Brave: How I rebuilt my life after love turned to hate

‘No!’ I promised him. ‘I’m out with the girls, and I just saw your mates and thought you’d want to say hello –’

‘I don’t want you talking to boys. I don’t even know why you’re out when I’m stuck in here.’

‘Anthony, I –’

But then the phone went dead, and so too then did the rest of my night. I spent the little time we had left before drinking-up time trying to call him back, or text him, but he never answered.

‘I’m gonna go home,’ I told the girls.

‘Oh Adele, don’t go, stay out with us.’

But it didn’t feel right any more, and if I’m honest the guilt was starting to bite at my insides. In the taxi home alone, my finger repeatedly dialled Anthony’s mobile without luck. He’d obviously switched his phone off. But each time I tried to call, it just hit me more – him locked up there, us all out in our usual haunts, was it any wonder that he found it hard to listen to us having fun? I got home and took my make-up off, slipping into my bed, tucked up in my cosy duvet, the last of the night out still ringing in my ears. Here I was, free to come and go, while he was having to sleep in his cell. I would try harder to make it easier for him to be away, there must be more that I could do. I couldn’t stand the thought of upsetting him, or us arguing, or me feeling like this when I couldn’t get hold of him. I wouldn’t be able to live like this for the next seven months, neither of us could …

The following morning, I was so relieved to wake up to a text from him.

Morning baby, sorry about last night, it’s just hard being locked up when I want to be out there with you x

As I lay in my bed, reading over all our old texts, my stomach fizzing at the thought of him, I felt on top of the world that everything was OK again. When it was just the two of us – me in my bedroom, him in his cell – he wasn’t annoyed with me, he wasn’t short-tempered. That’s what we needed to hang on to, those were the times that were the most valuable now.

The weeks went by like that. He’d text me to hurry home from my friend’s house so that we could lie in our beds, 30 miles away from each other, and talk about anything we wanted. We both started opening up, our relationship became deeper, more intimate, even though I missed so desperately the feel of his skin against mine. Perhaps because of the distance, and not only despite it, we became closer and closer, and that was worth rushing home for. I told Anthony things about myself, my fears, my worries that I hadn’t told anyone, and he opened up to me about his life, about his family, about his mum.

‘What happened to her, Anthony?’ I asked one night. I obviously knew she’d died, but I had no idea how.

There was silence from the other end of the phone, just for a second, and then a quiet voice said, ‘She committed suicide.’

‘Oh Anthony,’ I said, my heart wanting to reach all the way from Lowestoft to Norwich and wrap him up in my arms.

He told me how his parents had split up and he’d been living up in Scotland with his mum. He’d come down to stay with his dad for the summer holidays, and just before he did, he’d had a massive row with his mum, telling her he was moving to live with his dad.

‘My sister found her …’ he said.

His voice trailed off. I thought of my own mum downstairs watching telly while I chatted on the phone in my room. How on earth I’d feel if one day she just wasn’t there any more in the spot I knew she’d always be.

‘I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,’ I told him.

‘I try not to think about it,’ he said. ‘But it’s why I get angry when I drink because I think of Mum, because I argued with her before she died.’

He told me that his mum had suffered from postnatal depression when he was born, so he’d lived with his aunt until he was three, despite the fact that he had two older sisters and a brother.

‘I’ve never let anyone get close to me before because I always thought they’d let me down,’ he said. ‘Not until you …’

‘I won’t let you down,’ I said.

‘You promised that on New Year’s Eve.’

‘I know, I meant it. We can be happy when you get out, you’ll see.’

When we hung up that night I lay in my bedroom and thought of everything Anthony had been through. I could change him, I was sure of it. I could make him see that not everyone would let him down, not everyone he loved would leave. I’d stick around, I’d prove to him that he was worth hanging around for, and then we’d put all of this behind us, because I knew the real Anthony, the sensitive Anthony, the one that no one else did.

Those stolen phone calls became my life, and the nights out somehow became less important, or at least less important than speaking to Anthony on the phone. I could hear in his voice how much it upset him to ring me and hear that I was out having fun. He didn’t mean to shout, or put the phone down, it was just how he dealt with the unfairness of it all. I understood that. The arguments that followed made the nights out less fun anyway. They weren’t worth it if they were going to upset him and leave us rowing. So as the weeks went by, I just decided to stay in a bit more, give Anthony less to worry about – it became easier that way. It made sense.

Friends would text:

Fancy coming out tonight?

No, Anthony might call. xx

My friends understood. They never pushed me.

He still called me from the prison phone once a day too, so as not to arouse any suspicion that he was speaking to me any other way. He wrote me letters too. I’d come home from college during the tail end of the wet, cold winter, streets lit by lamps at 4 pm, the hope of spring feeling like a million years away, and mum would nod towards the kitchen worktop.

‘Another letter’s arrived for you from the prison,’ she’d say.

And an envelope would be laying there addressed to me with that same familiar handwriting.

A bit of lightness on a dark day.

I’d race up to my bedroom and tear it open, laying back on my bed to take in every detail of it:

I think about you all the time. The boy next to me was playing that ‘Sex on Fire’ song the other day and I had to tell him to turn it off because it just reminded me of when I first met you round Scotty’s. It really does hurt how much I miss you and miss all the stuff we used to do. I keep hoping I’ll wake up in the morning and it was all just a big dream and I was at home with you.

I’d hold the letter close and smile. Those were the things that made the days seem brighter, and each one not so long after all. This made the days feel warmer, or made me seek out the blue sky behind the clouds on a drizzly day. And it made the weeks pass much more quickly. At night we’d chat for hours once he was in his cell and no one knew he was on a mobile phone to me, and Anthony was happier, much happier than when he was ringing me and I was out in the pub. So I stopped dousing myself in Calvin Klein perfume and putting on thick black mascara, I was in my pyjamas with a cup of tea, watching Britain’s Got Talent on the sofa with Mum and Dad and waiting for Anthony to call.

‘You not going out tonight, Adele?’ Dad would ask.

‘Nah,’ I’d say. ‘Don’t fancy it.’

And I saw them pass a look between them, because it must have been obvious I was waiting for Anthony to call. Mum had never liked the fact I was out too much anyway – at least this way I was concentrating on my college work; perhaps they just wished it wasn’t to wait for a boy in prison. Not that they said anything to me, I was nearly 17, they knew they couldn’t tell me what to do anyway.

I knew they didn’t want me visiting Anthony in prison, though, that much they’d made clear.

‘We didn’t bring you up like that, Adele,’ Mum had warned me.

At 16 I was never going to be allowed into the prison on my own, I had to be with someone over 18, and Mum and Dad weren’t going to take me, so Anthony arranged that his dad and stepmum would give me a lift.

Two weeks later I found myself squashed into the back of their black Lexus car, alongside the new baby, as we made polite conversation. I’d bought a new outfit especially, some new jeans and a pretty top. I’d spent longer than usual doing my make-up, but when I arrived at those imposing red brick prison gates, I suddenly felt so out of place, so overdressed, so intimidated.

‘Just follow us,’ Anthony’s dad said casually.

The huge gates opened and we were shepherded inside. I looked around at the other people who were waiting, their scruffy clothes, their tattoos, and I wished that I’d worn a little less lip gloss, that the top I was wearing covered me up a little more. They looked me up and down in a way that told me they knew it was my first time, and I shifted uncomfortably inside my jacket. I felt Anthony’s dad’s hand on my shoulder.

‘He’s going to be so thrilled to see you,’ he said.

I managed a smile in return, telling myself as I looked round at the hard black metal of the guns that the prison officers were carrying, at the cold expression that matched each of their faces as they checked one after the other of us off a list, that this was all for Anthony. I scanned the rest of the visitors we were waiting with, my eyes falling on one woman in particular. Unlike me she hadn’t dressed up especially: from the looks of things she hadn’t even put a comb through her hair; she bounced a screaming toddler on her hip, sighing each time we were ushered into a different room as if she were doing nothing more unusual than waiting in line in a supermarket for a particularly slow cashier. I doubted that this would ever become so normalised for me. At least I only had seven months to wait – these women looked like they’d been waiting a lifetime.

We stepped up to a desk and were ticked off a sheet and in exchange for our names we were given a number and herded through the prison gates into a separate room where we handed over our identification and the door was locked behind us. The echo of it rattled around the room, and I tried to still my racing heart, without luck. We were then led into a pen, before the door behind us was locked and then another room unlocked, and then – Anthony’s dad told me – we were finally inside the prison. There we were searched by sniffer dogs, and we walked through an electrical security arch, much like those you see in airports. Once through that we were searched again, the prison officer asking me to slip off my jacket, and standing there, the thin straps of my top exposing my shoulders to the cold, I just wanted to close my eyes and pretend I was anywhere else but there. But then again, I told myself again, this experience, this humiliation, it was all for Anthony.

We went up to another desk and told the officer there who we were seeing. We were given a number for the table we were to sit at and slowly I made my way across the room, my eyes catching sight of the prisoners in their orange and yellow hi-vis bibs already sat with their loved ones, and the guards dotted around the room, one hand on the guns that hung across their chests. And then I heard one of the officers call out Anthony’s name, and before I knew it he was walking over to our table, not in the frightened way I had shuffled in, but striding towards us confidently, like this was home, a smile plastered wide across his face.