Mountjoy Prison, Dublin
23 October 1997
The building had that unfinished quality that I imagine many prisons have – unpainted concrete floors and exposed plumbing and metal grid walkways. The smell of boiled cabbage and detergent nagged away the last of my resolve and I sniffed away tears. I felt cold, even on this mild autumn day.
The prison is full and I am unexpected said the guard who was booking me in, as if one needed a reservation. A few guards had a chat and decided I should spend the night in the oratory. I wondered what an oratory was. A female guard told me to follow her and my experience of prisons, learned from American television, prepared me for a long walk through gates with complicated locking mechanisms and rows of cells with inmates waving their arms through the bars and shouting taunts, but it was nothing like that. The woman’s section could have been a girls’ boarding school or a university hostel, except that the heavy metal doors locked from the outside. I was surprised to see that the oratory was just an ordinary cell which had been converted into a little chapel of sorts. A padded bench lined each of the side walls and the far wall had a table containing a plastic vase with plastic flowers and an illuminated Madonna and I imagined the setup was meant to be an altar. Madonna had electrical issues and every few seconds she buzzed and her lights blinked, not quite in sync with the flickering of the overhead fluorescent light. I prepared myself for an evening of sad and ineffectual lighting.
‘All right then, here we are’, said the guard cheerfully, ‘you settle in so long and I’ll come and fetch you in a short while.’
‘May I have my book, please? It’s in my little backpack.’ It had been confiscated when I was brought in, along with all my luggage.
‘I can’t let you have any personal belongings, sorry.’ She smiled at me in a sweet way that made me think she really was sorry.
‘Ok.’ I tried to smile back, but my lips were trembling too much.
She left and I sat down on one of the padded benches and looked around the cell. I wondered how I was supposed to ‘settle in’. Panic crouched towards me from the corners of the room and again I considered crying, but I didn’t. There was muffled noisemaking elsewhere in the building; a string of sounds that never quite coalesced into anything I could identify.
About an hour later, my escort returned and after a brief visit with the doctor – standard procedure for new inmates, I learned – I was taken to the yard to mingle with the other women and where I had the option of playing with a tennis ball or sitting on a bench on the side-lines, watching the others play with the tennis ball. The wooden bench was still damp from the morning’s rain, but none of the women who were sitting there seemed to notice so I sat down on the edge, trying to look cool and invisible.
A pretty young woman about my age came to sit next to me. She smelled musky flowery, like those cheap deodorants one buys at Boots. For a while we both sat watching the ball game and then she turned and looked at me.
‘Do you want some gum?’ She held out a pack with a minty green wrapper.
‘No, thank you, I’m ok.’
‘You the one being deported?’ Because of her thick Irish accent and a mouth full of chewing gum it took me a few seconds to understand the question.
‘Oh, uhm, yes. How did you know?’
‘News travels fast in here.’ She looked away as she said it and started scanning the yard.
‘Oh. Ja, I suppose. And you, what are you here for?’
‘Drug mule. Most of us are here over drugs. You see that black girl over there?’ She pointed to a young woman sitting on her own at the other end of the yard. ‘She’s being deported as well, she’s from Ethiopia.’
‘Oh really, did she also arrive this morning? She wasn’t in the police car with me.’
‘She’s been here a few months already.’
‘What?’ This information rattled me.
‘Yea, she’s been here ages. They got her at the airport, trying to get in illegally.’
‘I’ve just come from the airport, but I wasn’t trying to come in illegally. Maybe I should go and speak to her.’ I started to get up from the damp seat.
‘She doesn’t speak English,’ she said and lazily blew an almighty big gum bubble. ‘Lawyers and charity workers visit her now and again so I think she’s fighting the deportation and probably trying to get asylum; that’s maybe why she’s been here so long.’
‘Oh.’ I realised that since arriving here, I had hardly been making great conversation and thought to myself that misery was rendering me stupid.
‘Where you from?’ She was looking at the handful of remaining ball players and I got the impression that the question was more for the sake of conversation than out of any real interest in the answer.
‘South Africa.’
‘Why are they deporting you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How do you mean, you don’t know? Of course you know. What have you done to get yourself thrown out?’ She turned to look at me and I noticed her eyes were so dark they were almost black.
‘Nothing, I really don’t know,’ I said, my voice faltering. ‘I got off the plane, showed my passport at immigration and the next thing I knew, I was in the back of a police car on my way here.’ I watched a young girl eat a bag of crisps and my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything since arriving in Ireland. ‘Can one buy food in here?’
‘There’s a commissary for snacks and fags, but it’s only open in the mornings so you missed it for today.’
I realised that my money had also been taken away and besides, does one even get to have money in prison?
The sun went in behind a cloud and my companion looked up at the sky.
‘Do you need any drugs?’ she asked.
‘Excuse me?’ I’d been asked that question only a few times in my life and I was never able to play it cool and make like it’s no big deal. I always fluffed my reply.
‘Drugs. Do you want any?’ She still wasn’t looking at me.
‘No thanks, I’m ok.’ The ball game was wrapping up and women drifted off into small huddles. ‘Why do you ask?’ I looked at my companion and realised I didn’t even know her name.
‘You see the redhead over there?’ She pointed to a forty-something woman who was chatting to one of the guards. ‘You get your drugs from her or her daughter.’ She pointed at a girl who looked like she should be in school. Mother and daughter both in jail, that’s rough, I thought.
‘Are they also here for drugs?’
‘Murder. She stabbed her husband and the daughter helped.’
At this point, I just wanted to go home. I wanted to get my stuff back and go to the airport and fly home to Cape Town and I wanted to be with my mum and dad. I didn’t want to sit in a Dublin jail and talk about drugs and murder.
My eyes started casting about the yard, looking for diversion, but the pickings were slim. The air was heavy with the threat of rain and the shadows and colours had been drained out of the day. The tree in the far corner shook off leaves and the breeze fluttered them about, like little brown birds looking for places to land. I looked at the groups of women and wondered if I was the topic of any of the conversations. The mother and daughter were now sitting with a few other women in a small cluster and I contemplated what shadowy commerce may be taking place there. They looked so normal. I wondered what had happened in their lives to make them kill their husband and father and I had to resist the urge to cast a judgement I had no business making.
The first drops of the rainstorm we would have that night started falling and we all went inside.
*
A few months after my adventure I received a letter from the Irish immigration services that contained several paragraphs of bureaucratic talk and ended with the statement that I was not barred from seeking future entry into the Irish Republic. It was not quite the apology I had hoped for and there was no mention of reimbursing me for the wasted plane ticket, but it was better than nothing. I thought to myself that only the Irish can get a person with a name like Reinette Visser mixed up in a case of mistaken identity………
