Clara
General. When you hear that word it could mean many things. A leader. Something common. Widespread. Unclear.
But to me General meant I was in danger. In with the toughest of criminals. Women convicted of murder, assault ... such horrendous crimes that would make you sick to your stomach. But to them, I was the worst kind of criminal.
A paedophile.
But I wasn’t one.
Dante hadn’t looked like a child. He may have been fifteen, and my student, but he was anything but a child. He looked so much older. Acted older too. A streetwise, tough boy with his eyes set on winning me.
And he had.
I fell head over heels in love with him, and he with me. We’d tried to run, to make a life together, but a car accident put him in a coma and me in jail. They said he was going to pull through, but me...
I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through three years in General let alone the rest of my life. They were meant to transfer me into the protected unit, otherwise known as the bone yard, somewhere I dearly wished I was in now as I walked through the dining hall. A number of women were watching me as I passed by, their eyes burning holes in the back of my head. I could imagine what they were thinking. They probably thought I’d raped a young boy, lured him in to doing things he didn’t want, their mind’s eye painting a very different picture of what Dante looked like. They wouldn’t know that he was almost six-foot, looking closer to twenty than fifteen. They also wouldn’t have known that he’d lured me, doing things to my body that even my twenty-four-year-old husband wasn’t capable of. But my fellow prisoners wouldn’t ... couldn’t, have known that, unless they’d met Dante in person.
I went to sit down at an almost empty table. There were two prisoners at the other end, a skinhead with a homemade swastika by her eye and an old woman who looked too similar not to be her mother—two generations locked away. They took one look at me and picked up their trays, gone before I could sit down. It was almost as though I was infected with a vile disease, a social leprosy that could contaminate them if they hung around me.
I placed my tray on the bench-like table, a bowl of porridge, an apple, a carton of juice—my breakfast for the day. I went to pick up the apple, the slop called porridge unpalatable, but a hand snatched it away before I could touch it. I looked up, seeing two prisoners standing over me, one holding my apple.
She smiled down at me, her expression anything but friendly. “You pro’bly got a lot of apples as a teacher,” she said, taking a bite out of it. She looked in her early thirties with a face that had probably been very attractive in her youth, the years grinding it down to the harsh woman dressed in prison greens.
I didn’t reply to her question, knowing no matter what I said it wouldn’t be received well.
She took another bite of my apple, a drop of juice hitting her chin. “I bet you also got a lot of cherries.”
The other prisoner, a large woman with thinning hair, snorted out a laugh. “That’s a good one, Marnie.”
Marnie ignored her and lowered her head to me. “You and your kind make me sick!” she spat, a bit of apple hitting my cheek. I didn’t wipe it away, the pure hatred in her dark eyes petrifying me. She narrowed them at me, the vein down the centre of her forehead practically pulsing. “I had a fifteen-year-old daughter. She committed suicide after a paedo raped her.”
“I didn’t rape—”
She cut me off before I could say Dante’s name, “I saw the news, saw what you were convicted of. It was massive. All over the telly. So don’t fuckin’ deny it. Don’t you fuckin’ dare!” She threw the half-eaten apple across the room, the prisoners in the line of fire ducking.
“Marnie!” a guard boomed. “Here! Now!”
Marnie straightened, her eyes going to the guard. “There’s no needa be like that, boss,” she said, all sugary sweet. “I’m just having a friendly convo with the local paedo.”
The other prisoners laughed.
The guard lifted his baton, indicating for her to come over. She rolled her eyes and sashayed over to him, puckering her lips, blowing him a kiss. Her mate yelled, “Go, Marnie, show him who’s queen bee!”
The guard shook his head, saying something to Marnie, whatever it was making her laugh. She looked over her shoulder at me, then back to the guard, nodding her head. She walked off, the guard following her. He glanced back at me, his eyes lingering for a moment, then he left with Marnie.
Marnie’s friend smiled down at me cruelly, showing a row of badly stained teeth, one of them chipped. “Looks like you got McAvoy’s attention.” She laughed and walked away.
I glanced around, wondering what that meant. The other women went back to eating, leaving me alone. I pushed my tray of food away, no longer hungry, sick to the stomach closer to the mark, what Marnie’s friend had said leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
And fear in my heart.