Correctional Read online

  CORRECTIONAL

  NJ CROSSKEY

  Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © N.J. Crosskey 2022

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-80031-003-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-80031-004-9

  Set in Times.

  Cover design by Kari Brownlie | www.karibrownlie.co.uk

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  N.J. Crosskey lives with her husband and two children in the seaside town of Worthing, West Sussex. She has worked in the care sector for almost twenty years, but has always yearned to be an author. In 2014 she finally found the courage to chase her dream, and began by writing short fiction which has since been published in various ezines and online literary magazines.

  Her first two novels Poster Boy and Overdrawn were published by Legend Press in 2019.

  Visit N.J. at

  www.njcrosskey.com

  or follow her

  @NJCrosskey

  For my awesome son Riley. Thank you for bringing

  so much love and laughter to our lives

  It’s just another Saturday evening. Up and down the country, families gather on their sofas ready to devour the entertainment provided for them by the gods of prime time. Snacks are gathered, drinks are poured. Guesses are made, opinions are shared. The nation waits in anticipation; the bookies take their final bets before the broadcast begins.

  It’s just like any other Saturday evening, except tonight I’m watching too. Tonight, I’m on the spectator side of the screen. For now. Reclining in my chair, beer in hand and a bowl of peanuts resting on the arm, waiting for the spectacle to begin, just like millions of others.

  From John o’ Groats to Land’s End, wives shush husbands, and parents hurriedly usher children to bed as the adverts draw to a close and the commentator finally speaks.

  “Twelve inmates. One chamber. Who will face justice tonight? Their fate is in your hands as we join Mo Wilson and the guards at Whitefield Prison for this week’s Juustiiice Liiive!”

  I turn the volume up as Mel saunters in, tutting.

  “Really, Cal?” She plucks the glass of Merlot from the coffee table. The one I poured for her. “On your holiday?”

  “What can I say?” I smile, slightly. Willing her to lift the wine to her lips. “I guess I’m a workaholic.”

  The theme music kicks in, a deep beat overlaid with jazzy electric guitar. The logo Justice Live – written in a jagged neon-blue font – sweeps across the screen at a jaunty angle before settling in the middle. CGI prison bars descend in front of it.

  Then it’s the mugshot montage. Twelve monsters, all in a row. Unwashed, unkempt, every scar and pockmark accentuated by the sickly yellow light. A rapist. A murderer. A paedophile. Each one holding a letter board that gives their name, their crime, and the number to call to cast your vote.

  Some of them are instantly recognisable to the public, even without the prop. I guess you’d call them notorious, or infamous. However you want to put it, they’re the images you see when you think of evil. Like Harvey Stone, whose picture comes last in the montage. His letter board reads Child Killer, but nobody needs to be told that. His round, greasy face and beady eyes are as familiar to the nation as any celebrity’s. The Playground Slasher. Seven little girls, seven different parks, one serrated blade. A reign of terror. A nationwide manhunt that lasted three months but ended abruptly, with a disappointing lack of bloodshed or drama, when he was arrested while buying a packet of digestives at a Tesco Express in Walthamstow. That was ten years ago now, but the memory of his crimes, and the innocent faces of his victims, are burned into the collective consciousness. Some things are so heinous, so painful, that we need to keep poking at them to remind ourselves they’re not just myths.

  The parade of pariahs ends and Whitefield itself comes on-screen. The hairs on my arms prickle, ever so slightly, at the sight of its barbed-wire-topped walls and lookout towers. I glance over at Mel, who’s now settled in her favourite armchair, knees to the side with her feet almost tucked under her. I wish I could do that – contort my limbs to fit my whole self into a chair as if it were a cocoon. But my legs are too long, too straight, and not at all flexible. I worry that she’ll notice the goosebumps on my arm, that my own flesh will rat me out, but she’s not looking at me. As much as she professes her disgust for the show, she can’t take her eyes off it.

  We all stare a little too long at the things we hate, and not long enough at the things we love.

  The camera zooms in, over the walls and on to the exercise yard. But the basketball hoops and workout benches have been cleared away, and you can’t see the courts marked out on the concrete, because of the crowd. They swarm around the raised platform in the centre, each holding an oversized umbrella, emblazoned with the Justice Live logo, to protect them from the autumn drizzle.

  Mo Wilson emerges from the main building, via a door I know to be the entrance to the camera runs, though they’ve moved all the wheelie bins that are usually there. The audience erupts into applause and he raises his hands in the air, fingers splayed as if trying to absorb their adoration into his skin. He’s all bleached teeth and slightly too orange spray tan. A walking Wotsit – as Dax likes to put it.

  One of the show’s runners jogs up to him, hands him an umbrella. Wouldn’t do to get that perfectly coiffured greying hair flattened and frizzed up by the misty rain.

  He steps up onto the platform, smiling wide and white. When he holds up his free hand, the crowd settles to a dull roar. He addresses the camera. “It’s Saturday night. The lines are open, the guards are pumped, and the inmates are quaking in their boots!”

  The crowd roars, almost feral in their excitement. Rabid dogs who’ve caught the scent of blood on the breeze.

  “And so they should be,” Mo continues, “because I’ve had a sneak peek at tonight’s chamber program, and let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it… is… a… doozy!” More roars. Cheers. They’ll all be hoarse by the first commercial break if they keep this up. “As always, it’s up to you guys at home to decide which of Britain’s most despicable criminals should face justice – live! But before you make up your mind, let’s catch up with what’s been happening at Whitefield this week. And I warn you, it’s not for the faint-hearted! They may be called inmates but there’s no love lost between our contenders.”

  Mel shakes her head slowly, biting her bottom lip. She’s judging me, I can feel it. Even though she doesn’t take her eyes off the television, I know that the raised eyebrow and soft clicks of her tongue are as much aimed at me as at Mo Wilson and his pithy one-liners.

  But that’s Mel all over. Reclining in her faux-leather chair, watching the world with faux outrage as she cradles the ornate glass in her palm, tapping the edges of it unconsciously with her slick, glossed fingernails – those are faux too. She can’t help it, everything she’s ever been surrounded with has been faux. Until she met me. At least that’s what I like to think. I like to think she wa
s overcome by me, instantly attracted. I like to think I was the first real and raw thing in her life, and that’s why she fell in love with me. I don’t like to think that maybe I was just a bit of rough at first, just a boy from the wrong side of the river to satisfy her desire.

  She grew up in a house full of false niceties and polished veneers, went to a school that gated itself off from the real world, took up a job in which appearance is everything. Even her supposedly profound experiences are artificial. Like the latest fad. She spent three months in the Himalayas last week, courtesy of a VR gift card her boss gave her for her birthday. She actually thinks she had a spiritual awakening, or some such cliché. The fact it was all pixels and code, when you get down to it, doesn’t register.

  Mo cuts to pre-recorded footage. Highlights of the week include inmates squaring up to each other over a pot of hair cream, and the infamous Manchester Maniac bragging about having sex with his victims – after he’d slit their necks.

  “Christ, Cal,” Mel says, looking at me for the first time since the show began. “Really?”

  “You don’t have to watch,” I say, turning up the volume again, “if you find it too distasteful.”

  She just tuts, and we sit through the rest of the week’s highlights in silence. I feel a shiver of excitement as my eyes dart to the clock.

  “I honestly don’t know what’s worse,” she says, topping up her glass. “The show itself, or the audience.”

  I know what she means. Of course I do. It’s sickening. The primal, hate-filled bloodlust on the crowd’s faces. Worse still will be what comes next. The pure delight, the whooping and cheering, when the votes are all counted and the tortures begin. The irony of it is lost on them.

  “So don’t watch,” I say, and she frowns even more. She wanted me to agree, to launch into a debate about the cruelty of human nature like we used to when faced with such stark evidence of man’s obscene treatment of man. But not any more. We don’t agree any more.

  I never intended to be a part of this, of course. It wasn’t what I signed up for. That I ever wanted to work at Whitefield at all was incomprehensible to her. But Justice Live isn’t Whitefield. Or at least, it’s only a tiny part of it. The part that makes the rest of it possible. I didn’t expect to be anywhere near this sick carnival of twisted punishments. I never dreamed I’d even set foot in the max wing. The guards of max are stars as much as they are correctional officers. All of them look like they could bench-press a double-decker bus without breaking a sweat. And, of course, they’re all ruggedly handsome, boasting a range of decidedly deep and masculine regional accents between them. All of them except me.

  I’m still in all the calendars and posters, of course. But I know I’m the joke addition–physique-wise. There are no teenage girls swooning over me like they do over Dax. All the women swoon over Dax. Even Mel.

  When she catches me staring she flashes a small smile, and I wonder how we got here. I think she still loves me. I know I still love her. This distance between us isn’t irrevocable, it can’t be. If I thought these walls between us could never be breached, I don’t know what I’d do. Even though the world she comes from turns my stomach now, even though the air of superiority she can’t seem to control sometimes makes me seethe, even after everything that’s happened, she is mine. My Melody. My soundtrack.

  I’ve loved her for so long that I can’t remember how it felt not to. And it’s because I love her that I don’t tell her how empty and vacuous the world she inhabits seems to me now. It’s because I love her that I don’t mar her psyche with the things I’ve seen. It’s because I love her that I don’t tell her what I’ve seen her do. It’s because I love her that I slipped the Valium into her drink tonight, so she won’t have to look. Won’t have to know who I’ve become, or learn what I know. She won’t have to watch me destroy Dax Miller, and bring the whole fucking house of cards down with him.

  When you love someone, you keep them from harm.

  She drains the rest of her spiked Merlot as the chamber preview begins. Tonight’s virtual reality scenario is the reason why more people than ever are tuning in. The details have been ‘accidentally’ leaked online to generate interest. You’ve always got to think about the ratings, that’s what the producers tell us. And for once, I’m completely on board. I want every pair of eyes in England glued to a screen. Every pair of eyes, that is, apart from hers.

  She shuffles slightly in her chair. Yawns. Her lids are growing heavy, starting to droop. She fights it a little, curious about the chamber despite all her protestations. But she can’t hold off for long. When she succumbs to sleep, I grab the blanket from the sofa and place it over her gently. Before I head for the door, I kiss the top of her head.

  “I’m going to fix it, Mel. I’m going to fix it all. I promise.”

  PART 1

  DON'T DRINK THE WATER

  1

  I was seven years old when the taps were turned off and we were plunged into poverty. Although there have been many accidental twists of fate that have led me to where I am now – and I won’t pretend that some of them weren’t my own fault – it was the events of that day that first set me on my path to Whitefield. I, like millions of others, saw my life change and my future dissolve almost overnight, and we were powerless to stop it. We were victims of a catalogue of circumstances that conspired to seal our misery.

  If the ship had been just a few miles further out, if the wind had been blowing in another direction, if the tide had turned, or if the authorities had been able to identify what they were dealing with a little earlier, then perhaps my life would have been very different.

  Little Josef Rodgers, his face covered in blisters, grabbing at his throat as he suffers through his final breaths with the white residue of the Mr Whippy ice cream he’d been eating smeared across his cheeks, is of course the most iconic image from that day. But it wasn’t the first one I saw. Instead it was the footage of ambulances and army trucks lining the coast roads and men shrouded in bright yellow biohazard suits frantically handing out gas masks in front of Brighton pier that first alerted me to the fact that something was very wrong.

  I asked my parents what was happening, in between mouthfuls of spaghetti hoops and chicken nuggets, but they had no idea either.

  “Must be an industrial accident,” Dad said. “Loads of factories round that way, aren’t there?”

  “But it’s not just there,” Mum replied, scraping her dinner into the bin. She seemed to have lost her appetite. “It’s the whole south coast. Jenny’s cousin lives in Devon, and she’s been told to stay inside, Jenny says. Keep doors and windows shut and all that.”

  It soon emerged that it was a national emergency, on a scale not seen since wartime. A scale I couldn’t possibly comprehend at my tender age. An unidentified cargo ship carrying biological and chemical weapons had caught fire, just a few miles off the south coast. The authorities didn’t know which country had been transporting them illegally in our waters or why, and I didn’t really understand the technicalities at the time, of course. All I knew was that a lot of people down south were very sick. There was something in the air that could kill them, so they were being moved inland. It was an awful thing that had happened to people who didn’t deserve it, and I hoped they’d be alright. But I had no clue that soon it would impact my little world too.

  For a few days, life went on as normal, apart from all the worried chatter from the adults. The school had a collection – old clothes and toiletries, things like that, to be sent to the displaced children who had had to flee their coastal homes in haste, but that was as far as it went. Until the morning I turned the tap on to brush my teeth, and nothing came out.

  “Muum,” I called out, “the bathroom tap’s not working.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She rushed in tutting and shoved me out of the way, but fiddle as she might not a drop emerged from the tap. She pushed the button on the toilet, and smiled in satisfaction when it worked. But her relief was short-lived
when the swirling flush ended abruptly, without the churn of the cistern refilling.

  “Must be a burst pipe or something,” she said. “I’ll call the water company later and find out. In the meantime, you still need to get dressed for school. Don’t look so worried, Cal. It’s just a water outage, not the end of life as we know it.”

  She didn’t know how wrong she was.

  * * *

  The water wasn’t back on by teatime. It never came back on again, but we lived in hope for a good few months until the reality of the situation slowly dawned on us. Along the coast, the water had stopped running almost immediately after the accident – the plants used safety valves, which automatically shut off as soon as the contamination was detected. As an emergency measure, neighbouring counties had rerouted some of their supplies to assist, but now the reserves were gone. With the groundwater, and rainwater, potentially contaminated by toxins, the powers that be felt it was too dangerous to allow people to consume water from the southern quarter of England, at least until they could ensure these new biological threats were completely eliminated in the treatment process.

  The air may have been breathable again down south, but the water wasn’t drinkable (neither, as we would later discover, was the land farmable, or the sea and rivers fishable). No one could precisely pinpoint the exact location where natural sources were no longer at risk, so a line had to be drawn somewhere – and that somewhere was the Thames.

  Every water source south of the Thames was potentially unsafe, the experts declared, and therefore every tap, pipe and drain went dry. But we were assured that solutions were being found, it was just a matter of time. “Just keep on keeping on,” the cheerful local news anchor said with a wink. “Help is on its way. Let’s pull together, and see this through.”

  For the first few weeks, the government trucks rolled in every day, filled with bottled water. Kind and concerned people from across the river filled bottles, buckets and old milk containers from their own taps and brought them to us. Although there was no longer anybody alive who had lived through the Second World War, there was much talk of ‘Blitz spirit’ and a rosy, almost nostalgic sense of community and togetherness.