Billy Rags (9 page)

I looked at my file. It was about the size of the
New Statesman
and about a foot thick. It must have weighed ten pounds. It made a lot of confetti when I eventually tore it up. Which is about all it was worth. It was incredible. Nearly everything in it was speculative and unsuppor-ted by facts. I expected to learn something about myself, some analytical insight that might shed some light on my motives, but all I discovered was what the great British public already knew via the newspapers. I was just another thug. A bit more spectacular than most, but just a thug. It made me sick. These people had put me in the same cell in different prisons for a total of almost ten years and they were the experts and this was their testament. Just another thug.

But the worst part in the file concerned the padre. I was registered as an atheist, but one day he'd barged into my cell full of assurances that he hadn't come to try and convert me, just to see “if I was all right.” We'd had a chat for about a quarter of an hour but I'd hardly told him a thing, certainly nothing about my private life. But he'd got enough out of that quarter of an hour of conversation about prison generalities to knock up a nice neat little report confirming my irrevocable criminality; quite a juicy little tid-bit lying in the middle of my file, there for any nosy screw to browse through.

But I wasn't the only one he'd put on file.

Ray Crompton said: “Here, would you fucking believe it? That bastard Tailby's been going at me from behind his collar. It's all down, what I told him about Maureen and me. About our business.”

“And me,” said Terry. “He's made me out to be a right cunt.”

Tommy said: “He's just been working as an assessor. It's all down here about how in his opinion I'll be back on the old tickle once I'm out and that the Governor should take this into account whenever I come up for review.”

“Christ, I'll shit all over him when I see the fucker,” said Dave.

“Why wait?” said Terry.

“How do you mean?” said Ray.

“Well we need a karsi, don't we? What's wrong with his fucking chapel? It's the next best thing to shitting over him.”

Tommy stood up.

“Funny you should say that,” he said. “I've been meaning to strain the greens.”

He got up and walked over to the door.

“Anyone for tennis?” he said.

Everybody cheered and those who could stir their bowels followed Tommy into the chapel and for the next five minutes the chapel echoed to the groans and farts and laughter of half a dozen cons. The rest of us in the office cheered each new noise and somebody remarked that it was a pity the wireless tannoy had been disconnected as we could have put one over the air and dedicated it to Moffatt.

While all this was going on, Walter's cousin, Dennis Colman, who was sitting next to me reading Walter's file, suddenly burst out laughing.

“What's got in your trousers?” I said.

He kept on laughing.

“Come on,” said Walter. “Let's all share the joke.”

Dennis wiped the tears from his face.

“Walter,” he said. “Have I got news for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dennis handed the file to me.

“Oh, John,” he said, “you've got to read this about Walter. You know that screw he was always saying was a good'un? Well, he was slipped in. The screw was planted.”

Walter stared at him.

“Don't look at me, Walter,” Dennis said. “It's all down in the file. You've been screwed by a screw.”

He burst into laughter again. I began to read the bit he was on about. The screw that Walter had been cultivating, getting a sympathetic ear for the travails of his life, had been slipped in a couple of months before Walter had arrived in this nick. The screw had been given the brief of getting Walter's confidence and reporting to Moffatt whatever he could find out. The assessment he'd made was encouraging: “Colman is self-centred . . . completely unrepentant . . . feels everybody is fair game to be used and has no qualms about using them . . . continually trying to establish a relationship with me and enlist my agreement with his running down of the staff . . .” And so on. I read all this out while Dennis fell about. Tommy and Ray and Terry had returned from the chapel and they augmented Dennis's laughter but the rest of the cons didn't know quite how to react. Walter couldn't stand having the piss taken and he had a long memory. Except for Dennis and Tommy and Ray and Dave and Benny Beauty and me the cons were all watching Walter's face to see which way he was going to bend.

It's the only time I've seen Walter speechless. He was too astonished to be angry. He took the file from me and sat down near a candle and read through the screw's report as if he was reading a foreign language, shaking his head as if he couldn't make any sense out of the words.

I said: “I thought your screw was too good to be true, Walter.”

“So did I,” said Dennis. “I mean, how many times did I say just that, Walter?”

For once Walter was unconcerned about his image. He was talking to himself, as if he was on his own.

“I can't believe it,” he said. “I just can't credit it. Imagine it. All the time he was coming into my cell he was at it.”

“Never mind, Walter,” I said. “You can't swallow everybody.”

Walter's face went black. Then he picked up his file and flung it across the room.

“Cunt,” he said.

Whether it was me or the screw he was referring to wasn't quite clear.

“Here, Billy,” said Ray, “let's have a look at Hopper's file.”

I got the file and passed it over to Ray. I'd been thinking about reading it myself but I'd put off opening it up for one reason or another.

Ray took the file and began to leaf through it. I lit up a cigarette and watched Walter as he stood by the window and looked out into the black night, not seeing the night at all, just seeing the face of his tame screw and no doubt imagining the designs he would work on it if he ever got the chance.

“Jesus,” Ray said, softly.

I turned to look at him. He let Hopper's file sag gently across his knees.

“What's the matter?” I said.

Ray shook his head.

“This,” he said, indicating the report.

“What about it?”

Ray carried on shaking his head.

“It's just . . . I don't know . . . I can't.”

Tears appeared at the edges of his eyes. I took the file off his lap. It was open at Hopper's deposition, his statement to the police.

“What's that, Billy?” Tommy said.

“Hopper,” I said.

“Read it to us,” Tommy said, his voice quiet and serious.

“Well,” I said. “If you want.”

I began to read. I didn't want to read it, let alone read it out loud, but it was as if somebody else was reading it, not me, somebody with a voice like a railway station loud-speaker, reading without emphasis or emotion, just droning on like a bored teacher on a hot summer afternoon. But even the voice that seemed to be outside of myself had to stop when in the text it occurred that Hopper had sliced into one of the little girls with razor blades when she'd refused to go down on him, and all the time she'd been calling for her Mummy but her Mummy never came and it was five hours after Hopper had used the razor blades he'd finally killed her. And then he'd turned to the other little girl who'd had to watch everything.

I think I must have stopped in mid-sentence but nobody asked me to go on. I put the file down on the floor beside me. I didn't have to look into any faces to know how everybody was feeling.

Just five minutes with him was all anybody wanted.

The picnic was never the same after that.

All I feel about him, looking at him, dead, in the coffin, is how like him yet unlike him he looks. The features are exactly the same as they were in life, the same distances, the same arrangement. But at the same time he looks like no one I've ever met before. A face passed in a crowd, unreal, making no contact. But that is all I feel. As I stand there I can hear my mother sobbing in the other room. The sound irritates me. Why doesn't she stop? It's just a useless, irritating noise, empty; the grief is for her lost life, not his. Later Linda comes to my bedroom. She stands by the bed, crying, asking to get in with me, but I pretend to be asleep, and eventually she goes away.

I awoke at quarter past six.

I sat up and the file paper I'd used to cover myself with slid off me and rattled coldly on to the floor. Grey morning light filtered through the barred windows. Ray was lying next to me and the smell of his feet drifted into my nostrils. I got up and went out of the office. I lit a cigar-ette and leant against the corridor wall. There was no sound out on the landing. Most of the screws would be in their pits, stoking up for the events of the coming day. We'd hardly heard from them at all during the night. The odd cowboy had thrown rocks up at the office window, but that had brought them no joy, except the pleasure of seeing our candle-lit faces squashed up against the glass.

I blew out smoke and it hung on the motionless air. I thought about something Dennis had said the night before. At the time it had made me smile not because of what he'd said but because before his current sentence he'd only done six months inside and it would hardly give him a wealth of experience about his subject. But now, thinking about it in the daylight, Dennis had been quite sharp about the situation. He'd made his remarks shortly after a sing-song Walter had organised. The favourite number had been “Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner,” and Walter had been in his element, beating time with his fist, exhorting those who were sick and tired of the song to join in at the tops of their voices. But when even Walter had no longer been able to keep the Scouts' atmosphere going, most of the cons had taken to wandering round the room like characters in search of a director, smashing up any remains of furniture still big enough to break, sticking bits of wood and metal in their belts like pirates, cursing the screws and the Governor and their mates and their wives and their mothers. It was during this aimlessness that Dennis had said to me: “Look at them, Billy. They're not up to it. They're not equal to the situation.”

“How do you mean?”

“They're a lot of piss artists. Before this, to hear them talk, you'd have thought they were all fucking Prime Ministers. ‘I did this, I did the other, when I was on so and so's firm, and with that I said . . .' All that fucking cobblers. But they're a fucking joke. They don't know how to handle fuck all. They're just winding themselves for nothing. They've convinced themselves that they're in control. There's no reality to them any more. They've done too much bird. Even Walter's acting like a fucking infant.”

I hadn't agreed and I hadn't disagreed. I hadn't known Dennis long enough to commit myself with him.

“I'll have a bet with you, Billy,” he'd gone on to say. “Right now, all those that are roaming about are feeling stalky. That's half the reason they can't sit down. They're being pulled round by their pricks. Inside half an hour there'll be some action, no worry.”

He had been right. I'd seen it happen before when there'd been a mixture of excitement and fear and frustration. Once when I'd been on a driving job with two heavies and the truck we'd been waiting for had been ten minutes late and we'd all been in danger of getting nicked just sitting by the kerb waiting, one of the heavies had slipped his hand in his pocket and given himself one just to get the tension out of him. And it had been the same with the cons during the night. Three of them had started crowding that vaseline-arse Ian Crosbie who didn't mind a bit but appreciated that those hard-cases, Monks, Climie and Ford liked it with rough stuff and so he'd put on a bit of a show of resisting. But before it'd gone very far I'd faced them out of the office and into the chapel because that kind of game is inclined to make me want to hurt somebody. Badly. A few of the others had drifted out with them to watch but when they'd all come back into the office afterwards only Monks and Climie had had the guts to look into my face and then not for very long.

I threw the cigarette down on to the floor and turned and had a look at the barricade.

But beyond the barricade there was something much more interesting to look at.

Two people had come out on to the landing. One was a bastard of a screw called Swain.

The other character was Hopper.

He was carrying a bucket and a floor cloth.

Swain's voice echoed up and down the levels.

“All of it, Hopper,” he said. “And I want it looking good.”

Hopper put the bucket down and got down on his knees and dipped the floor cloth in the bucket.

“Not there,” said Swain. “You can do that afterwards.”

Hopper looked up at him.

“I want you to do the catwalk first. No sense in doing all this and going over there and then walking your mucky feet back over what you've already done.”

Hopper's head swung round towards the gate. I stood stock still.

“What, over there?” he said.

“That's right,” Swain said.

“But what about them?”

“What about them?”

“Supposing they come out?”

“They won't come out,” said Swain. “Why should they, now they're in? Besides, the gate's locked. So get on with it.”

I didn't wait to listen to any more. I dodged back into the office and shook Ray and Tommy until they were awake.

“Hopper's coming to the gate,” I said.

Now all the sleep fell away from their minds.

“To the gate?” Tommy said.

I nodded, then explained what was going on. There was a silence. Eventually Ray said: “It's a trap.”

I nodded again.

“That's right,” I said.

Another silence.