Billy Rags (12 page)

Moffatt said:

“The HS is visiting us, Cracken. He's decided to see you.”

I didn't look at Moffatt. I just looked straight ahead at the Home Secretary.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, making it clear my remarks weren't addressed to Moffatt.

“Sit down, Cracken,” said the Home Secretary. All genial and open. “Is there anything you'd like to talk to me about?”

“Well, yes sir, there is as a matter of fact.”

“Well, that's what I'm here for. You can say what you like. No one will stop you.”

He grinned encouragingly. Moffatt re-crossed his legs.

“I know that it was wrong what we did, sir, having the demo and that, but we hadn't any choice, had we? I mean, what's the point of trying to enforce regulations that your own council's recommended for the chopping block? In any case, they weren't even enforced by the previous governor.”

I went on a bit in that vein and the HS never argued the toss. Nobody could. Moffatt had been gauntlet slapping and the demo had been a direct result. But I wasn't deluding myself about the HS. He was more interested in getting some first-hand experience of prisoners than debating the merits of the mutiny.

When I'd finished he leant back in his chair and said: “I stand by the Governor.”

I didn't say anything.

“In many respects,” he said, “this situation is similar to an industrial dispute where both sides have dug in and stubbornness is only making matters worse. But of course the Governor was fully within his rights to issue those orders and my department and myself back him up to the hilt. Nobody wants to see you chaps with sentences like yours locked in your cells for long periods of time but what else can we do when you behave like this? Everybody finally gets on to me and I have no choice.”

“I realise that, sir,” I said, “but, I mean, all of us are cooped up together in the maximum security wing, and business like stupid regulations is bound to set something alight.”

“The dispersal policy will go some way to remedying that particular problem.”

“Ah, now sir, if I may say so, a maximum security prison is more realistic. Where people like us are able to breathe.”

All the time we were talking Moffatt was sitting seething.

The Home Secretary looked down at the table top.

“What do you
do
all day, Cracken?” he said.

“Me, sir?” I said. “I'm in my cell, reading.”

“What, all day?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why all day?”

I didn't look at Moffatt but I knew he was staring at me fit to burn me up.

“Well, sir, the Governor won't let me go out on exercise.”

Moffatt had to speak now.

“Wait a minute, Cracken,” he said. “Tell us
why
you're not allowed on exercise. Tell the Home Secretary about your refusal to wear the shoes as issued.”

I couldn't believe my luck. Moffatt had shot himself in front of the Home Secretary.

I said: “I don't suppose the Home Secretary wants to hear about my shoes, Governor.”

“What's this about, then?” said the Home Secretary.

Moffatt was committed now.

“Cracken was issued with a new pair of shoes. He threw them out of the window, refusing to wear them. That's why he's not allowed out on exercise.”

The Home Secretary looked at Moffatt and then at me, taking in the Governor's venom and my own contempt.

“Well, come on, Cracken,” he said. “Tell me about the shoes.”

There was the trace of an amused smile on his face.

Well, he had asked, and you don't look it in the mouth when it comes.

“He's just trying to make me look bad, Mr. Home Secretary,” I said. “I came over here from E wing wearing a pair of plimsolls which I'd worn for weeks without anybody objecting. Then a week ago a warder pinched them off my chair when I'd put it outside my door. The shoes were put there instead. I admit I stuffed them out the window, but, Jesus, these kind of tactics, well, hardly the kind of games so-called responsible people are supposed to play. I mean, are they?”

The Home Secretary found this all highly amusing.

“Is that right?” he asked Moffatt. “Were they pinched off his chair?”

Moffat passed it on to the Chief.

“I merely gave the order for him to be issued with a new pair of shoes,” Moffatt said.

“What happened, Chief?”

The Chief was having a bit of a smile-up, too.

“Well, yes, quite frankly, they were taken off his chair in the manner described, yes,” he said. “Because, to be honest, I knew he wouldn't give them up if he was just asked.”

“That's not the point,” I said. “There are ways of doing these things and there are ways of
not
doing them. I mean, that's the kind of trick we're supposed to get up to.”

“If you can't . . .” Moffatt began, but the Home Secretary cut through him.

“Cracken,” he said, “I'm not in the habit of asking prisoners favours. But will you do something for me?”

“Yes sir, of course.”

“Will you wear your shoes if they're given back to you?”

“Yes sir, of course I will.”

I knew he'd meant my plimsolls. So did Bastin. But Moffatt missed the point completely. Pedantic as ever, he snapped out: “Yes, of course. If he wears his shoes he can go out on exercise.”

“Good,” said the Home Secretary, looking down at the table top.

There was a short silence while the Home Secretary, Bastin and myself thought one thing and Moffatt thought another.

Moffatt was finished now. That was obvious. He didn't know it. He probably never would. But it was clear that the Home Secretary was going to implement a few subtle changes, via Creasey probably, that would only filter through to Moffatt if it was absolutely necessary that he should be made aware of the changes. I got the feeling that it would never be absolutely necessary. Moffatt would just be kept happy until such time had elapsed that he could be respectably moved on.

That afternoon I got my plimsolls back and went out on exercise. The day was bright and sunny and by the hospital the flowers rocked from side to side in the slow warm wind. I stood in the shadow of the wall and looked up at its edge and beyond and watched the fluff-ball clouds drift across the kodak-blue sky and I thought about the park near where Sheila and Timmy and me had lived before this last lot. It's funny how good weather works your memory. I thought of the swings and Timmy's laugh as I pushed him higher and higher, right up into the sky, the chains clanking, Sheila calling “Be careful,” Tony laughing louder and louder, the goodness of the feeling of my own strong arms thrusting against the swing with the warm sun glinting on the warm iron and the squeaking of the joints and Timmy's little hands gripping tight as life itself.

I lay down on the grass by the hospital. So I'd screwed Moffatt up. Fine. For a moment there it had been great, a triumph, virtue rewarded. A victory to be savoured and passed on and absorbed into the false brightness of prison mythology. And the very fact that for a while I'd counted the victory as amounting to some kind of importance now described to me only the slackening of my own grip on my scale of values. I was like one of the cons Walter's cousin had described on the demo as suffering from too much bird. The victory was purely relative. Six months ago it wouldn't have been worth piss in the wind to me. Now I was stoking up on small glory.

I lay on my back and lit a fag. That way I couldn't see the wall or the hospital or any of the other hospital buildings. There was just the sky and the drifting clouds and the weight of the warm earth falling away beneath me.

I'd spent seven of the last ten years inside. The longest time all at once had been eleven months, the time before this last lot. I'd missed the first year of Timmy's life.

Only twenty-two years and seven months of this one to go.

I stood up and looked at the wall.

The wall is dark against the night sky. Now and then clouds slide slowly over the face of the moon. Beyond the wall is the building, its rooftops just visible over the wall's lip.

“Are we going over, then?” says Jackie Robinson.

“That's why we came, isn't it?” says Tony Cook. “No point in coming, otherwise.”

We are standing outside the approved school they've left recently. Earlier, in the cellar club, after the Bennies had been taken, they'd started talking about the school, about the lads they'd left behind, how great they were, how I should meet them.

We all shin up the wall and drop down the other side. Silence. The huge building is lit only at two windows. It is still and solid and its outline makes me shudder. All those kids in there, enclosed, regimented.

“That's Derwent's window,” says Jackie, nodding at one of the lights.

“The bastard,” says Tony.

We are about to move towards the building when a downstairs light is switched on. We freeze. A door opens and light pours out into the night. Someone comes out and walks round the corner of the building, out of sight. We turn and run and make it back over the wall.

“Bloody bastards,” says Tony. “I bet it was Derwent.”

“Bound to be,” says Jackie. “The sod never sleeps.”

We walk the streets until it is time for Jackie and Tony to turn off. We arrange to meet in the club up West again tomorrow. I look at my watch. I reckon that it will take me at least two hours to walk home. By that time it will be five-thirty in the morning. But I never make it. On my way home the Filth stops me, inspired by my Teddy Boy clothes. I am searched, and they find my file, my offensive weapon. Later I am conditionally discharged, but that doesn't matter to me, one way or the other. The important thing is that now I'm one of the boys, and that now I can start to rise above them. I have the first of my credentials.

When I got back to E wing things had changed. Everything was different.

The wing was definitely under new management. Gordon was still there. Naturally. But it was Creasey who was running things. Everything was sweetness and light. The whole thing was a different place.

It almost made you think twice about making it over the wall.

For a start, the wing had been almost cleared. We were left six-handed. The only three left from the original lot apart from me were Ray, Tommy and Terry. And of course, Walter. Seventy-seven years to go between us. It's that kind of incidental arithmetic that makes it ridiculous not to think of going over.

Strachey was still there but he didn't count. We just let him get on with it. The rest of the monsters had been locked off upstairs which in some ways was a pity.

The other new members were a real couple of cases: one was Albert Atkin, a double lifer. He'd killed one boy when he was seventeen and another one in the nick inside of his first year. He'd been a lucky bastard because topping was still in style when he'd done his thing but he'd got himself a reprieve because of his age. Even at this time he was just knocking twenty-one. He was a good-looking boy without his glasses, a bit fey, over six foot. He'd drift around the place looking like the Bad Lord Byron. In fact he was very intelligent. His favourite reading was the Greek tragedies. He was a bit like me, a self-educator. The two of us would have marathon discussions on literature that would irritate the others no end because there was no point of reference for them to jump in. The other thing about him was his conviction that to be any worth he had to be tough and courageous. This was alien to his basic nature, but he believed the view of the world he'd absorbed to be true and so he was always in conflict with himself. Apparently it had led him to his second killing: he'd been insulted by his prospective victim and he couldn't stand the idea of himself not being up to the rules and so rather than cop out he'd gone down for another dose of life.

The other newcomer was Jimmy Gearing. We called him Karate, because that's how he'd killed his one. Or so he said in court. Personally I had my doubts. He was an exaggerator. He was one of those guys who are so unsure of themselves, of their acceptability, they just run off at the mouth with stuff about how they've done this and how they've done that and what they're going to do next and the irony is that they become a pain in about one minute flat whereas if they kept their mouths shut for maybe half an hour then at least they wouldn't be left sitting all on their own. Karate would also get extremely excited at any mention of sex or any number of subjects he was allergic to. After a week or so of his presence I began to think the proper nickname for him should have been Lonely.

So being so short-handed, we virtually had the run of the entire wing. We were unlocked at seven in the morning and we didn't have to go away to our cells again till nine in the evening. All our meals were in association. Within the prescribed limits, we virtually ordered our own lives. There was strictly no ordering about for the sake of it. For instance, Ray and I did the cleaning. Originally this had been done by short-timers. Though there was less work, there only being two of us, Ray and I used to tear into it for about two hours every morning, sweat flowing off us. This way we got more leisure. The screws hated to see it but we now worked unsupervised so they had to lump it.

The rest of them worked in the new wrought iron shop. That wasn't the only new innovation. There was a new exercise pen, big enough to play football in, and we also got Creasey to organise some tennis gear.

Sometimes in the evenings we'd have lecturers from the local university to give us talks and twice a week the cook gave us cooking classes which was really just an excuse to have a decent meal. The other evening activity was weightlifting, along with telly-watching, and as we'd got the run of the two TV rooms there was no arguing as to what went on.