Machines Like Me

Until then, I’d never considered what humiliation it was, to be taken down the courtroom steps and escorted to prison – by force if you tried to resist. Her term began in Holloway prison, six months after the deed. Adam’s luminous love had triumphed.

Gorringe now had a reasonable basis on which to appeal his sentence: one outrage, not two, and time already served. But the law moved slowly. Cheaper and more efficient DNA testing was undermining all kinds of convictions. All kinds of self-declared innocent men and women were clamouring to have their cases reopened. There was a logjam at the Appeal Court. Gorringe, only partly innocent, would have to wait.

On Miranda’s first full day inside, I went to visit Mark at his reception class in Clapham Old Town. It was a single-storey prefabricated building by a Victorian church. As I walked up the path, passing under a heavily pollarded oak, I saw Jasmin waiting for me by the entrance. I knew straight away, and felt that I had always known. Her tight expression, as I came closer, was confirmation. We had been refused. She took me into the building and then, not into the classroom, but along a linoleum corridor to an office. As we passed, I saw Mark through an interior window, standing at a low table with a few others, doing something with coloured wooden blocks. I sat with a cup of weak coffee, while Jasmin told me how sorry she was, how the matter was out of her hands, though she had done her best. We should have told her that there was a court case pending. She was investigating the appeal procedure. In the meantime, she had managed to get a single concession from the bureaucracy. Given the close attachment already formed, Miranda would be allowed one audio-visual contact with Mark each week. My attention was wandering. I didn’t need to hear any more. I was thinking only of that point in the afternoon when I would break the news to Miranda.

When Jasmin was finished, I said I had nothing to ask or say. We stood, she gave me a quick hug and led me out of the building by another corridor that avoided the classroom. It was almost mid-morning break and Mark had already been told I wasn’t coming that day. He might not have cared, for early season snow was falling and all the children were excited. The next day he would be told again that I wasn’t coming, and the same the next day, and the next, until his expectations began to fade.

*

Miranda served six months, three in Holloway, the rest in an open prison north of Ipswich. Like many middle-class, educated criminals before her, she put in for a job in the prison library. But a number of famous poll-tax martyrs were still waiting for their release. In both prisons, the library posts were already filled and there was a waiting list. In Holloway, she took a course in industrial cleaning. In Suffolk, she worked in the nursery. Babies under one year were allowed to stay with their prisoner mothers.

In my first few visits to Holloway, it seemed to me that to lock someone up in this Victorian monstrosity, or in any building, was a form of slow torture. The bright visiting room, its child art on the walls, the companionable plastic tables, the haze of tobacco smoke, the din of voices and wailing babies, were a front for institutional horror. But I was guiltily surprised by how quickly I became used to having my wife in prison. I accustomed myself to her misery. Another surprise was Maxfield’s equanimity. There was no avoiding it, Miranda had to tell him the entire story. He applauded the motives for her crime, and just as easily accepted her punishment. He had spent a year in Wandsworth in 1942 as a conscientious objector. Holloway didn’t trouble him. While she was in London, the housekeeper brought him to see her twice a week and, according to Miranda, was good company.

We visitors were a community within which the incarceration of a loved one became a mere inconvenience. As we queued to be searched and checked in and out, we chatted cheerfully, too cheerfully, about our particular circumstances. I belonged in a band of husbands, boyfriends, children, middle-aged parents. Most of us colluded in the view that we and the women we were visiting didn’t belong here at all. It was a misfortune we learned to tolerate.

Some of Miranda’s sister-inmates looked frightening, born to give and receive punishment. I wouldn’t have been as resilient as she was. To conduct a conversation in the visitors’ room, we sometimes had to double down and concentrate hard to shut out exchanges between people on our table. Blame, threats, abuse, with ‘fuck’ and its variants at every turn. But there were always couples who mutely held hands, and stared at each other. I guessed they were in shock. When the session was over, I felt bad about my little surge of joy as I stepped outside into the clean London air of personal freedom.