Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  It was a warm spring day, and the van driver and his cheerful sidekick kept me furnished with cigarettes as we approached a large iron gate outside the jail. Two young soldiers appeared through a small door to the side, glanced in my general direction and within seconds the gates opened. The van drove a few yards into a holding area and the gates clanged shut behind us, leaving me feeling like a steer waiting to be branded. Eventually a huge steel gate opened in front, and I recalled the opening sequence of the BBC TV show Porridge and half expected to see the dour Scotsman Mr Mackay swinging his key chain to greet me off the bus. My first sight of Ti Lan Qiao was of a large courtyard with a hundred or so new arrivals in civilian clothes squatting like bullfrogs on the asphalt. I felt a sense of camaraderie with them as I was led into one of the rooms off the courtyard, some of them grinning as I winked, smiled and said ni hao. After eight months in a cell with two other guys, and all the intense emotions that involved, it was good to be part of a larger group – even if we were all criminals.

  We walked into a large room with huge piles of grey flannel uniforms and a mug-shot camera set-up. The place smelled different from the detention centre, and I was already feeling tired from the short walk. An officer removed my handcuffs and asked me to put out the cigarette I was still smoking while another appeared with the now familiar fingerprinting apparatus. A friendly officer appeared with a wet rag to wipe my inky fingers, and I was led to a chair in front of the camera. To my surprise I was told I would not be wearing a uniform, so my photograph was taken in a bright-green, yellow and red T-shirt with the silhouette of a spliff-smoking Rasta on the front. The Polaroid was then glued onto a card with the number 10071 printed on it and slotted into a rectangular plastic folder on a piece of cord, which was placed around my neck. Now it was official: my custodial sentence had finally begun and I had a number to prove it. I felt a vague sense of achievement, as if the last eight months had been a trial period and I’d finally been inducted into an exclusive gang of outlaws.

  My guitar and rucksack went off into another room to be checked, and I was led across the courtyard into a larger area with huge grey concrete walls and shuttered-steel windows. Prisoners with tightly cropped hair walked around in pairs, pointing towards me and chattering between themselves. Heads crowded round windows to get a glimpse of the new foreigner, while guards’ heads turned at the sight of the exotic-looking detainee, and I started to appreciate how a panda from the bamboo forests of Sichuan might have felt in London Zoo.

  We stood in the doorway of one of the blocks, and the details from my ID necklace were written down in a large reception book. A couple of officers came down the stairs as the ones who’d escorted me handed me over and returned to the processing area. With them was a smiling, English-speaking prisoner who introduced himself as Mr Yin. We shook hands and walked up the staircase to another landing, and then another, until we reached the third floor of 8th Brigade, which was to be my new home.

  I was met at the entrance to the wing by six Western-looking guys in civilian clothes, who shook my hand and welcomed me to the foreigners’ unit. There was an American, a Welshman, an Englishman, a Scotsman and two Germans, and before I had a chance to sit down they began to bombard me with questions. How long had I got? What for? What was the charge on my indictment? The last question was of particular interest, as I would later find out, but for now there was an easy, almost fun exchange of stories and anecdotes, particularly with respect to the detention centre, where everyone had spent between six and eleven months. The news that I was another dope smuggler went down well with my new companions, who’d all been involved in hash-related incidents of one kind or another. I spoke at length to Mark, from England, whose mother had got in touch with mine via Prisoners Abroad, a London-based charity that helps the 3,000-odd Brits in jail overseas. He told me that he had less than a year and a half to serve, and suggested that we might be leaving together. The other foreigners exchanged cynical glances with each other before pointing out that I’d almost certainly have to serve my whole sentence. This came as a shock because I’d spenteight months thinking I’d only have to do half of whatever sentence I got. ‘They always tell you that,’ said the Germans drily.

  ‘The best thing about this place is the food,’ said Gareth, the Welshman.

  ‘So it’s better than the detention centre, then?’

  ‘That fucking shithouse; I nearly died of starvation. No, really, the food is OK here; it’s the one thing they’re really on the case with. Apart from Mark and Larry, who are veggies, the foreigners get to eat off the Muslim menu.’

  ‘The Muslim menu?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s four menus. The guards get the best, of course, then the Chinese get the stuff in the huge trays you can see over there, and we get the Muslim, pork-free version of that, which pisses off the Krauts’cos they don’t get the fatty pork the Chinks get, but otherwise it’s pretty OK most of the time.’

  ‘So what’s the fourth menu?’

  ‘Downstairs. You may have noticed a wing on the second floor. That’s death row. They get the best food of all the inmates to keep their vital organs in shape so these bastards can make money out of them after they’ve been popped.’ He raised his finger up to his temple and made a gunshot noise.

  This ghoulish scandal has become well known in recent years – thanks in part to Mark, who exposed the scandal on the radio and TV, and in Parliament on his release – but at the time it was particularly disturbing. I had noticed the wing he was referring to as I walked up the stairs, particularly the fact that the prisoners, whom I saw handcuffed to benches while being interviewed, had no uniforms. I soon discovered they were having their last chats with their lawyers, who were obliged to go through a mandatory appeal routine before the prisoners were executed. There was also the question of writing wills, since their lawyers were the last civilians who’d see them alive. I wondered if the old man I’d given a packet of tissues to in the court cells was in there. In all probability he was, but I’d never see him again. Neither would his family. There were no visits for people on death row; the next they’d know of his case would be when they received the bill for the bullet that would blow his brains out of the side of his head.

  I’d had eight months to build up a mental picture of how my new life might look, and from the first impressions at least it seemed OK. Just being able to speak in my own language and walk for more than five paces at a time was a huge privilege. The prison wing had open windows all along its corridor and you could actually see out of them. The views were of identical buildings with huge concrete courtyards between them, but there were smiling faces and people looking busy. It was a strange place to live, but people had some kind of life here. Families could visit once a month and food was plentiful. Inmates went to work and had close friendships, and everyone knew when they’d be getting out. I breathed in the new smells that wafted through the building and heard the sounds of laughter where before I’d only heard wailing and misery. It was a happy day.

  After chatting to the foreigners, I went down the corridor to check out my cell. The first thing I noticed about it was that it had a barred door rather than a solid one. This struck me as a good thing, though I would later change my feelings about this and hang a sarong over the door before being told to remove it. My chief concern was claustrophobia. I’ve never liked small spaces, and the cells at Ti Lan Qiao were about five by seven feet. I envisaged myself feeling like a battery hen the second the door shut. In fact, I had little to complain about; the Chinese slept two or three to a cell and the door was opened at 5.30 a.m. every morning. Within a few weeks, I was not only accustomed to my new surroundings but also grew to look forward to the sound of my cell door clicking shut at night. The sound came to represent the end of another day, an escape from the stress of prison life, and the beginning of the all-important dream world that so many prisoners long for. As soon as the door shut, the atmosphere changed on the landing. There was a peaceful sense of security, and I fel
t cocooned in my own world: self-contained, alone, safe.

  A bell rang and Chinese began to flood into the wing for lunch. More huge steaming vats of rice and vegetables turned up.

  ‘Not that shit again,’ complained one of the foreigners, peering into one of the food containers.

  But it smelled great to me, and it tasted delicious. The rice was far superior to the kind we got in the detention centre and the vegetables came with tasty slices of tofu. Better still, I was given various condiments the foreigners had bought in the prison shop, like chilli oil and soy sauce. It was the first tasty meal I’d eaten in eight months. Afterwards, the American, Larry, gave me a cup of Nescafé, my first drug in more than half a year, which immediately sent me off to christen my shitbucket. This small wooden barrel sat in the corner of every cell and was not the kind of thing you’d sit on and read the paper, though some people did just that. First time round it felt awkward, because you had to suspend yourself a couple of inches above in case you slipped in. Someone lent me a roll of loo paper, and when I finished I put the lid on the barrel. This was one of the highlights of my first day, because my problems with constipation and jeering cellmates had plagued me throughout my time at the detention centre. Now I could relax, and in time I too was partial to reading on my bucket.

  The first Chinese prisoner to come and say hello was Gao Zhengguo, the head prisoner on our landing. Every wing in the jail had a number one – a prisoner chosen by the guards to represent and discipline the other inmates. Once Gao had broken the ice others followed, until a small crowd gathered round wondering what I’d done and how long I’d got. They all wanted to run their fingers through my chest hair, which didn’t bother me, but Gao shooed them away jealously. He seemed to take a bit of a shine to me and was almost overly friendly for my first few days. I was surprised by how few guards there were on the landing. I hadn’t seen one since I had been walked up the stairs hours earlier.

  ‘The prisoners run this place,’ said one of the foreigners. ‘You rarely see a guard outside the office. If they come out here, they might feel obliged to actually do something.’

  The office was at the end of the corridor at the top of the staircase, but there were no guards in it. There was a desk outside in view of the wing, but nobody sat at it. I walked over and looked out of a window beside the desk.

  ‘You can be shot for doing that,’ said a voice.

  I turned round to see Gareth pointing to a line on the floor at the end of the landing in front of the guards’ desk.

  ‘See that red line? It’s wei fan chilli to cross that line, and the guards have a right to shoot you if you cross it.’

  ‘Wei fan what?’

  ‘Wei fan chilli: it means against the rules. You’ll hear that a lot in here.’

  The Chinese disappeared back to their jobs and the landing was quiet again. I spent much of the afternoon wandering up and down the corridor. It was about 50 yards long, with 75 cells along its edge. In the middle of the landing there was a wooden island that was removable, opening up the jail to the landings down below. It had been sealed up for years due to accidents, so we were cut off from the noise of the rest of the jail, which was good. At the end of the corridor stood a tall plastic milk urn, which was the urinal. The piss was collected for medicinal purposes, apparently, and everybody seemed to use it. It was a bad idea to piss in the shit buckets because many of them leaked.

  After a few laps of the corridor, I felt exhausted. For eight months I had not been able to walk more than five or six steps in one direction, but now I could walk for fifty yards without having to turn round. I felt like I’d just run a marathon.

  ‘Go and have a kip, if you fancy,’ said Gareth.

  ‘Are we allowed to sleep in the day, then?’

  ‘No, but you don’t know that, do you?’

  Good point, I thought. I might as well make the most of being the new prisoner. The cell had wooden decking about three inches off the ground, with a thin futon-type mattress on top. There was no one around, so I lay down and nodded off quickly. It seemed like five minutes and the Chinese were back from work again. More food arrived and the mealtime hubbub rose as tin rice bowls clattered across the Formica tabletops. I ate my first potato in months and a young Chinese lad at an adjacent table offered me his.

  ‘Is it true people in your country eat this every day?’

  He didn’t like potato and neither did other Chinese I talked to. They considered it peasant food to eat as a last resort and were mystified as to why anyone would want to eat such a boring vegetable regularly. His name was T’an Ji, and he was my first friend in Ti Lan Qiao. He was around 30 but he looked 20, and appeared to have more status than most of the other prisoners. He shared a cell with the number one, Mr Gao, and ate on the number one table next to the foreigners and apart from most of the Chinese. I thought T’an Ji was gay at first; his friends were very tactile with him, putting their arms around him a lot and holding his hand or stroking his knee while sitting together. He’d taken on a female role on the wing and senior prisoners were protective of him. He was also good-looking, with a boyish grin and long eyelashes for a Chinese. The foreigners told me he was from a well-connected Shanghai family and was favoured by the guards. He was doing 12 years for stealing a load of television sets, and his family had been allowed to come into the wing to visit him when he first arrived to check his living conditions were suitable. We never worked out why he received such preferential treatment, but it was believed that his family were important Communist Party officials. He was brighter than most of the guys on the landing and was said to be talented at fixing electrical appliances. He was one of the stars of his work group, and guards from different brigades across the jail brought their broken radios and TVs to him to fix.

  I often saw prisoners giving him massages, though I never saw the favour returned, and when he heard I’d studied shiatsu he asked me to practise on him. His skin was unusually tender for a man, and kneading his muscles with my thumbs gave me a hard-on. Apart from shaking hands I hadn’t touched another human for eight months, and for my first few weeks in Ti Lan Qiao I had a bit of a crush on him.

  The foreigners were very happy to see I’d turned up with a good selection of books. A spare cell was provided for all our food and personal belongings, while two long shelves were devoted to books. The place was an Aladdin’s cave to me, with many great authors from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Gabriel García Márquez. I started off with The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s epic Gary Gilmore book, which I loved. The English speakers loved my Milan Kundera books, particularly his brilliantly lucid accounts of Communist police interrogation methods, a subject that was naturally of great interest to us all. There were books by Conrad, E.M. Forster, Flaubert and Tolstoy, and even more Micheners. I had enough books to see me through the rest of my sentence and could afford to pick and choose. When lock-up time came I had a small stack of books by my bed, but was too excited to read any of them.

  My mind reeled for most of the night as an endless stream of thoughts flooded my brain. I thought back to my first night at boarding school as a kid, and how I’d cried myself to sleep and felt so alone and alienated by my surroundings. But now, here in my cell on the other side of the world, I felt oddly satisfied with the latest hand my life had dealt me. I lay in bed and thought about how I’d spend the next two years, and when the cell door was opened at 5.30 a.m. I’d barely slept.

  The cell block became a hive of activity as prisoners wheeled huge vats of rice gruel down the corridor on sack barrows from the kitchen brigade. Unlike in the detention centre there was no pickled turnip to eat with the gruel, but I was advised by the other foreigners to skip the rice and wait for the mantou to arrive. Half an hour later, large trays of piping-hot yeast-free bread buns were brought up to our landing. Because I’d yet to make use of the monthly prison shopping list, other foreigners lent me jars of peanut butter, jam and, best of all, a can of fried dace in black-bean sauce and a jar of fer
mented soya chunks. This combination of fish and soya became my favourite breakfast from then on.

  It turned out that Mr Yin, the English-speaking prisoner who’d helped me carry my bags up the staircase, was the trustee in charge of the foreigners. If we had any problems, he would be the intermediary between us and the guards. All the foreigners dismissed this idea and had a particular dislike for Mr Yin, whom they said was a spy. He was nearing the end of an eight-year stretch for torturing his wife, whom he’d locked in his house and beaten for days on end. Unfortunately for him, her family were well-to-do Party members, and when his violence towards her became intolerable they used their connections to have him put away. Mr Yin was Captain Xu’s helper. He cleaned his office, washed his clothes, made his tea and cleaned his spit off the floor. Xu sympathised with Mr Yin, whom he felt should never have been put in prison as his wife was ‘no better than a whore’. I had no particular views on Mr Yin, and for my first few days I found him friendly and helpful. I felt that there was no point in adopting all the hatred and animosity that had accumulated before my arrival. Mr Yin was no doubt a deeply unpleasant man, but as long as he was OK with me I’d keep an open mind. Time would tell.

  After a week or so my views changed when I got a taste of his sadistic violent streak. I’d been sitting at a chair when he came up behind me and for no apparent reason put his arms round my neck and started to squeeze. It was almost playful at first and I thought it was a joke, but as his grip tightened I started to panic and fight back. Suddenly the American prisoner, Larry, was out of his seat, screaming at Mr Yin to stop. Even then he continued to twist my arm and give me a nasty Chinese burn as Larry was dragging him off me.