by Trevor Hoyle
‘Another month if I get full remission. You’ll have two months to do if you keep your nose clean.’ He used the jargon unselfconsciously. Kenny had always liked Skush but never admired him before; but this was an old lag speaking.
He said, ‘Does anyone ever try to make a break for it?’
‘A few do. A few Scousers, but it’s pointless because if you get caught you lose your remission. Watch out for the psychos.’
‘Who are them?’ Kenny said, worrying his thumbnail.
‘Some of the blokes in here are real nutters.’ He screwed his finger into his head. ‘They should be locked away. If they catch you looking at them they go for you. One of the lads nearly got knifed last week.’
‘Knifed?’ Kenny said. The word made him shiver and brought cold sweat to his forehead. But in a peculiar way he felt safer in here than he had outside: they couldn’t pick him up for that now, he was off the streets, out of the reckoning.
‘What are the screws like?’
Skush shrugged. ‘Not bad. Play fair with them and they play fair with you. It’s not them you have to bother about, it’s some of the head cases they’ve stuck in here because they don’t know where else to put them.’
Kenny was about to ask for a few names to avoid when an officer came in and they both stood to attention.
‘What you lot doing?’
‘Come to fetch my gym-kit, sir,’ Skush said.
‘Who are you?’
‘Seddon.’
‘Sir.’
‘Seddon, sir.’
‘Number?’
‘437…’ Kenny’s face was convulsed. ‘437… 972.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Mopping the floor. Sir.’
‘Don’t take all day. Carry on.’
• • •
In the evenings after tea there were classes in a dozen subjects, including English for those who literacy age was under seven; over the two months they were inside it was hoped to raise their standard to twelve plus. Kenny scraped through the compulsory English test and was able to choose the subjects he wanted. He decided on Art, Woodwork and Interior Decoration. Each lecture was complete in itself because with a class which gained a few and lost a few every week it was impossible to maintain any continuity. The teachers were part-time, from nearby schools, or local tradesmen who came in two or three evenings a week.
The days seemed interminably long at first and the nights were even worse: but after a week, what with the never-ending round of cleaning duties, PE, parades, meals, evening classes and an hour spent playing cards or, at the weekend, watching television, the hours lost their dragging inertia and merged into a passing blur and before you knew it it was time for bed, lights out, and a sound heavy sleep induced by a day spent in the fresh air and continual activity. For when you weren’t working you were exercising, and when not exercising, eating, and when not eating, studying, and when not studying, sleeping…
Still the worse time, though, was before sleep came, lying in the silent breathing dormitory with the occasional rustle of sheets as someone relieved his sexual urge and invariably the voice of a Scouser trying by turns to antagonise the other lads or make them laugh. One of the lads in Kenny’s dormitory who everyone treated as a simpleton – an enormous bloke with broad shoulders who went by the name of Desperate Dan – always waited till lights out and would then say in a loud Scouse voice:
‘Who’d like to look at my big toe?’
This set off a chain-reaction of wisecracks which mainly had to do with bum boys, giant pricks and kissing the Pope’s ring. Skush had warned Kenny to be on the look-out for queers but so far he hadn’t been approached or noticed anything suspicious going on. He couldn’t believe that Desperate Dan was a pouf, though the thought that he might be scared him to death.
He had never written a letter in his life – except for forging sick-notes at school – so he didn’t bother writing to Margaret; he thought once of writing to Janice but couldn’t think what to say, or rather what he wanted to say couldn’t be put in a letter. He would wait for Margaret’s first visit and ask her to pass a message to Jan, or better still get Jan to visit him, which is what he wanted most of all. He still wouldn’t accept that she had deserted him: it was Vera, it had to be, who had turned her daughter against him. He wasn’t resentful or even mildly annoyed that Jan had got off with a warning. The police hadn’t been too hard on her, probably because she didn’t have a record: the general consensus had been that Kenny had corrupted her and led her astray. That was how things worked in the world and Kenny was the last one to be dismayed or even surprised.
His report after two weeks was favourable, which meant that in another two weeks, all being well, he would be Grade II. The days settled down into a set routine, eating, working, studying, sleeping, and for this reason anything out of the ordinary was even more noticeable – such as the time when the bloke with four kids went berserk.
It happened in the recreation room one evening when everyone was peaceably reading, playing cards or just talking. As might be expected he was a Scouser, a thin nervous lad with a prominent Adam’s apple and tattoos on his skinny arms. Without warning and for no apparent reason he ran into the wall and started screaming. A couple of the lads tried to restrain him but he was demented and wouldn’t be held; he shook them off, pushed his fist through the window and turned his wrist against the jagged glass. The walls were sprayed with blood and a pack of cards on a nearby table was ruined; spots of blood were later found on the television screen in the far corner of the room. Kenny stood and watched as two officers picked him up off the floor and, without waiting for a stretcher, ran with him to the hospital ward.
‘Psycho,’ somebody said.
‘What’s up with him?’ Kenny asked.
‘He’s married with four kids. His wife’s been doing a bit on the side and he wants to get released quick and sort her out.’
‘It hits married fellas the hardest,’ Desperate Dan said. ‘That’s why you want to steer clear of women,’ leering vacantly in Kenny’s direction.
‘Will he get out?’
‘He’ll be shoved in hospital,’ somebody said, ‘and then he’ll be back. They’re not that stupid.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘What about her?’
It costs between £25 – £30 a week to keep a boy in a Detention Centre, though the cost would be very much greater if the place wasn’t to some extent self-sufficient: cleaning, maintenance and general repairs are done by the boys themselves with guidance from trades officers and workmen. The workshops, where Grade II detainees spend one month, produce concrete kerb and paving stones which are sent to other Borstals and Detention Centres to make roadworks and repair existing ones – which is why such establishments are always well looked after, neat and shipshape to the point of obsessiveness. Another workshop makes moulded rubber wheels under contract to a manufacturer of hand-trucks and trolleys. The farm supplies milk, cheese and eggs to the kitchens and any surplus is taken by local farmers. After two months the boys on six-month sentences are allowed outside in small working parties, either to the farm or helping Rochdale Corporation Works Department maintain roadworks in the district.
Behind the main building is the sports field, surrounded by a wire-mesh fence with barbed-wire along the top, and the Centre has a football team in a northern amateur league; all games are played at home. On Sundays the Chaplain (C of E) holds a service, and there is a mass for Catholics, which those who profess to be atheists can opt out of but which most of the detainees, who’ve never been near a church since their twelfth birthdays, if at all, attend without objection.
Kenny gradually found his feet in Buckley Hall and after the trauma of Margaret’s first visit it slowly began to dawn on him that compared with some of the other lads (excluding the illiterates) he didn’t have much of a clue: he had always reckoned himself to be pretty smart but there were some blokes – one in particular – who had really got it
all weighed up. Over a game of cards in the recreation room Kenny happened to mention that he had worked at Haigh’s and Woolworth’s and a few other places; Barry Keesig pulled a sour expression and called him a pillock to his face. Work was out, a mug’s game.
‘What did you get at Haigh’s?’ Barry Keesig asked, dealing a hand of crib.
‘Just over eleven,’ Kenny said.
‘Clear?’
‘No, nine pounds-summat clear.’
‘Nine quid for a week’s work.’ Barry Keesig smiled in his snarling way and shook his head. He had a long flat contemptuous face with a rectangular jaw and eyes like slits. He was the kind of bloke whose opinion everyone respects, though he never went out of his way to gain that respect and didn’t seem bothered one way or another. ‘I could make double that in an afternoon.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Using this,’ – tapping his head.
‘Yeh but doing what though?’
‘Not robbing fucking meters for a start,’ somebody said.
‘Who asked you?’ Kenny said, suddenly angry. He was willing to learn but he wasn’t prepared to let any of them put him down. They had all been caught, hadn’t they, no matter how clever they might have been?
‘Most of them in here are bums,’ Barry Keesig said. ‘Deadbeats. If you’re going to make it pay you’ve got to get organised. And it’s no good going for a few measly quid – it’s got to be real money.’
‘The cars is a good number,’ somebody said.
‘For that you’ve got to have the gear. Workshop. Spraying equipment. Log books. Number plates. And it means driving them down south somewhere. Hard cash, that’s the only way, no frigging about. Straight in, lift it, and out again.’
‘Post offices,’ Kenny said, coming up with a positive thought.
‘Yeh,’ Barry Keesig said. ‘Or better still, factories. There’s always loads of cash in factories. Three or four of you, say, in overalls; get in at dinner time with the rest of them and have a shuftie round. Wages office. Canteen. Cloakrooms. Christ, you can’t go wrong.’
Kenny’s hands trembled a little as he held the cards. Barry was right, it was dead easy. An afternoon’s work and you could get away with, what – forty or fifty dabs each – enough to last a fortnight. He felt himself getting excited at the idea.
The following day he received a letter from Margaret saying that she hadn’t yet been able to get in touch with Janice. Kenny had asked her to persuade Janice to visit him but he knew that if Mrs Singleton got to hear of it she wouldn’t allow it. The problem was how to get to Jan without Vera finding out. He put the letter in his locker.
Skush said, ‘Cheer up, it may never happen.’
‘It’s all right for you, you’re getting out on Friday. Lucky twat.’
‘It comes to us all,’ Skush said.
‘Hey,’ Kenny said, thinking.
‘What?’
‘If you happen to see Jan when you get out tell her to come and see me. Will you?’
‘Yeh,’ Skush said. ‘If I see her knocking around.’
‘What are you going to do when you leave?’
‘Get a job, I suppose. I’ll have to; the old fella will be on at me.’
‘Have you got rid of the habit?’
‘I have now. Give me two weeks outside and I’ll probably be on heroin.’
‘It’s a fucking hard life,’ Kenny said.
‘If you don’t weaken.’
Kenny became good friends with Barry Keesig and they talked a lot about what they were going to do when they left Buckley Hall. Barry Keesig had three months to serve – two months longer than Kenny – but they promised to keep in touch and meet up when they were both outside. Kenny had forgotten, or so it seemed to him, what it was like to be a free agent. He watched Skush walking down the stairs with a brown paper parcel under his arm and it was as though this life, inside HM Borstal and Detention Centre, behind the high wire fence, was the only one he had ever known. Skush was walking off the edge of the planet, away from the real world and into the mysterious Outside. Of course he, Kenny, could remember what it had been like before, but in an odd way it seemed unreal, a distant dream filled with people who were like actors in a film he had seen a long time ago and only faintly remembered. The place inside – Inside – had a life of its own; even the sky looked different, and for the first time in his life Kenny noticed such things as trees and grass and even heard the birds singing. He came to know the buildings, the courtyards, the workshops, the sports field in such intimate detail that he found it hard to recall his own bedroom at 472, Ashfield Valley: this was reality, here and now, the other was a memory from a half-forgotten past life.
Sometimes he was shaken out of his dream-state as when, for instance, three Scousers went for him in the showers and nearly broke his wrist. There was no motive for their action – none that Kenny could fathom, anyway – unless it was simply that they had stared at him and he had stared back. They waited, with cunning calculation, until the others were clear of the shower, and then closed in with fists and heels, Kenny slipping on the wet tiles and attempting to save himself by the reflex action of his left arm. The next thing he knew it was as if someone had inserted a white-hot needle between his hand and the protruding ulna on the point of his wrist, and he nearly fainted with the pain. Two of them held his arms flat against the streaming tiles while the other stood astride him and worked his heavy hanging cock into life, arriving quickly at a climax and masturbating into Kenny’s face. The spray of water soon washed the sperm away but he didn’t forget their faces in a hurry.
VISITORS
THE ROOM CONTAINED PERHAPS A DOZEN SMALL TABLES, AT each table two straight-backed wooden chairs set facing each other. The boys were in their places and most of the other visitors had arrived and sat down when Margaret appeared and came through the tables to where Kenny was intent on the index fingernail of his right hand. It was bitten almost to the half-moon.
‘Well,’ Margaret said, smiling in the way she had rehearsed. ‘You’re looking all right, love’ – spending longer than was necessary in sitting down, straightening her chair, brushing invisible specks off her coat while she thought what to say next – ‘how are they treating you?’
Kenny stared at her.
‘I’ve brought you some chocolate,’ Margaret said as if suddenly remembering, and she put two half-pound bars on the table. ‘You’re not allowed cigarettes, are you? I bet it’s made you stop, has it? One good thing, I suppose. Kat sends her love.’
Kenny said, ‘Why have you not said owt?’
‘What?’
‘Why’ve you not said owt about Janice?’
‘Give me time, love, I’ve only just got here; I told you in the letter I hadn’t had chance to see her. She’s—’
‘You said you’d get her to come and see me. Why didn’t she come with you?’ Kenny wasn’t aware that he was speaking louder, though people at the other tables had paused a moment to listen.
‘I’ll tell you if you’ll give me time,’ his mother said in a rushed whisper. ‘I tried to get in touch with her—’
‘You told me that in the letter,’ Kenny said stolidly.
‘Listen’ She cleared her throat and went on hurriedly in a low voice. ‘I had to be careful, didn’t I? You know very well what Mrs Singleton would have said. I just couldn’t go up there or send a letter, could I? Anyway…’
Kenny waited. ‘Anyway what?’ he said.
‘Well,’ Margaret said, fidgeting. ‘Janice couldn’t have come up.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s gone away. Her mother’s sent her away.’
‘Where to?’
‘Halifax.’
‘Halifax?’ Kenny said, his swollen eyes staring out of his head. ‘What the fuck’s she doing in Halifax?’
‘All I know is she’s gone to stay with relatives,’ Margaret said, trying to keep from meeting the eyes of the other visitors.
It took Kenny a moment to assimilat
e this information and a further moment to realise its implications. He said slowly and with real hatred, ‘The cow. She’s done it on purpose to stop Jan coming to see me.’ He knew why. He shouldn’t have plonked it. That was his big mistake. The cow was jealous. She couldn’t stand the thought of him and Janice wanting to see each other, to be together. His first reaction was to hit back in some way, tell somebody what he had done, make the cow suffer. But that wouldn’t do any good, and if Jan were to find out… He ripped the wrapping paper off the chocolate and broke off a huge piece in his mouth. A trickle of dark-brown saliva ran down his chin.
‘What’s wrong with your wrist?’ Margaret asked.
‘I fell on it.’
‘You ought to save that chocolate.’
‘What for, Christmas?’ Kenny said savagely.
‘Never mind, love, only another four weeks and then—’
‘And then I’ll sort her out.’
‘Now don’t say that – you mustn’t talk that way.’ Margaret suddenly felt it necessary to become firm. ‘It’s all through her and her mother that you’re where you are now. You’ll stay away, do you hear? We had enough of Vera Singleton in the court. It’s through them you got into trouble in the first place.’
Kenny gazed at her uncomprehendingly. ‘How do you work that out?’
‘Breaking into the flats,’ Margaret said, as if explaining an obvious fact to a recalcitrant child. ‘If you’d never met Janice in the first place you’d never have thought of taking that money. She probably put the idea into your head. She was always quiet, that girl, I grant you, but nobody’s that quiet; there’s usually a bit of wickedness lurking somewhere. You haven’t always been an angel but you never got into any real trouble till you started associating with her.’
Kenny’s chest moved with suppressed feeling but he breathed out slowly and the emotion subsided.
‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘did you?’
‘No,’ Kenny said.
‘There you are then,’ she said for want of something better to say. She seemed at a loss for words. And then, abruptly, ‘I’d better tell you. You’ll find out sooner or later. Janice is pregnant.’