THE RELEASE

Twelve years have passed since the murder of Oliver's father...

The skies were blue, summer was still painting fields and trees and hope with green and the door to the female wing of Brumpton Jail swung open to let a tatty Mrs Bramwell out to taste what she’d forgotten all about: freedom.

She had been given a long time to learn how to regret foolish impulses, and she may well have done that. There were the manly women who had taken an indiscreet interest in the curves of her motherly bottom and had tried to woo her into all manner of fascinating activities once the lights were out and the two-woman cells were ready to hide their secrets. Indeed, one or two of the manly women she’d taken quite a liking to and didn’t mind half of the things they wanted to do, and so the learning to regret foolish impulses had been slowed considerably and a few new regrets added to the big one of murder.

Not that she had ever looked on what she had done as murder. No, far from it: it was self-defence when she was a fragile mother and he an untethered beast ready to lash out for no good reason, and Terry Allbright unprepared to stand in the wings and watch. Terry had urged her on all right, but the hadn’t really needed any urging.

A woman can only really take so much and she’d taken more than that. You’d have thought the judge would have understood, would have taken her side and condemned the dead bully as justly punished for the way he’d been. But no. The judge had a few little domestic secrets of his own and felt uncomfortably that if women were allowed the rights to defend themselves against their men, especially if expensive alcohol was in the mix, then how would it end? Might not his own good lady take note and pick up a blade if the moment suggested its usefulness?

So no. Life was his dictum whilst wishing he could send her to the gallows, and she must serve a minimum of twelve years.

It had been a long twelve years. Her boy would be grown up by now. She hadn’t seen him, not once in all those years, though she might have put in the appropriate request but felt too humiliated by her unmaternal environment to face up to it.

Now there was the green all around, and the fields and the trees and the purest of pure air, and she stood, for the first time on the freedom side of the large wooden door and took her time.

She wanted to see Oliver, of course she did, he was her breath and her love, but not just yet. She must get out of these clothes, the same ones that she had worn twelve years earlier when they had carted her to this place, and they stank of mustiness and time and the lethargy of incarceration.

“Lydia?” came a voice.

She knew that voice, just about. It had been the woman who had been her only visitor this past twelve years, Cherie Bunkin who looked exactly like her name suggested she should.

She was a sweet woman and an official prison visitor. Sweet was the only word that could adequately describe her. She had a permanent sympathetic smile, tousled hair that suggested twelve year-old boy rather than approaching middle-aged woman and a tendency to wear short things. Short skirts, short dresses and even short shorts if the sun threatened to dominate the day. Today, though, she was wearing jeans of a proper length. She thought it only right and proper not to flaunt herself in front of a woman who most certainly had been pleasured by a good half dozen hard cases over the years. Little did she know the true depravity that can result from so long an incarceration as had been imposed on the once-lovely Lydia!

“Cherie,” replied Lydia, glad to see a familiar face even if it did remind her of the other side of the dreadful door she was still standing next to.

“I’ve got my car,” cooed Cherie, “I thought you’d need someone to visit you and help make plans with you for the rest of your life...”

“The rest of my life...” sighed Lydia, and suddenly that few words assumed a magnitude that, in her recently confined head, could well compete with the entire cosmos.

“Indeed!” smiled Cherie. “The past is the past, you know, and the future is all that is important! You need a home. Your old place is still there but nobody’s been near it since you were there last. I’ve had a look, and it needs quite a lot of work doing to make it decent and habitable again. I’ll see if I can tap some funds to help there… there are charities, you know… and then there’s Oliver.”

“Oliver,” sighed Lydia.

“He’s a big boy now. He left school this summer, you know, and he’s at work in the paper mill at Swanspottle End.”

“I know it! Mr Hunt, Cyril, … is he still there?

“He’s the boss, Oliver’s boss that is. He set him on and the last I heard is he thinks the boy shows quite a lot of promise.”

They started walking to Cherie’s car, an elderly but classic Mini.

“I knew him,” sighed Lydia. “The boss at the mill. He had a soft spot for me once upon a time. It was him who stole my virginity when I was fourteen.”

“How dreadful!”

“No, it wasn’t, though I guess it ought to have been. You see, I liked him even though he was old enough to be my own dad, just about. He was kind.”

“But fourteen! That makes him some kind of paedophile!”

“He might have been, but he was a kindly paedophile if that’s what you want to call him, and he took precautions so nothing bad came of it. Except this trouble, that is, because Tommy, my … I guess I’d better say late husband … heard about it one night in the pub when we were chatting about the past, and he never forgave me for it. That was what led to his violence. Until Cyril’s, that’s Mr Hunt to you and me, name came into it he had been as sweet as sugar and I could do no wrong. I was his innocent. I was his virgin. I was the one piece of purity in a soiled and sullied world so far as he was concerned, and then I foolishly talked about Cyril.”

“Why do that?” asked Cherie, opening the door to her car and inviting Lydia in.

“It was in the pub, with friends,” she said once she was seated comfortably. “One bloke told of how he’d done this or that with a woman, I can’t remember what but it was funny and we all laughed, and I came out with the story of Cyril and me. That turned Tommy from the sweetest and most loving of men into something quite different, and he was never the same to me again. And it got worse and worse until Terry Allbright came along and tried to rescue me… but it was all too late.

“I lost it one day, lost it completely, and Tommy never breathed again. I wish I hadn’t done it...”

“You wish you hadn’t let Mr Hunt do it to you when you were still a schoolgirl?”

Lydia shook her head. “No, that was wonderful! It turned my head, it filled me with all sorts of lovely feelings that persisted long afterwards! No I wish I hadn’t told the story in the pub. If I’d kept my silly mouth shut I might never have...”

“Where to?” asked Cherie, changing the subject and starting the engine.

“Home. I want to go home,” sighed Lydia. “And then I want to tell Oliver who I am...”

© Peter Rogerson 06.01.17