Boy A Page 8

  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 respo
nse 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?’

  A nodded again.

  ‘Don’t just nod. You say “Yes, sir”.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We’ve had them all in here, you know: Rat Boy; Spider Boy; Blip Boy; Safari Boy, every one of those tabloid touted toe-rags has passed through Feltham. And do you know what? None of them was any different to any other little thief. But you, you and your young friend were responsible for a genuine bloody national tragedy. Don’t, for one second, ever make me regret helping you to hide in here.’ His mouth twisted as though to let A see what it would look like in rage. ‘Because they would tear you apart.’

  Then in an instant the screw’s entire countenance changed. He closed the folder in front of him, and with spread fingers, pushed it to the side of his large desk. ‘Oh, on the governing governor’s orders you’re going to continue to see a psychologist once a month. Looks as though I should probably get you to a dentist too. Now, have you anything that you would like to raise?’

  A looked at the man. How he leaned forward with a deliberate smile, as if he cared. He didn’t care, A knew. But he also knew this might be all the help he was going to get.

  ‘I don’t know whether I can make it,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think I can take years of this. I don’t see how I can do it.’

  ‘That’s not a problem.’ The screw laughed his little joyless laugh again. ‘You just do what you can.’ He pushed a button that buzzed the door open. ‘I’ll see you do the rest.’

  I is for Insects.

  As Flies to Wanton Boys.

  Time flies when you’re having fun. When you’re young. Days passed A and B by, in the days when they were together. There was no maths and no spelling; Fridays were pretty much the same as Tuesdays. And though there were plenty of games, there was only ever one team.

  They would meet at the same crossroads where their ways parted again at night. The first there would hang around on a bleached bench that had been presented ‘With love to the memory of Bernard Debbs’. Once A tried to erase those words while he waited, scribbling over the brass plaque in a stolen red marker. But the engraved letters collected more ink than their surroundings, and became, if anything, more defined. Usually he would hold on until B arrived before doing much. No point in using up a good idea on your own. Most things he found were much better now he had a friend. And it was together that they carefully carved their initials all over the bench. Using the powerful retractable blade of B’s Stanley knife. Stonelee knife he called it.

  Sometimes B brought other tools with him, borrowed from his brother’s box. Pliers, screwdrivers, spanners, wrenches. On days like these they would spend their time looking for things that could be undone, in acts of careful vandalism. Other days they just smashed and stole stuff. Once B brought with him a ball of thick wool, a trowel and an old darning needle.

  ‘For killing eels,’ he told A. But he wouldn’t tell him more until they got to the right bit of the Byrne.

  A had never been down to the Byrne before. He’d watched it from a distance, seen the water run red then white. Leaving Stonelee stained with iron and aluminium salts. It congealed nearly to black in the flatter sluggish section, flowing under the unfinished ring road. It was here that B wanted to go, under the bridge like trolls. It was where eels lived, he said.

  This was the Byrne at its worst, concreted like a canal. But disused, overgrown, steep stone sides crumbling and dangerous. Clogged with weeds and lumped with dumped mortar from building the road a decade ago. Blocks of stone still uneroded by the slow flow. A had been forbidden ever to approach this part of the Byrne. Which was in itself reason enough to go there. Some mothers preferred to say that evil lurked under the bridge. And sometimes it did.

  B picked up a used condom with his trowel and wafted it at A, making him shrink back from it. But not actually trying to get him with it. Not like when he’d been held down and smeared with shit from a nappy that the boys in his class had found in a skip. Although he could tell it was to be avoided, A wasn’t really sure what the condom was.

  ‘Is that from an eel?’ he asked his friend.

  B laughed and dropped the skin-like tube at his friend’s feet, so that he could inspect it unafraid. ‘It’s a rubber-jonny,’ he said.

  A nudged it with a scuffed school shoe, not much the wiser, knowing only that he had on occasion been compared to such a thing.

  ‘You put it over your dick so you don’t get slime all over you when you shag a woman,’ B explained.

  It looked impossibly large for such a purpose to A, but he knew his ignorance next to his worldly companion. He kicked the jonny into the Byrne. Where it floated, no doubt due to its slime repellency, on the water’s dismal skin. Watching the jonny’s sorry progress was like trying to see the minute hand of a watch move. The debris-choked channel drifted at the precise border between flow and stagnation. It wasn’t long before they took to trying to sink the rubber-floater with rocks. The Byrne swallowed them with disdainful ease; eventually sucking down the jonny too.

  ‘Come on then,’ B said, brandishing his trowel. ‘We’re going to need a lot of worms if we’re going to go eel-bobbing.’

  ‘Eel-bobbing,’ A repeated, hoping this wasn’t going to resemble the apple-bobbing he had done one Halloween.

  B selected a spot where the earth was soft and began to dig. A joined him when he’d found a flat lump of wood and a rusty six-inch nail, which he used as shovel and pick. The worms came quickly, it had rained early in the morning, and B placed them all on a plastic hubcap, so they couldn’t escape. He tried to divide them into big ones and small ones, but the two groups kept squirming together. One worm they found was so large that, as it clung in its hole, it stretched in B’s hands to well over a foot before its flesh ripped and it snapped. Even shrunk back and in half, it was the biggest worm they had. So they carefully excavated its other section, which still burrowed frantically, shitting out the dirt it ate through the wound where the rest of its body had been.

  When he judged they had enough large worms B showed A how to thread them. He selected a fat one, which writhed in his grip, growing and twisting, and poking its blind head all around; in what seemed to be either pathetic attempts to escape, or else very proficient attempts to be so disgusting that it might be thrown away. The efforts were futile. B lifted his threaded darning needle before his glinting eyes and worked it through the whole length of the worm, so that it hung on the thick wool. He repeated the action with a second worm, and continued until a good three-foot section of string was covered e
ntirely by worm.

  Often the worms he pierced splurted a clear liquid which would fly on to his bomber, or his grubby school shirt. B would laugh at this, and assured A that it was good luck if some landed in your mouth. A kept his mouth firmly closed and took his chances with bad luck.

  Next B wrapped the worm-coated wool around the span of his hand, and tied all of those loops together at the top. To create a big clump of dead worms at the end of a long piece of string.

  With the Stonelee knife they turned a green branch into a rod, and then attached the heavily baited wool. A still couldn’t understand how they were going to catch eels with no hook. But he didn’t question his friend.

  B’s patience was amazing. Normally he got bored of any activity after a few minutes. But he sat there for half the morning on the bank of the Byrne, gently bobbing the clump of worm carcasses just off the water-bottom. A sat beside him, occasionally, as directed, throwing in a couple of the smaller worms as ground-bait. A few times he was allowed to take the rod for a while, on the strict condition that he pass it straight over if he felt a bite.

  ‘The strike’s got to be just right,’ B explained. ‘You got to be quick, but really steady, and then eely’s little teeth get snagged in the wool, and if you’re good you can get him over the bank before he untangles his self.’

  A didn’t feel a bite, but he felt a bit like Tom Sawyer when he held the rod; with his friend as Huckleberry Finn, whose adventures he’d seen on TV. The feeling would have been stronger if they were allowed out in the sunshine, but B insisted that eels liked the darkness under the bridge. Periodically, articulated lorries would labour over the road, and everything would rumble as if the whole world was going to come down on them.

  While they waited, A watched an ant dragging at a lump of dead worm, six or seven times bigger than itself. It was making slow progress, but it wouldn’t give up, just kept pulling, a millimetre at a time, in the direction of an unseen nest. On a generous impulse, A pushed the prize forward a few inches, careful not to harm the ant as he did so. The ant went frantic. Leaving the worm-meat altogether, it ran round and round in panic, and then fled, in the opposite direction. A didn’t understand what had happened, why his attempt to help seemed only to have flung the ant into the throes of insanity. He figured that the ant must have seen his hand as the hand of a god, something huge and powerful. And for a moment he felt huge and powerful.