Extradited (12 page)

He nodded and smiled, continuing to throw his
pegleri
up and down his fingers.

I stared at the mountain in the distance. ‘Man, you don’t get that where I’m from,’ I said. If I gazed at it for long enough, I could almost mentally block out the barbed-wired walls and imagine myself standing at the peak of it – freedom.

‘
Poly omorfo
– very beautiful,’ he added. Georgios and I stared at it for a short moment as if we could run towards it. ‘
Reh Andrea,
you know when I’m out of this fucking place, you know where I wanna live?’ he asked.

‘Where?’

‘Las Vegas, man.’

‘Las Vegas, eh?’

‘Yeah. Everything about Las Vegas is amazing: the lights, the women, the casinos … the party,’ he winked.

I nodded in agreement and offered him a smile. ‘I’ve never been,’ I told him. ‘Maybe one day, if I don’t go down for twenty years!’ I said, sarcastically.

‘Yeah,’ he responded. ‘But where is Las Vegas, man? Is it in America?’

‘Yeah, it’s in America,’ I chuckled.

Georgios and I sat outside for another hour. I began to build a picture of what his life was like in a small Cretan village, not too far from the party town of Malia. He told me far-fetched stories of the family vendettas, organised crime and corrupt policing that happen in their small community. He made it sound like the Sicilian village of Corleone in the 1900s, the way it was portrayed in
The Godfather: Part II
. He said that he made a living from selling drugs and prostituting women. He wouldn’t pay the women, he would rent a house for them to live in, buy them everything they needed, prostitute them and keep any profits. They were all Eastern European women; he told me there was no way he would ever prostitute a Greek girl.

Georgios was very homophobic, claiming that he wanted to behead all the homosexuals in the world. Regardless of his severe homophobia, he also believed that it was fine to fuck a man because the one getting ‘fucked’ was the only ‘
poustanos
– faggot’ in his eyes. It seemed as though his belief was that a real man has sex with absolutely any human being with a pulse; a real man can have sex with another man, because he has power over that man and dominates him with masculinity. He told me that a boy in his village was gay, and that all the boys used to ‘fuck him’.

He said, ‘Maybe you drink a bit too much, maybe you take a bit too much drugs, you see a
kolo
– bum, you get a
gavla
– boner. It happens!’

I admit that I did find the statement quite funny, but I’ll never understand his twisted view. I’m not homophobic in the slightest and I found the contradiction to be ignorant and pathetic.

He was really racist too, and said things like, ‘Black people make me sick. They should bring back slavery.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. When I asked him what black people had ever done to him, he answered, ‘Nothing, I don’t care, they should clean my feet.’ He even said, ‘If I ever saw a fucking Turk, I would stab
him. I hate Turks,’ then he would conclude his rant with ‘but the Turks …
perrrr
… they have very beautiful women.’

It was the first time in my life that I’d ever heard such racism. It seemed like he actually wanted to hurt people because of their ethnicity. I was never really exposed to serious racism growing up – then again, my upbringing was completely different from his. In his village there was a clear divide between the Greeks and ethnic minorities. On the other hand, my school in north London was filled with kids from many different ethnic backgrounds. Whatever ethnicity, or whatever the colour of someone’s skin, being British was always the common denominator.

After speaking with Georgios, I contemplated whether he was a bad person or not. I don’t think that he was; I knew that he held these strong views only because of the life that he’d led. It made me speculate what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person really is. If he’d lived a life similar to mine, he probably wouldn’t have had these unsettling opinions. He’d also probably know where Las Vegas was before deciding that he wanted to live there.

My conversation with Georgios made me wonder what I would have been like if we’d swapped lives. What if I’d led a life like his? We’ll never know! Maybe most of us would have ended up a racist, homophobic, drug-dealing pimp too.

I
would call my girlfriend Riya every day at 8 p.m., but there was always a long wait for the phones because lock-in would be at 8.30. There were only four payphones in Parartima and some inmates would talk for absolutely ages.

When waiting for one of the phones, Marios (the apparent paedophile) was waiting too. He asked me for a cigarette.

I ignored his request.
‘Yiati eisai mesa reh?
– Why are you inside, man?’ I asked.

He grinned, knowing that I’d probably been told of his real crime. He started to thrust his hips and smirk.
‘Dodeka chronon –
twelve years old,’ he winked.

‘You’re a sick cunt.’ I knew that he wouldn’t understand a word of what I’d said.

‘Reh Andrea, dose mou ena tsigaro!
– Andreas, man, give me a cigarette!’

‘No,’ I said. It couldn’t be helped; there was no way I was giving him anything. A telephone had become free; I picked it up and dialled the UK country code and Riya’s number that I’d memorised. For the entire conversation I could sense him behind me – staring.

In the main hallway of the Parartima wing, there was a big, plastic, cone-shaped speaker mounted onto the ceiling. If the guards wanted you for anything, or it was a visiting day, you would hear your name being called out. It was meant to be white, but was a blend of different shades of stained, dirty browns. A quarter of the cone had been chipped away, as though it was a pie and someone had cut out an uneven, crooked slice. It must have been there for years, having had the sound of thousands of prisoners’ names resonate within it.

When one of the guards called for you, distinguishing your own name was close to impossible. They must have been cupping their hands over their mouths and standing 10 feet away from the microphone. To make the muffled utterances even more difficult to comprehend, they were pronouncing my name in such strange ways. So oddly that it wasn’t my name any more. So on visiting days, I had to be on guard. I had to know that I would be called at some point and listen out for something that could potentially be my name. If not, I feared that I would miss the visit and my family would be sitting behind a pane of glass, holding a telephone and waiting for a son who didn’t turn up. To prevent that from happening I would hover around the speaker and walk up and down the corridor, lightly spinning my
pegleri
between my index and middle finger. When passing another inmate, it seemed to be the norm to acknowledge each other with a wink.

Sometimes I would hear my name after fifteen minutes – other times I could be waiting for two or three hours. My family would travel for three hours from central Athens, having to take two trains and a taxi to the Avlona complex. Every time they visited, they would bring me three letters from friends and family who were supporting me at home. Reading them would either put a huge smile on my face or leave me with tears in my eyes.

I hadn’t been in Avlona for very long, and already my entire
body was covered in flea bites – my arms and legs, my chest and back, even my hands were covered. The mattress that I’d been sleeping on must have been infested. It looked as though I had chickenpox and I was in constant pain. My mum watched me in complete shock as I walked over to the glass dividing us and sat down. She wanted to tell the guards to give me a new mattress, but I told her that it wasn’t as bad as it looked and I’d sort it out. I didn’t want to irritate the guards too much and bring attention to myself. The last thing I needed was my mum complaining, because I knew that they wouldn’t appreciate that.

After briefly explaining what was happening on the inside, I needed to know what was happening outside of the prison walls. My mum told me that a woman called Christine Sakali, who she’d met through the church, was supporting her greatly and would be driving up to Avlona to pick up my parents and take them to her house for a coffee. It was amazing that a completely random person could be so kind to my family.

‘And what’s going on with my bail appeal?’ I asked.

My dad then told me that George Pyromallis’s office had finally got through to the courthouse in Zante, who said that they had no record of any bail appeal at all. They’d forgotten about me, leaving me to rot. After hearing the news, any faith I did have in the Greek justice system disappeared completely. As difficult as it was to hear, I knew it was just as difficult for my parents to tell me. I struggled to digest more bad news, which seemed endless. I was the lowest I’d ever been and was trying desperately to pick myself back up – it felt as if I was being kicked back down and made to feel even worse. The only things getting me through were the visits from my family. I loved seeing them, even when the news was bad. We would have only half an hour to speak, or a bit longer if we were lucky. Whenever I saw them it felt as though I wasn’t in prison any more. For those precious minutes, it felt
as though there wasn’t really a pane of dirty glass between us. I was on the same side as them – free. As soon as the bell rang and the visiting time had run out, I was overcome with sadness every time. I didn’t want to go back to the Parartima wing. After each visit I relived my first day in Avlona all over again.

After that first visit I walked to the Chief Guard’s office to ask him for a new mattress. Everyone seemed to refer to him as the
‘Archi Fylakas
’, and his office was similar to that of the social worker’s; a number of religious icons were hung on the walls. He sat behind his desk with a cigarette in hand and the first few buttons of his shirt undone – he had thick chest hair and a gold crucifix for all to see. He was a real
manga
– geezer … a real lad. I showed him the hundreds of bites on my body, but he just shouted at me in Greek. I understood the words for ‘outside’ and ‘broom’. Unofficial sign language helped me understand that he was telling me to take the mattress outside and beat it with a broom handle. He said it abruptly, and gestured for me to leave the office as soon as possible. I didn’t want to risk another sweltering night of being bitten so badly. I don’t know why he couldn’t just have given me a new mattress; there was an entire room full of clean ones. When I asked the question, he became aggressive, shouting fast strands of Greek words that I couldn’t understand even though he spoke perfect English. I told him that I didn’t understand.

‘I’ll beat the shit out of you, maybe then you’ll understand.
Eimaste stin Ellada, milame Ellinika!
– We are in Greece, we speak Greek!’

I took the thin mattress into the courtyard along with a broom that we had in our cell. I hurled it over one of the bars that were there for pull-up exercises. I stood next to the hanging mattress like a baseball player, battering it with the broom and watching the brown dirt burst out of it with each strike. I heard some cheers, which caught my attention. A group of young offenders
were playing football and one of the inmates had scored a goal – the ‘posts’ were painted onto the concrete wall. I stopped battering the mattress and took a moment to watch them. ‘Shit tattoo guy’ was playing; he was a Romany gypsy called Costantinos, but went by his surname – Paiteris. He had a rough face and an oriental look to his eyes, which always had swollen, grey bags underneath. His mouth was a constant frown, so when he did smile it looked almost malicious.

Fivos had told me to stay away from him, saying that he was the biggest
roufianos
in prison – ‘You’ll get into trouble if you talk to him.’ I’d seen Paiteris act like a
malakas
before – a few days before he had stabbed another inmate’s leg with a pen for no reason. I felt sorry for the guy who was getting stabbed. His name was Dimitris but everyone called him ‘
Tripa
’, which means ‘hole’. He was involved in a train accident when he was a kid and doctors had to drill a hole in his neck to save his life. He would often come into our cell for a coffee and a cigarette. I’d hear him wheezing next to me and sometimes catch a glimpse of smoke exiting his neck hole as he laughed. I don’t know why Paiteris did that to Tripa, I think he was just a very angry person. I’d even caught Paiteris speaking on one of the phones to his ‘wife’, shouting things like ‘
Gamo ta paidia mas!
– Fuck our children!’ or ‘
Poutana! Na sas skotoso!
– You whore! I’m gonna kill you!’

As I beat my mattress, I watched him playing football – dribbling and running through people like a professional. He was doing kick-ups and keeping the ball up with his knees while he ran around the opposition. The ball was an extension of him; at times it seemed as though the ball was stuck to his foot with an invisible elastic band. He did 360-degree turns on one foot with the ball held tightly between his other foot and the shin above it. I witnessed him let the ball go from his shin and foot, propelling it upwards and volleying it into the goal at full pelt. Such a
repulsive person was performing in a way that was so beautiful; it was amazing to watch. He could take on the entire opposition single-handedly, but wasn’t tactically football-minded in the slightest. He’d probably learned these skills in the streets rather than football training on Sunday mornings – it seemed like he had no sense of teamwork whatsoever. I imagined what he could have been like if had been trained from a young age – maybe he would have been the next Cristiano Ronaldo.

I continued to beat the mattress as much as I could and then took it back to my cell. It probably made little difference. Still, I threw it onto my bunk and made my bed, ready to test it that night. Some time later (it may have even been the next day) I walked over to cell one with Fivos, who was going to play chess with Jamal.

I sat down on Jamal’s bunk while they set the board up.

‘What the fuck is all that?’ Jamal asked, referring to the flea bites covering my arms and hands. He had an unnecessarily exaggerated look of disgust on his face while pointing at me like a schoolboy bully.

‘Bites, what do they look like?’

‘Like you are fucking diseased, man,’ he responded.

Fivos moved a white pawn. ‘They’ve eaten you alive, you must have sweet blood,’ he added.

Jamal lit a cigarette – it almost looked like a novelty large one because he was such a small guy. He took a long drag and moved the black pawn opposite. ‘I’ve been here for a year and I’ve never had one bite,’ he said.

Fivos laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s because your blood is black and stinky.’

Jamal would hear stuff like that on a daily basis. He made out as though it didn’t bother him when everyone was around. When it was just the two of us, I asked him how the comments
made him feel and he told me that it made him ‘very angry and upset’ – understandably. He was thirty years old and all of the guards knew it. He was sent to Avlona only because he claimed that he was seventeen. In fact, he told me that his name wasn’t even Jamal, it was Mohammad and he was a Somali illegal immigrant from Syria. When he was arrested in Athens, he said that ‘Jamal’ was the first name that came to mind. He had a job in Avlona as a cleaner. In return, the guards looked after him, giving him cigarettes and pre-paid telephone cards to call his family, who were scattered all over the world. He would rarely use them; most of the time he would exchange them for more cigarettes. I would often hear his name being called on the muffled speaker for him to clean their offices – no surname, just ‘
Jamalli … Jamalli!
’ One guard even used to take him outside of the prison walls and make him clean his car. I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t allowed, but it didn’t surprise me that the guards made up rules as they went along. A few days earlier I’d seen Jamal walking with one of the guards out of the wing; he must have been about to start work. The guard looked at me, patted Jamal on the head and patronisingly said, ‘He’s a very good little black boy, isn’t he?’ Jamal wouldn’t react to the racist remarks, he always remained calm and silent – but I noticed that he found it more difficult to hold his tongue when my cellmate Christos spoke to him. Christos refused to call him by his name – instead he would refer to him as ‘
o mavros
– the black’ or ‘
arapis
’, which means ‘nigger’. His favourite phrase, which he also used to say to me, was ‘
gamo to spiti sou!
– Fuck your home!’

One night I discovered that Christos was more insane than I initially thought. He woke me up at four o’clock in the morning and was shouting something in Greek that I didn’t understand – waving his hands around. I told him to go back to sleep, but he kept on poking me with a stiff piece of thin wire. I managed to wake myself up and slid off the top bunk.

‘Ti thelis esi?
– What do you want?’ I asked him. I softly massaged my temples, having no idea what he was yapping on about.

Fivos, who was lying in his bunk, translated for us. ‘
Christos
says he wants you to pierce his tongue.’

I rubbed my eyes, hardly able to see. ‘He wants me to pierce his tongue?’

‘Yes,’ Fivos said, sitting up.

‘He wants
me
to pierce his tongue?’

‘Yes
reh!
I told you already, he is an arsehole!’ Fivos said, chuckling.