Five Weeks

"I had grown accustomed to the gaol. It was a terrible thing to realise, and a more terrible thing to accept, and the most terrible thing of all was that the acceptance came easily."

I woke before the bell.

This was new — or rather, it was five weeks old, which in the gaol's reckoning made it ancient. The body had learned. Somewhere in the accumulation of mornings — thirty-four of them, by my count, each one laid upon the last like the stones in the yard — my body had absorbed the gaol's rhythms so completely that it no longer required the bell to rouse it. The shift in the corridor's light was enough. The change in the quality of the silence — from the deep, held-breath stillness of the small hours to the shallower, more restless quiet that preceded dawn — was enough.

My eyes opened, and I was awake, and the transition from sleep to consciousness carried none of the confusion or dread that had characterised those first mornings. It was simply a change of state. One moment I was not awake. The next I was. The gaol did not care about the moments between.

I lay still for a count of ten — an indulgence I permitted myself on Sundays, the only morning the work bell did not ring — and listened to the building breathe. The gaol breathed. I had learned this in the weeks since the trial, learned it the way a sailor learns the moods of a ship: the particular creak of the corridor timber in cold weather, the drip that quickened when rain was coming, the way sound travelled differently through the stone depending on the hour and the temperature and the number of men who were awake and adding their breath to the air. I knew the building now. Not well — a man could spend a lifetime here and not know it well — but sufficiently. Sufficiently to navigate its moods, to anticipate its demands, to move through its routines with the minimum expenditure of surprise.

I sat up. The straw shifted beneath me — a sound I no longer noticed, the way a man stops noticing the ticking of a clock he has lived with long enough. My feet found the floor. The cold was there, as it always was, but it too had been absorbed into the catalogue of expected sensations, its bite registered and dismissed in the same instant. I stood. My back protested — it always protested, the muscles along my spine carrying the permanent, low-grade ache of tissue that was asked to do more each day than it had been built to do and was rebuilding itself, grudgingly, around the demand. But the protest was familiar, almost companionable, the body's morning complaint delivered and acknowledged and set aside like a neighbour's greeting.

I crossed to the table. The Sunday bowl was there — cleaner water than the trough afforded, a rag, a sliver of soap. The visiting day provisions, unchanged from the first Sunday, unchanged from every Sunday since. I stripped my shirt and washed. The movements were quick, thorough, unselfconscious — the awkwardness of the first Sunday's scrubbing, the desperate need to strip away the gaol's stain, had been replaced by something more functional. I washed because washing was what you did on Sundays. The soap found the places that needed finding. The water turned grey. I wrung the rag, dried my face, put the shirt back on.

My hands, when I looked at them — and I looked at them every morning now, the way a tradesman inspects his tools — were unrecognisable. Not to me; I had watched the transformation day by day, each stage arriving incrementally, each callus building upon its predecessor in layers so gradual that the change was visible only in the aggregate. But to the man who had sat at Harrison's desk five weeks ago, they would have been a stranger's hands.

The palms were hard, ridged with yellowish callus at the base of each finger and across the heel of the hand where the pickaxe shaft sat. The blisters were gone — healed, absorbed, replaced by the thickened skin that blisters become when they are torn and reformed and torn and reformed until the tissue surrenders and builds something the work cannot destroy. The fingers were broader, the knuckles more prominent, the nails cracked and darkened with stone dust that no amount of Sunday soap could fully remove. They were a labourer's hands now. Not a skilled labourer's — not Finch's hands, which carried thirty years of working knowledge in their shape — but hands that had been broken in, the way boots are broken in, through the sustained, painful application of use.

I drew the comb from beneath the straw where I kept it — not in my pocket anymore, not carried as a talisman, but stored as a tool, retrieved on Sundays, used, returned. The shift had happened without my noticing. Somewhere in the weeks between the first visit and this one, the comb had ceased to be the last remnant of my former life and become simply a comb — an object with a function, valued for that function, no longer freighted with the emotional cargo I had once attached to it. I worked it through my hair with quick, efficient strokes. The hair was longer than it had been — the gaol did not provide barbers on any schedule a man could rely upon — and it fell across my forehead and over my ears in a way that Mother would have found disreputable and Father would have ignored. I pushed it back, parted it roughly with my fingers, and set the comb aside.

Sunday. The sixth one. Visiting day.

The dread was still there. I will not pretend it wasn't — it lived in the pit of my stomach like a stone I had swallowed, heavy and indigestible, present every visiting Sunday from the moment I woke until the moment the far door opened and I saw their faces. But the dread had changed shape. On the first Sunday it had been formless, overwhelming, a terror born of not knowing — not knowing what the visiting room looked like, not knowing how to sit across from my parents with iron between us, not knowing what words could possibly bridge the distance the gaol had placed between my life and theirs.

Now I knew. I knew the room, the bench, the speaking holes, the guards, the other families, the particular quality of the light and the particular weight of the air and the particular sound the far door made when it opened. The knowing did not eliminate the dread. But it contained it, the way a levee contains a river — not by removing the water but by defining its boundaries, giving it shape, preventing it from flooding everything.

From across the corridor, through the grate, Carver's voice arrived. "Sunday best, Jeffries?"

I glanced towards the door. Carver's grate was a dark rectangle in the opposite wall, his face invisible behind it, but I could hear the familiar, dry amusement in his tone — the particular register he used for observations that were equal parts mockery and companionship, offered without warmth but not without regard.

"Something like that," I said.

"Give the old girl my love."

"She's not your type, Carver."

A snort. "Everyone's my type after fourteen months. Off you go, then. Try not to come back weeping."

The exchange was brief, habitual, carrying no more emotional weight than a nod between neighbours. This too had changed. In the first week, Carver's counsel had felt significant — each piece of advice a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. Now the conversations were shorter, lighter, stripped of the urgency that novelty had imposed upon them. We were not friends. The gaol did not produce friends, or if it did, the friendship it produced was a lean, cautious thing, built from proximity and shared circumstance rather than affection. But we were familiar, and familiarity, in a place where most things were hostile, carried a value I had learned not to underestimate.

The turnkey came. The door opened. I stepped into the corridor and fell into the line of men assembling for the visiting room — the same line, the same route, the same sequence of passages and stairs I had walked five times before. My boots knew the way. My body moved through the turns and descents without consulting my mind, the route encoded in muscle and bone the way the counting-house route had once been encoded — left at the landing, down twelve steps, right through the reinforced door, along the lower passage where the stone was darker and the air smelled of damp and tallow and the accumulated grief of a thousand previous Sundays.

The visiting room door stood open. I entered, found my place on the bench, sat. The wood was cold beneath me, the iron bars before me dark and pitted, the speaking hole at head height worn smooth as ever by the palms and lips of men who had leaned into it and whispered and wept and bargained and lied.

I waited. The room filled around me — the same choreography each time, the prisoners arriving first, the visitors after, the two halves of each severed family assembled on their respective sides of the iron and made to wait, facing one another across a distance of six feet and an infinity of circumstance. I watched the other men. Some I knew by name now — not well, not as companions, but as fixtures of the visiting room's regular cast. The old man who spoke to the small boy was here again, in the same position, his weathered face carrying the same careful gentleness. The boy was not with him today. A woman sat in the child's place, older, red-eyed, her hands folded in her lap with the rigid composure of someone holding herself together through force of will alone.

The far door opened.

I looked up. The visitors filed in — the same hesitant procession, the same scanning of the room, the same moment of recognition that passed between each visitor and each prisoner like a current leaping a gap. I searched the faces. Found them.

Mother came first. She always came first — Father behind her, his hand at her elbow, steering her through the door and into the room with the same quiet, structural attentiveness he had brought to every visit. But the attentiveness had changed. On the first Sunday it had been a gesture of support — a husband steadying a wife through an ordeal. Now it looked more like necessity. His hand was not at her elbow as a courtesy. It was there because she needed it. Because the woman walking into the visiting room on this May morning was thinner than the woman who had walked in on that April Sunday, and the thinness was not the gradual, expected diminishment of age but the sharper, more alarming reduction of a body that was not receiving what it required.

I saw it from across the room, and the seeing hit me with a force that five weeks of calluses and familiarity could not absorb.

She was gaunt. The word arrived in my mind with the flat, clinical finality of a diagnosis, displacing the softer words — thinner, drawn, tired — that I might have reached for if the truth had permitted gentleness. Her face, which had always been slender, was now hollow, the cheekbones sharp beneath skin that seemed stretched too tightly across the bone, the flesh beneath her jaw diminished so that the tendons of her neck were visible when she turned her head. Her shawl — the same shawl, the only shawl — hung upon her shoulders the way a garment hangs upon a frame too small for it, the fabric that had once draped with the fulness of a woman's figure now falling straight, unsupported, the body beneath it having withdrawn from the cloth's embrace.

Her eyes found me. The smile came — the same brave, ruined smile from the first visit, the smile that reached her mouth and stopped — but the effort behind it was greater now, the muscles slower to respond, the will driving them having less to work with. She released Father's arm and moved towards the bench, and her walk — I watched her walk, the way a doctor watches a patient cross a room, reading the gait for evidence of what the words will not say — was careful, measured, the walk of a woman conserving energy she could not afford to spend.

Father followed her. He was diminished too, but differently. Where Mother's reduction was visible in the loss of weight, Father's was visible in the loss of something less tangible — a compression of the man himself, as though the weeks had been pressing down upon him from above, driving him into a smaller, denser version of the figure that had once filled a doorway.

His shoulders, which had always been broad, were now hunched forward in a permanent stoop — not the containment posture of the first visit, the deliberate holding-in of emotion, but something structural, something the body had adopted and could not release. His coat hung the same way Mother's shawl hung: too large, too loose, the frame beneath it having retreated from the garment's dimensions. His hair had greyed further — not silver, not distinguished, but the flat, dull grey of metal that has been exposed to weather and neglected.

His hands. I looked at his hands as he guided Mother to the bench, and what I saw in them was worse than anything else — worse than the stoop, worse than the grey hair, worse than the coat that no longer fit. His knuckles were raw, split, the skin across them cracked and reddened in a pattern I recognised because I saw the same pattern on the hands of men in the stone yard — men whose labour involved the repeated, abrasive contact of skin against rough surfaces, who carried the marks of their work upon their hands the way scribes carry ink stains. Father's hands had always been a working man's hands — scarred, calloused, roughened by rope and timber. But these were damaged hands. These were the hands of a man doing work that was harder than the work he was accustomed to, or doing the same work without the protection he had once afforded them, or both.

They sat. Mother's descent to the bench had none of the first visit's controlled collapse — the dramatic folding, the hands flying to the shawl. She sat the way exhausted people sit: carefully, slowly, lowering herself onto the wood with the concentrated effort of a body that does not trust its own legs to manage the operation without supervision. Father sat beside her, his hand moving from her elbow to her back, resting there — lightly, steadily — in a gesture that had become, I could see, as habitual and as necessary as breathing.

They looked at me through the bars. I looked at them.

Five weeks. Five weeks had done this. And the sentence had seven years left to run.