Sunday Wash

"I had three days to prepare for seeing them. I spent four days preparing for everything else, and none at all for that."

The bell woke me, though I had not been sleeping. I had been lying in the dark with my eyes open, watching the window slit for the first greying of the sky, and when the iron tongue struck I was already sitting upright, my feet on the cold flagstones, my hands gripping the edge of the pallet as though it were the gunwale of a boat in heavy seas.

Sunday. The word had been circling me since yesterday's count, when the turnkey had paused at my grate long enough to say, without preamble or warmth, "Visitors tomorrow. Your lot's on the morning list." He had moved on before I could respond, and the information had settled into my chest like a swallowed coal — too hot to hold, too deep to reach.

Three days. Three days since the trial, since Mother's cry had split the courtroom air, since Father's voice had cracked on the words keep your head high. Three days of bells and counts and buckets and the trough and the chapel and the interminable, shapeless hours between, during which I had thought of little else but this morning, and yet had done nothing — nothing at all — to prepare myself for it.

What was there to prepare? What words existed for a son who had destroyed his parents' respectability, who had taken the modest, painstakingly assembled dignity of a dockworker's family and ground it to powder in a single afternoon? I had rehearsed speeches in the dark — explanations, apologies, promises — and each one had sounded more hollow than the last, the words collapsing under their own weight like structures built on sand. I'm sorry. I didn't do it. I was used. I'll come back. I'll make it right. Every phrase I turned over was either insufficient or untrue or both, and the knowledge that I would have to say something — would have to open my mouth and produce sounds that approximated meaning — filled me with a dread more acute than anything the gaol had yet inflicted.

The hatch banged open. I flinched — three days, and I still flinched — and looked down to see a tin bowl shoved through the gap, water slopping over its rim and darkening the stone. Beside it, a rag the colour of old dishwater and a sliver of soap so thin it was nearly translucent, its edges worn to a greasy smoothness. Sunday provisions. The gaol's concession to the sensibilities of those who would shortly be reminded that the men behind the bars were, in some former life, their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers.

"Make yourself decent, Jeffries," came the turnkey's voice through the door — not Culpepper, who I had not seen since yesterday morning, but the wiry one from the evening counts, his tone carrying the particular disdain of a man who considered decency, in a prisoner, to be a contradiction in terms. "Visitors don't need to smell the likes of you."

The hatch slammed shut. His footsteps receded.

I crouched and lifted the bowl. The water was cold — of course it was cold, everything in this place was cold — but it was cleaner than the trough's grey broth, and when I set it on the table and dipped my fingers in I felt the shock of it run through my hands and up my wrists with something approaching gratitude. Clean water. A private bowl. The luxury of washing without twenty other men's grime floating beside my own. Such were the privileges that visiting day bestowed.

I stripped the shirt from my back. The fabric peeled away from my skin with a faint, adhesive reluctance — three days of sweat and gaol air had bonded it to me — and the cold hit my bare chest and shoulders like a blow. I could see the gooseflesh rise, the skin prickling into tight, hard points, and beneath it the shape of my own body, thinner than I remembered, the ribs more prominent, the muscles of my arms less defined than they had been a week ago. Three days. What would seven years do?

I wet the rag, pressed the soap against it until it yielded a thin, reluctant lather, and scrubbed. I scrubbed my face, my neck, behind my ears, beneath my arms, across my chest. The soap stung where the skin had been rubbed raw by the blanket's coarse weave, and the water in the bowl turned cloudy with the residue of days I could not get back. I scrubbed harder. There was a need in it that went beyond cleanliness — a compulsion to strip away not merely the gaol's grime but some deeper layer, some invisible film that I feared my parents would see upon me the moment they entered the room. The mark of this place. The stain of what I had become.

I caught myself. My hands had stopped moving, the rag pressed against my chest, and I was staring at the wall with an intensity that had nothing to do with the stone and everything to do with what was happening inside me. I was not washing for their sake alone. I was washing for mine — for the version of myself I intended to present to them, the version that was holding up, coping, unbroken. The version that did not weep in the dark or flinch at hatches or sit frozen on a chapel bench whilst a chaplain's words burrowed into places he had no right to reach.

I wanted them to see their son. Not this — not the gaunt, stubbled creature with the swollen eyes and the hands that smelled of iron and worse. Their son. The boy who sat at Harrison's desk with neat cuffs and clean fingernails. The young man who had made them proud, however briefly, before making them ashamed.

I wrung the rag out and draped it over the table's edge. The shirt went back on — damp in places, stiff in others, its fabric carrying the permanent ghost of the gaol's smell no matter how many times it was rinsed in the trough. The missing button at the collar gaped like a wound. I tugged the fabric together and held it for a moment, as though I might will it closed, before letting it fall open. There was nothing to be done.

I ran my fingers through my hair, dragging them from the forehead back, but the effort was futile — three days of sweat and straw and restless turning had reduced it to a matted, greasy thatch that my fingers alone could not tame. The comb was in my pocket. It had been there since the morning of the trial, when Culpepper pressed it into my hand and told me to make myself presentable. I had not used it since. Not once, in three days. I could not have explained why, not in words that would have satisfied a rational mind. The comb belonged to before — to the last morning I had been a free man, to the last act of dignity anyone had offered me — and some instinct I did not fully understand had prevented me from wearing that association down through daily use, from turning Culpepper's gift into just another object handled over a bucket in a cell.

But today was not daily use. Today required everything I had.

I drew it out and worked it through my hair with slow, careful strokes, wincing as the teeth caught in tangles that resisted, broke, and finally yielded. The comb's spine was warm from my body — it had lain against my thigh for three days, carried without being touched, a small, private weight I had been aware of every time I shifted on the pallet or rose for the count. Using it now felt like spending a coin I had been hoarding, and the extravagance of it — the sheer, absurd luxury of combing one's hair for one's parents — tightened something in my throat that I had to swallow twice to clear.

When I had done what could be done, I sat on the edge of the pallet and placed my hands upon my knees and waited.

The gaol's voices found me there.

They came through the walls as they always did — filtered, disembodied, stripped of faces and bodies until they were nothing but sound and intention, floating through the stone like smoke through a cracked chimney. But this morning they carried a different quality. The usual currents of complaint and profanity had been displaced by something quieter, more considered, as though the knowledge of visiting day had drawn from the men around me a collective memory of what it meant to be seen by the people you had hurt.

"Don't let them see you cry, mate." The voice came from my right — not Carver, but someone further along, a man I had not yet placed. The tone was gruff, the advice delivered with the flat certainty of a lesson learned through failure. "Doesn't matter what you feel. You hold it. You smile if you can manage it. You let them cry if they need to, but you don't. Not in front of them. Not where they can see."

"Mind your tongue in there," another voice added, older, rawer, carrying the particular rasp of a man whose lungs had been working in damp air for too long. "Guards listen to everything. Don't say nothing about your case, don't say nothing about the gaol, don't say nothing that could be twisted. Keep it simple. Keep it short."

A pause. Then a third voice, quieter than the others, weighted with something that sounded less like advice and more like confession. "First time's the worst. You think you're ready. You're not. You think you know what it'll feel like to see them on the other side of the bars. You don't." Another pause, longer, and when the voice returned it had dropped almost to a whisper. "It's not your pain that'll get you. It's theirs. Seeing it on their faces. Knowing you put it there. That's the part no one tells you about."

The words settled into the cell like ash after a fire — soft, weightless, impossible to brush away. I sat with my hands on my knees and my jaw clenched and my freshly combed hair already beginning to fall across my forehead, and I felt the dread that had been coiling in my stomach all morning tighten another turn.

The bell rang. Not the deep, solemn toll of the morning count but a sharper, more insistent chime — the visiting bell, announcing that the hour was approaching, that the machinery of reunion was being set in motion.

"Visiting begins in one hour," the turnkey's voice called from the corridor. "Ready yourselves and wait."

Wait.

I was already waiting. I had been waiting since the turnkey told me yesterday, since the chapel, since the trough, since the night that did not end. I had been waiting, I realised, since the gavel fell — waiting for this, the thing I feared most: not the gaol, not the sentence, not the hulks or the voyage or the colony, but the look on my mother's face when she saw what her son had become.

The cell was quiet. The voices through the walls had fallen silent, each man retreated into his own private theatre of dread and preparation. The bowl of grey water sat on the table, cooling. The comb lay on the pallet beside me. The morning light through the slit had strengthened, casting its pale, indifferent bar across the floor.

I sat, and I waited, and the hour would not move.