Extradited (11 page)

‘Ade, kani
– All right, enough,’ I said, but everyone ignored me. The strangling continued and Yiannis fell to his knees. He began to make gagging noises and was clearly desperate for an intake of oxygen. Christos pulled the sheet even tighter.

‘He’s killing the guy!’ I said to Fivos, but he just looked back at me and gave a closed-mouth chuckle. My heart began to race a bit – I was about to witness a murder. ‘All right all right, stop
reh
!’

The gagging noise stopped. After giving the sheet one last tug, Christos loosened it and Yiannis collapsed frontwards. His left cheek slammed onto the dirty concrete floor. There was a pause. No sudden intake of breath.

‘He’s dead.’ We all looked down at his motionless body. I looked at Christos. ‘He’s fucking dead,’ I said.

The gleam in Christos’s eyes told me that he’d realised something was wrong. He slid his bare foot out of his flip-flop and gave the unconscious Yiannis a little nudge with his big toe to check if he was alive. Fivos sat up, finally taking notice of what was happening. Before I had the chance to check his pulse, Yiannis took a deep gasp of oxygen and began to shake. It looked as though he was having some kind of fit. Strands of saliva trickled from his mouth and he began to murmur like a zombie and crawl all over the floor. At this point Fivos and Christos burst into laughter.

It took Yiannis about a minute before attempting to bring himself up to his knees. He repeatedly tried to stand up, but kept falling back down to the floor. His face was covered with his own drool and his glazed eyes met mine for a brief moment. He looked straight through me, as though he had no idea I was even there. After a few minutes he managed to bring himself to his feet – then stumbled all around the cell and fell onto the plastic garden table like a drunk, knocking over the plastic ashtray that was filled with grimy water and cigarette butts. When finding
his feet he sat on the edge of Fivos’s bottom bunk and stared into space. He was silent. Christos tapped Yiannis’s face with his palm, but it was more like a subtle slap. He lit up a cigarette and passed it to Yiannis who took it, but remained in a euphoric state. Before managing to take a puff, Yiannis held the cigarette in his hand until half of it had burnt out. He finally managed to bring the cigarette to his lips – he took a long drag and the ash fell onto his lap. Holding the smoke in his lungs for a moment, he exhaled. ‘
Imoun sto spiti mou reh
– I was in my house, man,’ he mumbled. Yiannis began to tell us how amazing the experience was, that he’d hallucinated and believed he was at home. In fact, he loved the experience so much that he did it again – straight away. Only this time Christos strangled him with his bare hands. I don’t think Christos or Yiannis really considered how dangerous the stunt was. They thought it was hilarious.

That evening I lay on my top bunk facing the wall – the first night of many. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t so bad and that I wouldn’t be there for long. Thinking about my family – thinking about Riya and my friends – I wouldn’t allow myself to get emotional.
Man up
, I repeated in my thoughts. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with warm, smoke-polluted air. My cellmates didn’t seem like a threat to me, they were just a bit nuts.

There was a small TV in the corner, which was connected to many speakers that had been mounted around the cell in cardboard boxes. Fivos told me that Christos was a genius when it came to electronics, so other inmates would trust him to fix their electrical appliances. When asked to fix another inmate’s television, he would sometimes steal the internal speakers. He’d cut round holes into small cardboard boxes that the speakers could fit in. He mounted the speakers in them by burning the tips of drinking straws with a cigarette lighter and dripping the melted plastic between the edge of the speaker and the box, which acted
as a strong adhesive. When I was told that, I realised that it was melted plastic straws that were used to stick the colourful towels to the ceiling in the cell! I was impressed – my cellmates seemed to be imaginative and resourceful.

I turned around and could just about see the small television in the corner of the cell that my cellmates were watching. The volume was far too loud because of Christos’s DIY surround-sound system. I still remember the documentary that was on, which was in English but with Greek subtitles. It was about a Swiss woman called Elisabeth Sulser who supposedly had ‘fused senses’. Apparently, the sensory area in her brain was overactive, causing all of her senses to trigger at the same time. For example, she claimed that she could ‘see’ sounds. Whatever sound she heard, depending on the frequency, she would see different strands of colour in her peripheral vision. I remember her saying something along the lines of: ‘When a dog barks, I might see green. When a car drives past, I might see pink. If a telephone rings, I can see blue.’ Then Christos let out the loudest fart I’d ever heard.

‘
Kitrino!
– Yellow!’ he shouted.

On that note, I rolled over and forced myself to sleep.

T
he next day I woke up to the familiar clunking sound of a guard opening the cell door. There was a moment of confusion – it took me a few moments to remember where I was. I felt numb when it finally dawned on me.

‘
Symeou!
’ the guard shouted in his heavy Greek accent while poking my leg with the master key. He clapped his hands and motioned for me to hurry up. ‘
Pame, pame!
– Let’s go, let’s go!’

I was taken out of the Parartima wing into a small office where I was presented to a woman who introduced herself as Zoe, the social worker. She must have chain-smoked three or four cigarettes in the fifteen-minute period of me being there. I looked around the room, noticing a number of religious icons hanging on the walls. A clock presented a faint outline of Greece; the sound of the second-hand ticking from island to island resonated in the room. Her desk was messy and the ashtray overflowed with lipstick-stained cigarette butts. She asked me to fill out an application form and list the family members that would be visiting me. The entire thing was written in Greek and I had to ask her to translate it. I took the forms that she’d placed in front of me and began to write. Every pen that I attempted to use either wasn’t working or was so faint that you could hardly see the writing.

‘Do you have any other pens? These pens don’t work.’

She smiled and lit up another cigarette, almost ignoring my question. A strand of her mousy-brown hair hung in front of her face. She brushed it behind her ear with the claw-like red nail on her index finger. I shook my head to myself and took a deep, stinging breath of the air-conditioned, recycled smoke around me. I had to press the pen down as hard as I could, as if to carve the letters into the paper itself. I handed her the forms along with the broken pens. She filed the documents and placed the useless pens back into the pot on her desk, which really frustrated me!

‘My lawyer told me that I should be here for only about five days, so there won’t be many visits. My bail appeal is on 8 August.’

Zoe smiled, exposing a few nicotine-stained teeth. She gave one big nod, resting her double chin against her chest for a brief moment. Smoke exited each of her nostrils like a dragon. ‘You will be here a lot longer,’ she said, chillingly, while taking another puff of her cigarette.

I left the office and walked back down the corridor towards the Parartima wing. The comment left me irritated. Who was she to tell me that so confidently? How could she have known? She wasn’t a lawyer or a judge! I refused to believe her.

There was a barred gate that prevented prisoners from entering or exiting the wing. I stood behind it, completely unaware of how to open it. An African prisoner walked up to the gate and stood next to me. He was short and light-skinned with an unusual hairline that began at the top of his head. ‘You have to shout “
ypallileh
”,’ he told me. We looked over to the guard sitting about 30 feet away from us. In front of him was the bright red button that controlled the gate’s lock.

‘
Ypallileh!
’ the African man shouted.

The prison guard must have heard, but chose not to acknowledge him.

‘
Ypallileeeh!’
he shouted again, prolonging the last syllable. A deep buzzing and metallic clonk meant we could push the gate open and walk through.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

‘I have no fucking idea,’ he responded with a twang of an American accent. I had a feeling that he’d picked it up from American television shows. ‘Where’re you from? Australia or some shit?’

‘England.’

He had confused, squinted eyes that avoided contact with mine. ‘What the hell are you doing in Avlona? What did you do?’

I briefly explained why I was there, but I didn’t go into too much detail, remembering what Fivos’s response had been when I did a day earlier.

‘And why should I believe you?’ he asked.

I ignored the question and dismissed it with a smile. ‘Well, why are you here then?’

‘I was in Omonia Square and some police found a big bag of heroin in a trash can. They said it was mine.’

‘Was it?’

‘It wasn’t mine,’ he slurred.

We stopped in our tracks while I lit a cigarette and offered one to him. ‘And why should I believe you?’ I exhaled.

His eyes swung towards me. It looked like he wasn’t happy with what I’d just said – then he smiled. I lit the cigarette for him that he’d put between his lips.

‘You know what the police officer said to me? The one who arrested me?’ he took a big puff of his cigarette, holding it between his thumb and index finger like a spliff.

‘What did he say?’

‘“Well, if it’s not your drugs then it belongs to one of your brothers” – you know what he’s saying right?’ He gazed at me, waiting for me to ask as we stepped into the hallway of Parartima.

‘What was he saying?’

‘He’s saying all us fucking
arapides
– niggers are all the same. It doesn’t matter whose it was.’ He shrugged his small shoulders and walked through the puddle of water on the floor. I looked down and noticed that he was wearing brown sandals; they were slightly too big for him and it didn’t help that one of the buckles was broken. In addition to what he was saying, something as insignificant as a broken buckle made me feel sorry for him. As he shut the door to cell one behind him, he told me that his name was Jamal and that he had a chess set if I ever wanted to play.

The cell doors were left open for a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon, which allowed us to walk freely around the wing and courtyard. Almost all of the young offenders held a
pegleri
– coloured beads that had been threaded on a piece of thick black cord (like mini dumbbells). They were all different colours, deep blues and emerald greens. Some were even semi-precious stones threaded on thin stainless steel chains that glistened in the sun. The prisoners would throw the beads between each finger, swinging them from the pinky all the way up to the thumb. The beads quickly ran up and down their hands in an almost therapeutic motion. Every now and then, the beads looked as though they were floating in mid-air, defying the laws of physics. But they would always catch them and continue to twirl them gracefully between their fingers without having to think about it. I would often see prisoners with one leg crossed over the other, multitasking with their beads in their right hand, cigarette and
frappe
in their left.

Christos had a
pegleri
lying around the cell that he let me use. I spent the next few days walking up and down the courtyard smoking cigarettes, drinking
frappes
and practising with it. At least practising with the
pegleri
gave my mind something to focus on. It was a welcome distraction from the negative thoughts that plagued
me:
How long will I be here for? When will I finally clear my name?
As I attempted to twirl the beads between each of my fingers, it was easier to bury every worry that I had deep into the recesses of my mind. At first I would frequently drop it, having to pick it up and start over. As the days passed I became better and better, catching the cord when the beads swung over my index finger.

I was told that a judicial council would review my case upon five days of my arrival. I don’t know why, but I’d convinced myself that they would be releasing me. Maybe it was because I couldn’t deal with not knowing how long I would be held there. The five days had long passed. I’d got into the routine of waking up, speed walking through the wing and shouting through the barred gate. ‘
Ypallileh!
Have the papers arrived?’ The
ypallilos
– staff member – would always give an upward nod and tut, which is the cultural equivalent of us shaking our heads to say ‘no’. Each day I would wake up hoping that it was the day of my release, but each day I was let down. I started to accept what Zoe the social worker had told me; it was going to be a long time and I had no choice but to settle in there.

It didn’t take long to get to know most of the guys in Parartima. It was the smallest wing, where the guards tried to keep the Greek prisoners together – ‘away from the gypsies and Albanians’ as Fivos had said. There were still quite a few Albanians and Romany gypsies in Parartima, but the majority of the guys were Greek and it felt like they were all either a ‘Dimitris’ or a ‘Georgios’. The ones whose names I didn’t know (or couldn’t remember) I’d nicknamed in my head. For example, there was ‘telephone guy’, because he was always using the payphones, or ‘shit tattoo guy’ because he was covered with uneven prison tattoos that looked like a child had attacked him with a permanent marker.

One day I sat on one of the stone benches in the courtyard – I remember feeling the raging sun begin to burn my forehead and cheeks – and I read the graffiti that adorned the tall, concrete walls. The names of Greek football teams like AEK, Olympiakos and Panathinaikos covered them, along with other Greek writing like ‘
Gamo tin astynomia!
– Fuck the police!’ The walls that surrounded the courtyard had metres of spiralling barbed wire mounted on the top of them. Old, deflated footballs and basketballs were wedged within the metal. If you looked just above them, you were able to see a stunning, rocky mountain in the distance that was coated in a blanket of leafy, green trees.

An inmate called Georgios from cell nine, opposite mine, came and sat next to me.
‘Pou eisai alani mou?’
he said. I translated it as ‘where are you my homie?’ – or something similar to that.

‘
Fylaki, esi?
– Prison, you?’

Georgios smiled. ‘No
reh
, where are you
in your mind?
What’s up?’

I was picking up the slang terms,
slowly slowly.

His English was reasonably good, which surprised me because he was from a small Cretan village. There were guys in Avlona from cosmopolitan cities like Athens and Thessaloniki who couldn’t speak a word. Georgios and his best friend, also Georgios, had been caught with a hefty amount of cannabis and had both been held in Avlona for nine months. They reminded me of the Greek version of Ant and Dec – probably because they weren’t very tall, and usually strolled around together – almost inseparably. ‘You will see with time what it is really like here,’ Georgios said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

He crossed his right leg over his left and started to twirl his
pegleri
from finger to finger. ‘You see this guy?’ His eyes pointed to a guy at the other end of the courtyard. It was Marios – one of the guys who’d invited me into his cell on my first day for a
frappe
. ‘You met him yet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he tell you he was in prison for,
Andrea?
’

‘Theft, I think.’

Georgios burst into laughter, accidentally dropping his
pegleri
. ‘No
reh
. He raped a kid! Twelve-year-old boy! When he first came to Avlona we beat him every fucking day. But now we can’t; the guards protect him.’ Georgios spat on the ground in disgust while bending down to pick up his beads.

I looked over to Marios across the courtyard. He was sweaty and overweight with long oily hair that stuck to his neck. I couldn’t believe that I’d sat down and had a coffee with this guy, completely unaware that he was a paedophile.

‘And you know how fucked up the system is?’ Georgios continued. ‘Drugs is the worst in all of Greece. Men who sell drugs to feed their kids are worse than what this
hondro poustanos
– fat faggot did.
Den pistevo reh
– I don’t believe it, man.’ He spat on the ground again. ‘
Gamise ta
– Fuck it.’

My heart fell into my stomach. Hearing him say that the system was ‘fucked up’ made me worry about my own case. I needed a strong system to help me fight against the injustice, not a ‘fucked-up’ one.

Georgios continued his rant; his voice became louder and caught the attention of some other inmates in the courtyard. ‘Look, you see this fucking guy!?’ He pointed with his middle finger, making it quite obvious to those around us. It was the one who I’d nicknamed ‘telephone guy’.

‘This guy was in the army. On his last day he was in a bar with his army friends or something like that. He wanted some girl, but she told him “fuck you” in front of all his friends. They all laughed at him so he walked into the women’s bathroom when she was in there alone. He stamped on her head till she was dead
reh
.’

‘On her head?’ I repeated.

‘Her head
reh malaka.
Her fucking
kefali
,’ he reiterated, tapping his skull.

The guys in Avlona may have been bigger criminals than I’d thought. I started to understand why Fivos and Jamal reacted the way that they did when I told them my story – it was difficult to believe a word that came out of anyone else’s mouth. Although, the thought began to dawn on me – how could I know whether Georgios was telling the truth either? Maybe he was misinformed. How could I know?

‘
Reh Georgio,
we have to get out of this fucking place,’ I said.