I don’t feel embarrassed, as I usually would. It’s a centre for counsellors to train who have been somewhere tough themselves. I don’t know what Simon’s backstory is, but his colleague Emmett used to be homeless. There’s an abstaining alcoholic and someone who was brought up in care following abuse. And then there’s me. A woman who has to think very hard about how to operate the Oyster card top-up machines. I say as much to Simon.
‘Yes,’ he says, leaning forward, his tanned arms on his knees. ‘But isn’t that an example of being totally normal? Not adjusting after prison?’
‘I … maybe,’ I say, struggling to know.
‘I think that’s an example of being good. Not bad,’ he says. ‘You’d be mad if you could adjust to that.’
‘I think of Imran, too. All the time. About his injuries, and how he is, these days.’
‘Also normal. You care about him – because you’re a human being,’ he says, with a smile.
‘I know he won’t have recovered,’ I say. ‘But I hope he’s … I don’t know. I just hope.’
‘I know …’
He pauses for a second, then runs down a tick sheet as we decide on the next steps.
‘So you did the diploma in prison?’ he says.
I nod.
It took a year to get them to offer it to me. The old Joanna – as I have come to think of her – would have done nothing about that. Would have watched box sets and read books and ignored it, then been periodically disappointed on birthdays and when ringing in the New Year that nothing had changed. But this Joanna is different. Somehow, when society had decided I was worthless, I decided quite the opposite, and went after what I wanted. It was only me and one other woman – Dani – in the workshop room getting that diploma in counselling. But it was worth it.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Now I need a placement.’
‘And how do you feel your crime … intersects with your position as a counsellor?’
I sit back, thinking. In every way. It impacts my life in every way. Shaping who I am around the edges and deep inside, as if I am woodwork, whittled away by the events of that night in December and since.
‘I give less of a shit what people think of me,’ I say, eventually. ‘My parents. Anyone, really. I don’t care any more. And …’ I pause, thinking. ‘I used to have this thing where I’d look at other people – Proper People, I used to call them. And I’d compare their exterior with my interior. But I don’t do that any more. I am … I am a Proper Person.’
Simon nods, once, then laughs. ‘I think you’re set,’ he says.
Laura and I meet at the Gondola after her first day at work. Her hair has caught the sun during the heatwave. Her body, her face, they have the relics of the hippy she used to be – I can see it in her casual body language, in the earring I know to be hiding halfway up her ear, underneath her hair, but most of the traits have been bleached out, as if they’ve been left out in sunlight.
She knows about Reuben, and is stirring her drink thoughtfully. We’re sitting outside, the air humid and thick-feeling, like a winter duvet over our shoulders.
‘I’ve spent the day freezing,’ she says. ‘Offices overdo it in heatwaves.’
‘Do they?’ I say vaguely.
We pause. It’s awkward. It has never been awkward.
‘How’s Tabitha?’ I say, sounding spiteful.
Laura shrugs. ‘She’s well.’ She looks at me. ‘You’re sad about it.’
‘Oh, I’m not. I know,’ I say. ‘We couldn’t be – we couldn’t be friends. Not properly. While I was inside.’
‘No.’
‘But it seemed like you – well, maybe like you were a bit ashamed. Like you wanted to move on.’
Laura exhales through her nose. ‘It was hard, Jo. You know? It was tough.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry that it was, but it was, for me. It felt like everything had changed.’
‘It did.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ She holds her hands up, palms to me. She’s still wearing all of her rings. ‘There’s no excuse. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t a good enough friend.’
‘It is kind of unprecedented,’ I say. ‘Prison. In the – in the circles we move in.’
‘You’re telling me,’ she says, with a little laugh. ‘We all – I don’t know. We all struggled. It was a big adjustment, for everyone.’
‘I know,’ I say quietly. I tilt my face to the sun again. ‘I’m glad we’re here and not there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, holding my gaze, her expression sincere.
‘Let’s moan about Reuben, instead,’ I say, thinking, Come on, Joanna. Be an adult. Forgive. Alan would say I ought to. And maybe I can. Reuben wasn’t perfect. Laura wasn’t perfect. And I certainly wasn’t perfect.
Laura pauses for a moment. ‘Reuben,’ she says. ‘Maybe you actually broke up two years ago.’
‘What? What about what he did?’
She holds a hand up, and says, ‘Did it feel like you were together? Last year?’
I think of Reuben’s aged face as he shouted at me two nights previously. I think of the empty feeling I carried around with me in prison. I think of Reuben’s serious expression, across the table in the visitors’ centre. How he came at all the times he could, but never really said anything.
‘Nothing in prison feels very real,’ I say.
Nothing could be real. Those moments in the visitors’ centre were so weak, as though real life had been distilled and distilled, over and over, ending up with a homeopathic remedy: take two drops for a relationship. One for a friendship. Three for a normal Christmas dinner. Everything was displaced from reality to such an extent that it was hard to remember if reality continued beyond the prison walls.
‘The reason I ask,’ Laura says, bobbing the straw up and down in her drink, just like she did that Friday night, ‘is because I think maybe he’s just reacting how he wanted to two years ago. Now.’
‘He shopped me,’ I say.
‘He’s a child,’ she nods.
‘I have never felt so betrayed. In all my life.’
‘I think he’s very angry with you. But he has been … contrite. You know? He missed you so badly. He sang this song, in the jazz club. He cried during it.’
‘You went to see?’
She nods. ‘He had – he had hardly anybody, Jo. Without you.’
‘What was the song?’
‘It was all about your life together, I think. There weren’t many lyrics. But it was called “Our Blackboard”.’
My eyes fill with tears. ‘Well,’ I say thickly. ‘You can’t always have what you want.’
She squints up at the sun. The canal is still in the heat, the flower-covered barges looking like ornaments. ‘I miss my barge,’ she says.
‘You didn’t have to give it all up. The whole hog. Give up the art. Get the corporate job. The house in suburbia.’
‘I did,’ she says quickly. ‘It … legitimized it. For me. I have to buy into it. It has to be so.’
‘A house. A Volvo. Three kids.’
‘Maybe,’ she says, spreading her hands wide.
I feel a wave of jealousy. Reuben and I would have been brilliant parents. I know we would. I would have taught our kids about imagination, and people, and the power of dreaming. He would’ve taught them about politics and art and classics and economics. They would’ve been ours. Little socialists, no doubt.
‘What I meant was that the way he reacted came from … who he was,’ she says.
‘Reuben?’
‘Yeah. He’s an idealist. Isn’t he?’
‘Of course.’
‘But maybe he hasn’t really grown up. We’re all idealistic in our twenties.’
‘He’s the most mature person I know.’
‘Is he, though?’ She looks across at me, playing with a splinter in the wooden table. ‘Is that true?’
The Gondola seems so completely different in the summer to how it was that winter, years ago. Almost like the peculiar displaced feeling you get when you go to view a house, and then you move in, and it seems utterly different in ways you can’t describe or justify.
I didn’t even know it had a beer garden. I can just about see inside, through an old-fashioned window, to the bar. It’s smaller than I remember. Insignificant.
‘Maturity is flexibility,’ she says. ‘Look at me. I wanted to be an artist. It didn’t work out. That’s life. It’s not perfect – and people aren’t perfect. I think he’s childishly angry with you.’
‘Yeah,’ I shrug. ‘He probably is childish. He – he robbed me, Laura.’
‘I know,’ she says, nodding rapidly. ‘I know. But, he did miss you.’
‘I know that, too.’