Nikki Owen - Spider in the Corner of the Room

I arrived in a police van. Ten seats, two guards, three passengers. The entire journey I did not move, speak or barely breathe. Now I am here, I tell myself to calm down. My eyes scan the area, land on the tiles, each of them black like the doors, the walls a dirt grey. When I sniff, the air smells of urine and toilet cleaner. A guard stands one metre away from me and behind her lies the main quarter of Goldmouth Prison. My new home.

There is a renewed tugging at my sleeve. I look down. The woman now has hold of me, her fingers still pinching my jacket like a crab’s claw. Her nails are bitten, her skin is cracked like tree bark, and dirt lines track her thin veins.

‘Oi. You. I said, what’s your name?’ She eyes me. ‘You foreign or something?’

‘I am Spanish. My name is Dr Maria Martinez.’ She still pinches me. I don’t know what to do. Is she supposed to have hold of my jacket? In desperation, I search for the guard.

The woman lets out a laugh. ‘A doctor? Ha!’ She releases my sleeve and blows me a kiss. I wince; her breath smells of excrement. I pull back my arm and brush out the creases, brush her off me. Away from me. And just when I think she may have given up, she speaks again.

‘What the hell has a doctor done to get herself in this place then?’

I open my mouth to ask who she is-that is what I have heard people do-but a guard says move, so we do. There are so many questions in my head, but the new noises, shapes, colours, people-they are too much. For me, they are all too much.

‘My name’s Michaela,’ the woman says as we walk. She tries to look me in the eye. I turn away. ‘Michaela Croft,’ she continues, ‘Mickie to my mates.’ She hitches up her T-shirt.

‘The name Michaela is Hebrew, meaning who is like the Lord. Michael is an archangel of Jewish and Christian scripture,’ I say, unable to stop myself, the words shooting out of me.

I expect her to laugh at me, as people do, but when she does not, I steal a glance. She is smiling at her stomach where a tattoo of a snake circles her belly button. She catches me staring, drops her shirt and opens her mouth. Her tongue hangs out, revealing three silver studs. She pokes her tongue out some more. I look away.

After walking to the next area, we are instructed to halt. There are still no windows, no visible way out. No escape. The strip lights on the ceiling illuminate the corridor and I count the number of lights, losing myself in the pointless calculations.

‘I think you need to move on.’

I jump. There is a middle-aged man standing two metres away. His head is tilted, his lips parted. Who is he? He holds my gaze for a moment; then, raking a hand through his hair, strides away. I am about to turn, embarrassed to look at him, when he halts and stares at me again. Yet, this time I do not move, frozen, under a spell. His eyes. They are so brown, so deep that I cannot look away.

‘Martinez?’ the guard says. ‘We’re off again. Shift it.’

I crane my head to see if the man is still there, but he is suddenly gone. As though he never existed.

The internal prison building is loud. I fold my arms tight across my chest and keep my head lowered, hoping it will block out my bewilderment. We follow the guard and keep quiet. I try to remain calm, try to speak to myself, reason with myself that I can handle this, that I can cope with this new environment just as much as anyone else, but it is all so unfamiliar, the prison. The constant stench of body odour, the shouting, the sporadic screams. I have to take time to process it, to compute it. None of this is routine.

Michaela taps me on the shoulder. Instinctively, I flinch.

‘You’ve seen him then?’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘The Governor of Goldmouth. That fella just now with the nice eyes and the pricey tan.’ She grins. ‘Be careful, yeah?’ She places her palm on my right bottom cheek. ‘I’ve done time here before, gorgeous. Our Governor, well, he has…a reputation.’

She is still touching me, and I want her to get off me, to leave me alone. I am about slap her arm away when the guard shouts for her to release me.

Michaela licks her teeth then removes her hand. My body slackens. Without speaking, Michaela sniffs, wipes her nose with her palm and walks off.

Lowering my head once more, I make sure I stay well behind her.

We are taken through to something named The Booking-In Area.

The walls are white. Brown marks are smeared in the crevices between the brickwork and, when I squint, plastic splash panels glisten under the lights. Michaela remains at my side. I do not want her to touch me again.

The guards halt, turn and thrust something to us. It’s a forty-page booklet outlining the rules of Goldmouth Prison. It takes me less than a minute to read the whole thing- the TV privileges, the shower procedures, the full body searches, the library book lending guidelines. Timetables, regimes, endless regulations-a ticker tape of instructions. I remember every word, every comma, every picture on the page. Done, I close the file and look to my right. Michaela is stroking the studs on her tongue, pinching each one, wincing then smiling. Sweat pricks my neck. I want to go home.

‘You read fast, sweetheart,’ she says, leaning into me. ‘You remember all that? Shit, I can’t remember my own fucking name half the time.’

She pinches her studs again. They could cause problems, get infected. I should tell her. That’s what people do, isn’t it? Help each other?

‘Piercing can cause nerve damage to the tongue, leading to weakness, paralysis and loss of sensation,’ I say.

‘What the-’ The letter ‘f’ forms on her mouth, but before she can finish, a guard tears the booklet from my hand.

‘Hey!’

‘Strip,’ the guard says.

‘Strip what?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, you’re a funny one, Martinez. We need you to strip. It’s quite simple. We search all inmates on arrival.’

Michaela lets out a snort. The guard turns. ‘Enough out of you, Croft, you’re next.’

I tap the guard’s shoulder. Perhaps I have misunderstood. ‘You mean remove my clothes?’

The guard stares at me. ‘No, I mean keep them all on.’

‘Oh.’ I relax a little. ‘Okay.’

She shakes her head. ‘Of course I mean remove your clothes.’

‘But you said…‘ I stop, rub my forehead, look back at her. ‘But it is not routine. Stripping, now-it’s not part of my routine.’ My stomach starts to churn.

The guard sighs. ‘Okay, Martinez. Time for you to move. The last thing I need is you getting clever on me.’ She grabs my arm and I go rigid. ‘For crying out fucking loud.’

‘Please, get off me,’ I say.

But she doesn’t reply, instead she pushes me to move and I want to speak, shout, scream, but something tells me I shouldn’t, that if I did, that if I punched this guard hard, now, in the face, I may be in trouble.

We walk through two sets of double doors. These ones are metal. Heavy. My pulse quickens, my stomach squirms. All the while the guard stays close. There are two cleaners with buckets and mops up ahead, and when they see us they stop, their mops dripping on the tiles, water and cleaning suds trickling along the cracks, the bubbles wobbling first then popping, one by one, water melting into the grouting, gone forever.

One corner and two more doors, and we arrive at a new room. It is four metres by four metres and very warm. My jacket clings to my skin and my legs shake. I close my eyes. I have to. I need to think, to calm myself. I envision home, Spain. Orange groves, sunshine, mountains. Anything I can think of, anything that will take my mind away from where I am. From what I am.

A cough sounds and my eyes flicker open. There, ahead, is another guard sitting at a table. She coughs again, glances from under her spectacles and frowns. My leg itches from the sweat and heat. I bend down, hitch up my trousers and scratch.