Chapter One

      It was the last day of February, white and crisp, and very cold. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, Jay remembered the saying, and how strange he’d found it the first time he’d heard it. But he’d always found Hal Jefferson’s English mannerisms inexplicable. The man had talked in riddles; Cockney rhyming slang had constantly embroidered his conversation and he’d have to translate. ‘Apples and pears – stairs; Jack and Jill – bill, geddit?’ Sure he’d got it, but he’d never understood why Hal had bothered using three words where he could have used one. Nobody had.

      Jay’s face creased a little, it wasn’t a smile, more the effort of trying to put a date on the time he’d first met the dapper Englishman nicknamed ‘Hal’ because of his halitosis. Once, Jay had asked him what his real name was, suggesting that he use it instead of the derogatory reference to his breath. Hal had stuck his face in Jay’s, breathing heavily, emitting a smell like rotting meat. ‘So I’ve got bad breath; who cares?’

      Shaking his head Jay wondered why it mattered, then told himself it didn’t; not any more. The nightmare was over, past, done; finito. But was it? Or would he carry the faces and voices of the inmates in his head for the rest of his life? Would they always be with him, muttering the banalities that at the time had seemed of the utmost importance? In those days it somehow brought colour and character to the grey walls, the grey days, when all he had to worry about was staying alive, staying sane and getting out before he got too old.

      He saw her before she saw him. Her back was turned towards him. She was stooped and clothed from head to foot in crow black. He wished she’d worn something bright; red would have been heart-warming, or meadow green. A narrow shaft of late winter sun, stark in its brilliance, glanced across the top of her head where the pale pinkness of her scalp could be seen shining through a sparse covering of granite-coloured hair.

      Then she looked up. Her eyes were upon him, the same colour, or so they seemed in this light, as her hair. Yet as she came closer he could see they were blue; not the blue of the cornflowers he’d likened them to as a child, but a cold, milky shade, the brightness dulled by age. Jay stood very still, watching her approach. He couldn’t remember how old she was, seventy-one, seventy-two maybe? He tried to recall how old she’d been when she’d had him, almost forty-six years ago.

      When she was a couple of feet away she stopped and, pulling herself up ramrod straight, looked directly into his eyes. There was no tenderness there, only searching, and in that instant he knew what he’d always known yet had never allowed himself to accept. She had never believed in him; but, worse, she’d never forgiven him. He hoped she wouldn’t want to hug him, to take him in her arms, to hold him close; not yet, he wasn’t ready. Jay needn’t have worried, her hands were pushed deep into her coat pockets, and she made no further move. Neither of them spoke.

      Her face, he noticed, was a strange yellow colour, darker around her mouth and under her eyes. She looks sick he thought, picturing her weariness clinging to her stick limbs like moss to an ancient stone. But then he was older too, his once coal-black hair was threaded with silver, and lately he’d found white streaks in his pubic thatch. Deep lines etched from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and the crisscross tracery of fine lines around his eyes had nothing to do with laughter. He wished it had.

      It was Jay who broke the silence. ‘Thanks for coming, Mom.’ The words came out flat like meat forced through a mincer.

      A