Call Me the Breeze (16 page)

She is not like the others
.

I sealed all the bags then tried to get to sleep as best I could. But it was hard. What I wanted more than anything was for it all to be over. That it all would end so it could begin once again — with each new day being born in the way it ought to have been the first time.

(All the stuff from Mountjoy Bonehead has pasted into a number of ‘Jail Journals’, essentially thick, bound notebooks with various items of correspondence clipped or stapled into them. The writings themselves are far from chronological — quite erratic, with some of them typed, others handwritten. Quite a few a mixture. There were long periods when I didn’t write anything at all inside, being overcome by blackness, melancholy … I don’t know — maybe just not seeing the point. Months could go by without me writing so much as a word. Even years.)

Jail Journal
(subtitled: ‘Diary of a Kip’)

It has been hell in here for so long ever since I came through that fucking gate that I don’t even like to talk about it, much less write down my feelings in a notebook like this or anywhere else. After the hacksaw business the screws never left me alone, in particular one of the kicking squad — kind of like Tuite’s ‘Heavy Gang’ — who’d got it into his head that me and Bone were definitely queers. ‘You needn’t think you’ll get out of it that handy!’ he said to me one day when he
came up behind me in the yard. ‘Topping yourself with a hacksaw blade. It’s not good enough for you terrorizing women but now you’ve turned queer-boy as well. Well, don’t worry, my friend, I’ll see you finish your term. You try that again and I’ll bust your balls! I’ll sort you out good and fucking proper, Mr Taxi Driver! You see if I don’t!’

It came to a head and one day I lunged at him in the workshop. Which was a mistake for he had been waiting for it and I came off the worst. ‘I’ll put that other eye out for you, you half-blind fucker!’ he said when he had me down on the ground. They didn’t do that, but him and the rest of the kicking squad took me into the toilets and gave me a beating I will never forget. Bone said he’d get them but there was nothing we could do. I didn’t talk much to anyone after that and to tell you the truth I don’t think I ever would have if things hadn’t changed in the fifth year when the new governor Mervin Recks was brought in to take charge. This would be around the time when the first junkies had started to appear, all these porridge-faced Dubliners with dark eyes sunk in their heads, traipsing around the place like
Dawn of the Dead
. Me and Bone were sitting in the TV room watching U2 one day (I couldn’t take my eyes off Bono — he seemed so
sure
of what he was doing) when this fellow in a tracksuit sits down beside us and asks for a smoke. ‘What are you in for?’ says Bone, and when he says: ‘I got caught with seventy grand’s worth of gear!’, asks him maybe could he get us a telly, or a couple of Walkmans at least. ‘I’m bleedin’ talkin’ about
gear
!’ says your man. ‘Smack, you stupid bleeding tinker!’

Well, when he said that, you can imagine the reaction of Bonehead — it took three of us to pull him off him!

‘How dare you say that to me!’ he yells. ‘I’m one of the Stokeses of Rathowen! I have me own house, you jackeen drug addict bastard!’

Much of the diary for those four years is quite banal and tedious, with one day the same as the next. There’s this deadening rhythm going through it. And only for Mervin, to tell you the truth, I don’t know …

Whether I’d have made it or not, I mean.

A lot of them said that he took a shine to me and Bone and that because of it we got far more than we were ever entitled to. I don’t know about that but one thing I do know is that Mervin’s arrival changed the fucking place for ever. I won’t say the years after he was appointed were heaven but it sure did make it more bearable, the opportunities he offered you enabling you to forget the sickening smells that clung to the place, the stench of pisspots, fags and underwear changed once a week mixed up with that of overcooked food, disinfectant and detergent. It was as if the minute he came those smells kind of turned around and died. Which they couldn’t have, of course, but you definitely didn’t notice them. Not so much.

‘I’ve seen you writing the odd time,’ he said to me one day, and of course I denied it. Because at first I didn’t trust him. As well as that, I was embarrassed. If I’d been full of shame about attempting such things before, well, as you can imagine — the kicking squad can work wonders for your confidence — I was twice as full of it now. ‘No,’ I said, ‘as a matter of fact, Governor, I can barely write my name.’

If it had been anybody else, I suppose that would have been the end of it. But Mervin knew how to handle you and it sort of didn’t seem like you … were being used, I guess.

So in the end, I confess, he got around me. We used to have these chats in his study and, during walkabout, he’d come into the cell and spend some time there. He couldn’t get over Bonehead. ‘Does he ever talk about anything else?’ he asked me. Meaning travellers.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He talks about football.’

He was football mad, in fact. Which really did my head in, for when he got started all you’d hear would be: ‘Who scored the winning point in the All-Ireland Final in 1954? Go on then, Joey, who? Who?’

I never had the faintest clue. But Mervin did. He was nearly as bad as Bone. It was after one of those chats that the two of them cooked up the idea of the football tournament. The Mountjoy Gaels A wing
we were called and what a collection of fuckers as ever was let near a football pitch! We had the little junkie guy, who turned out to be like a streak of fucking lightning, scoring a hat-trick on his first outing alone. Bone was in goal and didn’t let one past. The only thing about it was he never shut up about it now. It was night, noon and morning football in the cell. ‘We’ll fucking take her, Joesup!’ you’d hear him saying, pacing up and down the floor at all hours of the night. ‘We’ll burt the fuckers!’

Meaning ‘burst’, of course.

The tournament was, at first, exclusively kept inside the prison but, later on, other cons were allowed in for games. By the time the season was over, you could hardly see the rim of the wall there were so many footballs impaled on the razor wire. I’ll never forget the day Boo Boo came in to visit and slipped me a tab of acid. Unfortunately it was the day of the final and all I can remember is the ball arriving at my feet and Bonehead going: ‘
Now, Joesup! Run
!’ but being so out of it that all I could think of was: ‘Look at those fabulous footballs! Those amazingly beautiful footballs! Man! Jeez!’, with the nimble flicky flickies — your own private little solar system — going
phwoosh
! and all the lovely colours — mostly orange and white — bleeding into each other there on top of the wall. It was the most magnificent of visions. At least until I heard Bonehead shouting: ‘You stupid bollocks, Joesup! You’ve gone and loosed-ed the game on us!’

Which I had. They won by three goals and a point to nil and the Bone didn’t speak to me for a week. ‘I’ll never forgive you, Joesup!’ he says. ‘Why did you do it? You let me down!’

But then he went and forgot all about it, being much too busy tormenting a young fellow called Ward who’d just been put in for stealing lead. He couldn’t go anywhere without getting a clip from Bonehead. ‘Just because I lifted lead doesn’t mean I’m like you!’ you’d hear. ‘Get away from about me, Ward — and all belonging to you! It’s a wonder youse wouldn’t go and do a day’s work! Isn’t that right, Joesup?’

Sometimes he’d just hit him a kick up the arse and run away. The poor young fellow didn’t have the life of a dog. But fortunately he was in for just six months and, after he left, poor Bone was at a loss as to know what to do with himself. That’s when he started reading. Westerns mostly, but generally anything he could get his hands on. ‘Did you ever see a
traveller
reading?’ he said to me one day, and before I could
get a chance to answer, he’d said: ‘No, you didn’t, for they’re too fucking stupid, that’s why!’ going back to his volume like he’s Head of Critical Studies, Mountjoy Jail.

(What I have to thank Mervin for, more than anything, is keeping at me until I admitted to him that, yes, I did scribble a bit, but not leaving it at that, insisting that I write down some of my experiences. He used to read my notes and stuff regularly, which gradually got me back into the swing of things.)

6 April 1984

The noise in the exercise yard you just would not believe! This evening they were all talking about the young fellow who hanged himself last night. There isn’t a blade of grass to be seen in the fucking place. It’s a long way from the reservoir here and that’s for fucking sure. But I don’t mind. I’m in no hurry out now. Sometimes I think: ‘It’s a pity they didn’t finish me off.’ The kicking squad, I mean. The minute just before I passed out beneath this sea of scything boots, I could see all the people lining up along the main street in Scotsfield. They were all there — Boyle Henry, Austie, pretty much everyone I’d ever known in the town. They were shaking their heads as they saw me coming. I was naked and covered in dried dirt. Smelling of Mountjoy. ‘That’s him,’ they said, ‘and it’s good enough for him.’ ‘He reeks of cabbage and dirty old drawers,’ I heard someone say, as another one mused: ‘There’s talk that he’s gone into a queer.’ ‘That’s right,’ came the reply, ‘I heard them saying that. With a bit of luck he’ll get AIDS, this new disease they’re all talking about. That will soon soften his cough for him. The way I understand, the pain is like nothing on earth. Your bowels collapse. Then your heart enlarges. And bursts out through your —!’

They were all laughing when I saw Jacy standing in the doorway of Austie’s. She looked like a
skeleton with hollow sunken eyes the very exact same as a junkie’s. She was shivering in a blanket and pointing as she asked me in this cracked voice: ‘Why, Joey? Why?’

The judge was standing in the doorway of Austie’s, writing in a ledger. Then he looked up and said: ‘Joseph Tallon, you have been found guilty by a jury of your peers. My role in this case is to protect the interests of the public against the possibility of such heinous offences being repeated. In view of your previous conviction and the fact that you have put the victim through the additional agony of having to give evidence in this case, I direct that these three sentences — comprising possession of drugs with intent to supply, false imprisonment and assault occasioning bodily harm — are to run consecutively.’

When I looked again he had gone back inside with the door marked ‘Austie’s’ in gold leaf just swinging there behind him.

It was Austie himself who walked out of the crowd and came over and knocked me to the ground with one single well-aimed blow. Far away I heard my own voice pleading: ‘Harder there, please! Please, do it again!’

But they were gone and all you could hear was, why Joey why why oh why did you have to do it she was really such a lovely girl and we know you liked her why oh why did you do it Joey why?

There is a little booth which acts as a lost-and-found point; in another part of the yard, prisoners queue up to buy stuff at the shop. Others are waiting to go to the workshops. You can watch TV or play pool in the recreation room. I managed to get myself a Walkman — Boo Boo brought it in — but I don’t listen to the old music now. It’s too hard for me.
Abraxas
would only remind me of The Seeker and Joni Mitchell. So I just listen to Bonehead’s
country-and-western tapes (‘Boys but I loves Daniel O’Donnell!’) and any other old rubbish I can find. I don’t care, so long as it takes me away from the stink of boiled cabbage and the all-pervasive rankness of other men’s drawers.

(Even flipping through it is enough to make the gloominess start insinuating itself again. You almost go into a foetal crouch as you turn each weighted and weary page, with talk of nothing — only strikes and abortion referenda, rain and misery in a country that seemed ruined.)

2 May 1985

Sleep broken all the way through the night. I woke up and said: ‘Don’t let me think about her,’ but when my eyes closed again I saw them all coming up the main street, sort of like in a movie but with the sound turned way down. It was like a funeral cortège, with Austie at the head of it dressed all in black. But a funeral that was taking place years ago with the hearse being pulled by two plumed horses and the Big Fellow inside driving it, wearing these breeches and buckled shoes. They looked ridiculous along with his fedora, but he didn’t care. He just smiled at the mourners lined along the streets as if to say: ‘
All in a day’s work
!’, and lashed the horses as they trotted onwards. Now I could see that the mourners were laughing too. When we got to the graveyard Jacy was there, attired in this beautiful floaty print dress — it alarmed me that it was a little bit like Mona’s — and a daffodil-yellow sunhat. When she opened the coffin it was filled with light, and when that had gone I saw quite clearly who was in there beneath the lid. It was me — in a starched white shirt and red tie, the one I used to wear when I’d go to Mona’s.

‘Hello, Joey,’ she said and stroked my forehead with her palm. ‘How are you in there? Is it nice being dead? Never mind, you’re alive now!’

Hoss appeared then, directing the men who were carrying the cross. I can still feel the pain of the nails as they went in. But it was nothing compared to the shame when Jacy approached me on the cross and started tugging at the strip of cloth they’d tied around my groin. She chuckled into her hand and then turned to the mourners, going — not in a Californian accent now but in a really drab country Irish one, from around County Wicklow or thereabouts it sounded — ‘Did you see the little yoke the fucker has in there? Tsk! Tsk!’

I died then and they all went back down to Austie’s. I can still hear her saying that, and the more I try to block it out the louder it seems to get.

23 June 1985

There is talk of establishing a Prisoners’ Revenge group to put a stop to the kicking squad and their intimidating bullshit. I don’t know. Everywhere you go there seems to be violence. Times the bad feelings start coming again, then you get over them and think, no, it’s not so bad in here. Maybe I’ll survive.