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prison staff he’d been in contact with had either worn gloves or initiated well-rehearsed routines for hand-shaking avoidance (one hand on the door handle, the other pointing to the chair – ‘Take a seat Mr Bagshaw’). He understood why – most hands in prison were wrapped firmly around sticky penises 24/7. He wouldn’t want to shake hands either.
    But Krissie Donald had, and it’d been nice to feel a warm, if rather sweaty, palm in his, like a normal everyday human being.
    Krissie asked what he liked to be called. Was Jeremy all right? She asked if he was coping inside, if he was feeling okay, eating, sleeping? If he’d had any visitors? Any news from home? She asked things he wished she hadn’t, because when he answered he cried, and it wasn’t okay to cry in Sandhill. It was the opposite.

9
    What a buzz, meeting Jeremy Bagshaw. Like the initial flush of romance – intimate and intense. I wasn’t aware at the time but if I’d asked any of my office mates they’d have told me that, like romance, after a while the excitement would dwindle, amazing stories would lose their zing and you would find yourself wanting to tell them to just stop it for God’s sake and close that door on your way out.
    The thing that immediately stood out about Jeremy Bagshaw was that he was extremely good-looking. Of the 956 prisoners in Sandhill, I would have put money on him being the only one with a healthy weight – not eaten away by heroin or stuffed by the fried carbs that had replaced it. And he was rare in having hair that wasn’t oily from the forsaking of a twice-weekly shower; nails that were clean; eyes that were bright and free of sand. All in hall, he was a bit of a Russell Crowe hunk, actually.
    Compared to sitting next to the lying-creepo- lewd-and-libber, it felt much more comfortable talking to Jeremy. No sticky aura. No sickly stare that made me feel exposed. I shook his hand without thinking about the alphabets of hepatitis on offer at Sandhill. And as I looked him in the eye, I saw something vulnerable and scared.
    Jeremy had been on remand for two weeks. Thatmeant he’d spent two weeks in a grotty cell with different ‘co-pilots’, one after another, locked up twenty-three hours a day. The only perk for remand prisoners is the possibility of a daily visit, instead of three a month like convicted prisoners. But this perk was irrelevant in Jeremy’s case because no one had visited him. He hadn’t even spoken to anyone on the phone in all that time.
    He told me he was fine, that it was his choice not to have contact with Amanda. He didn’t feel up to it, he said, which wasn’t unusual for men in his situation, diving into his time and hiding in it. He’d thrown out Amanda’s daily letters because it was too hard to read them, he told me, his blue eyes heavy with tears that he was about to let go.
    I didn’t want him to start crying. A crying client would be problematic. I’d have two choices: to be a heartless bastard, ignore his tears, and move the conversation on by saying: ‘Would you like me to come another time?’; or to give him a hug, thereby relinquishing all authority and professionalism and rendering myself a soft touch.
    So I did everything I could to stop the tears, defaulting into my particular brand of cheery empathy, telling him a bit about my own despairing moments and turning the page on them. I didn’t tell him an unprofessional amount about myself, mind, just this and that, to put him at ease, open him up. And it clearly worked because he talked for two hours. I’d been warned by my colleagues that they regularly did two-hour-long interviews and I’d wondered how they could possibly manage it, sitting there on a chair in a smelly room asking open questions, reflecting things back, maintaining a non-threatening, non- judgemental posture that also exuded professional distanceand authority. But with Jeremy I found myself so interested in everything he said that the minutes flew