Anna pushes herself upwards. ‘I didn’t kill her.’ She knows the words are futile even as they leave her mouth.
‘I didn’t ask,’ he says. ‘Look at yourself. Dead woman, your hands covered in blood.’ A pause. ‘I don’t need to ask.’
Anna shakes her head. ‘She did it to herself,’ she says, knowing full well the reception that’s going to get.
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
Words spring up to Anna’s tongue, but she forces them down. All she has now is her gut and it’s telling her to be quiet. She remembers the terror of the night before – maybe this is what it was warning her of. The woman dead, Anna blamed for it. She keeps her face impassive.
‘Keep searching,’ the officer yells at the others, who are rummaging round the bed. They’re not trying to administer first aid, nor paying any respect to the woman’s body. Any vestige of doubt Anna felt about hiding the phone leaves her, her toes clenching around it even more tightly.
‘Get back up,’ the officer screams into her face. ‘I didn’t tell you to sit down.’
Anna had not intended to crouch, but her legs are wobbling under her. She pushes herself up again, wanting to avoid more yelling. The noise is overwhelming, shouting from the officers as they try and ascertain what has happened, yells and bangs from along the corridors as the other residents start to realise that something is up, something more than the normal upheaval.
‘Out the way,’ the other officer shouts, ‘get the fuck out of the way,’ and he’s pushing her aside to let a paramedic get to the bunk. Anna moves towards the door to clear some space, but officer number one, the shouty one, grabs hold of her arm so hard that she cries out in pain. He drags her right next to him and screams again.
‘I didn’t tell you to leave the cell – do what you’re fucking told.’
Anna stands still. If she stops moving, maybe she’ll become invisible, or at least shrink until she’s so tiny they won’t notice her, and maybe she’ll be able to slip out between their fingers and slide under the bunk and lie in peace . . . She glances over at the dead woman. At least she’s far away from all this.
Officer number one twists her round and handcuffs her hands behind her back.
‘You’re coming with me,’ he says. ‘Move it.’
He pushes her in front of him, out of the cell and along the corridor to a room next to the officers’ room. It’s bare, containing only a metal table and chairs, all of which are bolted to the floor. Before he thrusts her on to one of the chairs, he rubs her down, front and back, pushing his hands hard against her breasts, her thighs. Between her legs. When he’s finished the search, he pulls her arms up painfully tight as he unlocks the cuff on her left hand. Leaving her right hand locked up, he clips the other cuff on to the table leg. She shuffles towards the edge of the seat to lessen some of the tension, but he pushes her back into place.
‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he says. He’s not shouting now, but there’s still force in his voice. He flicks at her right hand, catching it with his nail. ‘Literally caught red-handed. What the fuck were you thinking?’
Again, Anna stays completely still, and as if bored with her lack of response, the officer backs away. He walks out of the room, muttering something under his breath – she can only catch the wordsfucking stupid.
The minutes tick on. As the blood dries on her hands, it itches. She scratches it as far as she can reach while handcuffed, the eczema rash thick beneath her fingernails. A sharp sting tells her she’s broken through – new blood to add to the stains. She remembers when it first started, this patch of itchy flesh, sometimes burning so much it couldn’t be sated, however hard she went at it with her nails. She was sitting in a hospital bed, her head aching from the impact of the collision, horror mounting in her as the grim-faced police officers told her what she’d done.
She scratched.
Words she couldn’t process, words likelife-threatening injuryandcautionandcourt.All the time, she scratched, and scratched, and scratched, unable to stop.
She can’t stop it now, either. She’s spiralling off, unable to get a grip on anything. On top of everything else, the pill hasn’t fully worn off yet. Anna wishes she could disappear between the cracks in her own mind.
She knocks her head on the hard table, snapping herself back into now. This isn’t the same as last time. There’s a tiny chance she’s responsible, she can’t rule that out, but she finds it impossible to believe.
Murder, though. Someone is dead, and she’s going to be charged for it.
Even if they have questions, they won’t bother to ask them. They’ll want to tick it off as fast as possible. Why would the police even care about the death of one prisoner at the hands of another?
She knows how suspicious it looks. It was Anna the inmate, in the cell, with a razor blade. But deep in her bones, she’s sure it wasn’t her. She slept right through it, drugged up to the eyeballs. She should never have taken a sedative when she was in a new cell, with the risk of encountering someone she didn’t know. Anna’s got through these years as much by her wits as by luck – her guard was down, so close to the end, and now look what’s happened. She could have put a stop to it, talked to her, maybe saved the woman’s life, if only she’d been in control.
A beat. Another. The image of Naomi, her old pad mate, comes back to her, the woman kneeling in the cell, folding clothes and unfolding them over and over again.
Back again to the start. She stares down at her left hand again, transfixed by the bloodstains, staring into the darkness. Thinking about those hours of nothing between sleeping and waking.
Knowing that she’s innocent of the attack changes nothing.
If she admits that she took the sedative, it gives them an opening to convict her. If she says that she slept through it all, they’ll never believe her. She’s fucked, whichever way you look at it.
7
The clamour is building – finally, the noise is loud enough to break through Anna’s thoughts. The mood in this place is always on edge after a death. People might pretend they don’t give a fuck, but of course they do. Every time they’re thinkingbut there for the grace of God.It could have been me.
