From the first moment she saw him on her computer screen she knew, in those terrible days after the funeral when she was searching for answers and finding nothing. In his TED Talk, he spoke passionately about the need for prison reform, the toll it took on female prisoners to be incarcerated in such a punitive way – he seemed to understand exactly what Lucy was going through, somehow. His eyes were so piercing as he looked out of the screen that he might have been staring into her soul. She was only seventeen – she swore to herself then that she would do whatever it took to study under him.
The years have passed. She’s followed everything he’s done, watched every talk, read every publication. Every time he posts online she’s there, watching. His words inspired her at first, but it’s more than that now, when she allows herself the fantasy. She knows he’s the one for her.
Is she crazy to think so? She thinks about him at night, hard flesh in soft sheets. It started with his mind, the way she connected with his thoughts, his theories. But it’s grown, bigger, stronger, almost out of her control.
Now it’s only a matter of minutes before the image of his face becomes flesh, before she’s there in the same room as him. Will it have been worth it?
The stone walls of the quadrangle are mellow in the January sun. Borders of crocuses are starting to emerge, snowdrops too. There’s a wind cutting through Lucy’s thin coat. She wraps her arms around herself. It doesn’t bother her, though – it’s grounding, reminding her that she isn’t in a dream. The novelty still hasn’t worn off, the beauty of the place. Nor the disbelief at the fact that it’s hers.
Through the cloisters to the garden at the back, and there are more bulbs flowering here, bright white among the evergreens. Over a high wall, she can see down to a meadow surrounded by trees, their branches silhouetted against the blue sky. Rural. Not like the city in which she grew up, has only just left. Different worlds.
The seminar is due to start soon. The course she’s been waiting for since she first arrived in Oxford. She’s done a term already, hard at work in the MSc in Criminology she’s studying. But this, this is why she’s here.
She thinks back now to her arrival in the autumn, how she had to lecture herself before she got off the coach from Manchester, a freshly minted first-class law degree in her back pocket. She wasn’t to let anyone intimidate her. Anyone at all. It was good to be a postgrad, she saw that from the moment she stepped off the coach and wheeled her suitcase along St Giles and down the side street to her new college. If she were still eighteen, she’d have wondered if she was good enough when she saw the kids unloading mountains of belongings from their parents’ SUVs. She’s from another world, Primark to their Carhartt and Supreme. She’s the one who needed the full scholarship, after all.
She travelled light, all she needs in her head. It’s served her well over the last while. As has her holiday job for the last few years in a pub in that northern town, pulling pints for a series of drunk men who would never believe that someone so young and pretty could be a law student. Let alone at Oxford.
She wouldn’t believe it herself if she wasn’t here, bang in the middle of the dreaming spires. She knows exactly how she got here, though. That degree in law was hard won. But worth it. One step closer to her dream.
Some might call it obsession. She knows it’s more than that.
The first term went in a flash. Battels, blues, the Bod, college bops, the hacks running round trying to get slates together for the Union elections – the obscure terminology a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Or, more likely, a load of bollocks.
She loves it though, nearly everything about it. The room with its view across the rooftops, the short walk down staircases and through cloisters to breakfast. She’s lucky to have got a room in college – most postgrads have to live out, in purpose-built blocks on the Cowley or Iffley Roads, but she hit the jackpot. It’s a bubble, a chimera, golden stone against blue skies, trees towering over her as she walks down to the river, past the boat houses, but for this year the illusion is hers, and she’s going to relish every moment.
Eyes on the prize, though. She never lets that slip from her mind.
The core subjects of the course are fine. She’s blasting through them, head down. It’s the optional courses she’s interested in: Victims; Race and Gender; Sentencing: Victims and Restorative Justice. And then there’s the core reason she’s here. Bringing the personal to the principles. She’s studying Prisons, with the professor.
‘Lucy,’ a voice says, interrupting her reverie. She looks round. It’s Ben, bouncy and expectant as a puppy waiting for her to throw a ball. She swallows hard, trying to get her irritation under control. It’s not his fault she was lonely that night at the start of the course, that she let him in before she realised what a foolish mistake it would be.
‘I didn’t realise you were doing this option,’ she says, forcing a smile.
‘It’s Prisons,’ he says, and for a moment she’s completely lost, the relevance of this to him out of her mind. Then she remembers. He’d said something to her about his dad being a prison officer. She didn’t share her own story, though, and now he’s seen the expression of confusion that’s just passed quickly across her face. He turns from her, his shoulders hunched. He’s tried to message her a couple of times, to attract her attention at the end of lectures, but she’s blanked him. A pang of regret as she looks at the back of his head – his hair was so soft under her hand.
‘Come on then, what are you waiting for?’ One of their fellow students, a hearty woman called Alexandra. She’s doing the course purely because she didn’t get the pupillage she wanted first time round – this is meant to be making her more attractive to future chambers, or so she hopes. Opportunistic. Lucy doesn’t have time to waste on her.
The three of them walk together across the quad to a wooden door set into the stone wall. There’s a low step, the edge shiny, worn down by hundreds of years of students stepping inside, and for a moment Lucy feels herself not herself anymore but part of a chain, a continuum through the centuries, seekers of truth and knowledge.
They weren’t seeking the knowledge she wants, though. She knows she’s unique in that. Nor is she like past students – or present ones – in any other way.
Through a short passageway and through another wooden door, and then they’re into the seminar room. It’s bright, the light dazzling her after the gloom of the hall, and she can see the chairs around the big table are nearly full. Alexandra and Ben sit down, leaving only one seat free, next to the big chair at the head of the table that clearly belongs to the professor. She takes a deep breath and sits, looking around as she does. The walls are lined with shelves of books, old statutes, leatherbound King’s and Queen’s Bench Reports, copies of Hansard, textbooks on prison law and criminal justice.
The window at the far end of the room is open, the frame latched open and surrounded by dead leaves from the ivy that covers the back of the college building. Lucy closes her eyes. This could be some mansion, some posh hotel, she could be a visitor here—
‘Welcome,’ a deep voice says, a hand slapping the table. Lucy’s eyes snap open.
He’s arrived. She looks at his profile. Late fifties, dark hair frosted through with grey – the very definition of a silver fox. Perhaps he feels the intensity of her stare, because he turns directly to her and they hold each other’s gaze. The feeling of instant familiarity grows stronger. He nods at her again, breaks the connection. Raises his head to address the room.
‘Someone murdered your mother. They broke into her house, tied her up and stabbed her to death. You’ve caught them red-handed. What do you want to do?’ He looks round the room as if issuing a challenge. No one looks up. ‘Come on, she’s died in agony. Don’t you want revenge?’
Alexandra is studying her pen. Lucy squints past her to see Ben staring fixedly down at the table in front of him.
‘No one?’
Alexandra slowly raises her hand. ‘I’d want revenge.’
‘What kind of revenge? Would you like to take the same knife and make him suffer in the same way? Would you like to twist it into his guts just like he did to your mother?’
