No fear, no regret and no sound in the courtroom apart from the soft broken sobbing of Ginger.

‘Guilty,’ my father said.

34

Christian

There are children at the prison.

This is the first thing I notice.

All the children are penned into the waiting room and bound for what they call the visits room, children of every age from tiny babies, sleeping or squawking in the arms of young mums and youthful grandmothers, to teenagers hunched miserably on the edge of adulthood.

There are children everywhere.

They make a lot of noise when you are trying to remember the rules.

Because there are so many things that you cannot take into the prison. No phones, no keys, no credit cards, no cash, although you can take £20 in coins – per table, not per visitor – to be spent in the visits room’s vending machine. And it is not called the visiting room – it is the visits room.

There is suddenly so much to learn, so much to remember, so many things to get right. No gang colours, football shirts or ripped jeans are allowed. No short skirts or see-through blouses. You cannot wear metal hair clips, pins or badges. You cannot bring your own food and drink. You are not allowed sunglasses, hats or scarves, apart from those worn for religious reasons. And – my all-time favourite – you are not allowed to wear more than one pair of trousers.

And you cannot bring gifts.

But you can bring a child to prison.

You can bring all these children.

I watch Tara store her personal belongings in a scarred metal locker while a German Shepherd moves among us, its nose sniffing for drugs, and I know that she is thinking exactly the same thing as me.

Will we ever bring Marlon to this place? Our sweet, gentle boy?

It did not even cross our minds to bring Marlon today. Marlon has stayed at home with his grandmother, and his dog, and his beloved books. But if Marlon is ever going to see his grandfather again in the coming years, then he is going to have to see him here.

It creeps up on you slowly, so slowly.

The brute fact of prison.

You see the high walls and the barbed wire, and you look at all these children in the waiting area, and it is like a growing pressure on your heart, slowly increasing as you pass through the numbing bureaucracy of visiting someone inside.

This is what life will be like now.

For Leo, and for all of us who love him.

Your passport is scrutinised. Your name is checked against the list of visitors. Your belongings are locked away. Then there is all the waiting around – so much waiting around – and then come the steel doors, all those steel doors, and you pass through one and hear it loudly slam shut and lock behind you, as if you too have time to serve.