I STILL LOVE YOU, BUT...

CHAPTER 35

Three years later.

IRIS

I received a solicitor's letter two years ago saying my father had died and he had left everything to me: his London house, his belongings, quite a large sum in the bank. Possibly he hoped it would be useful for when I was released, I don't know; he didn't provide any further instructions or a note.

And so I lie here and think of my father, whom I have never known, nor spoken to. He had never asked to see me, and neither had I wanted to see him, or waited for him to visit me. It was enough that he had cried out, and wept for me in the gallery that final day in court. He was a stranger to me, after all. It did not matter, I told myself. What would we have in common? There would have been nothing, but an awkward silence. The only bond between us had been my mother, and she was no longer alive. He had not loved her, and I had hated her. It was better that he had kept his distance from me. Far better that way, than painful, remorseful concern from a father who had never been there, until it was too late.

They moved me from prison to a psychiatric hospital not long after. I was a model inmate. I queued for my meals, regimented, and served on time on plastic trays, divided into neat compartments, and came with plastic spoons and forks. Mashed potato and an ice-cream scoop on the top right, baked beans in the middle, grilled pink sausages at the bottom left. No squeeze of tomato ketchup, no thank you. I've always been polite. I would have liked mustard to spice up the blandness, but they don't allow it in here, or pepper.

There's been a lot of money spent on this place, not like some prisons that the women used to talk about. Some of the inmates here spent years in prison before they were transferred here. They talk about rats and drugs and fights. Out of control. No, I wouldn't like that. I was lucky, but then, it's all because of Ed. He fought for me. He got the best lawyers to help me. He got me out of prison after two weeks. I can't remember much of those two weeks. I was hallucinating a lot. Mama was in my cell, and she kept talking to me. I would scream at her to shut up, and the other women in the cell would get so annoyed they started badgering the prison wardens to get me transferred to another cell. The third week, I found myself in this psychiatric hospital. They put me on meds, and Mama finally shut up. Sometimes, I still see her, and she still talks to me, but I don't answer back. Some days, she keeps quiet. Some days, I don't see her at all.

They send me to see a psychiatrist every week. Her name is Dr. Bulwinder Kaur and she's really beautiful, and very kind. She has warm, lovely, soft brown eyes. She smiles and her eyes smile with her. I called her Dr. Kaur, and she smiled, and said, Iris is a beautiful name. No one has ever told me that before. It's my mother's favourite flower, she said. My mother passed away last year. She loved irises. And I liked her from that moment on. I don't like women. She is the first woman I like.

I told her how once I had lain in bed staring at the ceiling in my room and thought about the fact that when I was dead I would soon be forgotten. I didn't seek notoriety; I had no choice --- it came along with the court's decision and the reports all over the papers, the news, and social media. She asked about Mama and my father. I told her some things, but not all of it, of course. I never told all of it. I told her how much I had tried to please Mama as a child, how much I had wanted her to love me. I told her about Mama's increasingly erratic behaviour and her jealousy of me, about her visit to me, her dementia. I told her about how demanding she became, the routines: when I fed her, when I helped her with the bedpan, when I washed her private parts with the flannels. I embellished some of the parts in my retelling of my life. In my weekly sessions, I never said all of it. I never told it all.

"What would you have told, Iris?" Ed leans in. Today his breath reminds me of picking berries in the garden with him when we were first married. He plucked a berry, tore it in two, I opened my mouth, and he put one half in my mouth, then the other half in his, and smiled. It smelled perfectly of summer.