by Tig Hague
It was the first time since arriving that I had been able to gather my thoughts, and the realization crept over me like a shadow that at every single turn I had made the wrong call. How had I been so bloody naïve? What the hell was I thinking? Had I just been plain scared and put my hands up in the air before a shot had even been fired? A coward who couldn’t stand up for himself when it came to the crunch? Or was it that I simply couldn’t believe that such a fuss could be made over a miserably small piece of hash and that being a reasonable person, I’d expected everyone else to be reasonable and that common sense, common decency and natural justice would prevail?
I scrawled manically, and all the while the images of Lucy and my mum and dad kept coming back at me, harder and harder, as my eyes began to well up again at the thought of what they were doing right that moment. They’d still be awake back in England, worrying their hearts out, especially Mum, who I knew would be sobbing into her hankie in front of the telly, or into her pillow. Dad would be putting on a brave face trying to reassure her, cracking a few jokes, giving it the bravado. Deep down, though, he’d be as worried shitless as Mum. And Lucy, dear Luce – what nightmare had I plunged my gorgeous babe into? Would she stay with me through this? How the hell could I have done this to them all? The reality was bad enough for me, but in a way I’d rather have been in my shoes than theirs, imagining the most horrible things happening to me. Fucking idiot, Tig Hague! Idiot! Idiot!
I’d covered the equivalent of three and half pages of A4 when the young blond guy walked towards me and indicated that it was his turn to use the bunk. I thanked him with a nod and a smile, rolled up my mattress and made my way to the space on the floor he’d vacated by the bunks on the adjoining wall close to the toilet area. The tramp guy was on my right between me and the toilet and there was little more than two feet between us as I crouched down and lit up one of the few Marlboro Reds I had left. There were still only a few guys awake and, but for the sound of snoring, the room was silent. There were three men squatting on the floor, all smoking cigarettes, and all staring at me without either embarrassment or great curiosity, just blankly taking me in: the English guy in the natty shirt, jeans and loafers. How precious my clothes must have looked among all the grubby tracksuits and T-shirts.
My legs, especially my knees, soon began to ache and I realized there was simply no way I was going to be able to crouch like that for long periods. Moreover, my body was crying out for more sleep and I knew I needed to be as strong and calm as possible over the coming days and weeks. Standing up, I unrolled the mattress and then folded it in half lengthways because there wasn’t enough room to fully extend myself. I lay down on my side, my upper body on the mattress and my legs on the floor, pulled up towards my chest like a big embryo.
The crash of the hatch on the door opening woke me up however many hours later and I could tell by the watery natural light in the room that it was early morning. My eyelids were pasty with sleep, my head was thick and my upper right arm was half-sore, half-numb from lying on it. When I’d woken up in the night the stench of shit and piss seemed to have got better – probably, I figured, because my nose had got accustomed to it – but now it was worse than ever, like it was right under my nose. When I pulled myself up to sit on my mattress I realized why: the toilet area had leaked badly in the night, soaking my right trouser leg with waste. I leapt to my feet, holding my hand over my mouth and nose as I retched. It was lucky my stomach had nothing to offer in response.
In those same few moments, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that over to my left a guard had put a large bowl with a ladle in it through the hatch on to the fold-down tray, and I could see his hand now holding out a smaller bowl, waiting, it seemed, for someone to go and collect it. No one stirred a muscle in those few seconds, and I felt a sudden panic that as the new boy in the cell it was my job to go and collect the breakfast. I trod carefully through the bodies, but went as quickly as possible to get to the door on the other side, the wet of the toilet waste clinging to my leg. The little bowl had sugar in it and I took it from the guard, placed it on the long thin table against the wall next to the door, then put the larger bowl, containing a grey, runny, porridgy mixture, next to it. A couple of the guys were now forming a queue at the table and someone shouted ‘Bilander!’ (‘Food!’), causing those still in their beds to sit up and get to their feet. As I moved away I watched closely as they each put one ladle of the slop into their bowls and sprinkled it with about half a teaspoon of sugar.
I hadn’t eaten for three days and my stomach was starting to ache with hunger. I had to eat something, not least to try to regain some strength. When it was my turn at the big bowl, I was careful to take only a modest amount of porridge and sugar so as not to upset anyone and then I moved over to the bunk where my ‘bunk buddy’ was already sitting. He smiled and indicated I sit down next to him. I put one mouthful of the porridge in my mouth and instantly, but quietly, spat it back on to the spoon and into the bowl, swallowing back down another empty retch. It wasn’t my decision; it was my body’s. It just didn’t want the watery, lumpy filth, no matter how hungry I was. I put the bowl on the floor between my legs and then put my head in my hands and rubbed my face up and down in exasperation. How the fuck was I going to survive, living off that shit, in this shithole?
I looked up and the fat guy, squinting through his swollen eyes, was standing in front of me holding out his empty bowl. I went to take it, thinking he was telling me to wash it up, but he pulled it away and pointed at my bowl on the floor. He wanted my porridge. Dilemma: did I try and explain with hand and mouth gestures that I had spat in it, or did I just hand it to him and hope no one else had seen what I’d done and tell him? He pointed at it again – as I couldn’t see his eyes it was difficult to know if he was being aggressive or urgent – so I handed it to him and he quickly scooped out the contents into his bowl, nodded and smiled his gratitude, and handed back my bowl.
My bunk buddy stood up and held out his upturned hand, telling me to wait right there. Like I was going anywhere. He went to the cupboard above the table and took out some kind of metal and wire contraption, a primitive heating element with a plastic handle strapped on with tape. Taking a large metal cup off the cupboard shelf, he filled it up from the tap in the toilet area and plugged the element into a socket on the floor by the cupboard. It took ages for the water to heat, and I was quietly willing it to hurry up, partly because I was nervous about what he might present me with, and that I’d be obliged to consume it for fear of rebuffing his generosity, and partly because, in a room with nothing else happening in it, the heating of the water in the mug had become something of a spectacle for half the men in there. After half an hour it was ready and the young boy, beaming from ear to ear, held out the steaming mug with one hand and four oatmeal-style biscuits with the other. One of the squatters a few feet away turned to me and with a toothy grin, cackled: ‘English boy like tea and biscuits.’
I ate the biscuits with an almost obscene relish, and gulped the sweet black tea down as fast as its heat allowed me. As soon as I’d finished, I took out my Marlboros so that no one else could see them this time and passed one to the young guy, nodding at him a few times in gratitude for his kindness. He extended his hand to me and said: ‘Gennady.’
I shook his hand, replying with a smile: ‘Me Tig, thank you, spasiba.’
We had soup for lunch, or rather everyone else did. It looked suspiciously similar to the porridge, only with added bits of see-through cabbage and one or two dubious items of vegetation, and I couldn’t bring myself to consume it. Gennady swapped four more biscuits for a Marlboro Red, and that was enough to do away with the hunger cramps. Lunch had triggered a small flurry of activity, but half an hour after everyone had eaten, washed their bowls under the tap and used the toilet, the room was still and quiet again, except for those sitting up and crouching having a fag. It struck me that the reason it was so quiet was that none of us knew each other. We were just a room full o
f strangers, brought together by our crimes and misdemeanours, keeping our heads down and killing time.
At some point in the afternoon, all heads turned at the loud, slightly shocking sound of the key in the lock. A guard in khaki shirt and trousers took one step into the room, pointed at five people, including me, and barked something in Russian, motioning to us to follow him out of the room. I made sure I was the last out of the cell so I could watch and follow what the others did. We walked a little way down the corridor until the guard said something and we all stopped. We formed a line with our backs against the wall, legs apart, looking at the floor and, one by one, at intervals of five minutes, we were led into a little room opposite that looked like some kind of medical office.
When I was summoned, a man in a white coat tugged his shirt and clicked his fingers with a dramatic flourish, meaning, I guessed, ‘Strip off, scumbag, I need to look up your bum.’ It was a small room and I felt particularly uncomfortable as I undressed because the two guards and the medical officer were standing very close and there was little room for manoeuvre. For such a vast prison, why were all the rooms so bloody cramped, I wondered, balancing on one leg like a flamingo as I tried to take off a sock.
With my clothes piled on to the bed opposite I stood in the middle of the room, hands at my sides, cock beating a retreat into my pubes, while the medic began his examination. For the second day running I felt the horrible intrusion of rubbered fingers in my arse – I knew it was coming but I still felt myself tensing all over and my buttocks clamped on his hand like a vice. There’s nothing pleasant about a general body search or ‘exam’ but there’s something particularly humiliating about a stranger putting his hand up your backside, and right then I had to swallow down a powerful urge to shout and thrash out. He then lifted up my cock and my scrotum, checking for God knows what, each time picking them up with thumb and forefinger, like he was holding a china teacup, as he peered underneath.
‘You are Manchesters United or Liverpool?’ he asked as he let go of my cock and peeled off his rubber glove.
‘I like Arsenal. I’m a Gooner,’ I replied.
‘Ah, Terry Onri. Good goals. Fast.’
‘Yes, Thierry’s very fast,’ I said.
‘Goodbye.’
I put my clothes on, trying not to touch the stripe of dried shit down the right leg of my trousers, and returned to the corridor. When all five of us had been seen, we were taken further down the corridor back towards the shower area I’d come from yesterday. Again, we lined up against the wall and one by one were directed into a room opposite. This one was for fingerprints and ID photographs. The guard took me by the wrist, made me spread out my fingers and then pressed them first into a large ink sponge and then on to the appropriate finger spaces of an official document. We repeated the process with my other hand and I was then told to stand against the bare wall while he took my picture. The camera he took out from under the table was very large and very old with a big flash on top, the kind you see news photographers using in American films of the 1940s and 1950s. He took one of me face on and one of my left profile, each time the flash and the sound of the shutter making me jump a little.
I was a proper criminal now. With each burst of the flash I took another step deeper into the system and that much further away from home. The fingerprinting and the photos were a ritual initiation into my new world. I was being given a new identity. It was official: I was a prisoner in Russia. That was the main point about me now. Mum and Dad could no longer say, with pride: ‘Tig’s a broker in the City with a top American firm.’ They’d have to say: ‘Tig’s in gaol in Moscow on drugs charges.’ That was my character now, and it was time to start learning my lines.
5
Two dozen heads looked up as one as the key turned in the lock and a broad shaft of light from the corridor cut across the cell, lighting up the thick, acrid smoke as the door swung wide open. A grey silhouette stepped into the room and snapped: ‘Hague! Tig!’ I slowly walked over to him but he pointed back to my bedding, saying: ‘Matras!’
Where the hell was I going now? The cell was a squalid dump, but my instinctive reaction was that I didn’t want to leave, just as I hadn’t wanted to leave the filthy shower room the day before. I was safe in there at least. No one had threatened or disturbed me – they’d barely even registered my existence, except the young boy, Gennady, who had given me the tea and biscuits. He smiled and jerked his head upwards in farewell. I did the same. No one else in the room so much as looked or flinched. They just carried on smoking, crouching, sitting or lying.
I quickly rolled up my metal eating utensils inside my mattress and walked into the corridor, where the sight of roughly ten other prisoners in a line against the wall – each holding his mattress to his chest and looking solemnly down at the floor – made me stop in my tracks. They were a sorry sight, barely a flicker of life or energy between them, and I noticed that the guy nearest to me was dribbling down his chin and not bothering to wipe it off. It just drooled on to his T-shirt and mattress. I joined the back of the column, and with one guard at the front and one at the back we walked the short distance to the end of the corridor, through a metal gate and a door out into a stairwell. Up we went, floor by floor, slowly trudging up the steps, our numbers gradually reducing as we deposited prisoners at the entrance to each long corridor where two guards were waiting to take them away. In the stairwell I noticed the odd cigarette left in the right angle or side of a step or on the window ledge between floors. It seemed that they had been left deliberately for others to collect.
By the time we reached the third floor I was breathing heavily, partly because I was weak and short of breath but more because I was growing increasingly anxious about where I was heading. I was learning quickly that the fear of the unknown, the uncertainty of what was going to happen next, was causing me greater stress than any actual experience I had – to the extent that I’d rather have stayed in that shitty, rank, crowded cell than be moved. Better the devil you know. I was having some kind of panic attack, virtually hyperventilating, when we stopped at the door on the third floor and one of the guards said, ‘Hague, Tig.’ The way the guards pronounced it, it sounded like ‘hectic’. I followed the guards into the corridor and walked past two doors, one on either side, then we stopped and one of them rifled through the bunch on his belt for the right key.
He opened the door and said: ‘Franceuse,’ stepping aside for me to enter. The room opened up to the right. The only person I could see was a tall, wiry black man with a little pot belly, a shaved head and a moustache that dropped down to the sides of his mouth. From twenty feet away he looked like a dead ringer for Errol Brown, the lead singer of the 1970s soul band Hot Chocolate.
‘Ah, so we have a French dude coming to stay,’ the man said in excellent English with an American twang, walking towards me and holding out his hand.
‘English, actually,’ I said nervously.
‘Hey, an English boy! Welcome!’ he laughed. A big, friendly smile spread over his face as we shook hands.
‘Hi, I’m Zubi, welcome to Piet Central.’
‘Tig. How d’you do?’
I’d only been in the room ten seconds but my immediate impressions were very positive. The cell was the same size as the other one, but most of the bunks looked unoccupied. It didn’t stink of shit, the floor looked clean and dry, no one was smoking cheap Russian fags – in fact there was no smoke at all. There was bags of room and plenty of bunks to choose from, and some effort had been made to make the place comfortable. The wall on the door side, weirdly, had been decorated with old newspapers and magazines, layer upon layer of images and script from over the years all jumbled up on top of each other. A few of the images were of naked female bodies, a tit here, some buttocks there, and several shots of Jordan sticking out her enormous rack. People had also scrawled graffiti over it in places. It was the kind of work that wouldn’t look out of place in a student art exhibition. To the left, in the far corner, was th
e toilet area, which had been screened off all the way round with sheets, and along the left-hand wall there was a big metal cupboard above a worktop. In the centre of the room there was a metal table fixed to the floor with a bench on either side, each capable of sitting three people at a squeeze. Behind the door there was a small black and white television with a flickering screen, which right then was showing some kind of Russian game show with the volume down low.
From behind the bunk sheets two faces appeared, one white, one brown. A very young Indian-looking guy, probably barely out of his teens, emerged from one bunk and introduced himself softly. ‘Hey man, how you doin’? Nice to meet you. I’m Ranjit,’ he said with a shy giggle. His English sounded very good too.
‘Come and meet Pasha. He’s Czech – we think. He doesn’t give too much away,’ Zubi said, taking a few paces and pulling back a sheet over a bunk in the corner.
Pasha was a wiry, pale young hippy-looking character with shaved blond hair. He was sitting in the lotus position, wearing a T-shirt and a sarong, and he barely twitched a muscle as Zubi introduced me. He stared at me vacantly, moronically almost, with giant ice-blue eyes. The words ‘space cadet’ popped into my head as I shook his outstretched hand.
I felt much calmer than I had done just moments earlier but I was still breathing hard and I must have looked a little bewildered because Zubi took my mattress, set it down, then put his arm on my shoulder and said in a very soothing voice: ‘Calm down, it’s cool, my friend. We’ll look after you, you’re with us now. You’re in the foreigners’ cell.’
Zubi told Ranjit to go and boil some water, and with a big toothy grin that sent his moustache shooting across his face, he said: ‘Man, you look like shit! I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about this place and how to get the fuck out of it. But before we have a chat, we need to get you washed, shaved, dressed and fed.’