No More Heroes

by Stephen Thompson

  The fact that I turned myself in did not help me in court. My brief used it in his plea for leniency but it didn’t work. The judge gave me ten years. After he had passed sentence on me, one of Barbara’s family, a woman, shouted from the gallery, ‘You shoulda got life you evil sonofabitch!’

  My parents were nowhere to be seen. Too ashamed, they just couldn’t bring themselves to attend court. Only Theodore turned up, accompanied by several of his suited church brothers. Before I was taken down, the judge gave me permission to read out a statement I had prepared earlier. It was a carefully worded apology to Barbara, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than members of her family started booing in an attempt to drown me out. The judge had to order them to be quiet or face being charged with contempt of court. After I’d finished my statement and was about to be led from the dock, I turned to Theodore. He waved and mouthed something but I couldn’t read his lips properly. Later, as I sat in the court holding cells waiting to be taken to prison, one of the escorting officers said to me, ‘I wouldn’t worry too much. With good behaviour you’ll be out in about seven.’ I thought he was being sympathetic, but then he quickly added, ‘More’s the pity.’ Not long after that I was put in a van along with a few other convicts and driven away to start my sentence.

  It took the police several more months to track down first Benjy, who was picked up in Tottenham, and then Mitch, who had been hiding out at his cousin’s in Elephant and Castle. They didn’t contest the rape charge, but tried to argue that I had forced them into it at gunpoint, contradicting everything that Barbara had told the police in her statement. For some reason the judge chose to believe Barbara. For their temerity in trying to deceive the court, Mitch and Benjy got twelve years apiece with a recommendation that they serve a minimum of ten.

  * * *

  Tortured by guilt and remorse, I twice tried to commit suicide in prison, slashing my wrists both times. The first time I had to be taken to an outside hospital, the bleeding was that bad, but the second attempt was not as serious, more a cry for help, and I was bandaged up and given counselling. I talked a lot in those sessions, the counsellor sitting on a chair next to my bunk, but the words sounded empty. I couldn’t see a way back from where I was. How would I ever be able to walk upright again after what I’d done? What could I possibly do to redeem myself in the eyes of society? It seemed clear to me that I was destined to see out the rest of my days as a social outcast, skulking about the fringes of society, my head cast forever downwards. It was at this point that Theodore decided to take me in hand. Whenever he came to see me, he’d make me close my eyes and bow my head while he asked God to forgive me. He also told me that I had to find a way to forgive myself, saying that it was the only way I’d be able to go on and live a normal life again.

  During the dark days of my imprisonment and immediately after my release his words proved to be a great comfort. Even so, I didn’t believe them to be entirely true. If we do wrong and are genuinely remorseful, it’s not enough that we forgive ourselves, we have to know that we’ve also been forgiven. The circle has to be complete, but I feared that would never be the case for me. On Theodore’s advice, I tried to contact Barbara, I wrote to her from prison expressing my deepest shame and regret and begging her forgiveness. It took her months to reply and when she did, she was blunt: ‘I hope you rot in hell for what you did. Never contact me again.’ So there it was. I didn’t like to think it, but maybe there really were some things in life that were unforgivable.

  * * *

  I served my time on E-Wing, unofficially known as Fraggle Rock as it housed all the rapists and child molesters. It was twenty-three-hour bang-up, with an hour of exercise, away from the main prison population. We had to be separated for our own safety. I did everything in my cell. Sometimes I had it to myself, sometimes I had to share. I preferred those times when I was alone. Time dragged like I never thought possible. I looked forward to my visits like a plant needing rain. After saying they couldn’t face seeing me locked up, my parents relented and visited me at least once a month. They never had much to say beyond enquiring into my well-being. Mum always thought I looked skinny and said I should eat more and she always brought food with her. I was glad for it as the prison food was disgusting. Dad mostly sat in silence, occasionally asking if I was behaving myself and warning me not to do anything that would cause me to miss my release date.

  ‘There is a great deal of difference between seven years and ten.’

  He’d always been one for stating the obvious.

  Theodore’s visits were the worst. With him it was God this and Jesus that, all the time. He was now playing for his church team and coaching some kids in the area who had got into trouble with the law. He was really proud of the work and said he wanted me to get involved when I was released. I was tempted, I had to do something when I got out, but I was wary of Theodore’s motives: he was always trying to convert me to what he called ‘Christ’s army.’

  * * *

  The main activity in prison was bodybuilding. Inmates on Fraggle Rock were not allowed to use the gym and had to their sit-ups, pull ups and press ups in their cell. Most of the guys I shared with were obsessed with expanding their muscles, whereas I was more interested in expanding my mind. In prison I took to reading in a big way. I usually had at least a dozen books in my cell at any given point, a mixture of titles borrowed from the prison library and ones my family brought in on visits. Without really meaning to, I noticed that my reading habits changed significantly during my time in prison. At first I ate up all the crime fiction, particularly of the hardboiled American school, but eventually I grew tired of reading predictable stories that glamourised killing and violence and decided to broaden my tastes. I sampled a bit of sci-fi, which was all the rage in prison but which didn’t appeal to me at all, and for a time I ploughed through quite a number of the so-called classics in an effort to plug the gaps in my reading, none of which I found particularly enjoyable. The language was too old-fashioned and I couldn’t connect to the people or the world. And then I started reading prison memoirs. Here, at last, were stories I could relate to, written by people from very similar backgrounds as me. The Autobiography of Malcom X kept me absorbed for days while I was reading it and stayed with me long after I’d finished it. I was especially affected by the passage describing his conversion to Islam while serving his latest prison term. It has to be one of the most powerful accounts of a journey from blindness to sight that’s ever been written. Reading it gave me hope, made me think that I could still make something of myself, that it was not too late for me to turn things around.

  As well as reading for pleasure, I did a lot of academic reading in prison. Leaving school without any qualifications had been gnawing away at my conscience for years, like unfinished business, and I seized my opportunity through the prison’s distance-learning programme to take my GCEs and A-levels. All were gained with high marks, yet I felt unsatisfied with what I’d accomplished. I was proud of my success, for sure, but it didn’t feel authentic.

  When I first got to prison it hadn’t been possible to avoid Mitch and Benjy, though I’d wanted to. We spent a year together on the same wing. Our interactions were always tense. Incredibly, Mitch was still carrying a grievance and we actually had a fight one day in the exercise yard. Benjy had to separate us. From then on I tried to stay out of their way and was relieved when eventually they got transferred; first Benjy, who ended up somewhere near Manchester, and then Mitch, who got sent to a place in Maidstone. I knew that at some point I’d be transferred as well – it was rare for long-term inmates to serve their sentence in one prison – and I was praying not to be sent to the same place as either of them. It never happened. In fact, I never saw them again.

  * * *

  Little by little, as my release date drew nearer, I began to imagine what sort of life I wanted for myself and, more importantly, where I wanted to live. Instinctively I knew I didn’t want to return to London. I certainly didn’t want to ret
urn to Hackney. A clean break was the best option. I knew that. I also knew it wouldn’t be easy for me to start a new life anywhere else. Hackney was my home. It was all I had ever known. I was tied to the place. I had too much to lose by leaving, the most important thing being my family. Despite the heartache I had caused them, they had stood by me. Without their loyalty and support I doubt I would have made it through the seven long years I spent inside. Their value to me had never been higher and I had no desire to see it depreciated ever again.

  I was let out of prison in the autumn of 1993. For a long time after I returned, I barely left the house. The shame of seeing people who knew about my crime was crippling. I had moved in with my parents on the understanding that it was a temporary arrangement until I was on my feet again but ended up spending over a year with them. I wasn’t happy to be living under their roof at the age of twenty-four, but circumstances, not least of a financial kind, dictated my actions. I hated my life at that point. Discounting the fortnightly visits to my probation officer and my attempts to find work, I did little but sit at home and brood. Very occasionally, if I was feeling adventurous or if the folks were getting on my nerves, I’d go and watch a movie at an out-of-the-way cinema, taking back streets and doing everything possible to avoid being seen. On even rarer occasions, when I could be bothered to go to the stadium and queue up for tickets, I’d go and watch Spurs play at the weekend. Most of the time I’d go alone, but occasionally, if he could make it, if he didn’t have church commitments, Theodore would come with me.

  I knew I had to find a job, any job, and fast. My parents were not in a position to support me and I wouldn’t have allowed them to anyway. Unfortunately, finding a job was easier decided than achieved. As I began the process, it became immediately and depressingly clear that I was unemployable. My CV was almost a total blank. Apart from the few months I’d spent at Wimpy immediately after leaving school, I’d never had a proper job in my life. With no experience of the work place and no marketable skills, I was struggling to get even a menial position.

  My criminal record didn’t help.

  As for my cherished GCEs and A-Levels, they were next to worthless. I had left school to become a work-shy dole-scrounger and those chickens had now come home to roost. I used to be contemptuous of wage slaves, but after leaving prison I came to see them in an altogether more respectful light. To hold down a job, particularly if you’re only doing it for the money, is no mean feat. There’s much to admire in people who are prepared to make that kind of investment in their future, people who are able to take the long view. One of my best friends at school had gone on to become a nine-to-fiver, and whenever I used to see him on his way back from his shift – I was never up early enough to catch him on his way to it – I couldn’t help but laugh. Dressed in his regulation donkey jacket – he worked for Hackney Council as a parks attendant – I thought he looked daft. He hadn’t crossed my mind in years, but during that period when I was tramping around looking for work, he was all I could think about. Wherever he was, I felt sure that he was not only gainfully employed, but that he also had a mortgage and savings and a car and could maybe afford to take a holiday now and then; while I, the cool drop-out and now ex-con, couldn’t even get a job collecting rubbish.

  With my job hunt proving fruitless, I panicked and started applying for any and everything. For a dispiriting period of about six months I couldn’t even get a response to my letters, never mind interviews. Finally, on the advice of my probation officer, I turned to a handful of temping agencies that specialised in the sort of work for which I was suitable – anything physical that required neither experience nor formal qualifications – but even they were reluctant to take me on. All the same, I managed to blag my way onto the books of a couple of the leading agencies, having sworn to them that I was prepared to take anything, anywhere, at a moment’s notice. I must have impressed them, since it wasn’t long before the job offers started coming in. I turned down nothing, no matter how demeaning or low-paid. The idea was to convince the agencies of my reliability and willingness to work in the hope that the jobs would keep coming in. It didn’t quite pan out that way. There were too many dry spells followed by too few days of rain. I couldn’t establish any kind of rhythm, but somehow I got by.

  The work was depressing. It reminded me of a book I had read in prison, My Golden Trades by Ivan Klima. The author had described the type of work he had to do whilst trying to become a writer. Most of the jobs were menial and laborious, but Klima invests them with, if not nobility, then at least respectability. The jobs I endured could not be rescued by poetry. Warehouse-filling, hod-carrying, shelf-stacking, dishwashing, office-cleaning, night-portering, road sweeping, dog-walking, leafleting, canvassing, envelope-stuffing. Here were jobs to kill the soul, and I did them with about as much enthusiasm as a galley slave. This kind of work did not acquaint me with the dignity of simple toil. Nor did it make me appreciate the thankless but essential contribution being made to society by the ordinary workingman. What it did was throw my low position in society into sharp, demoralising relief. There was no point trying to dress it up. I was down there amongst the dregs, working alongside people who had no alternatives, no choices, people who were barely surviving, despite the fact that they regularly put in fifty- to sixty-hour shifts a week. On average, I only worked with these people for a few days at a stretch, coming in at the start of the week and often gone by the middle of it, but during these short periods it was all I could do not to become infected by the anger, bitterness and self-loathing of my workmates.

  I continued to do a variety of dead end jobs until, at last, I found something that paid quite well and didn’t make me want to kill myself: doing deliveries by van. The work took me all over London and the south east and sometimes as far as the midlands, delivering everything from coat hangers to rolls of bubble wrap. I loved the freedom of it, the sense of being alone on the road. I even liked those moments when I was stuck in traffic, which happened a lot, especially in London. I’d use the time to listen to the radio, mostly news and current affairs programmes. Being in prison for seven years, I felt totally out of the loop and had a lot of catching up to do. I did that job, off and on, for six years, making runs to some of England’s most down-at-heel towns; white, predominantly working class towns where people loved the Royal Family, ate fish and chips several times a week and put a Union Jack in their windows all year round and not just when the England football team was playing in major tournaments; towns like Duddenham.

  Epilogue

  I left Len’s and dashed home, my heart pounding. As soon as I got in I unplugged my landline, switched off my mobile, closed all the curtains and double-locked the front door. Then, needing something comforting, I went into the kitchen and made myself a hot chocolate. Leaning against the counter with the mug in my hands I became so distracted that it went cold. Try as I did, I just couldn’t shake the images of the rape from my mind. It was the only thing I could think about, as if it had happened that day and not twenty years previously. The memory had been getting clearer by the day, the pieces of the mental jigsaw slotting themselves neatly into place, and now the full picture had been assembled. It felt like I was watching some sick slasher movie that I couldn’t switch off. By contrast, I never thought once about the bombing. In fact, I couldn’t remember when I had last thought about it. The transfer, it seemed, was now complete.

  When I could no longer bear my thoughts I decided to call Theodore. At that moment he was the only person I wanted to speak to. I chose to call him with my mobile, and when I switched it on I noticed I had several missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognise. Most of the callers had tried once and given up, but a few had been more persistent and had called several times. These I took to be journalists looking for a quote. I’d also had calls from Theodore, Dave, Rhona and Richard but only Theodore, Richard and Rhona had left messages. Theodore said that he would be praying for me and that I should call him as soon as possible, Richard had left a l
ong rambling message to say that, in light of the revelations, my stock was at an all-time high and that I should call him if I was interested in making ‘some serious money’, while Rhona had called to say that one of her patients had just come into the surgery and shown her the article and that we really needed to talk. Before she hung up she asked me to come and see her after she’d finished work. I didn’t like the sound of her voice one bit. It was too sombre, too resigned. It was the voice of someone who needed to make a tough decision and was well on the way to making it. I thought about calling her right away. If she wanted nothing further to do with me, I figured I should know sooner rather than later, but I didn’t call her because if she was going to dump me I wanted her to do it when she wasn’t distracted by thoughts of fillings and root canals.

  I called Theodore on his mobile. He was at work, but he managed to take a few minutes to talk to me. When I told him that I hadn’t left the house since the story broke, that I didn’t dare go out for the shame, he said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Don’t worry about what other people are thinking, bruv. Try and go about your life as normal. Ignore the papers. Don’t read ‘em. Remember, today’s news, tomorrow’s chip wrapper. It’ll soon blow over. And if it all gets too much, then now might be the time for you to go and see the folks. You could even take Rhona. I’m sure she’d love it.’ It was typical of him to consider Rhona. He didn’t regard what she and I had as that serious, but it was a mark of his respect for me that he never tried to deny her existence.