“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me… I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life… I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I’ll ever have.” Natalie Goldberg
I love this
quote – it’s how I feel about writing just now – quite raw – I think that’s because I’m writing stories born out of my prison experience – forgotten stories that I need to tell and now I’ve opened the floodgates they’re pouring out
When You Hear The Birds Sing is the first story (8,000 words) – the story of an Irish girl called Theresa. It’s dedicated to the women of HMP Low Newton.
When You Hear The Birds Sing
Come now into that cell with me and stay here and feel if you can and if you will that time, whatever time it was, for however long, for time means nothing in this cell. Come, come in. An Evil Cradling – Brian Keenan
The first time they put me in a cell and I heard the door lock behind me I couldn’t breathe. I pressed the bell and they came running then; opened the door and gave me a brown paper bag to put over my mouth. Breathe Theresa, they said. Breathe.
Now, I’m used to it.
I was named after a saint: Little Flower, Marie Françoise Therese Martin. My mother Bernadette kept her picture by the bed in a pink plastic frame decorated with roses and lived in hope that I would grow up sweet and pure just like Saint Theresa. Bless her, but what the fuck did she know?’
I was thirteen when we left County Down and fifteen when Bernadette died, old enough to look after myself, and besides I’d met Asif and we’d set out on our summer of love. But that’s not to say I stopped missing her, or that I ever stopped loving her or wishing it had been different.
I sit at my desk in my cell pretending to be someone else. I look at the orange I kept back from breakfast sitting on a blue plastic plate. Did you know an orange is not orange? No, an orange has patches of pink and yellow and even green, if you look close enough, if you screw up your eyes like I sometimes do. Things are not always what they seem. They’re not that simple. I learned that in here. In the corridors, outside the cells, there are skins thicker than ten jaffa oranges and masks made of concrete. ..
I roll the orange against my cheek and under my nose then open my book… ‘You gotta learn how to bluff. You’ll never make it in this game if you don’t…’ well that’s what Bob Dylan says. And he was Bernadette’s idol.
I read a lot. It was books that keep me going. All kinds of books, including the ones we wrote in at school: feint- lined with margins, squared paper for graphs, better for words, letters fit just right in the squares. Books kept things cool. Still do.
I used to steal them, stole a lot of things I didn’t even want or books I could have got from the library. In the beginning I wrote everything I got down in a waxy covered notebook: a red Elizabeth Arden lipstick, a pair of diamond patterned tights, a pen and pencil set from Smiths, gardening magazines (hundreds – Bernadette loved gardening) the trouble was before long I had too much to keep and I was caught in a trap of steal and get rid and steal again, as if I had no choice.
Just like now, caught in the revolving door, in and out of prison, swearing never to come back but heading out and straight for trouble. Some people are made like that…
If you would like to read more, When You Hear The Birds Sing is available for download -99p onto KIndle or your PC HERE
