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

by Will Self

Back on F Wing Danny cut a compromise deal with Fat Boy. All the shots, even the one of the boy's corpse, but no address. The boy was dead now – and he didn't even know he was; but the living knew everything.

  In prison, in the English winter, the word crepuscular acquires new resonance, new intensity. You thought you knew what permanent dusk was like – you knew nothing. For here and now is an eternity of forty-watt bulbs, an Empty Quarter of linoleum, and a lost world of distempered walls. It's an environment of corridors and walkways, a space that taunts with the idea of progression towards arrival; then delivers only a TV room full of modular plastic chairs and Styrofoam beakers napalmed by fag ends. In this sepia interior the nonces move about reticently, unwilling to trouble the gloom. There's even a certain modesty in their demeanour, a modesty that flowers in the exercise yard, where their efforts to avoid one another and create zones of inner protection within their non-fraternity become almost courtly.

  Danny was absorbed into this mulch of humanity with barely a ripple. It was as Fat Boy had said: the nonces were a law-abiding lot. Indeed, abiding was their main strength. While the idiots over in the panopticon lost their heads, hung from the bars ranting, disdained pork, took up Rastafarianism, went on dirty protests and generally fought time's current, the nonces abided in their isolated gaol, shat out from the body of the prison, marooned in the desert of its own perversion.

  The nonces abided, trading photographs of their victims like soccer stars. They were largely family men, community-charge payers. Many had had travelling occupations – salesmen and such. They saw themselves as avuncular – and had often introduced one another to children as ‘uncle'; they were generous, and had frequently been apprehended by the police, carrying toys, looking for a child to give them to. The nonces abided and contemplated the sick society that denied its own desires and by extension theirs. They were big fans of The Clothes Show, and would be found in the TV room in silent ranks on Sunday afternoons, muttering about the obscene thinness of the teenage couture models, and how it shouldn't be allowed. They also enjoyed Children in Need.

  The nonces abided, plotting certain revolutionary acts that would enable them to advance the cause of noncery. They factored in social hypocrisy, but on the whole still considered that things would have changed by the time they got out, attitudes would have matured. Their ‘liberation’ of certain youthful citizens would be seen as just that: the freeing of tender souls into the warmth and bonhomie of a full relationship with someone older. Much older.

  There were some malcontents. A small posse – perhaps twenty in all-who gathered along with Waller and Higson outside the POs’ office on the ground floor. Here, the tough, bent ex-cops would swagger, showing their nonce acolytes the most effective way to punch out a screw. It worked – everybody was suitably intimidated.

  But Danny found he could cope. He cultivated sleep when lock-up came round. He would withstand an hour of Fat Boy's vapid, con-man blether, before pointedly wrapping the anorexic pillow round his head and diving for the bottom. Fat Boy still came on to him, of course. There were the endless wheedlings over the address, and the ceaseless exhortations for Danny to apply for a visiting order: ‘When yer gonna get a fuckin’ VO, O'Toole?’

  ‘When is never, Denver.’

  ‘Come on, O'Toole, one good bottler and we'll be flush for months. Come on. They say you can't bottle at Wandsworth – but that's bullshit, I done it loads of times. All you's gotta be is blatant like – just shove it up your jacksie right in front of the screw, all nonchalant like –’

  ‘I'm not getting a VO, Denver – I don't want no fuckin’ visitors.’

  ‘I know you don't want a fuckin’ visitor, but there's friends of mine that might like to visit you, get acquainted an’ that. Come on, O'Toole, you tol’ me you used to like a bit of smoke . . .’

  ‘Used to’ were the post-operative words. No longer was this the case. The inmates of F Wing were subjected to random drug testing as much as those in the rest of the prison. A smoke of dope would get you a positive test result after two weeks; although, with hoe-downing, honking irony, smack or crack would be out of your system in hours. It was as if the authorities were doing everything in their power to inculcate a vicious, hard-drug culture in the prison system.

  Danny took the long view and eschewed the puff. He didn't want to lose his remission, even though he was scheduled for release in 2014. And with the smack and crack evacuated from his body, and the Fates exiled, no more potent now than the dust balls which blew along the corridors, Danny knew that class As were off the menu as well. He began to work out again, stretching and slamming his body back into high tensility. He lobbied for work and got a cushy number: eight hours a week turning the poles for birdhouses. The work was pernickety, repetitive and economically useless; the birdhouses were shoddy and barely paid for the materials used to make them. It reminded Danny, in its very essentials, of the way he, in the depths of his crack addiction, had ceaselessly combed the carpets of Leopold Road on the lookout for lost bits of rock.

  But the work and work-outs got him away from Fat Boy and the cell. Because after lock-up, when he plunged into sleep, the Terrors were waiting for Danny. The Fates had always had a certain sang-froid, a certain disdain for their own haunting, but the Terrors were hams, pure and simple. They screamed at Danny, ringed him round with their gaping mouths, tier upon tier of them, like the landings of the wing, and every single one ejaculating nothing. The nothing of imprisonment, the nothing of a dead life, the nothing of a millennial come-down. Towards dawn Danny would usually awake, wrung out, more exhausted. He would essay an unambitious wank – two score tugs and a plash against the sheet – then wait for the darkness of the cell to be infused with the darkness of another day.

  Danny was waiting for the Governor to be in touch, to give him his break. He remained scrupulously low-profile, muttering ‘sir’ to the screws if they spoke to him, and shuffle-slapping out of trouble whenever he saw it coming at him, along a rumbling walkway, or around a distempered corner.

  One day, about two months after he'd arrived on the nonce wing, having taken receipt of a compartmentalised lunch tray mounded with mashed potato and little else, Danny found himself scrutinising the list of educational courses pinned up outside the POs’ office. It was a tatty little codification of tatty little opportunities. There was a carpentry class, if you wanted to brush up on birdhouse construction; and a music appreciation course, if you felt that Albinoni might soothe your soul. All in all there were eleven different classes offered. Danny sucked the inside of his cheek and considered the possibilities. Presumably this was what the Governor had meant went he talked of Danny ‘making something’ of himself; perhaps if he undertook one of the courses the Governor might hear of it and moderate his attitudes accordingly. Best to do a vocational course – that would go down well. At the very bottom of the list there was a course called ‘Creative Wiring’, taught by a Mr Mahoney. That sounded OK to Danny – it must, he thought, be to do with electrics and stuff. If he could add a few more skills to what he already knew about DIY, Danny would have the beginnings of a trade. The course kicked off that week on the Thursday afternoon, an hour before lock-up. Danny resolved that he would be there.

  4.

  The Nonce Prize

  Danny got permission from Officer Higson to go up to the Education Room. He walked along the ground floor of the block, eyes down, avoiding any eye contact with his fellow prisoners. Not that Danny worried about the nonces any more, and he certainly didn't perceive them as a sexual threat. The first few days he'd been on the wing, he'd been certain that every second he was on association, or in the exercise yard, or in the queue for food, the perverts were eyeing him up from behind, assessing his potential role in some deviant playlet. Danny could swear he felt their corkscrew gazes, like static electricity on the nape of his neck. But Fat Boy disabused him of this notion, as he had of so many others. “Na, na, you're wrong there. You gotta look at it this way, O'Toole; even yer rapi
st is incapable of any real straight sex, and yer nonce is doubly incapable. For a nonce to want to butt-fuck you, well! It wouldn't really be a perversion, as such, you'd ‘ave to say that ‘e was cured!’

  At the end of the block Danny took the stairs up to the Education Room. F Wing, although built later than the panopticon, was still constructed along the same severe lines. However, at either end of the landings there were several storeys of miscellaneous rooms, piled up higgledy-piggledy. Here the noxiousness of Victorian architecture, unconstricted by utility, burst forth into duff mouldings and depressing finials. This was Gormenghast Castle converted into an old people's home.

  Danny spiralled his way up glancing into rooms as he went. Here was a therapy group – there an early-release group. Knots of nonces sat about reassuring each other that everything would be all right – for them. Danny climbed on. At the very top of the staircase he found the Education Room. He paused outside and glanced through the window set in the door. Inside there were four battered desks; three of them had old manual typewriters set on them, and the fourth an equally primitive word processor. Two of the desks were tenanted, one by Sidney Cracknell, the other by Philip Greenslade.

  These were a couple of the most reviled nonces on the wing – nearly as reviled as Danny himself. They were both serving life, Cracknell for running a children's home in the way he thought best; Greenslade for a Clapton cab office-style abduction, torture, rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. They were physically diverse types. Cracknell was so warped and wizened, it was difficult to imagine anybody entrusting a gerbil to his care – let alone a human being; whereas Greenslade had the affable, open-featured countenance, the white hair, and twinkly blue eyes of a gregarious West Country publican. Which he was. Danny thought it a coincidence, if not an especially remarkable one, that they should both want to be electricians.

  Together with them in the room was a third man, who had to be the teacher. He was big, at least six feet four, and standing with his back to the door. He had a hip-length leather jacket on and black jeans. When he turned, Danny was confronted by a face that was the essence of Ireland: two big pink ears; full, sensual red lips; a blob-ended Roman nose and a knobbly forehead. The man's waxy complexion suggested that his potato-shaped head had been buried in a field for some months; while his broad shoulders and solid stance implied that he might have dug it up himself. He was probably around forty. He had deep-set, curious grey eyes which radiated intelligence and ferocity in equal measure from beneath an overhang of thick brown quiff. As he watched him, the man trained these eyes on Danny, then crooked his finger. Danny entered the room.

  ‘And you are?’ The man's voice was quite high, but crisp and assured, with the merest whiff of an Irish accent.

  ‘O'Toole, sir.’

  ‘No sirs here, Mister O'Toole. I prefer the title “Mister”. I am Mister Mahoney – I assume you know Messrs Greenslade and Cracknell?’

  ‘Err, well, yeah, sort of . . .’ Danny wanted to say ‘by reputation’, but didn't think it would go down well. As it was Cracknell was already tittering at him.

  ‘Please, Mister O'Toole, be so good as to take a seat. We are a small convocation, but I hope we'll prove a productive one.’ While Danny shuffled behind a desk the Irishman ran on. ‘I myself hold with the Alcoholics Anonymous dictum regarding these things – wherever two students of creative writing are gathered together, it's possible to hold a class.’

  Cracknell tittered some more at this quip, and Greenslade managed an amiable-sounding grunt, but Danny chimed up, ‘Mister Mahoney?’

  ‘Mister O'Toole, how may I assist?’

  ‘Did you say creative writing?‘

  ‘That's right.’

  ‘Thass like stories an’ that?’

  ‘Stories, short or otherwise, that are part of cycles or standing alone; novellas of all kinds and genres; novels even – although for the beginner I would counsel against attempting the longer narrative form; in a word: a tale, and you, Mr O'Toole, the teller. Hmm?’

  Danny thought carefully before answering. The wiring/writing mix-up would make him a laughing stock for weeks, the running gags on the nonce wing had incredibly weak legs. And anyway, writing was a proper thing to do, writers – Danny thought – could make good money, especially if they wrote ads and stuff like that. The Governor might well look kindly on Danny's burgeoning writing career, let him off the nonce wing and give him protection from Skank's associates, one of whom would undoubtedly be waiting for Danny in the main prison.

  ‘Mister Mahoney, this course, I mean, does it like . . .’ Danny struggled to find some new words, Mahoney forbore from assisting. ‘I mean will it like look good . . . I mean so far as the Governor's concerned.’

  Cracknell was openly laughing now, but Mahoney silenced him with a glare. ‘Mister O'Toole, I cannot speak for the Governor in this matter, or the Home Office in general. I don't believe they have an espoused position on writing as an aspect of rehabilitation. What I can tell you’ – he slapped the desk in front of Danny to emphasise his easy articulation – ‘is that every single one of the inmates who has completed my creative writing course has obtained a positive benefit from it. I'm not claiming to have produced an Henri Charriere, who after twenty years on Devil's Island had the singular success of publishing two bestselling novels, and having himself portrayed in the film version of one of them by Dustin Hoffman, but I've had my modest successes. One of my students last year is now being regularly published, and the year before we had a runner-up in the Wolfenden Prize for Prison Writing. That got a lot of good publicity for Wandsworth, and the then governor certainly looked very kindly on that inmate, got him the transfer he wanted to a cat. B, integrated nick, hmmm?’

  Danny was convinced – he said, ‘Will Smith.’

  ‘I'm sorry, Mister O'Toole?’

  ‘Will Smith. I mean, he'd have to play me in a film based on my prison experience – leastways I never seen that Hoffman blacked up nor nothing – in a skirt, granted, but never done up as a black geezer. A few years ago it'd have to be Wesley Snipes, but now it's gonna be Smith. The man's got more ‘umour an’ that, more sex appeal.’

  There may have only been three students in Gerry Mahoney's creative-writing course, and they may have all been sex offenders, but despite that they managed to exemplify the three commonest types of wannabe writer. Greenslade was the relentless, prosaic plodder. Mahoney had read a story of his already, while they waited for other aspirants. It was suitable for a fourth-rate Lithuanian women's magazine, with its contrived characters, mawkish sentimentality and anachronistic locutions: ‘And so it was . . .’, ‘The pale fingers of dawn . . .’, and ‘Deep in his heart . . .’ all featured on more than one occasion. The only thing to indicate that this story was written by a man with an unconscious as dark as a black hole was the peculiar absence of affect. The author might have felt for his creations in the abstract, but on the page he manipulated them like wooden puppets, like victims.

  Then there was the warped Cracknell. He was another stereotype – the compulsive scrawler. Once Cracknell got going, he couldn't rein it in. He'd been the first to arrive at the Education Room, dragging up the stairs with him – he walked with a particularly convoluted fake limp, the substance of ongoing and unsuccessful petitioning to the European Court of Human Rights – two heavy shopping bags full of hideous manuscript. ‘My novels,’ he'd puffed as he came in the door. ‘I mean, I say novels, but really they're all part of the same big thing . . . like a . . . like a –’

  ‘Saga?’ groaned Mahoney, who had seen the like of this many times before. Cracknell positively beamed.

  ‘Yeah, saga, that'd be the word, although it's not like there are a lot of Vikings and trolls and what have you in my novels; these are more sagas of the distant future – Oh! I like that, that's good, “Sagas of the Distant Future”, that could be on the spines of all of them, with the individual titles on the covers, or perhaps the other way rou –’

  ‘And what w
ould you like me to do with these sagas, Mister Cracknell?’ Mahoney had his hands on his hips and was observing Cracknell unpack his literary load, with such a baleful expression that his brows were not so much knitted as knotted.

  ‘I'd be much obliged, Mister Mahoney – given that you're a ,published writer and that – if you'd give me your opinion.

  Mahoney flipped open the cover of the first of the eighty-five narrow feint exercise books Cracknell had piled up. Inside there was a furious density of manuscript: thirty words to the line, forty lines to the page. The handwriting was viciously regular, backward-sloping, and utterly indecipherable. Doing a quick calculation, Mahoney reckoned there had to be five million words in the exercise books – at least.

  ‘You see,’ Cracknell continued, ‘these books here – one through twenty-seven – deal with the first three thousand years of the Arkonic Empire; and books twenty-seven through to forty cover the thousand-year rise to power of its arch rival, the Trimmian Empire. What I'd like is some gui –’

  ‘Do you like writing, Mister Cracknell?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Is it the writing itself you enjoy, Mister Cracknell; or is it merely a way for you to fill your time?’

  ‘Well, it certainly does fill my time. The bloke I share my cell with, he gets a little irritated now and then, because after lock-up it's out with the latest exercise book, open it up, and I may end up writing all night! By torchlight! I find it restful y'see –’

  ‘That's as may be, Mister Cracknell, and I'm sure there is considerable merit in your sagas of the distant future, but as far as here and now is concerned, I'm not going to read them.’

  Cracknell was dumbstruck, appalled. He nearly left the class forthwith, taking his literary tranche with him. He muttered about inmates’ rights, about requests to the Governor, and finally about the possible envy of a certain Irish writer who might not be quite as fluent as Cracknell himself. Mahoney was unmoved. When, following Danny's arrival, he came to address the class as a whole, Mahoney set out his curriculum in a series of bold emphatics: