Nikki's front door key fumbled for the slot in the lock, pushed it in and twisted it to let herself in. She never wanted to disturb Helen who was sometimes asleep by the time she got in. This time, she could here her light footsteps coming to meet her and to bring the blessing of melting into her arms and letting the aches and pains in her body be soothed away. She feared that tonight would be different.
The last few hours had been a sustained grotesque pantomime of hypocrisy that made Nikki want to throw up to make herself feel pure and uncontaminated once again. She had been very nice to Trisha and Trisha had been very nice to her. Nikki conceded that the barmaid would have one last chance and, if she were caught again, Trisha would hand out her marching orders personally. It was the least she could do to show willing and take a little of the responsibility off Nikki.That little disagreement was surely a misunderstanding which could be easily rectified, given good will on both sides. Nikki smiled her tightest smile so much that her facial muscles protested their pain in sympathy. Trisha was definitely moving in on what was left of her pitch. On that one evening, they both worked at the club to help make the party go with a swing one more time.
"Night, Trisha, I'll see you when I see you," Called out Nikki's very carrying voice from the passageway to the front door. Once she would have picked her up to take her home as she did that fateful night.
"We must meet up again, Nik.It was fun for both of us to work together for a change." Trisha's voice could be heard trailing faintly in the distance as Nikki pushed open the front door to let the fresh air in from the outside darkness.
Helen spread her arms wide, dressed in a short nightie as a dog-tired Nikki stumbled into her arms and their lips met in a long deep kiss. It seemed to Helen that she was part holding Nikki up in case she dropped to the floor. She had been looking peaky recently as Helen's experienced eye told her that work pressures were getting to Nikki. Last Sunday, that blissful day in the week was already a day away and it seemed that they lived for that precious amount of quality time. At least, Helen reflected sometimes, they had that assurance they would get it which was a big step up from life at Larkhall.
"Helen, there's something important I want to talk over with you."
The advantage with Nikki's tiredness was that she hadn't even got the energy to devote to worrying what she would say to Helen. She trusted that her words would fall into place at the right time. With a last tender caress of Helen's bare skin on her shoulders, Nikki collapsed into an armchair and let a few moments pass while she collected her thoughts. Helen raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
"I've been thinking over my future some time, I mean what I do for a living and I can't see a future in the club. I want to pack it in."
There it was the words right out there in the open, a more precise formulation of what she had first said to Karen.
"I've got the feeling that it doesn't mean the same to you as it once did." Helen's tactful reply edged closer to the heart of the matter. "but you've got a half share in it and half the right to make of it what you will."
"The problem is that it doesn't feel that way half the time, in fact most of the time, believe me. This has been a long time coming and I had an almighty row with Trisha tonight and that has put the tin lid on things," Nikki said bitterly and paused as the tiredness in every bone in her body swept over her in a huge tidal wave.
"That can't surely be it? There must be more to it than that," Helen pursued. She knew that Nikki would sometimes complain about Trisha from time to time but this seemed to have blown up from nowhere.
"You're right, Hel, it goes deeper than that. Let's put it this way, one reason is that the club has just become an impersonal money making machine when once it was for our friends. The second reason is that I'm fighting a losing battle to stop drugs spreading into the club, aided and abetted, I might say by Trisha. The third reason is that I can't stand to work with that tart any more as she's on a completely different planet professionally and the fourth reason is that I worked hard to get my degree and I could be doing something better in my life than smiling false smiles at someone else's party. I've had enough."
Helen was amazed that even though the words dragged their way wearily out of her mouth, that incisively reasoning mind of Nikki Wade still functioned.
"That sounds like all the reasons in the world, Nikki, but what will you do instead?"
Nikki swallowed and became very nervous. She knew how Helen felt about Larkhall even to the point of ducking out of getting involved with a civil court case to settle scores with that bastard Fenner once and for all.
"What's this leading up to?" Helen asked anxiously.
"I've had a possible job offer if everything pans out right. It is Wing Governor job at a …a…prison," Nikki stammered.
"You're joking, Nikki." The words escaped from Helen's mouth and her face was frozen with shock as sheer panic made her deny the evidence that her ears were telling her mind.
"Not Larkhall?" Helen added in a whisper, barely articulating the words.
Nikki nodded, unable to speak for a second before she was compelled to add the final words, which had a grotesque precision to this nightmare.
"And it's on G Wing, Helen."
Helen sought refuge from her growing panic by reaching out for facts and figures. It was just as well that she found something to bind herself down to the earth as otherwise she would have wanted to crawl her way through the armchair to some foetal position where nothing could harm her.
"You didn't find this out by browsing round the local Job Centre in your lunch break. Someone came to you to ask you about it. It was…."
"Karen," Nikki finished for her. As she related the bare facts of the story, she began to get a tenuous grip on herself. "She phoned me up at work and said that she had a proposition I might be interested in. Karen came round when I was in the middle of an almighty row with Trisha and explained the situation."
"And how in God's name is she going to sell this one to area personnel. No disrespect to you Nikki but I know how narrow minded people like them are and that they have long memories."
"Karen will put this to Neil Grayling who used to be governing governor and is now at area."
"She must be mad. Wait till I catch up with her. No matter how much she wants a good wing governor, she has no right to lug you into a job at that place. She knows how badly treated you were when you were there last time."
"I'll have to have an interview first and get over that hurdle before I even think of jacking it in at the club. If you think I'm mad for even thinking of taking the job, Karen's equally mad by your logic for trying to fix it for me to have an interview with people who are bound to know every bit of my past. She's got the courage of her convictions to try, and if area blow her idea away, then there's no interview, no job at Larkhall."
Nikki's tired but faultless logic brought Helen up short. Nikki was surely right in all these points but the idea was mad and dangerous.
"I mean it, I'll give Karen a piece of my mind when I see her next," Fumed Helen. "I don't want you to be put through what I went through at Larkhall. I barely got away with my sanity even if it left me free at last to love you."
The full range of emotions ran through Helen's words, anger at Karen, that fierce protectiveness for Nikki at even contemplating this act of folly.
"You can't blame it all on Karen. If I wanted to, I could have told her very nicely that she was wasting her time."
Helen couldn't answer as it was easier to direct her anger at Karen as a very convenient target. Nikki, bless her, was being her very sweet self and standing up for Karen. That made it harder for Helen. Her passionate love for Nikki made her never cease to bless that fortune that set her on the path that joined them together.
"You're thinking of Larkhall the way it used to be and not the way it is now," Gently urged Nikki.
"It will never change. I swear the place is cursed and so is everyone who goes there."
"It brought us together."
"That's true." Helen gave a half smile as it reminded her that she and Nikki hadn't been always together. After these years, it just felt that they had been together all their lives but hadn't known it. It wasn't only Nikki who was an open romantic these days.
"Tell me how hard it was, Helen. We don't often talk about that side of Larkhall, only our love and the laughs."
"I felt a frozen fear in my guts all the time I came up against those backstabbing bastards. I had the whole sodding mafia against me, devious bastards who would gang up against me and go behind my back. I remember looking at the expressions on their faces trying to peer into me for any sign of weakness, anything they could use to twist and turn back on me later on. There was something about them that made me angry even before they spoke. I had to build up an iron wall in front of them rather than show any weakness. The wonder of it all was that I lasted the course as long as I did without cracking. And, yeah, I was naïve when I started. Remember my crusade against drugs."
Nikki pulled a face.
"How could I forget? You actually thought I was taking drugs only because I was that gobby, stroppy bitch determined to give you as hard a time as possible and not give you an inch."
"But that's how it was, Nikki. Strong as you are, the job could break even you," Helen replied allowing herself the brief detour of a faint smile at Nikki's droll description of herself before pressing her intense concern at the foolhardiness of Nikki's idea.
"That was then, Helen. Things have changed since then. I'll have Karen as Governing Governor and not a lazy waste of space like Stubberfield."
An idea was forming in Nikki's mind. Helen ought to see Larkhall for herself and lay some ghosts that had never lain in their unquiet graves, as they should have done. The difference was that these ghosts were of the people as they then were, whether living or dead. She resolved that this idea can only come from Helen. It was not up to her to try to impose it on her and it wouldn't work on someone as stubborn as Helen anyway.
"You're forgetting another thing and that is that Fenner's dead. We went to the trial, remember?"
Helen's eyes went glazed. She had forgotten that very basic fact. Nevertheless, her mind refused to function. She could never see in her mind's eye the PO's room without that presence. Where she had fought such bitter battles, she could picture that brooding figure, sometimes standing at the back, sometimes sitting in a chair next to Sylvia and always plotting. Sometimes his voice was smooth like honey, seemingly compliant and other times cold and contemptuous, trying to cut her down. She couldn't imagine Larkhall without him.
"All right, I'll give you that one. But Fenner did not originate all the evil that took place at Larkhall. Someone must have initiated him into it, so that it stretches back till who knows when. Do you know who you'll have to deal with on G Wing?"
"I'm not sure. Bodybag will be there for sure but I know I can handle her. She's a cow but she's stupid. She needs someone like Fenner to feed off."
A brief gleam of hope dawned in Nikki as Helen was unconsciously talking as if she were in the job and discussing details.
"Don't be too complacent, Nikki. You ought to be very careful what you're letting yourself in for……."
Even at this late hour, the wheels in Helen's mind started turning over as at least temporarily, she was starting to reduce this paralysing living nightmare into a dealable problem, bits of which could be unravelled.
"I tell you what, Nikki. If you ask my opinion…."
"….I'll get it whether I ask or not," smiled Nikki.
"OK, you've got my opinion whether you like it or not," Helen responded playfully touching Nikki on the end of her nose. "I've got the strongest reservations about you taking on this job always supposing that Karen gets area onside and that is a big 'if.' I know that I can't stand in your way in going for this job so I'll put a question to you, which you'll get asked later on in spadefuls. Exactly why do you think that you are suitable for the job of wing governor at Larkhall prison."
Nikki blinked at the challenging smile on Helen's face. Jesus, I might as well explain Einstein's theory of relativity at three in the morning. With her last reserves of strength in her mind,
"I've always been good at helping people, talking to them, understanding them. That goes back to when I was a teenager. I know as no other wing governor does how prisoners think and feel, and I am sure I've got the practical abilities to help them and to help prison officers do their job properly. I've got strict standards of what is right or wrong and I'm perfectly able to impose discipline when I need to on both sides of the wire, only it will be based on reason."
She had to hand it to Nikki that the sheer simplicity and sincerity sounded good. She knew that, unlike anyone else she knew, Nikki was promising less of what she could deliver rather than more.
"Well, Nikki Wade," She said at last, reaching forwards to slip Nikki's jacket off her shoulders. "In a totally detached mad sort of way, a part of me understands your reasonings but I can't do anything about my gut instinct about this. You have to give me time while I get my head round this. It makes me angry with myself," and here she grinned slightly,"that here I am, a practising psychologist and I can't get my own feelings together when my girlfriend wants to change her job, nothing exactly life threatening."
"I wouldn't expect anything less, darling," Nikki's soft voice caressed her in return.
If there was one thing that they were both sure of, it was for Nikki's clothes to be shed as quickly as possible and for them to make love briefly before Helen had to face the next day. They needed the feel and taste of each other's bodies if only to reassure each other and themselves.As she lay in Nikki's arms, Helen's mind was immediately made up that it was down to her to scout out the ground and at least see what sort of hornet's nest Nikki was intending to walk into and see for herself what the place is like on her own account as she'll never put the nightmare that was G Wing behind her. The visit was half for her benefit as well as half for Nikki's.