Heaven: A Prison Diary (15 page)

‘I was so much
looking forward to putting you on report, Jeffrey,’ he says, ‘but I was pretty
sure you would come up with a good excuse as to what you were doing at
eightfifteen.’

‘I was with the
vicar,’ I tell him.

NOVEMBER 2001

Leon is sitting
in the waiting room at SMU ready for his HDC ajudication with Mr Berlyn (deputy
governor) and Mr Simpson (resident probation officer).

Leon called his
fiancée again last night.

The three
suitors have arrived from India, and once Sunita has made her choice (and if
she doesn’t, her parents will decide for her) she will then be flown back to
India to meet the man’s parents. The couple will then return to England to
prepare for a wedding on 6 December, the day before Leon will be released.

Sunita’s plan
is to take only hand luggage on the flight, so that when she returns, she will
walk straight through customs while her parents wait to pick up their luggage
from the baggage hall. Leon’s brother will be waiting in the arrivals hall and
drive her straight to Birmingham, where she and Leon will be married later that
day.

If the board
grants Leon his tagging, he will leave NSC at eight o’clock on the Saturday,
and drive straight to Birmingham, and they will be man and wife before the
family can work out where she’s disappeared. Everything is riding on the result
of Leon’s interview with the board in a few minutes’ time. Mr Berlyn calls for
Leon at ten-eleven and I escort him up to the interview room.

Carl and I run
around the kitchen pretending to be busy. SMU is on full alert because Martin
Narey, the director-general, arrived a few minutes ago.

Leon appears,
almost in tears. The
board have
turned down his
application. I fear he may abscond tonight and take the law into his own hands.

The Rev Derek
Johnson drops in to tell us that he’s met with the governor, who does not have
the authority to sanction a wedding in the chapel. A prisoner must have at
least nine months to serve before he can apply for such a privilege. He adds
that no one has ever come across such an unusual set of circumstances.

Leon now can’t
do anything until seven o’clock this evening when he’s arranged to phone his
fiancée on her mobile. Before he leaves us, he adds two more pieces of
information. First, his father, an extremely wealthy man, has offered a dowry
of £500,000 to Sunita’s family. Leon’s mother is a Brahmini, but because his
father is Irish, their son is unacceptable. One can only wonder how much the
three suitors from India are offering as a dowry for this girl they have yet to
meet. Second, Sunita’s sister was subjected to the same drama two years ago,
and is now going through a messy divorce. Carl and I agree to meet in Leon’s
room at 7.30 pm and plan his next move.

I leave for
lunch a few minutes before the director-general is due to arrive at SMU. By the
time I’ve finished my cauliflower cheese and gone back to the south block to
make a couple of phone calls, Mr Narey has moved on to visit the lifers’
quarters. I return to work at one o’clock.

I drop in to
see Doug, who confirms that Exotic Foods have agreed to interview him on Friday
morning, and he is hoping to begin work with them on Monday week, so I could
become hospital orderly in two weeks’ time.

Leon opens the
door of his room to greet us with a warm smile. Sunita has escaped from
Sheffield and has driven down to Portsmouth to stay with his brother and
sister-inlaw. She has purchased a new phone, as she is worried that her parents
will hire a detective to trace her through the mobile Leon bought for her.

Leon removes a
thick bundle of letters from his shelf.

‘She writes
twice a day,’ he says.

I am delighted
by the news, but suggest to Carl after we’ve left that it won’t take a
particularly bright private detective to work out Sunita might be staying with
Leon’s brother.

I have a
feeling this saga is not yet over.

I have
mentioned the worthwhile role played by the Samaritans who train selected
prisoners as Listeners. At NSC they have taken this trust one stage further and
set aside a room where a pre-programmed mobile phone has been provided for
inmates who need to call the Samaritans.

This service
has become very popular, as more and more prisoners claim to be in need of
succour from the Samaritans; so much so that Mr New recently became suspicious.

After one
particularly long call, which was interspersed with laughter, he confiscated
the phone and quickly discovered what the inmates had been up to. They had been
removing the Sim card from inside the phone and replacing it with one of their
own that had been smuggled in.

As of today,
there will no longer be a dedicated room for the Samaritans, or a mobile phone.

This will be my
last labour board if I am to join Doug in the hospital next week. I therefore
suggest to Carl that he should take charge as if I wasn’t there. During the
rest of the morning, whenever a prisoner calls in with some problem, Carl
handles it. My only worry is that as Carl has another fifteen months to serve
before he’ll be eligible for a tag, he may become bored long before his
sentence is up.

Mr New calls
Spring Hill to ask Mr Payne why my transfer is taking so long. He’s told that
Spring Hill is about to face a public enquiry as a consequence of something
that happened before he became governor. Mr Payne fears that the press will be
swarming all over the place and although he is quite willing to have me, he
can’t let me know his decision for at least another couple of weeks.

I press Mr New
for the details of what could possibly cause so much public interest but he
refuses to discuss it. I wonder if it’s simply a ploy to keep me from being
transferred.
12

I visit Leon in
the north block. He has just come off the phone to his fiancée, still safely
ensconced in Portsmouth with Leon’s brother. Sunita’s three Indian suitors have
returned home accompanied by her mother, leaving her father in Bradford. Sunita
has rung her father who has agreed to meet Leon. But he still doesn’t know that
Leon is in jail and won’t be released for another three weeks.

The best laid
plans of mice and convicts.

I am making tea
for Mr Simpson at SMU when the duty officer asks me to report to the hospital
for a suicide watch. Doug has gone to Boston for his Exotic Foods interview, so
they are short of an orderly.

Suicide watch
is quite common in prison, and this is the second I’ve covered in three weeks.
Linda and Gail have to judge whether the prisoner is genuinely considering
taking his own life, or simply looking for tea and sympathy and a chance to sit
and watch television.

I turn up at
the hospital a few minutes later to find my charge is a man of about
forty-five, squat, thick set, covered in tattoos, with several teeth missing.
David is serving a six-year sentence for GBH. What puzzles me is that he is due
to be released on 14 January, so he only has a few more weeks of his sentence
to complete. All I’m expected to do is to keep an eye on him while Gail gets on
with her other duties, which today include taking care of a prisoner who was
injured after being thrown through a window at his previous jail.

David’s first
request is for a glass of water, which is no problem. He then disappears into
the lavatory, and doesn’t reappear again for some time, when he requests
another glass of water. No sooner has he gulped that down than the vicar
arrives. He sits down next to David and asks if he can help. I ask David if he
wants me to leave.

‘No,’ he says,
but he would like another glass of water.

He then tells
the vicar about the demons that visit him during the night, insisting that he
must commit more crimes, and as he wants to go straight, he doesn’t know what
to do.

‘Are you a
practising member of any faith?’ asks the Reverend.

‘Yeah,’ replies
David, ‘I believe in God and life after death, but I’ve never been sure which
religion would be best for me.’

A long and
thoughtful discussion follows after which David decides he’s Church of England.
The only thing of interest that comes out of the talk is that David wants to
return to Nottingham jail, because he feels safer from the demons there, and
more importantly they have a full-time psychiatrist who understands his
problem. This also puzzles me. We have our own psychiatrist, Val, who is on
duty at SMU this morning.

Why would
anyone want to leave NSC to return to a hell-hole like Nottingham?

Once the vicar
has left, David disappears back into the lavatory and after another long period
of time, returns and requests another glass of water.

Gail pops her
head round the door to inform David that the governor has decided he can return
to Nottingham, so he should go back to his room and pack his belongings.

David looks
happy for the first time. He drains the glass of water and gets up to leave.

Are you also
puzzled?

Over lunch Dave
(lifer), who after eighteen years has seen it all, tells me what David was
really up to. Last night David was rumoured to be high on heroin, and feared
having to take an MDT today. Had he failed that test, he would have had
twenty-eight days added to his sentence and then been sent back to Nottingham.
So we were treated to his little performance with the demons. Drinking gallons
of water can flush heroin out of the system in twenty-four hours, and although
David’s still off to Nottingham, he avoided the added twenty-eight days. I’m so
dim. I should have spotted it.

Mr Lewis (the
governing governor) has received a letter from the Shadow Home Secretary, Sir
Brian Mawhinney, requesting to visit me.

Disaster.
Doug returns from his interview with Exotic Foods
and tells me that they don’t need him to start work until the middle of
January. As he will be eligible for resettlement in February, and able to
return to work with his own company, why should he bother? So he’s decided to
stay on as hospital orderly for the next couple of months.

My only hope
now is the governor of Spring Hill.

I lie awake for
hours, plotting. Although I’m currently revising the sixth draft of
Sons of Fortune
, I’ve come up with a new
idea for the ending, which will require some medical research. I will have to
seek advice from Dr Walling.

It’s just been
officially announced that Mr Lewis will retire as governing governor on 1

January.
I go over to the unit office and pick up a labour
board change of job application form. If I’m not going to be hospital orderly
I’ve decided to apply for his job. (See opposite).

Doug tells me
that he’s going to try another ploy to get outside work. He has a friend in
March who runs a small haulage company (three
lorries
),
who will offer him a job as a driver. The only problem is that he doesn’t work
out of Boston, which is one of the current specifications for anyone who wishes
to take up outside employment. However, Doug’s wife Wendy will meet the
potential employer today and get him to send a fax offering Doug a job of
driving loads from Boston back to March. We will have to wait and see if Mr
Berlyn will sanction this. I refuse to get excited.

I walk down to
the football field and watch NSC play Witherton. We lose 5-0 so there’s not a
lot more to report, other than it was very cold standing on the touch line; the
wind was blowing in off the next landmass to the east, which happens to be
Russia.

I sit in my
room reading This Week, an excellent journal if you want an overall view of the
week’s events. It gives me a chance to bring myself up to date with the
situation in Afghanistan, America and even NSC.

Under the
heading, ‘A Bad Week’, it seems that a Jeffrey Archer look-alike is complaining
about being regularly stopped by the police to make sure I haven’t escaped.
‘It’s most unfair,’ he protests, ‘it’s ruined my life.’ The paper felt his
protests would have been more convincing if he hadn’t travelled down to NSC
accompanied by a tabloid to have his photograph taken outside the prison.

I visit Leon in
his room on the north block.

His fiancée has
told her father that he is in Norway on business, and won’t be returning to
England until 21 December, the day he’s released from prison.