LITMIR.BIZ

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the tough times. Just one glance over the letter, just eating up some of the words that he’d written, was enough for me, it sated me, but it didn’t have to be enough any more. Today, I was getting Anthony for real, in just moments his hand would be in mine and I wasn’t going to let it go. Not this time. I smiled at that thought, and clutched my phone tighter, the only lifeline I’d had to him for months. What would I have done without it?

      Finally, we drove down the long, straight road that led right up to the prison gates themselves. There they were, two huge brown doors, framed by the red brick of the imposing prison walls, and there, looking so small standing in front of them clutching a plastic bag, was Anthony.

      The smile he had stretched across each cheek was wider than I’d ever seen before, and mirrored, I imagined, only by an identical one on my own face. He bounded over to us, reaching for the car door before we’d even properly stopped. But as he did so, I was already unclipping my seatbelt and leaping out of the door and into his arms. And then finally there he was, his body next to mine, squeezed into the tightest hug I’d ever known, one that told me he wasn’t going to let go again either. As I felt his arms around me, finally, I couldn’t stop the tears coursing down my cheeks.

      ‘Oh baby!’ he said, pulling a sad face and then kissing my cheeks. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

      He got into the back of the car beside me. After a year apart we weren’t going to let the front seat of the car separate us. Instead we sat on the back seat together, holding hands, entwining our fingers, and squeezing every so often as we chatted to Lorraine in the front.

      But it wasn’t exactly home we were going to. Anthony had been released on condition that he stay at a bail hostel in Ipswich, 45 miles from my home in Lowestoft, but miles better than being locked up in a red-brick prison.

      The bail hostel was down a short road next to a railway bridge. If it wasn’t for the bars at the window it would look like a pretty ordinary house, but for the time being it was the only place that Anthony would be able to call home.

      ‘It’s just for a few months, baby,’ he said, when he saw my face eyeing it from the outside. ‘I’m going to prove I’m good and get out and then we’ll get our own house together.’

      I thought then of all the letters he’d sent me from prison, every single one I’d kept, stuffed inside a drawer in my bedroom at home, and buried within them were all our plans for the future; our dreams of a house, hot sunny holidays, and Anthony hadn’t forgotten, that’s what he wanted too. So for now I’d live with him in this hostel because he was right, it wouldn’t be forever. He went inside to check in, then came out smiling.

      ‘I don’t have to be back until 9 pm,’ he grinned.

      So Lorraine put the car into gear and we were off back to Lowestoft. We headed to his dad’s house, and there I stood back while Anthony gave everyone a hug, picking up his tiny baby sister and giving her a squeeze.

      ‘It’s good to be back,’ he said, looking around, and his eyes falling on me.

      ‘We’ve got some making up to do, ain’t we, baby?’

      I nodded and I must have blushed because Anthony reached out for my hand.

      ‘Come on,’ he said, indicating his bedroom upstairs. We left everyone else downstairs and up in his old room we had sex for the first time in a year. That was when he cried, when he came undone. While our bodies were still tangled together, I wrapped my arms around him, stroking his hair, wishing all the time that we could stay like this and that 9 pm wouldn’t come around and steal him from me. And just as my mind drifted back to a time when we were free, when there was nothing and no one to keep us apart, he suddenly looked up at me. This time, his face was different, and when he spoke it wasn’t in the same gentle way he had all day. It was cold, hard.

      ‘You’ve blatantly had sex with someone else,’ he said.

      ‘What!’

      ‘You have, you clearly have.’

      ‘Anthony, what are you talking about? I haven’t been with anyone, I’ve been waiting for you!’

      He looked away.

      ‘Anthony!’ I tried, reaching for him, my fingertips brushing the tattoo dedicated to his mum, and my voice becoming instantly softer. ‘Don’t start this, you’ve been in prison and I’ve been waiting on you. You know I have …’

      When he turned around again, he was back to me, his face soft, his brow ironed out.

      ‘Come on,’ he smiled. ‘I better be getting back to the hostel.’

      I drove him back with Lorraine, stopping off at Asda to get him a cheap mobile phone.

      ‘This way I can ring you all the time,’ he said.

      Even something as simple as walking around Asda, under the harsh supermarket lights, his hand in mine, having him back in my arms, felt amazing. I’d got my man back, everyone had been wrong and I had been right, I had waited and now I had him back. It was worth every single day without him.

      We got him back to the hostel for 9 pm.

      ‘I’ll ring you when you get home,’ he said, waving his new phone at me.

      And he did, despite the fact that he was home, that he had other people to sit with or chat to in the hostel, it was still me he wanted. I went to sleep that night knowing that he was that step closer to me, that I could see him tomorrow, or the next day, or the next; that I could lie down with his arms wrapped around me, that there would be no prison guards standing over us, watching us. We were free, just a little bit more free, and soon we’d be even closer. I’d waited this long, and I just had to wait a little while longer.

      We fell into a routine which mostly – due to the times Anthony needed to check into the hostel – meant I would travel over to Ipswich to see him. The journey took an hour and a half on the train, but it was always worth it. He’d usually keep me from getting bored by phoning me on the way there and on the way home, and he’d always be there to meet me from my train.

      We had nowhere to go in the day as I wasn’t allowed into the hostel, but we still had fun. We’d go swimming, or look round the shops. Sometimes Anthony would see a dress he liked for me.

      ‘Do you like it?’ he’d ask, holding it up. And when I said yes, he’d head straight over to the till and buy it for me.

      There is romance to be found in wandering a city together with nowhere to go, the dinners or long lunches, sitting together in the darkness of a cinema holding hands, and in between walking round the shops planning what our life would be like when we could finally be together properly. On sunny days we’d get fish and chips and lie in the park together.

      ‘Look at me being all romantic,’ Anthony would laugh, and he really was, people didn’t see the side of him that I did. They didn’t know the soft side, they didn’t know the letters he’d written to me from prison. But I did, I remembered every single stroke of his biro as each word had built a better picture of the life that we were working towards.

      Mum never suspected that I was skipping college to go and meet Anthony, not when I left the house at 8 am in my black tunic and headed to the bus stop like I usually would; she didn’t see me phoning the admin office to call in sick. On Tuesdays Anthony had to meet with his parole officer in Lowestoft and those days he didn’t need to sign in, so we’d meet at his dad’s and spend long afternoons in bed together before he had to go home.

      But the demons were still there, the jealousy was only ever one wrong word away. Sometimes, just out of nowhere, when I’d spent an hour and a half on a train to visit him, he’d turn to me with dark eyes.

      ‘The other day I got told you cheated on me when I was inside.’

      ‘Anthony, I haven’t, we’ve been through this!’

      I’d perhaps roll my eyes at first, knowing we’d been here before. But that would just rile him more, so I’d plead and

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