifully had never really gotten too far into that. And I’d gotten involved with Kenny by the time I was sixteen. I had been besotted, and left home as soon as I was eighteen to follow him to Bristol. My mother had pleaded with me not to go, tried to warn me, in that way that mothers have. But I loved him, or thought I did, and in any case I knew best. In that way that teenagers have. It was that simple, and I’d gone without a backward glance.
Apart from occasional cards at Christmas and birthdays the next she had really known of me was when the Southmead had called and told her that I was there and that I needed her. And she’d come. She’d just dropped everything and had been there within two hours.
Sitting together in that prison visiting room, I told her she shouldn’t just hand over her life savings to me. Her reply was simple enough.
“Even though your baby’s dead, that doesn’t stop you being a mother now. Thinking like a mother. And so you’ll understand about priorities, about caring for your child more than anything else in the world. You might be grown up, Sharon, but you’re still my baby and you always will be. And my money’s yours, along with anything else I’ve got that’ll help you.”
And I did understand. Perfectly. So I hugged her and thanked her, and together we planned my new life.
I told her I was going to be a photographer. No, scratch that. I told her I already was
a photographer. She seemed less surprised than I might have expected. Perhaps it’s in the mother’s DNA to know about their child’s unspoken fantasies. Perhaps she knew that all my life I’d harbored a secret fascination for photography but, up until recently, I’d never had an opportunity to really try it out, really get into it. But then, out of the blue, shortly before I found myself in prison, I’d acquired a camera. A really good, state-of-the-art digital camera.
When I say ‘acquired’, I really mean stole. I didn’t tell my mother the details, but the truth is Kenny, me and a couple of other idiots who used to hang around him had stolen it from a bloke we’d mugged down by the river in Bristol way back. Then I’d stolen it from Kenny. Actually he never even knew I had it because I’d shoved it in my pocket instead of the bag with the rest of the stuff we’d got from that job. I’d kept it hidden and had soon worked out how to use it. And that’s when I became a photographer.
Up until then photography had just been a dream, something others did, people who could afford the expensive gear needed for high-quality pictures. But suddenly, courtesy of that man we’d robbed by the river in Bristol, I had a camera and my dream became reality. Before my enforced four-month sabbatical at Her Majesty’s pleasure I started by taking snaps of anything I saw in the neighborhood around me, the grimmer the better, then I’d go round to a friend’s flat to download my pictures onto her laptop.
Summer, my friend with the computer and a flat, worked in the local library. I’d gone in there looking for books on digital photography, and we’d gotten chatting when I asked her if I was allowed to use their computers to download and edit my pictures. She’d explained she was sorry, but no. Internet research only. Or if I was a student I could do my homework. But no downloading pictures—I might be into porn or God knows what. She’d been grinning as she’d said all this—I doubt anyone could look more innocuous than I did—but rules are rules.
On impulse, though, probably because she’d seen me in there a few times by then and I was a sort of regular, and I seemed harmless, she offered to let me use her laptop. She knew I lived near her because my library account showed my address, a few streets away from her flat. She’d said I could come round and use her place, her equipment. She’d even stand me as much coffee as it took. I’d thought she was crackers—despite appearances to the contrary I could have been a dangerous criminal, the judge clearly thought so—but I accepted her generosity. Summer’s kindness set me on the path toward my dream of becoming a photographer, and for a few weeks she was perhaps the best friend I had. Ever.
She thought I was nuts, taking pictures of drunks in shop doorways, piles of rubbish and litter, burned-out cars, vandalized property, stray dogs. My lovely camera even did black and white shots—that guy we robbed obviously knew quality gear—and that was perfect for my sort of material. Classy. To me that was how my world actually looked and I wanted to record it, my life in all its horrible, brutal reality.
The urban realism stuff fascinated me from the beginning, still does I suppose, but as I sat with my mother explaining how I wanted to rebuild my life, I realized that what I’m really passionate about is landscapes. Rural landscapes, different seasons, different locations, but the wilder, the more untamed, the better. So there began my dream of wanting to be a professional landscape photographer, taking pictures that people would want to buy, to pay good money for, to keep—to display on their walls.
I want to capture the moody, timeless, windswept wilderness of Britain’s hills, dales and moorlands, and translate those into beautiful stylish prints. In my mind’s eye I can already see the glorious reds and golds of autumn, the icy whites and blues of winter, the lush springtime greens and the sleepy summertime yellows, layered and blended onto canvas. I see the variegated patterns, some vibrant, some muted, some speckled with humanity in the form of buildings or livestock, some lonely and uninhabited. And I see my name, printed in the bottom corner, marking the work as mine.
I explained all of this to my mother, and she got it. She really did. She could see the photographer in me too. She believed in me. That was all I needed.
* * * *
Her Majesty was kind enough to offer to chuck me out of HMP Eastwood Park after four months. Naturally I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.
Just one week before I was due to be released I was asked to go to the governor’s office. I went along, not alarmed at all. I was a model prisoner, never in trouble. Too busy studying photography, graphic design and ICT in the prison education unit to get involved in anything dodgy. All my energies at that moment were channeled into preparing for the new beginning I’m crafting for myself, which I was so eager to take up as soon as I was released.
It couldn’t come soon enough for me. I was energized, fired up, so enthusiastic that sometimes I forgot about baby David for hours at a time. I was planning to go to my mother’s first and from there look for a suitable location where we might both resettle, somewhere nice and quiet, in the countryside, a place where I could start building my dream. Reinvent my life. And eventually, when Kenny got bored of looking for me and moved on—probably when he found some other sad, lonely, gullible little kid to bully—we might even be able to go back to Gloucester. Or not, we’d see. Yes, life was looking good as I knocked and went into the governor’s office that blustery day in March.
‘Out of control’, ‘speeding’, ‘drunk possibly’, ‘hit-and-run’, ‘pronounced dead at the scene’. I sat, numb, as the governor gently explained why my mother wouldn’t be there to meet me at the prison gate the following week for my release. Why I’d have to make my own way to—wherever. Why I was now finally, totally alone.
I was past tears, past thinking, past feeling as I sat there and let his softly spoken words wash over me. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be my mother who’d been hit by a car on her way home from the library that morning, thrown six feet in the air then died of internal bleeding, broken and battered, in the road, surrounded by her scattered and now torn Regency romances. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen, not at ten in the morning on a quiet side road in suburban Gloucester, not to me, not to my mother. It couldn’t be true.
Chapter Two
But it was true, and just two days later I was walking alone, shivering in the late March chilly breeze, down the road leading away from HMP Eastwood Park.
The governor used his discretion and in the circumstances brought my release forward. It was kind of him, but I wasn’t sure if I appreciated that or not as I’d no plans anymore, no idea what to do next. No clear idea where I was going. Guided by a mixture of instinct and autopilot, I found myself hopping on a bus headed for Gloucester town center, then another bus to my mother’s old home. Once there I stood on the front path in drizzling rain, just staring up at the house where I grew up, looking for some sign of life. And I found it in the form of Sadie, my mother’s old cat, sitting on the doorstep yowling pathetically.
Eventually I let the pair of us in, glad I’d kept my door key even though it’d been years since I lived here. I fed the cat, then Sadie followed me as I walked from room to room, each one cold and quiet, but still full of her life. It was as though she had only just left. And I suppose she had. It was only just over a week ago that she’d sat in her favorite chair to watch
Coronation Street
. Only a few days since she had last stocked up the cupboards with tins. There were vegetables just starting to wrinkle in the rack, bread gone stale but not yet moldy, all evidence that she was here not so very long ago. But not now, no longer, never again.
There was a light tapping at the back door, and I opened it cautiously. I knew it couldn’t be Kenny, but still… It was my mother’s next door neighbor, a woman I vaguely remembered. She recognized me instantly.
“Oh, love, I thought it was you. I told our Norman, I said, ‘It’s her, Sharon from next door. She’s back.’ I told him, I did. I was that sorry to hear what happened. Lovely woman, lovely woman…”
I murmured my thanks as I made to close the door. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but I really wasn’t up to socializing with the neighbors. Mrs Whatserface was made of stern stuff, though, and leaned against the door, craning to see past me.
Does she think I’ve got my mother laid out in the kitchen? That I scooped her up from the side of the road, perhaps, and brought what was left back here?
“Will you be staying on then, love? It’ll be nice to have you back.”
“Er, maybe. I’m not sure yet…”
“No, no, that’s right. I understand. You’ll be selling up then. Probably for the best. Too many memories…”
Starting to become irritated then, I tried in earnest to shut the door. “Excuse me, really, I have to go.”
She was not shifting, though.
This could get difficult.
“It’s just that when you get around to putting it on the market we’d like first refusal. I always said that, told your mother that we’d take the place off her hands. We were planning to knock through, you see, make a nice little annex for Norman’s mother…”
I saw red. There was going to be no knocking through. This place had been in my family for three generations—Norman’s mother would have to make other arrangements. My mind suddenly made up, I told her straight.
“I won’t be selling. My house is not going on the market. Sorry.” I made one last attempt to close the door without trapping her determined fingers in it. And at last she got the message, stepped back off my doorstep. But her feathers were far from unruffled.
“Oh, I see. Well that’s not what I agreed with your mother. And after I fed the cat too. I could have just had the thing carted off by the RSPCA, you know.”
I took a deep breath, and told it to her straight. “I’m staying. Sadie’s staying. There’ll be no RSPCA, and no knocking through. Now fuck off. Please.”
When I reflected on this conversation later I did regret that last remark. I wouldn’t normally speak to anyone like that, least of all a friend of my mother. But it did the trick, and Mrs Whatserface huffed and puffed off back down my path, shooting me a furious glare as she turned into her own gate. I should be grateful to the self-centerd old dear—she helped to crystallize my thinking. I loved that house. I couldn’t live there myself, but I knew if I could avoid selling it, I would.
Back inside, I wandered upstairs, aimlessly drifting from room to room. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror over my mother’s dressing table. Eastwood Park wasn’t over-supplied with mirrors and I’ve never been that interested in my looks in any case. Plain people aren’t. But that chance glimpse of my appearance pulled me up short. My spindly knees gave out and I sank to sit on the bed, shocked.
Is that frail-looking waif really me? I’ve always been skinny but now I look anorexic.
My prison-issue cheap denim jeans and plain white T-shirt didn’t help, and neither did the long, thin, gray cardigan I was hugging to my belly. Christ, what a mess! My hip-length, straight dark hair—possibly my best feature—was lank and dull, overdue a wash by several days. It was pulled back into my signature tight plait. Sometimes I coil it up and stuff the whole lot inside a hood or under a hat. Sometimes I just let the plait hang free down the center of my back, like then.