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

by Will Self

  Danny slapped the linoleum with the soles of his shoddy canvas shoes. ‘So,’ he asked after a while, ‘who's gonna do the sodding jugging, then?’

  ‘Waller, he's gonna do it. He's an ex-cop, see, an’ he's the fuckin’ baron in here right now. He an’ another bent copper, name of Hansen, between ‘em they've got the whole fuckin’ wing sewn up. Any given time they've got five hundred and forty Rule 43 prisoners on ‘ere. That's five hundred and forty to tax. They've got the drugs, they've got the money, they say who goes on an’ who goes off the wing, an’ naturally they organise the fuckin’ juggings.’ Fat Boy snuggled into the bunk a little more, drawing his chubby legs up into a tenth-lotus position, before continuing to impart wisdom, like some grotesque sadhu. ‘See, yer nonces are basically a law-abiding lot, an’ cowardly to boot. It comes natural to them to do whatever a copper says – whether ‘e's bent or not, see? And anyways these coppers are ‘ard fuckers, man, real ‘ard fuckers –’

  ‘Well, I'm no fuckin’ battyboy myself,’ Danny spat. ‘An’ I'm no nonce neither. I'm gonna see the fuckin’ governor today, right? They've gotta let me, right? An’ I'm gonna say I don't want no protection nor nothing –’

  ‘Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,’ said Fat Boy, as if he'd seen it all before – which he had, ‘an’ I'm no nonce neither leastways not a fiddler or a fucker – but let me tell you, man, as a favour like, there's only one fuckin’ way of doing your stretch an’ thass right here. Forget going over there, you wouldn't last seven seconds. An’ anyway, he won't let you, not until you build up some trust wiv’ ‘im, then he might let you go, but only as a fuckin’ tout, mind. No, you've got a jugging coming, man, an’ the only fuckin’ hope in hell you have of avoidin’ it is sittin’ right here in front of you in the shapely shape of yours truly, Mistah FB, the moderator, the negotiator, the secretary general of the United Nations of Nonce.’

  Fat Boy relaxed his legs and swung himself up. He waddled to the door, poked his jug head out and checked the landing in either direction, then he waddled back to the sink in the far corner and removed one of the tiles on the splash back; behind it there was a stash of – among other things – chocolate bars. Fat Boy took one out and replaced the tile, securing it with shreds of Blu-Tac. Turning back towards Danny he held the chocolate bar up and said, ‘Snickers?’ Danny ignored the offer. ‘Whadd'ya’ mean you're not a nonce?’

  ‘I'm not.’ Fat Boy bit deep into his Snickers.

  ‘Well, are you filth then?’

  ‘Nah! Course not! I'm doing a fuckin’ “nyum-nyum” five for supplying child porn, right? It's not my kick, you understand, but where there's a market . . . “nyum-nyum” . . . I could probably get away wiv’ being over there – I've got friends an’ that, but it suits me well enough to be on the nonce wing on account of the business opportunities, see? I'm on to a good “nyum-nyum” earner here an’ thass why I can help you out, stop you getting a fuckin’ jug of boilin’ water and fuckin’ sugar poured over your fuckin’ nonce bonce.’

  ‘What's the earner then?’ Danny asked, seemingly contrite.

  Fat Boy saw Danny was in earnest and sat down on the opposite bunk again, brushing fragments of peanut, chocolate and toffee from his ludicrously inappropriate, loudly patterned Hawaiian shorts. ‘You know what's it that envelope you carry everywhere wiv’ you?’ His voice was queasily intimate and lubricious.

  ‘W-what? My deposition, you mean?’ Danny reached instinctively for the brown envelope – he had been told that it was a disciplinary offence not to know where it was at all times.

  ‘That's the one – wass innit?’

  ‘I dunno, my statements, trial evidence an’ stuff –’

  ‘Trial evidence, right, trial evidence!’ Fat Boy snatched the envelope from Danny's hand, and before he could protest had opened it and scattered the contents on top of the bunk. Fat Boy sorted through the slew of paper with both hands. ‘See, here's your original statement, here's the filth's, here's psych’ reports an’ bullshit, an’ here's bingo!’ He had a smaller manila envelope in his browner hand, from which he pulled a sheaf of photographs. As he examined each one and tossed it on to the blanket, Fat Boy gave a helpful commentary: ‘Mug shot of you, ‘nother one . . . ah, here we go, crime scene, exterior, day – worth a few bob; crime scene interior – worth a few bob more; and here's the real spondulicks, victim at crime scene – one, two, three, four of ‘em. Oooh! Ugly man, ugly – good angles as well – and the fuckin’ icing, an’ old shot of the victim, ahhh! Ain't he sweet, lovely Toy Story top – !’

  ‘Gimme that!’ Danny snatched the photo from Fat Boy and grabbed the rest of them as well. He began stuffing them all back into the envelope, whilst almost shouting, ‘You sick fuck! You sick fuck! Thass your earner is it, is it?’ Fat Boy recoiled, his new cell mate might have looked skinny and run down but the boy's reflexes were damn fast. Danny ranted on: ‘You sell this shit, do you? Issat it? You sell this shit to the nonces, oh man! Seen I caan't believe it. Blud claat!’

  ‘An’ the fuckin’ address.’ Fat Boy acted unperturbed.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘The address, some fucker will pay well for little Toy Story's address. They get a kick out of it – the nonces do, sendin’ tapes an’ shit out to the victim's family. Yeah, they get a real kick out of it. You could cut it either way, man – a package deal, address, shots, the lot, or parcel it off. Given your rep’ man, half your bag will get you off the jugging, an’ then there's a bit of a profit to be ‘ad. Bit of puff, bit of brown, I can even get you a rock if you fancy one, whaddya’ say? If you want to cut a deal wiv’ Waller – I'm your man. I'm the deposition king of F Wing an’ thass the troof.’

  Danny had finished packing the envelope. Still holding it he stood and walked the two paces to the end of the cell. There was a foot-square, heavily barred window set near the top of the wall. Danny gripped the bars with one hand and dangled there for a while, allowing the strong currents of nausea that were passing through his mind gently to twist his body this way and that. He tilted his face over the sink in the corner and didn't so much spit into it, as allow the saliva to fall from his mouth. Christ! He'd known he was going to encounter men who would revolt him, men who had done unspeakable things, but Fat Boy's parasitism on the nonces’ perverted desires was even worse. To think that he might be banged up in here with the omega man – who was at it again as Danny dangled, his fat finger rasping through the nappy hair – for hours, then days, then months, then years. The two of them sleeping and shitting only inches apart, their breath, their farts, their very thoughts commingling. Danny retched and a cable of phlegm tethered him to the plughole.

  There was a cough and a rasp of boot outside the cell. The screw who had escorted Danny on to the wing was standing there. He clicked his heels, wiped his moustache with the back of his hand and intoned, ‘7989438, O'Toole, the Governor will see you now.’

  ‘O'Toole! Hahaha! O'Toole, that's your handle is it, man.’ It was inevitable that Fat Boy would appreciate a feeble pun. ‘O'Toole! Not enough you should be coon and nonce, you're a Mick into the bargain –’

  ‘Shut it, Denver,’ snapped the screw at Fat Boy; then he jerked his head at Danny, who disentangled his fingers from the bars, wiped his mouth and shuffled out of the cell. Before heading off along the landing Danny poked his head back into the cell and sang in a reasonably tuneful falsetto, ‘You fill up my se-enses like a night in a forest/Like a sleepy blue ocean –’ and then he was gone, leaving the omega man without the last word.

  The screw marched Danny along the iron catwalk of the landing; one pair of feet banging with boot-shod authority, the other slapping ineffectually. In the awful, silent drum of the nonce wing theirs were the only beats. To their left and twenty feet below, the ground floor of the wing was more or less empty, no association going on in this least sociable of areas. Bats were neatly aligned on the ping-pong table, balls racked on the pool table. To their right, cell doorway after cell doorway presented a vignette of a nonce standing,
a nonce sitting, a nonce writing, a nonce obsessively brushing his teeth. There was no soundtrack save for their footfalls on the landing; it was like a black-magic lantern, or the advent calendar of the Antichrist.

  When they reached the grey-painted iron stairway Danny cleared his throat and rasped, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, O'Toole.’

  ‘Will we have to go right up those two wings, sir, the way we came like – I mean to get to the Governor?’

  The screw pulled up and faced Danny, giving him a proper screwing out – it was his trademark. ‘No, son, we won't. That was your initiation; every inmate who's going into protection is led through those two wings. It satisfies the inmates who aren't protected.’ The screw was still screwing him out. Danny couldn't believe it, the old fucker was for real; he was talking to Danny as if Danny were a human being.

  ‘An’ you don't hold with it . . . sir?’

  ‘No, I don't. This is meant to be a showcase nick now, run by the POs, but don't believe it, lad, the cons still have a big hold here. Mind yourself.’ And they descended.

  The Governor of HMP Wandsworth, Marcus Peppiatt, was considered a high-flyer in a hierarchy that positively thrived on Icaruses. Since his graduate entry Peppiatt had fully justified his rapid ascent through the ranks. While Assistant Governor at Downview he had nobbled a skunk-growing operation in the prison infirmary. At Blundstone in Norfolk, where he assumed the gubernatorial position, he had put a stop to a situation where the bulk of supervisory visits was supervised by the inmates themselves. Then came the appointment to Wandsworth, in theory a great step up.

  But Peppiatt was only too aware that the old Victorian panopticons such as Wandsworth remained the dark-star ships of the prison fleet. It was an irony screaming into an eternal void that these five-winged whirligigs, built to embody an ideal, were the very real centres of eruption in a volcanic system. Peppiatr's appointment came in the wake of fifteen inmates seizing a JCB that had been brought into an inside yard for construction work. They'd battered nine prison officers and seriously assaulted three civilian workers. The only thing that prevented them from ramming their way through the gates and taking off across Wandsworth Common, batting promenading matrons to either side as they fled, was their inability to get the earthmover into reverse gear. The Home Office could manage reverse gear; they fired the then governor.

  Marcus Peppiatt was a liberal – in a strong sense. He believed in a prison system that embodied rational, utilitarian principles, not that far removed from those enjoined by Jeremy Bentham himself. Indeed, Peppiatt had gone so far as to set his ideas on these matters down in a book entitled Rational Imprisonment. Several copies of this tome were stacked in a shelf behind the Governor's desk. The spines of the books were blue, with the words ‘Rational Imprisonment’ picked out in a particularly virulent yellow. When, as now, the Governor was seated behind his desk, his head became aligned with the shelf in just such a way that, to a viewer in the position of 7989438, O'Toole, he appeared to be ensnared by his own slogan.

  ‘7989438, O'Toole, sir,’ said the old human screw with the white ‘tache.

  ‘Thank you, Officer Higson.’ The Governor hunched forward over his blotter. ‘Could you wait in the outer office to escort the inmate back, please, I don't think we'll be long. Deposition?’ This last was aimed at Danny, who passed across the envelope. The Governor extracted the folder inside and began to scan the contents. So this was the Clapton cab killer. He scrutinised the original mug shot of Danny; one that displayed to full effect the vapid, lost expression which had led the prosecutor at Danny's trial to descend to the banality of evoking the banality of evil. To the Governor it contrasted remarkably with the alert, tense, angry expression on the face of the young black man who stood in front of his desk.

  The Governor placed both his hands palm. down over the contents of Danny's deposition, as if he could staunch the blood of the victim inside. ‘Well.’ He regarded the psycho. ‘You're on F Wing now, O'Toole, and if you behave you'll stay there indefinitely.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don't want no protection, Sir, I want to be on an ordinary wing.’

  ‘Is that so, O'Toole.’ The Governor got up from behind his desk – a standard-issue, large-scale, dark-wood, gubernatorial item – and began to pace the office like the public-school headmaster he so closely resembled. Danny's eyes paced it along with him: over to the window (bars on the outside, mesh on the inside, people don't realise that it's the staff as much as the inmates who’re in jail). ‘I expect you got a worse initiation on your way from Reception to F Wing than most, O'Toole . . .’ Wheels away from the window, hand scrabbling in wire-wool hair. ‘You're a convicted sex killer, O'Toole, and your victim was a child; there are at least a thousand men in this prison who, given the chance – left alone with you in this office, for example –’ Moves over to the smoked-glass door, grey-flannel legs scissoring, shuts the door eliminating the riffle of computer keys in the outer office. ‘Would happily wring the life out of you with their bare hands.’ Moves back behind the desk and sets himself down, steeples his fingers erecting a small church over the deposition and addresses Danny from this fleshly pulpit. ‘I'm not so sure that I'm not one of them.’

  Danny wasn't impressed. The army had taught him how to square up to authority in the right way, directly but without any attitude. They didn't like attitude. ‘But, sir, if I'm on F Wing for my own protection how can you explain the fact, yeah, that the man I'm banged up with has jus’ tol’ me I've gotta sell him that’ – he stabbed a finger at the deposition on the desk – ‘if I don't want to get jugged.’

  At this the Governor sat up straight and was rationally imprisoned once more. ‘I see, yes, your deposition. And what's the name of your cell mate, O'Toole?’

  ‘The PO called him Denver, sir, but he styles ‘imsel Fat Boy.’

  ‘We know about Denver, O'Toole –’

  ‘It's bloody sick, sir, sick, the man's floggin’ the pictures of victims an’ that, floggin’ them to the nonces. He say they even get the victims’ addresses and send tapes and shit to them. It's bad, sir, it's n-not r-right.’ Danny stuttered to a finish, and took a step back, aware of having overstepped a mark and attempting practically to correct it.

  The Governor was quite beautifully perplexed, ‘I see, sick, is it.’ He'd heard of the righteous lack of conscience of paedophiles; he'd even witnessed plenty of it, but this was ridiculous. ‘I suppose it's sicker and badder than what you've been convicted for?’ He'd tapped the barrel. Danny commenced gushing.

  ‘I didn't do nothing, Governor. Nothing. I'm not a nonce – I've never interfered with no kiddies, no way, not ever, man. No, man – you gotta believe me, sir, I been set up. I was a crack dealer, see? For years like, an’ I worked for this man in Trenchtown. He sent me the powder an’ I had a crew in Philly, US of A. We'd cook the shit up and flog it, see? But I nicked a couple of keys off of him, this Yardie called Skank. It's him what done this, framed me up. You gotta believe me, I can't be with those nonces, I'll lose all respect, man, respect for myself, whatever –’

  ‘Appeal, O'Toole.’

  ‘Whassat?’

  ‘You will be wanting to appeal.’

  ‘Yes, sir, of course, but first off I gotta get off of the nonce wing.

  The Governor looked at a pair of crossed miniature sculls that had been left on the far wall by his predecessor. Next to them was his own Plexiglass-encapsulated Mission Statement. He could just about make out bullet point four: ‘Inmates should be regarded as potentially viable economic contributors, even while in a punitive environment.’ Next to this was a photograph of the Governor's freshman year at Loughborough; a long, pale, spotty swathe of humanity, curiously vague at one end because twenty of them had run round behind the stand while the camera was panning, so as to appear in the picture twice. The Governor's eyes returned to Danny's. ‘Anything is possible, O'Toole.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It's not impossi
ble for you to get off F Wing – if you really want to.’

  ‘Yeah, but Fat Boy says only as a tout – an’ I believe him . . . Sir.

  ‘Tout's an ugly word, O'Toole, but anyway that's not the point. You're in it up to here; even if you don't get attacked because you're a sexual offender it would appear more than likely that this man Skank will still want you dead, right?’

  ‘Even so, sir, even so, I ain't no nonce, I need my respect, my self-respect –’

  ‘You need a friend, O'Toole, and a very well-connected one at that.’

  ‘I've gotta get off the wing, Governor.’

  ‘You've got to listen – are you prepared to listen?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Good. Well, for now do just that. Do only that, and we'll see what we can do, and, O'Toole.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do something useful while you're here. It's quiet enough on F Wing, there's work available, there are courses available. Show me you can make something of yourself; show me you're worth it. Got it?’

  Danny nodded. The Governor signalled that the interview was at an end and was about to call for the PO when Danny butted in. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, O'Toole.’

  ‘What about the jugging, sir, what about Fat Boy, he says it's this ex-copper, Waller, he's the one that's gonna do me.’

  ‘I see.’ The Governor shuffled Danny's deposition together on the blotter, and handed it to him with a smile the bitter side of wry. ‘Well, everybody has to save their skin, don't they, O'Toole?’

  ‘Sir?’ Danny couldn't tell if this was fuckwit racist dissing or what.

  ‘I'll leave it to your conscience.’