Sculptress

ONE

It was impossible to see her approach without a shudder of distaste.

She was a grotesque parody of a woman, so fat that her feet and hands and head protruded absurdly from the huge slab of her body like tiny disproportionate afterthoughts. Dirty blonde hair clung damp and thin to her scalp, black patches of sweat spread beneath her armpits.

Clearly, walking was painful. She shuffled forward on the insides of her feet, legs forced apart by the thrust of one gigantic thigh against another, balance precarious. And with every movement, however small, the fabric of her dress strained ominously as the weight of her flesh shifted. She had, it seemed, no redeeming features. Even her eyes, a deep blue, were all but lost in the ugly folds of pitted white lard.

Strange that after so long she was still an object of curiosity. People who saw her every day watched her progress down that corridor as if for the first time. What was it that fascinated them? The sheer size of a woman who stood five feet eleven and weighed over twenty-six stones?

Her reputation? Disgust? There were no smiles. Most watched impassively as she passed, fearful perhaps of attracting her attention.

She had carved her mother and sister into little pieces and rearranged the bits in bloody abstract on her kitchen floor. Few who saw her could forget it. In view of the horrific nature of the crime and the fear that her huge brooding figure had instilled in everyone who had sat in the courtroom she had been sentenced to life with a recommendation that she serve a minimum of twenty-five years. What made her unusual, apart from the crime itself, was that she had pleaded guilty and refused to offer a defence.

She was known inside the prison walls as the Sculptress. Her real name was Olive Martin.

Rosalind Leigh, waiting by the door of the interview room, ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. Her revulsion was immediate as if Olive’s evil had reached out and touched her. My God, she was thinking, and the thought alarmed her, I can’t go through with this.

But she had, of course, no choice. The gates of the prison were locked on her, as a visitor, just as securely as they were locked on the inmates. She pressed a shaking hand to her thigh where the muscles were jumping uncontrollably. Behind her, her all but empty briefcase, a testament to her lack of preparation for this meeting, screamed derision at her if I-considered assumption that conversation with Olive could develop like any other. It had never occurred to her, not for one moment, that fear might stifle her inventiveness.

Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. The rhyme churned in her brain, over and over, numbingly repetitive. Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her sister forty-one… Roz stepped away from the door and forced herself to smile.

“Hello, Olive. I’m Rosalind Leigh. Nice to meet you at last.” She held out her hand and shook the other’s warmly, in the hope, perhaps, that by demonstrating an unprejudiced friendliness she could quell her dislike. Olive’s touch was token only, a brief brush of unresponsive fingers.

“Thank you.” Roz spoke to the hovering prison officer briskly.

“I’ll take it from here. We have the Governor’s permission to talk for an hour.” Lizzie Borden took an axe… Tell her you’ve changed your mind. Olive Martin took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks… I can’t go through with this!

The uniformed woman shrugged.

“OK.” She dropped the welded metal chair she was carrying carelessly on to the floor and steadied it against her knee.

“You’ll need this. Anything else in there will collapse the minute she sits on it.” She laughed amiably. An attractive woman.

“She got wedged in the flaming toilet last year and it took four men to pull her out again.

You’d never get her up on your own.”

Roz manoeuvred the chair awkwardly through the doorway.

She felt at a disadvantage, like the friend of warring partners being pressured into taking sides. But Olive intimidated her in a way the prison officer never could.

“You will see me using a tape-recorder during this interview,” she snapped, nervousness clipping the words brusquely.

“The Governor has agreed to it. I trust that’s in order.”

There was a short silence. The prison officer raised an eyebrow.

“If you say so. Presumably someone’s taken the trouble to get the Sculptress’s agreement. Any problems, like, for example, she objects violently’ she drew a finger across her throat before tapping the pane of glass beside the door which allowed the officers a clear view of the room ‘then bang on the window. Assuming she lets you, of course.” She smiled coolly.

“You’ve read the rules, I hope. You bring nothing in for her, you take nothing out. She can smoke your cigarettes in the interview room but she can’t take any away with her. You do not pass messages for her, in or out, without the Governor’s permission. If in doubt about anything, you refer it to one of the officers. Clear?”

Bitch, thought Roz angrily.

“Yes, thank you.” But it wasn’t anger she felt, of course, it was fear. Fear of being shut up in a confined space with this monstrous creature who stank of fat woman’s sweat and showed no emotion in her grotesquely bloated face.

“Good.” The officer walked away with a broad wink at a colleague.

Roz stared after her.

“Come in, Olive.” She chose the chair furthest from the door deliberately. It was a statement of confidence. She was so damn nervous she needed a wee.

The idea for the book had been delivered as an ultimatum by her agent.

“Your publisher is about to wash his hands of you, Roz. His precise words were, “She has a week to commit herself to something that will sell or I shall remove her from our lists.” And, though I hate to rub your nose in it, I am within a whisker of doing the same thing.” Iris’s face softened a little.

Berating Roz, she felt, was like beating your head against a brick wall, painful and completely ineffective. She was, she knew, the woman’s best friend her only friend, she thought sometimes. The barrier of barbed wire that Roz had erected around herself had deterred all but the most determined. People rarely even asked after her these days. With an inward sigh, Iris threw caution to the winds.

“Look, sweetheart, you really can’t go on like this. It’s unhealthy to shut yourself away and brood.

Did you think about what I suggested last time?”

Roz wasn’t listening.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, her eyes maddeningly vacant. She saw the irritation on Iris’s face and forced herself to concentrate. Iris, she thought, had been lecturing again. But really, Roz wondered, why did she bother?

Other people’s concern was so exhausting, for her and for them.

“Did you ring that psychiatrist I recommended?” Iris demanded bluntly.

“No, there’s no need. I’m fine.” She studied the immaculately made-up face, which had changed very little in fifteen years.

Someone had once told Iris Fielding that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

“A week’s too short,” Roz said, referring to her publisher.

“Tell him a month.”

Iris flicked a piece of paper across her desk.

“You’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, I’m afraid. He’s not even prepared to give you a choice of subject. He wants Olive Martin.

Here’s the name and address of her solicitor. Find out why she wasn’t sent to Broadmoor or Rampton. Find out why she refused to offer a defence. And find out what made her commit the murders in the first place. There’s a story there somewhere.” She watched the frown on Roz’s face deepen and shrugged.

“I know. It’s not your sort of thing, but you’ve brought this on yourself. I’ve been pressing you for months to produce an outline. Now it’s this or nothing. To tell you the truth, I think he’s done it on purpose. If you write it, it will sell, if you refuse to write it because it’s pure sensationalism, then he’s found a good excuse to drop you.”

Roz’s reaction surprised her.

“OK,” she said mildly, taking the piece of paper and tucking it into her handbag.

“I thought you’d refuse.”

“Why?”

“Because of the way the tabloids sensationalised what happened to you.”

Roz shrugged.

“Maybe it’s time someone showed them how to handle human tragedy with dignity.” She wouldn’t write it, of course she had no intention of writing anything any more but she gave Iris an encouraging smile.

“I’ve never met a murderess before.”

Roz’s application to visit Olive Martin for the purposes of research was passed on by the Prison Governor to the Home Office. It was several weeks before permission was given in a grudging processed letter from a civil servant. While Martin had consented to the visits, she reserved the right at any time to withdraw consent, without reason and without prejudice. It was emphasised that the visits had been authorised only on the understanding that there would be no breaches of the prison regulations, that the Governor’s word would be final in all circumstances, and that Ms Leigh would be held liable should she contribute in any way to an undermining of prison discipline.

Roz found it hard to look at Olive. Good manners and the Woman’s ugliness precluded staring and the monstrous face was so flat, so unresponsive, that her eyes kept sliding off it like butter off a baked potato. Olive, for her part, watched Roz greedily. Attractive looks put no such limitations on staring quite the reverse, they invite it and Roz was, in any case, a novelty. Visitors were rare in Olive’s life, particularly ones who came without the reforming baggage of missionary zeal.

After the cumbersome business of getting her seated, Roz gestured towards the tape-recorder.

“If you remember, I mentioned in my second letter that I’d like to record our chats. I presumed when the Governor gave permission for it that you’d agreed.” Her voice was pitched too high.

Olive shrugged a kind of acquiescence.

“You’ve no objections, then?”

A shake of the head.

“Fine. I’m switching on now. Date, Monday, April twelve.

Conversation with Olive Martin.” She consulted her all too sketchy list of questions.

“Let’s start with some factual details.

When were you born?”

No answer.

Roz looked up with an encouraging smile, only to be confronted by the woman’s unblinking scrutiny.

“Well,” she said, “I think I have that detail already. Let’s see.

Eighth of September, nineteen sixty-four, which makes you twenty-eight.

Am I right?”

No response.

“And you were born in Southampton General, the first of Gwen and Robert Martin’s two daughters. Your sister, Amber, came along two years later on the fifteenth of July, nineteen sixty-six. Were you pleased about that? Or would you rather have had a brother?” Nothing.

Roz did not look up this time. She could feel the weight of the woman’s eyes upon her.

“Your parents liked colours, obviously. I wonder what they would have called Amber if she’d been a boy?” She gave a nervous giggle.

“Red? Ginger?

Perhaps it was a good thing the baby was another girl.” She listened to herself in disgust. Goddamnit, why the hell did I agree to this!

Her bladder was hurting.

A fat finger reached out and switched off the tape-recorder.

Roz watched it with a horrible fascination.

“There’s no need to be so frightened,” said a deep, surprisingly cultured voice.

“Miss Henderson was teasing you. They all know I’m completely harmless. If I wasn’t, I’d be in Broadmoor.” A strange rumbling noise vibrated the air. A laugh? Roz wondered.

“Stands to reason, really.” The finger hovered over the switches.

“You see, I do what normal people do when I have objections to something. I express them.” The finger moved to Record and gently pushed the button.

“Had Amber been a boy they would have called him Jeremy after my mother’s father.

Colour didn’t come into it. In actual fact, Amber was christened Alison. I called her Amber because, at the age of two, I couldn’t get my tongue round the “1” or the “s”. It suited her. She had lovely honey-blonde hair, and as she grew up she always answered to Amber and never to Alison. She was very pretty.”

Roz waited a moment until she was sure she had her voice under control.

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. I’m used to it. Everyone is afraid at first.”

“Does that upset you?”

A ificker of amusement twitched the fatness round her eyes.

“Would it upset you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. Have you got a cigarette?”

“Sure.” Roz took an unopened pack from her briefcase and pushed it across the table with a box of matches.

“Help yourself.

I don’t smoke.”

“You would if you were in here. Everyone smokes inhere.”

She fumbled her way into the cigarette packet and lit up with a sigh of contentment.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Married?”

“Divorced.”

“Children?”

Roz shook her head.

“I’m not the maternal type.”

“Is that why you got divorced?”

“Probably. I was more interested in my career. We went our separate ways very amicably.” Absurd, she thought, to bother with pain management in front of Olive but the trouble was that if you told a lie often enough it became a truth, and the hurt only returned occasionally, in those strange, disorientating moments of wakening when she thought she was still at home with a warm body wrapped in her arms, hugging, loving, laughing.

Olive blew a smoke ring into the air.

“I’d have liked children. I got pregnant once but my mother persuaded me to get rid of it. I wish I hadn’t now. I keep wondering what sex it was.

I dream about my baby sometimes.” She gazed at the ceiling for a moment, following the wisp of smoke.

“Poor little thing. I was told by a woman in here that they wash them down the sink you know, when they’ve vacuumed them out of you.”

Roz watched the big lips suck wetly on the tiny cigarette and thought of foetuses being vacuumed out of wombs.

“I didn’t know that.”

“About the sink?”

“No. That you’d had an abortion.”

Olive’s face was impassive.

“Do you know anything about me?”

“Not much.”

“Who’ve you asked?”

“Your solicitor.”

Another wheeze rumbled up through the caverns of her chest.

“I didn’t know I had one.”

“Peter Crew,” said Roz with a frown, pulling a letter from her briefcase.

“Oh, him.” Olive’s tone was contemptuous.

“He’s a creep.”

She spoke with undisguised venom.

“He says here he’s your solicitor.”

“So? Governments say they care. I haven’t heard a word from him in four years. I told him to get stuffed when he came up with his wonderful idea to get me an indefinite stay at Broadmoor.

Slimy little sod. He didn’t like me. He’d have wet himself with excitement if he could have got me certified.”

“He says’ - Roz skimmed through the letter without thinking ‘ah, yes, here it is.

“Unfortunately Olive failed to grasp that a plea of diminished responsibility would have ensured her receiving the sort of help in a secure psychiatric unit that would, in all probability, have meant her release into society within, at the most, fifteen years. It has always been obvious to me-“’ She came to an abrupt stop as sweat broke out across her back.

Any problems like, for example, she objects violently… Was she completely out of her mind? She smiled weakly.

“Frankly, the rest is irrelevant.”

‘“It has always been obvious to me that Olive is psychologically disturbed, possibly to the point of paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy.” Is that what it says?” Olive stood the glowing butt of her cigarette on the table and took another from the packet.

“I don’t say I wasn’t tempted. Assuming I could have got the court to accept that I was temporarily insane when I did it, I would almost certainly be a free woman by now. Have you seen my psychological reports?” Roz shook her head.

“Apart from an unremitting compulsion to eat, which is generally considered abnormal one psychiatrist dubbed it a tendency to severe self-abuse I am classified “normal”.” She blew out the match with a gust of amusement.

“Whatever normal means.

You’ve probably got more hangups than I have but I assume you fall into a “normal” psychological profile.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Roz, fascinated.

“I’ve never been analysed.” I’m too frightened of what they might find.

“You get used to it in a place like this. I reckon they do it to keep their hand in and it’s probably more fun talking to a mother-hacker than a boring old depressive. I’ve had five different psychiatrists put me through the hoops. They love labels. It makes the filing system easier when they’re trying to sort out what to do with us. I create problems for them. I’m sane but dangerous, so where the hell do they put me? An open prison’s out of the question in case I get out and do it again. The public wouldn’t like that.”

Roz held up the letter.

“You say you were tempted. Why didn’t you go along with it if you thought there was a chance of getting out earlier?”

Olive didn’t answer immediately but smoothed the shapeless dress across her thighs.

“We make choices. They’re not always right but, once made, we have to live with them. I Was very ignorant before I came here. Now I’m streetwise.” She inhaled a lungful of smoke.

“Psychologists, policemen, Prison officers, judges, they were all out of the same mould.

Men in authority with complete control of my life. Supposing I’d pleaded diminished responsibility and they’d said this girl can never get better. Lock the door and throw away the key.

Twenty-five years amongst sane people was so much more attractive to me than a whole life with mad ones.”

“And what do you think now?”

“You learn, don’t you? We get some real nut cases in here before they’re transferred on. They’re not so bad. Most of them can see the funny side.” She balanced a second dog-end next to her first.

“And I’ll tell you something else, they’re a damn sight less critical than the sane ones. When you look like me, you appreciate that.” She scrutinised Roz from between sparse blonde eyelashes.

“That’s not to say I’d have pleaded differently had I been more aufait with the system. I still think it would have been immoral to claim I didn’t know what I was doing when I knew perfectly well.”

Roz made no comment. What can you say to a woman who dismembers her mother and sister and then calmly splits hairs over the morality of special pleading?

Olive guessed what she was thinking and gave her wheezy laugh.

“It makes sense to me. By my own standards, I’ve done nothing wrong.

It’s only the law, those standards set by society, that I’ve transgressed.”

There was a certain biblical flourish about that last phrase, and Roz remembered that today was Easter Monday.

“Do you believe in God?”

“No. I’m a pagan. I believe in natural forces. Worshipping the sun makes sense. Worshipping an invisible entity doesn’t.”

“What about Jesus Christ? He wasn’t invisible.”

“But he wasn’t God either.” Olive shrugged.

“He was a prophet, like Billy Graham. Can you swallow the garbage of the Trinity? I mean, either there’s one God or there’s a mountainful of them. It just depends on how imaginative you feel. I, for one, have no cause to celebrate that Christ is Risen.”

Roz, whose faith was dead, could sympathise with Olive’s cynicism.

“So, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying there is no absolute right or wrong, only individual conscience and the law.” Olive nodded.

“And your conscience isn’t troubling you because you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.”

Olive looked at her with approval.

“That’s it.”

Roz chewed her bottom lip in thought.

“Which means you believe your mother and sister deserved to die.” She frowned.

“Well. I don’t understand, then. Why didn’t you put up a defence at your trial?”

“I had no defence.”

“Provocation. Mental cruelty. Neglect. They must have done something if you felt you were justified in killing them.”

Olive took another cigarette from the pack but didn’t answer.

“Well?”

The intense scrutiny again. This time Roz held her gaze.

“Well?” she persisted.

Abruptly, Olive rapped the window pane with the back of her hand.

“I’m ready now, Miss Henderson,” she called out.

Roz looked at her in surprise.

“We’ve forty minutes yet.”

“I’ve talked enough.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve obviously upset you.” She waited.

“It was unintentional.”

Olive still didn’t answer but sat impassively until the Officer came in. Then she grasped the edge of the table and, with a shove from behind, heaved herself to her feet. The cigarette, unlit, clung to her lower lip like a string of cotton wool.

“I’ll see you next week,” she said, easing crabwise through the door and shambling off down the corridor with Miss Henderson and the metal chair in tow.

Roz sat on for several minutes, watching them through the window. Why had Olive baulked at the mention of justification?

Roz felt unreasonably cheated it was one of the few questions she had wanted an answer to and yet… Like the first stirrings of long dormant sap, her curiosity began to reawaken. God knows, there was no sense to it she and Olive were as different as two women could be but she had to admit an odd liking for the woman.

She snapped her briefcase closed and never noticed that her pencil was missing.

Iris had left a breathy message on the answer phone “Ring me with all the dope… Is she perfectly ghastly? If she’s as mad and as fat as her solicitor said, she must be terrifying. I’m agog to hear the gory details. If you don’t phone, I shall come round to the flat and make a nuisance of myself…”

Roz poured herself a gin and tonic and wondered if Iris’s insensitivity was inherited or acquired. She dialled her number.

“I’m phoning because it’s the lesser of two evils. If I had to watch you drooling your disgusting prurience all over my carpet, I should be sick.” Mrs. Antrobus, her bossy white cat, slithered round her legs, stiff tailed and purring. Roz winked down at her. She and Mrs.

Antrobus had a relationship of long standing, in which Mrs. Antrobus wore the trousers and Roz knew her place. There was no persuading Mrs.

A. to do anything she didn’t want.

“Oh, goody. You liked her, then?”

“What a revolting woman you are.” She took a sip from her glass.

“I’m not sure that like is quite the word I would use.”

“How fat is she?”

“Grotesque. And it’s sad, not funny.”

“Did she talk?”

“Yes. She has a very pukka accent and she’s a bit of an intellectual.

Not at all what I expected. Very sane, by the way. “I thought the solicitor said she was a psychopath.”

“He did. I’m going to see him tomorrow. I want to know who gave him that idea. According to Olive, five psychiatrists have diagnosed her normal.”

“She might be lying.”

“She’s not. I checked with the Governor afterwards.” Roz reached down to scoop Mrs. Antrobus against her chest. The cat, purring noisily, licked her nose. It was only cupboard love.

She was hungry.

“Still, I wouldn’t get too excited about this, if I were you. Olive may refuse to see me again.”

“Why, and what’s that awful row?” demanded Iris.

“Mrs. Antrobus.”

“Oh God! The mangy cat.” Iris was diverted.

“It sounds as if you’ve got the builders in. What on earth are you doing to it?”

“Loving it. She’s the only thing that makes this hideous flat worth coming back to.”

“You’re mad,” said Iris, whose contempt for cats was matched only by her contempt for authors.

“I can’t think why you wanted to rent it in the first place. Use the money from the divorce and get something decent.

Why might Olive refuse to see you?”

“She’s unpredidable. Got very angry with me suddenly and called a halt to the interview.”

She heard Iris’s indrawn gasp.

“Roz, you wretch!

You haven’t blown it, I hope.”

Roz grinned into the receiver.

“I’m not sure. We’ll just have to wait and see. Got to go now.

Bye-ee.” She hung up smartly on Iris’s angry squeaking and went into the kitchen to feed Mrs. Antrobus. When the phone rang again, she picked up her gin, moved into her bedroom, and started typing.

Olive took the pencil she had stolen from Roz and stood it carefully alongside the small clay figure of a woman that was propped up at the back of her chest of drawers. Her moist lips worked involuntarily, chewing, sucking, as she studied the figijre critically.

It was crudely executed, a lump of dried grey clay, unfired and unglazed but, like a fertility symbol from a less sophisticated age, its femininity was powerful.

She selected a red marker from a jar and carefully coloured in the slab of hair about the face, then, changing to a green marker, filled in on the torso a rough representation of the silk shirtwaisted dress that Roz had been wearing.

To an observer her actions would have appeared childish. She cradled the figure in her hands like a tiny doll, crooning over it, before replacing it beside the pencil which, too faintly for the human nose, still carried the scent of Rosalind Leigh.