Extradited (17 page)

‘Can you imagine
Stelios
, chasing the man with a shotgun?’ Vasilis, my other cellmate, said. He was in his late twenties – tall and thin with a kind face. He mimicked Stelios waddling along, holding a shotgun and sticking his tongue in and out like Stelios would sometimes do. ‘I call him the
savras
.’

‘What’s a
savras?
’ I asked.

‘It’s a lizard: this guy just reminds me of a lizard – look at him! You’ll notice that he does this thing with his tongue where he sticks it out sometimes,’ he said. Vasilis was from Athens – an ex-heroin addict who was caught mugging an old woman for her purse so that he could buy drugs. He seemed like such a normal guy and I couldn’t understand how he had ended up a heroin addict.

‘It starts off as a little thing you do with your friends, then it starts to be every week … then every few days … then every day. It’s an expensive habit and you will do anything for your next hit. Before you know it you’re robbing someone’s
yiayia
– grandma.
Malakia!
’ he said.

‘And what about now? Are you clean?’ I asked.

‘100 per cent clean. Even in prison I haven’t. I was a
malakas
back then, now oxygen is my drug,’ he said.

A new inmate called Ashmul had joined the cell while I was walking with Leonarde. He was from Bangladesh and, to this day,
I still have no idea why he was in prison. He spoke hardly any Greek and no English at all. Ashmul was a short, balding man in his thirties, with a big head, flat nose and pot belly. I’d been assigned to cell forty-nine just before him, and it was an unwritten rule that whoever had been in prison for the longest amount of time would be entitled to a bottom bunk. Vasilis was there for nine months before me, but preferred the top bunk above Stelios. I couldn’t understand his preference at first, because it meant that he would have to keep climbing up and down. That night, I discovered why.

When the sun set and it was time to sleep, the lights were turned off and I stared at the rectangular light fitting attached to the wall. The hundreds of cockroaches underneath it began to disperse until there were none left. They scurried around the cell and made themselves at home in our beds. Tiny cockroaches swarmed the underneath of the top bunk. However much I tried to get rid of them, more kept coming back. I could feel them falling on me and crawling all over my body. I lay there in streams of silent tears because I was in hell, and desperately wanted my life back. My mind repeated,
I don’t deserve this shit
, then I argued with myself, trying to give excuses for why I did deserve it. I needed a reason. I wasn’t a murderer, I didn’t kill Jonathan Hiles – but I deserved it because there were times when I may have acted selfishly in the past, or hadn’t worked hard enough in school. I needed to go to prison to realise what I’d lost; to realise not to take things for granted; to realise that there is a lot to achieve in this life; to see the real world, not the middle-class bubble that I knew.

But I reckon one night there would have been enough.

I
must have been far too exhausted for my sleeping mind to even conjure a dream, but the few hours of ‘nothingness’ at least offered some peace. My eyes opened and I couldn’t help but gasp when I realised that I was in Korydallos Prison; it was far more difficult to bear than waking up in one of the police cells, or in Avlona on my first morning. There were cockroaches crawling on my face and I quickly brushed them off in a panic. ‘What the fuck!’ I blurted aloud. Luckily I hadn’t woken any of my cellmates; it wouldn’t have been the best way to start my first day in cell forty-nine.

It was early and the
ypallilos
hadn’t yet unlocked the cell door. I lay there for hours, torturing myself with thoughts of the day ahead of me. Every negative thing in my life ran through my mind – the injustice of my extradition, the fear of life imprisonment – I even thought about my friend Michael like I’d always tend to do when things were bad. I sank deeper into my bunk, overcome with sadness and dread. I reminded myself that there were always people going through worse in the world – I just had to man the fuck up. The little cockroaches crawled around above me and I kept my attention on one, following it with my eyes. I let it crawl onto my finger – nothing to be afraid of.

An
ypallilos
unlocked the cell door. I shivered and I flicked the cockroach away. I stepped out of the cell onto the first floor hallway and lit a cigarette. Leaning over the chest-high bars, I overlooked a ground floor full of cats that would soon run away and be replaced with murderers, rapists and drug addicts. Inmates slowly began to fill the hallway to start their monotonous daily prison routines. After a few minutes, a herd of prisoners huddled near the front of the wing where a giant cauldron of watered-down milk was rolled in. I grabbed a plastic container from inside the cell and walked downstairs, thinking it would be a nice gesture to collect some while my cellmates were asleep. Within minutes I found myself in a ruck of prisoners again, all of whom were forcing themselves forward like animals and pushing me right to the back. I made my way out of the chaos and waited for it to be over. Once it’d calmed down, I collected the last dregs of milk and took it back to cell forty-nine. Stelios kept a box full of disposable plastic tumbler cups and straws under his bunk. I sneakily took a cup while he was asleep, but didn’t take any of his coffee to shake up a
frappe
. I just filled it up with milk, wrapped up warm and made my way outside.

I was the first one in the courtyard that morning, a large, open rectangular space. There was a small, concrete area at the front with two wonky basketball hoops and sets of wooden benches under shelters on either side. The rest of the courtyard’s ground was made up of grey sand and tiny broken-up rocks. As the hours passed, a group of Romany gypsies eventually began to play football on the gravel with a ball made of wrapped-up rags – some of them were barefoot and it was so cold.

Keeping myself to myself, I sat and hoped that no one would approach me. More inmates made their way into the courtyard and gathered into clusters of their own race. Ashmul came and sat with me for a few minutes – we attempted to communicate,
but the language barrier was far too high. I noticed a few strange looks from other inmates. They probably thought, a white and brown inmate sitting together? Insanity! When Ashmul wandered back into the wing I heard a voice behind me that was deep and powerful. I couldn’t understand the Greek words, but I knew that the man was speaking to me. I turned my head around to look at him – the first thing that I noticed was the five-dot prison tattoo on his left hand, which was the size of a baseball mitt. The man must have been in his thirties, bearded with a scar on the left side of his neck as though someone had tried to slice him with a right hook. He towered over me, broad and standing at around six and a half feet.

My heart began to palpitate. I lit a cigarette and didn’t look at him. ‘English,’ I muttered, hoping that he couldn’t speak a word.

‘I said … I haven’t seen you here. You’re not an
Ellinas?
– a Greek?’ he asked in his thick accent.

‘
Kyprios apo Londino
– Cypriot from London.’

‘
Milas Ellinika reh
– You speak Greek, man,’ he said.

‘Not as good as your English.’

‘Here in prison, you are a Greek. You are one of us, unless you want to be fucking Albanian? Or are you a
Pakistanos
like your friend?’ he chuckled – referring to Ashmul.

‘I’m Greek.’

‘You’re with us now.
Onoma?
– Name?’ he asked.

‘Andreas.’

He pointed to his chest. ‘
Apollo
. Come to my
keli
– cell, whenever you want, number thirty-three. We will talk and drink coffee,’ he said. He strolled off, back into the wing.

I had no intention of going to Apollo’s cell for a coffee – he was being too nice and I had an uneasy feeling about it in the pit of my stomach.

The gypsies finished playing football, so I walked onto the
rocky part of the courtyard and circled it for a while. I saw an inmate shouting at the tall, concrete wall at the back of the courtyard. This guy’s nuts, I thought. When I walked a bit closer I could hear faint, shouting voices responding to him. The wall at the back end of Gamma’s courtyard met with Delta’s courtyard, and the guy was arguing with someone from the neighbouring wing. Suddenly I noticed a rectangular package land a few metres away from my feet. Someone had hurled it from Delta into Gamma over the wall. The man sprinted over, grabbed the package and stuffed it inside his jacket before zipping it up and casually walking back to the wing – whistling. I looked around; there were no guards supervising the courtyard whatsoever.

My cellmate Stelios didn’t seem to remember Ashmul’s name. He would accidentally refer to him as ‘
Moushmou
’, or ‘
Moushmoul
’, and it had slowly evolved into the nickname ‘
Moushmoullo
’. Then he would blurt out different variations like ‘
Moushmoullides!
’ (which could pass as a strange Greek surname) or ‘
Moushmoullopita!
’ (which quite literally means a ‘
Moushmoullo
pie’). I felt sorry for Ashmul, not just because he had been assigned a stupid name, but because he had no family outside of prison to financially support him. To help out, we would sometimes give him cigarettes or phone cards, and in return he’d clean the cell. Whenever he asked if it was OK to clean, he would try to say ‘
Poro na kathariso?
– Can I clean?’ but because of his thick Bangladeshi accent, he would accidentally say ‘
Poro na katouriso?
’ which means ‘Can I urinate?’ However depressed I was, I couldn’t help but find it quite funny.

Stelios tried to correct him. ‘
Kathariso!
– I clean!’

Ashmul attempted to repeat the word. ‘
Katouriso!
– I urinate!’

‘
Ka-THA-riso!
– I CLEAN!’ Stelios reiterated.

‘
Ka-TOU-riso!
– I URINATE!’ Ashmul struggled.

‘
Ahhh Moushmoullo!
’ Stelios said, shaking his head and smiling. He was still wearing the McDonald’s T-shirt and I hadn’t seen him leave the cell yet. His days would involve sitting on his bunk chain-smoking, drinking
frappes
and moaning. The majority of what came out of his mouth were complaints. Every day he would list the same things about prison that he didn’t like and count them on his fingers. ‘
Ohi mastoura, ohi sex, ohi kalo fayito!
– No weed, no sex, no good food!’ He moaned about the same things over and over again, especially about the heroin addicts. They would continuously ask him for coffee or cigarettes
because they’d spent their own money on drugs. Desperate for more drugs, they would pickpocket and cause trouble. It made life in prison for everyone else harder than it already was.

I’d been in Korydallos Prison for almost a week. The clunking sound of heavy rain pattered on the roof and echoed within the Gamma wing. When it rained the guards would shut the door that led to the courtyard – it left the wing overcrowded because no one was allowed to go outside. Rainwater leaked from several parts of the ceiling like dripping taps, leaving the wing slippery with a damp smell. The ground floor was heaving with criminals and it was muggy from an overload of body heat. Everyone was so crammed together, and it was the best opportunity for pickpockets to act. Fights would often kick off and inmates would start to scream, shout and wolf-whistle in fascination at the men who were beating each other senseless.

‘
Andrea, ela!
– Andreas, come!’ Apollo shouted over a chaotic uproar of spectators. I tried to keep Apollo at arm’s length, but he was adamant that I was ‘with’ him and his clique. I’d avoided him as much as I could, but I was put into a position where I couldn’t say no. I walked into his cell.

‘
Tsigaro
– Cigarette?’ he said, offering me the box.

I took one and lit it. ‘Thanks
reh
.’

‘
Tipote
– Nothing.’

‘You been in here a long time?’ I asked.

‘Ten years for a bank robbery,’ Apollo responded.

‘Oh … fuck,’ I was lost for words.

He made the ‘
malakia
’ hand gesture and continued. ‘Then when I was let out I had no fucking money. I killed a man for €20,000 and now I’m back. Five months it’s been.’

‘
Gamise ta
– Fuck,’ I replied. It made me feel uncomfortable knowing that he was a hit man – I wanted to get the hell out of his cell as quickly as possible! ‘Anyway
reh Apollo
, I gotta go make a quick phone call.’

‘
Katse reh malaka
– Sit my friend.’

‘In a bit, man, I just have to call my girl quickly,’ I said.

‘Your girl? She is your Beyoncé?’ he asked.

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. ‘What do you mean
my
Beyoncé?’

‘I have two Beyoncés, one’s in Korydallos Prison for women, so I found another.’

‘I think you mean “fiancée”, not “Beyoncé”, she’s a singer!’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You mean “
fiancée
”. Beyoncé’s the one who’s married to Jay Z,’ I told him.

‘What are you talking about!?’ he asked in his thick Greek accent. His face was stern and confused.

I tutted and smiled because I was nervous. ‘Come on, you know
reh
. She was in the group Destiny’s Child.’

He shook his head. ‘No. She’s not my fucking child. She is my Beyoncé,’ he said with a harsh and serious voice.

‘Oh,
your Beyoncé!
No, I don’t have a Beyoncé, just a
kopella
– girlfriend. Why is your Beyoncé in prison?’ I asked.

‘She’s a
poutana!
– whore! No one wants this for a Beyoncé.’ His frown turned into a smile. ‘They are all just fucking
poutanes
– whores – anyway. Not our mothers and sisters, but all the rest.’

I stood up. ‘Anyway
reh
. I’ll see you later.’

‘
Pineis?
– You drink?’ he asked, trying to delay my exit.

‘No
reh
, I’m all right.’

‘I don’t mean coffee.’ He put his index finger to his nose and sniffed. ‘
Pineis?
– you drink?
Prezza?
’ – the slang term for heroin.

‘
Ohi
– No,’ I tutted.

‘
Katse reh
– Sit, man.’

‘In a bit, I’ve gotta go call her before she leaves her house,’ I lied.

‘She won’t leave,’ he pointed at me with his index finger. ‘You are the one who wants to leave.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘I would love to leave. You really wanna stay in this fucking place?’ I said smiling – attempting to generalise his words.

‘
Ade reh katse!
– Come on, man, sit! This is an insult to me.’

I sat down on the bottom bunk.