He is sitting opposite me, staring blankly like a dead fish. Stone eyes. Cobalt and lifeless. Pale gray skin, dripping scales. I imagine him hauled out of the water and dumped on the riverbank, gasping for breath. Just as he deserves. I only agreed to meet him after my husband, Bobby, persuaded me that it would help me come to terms with it all. But I don’t know how talking will help. I can’t see how anything could persuade me to accept the unacceptable.
The prison is housed in an old Victorian redbrick building encircled by high red brick walls topped off with barbed wire. It has a terrible reputation in the area. Locals tell tales of escapees who murdered children in their beds. I was scared to even pass through the main entrance and petrified when I was held in an airlock between glass doors and padded down by beefy guards. The pale green walls of the corridor we walk down to the meeting room speak of institutional blandness. I can’t see a picture or a window anywhere. And it smells strange—a hint of urine and disinfectant mingled with the aroma of boiled cabbage that reminds me of primary school.
Bobby and I are shown into a small, brightly lit meeting room. A uniformed prison officer stands straight-backed against the wall at the rear of the room. I sit next to Bobby on a pale blue sofa in front of a framed print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers that hangs on the soft green (the same damn color everywhere) walls. But the famous bright painting can’t transform a desolate atmosphere into hope.
He—David John McBride, criminal—is already waiting for us, seated on a low sofa with his wife beside him. Why is she here? In court, she said the marriage was over. Don’t tell me she has taken him back. Fool!
David John McBride, thirty-two years old, is a tall man wearing gray prison garb. He has lost the look of defiance I saw on his face during the trial and appears anxious and fragile. He had not looked at me through the court proceedings and, still, does catch my eye.
