I am currently sat in a Morrisons café.
I bloody love a Morrisons café. But I love this Morrisons café
more than most.
I sit on a Thursday afternoon in the Merrion Centre in Leeds.
The first time I sat here, in this exact seat, was almost a year ago, on my
first day of work. Hardly the most magical narrative you’ve ever heard from me,
I’m sure, but this table, this coffee, hold particular nostalgia in my mind and
heart.
A year ago, I was residing at her majesty’s pleasure, many miles
from here, a long commute, but what a thing to be able to do. A commute.
In my bright pink shirt, my bright pink fleece, my shiny
name badge bouncing upon my bosom chasing a bus down the A64 to make sure I got
to work on time, and by on time, I mean early, early so I could grab a coffee. At
this table. In this seat.
So much has changed since then.
It was my 34th birthday. Day one at Max
Spielmann, which meant day one out of the prison gates. Day one in society,
community, reality. But a prisoner who went to work and returned home to not a
homecooked meal or a Sarah or a cat called Gordon Ramsay, but to what had become
my prison family. Where by pals would pick up my dinner at the 4pm role check,
and keep hold of it for me so that I didn’t have to go and ask to be let into
the kitchens to collect it after a 12 hour day out of the prison. I would leave
at 6am, return at 8pm, eat my dinner on a picnic bench with the girls, drink
coffee at a time of day I haven’t dared do since returning home, because in
real life, who does indeed drink coffee for fun and conversation after 8pm? Unless
out for dinner?
I realise how middle class and paradoxical that sounded.
My 34th birthday, I hopped on the bright blue
coastliner, having walked miles to get it, a level of fitness that grew with
time, and many a bus chase. On that bus, I would sit, I would call my wife,
bright and breezy, and she would wake or be at work, always making time to talk
to me. Whether sleepy or with cancer specimen in hand – mornings fast became our
time of day. No prison phones, no recorded intimacy, no “I love you’s” spoken
to half the prison population listening to conversations between married
couples.
I had a birthday cake on my birthday – despite being in
prison. In this very café. And it was free! The lovely man who worked here was fascinated
by my choice of mini Victoria sponge for breakfast at 8am on a random morning
in May, I told him it was my birthday, he brought it to my table with a coffee
and wished me happy birthday and the level of kindness, for a woman on day release
from prison, warmed even my cold heart.
I ate that little cake in wonderment of my new found freedom.
Hours out of the prison compound to work, like a regular person. To work. I had
missed that sense of purpose, drive, dedication more than many of the other
aspects of real life – now as a free-ish woman, it’s an exhausting narrative of
hamster wheel behaviour we all exist to maintain and sustain until the government
lets us while and wither away with the pennies our pensions allow.
Here I sit, typing on my laptop, with my smartphone plugged
in, emailing clients, writing up proposals, checking social media, checking in
on friends, taking calls from my wife.
What a bizarre 12 months.
If you had asked me this time last year where I saw my life in
a years time, I would not have been able to give you this answer. I don’t know
what my answer would have been. Many of the assumptions I had, that I would
leave prison and work hard to regain my career for example, were naïve and
idealistic and perhaps a little over reaching – and how depressing a realisation,
that just 10 short months out of society and behind bars, whether nice bars or
suffocating ones, the loss of liberty had come at a high cost to many, and to
me. Crime doesn’t pay my friends. But I knew that in the moments after my
misdeeds, as I do so many years later.
I love Leeds. It’s a city that makes me feel free. Because
it’s a city where I was free. I was born here in a way. In my bright pink
shirt, I was just Fran, day release prisoner, who worked minimum wage, in a
photo shop, who had the opportunity to eat real food, talk to real people, live
a real life, and then return to the penance I had to pay.
This city has part of my heart. In more ways than one. It
was where I found myself, a new version of myself, a version I wanted to hold
onto when coming home. So clear, calm and collected, without the people
pleasing necessities I had spent 30 years trying to outrun. Prison is a place
where judgement is for a the judge, as soon as you’re in that white van whizzing
down the M6 to your nearest HMP, judgement evaporates, because you’re all in
the same boat, in the same place, suffering for your disgrace.
Together.
I write, because it drives me, inspires me, and has always
been my emotional exorcism. My necessary therapy and familiarity. To write
today, in this place, this space, has made me feel so many things all at once.
New beginnings. That’s what this place was last year. And
that is what it is today. The cathartic cleansing as past becomes present
becomes future. Taking only the worthwhile into tomorrow.
Morrisons café, creating emotive epiphanies since 2021.
