Two days after my visit, I got word from Mum that the article had been published in the Mirror under the headline, 'Save my innocent girl from jail hell'. Tom had described my trial as being 'shambolic' and highlighted the fact that my family wouldn't have even known what prison I was in if he hadn't helped to track me down.
'A MUM pleaded yesterday for her daughter to be freed from a grim Spanish jail where she faces 10 years for drug-running. Mum Pat said: "My poor daughter is totally innocent but now she's looking at the prospect of being in jail until she's 42. I can't stand to see her in that horrible place." And in an emotional reunion, Terry begged: "Please help me get out of here. I can't take it much longer."'
I was pleased that the world was finally getting to know the truth and even more made up that none of the guards had kicked off about it. If they had read the piece then they were keeping it to themselves because nobody had said a word to me.
'That's not the only good news that I've got for you,' Mum told me. 'The BBC have rung. They want to do an interview with you about your case over the phone tomorrow. People are finally starting to sit up and take notice, Terry. The more publicity we can get the better 'cause then they'll see what a joke this whole thing is and maybe you'll get let out.'
'I'll do it,' I told her. 'There's no way I'm giving up a decade of my life without a fight.'
My interview with the BBC went without a hitch and before I knew it, Radio 5 Live and Look East were ringing Mum up, asking if she would be a guest on their shows. All of the British journalists covering the story seemed sympathetic to my plight. If the Home Secretary had shown an ounce of compassion and reacted the way they did, I wouldn't have been sent down in the first place.
The flurry of media attention got citizens up and down the country interested in my case and before I knew it, I was receiving up to thirty letters a week. My mum also got random people posting cash to her, which was brilliant. It was heart-warming to know that they were concerned enough about my plight to dip into their wallets.
Things were starting to look up for me on the wing as well. I managed to befriend some of the ETA girls, who were all lovely. Their politics reminded me of my time in Northern Ireland, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but none of them were really proper terrorists. They all seemed to have fallen victim to the Guardia Civil's love of banging people up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody who knocks about with criminals is automatically a villain in the eyes of the Spanish police. If you're unlucky enough to be there when somebody gets raided then the betting is that you'll be hauled off to jail with them.
Over the weeks I grew particularly close to a girl called Andia, who had been given a five-year sentence after being caught with an ETA boy in her house. Quite how that merited such a lengthy stint inside, I will never know. She could speak a little bit of English and made sure that none of the other inmates gave me any problems. The ETA girls were at the top of the prison hierarchy. All of the other groups were constantly competing for lesser positions of power but nobody ever challenged Andia and her friends. They were the one faction in the prison that was completely untouchable.
I also became pally with an African woman called Mama Rosa, who was arrested in Gran Canaria with six million pesetas on her. The police had no proof whatsoever that it was earned through illegal means, but locked her up for eight years anyway under the logic that it must have been drug money. Her sentence never got her down though; she was always smiling and gave me a big hug whenever I saw her. Nobody ever had a clue what she was on about because she didn't speak a word of Spanish or English so most of our conversations included a lot of gesturing and pointing at things. She couldn't read or write either, which must have made it difficult for her to keep in touch with anybody outside of the prison. If I was her, I probably wouldn't have been able to cope but she seemed to hold up OK.
My two other closest friends were a Brazilian cocaine smuggler called Elizabeth and a transsexual drug dealer called Adriano. Adriano was one of the prison's biggest characters. She was part way through her transformation from female to male and looked like a bloke with a woman's body. Years of drug abuse had made her teeth fall out and she was as eccentric as they come, but very good-hearted and a laugh a minute.
Elizabeth had deliberately got herself pregnant whilst working on the male wing so that the Spanish government would let her stay in the country. Questions should have been asked about how this was allowed to happen but nobody seemed to care. She had eight kids back in Brazil so you would have thought that she would want to return home to see them, but the conditions in the slum that she was from were so horrific that she was willing to sacrifice her family for the chance to get away. I didn't judge her for what she had done because at the end of the day, I hadn't been through what she had been through and didn't know her life. She was one of the few genuinely pleasant people in the prison so I was glad of her company.
Although I tried my hardest to get on with everyone, the gypsies were hard work at first. They thought that I was rude because I talked to people in English and hadn't bothered to learn Spanish. I actively resisted picking up the local lingo to begin with because the way I saw it, I had been taken overseas against my will and didn't see why I should have to adapt to a country that I didn't belong in. I hated the Spanish and everything that they stood for, so the last thing that I wanted to do was start speaking like them.
Most of the other Spanish prisoners were hardcore addicts, who I wanted nothing to do with. Their world was no longer of any interest to me because I had stopped taking drugs the minute I entered the prison system. Seeing their track-mark-covered bodies and wiry, skeletal frames was like an advert for staying clean. It made me think, 'Thank God I stopped taking whiz before I got to that stage.' I felt sorry for some of them but others were prolific offenders, who I thought should have used their first few jail sentences as a wake-up call and sorted themselves out. Being honest, I don't think I had the understanding of drug addicts' circumstances that I now possess. I have since worked as a drug counsellor and learnt that even the most dedicated quitter can end up relapsing.
Drink was just as readily available as drugs so I still had the odd tipple every now and again. There were two ways that inmates could get hold of booze. They could either bribe the guards to bring a bottle of whisky in for the equivalent of £50 or drink homebrew made by fermenting fruit. The homebrew smelt disgusting so I usually stuck to the whisky. By this stage Mum had sent some money over for me but I still didn't have enough to splash out on luxuries like that so I usually relied upon people giving me a sip of theirs.
I had to keep my addictions hidden from the authorities because anybody who had suffered from any kind of drug or alcohol abuse was prescribed methadone and normally ended up getting hooked. Meth is only meant to be given to heroin addicts but I had seen the nurses dishing it out to everybody from alcoholics to crackheads. They didn't reduce the dosage either, which meant that the inmates still had drug habits but were just addicted to meth instead of whatever it was that they were on before. A Spanish girl I knew had entered the jail with a minor cocaine habit and ended up a fully-fledged meth-head. She tried to go cold turkey at one stage but only lasted two days.
The side effects of methadone are just as unpleasant as those of illegal drugs. Some girls had no teeth because it had rotted them away. Others were forced to eat liquidised food because the drugs had given them serious problems with their stomachs. Technically they had had the choice to refuse the meth but when you land in prison with a crippling drug habit, you're likely to take anything that you can get your hands on. The morality of offering recovering addicts such a harmful and addictive drug is questionable to say the least. It was yet another example of the Spaniards' haphazard approach to caring for their prisoners. They didn't worry if people managed to get clean or not, just as long as they were able to make out that they were taking steps to try and rehabilitate them.
Heroin was also rife within the jail a
nd every couple of weeks, I heard the clanging of the metal trolleys that they used to cart people off who had overdosed. Sometimes the guards would give OD'd inmates a glass of sugary water to rehydrate them and then leave them in their cells. More often than not, the addicts would be dead by the next morning. Life was very cheap in Topas. The medical care was non-existent. One time I went to the doctor to tell him that I felt depressed and tired all the time and he advised me to boost my energy by eating more chocolate. And there was me thinking that they were meant to tell you to eat an apple a day!
Another time I cut my finger and asked one of the guards for a plaster. She came back with a piece of Sellotape. God knows what she would have given me if I had broken my arm. I probably would have had to wrap it in a dishcloth.
The mentally ill inmates were the ones who suffered the most from the poor quality healthcare. There wasn't enough room for them all on the medical wing, so vulnerable prisoners with schizophrenia and psychosis were bunged in with the rest of the riff-raff. Some girls hadn't got a clue what day of the week it was. They should have been in hospital, not locked away with muggers, armed robbers and murderers.
Then there were the AIDs cases. Prisoners would come in looking healthy and in shape and leave dying on their feet because they had shared a syringe. One of the Spanish inmates got brain damage as a result of the virus and went from being quiet and reserved to smashing up her cell and randomly kicking off on other girls within the space of a few months. It was blindingly obvious that there was something wrong with her but yet she still didn't get moved off the wing. Violence was perfectly normal in Topas. The guards expected it and usually ignored it.
The fights were never one on one; they were always massive brawls. The female prisoners would fight like men and pummel each other to within an inch of their lives. There was at least one fatal stabbing whilst I was in the jail and countless brutal beatings.
A lot of the fights involved two big, hard Russian birds, who spent every waking moment looking for a scrap. One of them was in for murder and the other was a drug dealer with a mouthful of gold teeth, which presumably meant that she had earned a bit of money from her crime. They were both incredibly tough and loved to show off their fist work. All they ever did was drink and batter people.
I did my best to stay away from the more aggressive girls in the jail because my haemorrhage meant I was especially vulnerable. A single punch could trigger another aneurysm and put me back in hospital. It didn't take much provocation to start a fight in Topas, though. Sometimes the other prisoners would kick off for no reason at all. One day I was chatting away to someone on the wing when a nasty, rough-looking junkie with track marks all over her arms and legs came sidling up to me. She stood there for a couple of minutes giving me the evils and then suddenly lunged across and slammed my head into the wall.
'Speak Spanish!' she shouted, as the other inmates dragged her off me. 'You are in Spain now. You need speak Spanish!'
The attack made me feel jittery for weeks afterwards. I saw the junkie girl whenever I went out on the wing so there was no getting away from her. The guards should have been on hand to protect me but all they cared about was how much money they could hustle up by exploiting their positions. If they weren't selling whisky to the alkies, they were stealing food from the kitchen.
The screws weren't the only members of staff who were on the take either; the prison governor was the most bent of the lot. He had been sacked from the last jail that he worked at for siphoning off money and there were rumours that he was doing the same in Topas. The word about the wing was that he had put a non-existent person down on the books as 'sub-medical director' so that he could embezzle prison funds. With such an unsavoury character in charge of the guards, it was little wonder they were fleecing the place for all that it was worth.
The governor was also incredibly two-faced. A couple of weeks after my interview with the BBC, he invited me into his office and told me he was going to make my time inside as easy as possible, presumably as a way of making sure I didn't bad-mouth him to the media. This would have been all well and good if I hadn't found out from Fair Trials that he had spoken to the Spanish government behind my back and advised them not to pardon me because I wasn't ill enough. The way I saw it, he shouldn't have acted all pally-pally with me when he knew full well that he had done something that was likely to extend my stay in jail. I had known that the prison staff were not to be trusted, but still felt betrayed and let down. Now the chances of being released were even slimmer than before.
The governor's backstabbing antics sent me spiralling further into depression and I started going for days without eating. Sometimes my stomach would be horribly painful because I was so hungry and I would go to sleep dreaming about food. Looking back, I think this was a form of self-harm. Starving myself was the only way that I could express how awful I was feeling.
I also suffered terrible bouts of anxiety. Some nights I would lie awake, unable to get to sleep because I was so full of dread, other nights I would have horrendous nightmares. There were rumours going round the wing that the guards would let themselves into girls' cells and rape them whilst the other inmates slept, which left me paralysed with fear whenever I thought about it.
As well as having to deal with anxiety, depression and hunger pains, my head was also still cripplingly painful. Sometimes it was so unbearable that I could hardly move and had to spend all day in bed. After pestering the doctor time and time again to examine me more thoroughly, I eventually managed to persuade him to arrange for the Guardia Civil to take me to the local hospital. This proved to be a thoroughly humiliating experience because I was escorted there in handcuffs by gun-toting Old Bill. Mothers pulled their children back away from me and old ladies clutched their purses tighter to their chests as I walked past them in the waiting room. I felt as if the prison authorities had deliberately engineered my appointment to be as degrading as possible so that I wouldn't ask for any more trips outside the jail.
The doctor at the hospital was even worse than the one at Topas. Upon reading my notes, the first thing that he did was signal for me to get inside a CAT-scan machine, which was a little bit worrying because I had been warned specifically not to have a CAT scan by the doctor who did my coiling. I had a metal plate in my head where they had repaired my skull and had been told that scanning it could cause it to heat up and explode. Refusing to budge was completely out of the question though because I knew full well that the coppers would beat me up if I did. They might even shoot me if I kicked up too much of a fuss. Nobody spoke a word of English so attempting to explain to them that I could die if I had the scan would be a pointless exercise. I was just going to have to get in the machine and hope that they realised something was up and stopped before it was too late.
As the scan began, I closed my eyes and braced myself for my skull to blow up. Maybe it would be less painful than having to go back to Topas anyway. It would mean no more junkies, no more being treated like an animal by the guards, no more rubbish food, no more having to listen to hours of people shouting across the wing to one another in Spanish…
'¡Parar! Hay un problema.¡Detenerlo ahora! ¡Parar la TAC!'
… no more being crammed into a space the size of a rabbit hutch…
CLANK!
… but I was still almost jumping for joy when the whirring of the machinery came to a halt – so maybe life was worth living after all.
'There is problem. We cannot do scan,' the doctor told me. 'We no able to proceed.'
By this stage I no longer cared about my headaches. I was so relieved to be alive that I had forgotten all about them. The relief didn't last long though because it was quickly replaced by rightful indignation. If the prison had sent somebody along with me to translate then none of this would have happened. The guards had needlessly endangered my life just for the sake of being awkward. I felt frustrated but was unable to show any signs of anger in front of the police for fear that they would take it as an act
of aggression and beat me with their truncheons. The whole thing sickened me and made me long to return to a world where life was actually worth something. The screws would have probably preferred my head to have blown up so that they had one less foreign prisoner to worry about.
The only slight silver lining was that I had some good news waiting for me back at the jail when I returned. The British Consulate had written to ask if I wanted them to authorise a transfer to an English prison on grounds of ill health, which meant that even if I didn't get my pardon, there was still a chance of serving my sentence in my own country. After what I had been through at the hospital, I didn't need to think twice about the answer. It was a total no brainer.
The letter stressed that the transfer would be reliant upon Interpol agreeing to send an officer to accompany me on my flight. There was a good chance that the move wouldn't come to fruition but the fact that there was even a faint possibility of landing on British soil again still made me feel a lot more optimistic. Things were starting to look up. As I lay in bed that night, I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like to talk to other prisoners and know exactly what they were saying when they answered. It would be like heaven on earth after spending months surrounded by people speaking Spanish at a million miles per hour. I just hoped that it would actually happen. After all, I was due a bit of luck. Fate owed me a good turn and I was hoping he'd pay up.
Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons Page 23
