Punishment Read Free

ended up with the conjugal bed. All sentiment aside, it was a good bed and when she indicated her intent to send it to the dump I said I’d take it. She kept almost everything else.
    We’d sold the Kingston house and split the equity. I kept the place in St. Ninian, the coastal village I’d grown up in, and where Anna always seemed to be vaguely miserable. Now I was here alone, for good. It was a disturbing thought—being at a dead end, in a way—but I was vaguely comforted by the desk’s connection with a time when I was relevant and busy. And I admired its obvious antiquity and quality as I sat in front of it with my fingers laced across my stomach the way an old man sits. The stomach, I noted with some chagrin, had become substantial.
    I’d been told the upside of divorce is often weight loss but, if anything, I’d gained. The Kingston doctor had cautioned me that two life changes close together—retirement and divorce—might constitute a psychic overload and to be careful with the comfort food and booze. He offered pills. I’d never needed pills before, even in the most stressful periods of my working life. I didn’t trust pills. He said I needn’t worry. The pill he had in mind would be innocuous—it might cause some dryness in the mouth, a fuzzy brain at first and perhaps, occasionally, an inappropriate erection which, at my age, might not be entirely a bad thing.
    “At my age,” I asked rather sourly, “what would you consider ‘inappropriate’?”
    He laughed. “You’ll have to be the judge.”
    I’ve been on the pills ever since, with no apparent side effects.
    ——
    I remembered that I had a photograph of Dwayne Strickland buried somewhere in a desk drawer, a coloured eight-by-ten that I found easily. A friendly inmate snapped it for us on the day I introduced young Strickland to my wife, back in 1998. It was August, I believe. The backdrop was a whitewashed prison wall and they were crouched while I was standing. I was frowning slightly, which was appropriate for my status as an institutional parole officer. Anna was still building up her practice at the time. They, being much younger than I, were more flexible and so looked quite relaxed, squatting in what I would have found to be an awkward pose. Anna was smiling like a girl and afterwards she gushed about the con—Strickland was so engaging; “a waste,” was how she put it. What was he like once one got to know him?
    I had pointed out to her that one rarely ever gets to “know” an inmate but as far as I could tell he had no discernable personality disorders. He had a fairly high opinion of himself. He wasn’t especially violent, just a garden-variety drug dealer who had strayed beyond his expertise by robbing banks for which he was serving eight years. He was in Kingston Pen, far more custody than he required, but only for a psychological assessment before a likely reclassification to medium security. His case managers were also trying to assess the fallout from an incident that might have got him labelled as a rat—a fatal designation in the world we occupied. All that aside, he had a lot of life ahead of him if he had the character to rise above the consequences of his past behaviour.
    She had shrugged. “He’s awfully good-looking anyway.”
    Four years had passed since that sunny day in 1998 but I remembered quite clearly how young and carefree Anna seemedback then. It’s amazing how anger strips away a woman’s youthful qualities. She
was
beautiful, even squinting in the sunshine that was bouncing off the glaring walls, her fine auburn hair ruffled by the August breeze.
    I’d had to visit Strickland there that day and Anna had asked to come along. She’d acquired her interest in criminals quite naturally. Anna grew up in or near a lot of prisons. Her father was an officer who had worked his way up the corrections food chain to warden in another institution. She’d heard me speak of Strickland, and the fact that he and I