Boy A (10 page)

‘What the bloody hell have you lot been up to?’ the driver asks, when they’re in the back.

‘You should have seen the other fellas,’ says Chris. Him and Steve the mechanic laugh with the safety.

Jack does not laugh. Jack feels his whole world crumbling around his ears; sees the prison gates opening up in front of him – reaching out for him, like the long sticky tongue of a frog. Of a filthy, gloating, wide-mouthed frog.

‘Come on, Bruiser.’ Chris puts his arm round him. ‘You should be on top of the world. You’re a hero, son. A proper hero. It’s just the come-down making you feel crap.’

‘Yeah, I reckon it’s time for bed,’ Steve the mechanic says. ‘We’ll drop you off first, heh, Bruiser. What a night. What a fucking night.’

The screw that brought
A
back from the infirmary took him to a new cell, on a different landing, a different wing. It looked just the same as the old one, although the door was painted in a primary-school yellow. The screw told him he was now in cell 17, threes, Kestrel wing. His new pad-mate was called Hacendado-563.

‘Cheers, sir,’ said Hacendado to the screw, when he saw
A
. ‘Twoing me up with Quasimodo. Thanks for that one.’

A
knew he looked a state. His face was purple, his lips busted and swollen, one of his eyes sealed shut, the good one blackened and bloodshot.

‘Sorry,’ he said to his new pad-mate.

Hacendado looked at
A
, and raised a dark eyebrow.

‘Sorry is a large word, my friend; and apologizing to someone you don’t know looks weak.’

‘I’ll leave him for instruction in your capable hands then, Hacendado,’ said the screw. ‘He’s fresh in, first timer.’ And he locked the door.

A
stood, holding his bed-pack, all he had: two blankets; two T-shirts; two jeans; two jumpers; two pants; two socks; one jacket; one sheet; one pillowcase; one shoes; one toothbrush; one toothpaste; one razor; one soap; one shaving brush; one comb; and one property card to list the above.

Hacendado chipped himself slickly on to the top bunk and turned on his radio.
A
walked to the lower bed and sat down on it, still holding his bundle. With his tongue he felt the raw gap where his front teeth had been. He could have done with a dump, but the toilet was at the end of the bed, in plain view. Unsure of etiquette he thought it better to wait.

The lights went out before he had moved or spoken.

During the ten days that he’d spent in reception
A
had heard the nightly chorus of conversation from remote windows. Isolated down in the lowest coldest cells. Locked up alone for twenty-three hours a day, he had longed for this human contact. Voices, too faint to hear the words, spoke to him of solidarity. And singing, there was often singing, he could make out nursery rhymes. Though he feared what Feltham was going to fling,
A
was sure that he’d be better off up on a wing. In a paired cell where the shared hell could be halved. But his first pad-mate had nearly killed him, and his new one was ignoring him. When the voices started
A
began to believe that there was no amity left in the world.

Suck your mum. Fuck you. Batty boy. Batter you. Fucking kill yous. Sing you shit. Arren sucks screws. Baa baa black sheep. Window warriors. You’ll be sorry. Quarter in the morning or I break your fucking arm. Bitch had a rape alarm. Fresh Fish threes 17. Eighteen. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. Stop when I say so. Lay low. Tomorrow Jethrow. Kenny says he’ll chivvy your throat. Your mum’s so fat, so ugly, so broke. Your mum fucks old bald Pakis. Gives hand jobs outside Stakis. I’m a soldier. One for the master and one for the dame. You ain’t getting no older. Cut you a slash like a gash. Like your mum’s. One for the little boy who lives down the lane. Sing it again, bitch. Again.

A
could hardly believe what he was hearing. Threats and insults and bullying and bragging aggressed his ears. Some messages echoed as they passed along whole wings of barred windows. Some were aimed close to home. Live and direct. Live and kicking.

‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, open your window,’ someone shouted.

‘That’s you,’ Hacendado said from above.

‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, come to your fucking window.’

‘Open the window, Fresh Fish.’ this time it sounds real close, like the pad next door.

‘You’d better go.’ Hacendado said impassively, ‘They won’t let up until you do. You might as well go right away and not look scared.’

A
was scared. But he put down his bundle, got up, and trod the four steps to the wire-crossed pane of glass.

‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, open your fucking window.’

‘Wait till I’m under the blanket before you open it,’ Hacendado said. ‘It’s gonna be cold out there.’

A
was shivering already. There were brown splatters all over the glass and the once-white ledge. Three truncheon-thick bars divided the world beyond them. He opened the window and the choir outside was immediately amplified. Calls bounced about like crows, squawking from place to place. Ugly, murderous, bare-faced and loud. Claims to have done things to each other’s mothers, that
A
hadn’t known could be done at all.

‘Fresh Fish, threes 17, open your fucking…’

‘It’s open!’ Hacendado shouted from his bunk.

‘What’s your name, Fresh Fish?’ someone nearby asked.

A
told them, told them his fake name anyway. His stage name for this cage.

‘What you in for?’

Terry had said that question was against the rules; and said that everyone would ask it anyway. They’d practised together, dates and details. Facts learned so well that one day
they would become Jack’s: another young man with a similar history. Another young man who was not a nonce.

‘You a nonce? Why ain’t you answerin’?’

Not a nonce. Joy-rider. Happy car theft. Care-free crime. Pleasant escapism. Entertainment not evil. Everyone well-insured, everyone’s a winner. No victims, no violence. Not a nonce, oh no, not a nonce. Nothing like that.

‘Speak, you nonce! What you in for?’

‘Taking and driving away.’
A
realized that he was squeaking a bit, his voice going involuntarily high. He tried to calm himself, stretched out his fingers by his side to give him something to concentrate on.

‘Suck your mum!’

‘My mum’s dead.’

‘Suck your mum RIP.’

There was laughter at this from all around.
A
was momentarily taken back to a time when he always seemed to be encircled by mocking laughter. But his present was so pressing that the memories quickly crumbled in on themselves.

Emboldened by a successful strike, the same voice ordered
A
to sing.

‘Sing what?’ he asked.

‘Mummy had a little lamb.’

More laughter. Some people were banging on their bars to make noise.

‘Sing it, Fresh Fish, or I’mna break your fucking legs in the morning.’ The voice was shouting.
A
could imagine its huge owner, spittle flying from his enraged lips.

‘Don’t sing,’ said another voice, softly from in the cell. Hacendado was sitting up, blanket still over his lap.

‘But you heard him, he said he’d do me if I don’t.’

‘And if you give in he’ll make you sing it again and again until you can’t do it anymore; and then maybe he’ll do you
anyway. You’ve got to keep your fucking dignity in here, man. It’s all you’ve got.’

‘Sing it, you fuck!’

‘Don’t do it, mate. Trust me, I’m telling you the truth. Shit, I don’t want a muppet for a pad-mate.’

A
went to close the window.

The voice started screaming at him: ‘You shut that and I’mna fucking do you tomorrow. I’ll fucking mash you up. Don’t shut that window, you little shit.’

Then it was done. The window was shut. And a door shut with it, to what might have been.

‘Now what?’
A
asked his pad-mate.

‘Now we go to sleep. People are always making threats in here, chances are nothing’ll come of it.’

A
roughly spread one of his two blankets and lay down under it fully clothed. Course fibres scratched at the welts around his neck. Though he knew he couldn’t sleep, somehow he did.

Shrill shrieks joined
A
’s dream, turning to the scream of a girl who could never now become a woman, though in the dream she somehow might have been his mother. But the shrieks continued even after they broke him into a world of musty, grey morning light. He was immediately aware of where he was, but the noise was still dislocating. It told him that he could not go on like this, that something had to give.

‘Fucking peacock.’

A
recognized the voice as Hacendado-563’s, great start to the day, wake to an insult.

‘They’re supposed to be calming, I think. But they make that noise every morning. Some governor’s brilliant idea to bring them in when they changed all the wings to bird names.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The peacocks.’

‘Ah.’ A realization sinks in, a slim relief: the day’s first bump just driftwood.

‘But what was it going to achieve anyway, changing the names? They’re still the same fucking buildings, still filled with the same scum and the same screws. Was it meant to be a joke? Like “wings”, or “jail-bird”; or is it supposed to rub our noses in it, remind us what real freedom is? What goes through these people’s minds?’

Hacendado dropped himself over the side of his bunk. His bare feet landed with a squeak on the lino floor. ‘You are a mess, aren’t you?’ he said, looking at
A
. Then he hitched up his prison issue, white Y-fronts, which looked at least a size too big, and walked the four feet to the seat-less steel toilet. Hacendado’s piss pounded against the thin metal, sounding like rain water down guttering. His hair was cropped close to his scalp. From behind, like this, you could see lines where it wouldn’t grow, scar tissue.

He turned around and carefully washed his hands. Then he walked over to a locker, which was lying on its side. Not as if it’d been knocked over, but set precisely in the centre of the longest wall.

‘You smoke?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Don’t start. You’ve got an advantage in here if you don’t smoke. Most of the guys spend three quarters of their pies on burn. Look at this.’ He pulled a neatly folded pair of jeans out of the locker and put them on. Then carefully, one by one, he took out sixteen identical bars of soap and placed them on top of the cabinet. Four perfect rows of four. Then he put beside them six unopened packets of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and four Whisper bars. ‘I’ve got everything in there; phonecards, crisps, razors, hairbrushes, deodorants. The soaps look the best though.’ He stood back to admire them.

‘I always put my lockers on their side, nice to display your stuff. Also, it makes the pad look bigger if everything’s below
waist height. It’s all about presentation in here. Look smart and clean, and keep your pad smart and clean. It shows you respect yourself. Which is the first step to getting respect.’

Breakfast was served at the hot-plates at the end of each wing. Hacendado had taken a wrap of toilet paper, from one of five fresh rolls, none of which had ever seen a toilet. He used half of it to wrap a stack of bread in, and gave
A
a section to do the same.

‘Take a few slices back to the pad to eat later. You keep it clean and fresh this way.’

To
A
the bread tasted out of date already; there was a varicose vein of mould running through one of his slices.

Because they were on the third landing, the threes, there was netting strung about beyond all the railing. It looked like the stuff of circuses: springy, for capturing mis-timed trapeze leaps. But it didn’t seem to protrude far enough to stop a determined jumper.
A
was sure you could clear it. He could imagine himself taking a run at it, legs tensed to spring, soaring, headlong, head first, fearless beyond that netting. The picture remained in his mind of himself suspended, just before the instant when the glorious dive would become a terminal plunge. He was handsome in the picture, wholesome, and though he was static he was active. Frozen forever in a position of decision.

When he asked Hacendado about the netting, later, he was told it wasn’t meant to stop jumpers, just to stop people being thrown.

After breakfast they were locked in again. Everyone but
A
, who was taken to meet his Personal Officer, PO. The screw he was supposed to go to with his problems. The man had sweaty jowls, and a greasy brush-over.

‘Just call me sir,’ he said. ‘I prefer the inmates not to know my real name. Rather like yourself,’ he chuckled a joyless
laugh. ‘But make no mistake about it, that is where any similarity between the two of us ends. Right there.’

A
shifted his weight on the moulded plastic chair, and nodded, not sure what response he was expected to make.

‘This is your Wing flimsy,’ the screw said, opening a brown manila folder, with shiny metal clasps for putting in a filing cabinet. ‘Everything you do inside goes in here. You’re not doing badly so far. Less than twenty-four hours and you’ve been beaten and changed wings. These sorts of things can create work for me. Please try to avoid them.’ He put down the file, folded his arms and looked straight into
A
’s eyes. ‘I’ve read your full file, by the way. I know who you are.’

A
felt a squirt of breakfast and bile try to rise up to his throat. He could taste the acid.

‘But I am a professional,’ the screw continued, ‘and regardless of the utter disgust I have for you, I will treat you like any other of my personal charges. There are those, among the officers, who would not be so understanding. Who might share the information with the prisoners. I am sure you are aware of the possible consequences of this.’

A
nodded.

‘Because of this your file has been placed in the care of the number one governor. Anyone wishing to see it must approach him. But since this in itself is so unusual, it would still arouse some suspicion.’ His voice moved up a level. Stiffly, almost angrily, he said: ‘Your best chance is to stay so bloody low profile that none of the officers bother to check your file at all. Do you understand? No fights, no complaints, work hard, but not too hard, obey their every word, but don’t crawl, and you might just get out one day more or less intact. You got that?’