Extradited (22 page)

The four of us got along quite well sometimes, regardless of their drug habits. We would sit in the cell, smoking, drinking
frappes
and chatting some days. My Greek had really improved and I remember one day I told them a joke in Greek that my auntie Georgina had told me years before: Two doctors watched a fat man running for a bus. His right arm was sticking out and curved downwards, like a teapot handle. The doctors looked at his deformed arm; one of them argued that the man was born with the abnormality – the other argued that it was the result of an accident. They followed the man onto the bus and asked him why his arm was deformed; was it the result of an accident or was it something that he was born with? The fat man stretched out his perfectly functioning arm and responded, ‘Oh shit!
Epese to karpouzi mou!
– My watermelon fell!’ My cellmates all seemed to find it hilarious. Maybe it was a ‘had to be there’ kind of moment, which needs actions and facial expressions to make the joke funny.

‘Who told you this joke? Was it from
Gougli?’
Zafeiris asked, chuckling.

‘Who’s
Gougli?
’

‘
Xerete ti einai gougli reh
– You know what
gougli
is, man,’ he said.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You know:
youtubes, facebooks
– and
gougli!
’

‘Google! Not
gougli
.’

Zafeiris chuckled and put his arm around me. ‘Gougli …
Gougle … whatever. You know,
Mesa sti fylaki eimai o pateras sou
– Inside prison, I’m your father.’

Zafeiris wasn’t my ‘father’ in prison. My dad was a good man who would do absolutely anything for his family. Zafeiris was a piece of shit; he used to steal from me for drugs. If he was my real dad I’d probably never see him, or even want to see him. A typical day would consist of my cellmates and their friends using my books to snort heroin off – one day I’d even caught them snorting off my copy of the Bible that my auntie Teresa had bought me. It offended me, but I didn’t make a deal of it because I didn’t need the stress.

The guy who they would buy the drugs from would knock on our cell door and enter. ‘
Ti egine manges?
– What’s happening lads?’ He was Albanian and I knew him from Avlona’s Parartima – short, skinny and bald with a big head. He told me that he was on remand for drugs, but Georgios from Crete in Avlona told me that he was lying and that his real crime was very different. I can’t say that it was 100 per cent true, but Georgios told me that the guy’s girlfriend had been cheating on him; she’d become pregnant and there was a possibility that another man was the father. Apparently, he pretended not to know about the other man, and during an intimate moment with his girlfriend, he went down to perform oral sex on her. According to Georgios, he grabbed a gun that he had planted under the bed, forced the barrel into her vagina and shot her internally.

He was twenty-one years old and had been transferred to Korydallos not long after me. Within a week of his transfer he was involved in the drug-dealing scene in Alpha with the ‘king’ of the Albanians. He would come into our cell. ‘
Koita
– look.’ He would unravel a pile of heroin wrapped in a piece of newspaper. My three cellmates’ eyes would gleam at the sight and they were probably salivating like hungry dogs. They would start to bombard the young
drug dealer with propositions like ‘If you give me the drugs now, I’ll give you a card and a big can of coffee’ or ‘If you give me the drugs now, I’ll give you two cards next week AND a packet of cigarettes.’ The drug-dealing kid would smile and refuse – knowing that he had them all wrapped around his little finger. My cellmates would roam the wing looking for people to pickpocket and would come back hours later with bruises. The Albanian kid would return. My cellmates would offer him less than what his ‘king’ had instructed. The drug dealer would accept the offer and wait a few days for the rest of the payment. Other inmates would enter our cell throughout the day and ask for the phone cards or cigarettes that they were already owed from the previous week. ‘
Deftera
– Monday,’ ‘
Triti
– Tuesday,’ ‘
Tetarti
! – Wednesday!’ The answers my cellmates would give were merely random, meaningless days of the week. They were in heaps of debt to drug dealers with links to Albanian mafia – they were morons because it was how riots would start. I didn’t feel the need to warn them; it was something that they already knew. It didn’t stop them – they were addicts and they just couldn’t help themselves.

I went for a walk in the courtyard one day and the Albanian drug-dealing kid approached me. We walked up and down for a bit; I tried to forget about what he may have been in prison for and just treated him like any other person. His English was very broken, but he ended up explaining a few things to me. What he couldn’t say in English I could understand in Greek: heroin addicts that had money caused no trouble; it was simply a way for them to medicate themselves. They would have a friend on the outside who would transfer money to the drug supplier through Western Union. The drug supplier would phone their friends on the outside, who would let him know whether the money had been transferred or not. Customers like this would receive heroin after a very small cut with paracetamol. Inmates like my cellmates
were junkies who couldn’t afford to take drugs. They would resort to thieving and get into debt. It was junkies like these who would get themselves into trouble – and you really wouldn’t want to be in trouble with these guys. Some junkies would even prostitute themselves for phone cards or a hit of heroin – one man even offered me a blowjob for a telephone card. I declined the offer and couldn’t believe my ears.

The Albanian kid trusted me for some reason; I don’t know why, maybe it was because he knew me as the barber in Avlona – or maybe it was because he was young and had yet to learn to keep his mouth shut. He told me that the junkies are sold heavily cut drugs because they are less likely to make money from them. Costas, Zafeiris and Georgios were snorting paracetamol with heroin scraps in it.

One morning I lost my temper because two telephone cards that I’d hidden under my mattress were gone – €20 worth. I used to lie on my bunk and daydream about speaking to Riya or my sister Sophie on the phone – or calling up my mum and dad to find out what was happening on the outside. At the beginning of the week I would strategically plan the days and times that I would call them. It would break up the day and I would feel like my life had some sort of structure – something that I may have taken for granted in my youth, but now craved. If I’d finished reading a book, or felt that my Greek had improved, I would reward myself with a spontaneous phone call to anyone of my choice because my mum had given me a list of all of my friends’ phone numbers back at home. I would replay the conversations in my head and do absolutely anything psychologically possible to escape from the four walls around me. It is far too easy in prison to completely forget that the world is still spinning on the outside of the prison walls. My telephone calls were a huge escape, and on this particular day, my only escape
was about to go up my cellmates’ noses. ‘Where are my cards?’ I asked them.

They all responded one by one. ‘
Den xero
– I don’t know.’

‘Are you all
thick?
We’re in a fucking cell. The door’s locked.’ I could feel myself losing my temper and started calling them a bunch of thieving pricks. I called them all
gyftous
– gypsies and junkies. Although I appreciate that addiction is an illness, I was filled with anger and frustration. Costas went crazy; he stood up and pushed me. I grabbed his fist and smashed it against my face. ‘Go on you little cunt, do it!’ Zafeiris jumped down from his bunk and stood between us – he was my ‘dad’ after all. ‘
Gami sou!
– Fuck you!’ I roared to Costas.

‘I mana sou
– Your mum,’ he blurted back.

Zafeiris pushed him. ‘
Ohi manes, entaxi?
– No mums, okay?’

Costas fell backward onto his bottom bunk. ‘
Gamo ton! Dolofonos einai! –
Fuck him! He’s a murderer!’ he cried.

‘Look at the state of you
Costa
, you’re a fucking junkie. You’re covered in bruises – with your black eyes. Why’re you covered in bruises? Why do you think you have black eyes
Costa!?
’

An
ypallilos
unlocked the cell door and we became silent – he must have been walking past and heard the shouting. He strolled in and stared us all up and down. ‘
Kalimera kyries
– Morning ladies,’ he said. I sat down and filled a cigarette paper with tobacco, then rolled it and licked the sticky edge while allowing my pounding heart to return to a normal pace.

‘
Kalimera
.’

‘
Kalimera
…’ I mumbled.

‘
Ehoume ena provlima?
– Do we have a problem?’

Costas stayed silent. Georgios tutted. ‘
Ohi
– No.’

‘
Teliosata na paizete malakia o enas ston allon?
– So you’ve finished wanking each other off then?’ he asked sarcastically with a subtle snigger.

Costas tutted. Zafeiris smirked and Georgios half smiled.

The guard grinned. ‘
Nai kalo, etsi nomiza
– Yeah good, that’s what I thought.’

He walked back outside and locked us in. I lay down and took a deep drag of the roll-up cigarette, reminding myself that I had to stay cool. In control. I’d come so far; I couldn’t ruin it now.

A
lpha wing was meant to be quieter than Gamma but it was just as loud. Whenever there was a football match on TV, hundreds of prisoners would bang on the cell doors screaming with joy. If the cell doors happened to be unlocked, football fans would run into the hallway celebrating. I met a number of inmates who told me that they were in prison for football hooliganism – especially
Panathinaikos
fans. Fights would start and it would inevitably result in an early lock-in for the evening.

Every few nights at around 10 p.m. an
ypallilos
would unlock the cell door and walk into our cell with a large mallet. He would step onto my bottom bunk, lean over Zafeiris’s top bunk and repeatedly strike the iron prison bars that were mounted in the outside wall. The prison staff would check all of the cells in the wing, and all we could hear were loud bangs for hours when we were trying to sleep. Ever since the Korydallos inmate Vassilis Paleokostas had escaped with a rented helicopter a year earlier, the guards would be extra careful for potential prison break attempts. Apparently, he’d rented a helicopter to come and pick him up from the courtyard. They’d dangled a rope ladder, which he’d grabbed onto and then was flown away into the distance. In prison, Paleokostas was a god! It seemed that almost every inmate idolised him. But what is the point of life
if you’re constantly on the run? My ex-cellmate Vasilis told me that when it happened, almost every inmate was chanting out their cell windows and watching in amazement. Apparently, some had even set fire to their bed sheets and dangled them out of their windows out of excitement because someone was rebelling against the system. That must have been quite an eventful day in Korydallos Prison.

It was evening and I’d just collected my food; the process of distributing it to the inmates had gone quite smoothly. I remember that it was a Sunday, because on Sundays the food in Korydallos was just cold, boiled, white rice on its own with either a pot of plain yoghurt or a banana on the side. On this particular evening they were serving bananas and there were a few left over. Inmates began to fight their way to the front to grab one and it turned into a mini riot. I watched a group of inmates roll around on the floor, kicking and punching each other. A Greek man in his sixties was standing next to me; his grey, bearded jaw had dropped and was quivering slightly at the sight.

‘They’re like a bunch of monkeys,’ I said to him.

The man nodded in agreement. ‘Son, these people haven’t been brought up; they’ve been dragged up,’ he said. His name was Stefanos and I would see him outside in the courtyard on most days. We had a spot at the back of the courtyard where we’d sit for hours with an American Greek/Venezuelan called Tom and a new inmate called Mahmood who was Iranian. I remember it so vividly – I would spin my
pegleri
and fill my lungs with cigarette smoke. The warm sun shone on my face and I would squint my eyes. ‘Rich in vitamin D,’ Stefanos would say, as though it would counteract the effects of what we were breathing. We’d pass the time with idle conversation; they would tell me stories about their lives – I would tell them about my life in north London.

Stefanos was Greek, but told me that he’d lived in several different countries. At one stage he’d lived in Golders Green in London for a while and had worked for the company IBM for decades. He said that he’d started off washing their windows when he was a teenager and ended up running a department years later. I can’t remember exactly why he was on remand in Korydallos; it was for some sort of white-collar crime to do with a property.

The external wall of Alpha’s courtyard was the only thing separating us from the outside world. Looking over the barbed wire we could see blocks of flats with balconies where civilians would be sitting. ‘We’re 10 feet away from freedom,’ Stefanos said.

‘Yep, and they’re 10 feet away from prison! They don’t exactly have a sea-view,’ I replied.

‘One step out of line and they’ll be right here with us!’ he said.

Mahmood overheard our conversation and joined in. ‘Man, they don’t even have to do anything! If the police pick you out for no reason, they will be right here with us!’ he said. Mahmood looked a bit like my cousin Andrew Demetriou – one of the ‘Bum Squad’ members who’d worked towards the Justice for Symeou campaign almost two years earlier. Mahmood stood accused of human trafficking, but claimed that he was the one being smuggled into the EU. Apparently he’d had to flee Iran illegally to run away from dodgy policemen who wanted him dead. He’d caught them on video doing something illegal and sent it to CNN, and then was threatened by the officers because he’d exposed them. When making it into Greece, the police had caught both him and the other illegal immigrants. He had a passport, lots of cash and nice clothes. It made no sense to the Greek police; a man with a passport who could afford to enter the country legally would never need to be smuggled into the country. They accused him of being the smuggler and he faced life imprisonment.

Tom was from Chicago, and was on holiday in Greece when
he was arrested. I used to call him ‘big man’ because he was absolutely huge – not fat, just very broad and tall. He told me that his name was
Athanasios
, but people called him
Sakis
– short for
Athanasakis
– but went by ‘Tom’.

‘How many names do you have?’ I joked. It was the first time we’d met in the courtyard.

‘Only three! What’s your name buddy,’ he asked, putting his hand out to shake mine.

My hand met his. ‘Andrew, but people call me Dave; you can call me Ben,’ I kidded.

‘Nice to meet’cha, Ben.’

I chuckled. ‘I’m joking with you, man, it’s Andrew.’

He seemed like a nice guy, but he would often say very odd things. For example, one day he said, ‘I think I need a haircut.’ Other than five flimsy hairs that he’d combed over – his head was as bald as a bowling ball.

‘Ha, good one.’

‘What d’you mean?’ he asked – his face was straight.

‘You said you need a haircut, you were joking – it was funny.’

‘I do need a haircut, my hair’s getting a bit too long,’ he said as the reflection of the sun bounced off his bald head. ‘But the sides and back of your head are completely shaved,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I use a razor for that.’

‘So you don’t need a haircut,’ I suggested.

‘I was talking about the top of my head, dude.’

I couldn’t help myself. ‘But you’re completely bald,’ I said.

He became defensive. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Why do you leave those little strands of hair? Why don’t you just shave them off?’ I asked him.

‘There’s something about a bald head that I don’t like,’ he said.

Tom told me that he was in prison because a woman had accused him of threatening her with a knife and stealing her
purse – he claimed that he was totally innocent. A few days later he casually brought up his case again, only the story had changed; suddenly he was being wrongly accused of threatening a man with a gun. It didn’t really matter to me if he was innocent or not, but he could at least stick to the same story.

The four of us (Stefanos, Tom, Mahmood and I) were acquainted with a number of weird inmates who would often sit with us in the courtyard, which was different from Gamma’s. There was a small patch of grass and a tree, and inmates had created their own gym equipment out of water bottles that they’d filled with rocky sand and wrapped in bed sheets. The rest of the courtyard was a huge rectangle, and, like Gamma, it was just made of grey rocks and gravel that cats would use as a litter tray.

There was one day in particular, when a funny-looking, short Albanian guy sat with us – he reminded me of ‘Dr Nick’ from
The Simpsons.
He started complaining that there are no virgin girls left in the world because they all have sex so young these days. He said that when he was released, he would lock up a ten-year-old girl and wait for her to grow up so that he could marry her.

‘Yeah, she’s gonna love you for that, mate. You’ll make a great husband,’ I said.

‘Man, I’m serious,’ he insisted. ‘How else will I find a virgin? I don’t want my wife to be ruined!’

Mahmood let out an irritated breath and shook his head. ‘You’re a very sick man you know.’

There was also an eccentric Greek guy called Kyriacos who had thinning hair and a lazy eye. He was brought up in Germany so he spoke with a strange muddle of the two accents. Every few days he would sit next to me and say, ‘Hey, man, you need to give me your email address.’ He would constantly propose that I fly to Munich when we were released and go to Oktoberfest together, like best mates. One day he brought a piece of paper and a pen
into the courtyard to take my email address. I was put on the spot, and didn’t want him to email me. At the same time, I couldn’t refuse to give it to him. I wrote
[email protected].
‘Thanks, man, I’ll email you. I can’t wait … hey, I was just thinking, you want to go do some
prezza
– heroin?’

‘No no, I’m OK my friend,’ I said.

I tried to spend as much time out of the cell as possible because it had become a drug den – but the courtyard was also full of nutters. Tom and I started to play the card game UNO on the middle floor hallway. Normal playing cards weren’t allowed in prison because it encouraged gambling – even though backgammon, chess, dominos, UNO and any other game under the sun was perfectly acceptable. Several other inmates started to notice us playing and would join in on the game. Before I knew it, a friendly game between the two of us had become a game with eight players who would gamble for quite a lot of money. It had stopped being fun because things would get heated. Arguments would happen and fights would start – they would try to involve Tom and me because we’d started the game. One guy even turned to me and said, ‘
Den mou edose ta tsigara mou
akoma!
– He hasn’t given me my cigarettes yet!’

‘
Kai einai to provlima mou?
– And that’s my problem?’ I asked him. He seemed to think that I was the high commissioner of the game, like a croupier in a casino. Tom and I stopped playing with them, and even weeks later it was still going on without us.

Things in my cell started to become worse than they already were. Costas, Zafeiris and Georgios were hiding half a kilo of heroin in our cell that belonged to somebody else. I thought it was ridiculous; what moron would give that amount of drugs to three addicts? It was like throwing a rump steak into a room full of stray dogs and asking them to keep it safe. Every day I would watch them take out the heroin that didn’t belong to them and snort lines of the stuff. Costas managed to get hold of some
Depon
(effervescent paracetamol), which they burnt and cut the drugs with. The person who owned the drugs couldn’t have been that stupid, and my cellmates weren’t exactly using scales to measure whether the drugs had the same weight after cutting them! Their plan was destined to backfire, but yet again, they couldn’t help themselves. It was a time bomb waiting to explode. To say that the situation made me uncomfortable would be an understatement.

‘You won’t say a thing!’ Zafeiris exclaimed.

‘Say a thing about what?’ I asked. However much I didn’t like the situation, my eyes and ears were shut in prison – as always.

Zafeiris struck my left cheek with his right palm and I let out a surprised wail as it stung on impact. ‘You think this is funny!? I see you talking with the Albanian. Don’t think we haven’t seen you,’ he shouted.

The three of them had surrounded me. I’d been living with
these guys for months now; they didn’t intimidate me at all. They were losers. ‘You’re stealing this guy’s drugs! I’m not gonna say shit, but he’ll figure it out himself. You know that, right!?’

One night, when they were asleep, my heart began to race and I was plagued with insomnia. I didn’t know if I was being paranoid or not, but they were acting in a way that led me to believe that they would let me take the blame if they were to get caught with the drugs. I heard things that I couldn’t translate, but I was sure that they had it planned. During the days I would notice subtle smiles and looks between them. There were three of them and one of me; it would be three against one. I felt vulnerable, exposed and alone. I couldn’t tell any of my family because they were already stressed out enough. I wanted to move cell but I had no excuse to. I couldn’t tell the guards the truth because I wasn’t a rat. Mahmood, Stefanos and Tom were in cells that were full. If I requested to be moved, I could have been lumbered with murderers and rapists who were even worse than these guys! Sometimes they were cool, and we’d sit down in the cell laughing and joking. It was all so confusing. After a week of my pillow absorbing my tears, I’d decided that the best thing to do was wait until I was transferred to Patras. I just had to live with it for a little while longer.