I followed the prison officer back into the reception area. Two more heavy-duty female officers were waiting. Both wore boots and heavy belts, hung with bats, leather pockets and walkie talkie.

“Behind the curtain, prisoner,” said one of the officers, handing me a paper bag and pointing to a curtained area.

Behind the curtain was a small space with one straight-backed chair. I put the paper bag on the chair. The shorter guard stepped into the small enclosure with me. The other stood holding the edge of the curtain, watching. I was told to remove my clothes one item at a time.

I pulled my blouse over my head. I don’t wear a bra and felt their eyes upon my naked breasts. It worked for me to pretend I didn’t care. It’s just a shift in consciousness. A change of attitude. I’d had twenty years to practice things like this. I imagined they were thinking She’ll have no chance of keeping up that suntan in prison.

Where there is a will, there is a way, even behind bars.

“Shake your shirt,” said the short guard. “Then drop it in the bag.”

I unzipped my pants. One must adapt quickly in prison. I whipped my trousers off, shook them, and tossed them into the bag with my blouse. Stepping out of my knickers, I wondered why I was being strip searched. I had not been convicted of any drug offence.

In any other circumstance, the scenario behind that curtain would have been obscene! Two big women, fully clothed and armed, ordering a small woman to get naked, against her will, while they watched. But we were just getting started. Before I could drop my knickers into the bag, the officer holding the bag said, “Do you need a separate bag for your pants?”

I guessed she was asking if my knickers were dirty.

“Nope,” I said, tossing them in.

I was stark naked. Stripped down to nothing left to hide. It should have ended there but the taller guard stepped into the space and said, “Bend forward and toss your hair over your shoulders.”

Were they searching for nits?

This was just the beginning of the indignity women must endure. How traumatic for those who had suffered violent relationships or had been raped or tortured – and there are many such women in prison.

“Open your mouth.”

“Poke out your tongue.”

“Stretch your lips.”

“Turn around and face the wall.”

“Lift your right foot.”

“Lift your left foot.”

For me, the issue was not about being naked – it was being ordered to get naked. It was the stage-show scenario. The belittling of another human being. I’d just met a woman who gets naked for a living, but I knew this was not going to be easy for her.

“Pick up the paper bag,” one officer said, pointing to the paper bag on the straight-backed chair. She handed me a towel and opened a door within the curtained area.

“Step inside, prisoner.”

I entered a tiny cement space. There was no window to climb out, not a drain to slither down, not a fire escape, just a shower nozzle and two grubby taps.

Inside the bag was a cake of yellow soap, a cheap toothbrush and toothpaste.

Showering for the first time in days, I tried not to think about the germs crawling under my feet or to notice the dried blood and spit on the damp walls. Done, I dried myself on the towel that Brer Rabbit had dragged through the briar patch and then given to Brer Fox – to piss on. 

As a hygiene freak, I’d already braced myself for this filth.

Back behind the stripper’s curtain a pile of clothes had been placed on the chair: a faded boob-tube, a new pair of high-waisted, elastic underpants, and a blue tracksuit, the material worn and stiff from washing powder. The ‘Correctional Centre’ logo was printed on the right leg. The term ‘correctional centre’ irked me. I’d rather have ‘prisoner’ as my logo. It would allow me to own my ‘crime’. Some crimes are not to be ashamed of, and, as far as I was concerned, my behaviour did not need correcting. I live in a society that allows the abuse of women and children – that’s what needs correcting.

While the other prisoners were stripped and showered, Nina and I sat on a chair in the reception area, eating breakfast cereal. Well, Nina ate both our packets of Rice Bubbles while I stared at my initials on two white sacks. These sacks were stacked on a portable wire cage. Two of them had M.F boldly printed on the side. Oddly, seeing my initials, made me feel present in that moment. They had been expecting me. The strange disassociation from my surroundings faded, as I stared as those sacks. While I was locked in a cell and riding in the meat wagon, people were waiting for me, writing my initials on bags. This was real.

I stared at those sacks, my breath caught in my throat, and I blinked back tears. I felt so desperately hopeless, but right then something bloody funny happened. Annie Oakley shot out from behind the curtain with her long brown hair dripping wet and said, “A fucken cup of tea would be lovely,” – and, out of nowhere, a genie appeared, bearing plastic cups of tea on a plastic tray.

The genie was a small woman with short brown hair and a kind face. I guessed her to be late sixties. She was wearing a blue prison-issue uniform, just like us. A prisoner serving prisoners tea! And the tea was hot, it was sweet, it was white, and it tasted like … oh, my God, it was just so good. It was an unexpected delight to have a hot, sweet cup of tea. 

A few minutes later, this kind genie was back carrying socks and sneakers. She squatted down at my knee and asked, “What size are you, love?” Dell really did have the kindest voice. I would never have guessed that she was doing sixteen years for murdering her husband. Every new prisoner is fortunate to meet this woman. Her gentle voice soothes the fear and eases the transition, because her kindness gives you hope that there might be other friendly women behind bars. 

Once each new prisoner had been stripped, humiliated, intimidated, showered, and rubbed with the Brer Fox odour, we had our mugshots taken. I was faint from weariness, my hair wet and slicked back behind my ears. This really helped create the look they were after.

These ugly mugshots were printed onto an I.D. tag and given to us to pin to our chest. I pinned mine on back-to-front so no one would see it, but a guard came along and yelled, “Are you an imbecile …?”

I certainly looked like one.

We were told to each take two plastic sacks from the pile. “Take the bags with your initials, for fuck’s sake, and stand in a straight line against the wall.”

“Attention!”

It was our first muster – of sorts. We stood in a row along the wall, our shoulders and arms touching, our faces in sombre shades of ethnicity. There was no one to hug us and tell us it was going to be okay (and they would have been lying, anyway). We were tired, traumatised, scared, aching for our children, and some were very obviously coping with withdrawal – mostly from the drug Ice.

Spinner was having a difficult time standing still.

Annie Oakley looked as if she was in the army.

Macy was sizing up the guards.

Grunter was a lost soul.

Zorba and Nina looked scared.

I didn’t know any of these women, but, as we stood with our back to the wall, staring into the faces of our oppressors, I was no longer convinced I could cope by pretending this was just a journalistic assignment.

Yet, standing between Annie Oakley and Macy, I felt as if I were with my crew. After dreading prison for so long, I was oddly at ease with these two women. Drifting into my imagination, I was presented with a bizarre fantasy: all of us marching through the jungle, Macy leading the way, Annie Oakley barking orders, Spinner stealing aeroplanes, and me … well, after almost two decades as a fugitive living on the edge, I knew a thing or two about keeping out of sight and surviving.

We were led out of reception into the great outdoors, a compound surrounded by high wire enclosures topped with coils of razor wire. Gaudy-coloured buildings. Concrete pavements leading in all directions. The depressing stench of sewage, boiled cabbage, and the body sweat of too many caged humans, together with a noise that could well have been coming from a crowd at a football stadium.

The plucking of Nina from the pack was so quick that she was on her way along another path before we knew she’d been taken. I learned later that she was whisked away to the isolation block (also called the boneyard) for her own safety, something to do with her newborn baby.

Down a path we went, past the desolate Visits Centre, and the clanging kitchen, the medical centre and, across the way, a caged gym, inmates rushing to stare out at us, the new arrivals. There were patches of grass the size of a Cornflakes box along the way, with mocking signs: ‘Do Not Walk on Grass.’

We came to a standstill outside a large building: ‘Secure 7’. ‘Secure 8’.

The magic door swung open.

We were ordered inside and marched along grey-white tiles, up a corridor and around a bend to a heavy door: ‘Secure 8’.

I could hear Macy breathing beside me. I saw the perspiration on Spinner’s top lip. Annie Oakley had gone deathly quiet.

The door swung open.

It looked like a mental asylum. We stared into a crowd of ghoulish prisoners. These morbid creatures sat around metal tables drinking skim milk from 600 ml cartons, milk-lipped, cross-eyed, mouths full of broken and rotting teeth. The fucked-up hair! The weeping sores. Bloodthirsty and drugged to the eyeballs… how the hell long had these women been locked up?

“Come on, mate, move your arse!”

If I’d not been shunted along by Annie Oakley, I might have been rooted to the spot. There was nothing but wretchedness ahead … or so I thought until she stood up. If I had to describe this woman in two words, I’d say “Venus Williams”; she was tall, brown-skinned, stunning, and poised – just like the tennis player.

Her vision narrowed to a pinprick. “Hey, you,” she called. “You can sit with us!”

In hindsight, that was a magic prison moment. Venus had singled me out.

I would later learn that she had been incarcerated nine times since she was a kid. She has a knife-slash scar across her cheek bone, warning us of her past. She can knock a grown man out with a fist hardened by a lifetime of injustice and driven by the pain and anguish she has endured.

Any other woman might have taken her offer like the jewel it was, but I was prison green and knew no better, and, besides, I desperately needed to withdraw into myself. It has been a traumatic week and a metal bench beneath a protective spiral staircase beckoned me.

Sitting down, I stared at the three small cells in front of me. Cages for women. There were more cells behind me and along the back wall, where a hefty drink dispensing machine sparkled with orange, silver and yellow cans. I would soon learn that tokens could be purchased to poke into the coin slot and out would pop a Fanta, Coke, or Lemonade.

“New arrivals. Over here. Now!”

Back I went through the throng of gawking inmates, carefully avoiding the skinny waif who kept bellowing, “Who ate all the fucking jam?”

I stood in a huddle with Annie Oakley, Macy, Spinner, Zorba and Grunter. We paid attention to the female officer who told us the rules: “You will be doubled up in a cell. There is only one bed in each cell, but you will find two mattresses on that bed. One mattress will go on the floor at bedtime.”

During the lead-up to my trial I had read about the over-crowding and horrendous conditions inside this prison. I now began praying: please cell me up with Annie Oakley; please, dear patron saint of prisoners, do not put me with a lunatic; please don’t put me with Zorba the old stripper, or Grunter…

“Choose a cell-mate and …”

We got to choose! I quickly moved closer to Annie Oakley. Surely, she would remember our meat-wagon solidarity… but, no, she slung her arm through Spinner’s – best friends now, both druggies, both rally car drivers. I didn’t stand a chance. I’d lost my first prison friend as soon as I’d met her.

Macy grabbed my arm. “You’re with me,” she said.

Oh, glory, to be penned up with a giant teenager. But had I known what was to come, I would have been praying to be caged with Macy in the first place. We were not given the key to our new pad. No such luck. In fact, we were locked out until it was time to be locked in.

I went back to the bench.

“Hey, you, you fucking cunt.”

Were they talking to me? Venus was surrounded by her cronies, all silent, all sneering at me. One bleached blonde with severely rotted teeth beheld me with a calm, foreboding contemplation, as if visualising my dead body.

Venus clenched her strong jaw, narrowed her captivating dark eyes. “You’re dead.”

I’d been in Secure 8 no more than a half-hour and someone wanted to kill me. Well, not just someone – an entire mob.

By now, what was left of my innards was shrunken with trepidation, a hard walnut-sized knot that sucked the energy out of me. I lay down on the floor outside my assigned prison cell and stared up at the floor above. More cells. It was like a zoo, but once all the women were locked in their cages, I’d feel safe for a while.

And then something unexpected happened. In an act of solidarity, Annie Oakley crossed the floor and lay down beside me. She reached an arm across my shoulders: “What the fuck have you done, mate?”

It was a dangerous act of kindness. My throat froze with a painful knot, my eyes burned with tears. This woman, who seemed so lost in her own troubles, was awake to what was going down and offered me support, at the risk of the mob turning on her.

“Muster up!”

Annie Oakley and I quickly jumped to our feet as the stampede of inmates rushed into the tight alcove surrounding the staircase, to stand outside cell doors. Other inmates thumped up the stairs.

And then … a silence that could have heard a pin drop, as two officers entered. The male officer stood silent as the female officer began reading off names, and we responded. When she’d finished, the pair made their way up the staircase.

Silence prevailed.

I cast my eyes over the faces of the women I’d be living with. Too many of them were looking straight at me. Just a few more minutes and I’d be locked down in my cell with Macy. A few more minutes and I’d have made it through my first day in prison. But just then Venus broke away from the wall and surged forward, her eyes glistening with anger.