Stone Walls, Iron Bars

Hey, you, out there; you think you know everything there is to know about incarcerated women. But you are grossly misinformed.

Just because you watch re-runs of Locked Up, Orange is the New Black, Wentworth, or Prisoners, you can’t even begin to know what life is like behind bars in a women’s prison. Each of us has a different story.

Oh yes, the dramas about favouritism, butches and Nellies, and physical and psychological violence do exist. There is torture, there are murderers, there are thriving back markets for necessities, and there are drugs.

There is also the profiteering by the staff, who use the inmates as cheap labour in the laundry or bakery.

As with any genre, the script-writers have to come up with colourful plots, to hold the viewers glued to their seats. They have to blow up each tiny incident to make it seem as if all of us women in a prison eat, drink, and breathe violence.

Then of course, there are the back-stories to explain why the motley assembly of actresses portray us inmates.

There is the prostitute who killed her pimp; the woman who ran a baby-for-sale enterprise; the drug mule; the desperate woman who poisoned her grandmother after persuading her to change the will in her favour, because she owed big money to the Mafia.

Most of us end up in prison because “Because I ain’t have no choice but to do it,” whatever the “it” is – but this is our real life, not the celluloid one that you watch unfold, episode by episode, each week.

Not all of you realise, ironically, that when the cameras stop rolling, your pin-up girls go home to their hot cocoa and, perhaps, doting partners and loving children. You speak of them as if they were real people, and say what you would do and say if you were in their shoes.

Nobody ever tells us to take five; if we act up, they just remind us that solitary is only a warden’s whim away. To the blazes with human rights; we signed them away when we broke the law. “Our job is to instil fear” the superintendent never tired of reminding us.

We have to put up with having the water and power supplies cut off by sadistic gaolers, for the least infringement. There are outbreaks of scabies, and black and green mould… but no Director to yell “Cut!”

They say that women in prison are violent. Let me explain this word to you in terms you might understand. A woman suffers brutal physical harm. She snaps, and kills her aggressor. So, she is no longer the meek, silent, victim that everyone would pity – she is suddenly a cunning, vicious diabolical, evil, savage, monster-bitch who must be made to pay for her violent actions.

Our will to live, our instinct to survive, our determination to safeguard our children, have become the very reasons to condemn us.

There is a body – and it isn’t ours, as it ought to have been.

Oh, the irony – when you consider that the term ‘prison’ is nowadays often replaced by “correctional facility”, and that our sentences are supposed to have rehabilitative values.

That is one of the main differences between the designer orange jumpsuits of a television series, and the foul-smelling boilersuits we have to wear, day in, day out.

Only one more day to go. The thought had been going round and round my brain since daybreak.  

Six months before, we’d got a new librarian. When I saw her, I gasped.

Right place, wrong time? Or was it, wrong place, right time?

She kept pretty much to herself, reticent to the point of rudeness. The consensus was that she was harbouring a secret.

I was like that, once. A quarter of a century before. Except that then, I had been pregnant. The father of my child told me that he had only seduced me because his pals had dared him to do so. He said that I flattered myself to think that he would really fall for Miss Goody Two-Shoes (oh, how that jibe hurt!). And, yes, my Catholic faith was the reason I did not accept his offer for an abortion.

He said he wasn’t going to stand by me. There was no one else; it was just that he did not want to be bogged down with a partner and child. Weeks later, I heard that he’d emigrated to America.

In those days, you did what your parents told you to do. When I began to show, Dad made me go to Gozo, to an aunt’s house. They said I was on a working holiday. When my child was born, they told me sha had been stillborn. They would not allow me to see her, because, they said, it would be traumatic.

I wanted to prove to myself that I was more than somebody’s whore. I returned to Malta and announced my plans to really go abroad to read for a degree at a foreign University. My mother begged me not to go; she played the ‘you are my one and only daughter’ card, saying that she wanted me to be by her bedside when she died. But she hadn’t lifted a finger when my father belted me good and proper for being expectant before marriage…

I as good as cut all my ties with the family. I got my first degree, a Master’s and then a Doctorate, while giving guest lectures on molluscs, hell-bent on erasing my sorry past.

I discovered writing, and my peers, who were my Beta Readers, said I was a natural. I wrote as if my life depended upon it – perhaps it did. My pot-boilers, under a different name, kept me in clover, and allowed me to treat my friends, who were now my chosen family.

People would be shocked to know that the self-effacing person who wrote textbooks and treatises, also authored hardcore erotica.

One of my cousins looked me up on Google, and sent a letter to each of the Universities where I lectured, hoping that one of them, at least, would reach me. A good couple did.

She told me that my father had terminal cancer, and was begging to see me. On his deathbed, my father confessed. My child had not died; she had been given up for adoption to a couple who would have gone their separate ways, had it not been for his involvement… an Elastoplast child, go figure.

He actually said I ought to count myself lucky that my child was, as he crassly put it, sold into a better life than I could ever give her.

That is when I lost it. I punched him in the face and smothered him with his own pillow. He was too frail to resist me. When the Community Nurse called, I was still sitting in the chair, catatonic.

The judge said he could not understand why I was such an ingrate; after all, my father had acted to the best of his ability. He had saved me from the stigma of single parenthood, and my child from the shame of having “unknown father” on her birth certificate. I should have been eternally grateful. He said that twice, because I made no reaction, the first time around. I screamed. I had to be restrained. My sentence was harsher because I had shown contempt of court.

I kept writing throughout my stretch. The academia was easy to get past the  censors. Anything else required a battle plan. I sussed out which of the warders would help me find a solution… and it worked.  She introduced me to Startit.com, and I created a new, untraceable, account.  

Our new librarian had probably been told about me; I noticed she gave me several wary sidelong glances as she pushed the tray with books along the common room floor. Most people cannot reconcile parricide with academia.

So, I gained her trust, little by little; and discovered she was familiar with my educational works. Boy, was she impressed! I did not mention my pen name, though, lest I scare her off.  

We became friends; and I knew she would miss me when I left, on the morrow. Her aquamarine eyes with golden flecks, just like her father’s, brimmed over with tears when we said goodbye after I handed over my stack of books.

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That was ten years ago. I’d allowed five years to pass, and then, I sent her a PM on Facebook (we were already Friends), explaining everything, and I said I’d understand if she blocked me.

But, hey - my precious daughter, her husband and her two girls will be coming over for Sunday Lunch again, today.