Part Eighty-Eight
Sometimes, Shell felt as if she were floating in the blank whiteness of the huge room that she was in. Of course, the eight neon strip lights geometrically lined up along the length of the ceiling shone down from their fixed, no pain, no………
She turned the music off in her head that the batty woman was singing on the radio that someone was playing. Annie something from the Eurythmics it was, that mad woman told her when she complained about the row. She could passively watch the world move past her open eyelids and look at her as she shuffled along with a blank expression on her stupid face. At that moment, Shell had no past that she could remember clearly. Her future was going to be the same as the present, which was flat, featureless and held he. Annie something from the Eurythmics it was, that mad woman told her when she complained about the row. She could passively watch the world move past her open eyelids and look at her as she shuffled along with a blank expression on her stupid face. At that moment, Shell had no past that she could remember clearly. Her future was going to be the same as the present, which was flat, featureless and held her in a vice-like grip with that cotton wool feeling. At least, that was just after they had fed her the drugs, which kept her placid and stopped her getting worked up about things.
That was what the doctor had ordered, a few days after she first came here. He could see from the admission notes that when Michelle Dockley was admitted she was in a highly disturbed yet virtually catatonic state from the moment when a prison officer on either side of her helped her to move like a puppet into the enclosed world of Ashmore. Her reactions of dissociation from the world were obvious from what the referral notes described in flat tones the enormity of her actions in trying to kill her own baby. Guilt affected people that way, to varying degrees, he reflected.
Miss Taylor was one of the nice ones even if she was a screw. She must be as she pressed those buttons that silently opened that door and locked it after her. She found that out in the early days when she had made a rush for the door to pull it open and escape for a reason she couldn't properly remember. The frigging nurse stood there without moving while she made a fool of herself, yelling and screeching away and the door was bloody stuck and didn't move an inch. That was when she figured out that this dump was different. Where she was at her last place, they used to slam the doors shut and she could hear the bolts shut tight on her. She knew then when she was being banged up.
"You're all right, Shell."
"Yes, thank you, miss," Shell's best little girl voice answered with that blank smile. It was what they expected of her. That was what patients were expected to say but the only thing the frigging nurse never told you was when she was going to get out. This was a hospital like nothing she had seen before. She thought she could remember having one, two children, poor little mites and that hospital was different. She couldn't work out how she ever came to lose them….
Her limbs were free and she knew she could walk if she could get off her bed and she could walk anywhere she wanted to go but she didn't feel quite like it, not right now. All but a small knotted thought deep in the bottom of her mind, so far down that she couldn't work out how deep it was in her confused mind and sometimes she forgot that it was ever there in the first place.
"Well, you keep going on that way. You need to keep up your spirits."
Miss Taylor meant well.
Most of the other women were all right, once she made allowances and she got to know them. Sometimes, she spoke to them and got an answer that didn't quite make sense though she, too, had her off days. She supposed that this was why they were there. If they were all right, and then they wouldn't be here, would they?
One day drifted past just like another, in the endless brightness till they put her to bed and turned the lights out. It was good that someone was in control round here….
Then, in the afternoon, she got the chance to watch the telly, just the way she had always seen it with a crowd of other girls around her. She could never remember a time when she had her own telly and could watch what she wanted though she could vaguely remember frightening the other girls into giving her what she wanted.
A few newspapers came into her world from out there. One gave her the biggest shock of
Her life that she was capable of feeling. It was a man's face in a prison officer's uniform right across the front page of "The Sun." 'Prison Officer Found Dead in Epping Forest.' It said. She knew that face. It belonged to that vague time before she came here but he was not vague, nor were the feelings of rage and anger and something else. It was hard edged, like his eyes, like the shape of his nose and just like his fists. She could remember that….
"You surely felt some feelings for this man when you first read the headlines?" That soft voice of the shrink insinuated that day.
"Yeah, mostly hatred," Shell sneered. "And I'm glad he is dead."
"You speak of him as if he wasn't human, capable of feeling emotions, either good or bad but just as some kind of object. Surely he must have been very scared just before he was killed," The voice reasoned at her.
"Sure he was scared. He must have thought to himself, what am I doing lost in Epping Forest. I must be a right spazza. I mean that's a stupid place to go."
The woman flinched at the brutal inhuman force of this remark and brought the counselling session to a fairly quick conclusion and later lit a cigarette before writing up her report in the voluminous file…
'Michelle Dockley is becoming superficially socialised as to the regime at Ashmore and has learnt to accept the reality of her situation. She has underlying dysfunctional personality traits, which need long term cognitive therapy.
On the one hand, she can assume the appearance of remorse for the consequences of her past actions when they arise in discussion. Whenever I have pursued the matter further, it is only a matter of time before a real distance opens up between the supposed object of her feelings and her emotional reaction to it. A cold, inexpressive reaction emerges where there is a disturbing lack of conscience. This was conspicuously present when I engaged
her in discussion about the fate of a former prison officer, the late James Fenner. Apparently, her relationship, within the natural confines of the appropriate behaviour between prisoner and prison officer, lasted over a number of years and was stable.
Miss Dockley's current medication suppresses and masks this schism in her personality which is, at root, born of a negative attitude to men whom she regards as self seeking and rejecting and her only version of a relationship is based, to her thinking, of exploiting to save herself from being exploited.
The cognitive therapy up till now has, at best contained the situation. ……"
Most of all, she wondered as her cigarette smouldered away between her forefinger and second finger, just why a woman like her who had just given birth to a baby had chosen to attempt to smother it. The case notes made mention over a number of months of her unusually positive feelings of anticipation of becoming a mother again and yet this sudden reversal in attitude was unexplained by the facts. She could not help but feel grateful for the prompt intervention of Mr Fenner and Mr Hedges.
That silly bitch asked too many questions for her good, she scowled. It was all the fault of that bastard Fenner and Hedges who had dragged her away from her baby and had killed something inside of her, as if someone had stuck a knife into her. It wasn't her fault this time, wasn't her fault as she remembered.. Like she said, do the crime and do the time. She always used to be dead straight up about things like that. As if she wanted to talk about Jim bloody Fenner.
She had to laugh when she looked at the front page of the Sun with all the trial details. Funny the way things had turned out that that spazzified daughter of Atkins had done him in. She remembered glaring at the smaller headline photo of Fenner and that it ought to sort of dissolve its way out of her mind now that he was dead and buried. He was gone after all, wasn't he, and all the other bastard men in her life should be well away. They were no longer there to haunt her dreams anymore like they used to.
Her anger came back from her past to haunt her present when she came to think of Atkins. She had hated her for the way that she muscled her way in on her patch. She was top dog up till then and got all the attention like the way that she had come back from Amsterdam and the first time in her life without asking for it, all eyes were on her. That was the way she liked it, being on stage like she used to in that club in Amsterdam. She remembered them now. She liked it when she was dressed up in that leather costume and cracked her whip. All the sad punters who liked that sort of thing fawned in front of her almost waiting to be whipped. That was what she liked best. It made for a change in her life.
"Stupid cow," she muttered under her breath. "She doesn't know what the frigging hell went on."
She lay down for a while and let her thoughts drift away into nothingness into bleak, bitter dreams as she brooded. It was icy cold where she lived and she let noone into her world.
"There's a letter for you, Shell," Miss Taylor's voice came out of nowhere. "It came in the second post."
Shell took in the clean white envelope and the neat handwriting, which looked like Miss Bett's script. Funny that she came back to her mind as if she were a long time underwater and had suddenly come up to the surface to the real world. She used to do that for real in that time that someone else lived when she and Denny were on the run. The sea beat down on her bare skin and she could hear the gentle lapping of tiny waves along the yacht.
"………..You might find it amusing that your old friend Denny played a couple of practical jokes at Larkhall that certainly livened up the place. She substituted some Monopoly money in Mrs Hollamby's purse and I understand that the first time that she discovered it was when she went to buy a drink at the prison Social Club. Not content with that, she and accomplices who you might guess, made up some cookies that were spiced with cannabis. Miss Rossi and I foolishly accepted their free gift and it took us a little while for us to discover why we felt very relaxed all of a sudden. I hope that where you are for one day in the year that those in charge go a little bit easy on you and that you are being looked after properly…"
She could hear the words spoken in that tone of voice that even she couldn't forget, however doped up she felt. She tried to remember what Miss Betts looked like but her mind started to go cloudy again.
While she read the rest of her letter, her last words to Miss Betts came back to her.
"You have got to get me out of this place, miss. I shouldn't be here….and I'm sorry for some of the things I done," she remembered herself saying.
"If I ever can, I will, Shell. But it won't be easy." That melodious voice answered flatly with no false promises. She hated big promises only to be let down.
"So there's hope, yeah?"
"That's the best I can do, Shell,"
So she resolved to herself, there and then that somehow that was what she should do. She should hope. Why the hell hadn't she thought of that before? Up till then, she had let life take her where it wanted to take her.
Suddenly, there came another voice that came from a past life. It was Denny's voice this time. Everything in her mind which was replayed to her seemed like some film that she was watching on telly. She could see the two of them, all got up in false wigs and smart clothes headed out to Spain.They had had a riot out in Spain, living out on that yacht, all blue shy, sunbathing and living the life of millionaires. That was really living. They lay out on the deck, a glass of Sangria within reach from which they could drink whenever they wanted. Making porno films with Denny was easy money for those sad bastards and, besides, it wasn't acting. It all passed in a riotous blur like one big party and she wished she could remember it. That was like the best bits of her life. The other Shell Dockley did it and she had trouble remembering the next day.
Something happened to take her back to Larkhall, she wasn't sure what. Her memory wasn't very good these days for facts and figures, only feelings. She could remember and she was back with Denny again and it was like the old days for a bit. She remembered most clearly her tiny baby she cradled in her arms and all her love with her went out to that little mite. Tears started running down her face for the first time since she had been banged up there. It wasn't right that a mother should be separated from her baby, all the good books said that but right was getting her nowhere.