Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self)

by Will Self

  Shaun had spent the last year of his sentence, at Gerald's behest, cheerfully allowing himself to be buggered by the ex-cop who was the boss of the nonce wing. The ex-cop had gone down for corruption and was desperate not to be sussed as a queer. Shaun guaranteed to keep this information to himself in return for a little assistance with getting back on his feet once he got out. The assistance he most required was a reasonably roomy set of premises where he and his good buddy Gerald could resume their activities. The ex-cop had to oblige. It transpired that he had the lease on the offices of a defunct minicab firm on the Lower Clapton Road. The place was boarded up and had no electricity or water, but it had several rooms, and most importantly a back entrance that wasn't overlooked. Gerald and Shaun took the keys while making sincere expressions of gratitude.

  They found the boy in a playground a mile away in Stoke Newington; his name was Gary. It took only minutes for the two men to persuade the six year old to accompany them to their house for some sweets and videos. He got into the Maxi almost gaily and chattered away as they drove carefully back to the cab office. For Gary was not simply neglected and unwanted – he was also being abused already. Shaun and Gerald found this out when they got him inside and took his clothes off – his little arse was cratered with cigarette burns. The burns were the work of his mother's sadistic boyfriend. The same boyfriend who had bought him the Toy Story top.

  Still, despite this, Gary was blond and slim and almost pretty. Gerald and Shaun managed to have plenty of fun with him over the next ten days or so, but then he became a bit of a drag. He was incontinent, he wouldn't eat, he'd lost his freshness, and the two men began to argue about who should have the task of washing him in between sessions. And Gary didn't even struggle satisfactorily any more, he just whimpered. Worse than that, Gerald had already clocked the profusion of missing-child posters that had gone up in the area, and he'd read in the local paper that the police were conducting exhaustive house-to-house questioning. It could only be a matter of time before the knock on the door came.

  Gerald decided that what they needed was another body, someone to take the rap. Then, through the Sparks, he heard about a Chinaman in Limehouse who had a contract that needed enforcing. ‘Just the ticket,’ Gerald said to Shaun. Gerald never spoke much, but when he did he invariably retailed such hackneyed turns of phrase. When the two men came to heaving Danny's unconscious body into the office, and stuffing the downers down his throat, and removing the semen from his seminal vesicles with a long hypodermic, Gerald referred insistently to him as the ‘thingummyjig’.

  And that's how the thingummyjig came to be in the boarded-up cab office in Lower Clapton Road, screaming and puking on a cold November afternoon. But he didn't have to suffer his terror and revulsion alone for long. Gerald and Shaun had thoughtfully phoned the local constabulary, shortly after quitting the premises.

  Three months later, and ensconced on the nonce wing of Wandsworth Prison, Danny had plenty of leisure with which to reflect on the awesome apathy that had gripped him during those few minutes in which he waited with dead Gary for the door to the cab office to be kicked in by the police. Granted, he still had enough downers in his system to make a polar bear sluggish; and granted he had the smack withdrawal and the crack come-down underlying this fateful torpor, but even so there was a genuine acceptance of his fate – or rather his Fates.

  They thronged the corners of the dark room, their gloomy robes brushing against the missing-children posters, their grimy turbans scratching the polystyrene ceiling tiles. The Fates muttered and chuckled over the child's corpse, and for the first time since they emerged from the cracks in the corners of the world to keep him company, Danny could clearly understand what they were saying. The words ‘low profile’ and ‘Maltese’ and ‘set-up’ and ‘Skank’ were there; along with ‘fool’ and ‘crack-head’. And in the dark room, perfumed by psychopathy, Danny acknowledged that his nemesis had come back to haunt him.

  It was just too smooth – and too inexplicable otherwise. Bruno offering to front him an evening's rocking in the East End. The big, ugly Maltese who had given him a careful twice-over when they arrived at Milligan Street, and then the same fucker, choking the sense out of him after Danny had given that lairy git a smack. Now he was here, obviously many hours later, and there was blood on his hands. Danny, unlike anything else graphic in the room, had been neatly framed.

  For, there was not only blood on his hands, it was under his nails and in his hair as well. Some of it was his own – some was Gary's. This, when it was also neatly catalogued at the trial, was damning enough; as were Danny's dabs on assorted implements: knives, hacksaw blades, screwdrivers etc., revolting etc . . . . But ‘worse, far worse, was Danny's semen in the little boy's anus, Danny's semen in the little boy's throat. These were facts that thankfully weren't published in the newspapers, although they remained in Danny's deposition papers, when the corridor was frozen and he was hurried down it on his way to the nonce wing.

  The police were amazed by Danny's quietism when they arrested him. Since he put up hardly any resistance, they administered a minimal beating. It was the same as he was shuffled from one nick to the next over the next nine weeks. It didn't matter what they screamed at him, or how they slapped him – he wouldn't rise to it. Eventually they gave up – it was no fun punching a bag.

  Danny's lawyer, a young white woman, was perfectly prepared to attempt a proper defence of her client. She may have been inexperienced, and have had as little knowledge of Danny's world as she did of the dark side of the moon, but she could see that none of it added up. Danny had no form as a sex offender, and was too old to have suddenly blossomed into such an evil flower. He might have no alibi, and no willingness to go in search of one, but there was no effective circumstantial evidence against him either. This was an organised killing, but the police could find no signs, other than forensic, that it had been Danny who'd organised it. And anyway, why organise a murder so comprehensively, then fail to remove yourself from the crime scene in time?

  None of this mattered though. None of this could fly in the face of that semen, which Gerald had so artfully extracted, then inserted. And none of it could be challenged if Danny remained, as he did, listless, silent, surly, showing no indication that he wanted to substantiate his – purely formal – plea of not guilty.

  For Danny the trial was a series of unconnected, almost absurd, impressions. At the Crown Court in Kingston, the police who had arrested him stood about in the lobby, smoking heavily in their short hair and C&A suits. Danny mused on how peculiar it was that they always looked more uniformed when they weren't. The gold-painted mouldings of fruit bordering the ceiling of the large hall jibed with the freestanding, cannister-shaped ashtrays that pinioned its floor. The court usher was black, and had more than a passing resemblance to the late Aunt Hattie. The prosecuting QC was white; he affected a large signet ring, a watch chain and a clip-on bow tie. He reminded Danny of one of the punters he used to serve in the City. As he waited each morning with the Securicor guards for the expensive charade to begin, Danny would look for sympathy in the eyes of a large portrait of Queen Caroline – and find none.

  Sitting in the dock for day after day, Danny was acutely conscious of the need not to look at anyone. The jury were ordinary people, who, in the struggle to appear mature at all times, ended up seeming far more childish. Especially childish in the way that they beamed hatred at Danny given half a chance. The public gallery was, of course, out of the question. Instead Danny concentrated on the peculiar, double-jointed ratchets that were used to open the high windows in the courtroom. And for hours he would lose himself in the texture of the vertical louvres that covered those windows.

  Danny came to during the judge's summing up: It was for the jury to decide what they believed; it was up to them to assess whether the witnesses were telling the truth; it was important that they accepted the judge's direction in matters of law, but it was for them to decide in matters of fact. The judge was ca
reful to acknowledge that they might decide to believe this; but on the whole he thought it far more likely that they would prefer to accept that. So he cut up the cake of justice and handed out a slice to everyone saving Danny.

  The jury were out for such a short time that it was difficult to believe they'd done anything save walk into the jury room, chorus ‘He's guilty as hell’ and walk straight back out again. Even the judge was impressed by their alacrity – and the prosecuting QC positively glowed. It was three in the afternoon when the scrap of paper was passed by the foreman to the clerk, and then by the clerk up to the bench. All morning the court had been directly under the Heathrow flight path, and each damning summation by the judge was accompanied by the roar of another 747, bearing another six hundred people and escaping earthly confinement at six hundred miles an hour. As the judge took the scrap of paper Danny heard an almighty boom, and peering through the gap in the louvres behind the judge's shoulder, he saw the white needle of Concorde lifting off into the grey sky.

  Danny's sentence was life. With a minimum recommendation that he serve twenty years.

  His solicitor managed to grab a few minutes with him in the holding cell. ‘You'll have to ask for protection,’ she told him. ‘With your offence and sentence you have no choice – otherwise you'll get a pasting. But do everything you can to get off Rule 43. If you come to your senses and want to fight this, want to appeal, it will go far better for you if you've protested at your sentencing all along, and the best demonstration of that is that you refuse to admit you're a nonce. Never admit you're a nonce – you're not a nonce, are you, Danny?’

  Danny gave the young woman a long, level look for the first time since he'd met her, then tonelessly replied, ‘No.’ Then two Securicor men came into the cell, cuffed him and led him out.

  For Danny the next two weeks were as confused as the last two weeks before his rendezvous with Gerald. With its elision of day and night, its muddling of time and distance, and its random acts of senseless departure, the Prison Service did its best to replicate the lifestyle of the drug addict. Outside the court Danny was bundled into a blacked-out category ‘A’ Securicor van. The inside of the van was divided into sixteen individual cell-lets, eight each side. Once he had been locked into his cell he was there for the duration of an eighteen-hour day, every day, for a fortnight. The cell window was blacked out, so that the outside world was doused in permanent night-time; and the door was solid to the ceiling. Inches in front of Danny's face there was a metal grille which ran from waist-height to the roof of the van. Should Danny have chosen to do so he could have communicated, through this grille, with his fellow traveller in front. And if he'd been prepared to twist around in his seat he could have done the same with the prisoner behind.

  Danny chose to do neither. He sat still, listening to the catcalls of the inmates and the imprecations of the guards. When the van stopped he heard the slop and slurp of the shit and piss in the covered bucket between his shins. It didn't feel like any kind of an indignity – this; after all Danny was a nonce. A nonce, a sickening, shitty, pissy nonce. The lowest of the low. Danny had been around enough to hear the stories about what happened to sex offenders inside. He knew about juggings and shivings and socks full of pool balls. He had heard tell of how the ‘normal’ offenders plotted to get their hands on nonces; how even a fairly lowly crim’ – a crack-head, a larcenist, whatever – could vastly improve his status by doing a nonce. Behind those high walls slathered with anti-climb paint there was only ever one season; an open one for nonces.

  So Danny kept silent, lest he give himself away, and listened to the constant yammering of his fellow prisoners. Every time they stopped at another nick and there was an exchange of personnel, the questioning would start up: ‘Who're you?'; ‘What're you in for?'; ‘Have you got anything bottled?'; ‘D'jew know Johnnie Marco?’ and so on.

  Every day, late, the van would halt for the night and the shackled prisoners would be led into another shower block, ordered to strip, doused, and then locked away for a few hours in holding cells. Then, with dawn still far off in this winter wonderlessland, the cell door would be whacked open, they'd be shackled again, marched out to the van, loaded, and driven off.

  After a few days Danny became conscious of the fact that almost every prisoner in the van, at some point during the day, would realise that he knew one of the other prisoners in the van. Further, all the prisoners in the van seemed to take this for granted: ‘Issat so-and-so?’ they'd call out, and when it was confirmed that it was, they'd try and ascertain what it was that had happened to so-and-so. Had he done a screw? Had he been on the block? Had he been nicked for drugs? Gradually it dawned on Danny that this snail's-pace progression in the jolting miniature cell actually was a form of incarceration for these men; and that the prison van itself was a special kind of institution. The prisoners who were moved so relentlessly were the troublemakers, the bolters, the ex-barons, and presumably those like Danny himself who required rigorous sequestration.

  Danny began to wonder whether he would serve all of his twenty years being shunted around the country in this fashion, with nothing to read save his deposition and no one to talk to at all. Along with this creeping suspicion came another, curiously ambivalent intimation. The Fates had gone – or perhaps they'd never existed at all. No longer did Danny have to indulge in peculiar twists of magical thought in order to protect himself from the malevolent djinns, there was no point – his fate was worse than death already. Not only had the Fates gone, but his stomach had ceased to gurgle and void itself, his armpits had ceased to drip cold sweat and his appetite had – grossly inopportunely – returned in force. Danny was clean.

  With cleanliness came an indignation that burned inside Danny like a whole body dose of clap. Granted he'd ripped off Skank, and granted that he'd been due a comeuppance, but this? This! To be framed as a nonce! No, it couldn't be, Danny would do anything, adopt any stratagem to clear his name. He remembered what the solicitor had said after the trial; that he should do all he could to avoid getting stuck on the nonce wing – that would have to be his first priority. He would tell the governor – he remembered that every new inmate had an interview with the governor – that he didn't want protection, he didn't want to be segregated.

  All of this Danny firmly resolved on the thirteenth day of the van. But the following morning, when the van pulled up for the fifth time, and to his blinking surprise Danny found himself standing outside the high brick wall of HMP Wandsworth, his resolve began to drain away.

  It continued to drain away as Danny was inducted into the prison. The screws who showered him, printed him, issued him with his kit, and then led him through the curiously empty reception block seemed so uncustomarily unaggressive that they were almost solicitous. Danny, of course, didn't say anything to them save for ‘Yessir’ and ‘Nossir’, but when he was ready to go on to the wing, one of them muttered ‘Poor fucker’, and he couldn't forbear from asking, ‘What's up?’

  The screw, who was white moustachioed and close to retirement, shook his head and looked straight at Danny before answering, ‘You'll see.’

  There was no enigma to this arrival. Danny was led across a yard, in through one gate, across another yard and in through the end door of A Wing, the first of the five ‘spokes’ that comprise the Wandsworth panopticon. It's possible – but unlikely – that had Jeremy Bentham, the originator of the panopticon prison design, seen Danny's welcome at Wandsworth, he would have felt that his ideas had reached an effective fruition.

  Bentham conceived of the panopticon, with its five spoke-like wings, projecting from a hub-like central hall, as an evocation of the all-seeing eye of God. He had hoped that the inmates of the five wings, constantly aware of their observation from the central hall, would apprehend within the architectonic of their own imprisonment the true nature of the relationship between God and Man. Certainly, Danny felt the presence of an all-seeing eye as he walked down A Wing, a screw to his rear and another in front, an
d then walked through the central hall and on down E Wing to his final destination. But this was an all-seeing eye made up of many hundreds of other eyes, an all-seeing eye that also possessed hands, hands which were all banging cutlery against the bars of their cells. And there were all-shouting mouths as well, row upon row of them. They kept pace with Danny as he marched through the gauntlet of hatred. ‘Nonce! Nonce! Fucking nonce!’ they all screamed, and every ten shaky paces Danny heard a more personal, targeted remark like: ‘We'll get you – you fucking nonce!’

  By the time Danny reached his allotted cell, on F Wing, he was blanched with the sweat of terror. ‘We thought we'd put you two together,’ said the screw, gesturing through the doorway of the cell he'd just unlocked, ‘given that you're both black geezers and that.’

  Inside the cell a fat black man was sitting on a bunk. He looked up from something he was writing on a pad of paper, gave a broad grin and said, ‘So, you're the famous Clapton cab killer.’

  And that's how Danny came to meet Fat Boy, the mentor from hell.

  3.

  ‘Yah man!’ said Fat Boy, ‘I've got it on damn good authority – you're gonna get jugged, an’ right here, on the fuckin’ nonce wing, tomorrer –’

  ‘B-but this is – I mean we're all fuckin’ the same here, how can anyone think they have the right.’

  ‘The right! Ha-ha-ha! Rights he talks about. That's real fine; you, the fuckin’ Clapton cab killer, talking ‘bout rights. You – a fuckin’ monster who tortured and sexually abused a six-year-old child for days before killin’ ‘im and cuttin his fuckin’ hands and feet off! Sheee!’ Fat Boy ran his finger around the omega sign he had shaved into the hair at the back of his neck before continuing. ‘You've got a nerve, man. Right here, right now, you're regarded as one of the badarsed of the badarsed in the whole fuckin’ nick. And, since this wing is the fuckin’ clearing house for every single fuckin’ nonce in the whole country – it means you're one of the baddest arseholes there is.’ And Fat Boy went back to running his finger around the furry groove of his omega sign; a nervous tic, which, in a few short hours had driven Danny closer to distraction than anything else he'd experienced since going down.