by Kealan Ryan
You don’t get these kinds of answers when you die – who the fuck was Jack the Ripper, for instance? I don’t know if Marilyn committed suicide or if she was killed. I couldn’t tell you if Elvis is alive or dead. Well, I suppose, I could – he’s dead, but that’s only because I don’t believe any of that conspiracy stuff. How could anyone think that the biggest star on the planet would just go into hiding for the rest of his life because he didn’t like the limelight? Elvis not like the limelight? He was the limelight; sure just look at him on stage – the guy was born to be famous. There are some awful dummies out there.
It’s a pity you don’t learn all the hidden mysteries of the world. When you’re alive you assume you’ll find them out when you die, or at the very least you won’t give a shit about them anymore. But you do. I’d still like to know who killed J.F.K., but I’m none the wiser than when I last watched the movie. No big deal or anything, but it would be nice to have complete knowledge of the universe as we are led to believe will happen. I still don’t even know if there is a God, for Christ’s sake, and I’m dead. If you don’t know whether or not God exists when you’re dead, then what’s the world coming to?
Suppose he doesn’t; otherwise I’d probably have met him by now. Although I often heard ghost stories about people who had a chance to walk into the light but turned around last minute because they weren’t finished on earth – like the way Swayze turned back in Ghost because he wasn’t ready to leave Demi Moore behind. Maybe that’s the story with me. Although I definitely didn’t see any beautiful light that I could have walked into, so I have my doubts.
Once Danny is sent to prison hopefully the light will show up. It might, but I doubt it. I hope I don’t have to wait until Pam is happy again or something. I want her to move on with her life, but I don’t want to have to hang around and watch her shag some other bloke. Maybe once I get back at Danny I’ll be able to get out of here, but I still haven’t figured out how the hell to do that. Keep him awake at night, whoop-de-do; he fucking killed me.
Orla is really looking forward to getting up on the dock and giving her version of events. She plans on crying a little but not too much – just enough to show people how upset she is – but then hold it back to show how strong she can be.
Her plan seems to fall apart, at first, when Danny admits to absolutely everything. That it was completely his fault and that he will accept any punishment that the court deems fit. With the guilty plea there’s no need for a trial or any of that. Thankfully, though, the judge still wants to hear exactly what happened. Orla smiles. She will get her chance up on the stage. But Pam is called first and that’s not easy for anyone – especially me. Well, especially her, I guess, but also for me.
Watching her relive the whole thing is terrible. Danny’s prick of a barrister keeps hounding her for some reason. Wonky head on him with glasses frames way too old-fashioned for his baby face, asking her loads of stupid questions that don’t mean anything.
‘What time was it when you went out to the smoking area?’
‘I’m not sure, maybe half twelve or something.’
‘You’re not sure?’
Tosser.
‘No.’
She’s about to crack. What difference does it make what time it was? Your man pleaded guilty, so what difference do the minor details make? He’s asking her how big the smoking area was – now that makes no fucking sense at all. Who gives a shit how big it was?
‘Well how far away were you from the defendant when you first went outside?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it ten feet, twelve?’
Pam hasn’t a clue about feet and inches or any of that shit. She bursts out crying. ‘Just a normal distance away – I don’t know how much,’ she splutters. Poor thing, bawling crying, and the barrister just looking at her with his crooked eyes as if she’s stupid. My dad wants to get up and smack him.
It seems to me like he’s just a crap lawyer and doesn’t really know what to ask. He looks ridiculous as well. I don’t understand why lawyers in Ireland wear that silly outfit, the white wig and black cape. He looks like he’s going to a fancy-dress party. ‘What are you dressed up as?’ ‘I’m a highwayman!’ All he’s missing is the black mask and maybe a musket. The whole time he’s asking his stupid questions I keep picturing him riding into work on a horse – cape flapping in the wind, calling out ‘Stand and deliver!’
He hasn’t thought of any new questions when Orla gets up. ‘Miss Halpin – what size would you say the smoking area was?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Well roughly.’
Orla sniffs, straightens her back. ‘To be honest I was a little preoccupied with watching my friend die to measure the courtyard; besides I left my ruler at home.’
Orla has always wrecked Tim’s head, but he cracks a huge grin at that.
The barrister appears flustered. ‘Okay, Miss Halpin, I’m just trying to establish how everything happened that night.’
‘Fine, then let me sum it up for you. Chris was minding his own business, when that man came over to us and punched him as hard as he could with absolutely no provocation. He has admitted as much, case closed, move on.’
Every question he asks her is met with a snappy answer. She’s fuming – she’s so mad that she forgets to do her pre-planned bit of crying and then holding back the tears thing. She only realises she never cried as she sits back down in her seat and is slightly annoyed at herself because she figures crying might make the judge act a little harder on Danny. Everyone else is proud of her, though; Fanny even finds himself fancying her a little.
After a brief recess, the judge returns. I kind of liked the judge originally, as he seemed very thorough, but now I’m not so sure because he’s not holding off on sentencing. Most times you might have to wait a couple of weeks or a month, but this guy saunters out after fuck-all deliberation, acting all grand. Why’s he rushing it?
Mind you, peering down over his glasses at Danny, he does look like he’s going to sock it to him. Danny thinks so too. His hands are shaking, but he holds them tight behind his back. As the judge begins to speak, Danny tries to listen to what he is saying, but for some reason all he can think about is how the situation reminds him of being sent to the principal’s office in primary school. It’s so similar. He’s standing up straight just like he did when he was a kid in trouble. He can’t even see the judge anymore. All he can see is his old principal, Mr Cronin, glaring at him from behind his desk. The room would move on him – not spin but sway from side to side, as if it was floating on a slow stream. The tick … tick … tick of the clock was the loudest thing in the principal’s office as is the clock behind the judge. Snap out of it, he tells himself – listen to what the man is saying. Tick … tick … tick. He pushes the school memory out of his head and focuses in on the judge, but all he can hear is the damn clock; it’s like someone has a speaker attached to it. Tick … Tick!
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the judge’s voice booms over it. ‘It is a difficult sentencing exercise. I hope the public understands you have to be dealt with for a single blow, one which had dreadful but unintended consequences. It is a very sad case for all involved and although it was accidental you must be punished for what devastation you caused.’
Tick … tick …
‘Therefore, I am sentencing you to four years with two and a half years suspended.’
Tick … tick … boom.
Motherfucker! A year and a half. A fucking year and a half – that’s nothing. What the hell is that suspended sentence shit, anyway? I never understood that – what’s the fucking point of it?
This whole thing isn’t right. It’s not like on TV. I mean, over in the one day? Come on. I thought it would go on for weeks with loads of evidence and stuff. He finds a conscience a
t the last minute and saves himself all that, saves himself a jury. Fucker. So because the DPP and court agree to a guilty plea of manslaughter, they reckon a four-year sentence with two and a half suspended is grand. The judge took into account how remorseful Danny supposedly is. How the accused is a young man of conscience and had attempted to cooperate fully with the gardaí. What a load of bollocks.
Beautiful, shining, walk-in-to-light passageway? Any chance?
No?
Didn’t think so.
28
The first thing Danny notices in Mountjoy Prison is the smell. It’s a mix of a bleached locker room and a warehouse that sells cardboard – wet cardboard. He can’t figure it out because as far as he can tell there is fuck all cardboard anywhere, but the smell is unmistakable.
The basement stockroom of the phone shop where he used to work would often let in water from the street when it rained heavily. His boss could never be arsed fixing it, and instead would get them to line up ripped cardboard boxes to stop the water from travelling too far. Danny always had the lovely job of changing the cardboard when it got too soggy or smelly. He hated that fucking job; his boss didn’t have any rubber gloves so Danny would have to pick up the nasty cardboard with his bare fingers, grimacing as it ripped when he lifted it, or when his hands touched the brown-purplish stuff that had grown on it.
Of all the things that could have been going through his mind at this point, he’s surprised it’s this. He had expected terror, but he’s more pissed off than terrified. Pissed off that he’ll have to spend the next year and a half in a place that smells exactly like something he hates.
He’s still sniffing away when he’s led through the holding cells where all the newbies are first brought. The cells don’t look like how I expected them to – they all have glass walls instead of bars, like the way it is in Silence of the Lambs where Anthony Hopkins is kept. As he walks, Danny tries not to look into any of them, but one guy gets up abruptly and starts banging his head against the window.
‘Fuck sake,’ Danny mutters by accident. Loafing his fucking head, what the hell kind of a place is this?
Headbutters and in particular the wet cardboard smell are the least of his problems when he sees the state of his holding cell. No Shawshank Redemption-like, fine big room all to yourself to put up posters and little ornaments to make your stay more pleasant. No, instead it’s a room he has to share with four other horrible bastards. All of whom Danny wouldn’t be caught dead spending time with on the outside. Three of them he wouldn’t even risk sitting beside on a bus. The guard who had taken all his details when he first got to the prison explained that he would have to share for a few days until he got his own cell. Danny nodded, figuring he’d have to bunk in with one other guy. Four was pushing it.
At first he’s too busy looking at the mostly unfriendly faces of his new roomies to notice that there’s no toilet in the place. What a dump. He had kind of expected the overcrowding thing – it had been in the news a lot – but he’d always assumed there would be a jacks.
None of them really say anything, so he decides to introduce himself. After a brief hesitation, they introduce themselves in return. There’s a fat auld lad named Seamus who looks even more out of place than Danny; there are two crackhead-looking blokes called Wacko (yes, Wacko) and Damo. Last but not least is a big, tall, scary-looking bastard named Bogdasha, who is from Russia of all places. At first glance I like the Russian the most. Danny hates them all equally: the auld fella because he’s too eager to be his friend, Wacko and Damo because they are exactly the kind of scumbags that he hates, and the Russian, well, because he’s a Russian.
A lot of people don’t like Russians because they are such cold-blooded bastards, but that’s exactly why I like them. They come across as ruthless fuckers and you have to admire that. Hard bastards, nothing seems to get to them – I think it’s because they are all so used to death that they just don’t give a bollocks. Loads of them perished at the end of the Second World War and their own leader managed to wipe out about twenty million of the fuckers. Speaking of which, I’ve always wondered why Stalin doesn’t get as bad a rap as Hitler. I reckon he was worse. Every time people talk dictators it’s always Hitler who’s crowned The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived. Stalin only gets an ‘Ah yeah, he was a bit of a bollocks too.’ You wouldn’t be caught dead with a name like Adolf today, but there are more Josephs than you can shake a stick at. Having that lunatic killing half your family would change your outlook. Even the women seem cold as fuck. This Russian girl used to work in the deli across from where I worked – every day for three years she’d make me a sandwich and not once did she give me a look of recognition. I hated that one.
But most of them I liked – then again, she was the only one I’d personally known. Although John did tell me a story about a Russian bloke he worked with – his girlfriend smooched some other guy when she was drunk. No matter how much she cried and pleaded with him for forgiveness he was having none of it. The last thing he said to her as he was walking out the door in his deep Russian accent was, ‘You will never see me again.’
Cool bastard.
Other than that I don’t know any of them, so I suppose it’s the stereotype that I like. But I’ve found most stereotypes are true enough to fact. Of course there are loads of exceptions, but often, by and large, it’s fairly on the money. The Russians have a good one – ruthless, and they are. The Irish have a good one too – a bunch of drunks. And, let’s face it, we are. Suppose that one could be taken two ways, but most Irish are proud to be known as alcoholics – it means you like to party.
The English don’t really have a stereotype. I wonder why not. Everyone else has – the tanned Frenchman with a cigarette in his mouth, talking to some lash about making love; the American husband and wife tourists wearing the same red windbreaker and beige trousers. What else? Lazy Spanish, boring Germans. Some Aussie bigot driving a pickup truck and drinking a beer. Sleazy Italians, Asian nerds, coke-dealing Colombians. That sucks for the English, not having one. Suppose the English lout – ‘Would you look at that English lout!’ Or the posh toffs, maybe.
Wacko and Damo are total stereotypes. They’re like cartoon characters of Dublin scangers. Both with names that end in ‘o’, both are thin and wiry, with shaved heads and mashed-up faces.
After the introductions, Danny decides to keep his mouth shut. There are two double bunks that have feet dangling off them and one floor mattress where Wacko sits. Danny parks himself beside him and stares at the wall. Wacko says something to him, but Danny ignores it, barely even hears him; all he can hear is the anxiety building in his gut, pounding away.
An hour passes before Danny’s stomach starts calming down. He looks around the cell again and the same thing comes into his head that must come into all new inmates’ heads about their new companions: ‘What are you in for?’ He thinks about saying it but then stops himself. What’s the point? He figures he knows what they’re in for, anyway. He sees Wacko talking the ear off Seamus, Damo stretched out on a bottom bunk joining in the odd time, and Bogdasha sitting above him saying nothing to nobody. Damo and Wacko are obvious – they’re in for robbing one too many car stereos or something like that. Seamus must have been stung for a white-collar crime – screwed over some little guy – and the Russian probably chopped some other Eastern European’s head off and fucked it into the canal. No point in asking.
No point in anything. Is this my tribe now? Danny thinks. Are these the type of people who are on my level – who I should be associated with? He then thinks of his loving father, battling through the despair of watching his wife wither away to nothing and die. He was strong enough to get out from under that pain. He had struggled, sure, but he never made Danny feel unloved and he did his best to make him want for nothing, save his mother. He doesn’t think of her often anymore, but he thinks of her now. What would she make of her ‘little superstar’ now? That’s what she
used to call him – superstar. His memories of her have grown dim through the years, but the overriding image he has is the look of pride she wore every time she looked at him. If he kicked a ball straight or painted her a picture she would always give him that look. That over-the-top reaction that he so deeply craved and which made him feel so warm inside. Now the thought of that look makes him shiver. His heart feels frozen – he’s let her down too.
He thinks of the monumental screw-up he perpetrated which led him to this hell on earth and decides: Yes, this is my tribe. These are my people.
I am home.
29
When my mam and dad get home from the court their main emotion is anger. The grief of my being dead they are getting used to somewhat, but the thought of this Danny Murray only getting eighteen months’ prison time infuriates them. They struggle to understand it. He’s taken everything from them and all that’s being taken from him is eighteen lousy months? Actually that reminds me of one of my favourite lines from Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood says towards the end, ‘It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.’ Classic. I never thought that line would end up reminding me of me.
Anyway, my poor folks call Danny every name under the sun, sitting in the kitchen, giving out about the legal system and wondering if there’s anything they can do – the same stuff you’d give out about yourself if you were in this situation.
