Dead Secret. Ava McCarthy

      ‘And may I ask why?’

      ‘Isn’t it obvious? I don’t paint any more.’

      ‘I don’t care if you paint or not. I want you to teach the other women.’

      Jodie frowned, and cast a look around the room: at the pencils, the charcoal, the tinted pastels; at the creamy slabs of paper and cotton-textured canvas. All the materials that had fed her and that she’d shared so much with Abby.

      She shook her head, stumbled backwards towards the door. ‘I can’t help you, I’m sorry.’

      In the end, it was Dixie who’d talked her into it.

      ‘Bullshit. Just because you’ve checked out don’t mean you can’t help the rest of us.’ Dixie’s eyes had strayed meaningfully to Nate on the next bunk, whose arms had been freshly scored that morning with self-inflicted welts. ‘It could help some of us get through another day in here, you know?’

      Doors slammed outside the art room, and Jodie stole another look at the clock.

      3:48 p.m.

      Twelve more minutes till the class finished up. After that, she’d be free until the cell count at six. Free to retrieve the hidden stash of pills she’d been stockpiling for the last eighteen months.

      Hiding stuff in prison was always tricky. The COs spent their days on the hunt for contraband, ransacking cells, scouring common areas, conducting random body searches. Not to mention the added hindrance of Dixie watching her every move.

      Jodie had been forced to switch hidey-holes a couple of times, but so far her stash had been safe. Counting today’s dose, she had thirty-six pills, which by her reckoning had to be enough. Tonight she planned to use them.

      ‘You okay?’

      Momma Ruth’s strong-boned face was turned up towards hers. Jodie nodded.

      ‘I’m fine.’

      The older woman tilted her head, the light catching the broad, olive cheeks that hinted at Cherokee ancestry. Deep lines criss-crossed her skin, like grids for tic-tac-toe. She was fifty-two years old, and had been in prison since she was twenty. She would never leave.

      She held Jodie’s gaze. ‘If it’s Magda you’re worried about, she’s in Seg. They frisked her and found the blade.’

      ‘I heard.’

      Seg was the Administrative Segregation Unit, where inmates were isolated in lockdown for disciplinary offences. Most women came out of there a lot meaner than when they went in.

      Momma Ruth’s dark eyes still probed hers, and not for the first time Jodie imagined how she might paint her. For the skin, a blend of earthy tones: yellow ochre, cadmium red. For the black hair, layers of ultramarine blue, flecked with titanium white. The challenge would be the eyes; how to capture that taciturn acceptance.

      She recalled Momma Ruth’s quiet words of advice the day she got here.

      ‘Don’t fight it,’ she’d said. ‘I fought it every day for fifteen years, and that just made it worse. Make your peace with it.’ Then she’d held up a finger. ‘But you got to know how to survive. You got to be careful how you walk, how you hold yourself. Always look ahead. Don’t stare at anyone, but don’t look down at your feet. And remember, for some of these women, the more violent it is, the more fun they’re having. You’re dealing with women who don’t care.’

      Jodie blinked. She fought the urge to check the clock, and tried to focus on Momma Ruth’s easel.

      ‘Let’s see what you’ve got here.’

      ‘It’s not very pretty.’

      ‘Art’s not about pretty, you know that.’

      As usual, Momma Ruth had ignored the plastic mannequin the others were drawing and had painted something abstract of her own. Jodie took in the series of dark, concentric whorls, all rippling outwards across the canvas from a pale blue core.

      She glanced at Momma Ruth, then back at the easel, her eyes drawn to the warm blue kernel. ‘You’re not happy with it?’

      ‘Loops went all sludgy. The browns all look like muck.’

      ‘What about the blue bit?’

      ‘Yeah, I like the blue bit.’ Momma Ruth’s eyes flicked to Jodie’s face. ‘Sort of tugs at you, doesn’t it?’

      Jodie nodded, studying the pattern of elliptical swirls. ‘It’s important, the blue bit?’

      Momma Ruth pushed some paint around her palette with a brush, stirring up the resinous smell of linseed oil. ‘It’s supposed to be … I don’t know. Like, who we are before we make all these bad choices.’

      ‘You mean innocence?’

      ‘Sort of. More like a clean slate, you know? Before you make that first bad choice and start up all of these consequences.’ Momma Ruth gestured with the brush at the murky ripples. ‘But the browns aren’t right.’

      ‘You just mixed too many colours.’ Jodie nodded at the muddy-looking palette. ‘You could fix it when it’s dry.’

      ‘Make the best of a bad mistake? Maybe.’ Momma Ruth shrugged. ‘Not all bad mistakes can be undone, though, can they?’

      Jodie let her gaze fall away, the question floating between them. No one knew for sure what Momma Ruth had done. If ever anyone asked, she’d say it didn’t matter; she’d done a terrible thing and now she was paying for it, and that was as it should be.

      She’d tried to teach Jodie the same acceptance, but Jodie already knew she could endure her prison sentence. It was the loss of Abby she couldn’t live with.

      She flashed another glance at the clock. Only five more minutes to go.

      Nate drew up beside them, on her way to the sink with a jar of brushes. Her freshly buzzed hair made her look like an army recruit.

      ‘Jesus, what the fuck is that?’

      Momma Ruth flapped at her to go away. ‘You wouldn’t get it. And I don’t need any of your smart-ass comments.’

      ‘Hey, come on, try me.’

      Momma Ruth rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, it’s us. Our choices and mistakes.’

      ‘It’s a fucking mistake alright. Looks like a giant fingerprint.’

      To Jodie’s surprise, Momma Ruth looked pleased.

      ‘You can see that?’ She glanced at Jodie. ‘It’s what I was aiming for. You know, like our mistakes are hard-wired into our DNA? Like we don’t really have any choices.’

      Nate made a face. ‘Fuck, that’s depressing. You believe that crap?’

      ‘I believe I would have ended up here no matter what, yes. Because of who I am. Wasn’t in my blood to make different choices.’

      ‘Well, I got choices. And I choose to call that bullshit.’ Nate banged her jar on a nearby desk. ‘And I choose to dump these brushes with you, because I ain’t fucking cleaning them.’

      She stomped back across the room, and when she’d gone Jodie said, ‘Is that really what you believe?’

      Momma Ruth got to her feet, her eyes on a level with Jodie’s. ‘Think about it. About what you did. If you had the chance to do it over again, would you really do anything different?’

      Jodie stared at her, and for an instant, she was back in Ethan’s car: his gaze challenging hers in the rear-view mirror, watchful, twisted.

      ‘I picked a pretty spot … she didn’t wake up once.’

      The air rushed out of Jodie’s lungs. She clenched her fists, her whole body.

      She’d kill him again in a heartbeat.