Page 109 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

were to put headphones on and reengage in the conversation, responding to each

other’s words, saying their own parts as they remembered them.
—

JACOB PHONED her when he and Vi arrived at the prison where she worked. The
timing was inconvenient because Jill had just made accidental eye contact with
the governor of the prison and had done what she usually did when that
happened—she’d walked around the nearest corner to hide. She was well aware

that the governor thought she was useless. Not Jill as an individual, necessarily,
but her role within the framework of the prison. “Letting young offenders have
half an hour a week tapping out fuchsia landscapes on a chromatic typewriter
doesn’t really do much toward turning them into better citizens, does it?” Not a
fair summation of her work, but getting on with her job was Jill’s only answer,

amiable until some bureaucratic roadblock popped up. And once it had been
dealt with she was a nice person once more, even nicer than before. She and
Jacob repeated their three conversations for the camera and then she went back
to work.
Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to,
anyway. They all received treatment; they could talk to her as long as they tried
to say what was true for them. Everything they said was recorded, and her office

door stayed open whenever a boy was in there with her. There was a guard at the
door too, just in case, but problems between her and the boys were infrequent.
Many of them called her “Miss,” quite tenderly—Tell me if anyone’s rude to
you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah?—as if she was their favorite teacher at
school. She had hope for them, even though the things they told her made her
shake like a jellyfish when she got a moment in her office alone.

Ben and Solomon were the two boys whose progress she dwelled on the
most, and they came to see her that afternoon, one after the other. Ben was
deeply introverted, coping relatively well with his incarceration and mostly
harmless—if only she could get him to express some, or any, emotion to her so
that she could confirm or revise these impressions of his coping and his
harmlessness. He had language and could understand everything that was said to
him, but his introversion was so deep that he often looked as if he no longer

knew whether he’d spoken aloud or not; he was irked when she pressed him to
answer her questions: I already answered, Miss . . .
A phone had recently been discovered in Ben’s cell; there were no incoming
or outgoing calls or messages recorded on it. Nobody could explain how Ben