Having finally managed to close his eyes and blot out his surroundings, he was jolted by a loud blast of reggae music. As Dwayne played his ‘sounds’ with no concern for him or, to judge by the shouts from the neighbouring cells, anyone else, despair as much as cowardice kept him from complaining. He pressed his pillow over his ears, but it was no more use as a muffler than a support. The nightmare grew worse when he looked up to see Dwayne’s face leering at him.
‘Hey, Mr Prime Minister, this one’s for you,’ he said. Listening to the hate-filled lyrics, Clement feared that his relief had been premature. Four tracks later, he was grateful for the noise, which offered some distraction from Dwayne’s unrestrained bowel movements… although nothing could drive away the smell. Returning to his bunk, Dwayne switched off the light as abruptly as he had switched on the music. Then, after playing two more songs, he plunged the cell into a blessed silence.
Clement’s reprieve proved to be short-lived, as he adjusted to as strange and disturbing a nocturnal soundtrack as any in his mother’s African stories. From the yard came the din of barking dogs and booming exchanges between blocks. Across the landing a man screamed that, unless he were let out, he would hang himself, sparking cries of ‘Schizo’ and ‘Nutter’, with even the duty officer telling him to ‘Shut the fuck up and get some rope!’ Meanwhile, the constant clanging on the pipes attested to either dangerously defective plumbing or sinister codes.
Lying back with his senses numb and brain pounding, he wondered if sleep deprivation were to be a part of his sentence. He felt as though he were being sucked into a vast hole and refused to close his eyes for fear of becoming permanently trapped. He must have dozed off in the early hours, because he was roused by a sustained drumming on the pipes. Stealing a hurried glance at Dwayne’s watch, he saw that it was only a quarter to five. He used the loo and instinctively flushed it, inciting Dwayne to a torrent of abuse. ‘What’s up with you, man? You sick or something? Don’t you never think of anyone else?’
‘I’m sorry. I was startled. The pipes.’
‘It’s the Muslims. The righteous ones. The holy brothers. They have to pray, man. And I have to sleep. Right?’
Dwayne fell asleep, compounding the cacophony, but Clement remained wide awake. At breakfast, he felt as if he had spent the whole night crying, although his cheeks were bone dry. With a fluttering in his stomach that went beyond panic, he sat on the edge of his bunk unable to move until even Dwayne noticed and, glancing up from the cornflakes and UHT milk that had replaced the proverbial porridge, told him to ask the doctor for tranquillizers. ‘There ain’t no shame, man. Half the nick’s on tablets. Whatever gets you through the day.’
‘Thanks, I’ll be fine,’ Clement replied, afraid that taking them would sanction thoughts of suicide, ‘I just need some air.’ Recklessly encroaching on Dwayne’s territory, he moved to the window. ‘I just need some air,’ he repeated, hauling himself up to one of the three inch panes that made bars superfluous and peering out at the desolate vista. He felt strangely heartened by the sight of an officer playing with a dog, albeit an Alsatian, but, when he tried to convey his pleasure, all Dwayne replied was ‘If the screws here had their ways, man, they’d change the dogs with lions.’
Mid-morning Exercise gave him a chance to go down to the yard, but his relief at being outside was tempered by the dismal surroundings. Every wall and walkway was profligately covered in rolls of razor wire and the entire area wrapped in acres of meshing. The fitter men were working out, racing around the perimeter as if in training for an escape, kicking a ball in a roisterous free-for-all and practising martial arts. Only the parallel bars remained untouched, like the climbing frame on a sink estate. Meanwhile the indolent majority loitered aimlessly, their sole exertion being to stamp their feet in a bid to keep out the cold. As he tried to blend into the background, afraid of provoking an assault by an inadvertent glance or gesture, he found himself approached by a stream of baleful men. But, far from the crazed killers of his imagination, they were dealers offering supplies of drugs, tobacco and phone cards. Having declined the offers with enough grace to retain their goodwill, he was even more alarmed to be accosted by a man so intricately tattooed that he resembled a piece of William Morris wallpaper.
As he stared in dismay at the sinuous pattern of swastikas, the man announced that he was the drummer for the Aryan band, Ploughshare. ‘You have a problem with that?’
‘No,’ he replied faintly.
‘All the bleeding hearts bang on about saving pandas and polar bears and what have you, but the white race is the most endangered species on the planet and nobody gives a fuck.’ Clement wondered if he were trying to recruit him. ‘Word is you’re a wicked artist. I want you to draw my picture to send to my tart. Make sure she won’t forget me. I’ll pay.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ Clement replied.
‘Course I do. You should never do nothing for nothing in here, mate. You ask for nothing, they think you’re nothing. I’ll give you some burn.’
‘Burn?’
‘Baccy.’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘No problem. You can give it me back then,’ he said, with a broad grin and a half-friendly poke in the kidneys.
Clement’s success with the portrait led to other commissions on similar terms and he spent several Association periods in a corner of the landing, softening the lines of hardened faces in front of an appreciative crowd. Finally, even Dwayne took notice, asking him to draw him a woman.
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘A sexy woman, man. I want to see her tits and pussy. I want to rub my face in her cunt juice. You understand?’
‘I understand.’ It was a fitting irony that, with his artistic dreams in tatters, he should have ended up as a prison pornographer. The success of his new role did nothing to alleviate his depression. Each morning he woke up exhausted, as though he had spent ten hours in the studio. He suffered from permanent nausea and his gut felt as constricted as if it had been fitted with one of Gillian’s bands. He lived on his nerves. Death seemed to lurk around every corner. The need for constant vigilance was compounded by being cooped up day and night with Dwayne. Passing wet sheets through the presses put a severe strain on his cell-mate’s back. Claiming to be feeling ‘well ill’, he made an appointment to see the doctor, whose standard diagnosis was malingering and whose sole expression of sympathy came on the disclosure of his own slipped disc.
‘He said I’m the most healthy person he’s seen this week.’ Dwayne said. ‘I asked him: “Where you been working, man? The morgue?”’
The doctor passed him fit, but the works manager demurred, insisting that Dwayne take time off to recuperate from an injury whose seriousness was made clear to Clement when he demanded to swap bunks, a true loss of face for someone with a deep compulsion to be on top.
Clement’s days were now as fraught as his nights, with the morning and afternoon naps which had been his one solace destroyed alternately by Dwayne’s music and his taunts. Everything he did seemed to irritate his cell-mate, whether it was reading: ‘You just get all them library books to show you’re better than me; you can’t tell me you really enjoy them’; or opening mail: ‘What’s that? Four letters today. It seems like the whole world’s your friend, man. I ain’t had four in the last ten months.’ Clement’s retort that correspondence was a two-way process backfired when Dwayne asked him to check the spelling of a note he’d written to his girlfriend, an effusion of sexual violence he described as ‘nice’, for no other reason than that the word nice occurred in every second line.
Nothing incensed Dwayne more than to be asked the time. Nonetheless Clement braved his anger three times on the afternoon of Mike’s first visit, even after his warning that ‘If you bug me once more, you won’t be off to no visiting room but the hospital.’ Meanwhile, he tortured himself by picturing everything that could go wrong, from a crisis at the school through a tailback on Brixton Hill to a riot on another wi
ng which left him without an escort. Just when he was convinced that, even allowing for Dwayne’s malice, visiting hour must be over, he was hauled out of the cell, searched, made to put on an orange tabard, and ushered into a crowded hall. He walked up to the dais where an officer took his name and number and pointed to a table, at which, for the first time in three weeks, he saw a face that wasn’t a threat. Guards patrolled the hall and balcony, routinely ordering people to display their hands, but Mike’s hug was more precious than any contraband, imbuing him with hope.
‘Great gear,’ Mike said. ‘Orange has to be your colour.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘I’ve been worried about you. On the phone you sounded so distant. But, seeing you in the flesh, you look terrific.’
‘You’ve never been a convincing liar.’
‘A little thinner, perhaps.’
‘It’s not the Ritz! We’re locked up with our dirty plates from five at night till eight in the morning, so half the tea – that is dinner – ends up out of the window. Is it any wonder the place is infested with rats?’
‘But you’re surviving?’
‘I’ve learnt to keep my head down. Prison’s like the rest of the world writ large… packed with people ready to hurt you, betray you and drag you down in order to feel better about themselves.’
‘You’ve not been bullied or got at in any way or…?’
‘Don’t worry. Granted my cell-mate’s an acquired taste. Dwayne. He’s put in a request for a new mattress on the grounds that the old one’s giving him nightmares. I kid you not! We do have one thing in common.’
‘What?’
‘Guess?’
‘Come on, Clem…’
‘Humour me. Think of your three least favourite letters.’
‘Ah!’
‘You see? Although “in common” is putting it too strong. As he never ceases to remind me, Dwayne is a red-blooded male. But I’m bored with me! I want to hear all the gossip from home.’
Mike duly obliged, conveying the love and support of so many friends that Clement wondered if he had simply memorised his address book. ‘I talk to your mum regularly. I asked if she’d like to come today, but she said “next time”. I think she was afraid she’d be intruding.’
‘Sounds like Ma.’ The thought of her selfless love was almost too much to bear.
‘Carla’s up in the Lake District putting the finishing touches to her window. Not that I see the appeal of all those smug little animals myself.’
‘That’s because you never knew Nanny Goddard.’
‘But she’s done a splendid job.’
‘Tell her to send me a photo. Poster-size. I’ll stick it up on the wall.’ He smiled at the thought of Dwayne’s bemusement.
‘I went to visit Newsom in the Mildmay.’
‘I’ve written to him but I’ve yet to receive a reply,’ Clement said, troubled by Mike’s change of tone.
‘I shouldn’t expect one. Not for a while. But he’s being brilliantly looked after. And he says that if anything’ll help him pull through, it’s the thought of being around when you’re released.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Shoana?’
‘You don’t suppose right.’
‘She’s written to me twice.’
‘I hope you chucked the letters straight in the bin.’
‘Not on your life! Even an estate agent’s circular would be welcome in here.’
‘What? Advising you they have a prospective buyer for your bijou south London cell?’ Mike asked, triggering Clement’s laughter. ‘Sorry, that was tasteless.’
‘Yes, it was, and all the better for it… Shoana asked if there were anything she could do for me.’
‘Certainly. How about an apology and a divorce?’
‘Come on, it’s never going to happen. I think the letters themselves are a kind of apology. I asked her to go and see Ma as often as she can and carry on writing to me.’
‘You’re a good man, Clem. I’ve always known it, but never as surely as I do in here.’
Despite the constraints of the setting, they chatted so freely that Clement felt almost human. When the time came for Mike to leave, he sank into such despair that, for the first time, he understood those prisoners who preferred not to send Visiting Orders than to be reminded of ‘life on the out’. His misery increased when he returned to the cell to find Dwayne locked in a heated dispute with an officer about the pair of speakers he had ordered from Argos.
‘Them are sitting there at reception. Reception say it’s not their job to bring them and Canteen say it’s not their job to fetch them. I’ve been waiting two weeks. I’ve paid £3.95 delivery. That’s thieving, man.’
‘So what am I meant to do about it?’
‘Go get them for me. This is the Prison Service, man! Why they call it a service makes no sense to me.’
‘Because we devote our lives to looking after scum like you! Don’t you think that wog-box of yours causes enough aggravation already? Now if you’re a good lad and keep your nose clean, your Uncle Gordon may think about going to collect them in a week or so.’
Dwayne’s reaction was so predictable that Clement suspected the officer of engineering it. Venting months of frustration, he flung a chair at the wall before springing on his tormentor. Clement flattened himself against the bunks as the officer blew his whistle and was joined within seconds by four colleagues who fell on Dwayne, pinning him to the ground and frogmarching him off for a spell in solitary, while he shrieked that ‘The bastards are twisting me up!’ Left alone, Clement cleared up the mess and made some tea, recycling his two o’clock teabag, whipping it out to ensure that there was enough left for one more cup. Then he lay back on his bunk to contemplate his own spell in solitary, made all the more attractive by the discovery that Dwayne had not been wearing his watch.
4
Clement was given only three hours to prepare for the move to Bullingdon. At nine o’clock the principal officer told him that he was to be transferred and, at noon, he was led out to a cross between a refrigeration van and a Portaloo, much like the one in which he had been brought from the Old Bailey. Despite the discomfort, he savoured the brief return to the outside world, grateful even for the M40 lane closure which extended the journey by an hour. On arrival, he was taken through the same reception procedure as at Brixton but, whether because he had grown stronger or simply tougher, he felt no humiliation. Standing stark naked in front of the officers, he knew that pride was not the same as dignity. They could strip him of his clothes, but not of his self-respect.
Kitted out in a burgundy tracksuit, he was taken to an interview room where he had a bruising encounter with Senior Officer Willis, a gaunt man with a pencil moustache, clipped white hair and chipped teeth, who displayed an alarming hostility towards him, as well as an unexpected familiarity with his case. ‘This is a Category B prison. You should be in Category A. Strings have been pulled and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one little bit. I have my eye on you, lad. Step out of line just the once and I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks. Understood?’ Clement nodded. ‘Good.’
He escorted Clement down the landing to a cell which was cleaner, brighter and, above all, fresher than the one in Brixton. An elderly man sat on the bottom bunk, carving something out of cardboard. He jumped to attention as the officer walked in.
‘Your new pad-mate, Parker. You’ll show him the ropes.’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘A word to the wise, Parker. Never use the wrong toothbrush. And make sure you sleep on your back!’
Willis went out, leaving Clement with his cell-mate, an owl-like man with a few strands of hair ineffectually combed over his bald spot who, unless prison had prematurely aged him, had to be in his seventies. Since the prisoners’ code ruled out a direct question, Clement speculated on his crime, picturing tax evasion, benefit fraud and identity theft, before fixing on a refusal to pay his Council Tax in protest at cuts in loc
al amenities. Although perturbed by his greater sympathy with white-collar crime, he was grateful that the physical threat ever present with Dwayne had been reduced.
‘Am I on top?’ he asked. Parker grunted his assent before jumping up and dividing the cell into two ‘halves’, which were so blatantly unequal that Clement assumed he was either myopic or trying his luck. Resolving not to object but to reclaim his rights by stealth, he clambered on to his bunk from where he surveyed the room. It was the familiar hotchpotch, with the welcome addition of a rickety TV on the chest of drawers and the even more welcome absence of pin-ups, the only female presence being a matronly face in a frame on the windowsill.
‘Your wife?’ Clement asked.
‘What’s that?’ Parker spun round, gripping his Stanley knife like a cornered schoolboy.
‘This photograph. Is it your wife?’
‘That’s right.’
‘She has a kind smile.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Does she live nearby?’
‘What?’
‘For visits?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
Parker worked in silence until tea when, after responding tersely to Clement’s questions on Bullingdon life, he grew more voluble on the subject of his modelling and the many Golden Hinds and Cutty Sarks he had bottled for sale by a prison officers’ charity. Eager to make the most of his short time with the knife, he returned to his ship for another hour, before asking if Clement minded his watching TV. Clement was so disarmed by the courtesy that he put up with a programme in which a group of minor celebrities was submerged in a submarine. After a battle royal between a daytime newscaster and a footballer’s ex-wife over the benefits of Botox, Parker switched it off. Rummaging under his bunk, he produced a bottle of cloudy liquid and offered Clement a drink. ‘It’s cider,’ he said, in response to his dubious expression. ‘First, I leave the apples to rot. Then I ferment them in sugared water. The kangas allow me the bottles for my ships.’ Clement downed a mug with enthusiasm, which he paid for in the early hours when he was struck by agonising cramps and chronic flatulence. His one consolation was that Parker slept through it all, waking up to dismiss his mild reproaches with the claim that a trip in the ‘meat-wagon’ would upset anyone’s stomach.
The Enemy of the Good Page 39