by Will Self
But the work and work-outs got him away from Fat Boy and the cell. Because after lock-up, when he plunged into sleep, the Terrors were waiting for Danny. The Fates had always had a certain sang-froid, a certain disdain for their own haunting, but the Terrors were hams, pure and simple. They screamed at Danny, ringed him round with their gaping mouths, tier upon tier of them, like the landings of the wing, and every single one ejaculating nothing. The nothing of imprisonment, the nothing of a dead life, the nothing of a millennial come-down. Towards dawn Danny would usually awake, wrung out, more exhausted. He would essay an unambitious wank – two score tugs and a plash against the sheet – then wait for the darkness of the cell to be infused with the darkness of another day.
Danny was waiting for the Governor to be in touch, to give him his break. He remained scrupulously low-profile, muttering ‘sir’ to the screws if they spoke to him, and shuffle-slapping out of trouble whenever he saw it coming at him, along a rumbling walkway, or around a distempered corner.
One day, about two months after he’d arrived on the nonce wing, having taken receipt of a compartmentalised lunch tray mounded with mashed potato and little else, Danny found himself scrutinising the list of educational courses pinned up outside the POs’ office. It was a tatty little codification of tatty little opportunities. There was a carpentry class, if you wanted to brush up on birdhouse construction; and a music appreciation course, if you felt that Albinoni might soothe your soul. All in all there were eleven different classes offered. Danny sucked the inside of his cheek and considered the possibilities. Presumably this was what the Governor had meant went he talked of Danny ‘making something’ of himself; perhaps if he undertook one of the courses the Governor might hear of it and moderate his attitudes accordingly. Best to do a vocational course – that would go down well. At the very bottom of the list there was a course called ‘Creative Wiring’, taught by a Mr Mahoney. That sounded OK to Danny – it must, he thought, be to do with electrics and stuff. If he could add a few more skills to what he already knew about DIY, Danny would have the beginnings of a trade. The course kicked off that week on the Thursday afternoon, an hour before lock-up. Danny resolved that he would be there.
4. The Nonce Prize
Danny got permission from Officer Higson to go up to the Education Room. He walked along the ground floor of the block, eyes down, avoiding any eye contact with his fellow prisoners. Not that Danny worried about the nonces any more, and he certainly didn’t perceive them as a sexual threat. The first few days he’d been on the wing, he’d been certain that every second he was on association, or in the exercise yard, or in the queue for food, the perverts were eyeing him up from behind, assessing his potential role in some deviant playlet. Danny could swear he felt their corkscrew gazes, like static electricity on the nape of his neck. But Fat Boy disabused him of this notion, as he had of so many others. ‘Na, na, you’re wrong there. You gotta look at it this way, O’Toole; even yer rapist is incapable of any real straight sex, and yer nonce is doubly incapable. For a nonce to want to butt-fuck you, well! It wouldn’t really be a perversion, as such, you’d ’ave to say that ’e was cured!’
At the end of the block Danny took the stairs up to the Education Room. F Wing, although built later than the panopticon, was still constructed along the same severe lines. However, at either end of the landings there were several storeys of miscellaneous rooms, piled up higgledy-piggledy. Here the noxiousness of Victorian architecture, unconstricted by utility, burst forth into duff mouldings and depressing finials. This was Gormenghast Castle converted into an old people’s home.
Danny spiralled his way up glancing into rooms as he went. Here was a therapy group – there an early-release group. Knots of nonces sat about reassuring each other that everything would be all right – for them. Danny climbed on. At the very top of the staircase he found the Education Room. He paused outside and glanced through the window set in the door. Inside there were four battered desks; three of them had old manual typewriters set on them, and the fourth an equally primitive word processor. Two of the desks were tenanted, one by Sidney Cracknell, the other by Philip Greenslade.
These were a couple of the most reviled nonces on the wing – nearly as reviled as Danny himself. They were both serving life, Cracknell for running a children’s home in the way he thought best; Greenslade for a Clapton cab office-style abduction, torture, rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. They were physically diverse types. Cracknell was so warped and wizened, it was difficult to imagine anybody entrusting a gerbil to his care – let alone a human being; whereas Greenslade had the affable, open-featured countenance, the white hair, and twinkly blue eyes of a gregarious West Country publican. Which he was. Danny thought it a coincidence, if not an especially remarkable one, that they should both want to be electricians.
Together with them in the room was a third man, who had to be the teacher. He was big, at least six feet four, and standing with his back to the door. He had a hip-length leather jacket on and black jeans. When he turned, Danny was confronted by a face that was the essence of Ireland: two big pink ears; full, sensual red lips; a blob-ended Roman nose and a knobbly forehead. The man’s waxy complexion suggested that his potato-shaped head had been buried in a field for some months; while his broad shoulders and solid stance implied that he might have dug it up himself. He was probably around forty. He had deep-set, curious grey eyes which radiated intelligence and ferocity in equal measure from beneath an overhang of thick brown quiff. As he watched him, the man trained these eyes on Danny, then crooked his finger. Danny entered the room.
‘And you are?’ The man’s voice was quite high, but crisp and assured, with the merest whiff of an Irish accent.
‘O’Toole, sir.’
‘No sirs here, Mister O’Toole. I prefer the title “Mister”. I am Mister Mahoney – I assume you know Messrs Greenslade and Cracknell?’
‘Err, well, yeah, sort of …’ Danny wanted to say ‘by reputation’, but didn’t think it would go down well. As it was Cracknell was already tittering at him.
‘Please, Mister O’Toole, be so good as to take a seat. We are a small convocation, but I hope we’ll prove a productive one.’ While Danny shuffled behind a desk the Irishman ran on. ‘I myself hold with the Alcoholics Anonymous dictum regarding these things – wherever two students of creative writing are gathered together, it’s possible to hold a class.’
Cracknell tittered some more at this quip, and Greenslade managed an amiable-sounding grunt, but Danny chimed up, ‘Mister Mahoney?’
‘Mister O’Toole, how may I assist?’
‘Did you say creative writing?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Thass like stories an’ that?’
‘Stories, short or otherwise, that are part of cycles or standing alone; novellas of all kinds and genres; novels even – although for the beginner I would counsel against attempting the longer narrative form; in a word: a tale, and you, Mr O’Toole, the teller. Hmm?’
Danny thought carefully before answering. The wiring/writing mix-up would make him a laughing stock for weeks, the running gags on the nonce wing had incredibly weak legs. And anyway, writing was a proper thing to do, writers – Danny thought – could make good money, especially if they wrote ads and stuff like that. The Governor might well look kindly on Danny’s burgeoning writing career, let him off the nonce wing and give him protection from Skank’s associates, one of whom would undoubtedly be waiting for Danny in the main prison.
‘Mister Mahoney, this course, I mean, does it like …’ Danny struggled to find some new words, Mahoney forbore from assisting. ‘I mean will it like look good … I mean so far as the Governor’s concerned.’
Cracknell was openly laughing now, but Mahoney silenced him with a glare. ‘Mister O’Toole, I cannot speak for the Governor in this matter, or the Home Office in general. I don’t believe they have an espoused position on writing as an aspect of rehabilitation. What I can tell you’ – he
slapped the desk in front of Danny to emphasise his easy articulation – ‘is that every single one of the inmates who has completed my creative writing course has obtained a positive benefit from it. I’m not claiming to have produced an Henri Charriere, who after twenty years on Devil’s Island had the singular success of publishing two bestselling novels, and having himself portrayed in the film version of one of them by Dustin Hoffman, but I’ve had my modest successes. One of my students last year is now being regularly published, and the year before we had a runner-up in the Wolfenden Prize for Prison Writing. That got a lot of good publicity for Wandsworth, and the then governor certainly looked very kindly on that inmate, got him the transfer he wanted to a cat. B, integrated nick, hmmm?’
Danny was convinced – he said, ‘Will Smith.’
‘I’m sorry, Mister O’Toole?’
‘Will Smith. I mean, he’d have to play me in a film based on my prison experience – leastways I never seen that Hoffman blacked up nor nothing – in a skirt, granted, but never done up as a black geezer. A few years ago it’d have to be Wesley Snipes, but now it’s gonna be Smith. The man’s got more ’umour an’ that, more sex appeal.’
There may have only been three students in Gerry Mahoney’s creative-writing course, and they may have all been sex offenders, but despite that they managed to exemplify the three commonest types of wannabe writer. Greenslade was the relentless, prosaic plodder. Mahoney had read a story of his already, while they waited for other aspirants. It was suitable for a fourth-rate Lithuanian women’s magazine, with its contrived characters, mawkish sentimentality and anachronistic locutions: ‘And so it was …’, ‘The pale fingers of dawn …’, and ‘Deep in his heart …’ all featured on more than one occasion. The only thing to indicate that this story was written by a man with an unconscious as dark as a black hole was the peculiar absence of affect. The author might have felt for his creations in the abstract, but on the page he manipulated them like wooden puppets, like victims.
Then there was the warped Cracknell. He was another stereotype – the compulsive scrawler. Once Cracknell got going, he couldn’t rein it in. He’d been the first to arrive at the Education Room, dragging up the stairs with him – he walked with a particularly convoluted fake limp, the substance of ongoing and unsuccessful petitioning to the European Court of Human Rights – two heavy shopping bags full of hideous manuscript. ‘My novels,’ he’d puffed as he came in the door. ‘I mean, I say novels, but really they’re all part of the same big thing … like a … like a –’
‘Saga?’ groaned Mahoney, who had seen the like of this many times before. Cracknell positively beamed.
‘Yeah, saga, that’d be the word, although it’s not like there are a lot of Vikings and trolls and what have you in my novels; these are more sagas of the distant future – Oh! I like that, that’s good, “Sagas of the Distant Future”, that could be on the spines of all of them, with the individual titles on the covers, or perhaps the other way rou –’
‘And what would you like me to do with these sagas, Mister Cracknell?’ Mahoney had his hands on his hips and was observing Cracknell unpack his literary load, with such a baleful expression that his brows were not so much knitted as knotted.
‘I’d be much obliged, Mister Mahoney – given that you’re a published writer and that – if you’d give me your opinion.’
Mahoney flipped open the cover of the first of the eighty-five narrow feint exercise books Cracknell had piled up. Inside there was a furious density of manuscript: thirty words to the line, forty lines to the page. The handwriting was viciously regular, backward-sloping, and utterly indecipherable. Doing a quick calculation, Mahoney reckoned there had to be five million words in the exercise books – at least.
‘You see,’ Cracknell continued, ‘these books here – one through twenty-seven – deal with the first three thousand years of the Arkonic Empire; and books twenty-seven through to forty cover the thousand-year rise to power of its arch rival, the Trimmian Empire. What I’d like is some gui –’
‘Do you like writing, Mister Cracknell?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Is it the writing itself you enjoy, Mister Cracknell; or is it merely a way for you to fill your time?’
‘Well, it certainly does fill my time. The bloke I share my cell with, he gets a little irritated now and then, because after lock-up it’s out with the latest exercise book, open it up, and I may end up writing all night! By torchlight! I find it restful y’see –’
‘That’s as may be, Mister Cracknell, and I’m sure there is considerable merit in your sagas of the distant future, but as far as here and now is concerned, I’m not going to read them.’
Cracknell was dumbstruck, appalled. He nearly left the class forthwith, taking his literary tranche with him. He muttered about inmates’ rights, about requests to the Governor, and finally about the possible envy of a certain Irish writer who might not be quite as fluent as Cracknell himself. Mahoney was unmoved. When, following Danny’s arrival, he came to address the class as a whole, Mahoney set out his curriculum in a series of bold emphatics:
‘Gentlemen, I appreciate Messrs Greenslade and Cracknell bringing me their work to read, but in my class we shall start from scratch, from the beginning, and proceed in an orderly fashion to the end. During this course you will write one short story, gentlemen, of between four and six thousand words. That’s it. That’s what we will focus on. Writing a story is deceptively easy – and deceptively hard. I don’t want you to run before you can walk. I’m not going to be looking for fancy timescales, unusual settings, or stories that take place entirely within the mind of a stick insect.’ He paused and gave Cracknell a meaningful look. ‘And nor will I be satisfied with stories which feature unbelievable characters in unreal settings.’ The look was directed at Greenslade. ‘Your stories should be about something you know, they should be written in plain language, and they should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.’
These last assertions were punctuated by Mahoney turning to the clapped-out whiteboard at the front of the room, and writing the three words on it, each with an eeeking flourish of a marker pen. ‘Beginning, middle, end,’ Mahoney reiterated pointing to the words in turn, as if he half expected the three nonces to sing along. ‘When I’m at the beginning I should know where I am, and the same goes for any subsequent point in the story. A story is a logical progression like any other. For the next twenty minutes or so I should like you to think about a subject for your story and write me a single paragraph about it.’ As he said this Mahoney moved between the three of them depositing pieces of paper and biros. ‘A single paragraph’ – Crackell got the look again – ‘that tells me who, where, what, why, and when. That’s all, no fancy stuff. Got it?’ And with this the big Irishman plonked himself down in a chair, put his feet up on another, pulled a small-circulation left-wing periodical out of his jacket pocket, and commenced reading.
Twenty minutes later Mahoney identified the third stereotypic wannabe in his creative-writing course: the writer who can’t write. Danny had just about managed a paragraph, but the sentences composing it infrequently parsed, and the individual words were largely spelt phonetically. Mahoney, however, did find to his surprise that Danny had genuinely fulfilled the assignment. His projected story had a beginning, a middle and an end, it had recognisable characters, and it was set in a milieu Danny clearly knew well. Mahoney looked down sympathetically at his newest recruit to the fount of literature. ‘This isn’t too bad, Mister O’Toole. I like the idea, although I’m not so sure how you’re going to handle the triple cross over the coke deal, but you can get to that later. Are you serious about giving this a try?’
‘Well, yeah, s’pose,’ Danny muttered – Mahoney hadn’t taken this trouble with the other two.
‘In that case I would be obliged if you’d stop behind for a couple of minutes.’
When the repugnant duo had shuffled off down the stairs, each secretly satisfied that he was the most talent
ed writer in HMP Wandsworth, Mahoney turned to Danny with a new and more serious expression on his broad pink face. ‘You’ve got to get your spelling and grammar up to speed,’ he said. ‘It’s no good having good ideas – and I can see you’ve got those – if you can’t express them. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’ve got two course books here designed to help adults with their literacy – with their reading and writing, that is. I’d like you to have at look at them. If we’re going to make a writer of you, Mister O’Toole, you need to have a good command of basic grammar, hmm?’
Danny didn’t take it the wrong way; he had decided a while before something quite momentous – he liked Mister Mahoney and wanted to please him. And within a matter of a fortnight Gerry Mahoney discovered something rather momentous as well – Danny O’Toole had genuine talent as a writer.
Danny chewed up the adult literacy course and digested it with ease. By the time the next class came round he was able to hand in to Mahoney all of the completed exercises. Mahoney gave him another book for a higher standard. Danny also began to read – and read at speed. He invested all of his birdhouse earnings to date in a torch and a supply of batteries. Then, after lock-up each afternoon, he proceeded to read his way through every single book available in the meagre nonce-wing library.
In the army Danny had read Sven Hassel, and on the outside he’d occasionally toyed with a thriller, but he’d never devoured print like this. He read historical romances and detective stories; he chomped his way through ancient numbers of the Reader’s Digest; and he scarfed vast quantities of J.T. Edson westerns, with titles like Sidewinder, and Five Guns at Noon. As he read more and more Danny found himself essaying more difficult texts – the old dusty linen-bound books with the oppressively small type that were crowded on the bottom shelf of the library cart. So he came to read Dumas and Dickens, Twain and Thackeray, Galsworthy and – and an especial favourite – Elizabeth Gaskell.