Page 47 of One More Time

Boom!

Grace’s heart slammed against her ribcage.

‘Mr Wilson, please rise.’ The judge lifted his eyes from the official document and directed his undivided attention to Charlie.

A long shuddering breath escaped Grace as Charlie did as he was told and clasped his hands in front of him. His broad shoulders were slumped, his eyes to the floor. His proud demeanour had all but left him. Grace desperately wanted to run to her husband, to hold him and tell him everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t, and never would be again; she could feel it deep in her bones. Self-defence or not, Charlie had killed a man with his bare hands. That couldn’t go unpunished.

Tick, tick, tick…

She laced her fingers into her mother’s and gripped the hand that had soothed cuts, hurts and tears over the years like her life depended upon it. After taking a deep breath to both work up courage and hold back tears, Grace held her breath. Every single fibre of her being wanted to run, to get out of there, or to at least stand there with her hands over her ears, because her survival mode was kicking in full force, telling her that if she didn’t hear the verdict, if she didn’t see Charlie being led away, if that were to be the case, she wouldn’t have to face it.

After a long pause, the judge drew in a noisy breath. ‘On the charge of murder, how do you find?’

‘We find the defendant not guilty.’

As there was a resounding exhalation in the courtroom, the judge continued. ‘And on the charge of manslaughter, how do you find?’

‘We find the defendant guilty.’

Shocked to her very core, Grace found it impossible to take a breath, while still hoping she’d heard wrong.

The courtroom erupted in chatter and whispers, and the judge thumped his gravel, one, two, three times, then started going on about sentencing submissions and times and dates. It was all a blur to Grace, sobbing in her father’s arms, her head buried into his chest. Her mother was rubbing her back, trying to soothe her with gentle sounds. Gathering herself enough to move without collapsing, she unravelled from her father’s protective embrace and turned to see Charlie being led away, a solemn officer either side. Just before he stepped out of sight, their eyes met.

‘I’m sorry. I love you,’ he mouthed before he disappeared through a side door.

She went to offer a reply, but the words died in her throat. He should have never been in that bar in the first place. And because of one wrong decision, Charlie Wilson was going to face his fate. The hopeful flame she’d tried to keep alight blew out with the slamming of the holding-cell door.

Out the back of the courthouse, away from the frenzy of media out the front, Grace watched on helplessly as Charlie was loaded into a van. She watched it drive through a set of gates then grow smaller as it headed out of sight, taking the man she loved with all her heart and soul, the father of her children, away.

CHAPTER

15

1991

Pulling his pen and notebook from beneath his thin mattress, Charlie lifted his glasses to the top of his head and looked to the bars of his cell – iron rods covered anything with even a whiff of freedom in this place. At precisely 8.30 am, that door would slide open and he’d join the swell of men hightailing it to the dining area for a breakfast anyone who had never been incarcerated would turn their nose up at. Lunch was at midday. Dinner was at five. Cells were locked again at seven. Once the nightly counts were finished, it was strictly lights out at nine. Prison life was a repetitive existence.

Sleep was the only reprieve. Slumber had never been his bedfellow, but behind these wretched bars, he’d eventually learnt to make his peace with it. For the first year, his vivid nightmares had brutally thrown him out of fitful sleep and left him pacing the tiny cell in half-darkness. Over time, though, the bad dreams had subsided, as his horrendous reality outweighed the terrors that had once plagued him. It was proof enough for him that miracles did happen in the strangest of ways – because he couldn’t drink to drown out the voices anymore, he’d had to face them, head-on. It had been both confronting and curative, with a hell of a lot of soul-searching. He’d even written a letter to Margaret Mary Baker to explain, and apologise. Joey Baker had been his friend, his comrade in arms, but he couldn’t go on blaming himself for not returning to Vietnam to find him. Many men didn’t return to their loved ones; he had to be grateful that he himself hadn’t been one of them.

In some ways, this place had taught him to let go of what he had no control over. If only he’d learnt this lesson before it was too late. Retrospection was a perpetual thorn in his side. Although, he understood that everything he’d been through up until this point in his life was nothing on what he was about to do in three days’ time. It was going to break him, almost destroy him, change him, but he didn’t have a choice. Shifting the pair of reading glasses up the bridge of his nose, he paused to reflect on both his time in prison and the life he was missing out on. Pen poised, he eased out his neck – putting an experience most never had into words was proving a challenge, but his gut told him this was something he had to do. It was a biography of sorts, written about his battles fought in the Vietnam War, and the war of his internal battles thereafter, including what had led him to serving time in this hellhole. It was therapeutic to be able to express his deepest inner thoughts, fears and emotions on the page. Maybe he should have written his heart and soul out years ago – it might have saved him from travelling along this horrendous path he was now on.

Too little, too late.

At the very least, it gave him something to focus on, other than counting down the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years he had left here. So, drawing in a slow, steady breath, he continued.

On the first day of my three thousand, six hundred and fifty day sentence, myself and five other men were loaded into a prison van, like cattle being led to slaughter. I’d remained impassive as they’d cuffed me, pushed me into a hallway, and then driven me to what was going to be my home, my hell, for ten long years. Now wasn’t the time to show any kind of fear, though the slamming of the van door jarred me to my very core. Little did I know it would be my first of many slamming doors, each one leading me further into a life of heavy-handed conformity.

Lost in my distressing thoughts while the tyres had eaten up the distance between home and perdition, what felt like seconds later, though it was almost an hour, we had arrived at the end of a chain-wire fence that rose twenty-five foot in the air and seemed to go on and into forever. I watched as the guard pulled up at the towering walls topped with barbed wire. I no longer felt an ounce of courage, but I knew I was going to have to find bravery somewhere, or I wouldn’t survive.

I fought on the frontline. I witnessed my fellow brothers-in-arms been blown to smithereens, wondering if I was going to be next, when I was going to be next, but never had I been so damn scared as the moment I was led through the front gates of this living nightmare.

The crash of the steel gate slamming shut behind me was the finality to the life of freedom I had known, yet taken for granted way too many times. This atrocious place was now my home, my future, for an entire decade. I would no longer be viewed as a human, but rather as a number.

We were ordered off the van and led down a corridor with high fences. Tattooed, jail-tough prisoners glared at me, others eyed me like fresh meat. I still wonder, each and every day, which inmate might try and stab me. I’ve come to accept that I may well be wheeled out on a gurney.

In a bizarre way, arriving at Jackson Correctional Complex was like turning up for my first day of boot camp, where I was about to meet my new drill sergeant – an angry man who loathed the sentenced and lived for punishment.

Looking to his watch, he confirmed he had four minutes and twenty-five seconds to go before his cell would be unlocked. Sitting on the edge of his impeccably made bottom bunk, he tucked his notebook and pen away and turned his back to his latest cellmate to give him lavatory privacy.