The Devil You Know Read online

  Her offender manager had told me that Zahra had a history of self-harming, which had continued in prison, where she would cut her arms and legs. This wasn’t unusual; there is a high incidence of self-harm in Britain’s prisons, with reports of between a quarter and a third of all women in prison self-harming (five times as many as in the men’s estate). The figure increases annually, and has tripled over the last decade, according to a recent Ministry of Justice report.2 Self-harm might explain the bandage on her arm, although it could be due to burns sustained in her cell. I would not probe her at this early stage, but I thought there could be something in her past that was ‘unspeakable’ for her. Some people who can’t manage their feelings will feel bodily pain or become depressed, internalising their hurt, while those who self-harm or set things alight are externalising it. Both types of activity can be seen as signal fires, calls for urgent assistance. This can become a habit that is hard to break, and it is a risky one. It is a grave error when people dismiss acts of self-harm as attention-seeking – as if that were a bad thing.3

  Sitting with her that morning, I was struck by the starkness of Zahra’s express wish to die and her toneless voice. Clearly, her suicidality had not abated during her time in the HCU. I would have to be meticulous about alerting staff and colleagues to this, putting in place mechanisms to ensure that every safeguarding measure was in place. There would be forms to fill out and notes made in her ACCT file, a paper trail to create. It would protect Zahra, and also serve as proof that she had been heard and had received the appropriate level of care and response, ‘just in case’. This bureaucracy can seem onerous, but it is important; just as I can feel compassion and still remain detached in my role, the people who run prisons must balance concern for the inmates with a duty to maintain order and be prudent in tracking matters of liability and oversight.

  I thought if I did not respond immediately to Zahra’s stark statement about wanting to die, she might expand on it, but instead she sat quietly, staring down at the floor. I took time to reflect on what I could say to her. It would be a rookie error to express sorrow or worry, making this moment all about me. I thought I’d just leave her space in which to feel her feelings without intrusion. After several minutes, she lifted her head, perhaps a bit thrown by my silence, and I held her gaze. ‘How long do you think you’ve felt that way, Zahra?’ She didn’t waver. ‘All my life.’ A bleak, soft admission, like a verbal frost. I was reminded of Keats’s line, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death,’ even if self-immolation was hardly easeful. How had she accommodated that feeling, how had she lived this long? She shrugged.

  I decided it was probably time to change the subject, and remembered my plan to try and talk about her work. I told her I understood that her old boss had been supportive of her, and asked if she could tell me more about him and her work. She responded immediately, in a brief moment of animation. She described the garden centre, and how she took pride in setting out displays and helping customers. She missed that, she said. ‘I was a good worker. Maybe I can get a job there again when I get out.’ Her reference to a future life and the indication of an appetite to leave prison alive were a relief for me to hear.

  It occurred to me that Zahra might be most at risk of acting out her distress if she didn’t have work she liked to do. As anyone who has ever enjoyed their work will recognise, once that’s taken away, you’re left with whatever home or leisure means in your life. If that’s a trouble spot or a blank space, then depression can rush in to fill the vacuum. Zahra’s recent suicide attempt, and also her index offence, might have been related to that lull in routine and work that holidays can bring. At Christmas, the ubiquitous celebrations of the happy family ideal are intense enough in the world outside prison, as we all know (and they seem to start earlier every year). People inside absorb the same enforced merriment from TV specials, from the radio blaring carols and pop songs (‘I wish it could be Christmas every day’), from reading print media and online postings (for those who have internet access) full of imagery of celebration and plenitude. All serve as painful reminders that prison punishment is all about social exclusion. Secure hospitals and prisons are required to develop what are called (with unconscious irony) ‘festive care plans’, procedures tailored to help relieve some of the upset inmates will feel at the memories of Christmases past or the contemplation of what they see as a future without joy. Festivities around the new year or on birthdays and anniversaries can also be tricky, particularly for someone serving a long sentence; they mark another long, monotonous, twelve-month stretch, another chasm of loneliness and boredom to cross. For prisoners with mental health issues, this can go deep, stirring up difficult feelings of dread, paranoia and anxiety, as well as disturbing dreams and memories of loss or, perhaps, of happier times. As the medieval philosopher Boethius put it so well, ‘The greatest misery in adverse fortune is once to have been happy.’

  I wanted to find out more about the specific significance of the season for Zahra and to discover what was the question to which, for her, death by fire seemed the right answer. But our time was running out and I would have to return to that another day. For now, I needed to discuss how we were going to handle her revelation that she was still feeling suicidal. The prison staff were worried, I said, ‘and we all want to keep you safe while you’re here’. I deliberately put it in those terms to underline the temporary nature of her stay. One day she would get out; the future was waiting for her. ‘They already know,’ she said, her eyes drifting to the orange file. She sounded as if she could hardly be bothered with everyone’s concern for her; if she had any worries of her own about dying, it seemed she wasn’t conscious of them.

  The prison – and, by extension, I – would have to do the emotional work of keeping her alive. If she was going to make it, I thought, she would have to get more invested in her own survival. And if she didn’t give up her interest in fire-setting, she could be in prison for a long time, possibly stretching beyond her already lengthy sentence. I asked if she would meet me again the following week. ‘Is there any point?’ she asked. It was a good question, and I had my answer ready. I told her I wanted to stand up for the part of her that had expressed a hope for the future, in the form of a return to her old job, and suggested that she might think of therapy as a kind of work too. I told her I was willing to try that, if she was. To my surprise, she agreed.

  *

  I didn’t know where I would find Zahra when I came for our next meeting. I thought it was likely she’d still be in the HCU, but I was told on arrival that she had been sent back to the wing, signifying that staff thought her risk of suicide had decreased. I guessed that they would also have been under pressure to free up beds in the unit for some other woman who was more obviously mentally unwell. In a poorly resourced system, this is the juggling act; everyone does their best and we pray that no balls are dropped. I wasn’t under any illusion that Zahra had miraculously stopped wanting to die, but perhaps she was willing to gamble on a more positive future.

  I took it as another good sign when I found she wasn’t in her cell but was at work. She had decided to return to a job she had previously held in the chaplaincy, cleaning the worship room and providing assistance to staff during services. We could have our session there.

  Prisons in Britain have a chaplaincy that serves all faiths and none, supportive of all religious practices and beliefs, including paganism, agnosticism and atheism. Although self-professed atheists are the largest group in our prisons, there is still a sizeable proportion who identify as religious. Visiting priests, rabbis and imams complement the prison chaplain’s pastoral function. This is one way in which these institutions can treat prisoners as individuals and model respect for human dignity, as well as encouraging better relationships between staff and prisoners. There is also a recognition that spirituality can play a role in people becoming more pro-social and less likely to reoffend on release.

  Work, education, therapy programmes, and taking diet an
d physical health seriously are other examples of dignifying people’s experience inside, but there is an inherent tension in the provision of these, beyond the perennial lack of funding. If they are to be seen as fair, prisons must have one rule for everyone, and sometimes options that cater to a specific subgroup are seen as biased; the same is true in secure hospitals. The focus of penal reform, which has existed for as long as modern prisons, has increasingly been on trying to prioritise rehabilitation and, with it, human dignity, but there have been many failures. I’m not naive about this and I’m also aware that in my role I may be shielded from seeing the worst of the injustices or abuses that do occur.

  Each chaplaincy is unique to the institution, but they all seem to have a calm atmosphere and a relative sense of safety. I could hear the quiet rumble of conversation and the sound of bells as I approached the doors – not church bells, but those tinkling tingsha cymbals used by Buddhist monks to mark the beginning and end of meditation practice. It was quite the opposite of arriving at the HCU. Inside, a prison officer chatted with two women who were waiting to see the chaplain; nature photographs on the walls featured inspirational quotes, including Robert Frost’s wonderful ‘The best way out is always through,’4 superimposed over an image of a tunnel made of oak trees. It struck me how important this non-judgemental, hopeful space was for people living with the consequences handed down by courts. Within these walls, sorrow, grief and forgiveness were well understood.

  I spoke briefly with the chaplain, who seemed to like and value Zahra. She told me Zahra was in a stable state of mind and had met with the visiting imam that morning. This was heartening too; it suggested she could be reflective and ask for help. At the same time, I knew there was a risk that as we went on in therapy, some painful feelings would surface that setting fires had probably helped her to avoid. There’s a meme that nicely captures the true sense of menace in difficult emotions: a man opens his front door to a crowd of rather cheery monsters, jostling to enter, and responds by saying, ‘Well, well, if it isn’t those feelings I’ve been trying to avoid …’ Zahra would have to trust me as we opened that door together, and I knew that wouldn’t come easily to her.

  She arrived a few moments later, taking the seat facing me and nodding in greeting. She looked more alert and less blank this time but fiddled with the bandage still in place on her left arm, tugging at it and smoothing it as we talked. I told her I was glad to see her and mentioned that the chaplain had spoken warmly of her. I was treated to the briefest of smiles, transforming her face for a moment, but it soon vanished, a light switch flicked on and off. I reminded her that therapy was a kind of work – the work of taking her mind seriously – and that it might mean talking about her past experiences and choices. She frowned, telling me she wasn’t sure she could do that. It made her nervous because she didn’t want to think about ‘hard things in the past’.

  The hard things could wait, I said. We could start with some simple stuff. ‘Like what?’ She might tell me a bit about her family, I suggested. She exhaled, as if I’d given her more than she could handle, but she made an attempt. She was careful not to speak ill of them, I thought later; her true feelings would only emerge over time. She told me her father had died during her first prison sentence, succumbing to cancer. ‘He was a good and decent man,’ said Zahra, sounding like she was reading a quote from an elegy or obituary. ‘And your mother?’ I asked. ‘She’s alive.’ Her voice sounded brisk and impersonal. ‘She’s a busy woman. Seven grandchildren now, you know?’ Again, that sounded like a quote, and I found myself thinking she might be parroting her mother. Did she ever visit her daughter in prison? ‘No, no, it’s much too far away.’ Zahra’s tone did not invite another question, and I had a strong sense that this line of enquiry was closed.

  There’s a cliché, dating back to Freud, that therapists always ask about people’s parents and inevitably invite their patients to blame them for their troubles. The work in recent decades on childhood attachments that I’ve described, which builds on the work of Freud and many who followed, provides empirical evidence that there is a connection between a child’s early relationship with their parents and the way in which their mind develops. This in turn influences the function of the adult personality, including the ways in which people talk about themselves and those closest to them. Some research indicates that repeated exposure to abuse or neglect in childhood may affect the development of neural connections between those areas of the brain that manage emotions and support self-reflection. By the time I met Zahra, along with other forensic colleagues I’d published research into how the unresolved distress of childhood attachment insecurity can increase the risk of violence.5 I had a sense that this work would prove relevant to Zahra, whose self-narrative, such as it was, appeared to be preoccupied with family members who seemed to be absent from her life. I was reminded of the double meaning of ‘account’, as both a story and an honest reckoning.

  Good therapists don’t probe for evidence of abuse or trauma, but instead listen carefully and attend to what their patients don’t say as much as what they do, noticing the all-important spaces between the words. Most of us will also want to draw people out about their positive experiences with parents and carers, particularly their memories of being attended to, held in mind and known as an individual. These can have a neutralising effect on adversity, building resilience and making therapy more likely to succeed. Although I made no early assumptions, I was struck by how Zahra avoided talking about the emotional reality of her relationships with her family; her account was dry, matter-of-fact.

  I could see that Zahra was unused to talking about herself and her experience. Reticence early on in therapy isn’t unusual, but I thought it went deeper with her. She was educated and articulate, far more so than many people I worked with, yet she struggled to find words for her experience and her feelings. It took several sessions to learn a little more about her life growing up in the Midlands. As I’ve noted in other cases, hearing someone’s history first hand is always preferable to reports or documentation: their use of language opens a window onto their emotional experience. For example, I knew Zahra had been born to parents who already had two boys in their teens when she came along; she described this as being a ‘late child’. Again, there were two meanings to consider: late can mean either deceased or tardy, and neither word has warm connotations. I had the impression that she may have learned this phrase early on, and that she felt somehow at fault for her birth, as if her life was a mistake.

  Each time we met, we would talk about the orange ACCT book she still had to carry around with her, containing notes about her suicide risk. I suggested that together we could think of reflections that we might add to her notes, as if it were a work assignment. As a result, I think she began to see her suicidal feelings as a problem for the non-suicidal part of her mind. This was something that we could consider together, something which she did not have to hide from me. By this method we began to construct a kind of bridge between us. In taking her suicidal feelings seriously through our work together, she began to make a connection between what had happened in her cell and the day when she set fire to her flat. Little by little, haltingly at first and then flowing more easily, she told me the story of her offence in language that suggested agency and acceptance. I was able to piece together a detailed impression of that fateful day, one that has stayed with me for years, in the same way that a particularly moving or distressing film lodges in the memory, with certain images returning to mind at unexpected moments in my daily life.

  *

  Her shopping list that November evening was not long, she began, but she had to go to a few different places. She recalled it was bitterly cold, and I pictured her tugging a scarf higher around her neck to protect her from the chill as she picked her way along the high street towards home. Threading through the crowd of shoppers and commuters, she passed Khan’s bakery and nearly walked by, but then turned around and slipped inside. I was familiar with those Asia
n sweet shops and imagined the brass bell above the door tinkling as she stepped into the damp, cardamom-scented warmth.

  She had to queue for ages alongside an almost entirely female crowd, their high-pitched chatter grating on her ears. Through the glass window of the counter display she eyed her favourite sweets, gulab jamun: golden spongy balls of pastry dusted with tiny shards of pistachio. The girl at the counter yawned as she took the order. ‘Cover your mouth or something will fly right in there, stupid girl,’ she heard in her head, as if her mother were pressed close beside her. But Mum was far away, in Leicester, in the house where Zahra was born but no longer welcome. As she left the bakery to go home, perhaps pinching one of those pastries out of the bag to eat as she juggled the shopping bags holding the other supplies she’d purchased, I’m sure she appeared utterly harmless. Anyone waiting with her for the light to turn green at the intersection would have seen her as one of many: an Indian woman aged anywhere between thirty and forty, well groomed and unflashy, no doubt wearing a sensible winter coat.

  When she got home, the first thing Zahra did was text her mum. The non-response came: ‘Delivered’. Again. She’d sent several text messages wishing her happy Diwali, since it was the first night of the festival, and asking her to call sometime. Mum was probably cooking for everyone and would see this message later, Zahra thought. The clay lamp with a spout that she’d pulled out of a dusty box under her bed that morning was sitting on the table, and she took a moment to fill it from the big bottle of oil she’d just purchased. She went to hang up her coat, and then simply dropped it on the floor by her armchair. What was the point? Her phone buzzed – a text! ‘CLAIM YOUR £10 VOUCHER OR REPLY STOP TO END.’ Outside, fireworks began. I pictured her standing there listening to the first hiss, whistle … pop of the night, peering out through her kitchen window at the display. She heard faint cheers filtering through the glass from the children living next door. Did she think of them, as she made her plan? She didn’t want to, she said. She figured they would be fine. The building was mostly brick, wasn’t it?