We stayed in the courtyard until the evening food was served. Like every evening in Avlona, inmates from the other prison wings had brought the food in wide metal cauldrons that they would push on a set of wheels. It was their job – I just tried not to think about them cooking it. Usually it was fassolia – beans, or fakes – lentils that we would eat with plastic cutlery. Sometimes it would be spaghetti, but it would be slimy and cold. They would put on a plastic glove, grip a load of it and slap it into our plastic Tupperware containers, which wasn’t a very appetising sound. Once we’d collected our food, we’d take it back to our cells and the guards would lock us in for the night.
On this particular evening, we’d been served fassolia. I remember walking into the cell, placing my plastic container of fassolia onto the table and being shocked to see Christos lying on his bunk with electrodes connected to his body – jolting because he was electrocuting himself. Over the previous week, I’d started to realise how intelligent Christos was, not necessarily in an academic way, but in terms of electronics and DIY. I’d already watched him turn a normal CD player into a CD MP3 player somehow, and now he’d created his own ‘Slendertone’ machine. It was slightly too powerful though, and probably very dangerous.
Since before I’d arrived in Avlona, Christos had been sneaking into other inmates’ cells and ripping the wires out of their electric fans. He had stolen loads of them, leaving other inmates to bake in the scorching summer heat. He’d dissected his portable hi-fi and connected eight wires to specific components on the main circuit board. He’d attached them by burning the ends of plastic straws, holding them like a soldering iron and using the melted, dripping plastic to stick the metal wire to the circuit board, which then hardened like solder. He’d been careful to ensure that the metal elements were touching, as plastic doesn’t conduct electricity like solder does. To my surprise, it seemed to hold and actually work. He’d collected eight of the circular foil seals that you peel from the lids of fresh cans of instant Nescafé, which he then attached to the other end of each of the long wires. The best way to imagine his little portable hi-fi is like an octopus with skinny wire legs and metallic foil shoes.
Christos had licked each of the circular foil seals and slapped them onto his body – four on his abdomen, two on his chest and one on each of his biceps. It caused him to be electrocuted when the music played, but he claimed that the shocks were strengthening his muscles. What was funny was that he was being electrocuted to the beat of the music! With each kick, snare and bass note, electrical pulses would shoot through the wires into the circular foils and shock him. What was even funnier was that when the volume was turned up, the shock would be more powerful. The song that he would repeat over and over again was ‘My Love’ by Justin Timberlake – adamant that the beat was ‘very good for his muscles’. We tried turning the volume up to full blast and Christos started to jolt and shake uncontrollably to the rhythm, and the speakers in his homemade ‘surround-sound system’ almost burst. Christos had a huge grin on his face. His abdominal muscles and chest were tensing as though a doctor was shocking him with a cardiac defibrillator. His arms were hopping like a puppet and his hands were jerkily opening and closing to the beat of the music like a dancer from a Bollywood movie. Christos’s body relaxed when the volume was turned down. Fivos then rapidly switched the volume from silent to full blast, and back down to nothing, and then to full blast again. The three of us were overcome with laughter because we’d finally found a way to control Christos.
I was the lowest that I had ever been in my life – wrongly accused of murder and caught up in what is possibly one of the slowest, most inept justice systems in the world. I had no idea if I would be granted bail, and had the fear of being transferred to one of Europe’s worst prisons hovering over me. Nevertheless, moments like that would never fail to lift my spirits.
22
* * *
A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
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My lawyer George Pyromallis contacted the court every two days to find out when my bail appeal would be considered. Unsurprisingly, it was a question that remained unanswered. I’d been locked up for a month and a half and my family hadn’t stopped fighting for my release. Along with many family members, friends and the charity Fair Trials International, they continued to lobby dozens of MPs and MEPs, outlining the injustice and pushing them to put pressure on the Greek authorities for my release. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the Lord High Chancellor Jack Straw, the minister for security Admiral Lord West and the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, among many others, were constantly bombarded with emails and letters, pleading for intervention in my bail appeal.
Both of my parents had been flying back and forth from Athens to be close to me, spending each day in an internet café because they had no connection at my uncle’s apartment. My dad’s business was on the verge of failing because he couldn’t dedicate enough time to it, and they were spending an absolute fortune on legal fees – it was a very difficult and stressful time for them. They had a meeting with the British embassy in Athens, who made it clear that they couldn’t intervene, but would push for a meeting with the Greek justice minister. Alison Beckett from the British consulate told my parents some of the truths about the delays in the Greek justice system. She informed them of an ongoing case that involved two young children who had tragically died in a rented holiday bungalow in Corfu. They were poisoned by carbon monoxide that leaked out of a badly installed boiler and two Thomas Cook holiday representatives had been wrongly accused of causing their deaths. Several months had already passed and the trial was adjourned for a further six months. We feared that the delays in my case would be just as long. I would remain locked up until finally having the chance to defend myself – and the threat of being randomly transferred to Korydallos became one of my greatest fears. School or no school, I knew that the guards could probably do whatever they wanted.
Journal extract – Day 50 – 10 September 2009
I’m an innocent man and sometimes it just gets too much. How do you stay strong and positive, but prepare for the worst at the same time? Have I gone through the worst? Or is it yet to come? There’s no point in telling myself that this is too much and that I want this to end, or wonder why this burden has been put on me. All I can do is continue to do what I have been doing for the past fifty days. I have been caught in a trap. I have to go through the whole corrupt system in this country when I have already been through the UK system for a year. This is psychological pain. I can’t describe these emotions, I can only feel them. I feel like I am being treated as though I am guilty. I can’t even cry, even though I want to because there is always someone here. No privacy. All I can do is endure and continue to go with the flow. All I want to do is be with the ones who mean the most to me – everyone who has been with me throughout this.
Arnas and I started to play chess quite a bit with Jamal, and I began to notice that many things that came out of Jamal’s mouth were lies. Accounts he would tell me about his life were funny – but clearly untrue. Some of the stories were definitely plagiarised from television shows or films that he’d watched since being in prison. He must have thought he was the only person in the world to have seen them. One time he said, ‘You know Andrew, when I was living in Syria, me and my friend used to crash weddings to pick up chicks.’
‘Yeah, I think there’s a movie about that, mate – it’s called Wedding Crashers.’
‘Maybe,’ he responded.
Another time he said to me, ‘When I was a kid, my mother left me in the house and these guys broke in to rob us – so I set traps around the house to catch them.’ He mentioned it so casually, as if I hadn’t watched Home Alone on TV every Christmas since I was a kid. I would have preferred to listen to real stories about his life. I remember looking at him and thinking, Who the hell is this guy!? Surely he had a life story far more interesting than mine. He didn’t need to lie. One day he opened up to me, admitting that he didn’t
choose his life and that he had no opportunities. He referred to himself as a ‘wild animal’. I couldn’t even begin to compare him to myself – the son of a man who designs cruise ship interiors and living in a five-bedroom house. It made me feel stupid for ever complaining about my situation. He was alone, and even when he was released he would have nowhere to go. No wonder he felt the need to make up stories. At least in Avlona he had a job; he had a purpose.
My cellmates and I would spend hours locked up during the day, which is when I spent my time reading and writing. A week had passed and Christos was still playing the Justin Timberlake song over and over again – I was absolutely sick of it! It would be on repeat all the time, continuing to ‘tone’ his muscles. I asked him to change the track, but he refused. The song became a form of slow, painful torture. When Fivos, Makis and I joined forces to tell him that it was malakia and that he was getting on everyone’s nerves, he finally stopped the music. I could close my eyes and escape again.
Every now and then we would check the bag of juice, sugar, apples and bread. It had been a few days and the bag was beginning to fill with fumes, which was a sign of fermentation. One day I showed Arnas the bag. He’d become a good friend of mine and I trusted him. I told him that I would give him some of the alcohol if he wanted, but to keep it to himself. Jamal, who was his cellmate, would have been the worst person to tell. Apart from being very close to the guards, nobody seemed to trust him. Fivos said that he was a roufianos who would tell the guards anything for a packet of cigarettes.
Eventually the bag had filled with so much gas that it looked like it would explode. Christos opened the top of the bag, letting all of the fumes out. It left the cell with a potent stench – the perfect mixture of rotting fruit and alcohol. It took another day for the bag to balloon up again. Every time we let the gas out, it would fill up faster and faster, leaving the cell smelling more like alcohol and less like rotten fruit every time. After a few more days had passed, the bag would inflate every ten minutes.
Christos untied the top of the bag and alcoholic fumes hovered around the opening. He put his mouth over it and took a deep breath – inhaling as much of the vapour as his tar-ridden lungs could hold. The bag was handed to me. I was confused as to what we would be achieving by doing this. I copied him and put my mouth around the opening, sucking in as much of the gas as I could. I held the fumes in my lungs, attempting to prevent the imminent cough that wanted to escape. As I exhaled, my world began to spin. I was overcome with a powerful rush and couldn’t help but take fast deep breaths, unable to move for a short while. The high didn’t last very long. I found it hard to believe that the fumes of fermented apples, juice, sugar and bread would have an effect that strong! The alcohol was definitely ready.
We were locked in for the afternoon. Makis and Christos used Tupperware containers to scoop the lumpy liquid out of the bag. They then filtered it through a plastic drainer into another container and then carefully poured the concoction into plastic bottles that we’d collected. We ended up with twelve litres. There was a big bucket that we’d use to wash our clothes, which we filled with cold water from the shower hose. We left the six 2-litre bottles in there to stay cool until the evening. When the ypallilos locked us in for the night, the four of us waited a few minutes to ensure that he’d left the Parartima wing. Fivos clapped his hands together. ‘Ade pame – Come on, let’s go,’ he said.
The four of us sat around the plastic garden table, smoking cigarette after cigarette and listening to hip hop music on Christos’s homemade stereo system. We drank our prison-brewed alcohol out of plastic cups. It tasted like alcoholic orange juice and had bits of bread and apples still floating in it. I had an idea, which was to melt the bottom of the plastic straws with a lighter and pinch it, so that the hole at the bottom was a lot smaller and wouldn’t let in the bits of apple and bread. Clearly, I was beginning to think like a prisoner. I was sitting around the table drinking with my cellmates, and I felt accepted – it was almost the same feeling as starting secondary school and managing to fit into a group. The others used my straw idea, and when finishing a cup we’d find a lump of orange pulp sitting at the bottom.
‘Reh, I bet you never would have thought you’d be sitting here getting drunk with us in prison,’ Fivos chuckled.
It was true – I could never have imagined it happening. Two months earlier, when I’d landed in Athens and watched a row of armed police officers ready to handcuff me, my mind would never have conjured up such a situation.
We all became merry and ended up jumping around the cell and doing silly dances. We caught a mouse, as there would often be some running around the cell. Christos ripped the live wires out of his fan and electrocuted it. Then we attached the homemade electrodes to Christos’s neck and face, finding it hilarious as the shock in his cheeks forced him to smile uncontrollably to the beat of the music. In hindsight, it was all quite dangerous.
We made the most of a bad situation, which is something that we all should do when life deals us something difficult to get through; if we don’t laugh, we’ll only cry. I actually enjoyed myself that night, regardless of the circumstances. From the moment that I’d landed in Greece, there was a deadening numbness in my body and a tremor in my chest that wouldn’t desist. But for those few hours it seemed like all my anxieties were lifted. We’d forgotten about our problems and were doing what all normal young people did. That night, we were free. I know it may sound strange, but I hold the memory close to my heart.
23
* * *
THE ACCUSED WHO PUNCHED THE VICTIM IN THE HEAD
* * *
Journal extract – Day 85 – 15 October 2009
It’s funny how you can wake up one day, oblivious to what is happening behind closed doors. After over two months here I just found out that I didn’t make bail, again. The judicial council bail hearing happened. A guard just came and opened my cell door and gave me something to sign. He said, ‘You made a request to wait for court outside, but they said no.’ Just like that. I always wondered how I would find out. It’s crazy how you can feel OK and then so emotionally weak in an instant. I can’t even call my parents until they open the cell door in a few hours. So I’m locked in here to think about it. How are you supposed to feel? I can’t believe this has happened. I’m going to be inside for a very long time. It kills me just thinking about it. I just want my life back. This is such an injustice – it’s unbelievable. What do I do? It’s my 21st birthday tomorrow and I wish it wasn’t. When will they move me to Korydallos? I don’t know, but something tells me it will happen now. How could the bastards reject me? I don’t even know the reason because I can’t understand the document – it is all in Greek. I can’t think straight. I want to get the fuck out of here, but now I know that it’s not even an option any more. This is my life for now, maybe for the next year or so. I feel so powerless and there’s no one around me to care. Just me, my mind and four walls.
When I found out the news I became detached from my own body – numb. The ypallilos eventually unlocked the cell door in the afternoon and I ran into the hall so that I could be the first one to grab a telephone. I slotted in a telephone card and quickly dialled my parents’ number that I’d memorised. My hand was shaking and my chest stiffened for the first time in my life – I remember the agony as I attempted to take a breath.
It wasn’t long before we discovered what the document said. George Pyromallis sent my parents a translated copy. According to the Greek authorities, I would ‘naturally’ deny the charge. My two friends Chris and Charlie were beaten by Greek police officers and forced to incriminate me. On this matter, the judicial council’s verdict simply stated: ‘During the principal inquiry relating the pressure and physical violence from the staff in the preliminary inquiry are deemed trite, since nothing of the kind had occurred.’ I find it incredible that the judicial council was able to make this decision without investigating the matter at all.
The document stated:
In the light of the aforementioned facts and in particular of the aforesaid behaviour of the accused who punched the victim in the head, it is evident that his intention was to cause the aforesaid grievous bodily harm to the victim, owing to the vulnerable point of the body chosen, with the risk of his ensuing death, which indeed occurred. The resulting outcome, which was more serious than intended, that is the victim’s death, is attributable to the negligence of the accused who, although like every sensible person finding himself in the same circumstance, and given his age, his physical and mental health and his personality, should and could have foreseen and avoided such an outcome, by not striking the victim in the head in the manner described, and specifically although he was aware that the violent blow to the head could cause the victim to lose consciousness and fall from some height to the floor and be killed, he attacked the victim and struck him as described, resulting in the most serious outcome, that is the victim’s death which he neither sought nor accepted as a possible outcome of his action.
In the instant case, in view of the foregoing, sufficient evidence has emerged of the accused’s guilt, and moreover the serious evidence of his guilt, which led to the issuance of the aforesaid provisional custody warrant, following a European Arrest Warrant, remains just as strong today, as he has no permanent abode in the country and it is very likely that if he were allowed to go free he would abscond abroad. Consequently, there is a lawful case for this Council to find that the appeal under consideration should be refused as to its substance and that the disputed Warrant should remain in force.
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