You treated me for an ear infection once. It was a long time ago. I wouldn’t expect you to remember.
Stock just nodded and waited for Naz to go on, but she was already starting to have a bad feeling about this. The texture of the dream had changed. She was sort of awake inside it, and wishing she wasn’t.
You hurt someone I love, Naz said. I’m not really big on vengeance any more, but I can’t let this one go. Sorry.
“I didn’t mean to…”
Naz shook her head, and Sylvie left the sentence unfinished. Something in the other woman’s face told her that she wouldn’t be doing herself any favours by lying. It’s all right, Naz said. Things are better here than they used to be, in all sorts of ways. Nobody gets murdered now for not facing the way the wind is blowing.
She was looking at Stock searchingly, expectantly, as though there was some sign she was hoping Stock would give her. You understand me, Sylvie? If I could hate anyone, it would be you. But I can’t. I can’t afford to. Everything just runs in together here, and we’d keep drinking that hate until it made us all sick. I’m not prepared to do that.
She stood up and waved away the furniture of Stock’s dream with one hand. So, she said. I’m not going to hurt you. And I’m not going to ask Lizzie to hurt you. I’m going to do something else.
“What?” Stock asked, terrified for no reason she could explain. It’s not a good thing to be awake in your own dream and then have someone walk in out of nowhere and hijack it. “What are you going to do?”
I’m going to show you everything – every last thing – about what happened here, Naseem said. I want you to understand what you did and who you did it to. I want you to remember her the way I do.
She took Stock’s hand and they walked together through the memories of the women of Goodall. Everyone had seen something, and some people had seen a lot. But nobody had seen it all except Naz herself, so the last thing they did was to stroll, still hand in hand, into Naz’s own soul. Stock walked that M?bius strip road with her, and it was the hardest road of all.
So she got to remember all these things she’d never seen. She saw her sins and regretted them bitterly. She knew that the harm she’d done couldn’t ever be put right. That she’d have to carry the weight of it to her grave and find out after that if there was going to be a chance, ever, to put it down.
But the harm she hadn’t done yet was still up for grabs, and it might yet make a difference. Who knows, really, how the system works? That was Naz’s revenge on Sylvie Stock, and her mercy too. When it was all over, when Stock had lived it all and acted it all and suffered it all, Naz told her goodbye and good luck and went away. Stock would have to figure out for herself what she did next. She wouldn’t get to see Naz any more.
Stock wasn’t sure if that last thing was part of the revenge or part of the mercy.
100
There were more aftershocks besides, some of them trivial, others not so much.
Save-Me Scratchwell survived the riots by two days and seven hours. He dug his heels in and refused to resign, claiming that he’d shown superb leadership during the disturbance and that he’d been on the brink of uncovering Grace’s drug ring when Grace pre-empted him by dying. The N-fold directors sacked him and withdrew his pension rights, inviting him to sue them if he was feeling brave. He didn’t take them up on that invitation.
N-fold itself was another casualty. In the wake of that one indelible night and the morning of revelations that followed it, all the new licences they were hoping to get vanished like shadows at noonday. Three successive quarters of negative profits were followed by a zero dividend and an abysmally unsuccessful share issue. A year after that, the whole company was swallowed by a Swiss pharmaceuticals giant which had whimsically decided to diversify into public utilities. They left Scratchwell’s successor in place but made her answerable to a board of trustees, including a Howard League representative and the current editor of the Guardian.
John Street got a life sentence for setting the fire that killed Alex Beech. Nicola Saunders wrote a book about her relationship with him, portraying both herself and Moulson as victims of his Svengali-like charm. It sold in reasonable numbers, but her attempts to reinvent herself as a talk show host didn’t come to anything.
Earnshaw is a lifer too now. They got her for Grace’s murder and – on much more questionable evidence – for Moulson’s. She didn’t mind at all. Fellside is where Naseem lives, so it’s Earnshaw’s home too. The only home she wants or needs. If they ever try to take her out of there, they’d better send an armed response unit.
The two of them are happy together. Although happy, all things considered, is a pretty pale word for it. Naseem Suresh lives in Liz Earnshaw’s soul. They’re never going to be separated, not while they live and not in what comes after.
It’s changed Liz. And Liz and Naseem between them have changed everything else. Women who’ve got shit happening in their lives that they can’t deal with, whether it’s going cold turkey (G block is about ninety-nine per cent clean now) or relationship hassles, or just the despair and stir-craziness that comes over you sometimes in a place like Fellside, they go to Liz. If they don’t know to do that, some old stager will point the way. Po Royal, maybe, or Hannah Passmore. One of the women who were there when all this went down and who know what the deal is.
You come to Liz’s cell in free association time and you wait outside until she calls you in. Then she sits with you, holding your hand in complete silence, while Naz takes you to places inside yourself that you didn’t know were there. If a queue builds up, which it does most days, it’s a very peaceable queue because nobody wants to do anything that will lose them their place in it. The women don’t talk afterwards about what happened, but they come out of Liz’s cell with a different way of looking at things. Sanity, serenity, solace, something like that. But not something you’d be quick to give a name to.
Dr Salazar’s ghost never found its way to Fellside, and neither did Dennis Devlin’s. Perhaps they both had other places where they needed to be. It was a women’s prison, after all.
And then there’s Moulson.
No news there really. There haven’t been any sightings of her since that night of death and madness.
But Naseem still keeps a lookout for her. At night, when Liz is asleep – properly asleep, not walking in the Other Place – Naz will slip away from that endless, perfect embrace to go and sit at the edge of the abyss.
She never sees anything moving in there, but she knows it’s a long way down. Days, months, years, there’s room for that. Maybe Moulson managed to pull free before she and Grace hit the bottom. Maybe she’s been climbing all this time, and one of these nights she’ll haul herself up over the edge, brush herself off and come home.
Or maybe not. There was one time when Naz was walking a long way out in that silent immensity and she saw something. Footprints. Naked. Human. About a size 6, if she had to guess.
She traced them back to the edge of the pit, and forward as far as she could go. But the prints were heading away from the pit, and away from Fellside, in a direction Naz had never gone. You could get lost out there and she was afraid to risk it.
Naz didn’t give up her vigil (to some extent she’s also watching out for Grace; you can’t be too careful), but when she thinks about those footprints, she thinks two things.
First, there’s no need to leave prints in the Other Place. You would have to work hard to do it. So whatever feet those were, and wherever they were going, their owner most likely put the prints there as a signal. As a message.
Like, just for the sake of example, goodbye.