"Chapter 1 - Daunting Prospects"

Freedom is a virtue of life, an inevitable human right. Something that is valued by multitudes of people. Forty years of freedom is an elongated yet extensive period of time in someone's life. An infinity and recurring amount of possibilities could happen in that time; you could have children, watch them grow, you could go and venture the world, you could make life-long friends and bonds, you could gather friends and regale some songs. Finally - you could enjoy your freedom, the right to do whatever you want regarding society's rules and laws that ensure the safety of all citizens. Being at liberty and being at one with nature, watching the sun set and the sun rise, and the composition of colours that is visually pleasing to anybody that appreciates natures work. Freedom allows you to do whatever you want, and allows you to envisage and create a future for yourself, your friends and your families with multiple choices that are all up to you. After all, all you have is time right?

For Bea Smith, the realisation that she would be spending forty years of her life being locked up being bars in confinement at Wentworth Correctional Centre was overwhelming and sinister. The question that kept going over Bea's head again and again is "what am I going to do?". She dawned upon this question as she sat in the bus that was driving towards Wentworth Prison. They had been housed at Walford, the men's prison, for the last four months as a result of a fire caused by the former governor of Wentworth and her arch nemesis, Joan Ferguson. They were packed off to Walford, much to Bea's liking and she did not have the pressures of being top dog, a huge pressure and responsibility to take, which allowed reality to come upon her and compose herself; she was going to die incarcerated.

So what does she have to keep on living? She was a housewife, abused and raped by her controlling husband, Harry. She had never felt true love or pleasure in a relationship. She tried to put her daughter first and stayed with Harry for Debbie's sake, but when he raped her once more, Bea found herself trying to kill Harry by suffocating him. She stopped herself, with guilt and worry, realising what she was doing. Before she knew it, she was whisked off to Wentworth for an attempted murder charge, away and unable to protect her beloved Debbie. Her daughter died as a result of a heroin overdose orchestrated by the former top dog, Jacs Holt, who ordered her son to get Debbie hooked on heroin and make her death seem like an overdose. He succeeded, and the death of her daughter obliterated Bea. The one and only thing she only ever felt love for in this world was her daughter, and that had been taken away from her.

Wentworth had taken that from her.

For the next few years, her anger would be the one asset that would drive her and cave out her future and her destiny; to be top dog. She confronted Jacs about the death of her daughter who admitted that she had her son, Brayden Holt, befriend Debbie and kill her as use for leverage. Bea was used as a pawn between Jacs Holt and the contender for top dog, Franky Doyle. Jacs had Debbie killed to make Bea weaker. Jacs provoked Bea, referencing things such as "it was a kindness really" and "she was better off dead". Words that circled round Bea's head even in the present as she stared out of the window contemplating her future. Before Bea knew it, her anger drove her to grab a biro from one of the bedside cabinets and to stick it in Jacs' neck. The initial stabbing would have not been enough to kill her, however as the biro was removed, it severed a main artery and Jacs died in her cell at the hands of Bea Smith. The sound of the panic button still rang in her ears, the sight of Jacs' dead body lay there on the bed, her smile, the blood. All still fresh on her mind, and slowly decomposing Bea.

After her sentencing, she experienced a mental breakdown; being hooked on sedatives and hooked on the false reality that her daughter was still alive and that Bea was able to speak to her. On the brink of destruction, Liz talked some sense into Bea and told her that she needed to find a reason to get up tomorrow. From that moment on, it spurred her to go cold turkey and to get off the sedatives and her dependence on them once and for all but to depend on the fact that one day she would avenge her daughters death, and that she would kill Brayden Holt. Months of planning and motivation and doing anything to get by, Bea orchestrated her escape by having a fight with the top dog Franky, winning, and then slashing her own wrists deep enough that it would only be treatable by the hospital. She was taking blood-clotting pills that stemmed a lot of the bleeding. She escaped from the hospital and went to Liz, whom she had had a firearm sent to, in order to kill Brayden.

Liz argued against it but pure anger and hatred was driving this woman, and there was no way she was going to stop now. She went straight to Brayden's business and confronted him. During a spur of remorse and mercy instigated by Mr Jackson, Brayden was a free man and began to walk out until he smiled thinking that he had gotten away with it, but Bea shot him straight in the head, instantly killing him, remnants of his brain dotten against the wall, as his body lay limp on an armchair. Bea sat down, finally relieved but feeling justice after she had just killed him. She sat, staring at his body. The body of a man who took the life of her daughter. At the time, it felt good and justified. But years on, looking at it from a different perspective, Bea was not quite so sure. She returned to Wentworth Correctional Centre, where the former top dog, Franky Doyle, announced that Bea Smith would now be taking on from her. She recieved a round of applause but Bea was not so sure what she had quite signed herself up for.

During the sentencing of the murder of Brayden Holt, she remained unrepentent until the end. The judge sentenced her to life without parole with a minimum of forty years, meaning that she would spend the rest of her days behind iron bars. Returning after the sentencing, Joan Ferguson taunted her about her sentence, and from then on, Bea knew it was her goal to take down Joan "The Freak" Ferguson and to prove to her that Bea ran Wentworth, not her. During an eventful couple of months on which the Freak commited some unspeakable things like psychological torture to Jodie Spiteri resulting her losing an eye, drugging Bea with LSD in an attempt to try and get her sent to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, and to try and prevent Franky Doyle's parole by any means necessary. The Freak's murder of the baby killer, Jess Warner, led to a fire started by Ferguson that got out of control and burnt down the whole of H Block. Ferguson was arrested and detained, Franky got paroled, and the girls were moved to Walford before returning back on the bus to Wentworth.

Bea stared outside of the window, envious of the people that lived a normal life. The people that had freedom, that had family, and that had a reason to live. Everything that seemed normal in a functioning society seemed so alien and abstract to Bea now, it really did come close to home that she was never going to experience that freedom again, that she was never going to experience love again. She was never going to be apart of that society again, and that's what hit her the most. After the fire, the sights of Jacs' dead body laying up against the cell wall, and Brayden sat limp in the arm-chair with blood gushing out of his head stayed with Bea and took her apart mentally, however she never seemed to show that on her very hard and physically imposing exterior. She had never been able to get rest or sleep normally again since, which was her faulty entirely as she was the one that killed them both. Before, it didn't seem so bad. She had a goal, she had something to work towards; to take the Freak down. And she did but now, Bea was left with daunting prospects and feeling lost and disconnected from the world. Bea knew that out of all of her friends, she was the only one that was going to be there forever and the only one who would never had a future outside of these walls, only inside them, and the only person who will never see the sky as a free woman again.

This mental track of thought led Bea to think and conclude a summary of questions that she understood that she would ask herself repeatedly and on a daily basis whilst at Wentworth. Was it all worth it? What is left for me here? What am I going to do for the next forty years of my sentence? Do I still have the strength and desire to carry the women and be responsible for them and to lead them in the right direction? These questions rotated around her head like a ferris wheel as she contemplated what she would do. Her loss of feeling and emotion told her primal instinct that a lot of things had changed for her since she came to Wentworth but the question she needed to ask herself was "Am I now a person that can lead these women, who want me in charge, in the right direction?" or "Am I now a person who is feared, and the women do not want in charge, but will not say anything due to my past?". Bea would only know once and for all, and that was when she arrived at Wentworth. By the time she had done all this mental thinking, their van arrived in the sally port, and the first step to her future, began here and now.