Henry nodded.
Jonas pulled out a card. Whatever he read must have shocked him because he gaped at Henry and didn’t say anything.
“We g-go on Monday?” he finally stuttered.
“Unless you’ve something better to do. You’ve booked the time off, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but I thought…” Jonas smiled and turned to Zed. “A two-week holiday in the States.”
“A touring holiday. Mount St Helens in Washington State, then to Portland, a bit of white water rafting before we go down to Crater Lake, drive south-west to look at the redwoods, back up the coast, dune buggy riding and whale watching before we get back to Portland. All the hotels are booked. Nothing to stress about except what to pack and the weather. Oh, and driving on the correct side of the road.” Henry held out another envelope to Zed.
“You don’t need to send me to a summer camp. I’ll be fine in the house on my own. No wild parties. I promise.”
“Open the envelope,” Henry said.
Zed opened it. There was a passport inside.
“You’re coming too,” Henry said.
“But…you need time together. You don’t need me.”
Jonas grabbed his hand. “But we do need you.”
Oh God. My heart.
“And now I’m aware you know there’s such a thing as a wild party, you’re definitely coming,” Henry said. “Pour Zed some more wine, Jonas. He looks like he’s going to pass out.”
Zed drank too much. He’d never been drunk in his life but he had a feeling that was part of why he felt so happy. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just life with Henry and Jonas.
His happiness lasted all the way to London Bridge station. Henry and Jonas were holding hands. He didn’t think he’d ever seen them do that before in public. Then he heard someone call his name and looked around to see Tamaz hurrying toward him.
“My brother,” he whispered to Henry before he walked into Tamaz’s arms.
Tamaz hugged him tight. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing.” Maybe Tamaz wouldn’t realise he was with Jonas and Henry. “What are you up to? Been following me?”
Zed was joking but he saw from Tamaz’s expression that he’d got it right. Jackson had known of every meeting Zed had had with his brother. Was he aware of what Tamaz had done?
“I worry about you,” Tamaz said. “You need to be with a good Muslim family or at least a family that encouraged you to keep to your faith. But you’re with them.”
Zed couldn’t talk past the glass in his throat.
Henry stepped forward and held out his hand. “You must be Zed’s brother. Zed lives with us.”
Tamaz didn’t take his hand. He looked at Zed. “You live with two men?”
“They’re kinder to me than our father ever was.”
Zed flinched as Tamaz wrapped his fingers around his arm and Zed pulled away from his grip.
“This is the family you didn’t want me to meet? They’re filthy homosexuals,” Tamaz spat out the words and Zed’s happiness crumbled a little more.
“So am I,” Zed said.
Tamaz’s eyes widened, then he turned and walked away.
Chapter Nineteen
On the day of the trial, Caspian had left the court late in the afternoon after all the cases had been heard. He wasn’t taken back to Woodbury but a different YOI in Surrey. Shawton was a much older place. It looked more like a prison inside and out. He went through exactly the same entry process as he had a year ago when he’d been remanded to Woodbury, except this time he had more possessions with him. His own clothes, including his suit, were put in a bag to be kept until release, and others handed over. He had to wear the same as everyone else now; blue T-shirt, grey sweatpants and grey trainers.
He was disappointed but not surprised to learn that he was back at the bottom of the incentive scheme. He had no idea whether that was down to the rules, or the whim of his new personal officer, Steve Webster—call me sir, do not make work for me, which sounded familiar—but he knew there was no point questioning his lowest of the low status.
Induction was as confusing as it had been a year ago. Too much information given at one go for him to take in, too much information handed to him to read. Why didn’t they use pictures? From what he’d seen at Woodbury, hardly anyone in there was a good reader. Guys in the library picked up the book with the most pictures because they didn’t want people to know they couldn’t read or write. Caspian had a half-formed thought about creating a different induction leaflet with more images than words.
Falcon wing—birds this time—was to be his new home. He had a room of his own but no TV until he’d proved he could be a good boy. Once he had all his stuff stored away, including the pile of induction literature he wouldn’t be reading today, or tomorrow probably, he made his bed, lay down on it and curled up.
The smell in Shawton was stronger than in Woodbury. Piss, shit, body odour and jizz mixed with whatever was being prepared in the kitchen. Boiled something or other. The pad he was in had a window too high for him to see through unless he stood on his chair on tiptoe. The walls needed repainting, but the mattress looked new which made him wonder what had happened to the old one and who had previously occupied this room.
He told himself not to think about Zed, but he’d never been good at taking his own advice. Caspian knew he’d hurt him when he’d pushed him away. He’d hurt himself, but there was no choice. Shit. Well yeah, there was a choice but not one he was prepared to make. Without Caspian on his back, Zed could cross rivers, climb mountains, fly high, see the world. Zed was better off without him. Two objects falling from the same point and Caspian would hit the ground first.
He closed his eyes and hoped for oblivion except he already knew that wasn’t what he’d get. He was tired, weary of everything, but he couldn’t switch off. He reran the trial in his head, recalled the glance he’d snatched of his parents, their stricken faces, Lachlan’s paleness. Any sense of satisfaction he’d hoped for in them seeing what their lies had done vanished under the length of the sentence. But the hardest thing to bear was remembering the way Zed had felt in his arms for that brief moment before Caspian had pushed him away and knowing that feeling was lost to him forever.
Caspian rolled over to face the wall. He was more scared than he had been before. He hadn’t particularly wanted to go back to Woodbury but now he wished he was where he knew how everything stood. Here he was a baby again. The eighteen-year-old who’d had a privileged life living with hardened criminals: murderers, drug-dealers, burglars and rapists. The voices echoing around the cells sounded harsher, more threatening.
When asked, Caspian told his PO he wasn’t gay, though he wondered if he’d made the right decision. Not through any sense of guilt about climbing back into the closet but because he might not be able to cope in general population in this new place. Oh fuck it, I just have to. While he was still eighteen he could take lots of classes to make the time pass more quickly and if he was classified as a VP, vulnerable prisoner, classes and chances for exercise would be limited.
This time he’d accepted the smoker’s welcome pack. At least he had something to offer if he was threatened.
When he was threatened.
It didn’t take long. He’d been persuaded to hand the cigarettes over the next day yet didn’t know whether he’d given them to someone of power, someone who mattered or just a con artist. He didn’t want them anyway. Smoking held no appeal.
He was about to come out of his pad for lunch, hunger was one thing that never went away though his ability to eat ebbed and flowed, when three guys blocked his path. Two were white, one black. All three were bigger than him. Caspian was shoved to the rear of his cell and he backed up as close to the emergency button as he could get.
“Don’t like the way you walk,” one of the white guys said. “Strutting as if you own the place. Don’t like the way you talk either. Think you’re better than the rest of us?”
Caspian had only em
erged from his pad once, and made a point of neither strutting nor speaking, but had shambled along with his head down, avoiding eye contact. But he knew any excuse would serve for what they were about to do. Try to do.
“We need you to take a nicking,” said the black guy. “Screws found tablets in Steve’s washbag. You say you put them there, that they’re yours.”
“No.”
“What?” The biggest of the white guys gaped at him.
“I don’t take drugs. They won’t believe me. In the block I was in before they always used my piss for the tests. I’ll do that but I won’t take a nicking.”
“You’ll do whatever we fucking want you too,” the black guy said.
No, no, no.
“Saw on the TV you killed three little girls,” one of the white guys said, and Caspian’s heart lodged in his throat.
“Fuck ‘em first did you?” snarled another.
What? Caspian’s moment of frozen shock allowed them to wrestle him onto the floor. He was held down, a hand pressed over his mouth while they fumbled with his sweatpants. Strengthened by fury and fear, Caspian kicked, lashed out and managed to wriggle just far enough to smack his hand on the emergency button. By the time the prison officers arrived, his attackers had gone, his sweatpants were back over his arse and his nosebleed had almost stopped.
No, Caspian had no idea who they were.
No, he didn’t need medical treatment.
He looked at the blood on his T-shirt and thought of what the guys had threatened then said as they’d left—you’re bird food. Yes, he wanted protection.
The governor agreed, and Caspian was moved to the VP wing. Overwhelming his sense of relief was shame he’d not lasted longer in general population. There were never any positive feelings in here. It was all negative. Guilt, humiliation, anger, frustration, fear, misery, loneliness, depression.
He didn’t expect the protective wing to be easy but almost immediately, he was on edge. This was a home for the eighteen to twenty-one-year-old wild things: a jungle holding beasts, snitches, chesters, bent pigs, crooked kangas, radio rentals, pilchards, cucumbers, all manner of fraggles along with guys who were loudly gay and those who were quietly gay. That would be me.
Prison language was elaborate and inventive. Caspian still didn’t know what it all meant, why there were several words for the same thing. The child molesters were beasts and chesters. Crooked screws were kangaroos—kangas. The mentally ill were pilchards and radio rentals—mentals, but why pilchards? The rest, he had no idea about.
He was surrounded by those who were too fragile—fraggles—to cope with life inside in any wing including this one. They were outcasts from the prison community yet seemed to have made no effort to form a community of their own. They stayed in their cells like nocturnal zoo animals, emerging only to feed.
Except that first quick assessment proved to be wrong. There was a hierarchy even among the misfits. The cliques of the ordinary wings existed here too. People from different parts of the country stuck together. Gang members united against other gangs.
In the other wings, the sex offenders lurked at the bottom of the heap, the child molesters were on a journey to the centre of the earth. Armed robbers were at the top, admired as some type of Robin Hood figure because when you had no money, stealing from those who did and redistributing wealth was viewed as a noble thing. What fucking crap. Caspian kept his views on that to himself.
In the VP wing, sex offenders ruled the roost, not those who’d gone after kids, they were just as despised, but guys who’d raped women, often multiple times, swaggered around bullying the rest. The most normal guys were the crooked cops and bent prison officers but they kept themselves to themselves, forming protective circles when they were out of their cells on recreation, a bit like gazelles watching for prowling lions. Caspian felt like a deer that had mislaid his herd. It was a matter of time before he was prey of the day.
All I have to do is survive.
Zed helped him. Caspian wasn’t supposed to be thinking about him. He’d physically pushed him away, tried to get him out of his head, but he’d done that before and Zed had known, understood and had still written. Those letters were in his locker, in his head, written in his heart. He’ll write to me. I love him. He loves me. Too soon to say the words. Maybe too soon to even think them, but memories of Zed brought him joy. The only source of joy he had.
He knew he was fixating, obsessing, fantasising—whatever the word was—over the way he felt about Zed, but he was incapable of letting go. Something about being locked up made him think differently.
Caspian wanted it to be love, so he made it love. At eighteen years old he thought he’d found the meaning of life, the reason for living. But he had to hide it, lock it away in a box in his head with Zed’s letters because he didn’t want something beautiful tainted by his current home. When he was low—though he was always low—he’d open that box and happiness would flood out, providing enough joy to let him carry on. Love gave life meaning. That was what he clung to. Caspian could exist without it. He could survive without it but with it—he was invincible. He would survive.
But when no letters came, love—if it ever was—slowly and steadily dissolved, became corrupted, then turned to hate. He might have told Zed to forget him, told him he’d hooked up with his cellmate but why had Zed believed him? Couldn’t the idiot see what he was trying to do? Caspian had offered him the chance to fly without him but hadn’t really meant it. In moments of lucidity, Caspian understood the flaws in his logic, his stupidity, but with too much time on his hands, his mind wandered back and forth over the same things, telling himself he was right, telling himself he was wrong.
When a letter came, clearly forwarded from Woodbury and judging by the length of time it had taken to get to him, rerouted via the North and South Poles, he was on an up cycle, he was coping, life was okay, and had the strength to not read it. He scrawled a note telling Zed to stop writing and posted it before he slid down a snake which would make him change his mind.
The snake bit him the next day.
There were no more letters.
Caspian kept his head down and his mouth shut. Opportunities for education, the gym and outdoor exercise were as limited as he’d expected. But faced with a choice between boredom in isolation or stimulation in danger, there was no choice. He tried to exercise in his cell but that didn’t last long, his motivation wilting like his dick. Wanking failed to make him feel good for even those fleeting moments when he came. It took him longer and longer to get to the point of coming, and he stopped bothering.
Depressed and lonely, he began to fade. He didn’t touch his sketch books. His idea for an image-driven induction leaflet dried up. He ate very little. He lost weight. The times for meals were off-kilter. Lunch at eleven, dinner at four with a breakfast pack for the next morning handed over at the same time, which almost all of them ate there and then. An eighteen-hour gap without food unless you had the money to buy snacks. He didn’t. Not without touching the money his father was sending. But Caspian didn’t want them anyway.
But when his good behaviour meant he was allowed a guitar to play in his cell—while it was unlocked—time finally passed more quickly. He couldn’t stop playing. He played until his fingers bled, played until someone came and threatened to break his fingers if he didn’t shut the fuck up.
There were drugs to buy that made you not care anymore. Spice was cheaper than tobacco. Sent into the prison in impregnated letters or magazines, it was easy to get. Spice offered a brief escape from reality but it turned the person who’d taken it into a zombie. No way was Caspian taking drugs but sometimes guys were tricked into it just to give the others something to laugh at in the yard. Entertainment was everything. The prison officers seemed helpless to stop it.
When dogs were brought in to sniff for drugs, Caspian liked watching them work. Their tails wagged so hard. Even though there were no drugs in his pad, he still worried when the dogs went in, in case
someone had hidden their stash so Caspian got the blame. But they never found anything in his cell.
There seemed less of an issue with drugs in the VP wing and he was grateful for that. In a block already populated with snitches, people were quick to tell on others and drugs weren’t so easy to get. When they were finally offered to Caspian, because he couldn’t sleep, they were prescribed by a doctor and carefully handed to him one at a time. Caspian wasn’t sure they made any difference, but he took them. Then he started to pretend to take them and stored them instead. Knowing he was building a way out gave him some comfort.
As did figuring out ways to hang himself in his pad. Jason had told him everyone thought about suicide and Caspian had promised himself he wouldn’t. But…
Time was his enemy.
Zed was no longer his hope. Caspian knew he’d never forget him, but his life, if he ever got it back, would be one without Zed. He didn’t hate him anymore. He saw him as one bright beam of light in the darkness.
When Caspian’s stash of pills was discovered, he dropped to the bottom of a snake from halfway up a ladder. No guitar in his cell. No TV. The idiots failed to see that both those things kept him sane, kept him normal. He was sinking into a hole entirely of his own making. Well, he hadn’t made the hole, Lachlan had, but the rest was Caspian’s fault.
All he’d needed to do was tell the truth or plead guilty. Say he was sorry for something he hadn’t done. He reran the trial in his head, playing a different hand, getting a different outcome. Saying he was sorry might have helped the families of the girls, might have helped him get a lesser sentence. He was sorry but if he’d said it, they’d have seen it as an admission of guilt. I could have just fucking said it anyway. Everyone except his father, brother and maybe his mother, and Zed, thought he was guilty. That wasn’t going to change when he came out.
A short sentence might have made him less desperate to push Zed away. With a shorter sentence, they could have had something.
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