Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

He looks at me. “I fucking love you, Erin Locke,” he says. Just like that.

“I fucking love you too, Mark Roberts.”

He leans in, tilts my head, and kisses me.

“Are you real?” he asks, fixing my gaze.

We’ve played this game before, except it’s not really a game at all. Or is it? A mind game perhaps.

What he’s actually asking is, “Is this real?” It’s so good it must be a trick, a mistake. I must be lying. Am I lying?

I give it a second. I let the muscles of my face fall as he studies me. I let my pupils contract like the universe imploding and calmly reply, “No.” No, I’m not real. It’s scary. I’ve only done it a few times. Absented myself from my own face. Made myself disappear. Like a phone reverting to factory settings.

“No, I’m not real,” I say simply, my face blank and open.

It has to look like I mean it.

It works best when it looks real.

His eyes flicker and jump across my face, searching for a hook, a crack to hang understanding on. There’s nothing there. I’ve disappeared.

I know he worries. He worries deep down that one day I will actually just vanish. Leave. That this isn’t real. That he’ll wake up and everything will be the same in the house but I won’t be there. I know that fear; I see it fluttering across his face at random moments when we’re out with friends or standing on opposite sides of a busy room. I see it, that look, and then I know that he is real. I see it on his face now. And that’s enough for me.

I let the smile creep out of me and his face bursts with joy. He laughs. Flushing with emotion. I laugh and then he takes my face in his hands again and puts his lips to mine. Like I’ve won a race. Like I’m back from war. Well done, me. God, I love you, Mark. He pulls me into the salt marsh reeds and we fuck, desperately, hands full of woolen sweater and wet skin. As he comes I whisper in his ear, “I’m real.”

Last year I finally got co-funding from a prison charity to finance my first solo project. It’s now coming together after years of research and planning: my very own feature-length documentary. I’ve managed to get all the research and preproduction done while taking freelance projects along the way, and I’m due to start filming the face-to-face interviews in nine days. I’ve put so much of myself into this production and I hope, more than anything, that it all comes together. There’s only so far planning can take you, then you just have to wait and see what happens. It’s a big year. For me. For us. The film, the wedding—everything seems to be happening all at once. But I honestly think I’m at that magical point in my life where all the plans I set in motion in my twenties are finally coming together, all in unison, as if somehow I’d deliberately orchestrated it that way, though I don’t remember consciously doing that. I guess that’s the way life works, isn’t it—nothing, and then everything at once.

The idea for the film is simple, really; it came to me one evening when I was telling Mark about what it was like at boarding school. At night after lights-out we girls would spend hours in the darkness talking about what we would do when we finally got home. What we would eat when we could choose our own food. We’d fantasize endlessly about those imagined meals. We’d obsess over Yorkshire puddings in gravy or cocktail sausages on sticks. We’d imagine what we would wear when we could choose our own clothes, where we would go, what we would do when we had our freedom. And then Mark said it sounded like prison. That we’d dreamt of home in the same way prisoners dream of home.

So came the idea for the documentary. Its format is simple. It will follow three different prisoners during and after incarceration, through interviews and fly-on-the-wall coverage: two women and one man charting their hopes and dreams about their freedom before and after release. Today I’m doing my last introductory telephone conversation with my final prisoner, then I’ll be conducting face-to-face interviews with each of the subjects in prison before their release. So far I’ve spoken several times to the two female candidates, but it’s been much harder to secure access to my male candidate. Today we’ve finally got our hard-won phone call. Today I am waiting for a phone call from Eddie Bishop. The Eddie Bishop, one of the last remaining East End London gangsters. One hundred percent authentic, chop-you-up-with-a-hatchet, nightclub-casino, cockney-rhyming gangster. An original Richardson Gang member and, more recently, the center of the largest criminal gang in London operating south of the river.

I stare down at the house phone. It’s not ringing. It’s supposed to be ringing. It’s 1:12 and I’ve been waiting for an incoming call from Pentonville Prison for twelve—no, now thirteen—minutes. My other subjects’, Alexa’s and Holli’s, calls came through exactly on time. I wonder what the problem is, and pray that Eddie hasn’t pulled out, changed his mind. I pray the prison board hasn’t changed theirs.

It was hard to get approval from the prison board on anything, so I’ll be conducting the face-to-face interview portions on my own. Just me and a locked-off fixed-position camera. It’ll be raw footage at that stage, but then that fits the content, so I’m happy. During the second stage, once my candidates are out of prison, Phil and Duncan are joining me.

Phil is a cameraman I know and trust implicitly—he’s got a great eye and we share a very similar aesthetic, which I know sounds a bit pretentious but I promise it’s important. And Duncan and I have worked together a couple of times before. He’s fun, but more importantly he’s much better than I can afford. Duncan and Phil will both be taking a hit on the money front for this; the funding’s good but it’s not great. Thankfully, they love the concept as much as I do and they’ve got faith in the project.

I look through the plastic wallets containing my hard-won permissions papers from the Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison Service. More than anything, I want the documentary to overcome the conventional representation of prisoners by trying to show these three people as individuals separate from their convictions. Both Holli and Eddie have sentences between four and seven years for nonfatal crimes. Alexa has a sentence of “life with parole,” so fourteen years. But do those sentences say anything about who they are as people? Does that tell you who is more dangerous? Who is a better person? Who you can trust? We’ll see.

I pull the phone, cord and all, over to the sofa and sit down with it in a patch of sunlight under the window. Leafy North London sun instantly warms my shoulders and the back of my neck. Somehow the British summer is lingering. We usually only get a couple of days of proper summer but the sunshine is still going strong. We’ve had three weeks of it already. They’re saying it won’t last, but it has so far. Mark’s out at work and the house is silent. Only the muffled rumble of lorries and the buzz of scooters reach me from distant Stoke Newington High Street. I look out of the Georgian sash windows into our back garden; a cat wanders along the back wall, black with white paws.

—

I’ve had to call in favors from everyone to get this far. Fred Davey, the film director who gave me my first job, vouched for me in a letter to the Minister for Justice. I’m pretty sure Fred’s two BAFTAs and the Oscar nomination helped my cause a damn sight better than the synopsis I wrote for the film proposal. ITV has already expressed an interest in picking up the doc after general release, and Channel 4 vouched for my work in another letter—they’ve already aired two of my shorts. My film school backed me, of course. The White Cube gave me a reference, for what that’s worth to the Ministry of Justice. So did all the production companies I’ve freelanced for and Creative England, which has helped so much with funding and support throughout the process so far.