On the Brinks

by Sam Millar

  “And Tony Curtis!” shouted Cowboy.

  “Fuck Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis!” someone shouted. “We’ve a fuckin’ wing-shift in a couple of days and with that screw buried, we’ll all be fuckin’ dead Vikings!”

  Like all of us, the owner of the voice was on his nerves wondering what the screws had in store. We all knew it wouldn’t be too pleasant.

  “Whaddya mean fuck Kirk Douglas?” asked an indignant Cowboy.

  Just as the conversation began to decompose, a shooting star lined the iron-blue night like a silver papilla chalking the sky. I wondered if it was an omen, or simply the blinking of my eye causing a brilliance, gone forever?

  “Make a wish,” someone shouted, proving it wasn’t imaginary.

  “It’ll all be over tomorrow!” shouted Goose.

  “Some snout!” shouted Teapot.

  “A woman!” All in unison.

  “Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness forced to go through a wing-shift before they could squeaky-boot, the wanking bastards!” Everyone laughing.

  Quietness came, and this icy wind would take no prisoners. Snow was falling in thick corollas, swirling tightly in a rage before pyramiding in tiny conics at the base of the wire. White rust clung to the wire, as if invaded by legions of sick frogs scaling for battle, while into our windowless cells came the wind, like a drunken banshee laced with evil. Her mocking howls reminded us just how lonely and isolated we had become.

  “We’re movin’!” screamed a voice from the top of the wing, and a few of us laughed at that, too. The screws never moved at night. Security. Not enough screws on. Besides, they had yet to clean the wing opposite for us to move into.

  It took us all by surprise. A first. Bodies that only minutes ago had started to relax for sleep were now rigid with nerves. Our minds and stomachs raced with cathartic jerks as we paced, wondering, why a nocturnal manoeuvre?

  Normally, the intervals between the opening of cell doors lasted no more than thirty to sixty seconds: time enough for a prisoner to be moved to the ablutions area, searched, beaten and then moved to a clean wing.

  Not this time, however. Three to four minutes were elapsing before each door was opened.

  In the distance we could hear the sound of tables being dragged across the Circle floor. Muffled screams and shouts carried back, making us pace faster, our stomachs churning with acid.

  My cellmate and I just stared at each other like zombies. Each of us wanted to take a shit, bad.

  Control your breathing. Don’t let the fuckers see your fear. Steady … easy …

  Getting closer. Two cells away. More screams. The freezing cold was irrelevant now. Fear was supreme. It knows no walls.

  They’re next door!

  God, I’m gonna shit my pants, except I don’t have any pants to shit.

  The moon never looked colder or fuller. Not a cloud to diminish its supremacy, while speckles of stars winked Morse code warnings all too late. Suddenly, the key was being placed in my cell door. It made me jump, a little. The door opened. No words exchanged. My cellmate went first. He preferred to get it over with.

  I had done this so many times that my mind went into automatic denial mode as I left the cell: I’m walking in the park … at home watching Top of the Pops … It’s Thursday and I feel great ’cause I just got paid …

  The tableau of horror before my eyes quickly slapped me back to reality. Instead of the wash area, the search was being conducted in the Circle. A naked prisoner was being held upside down by his ankles by four screws. Six other screws surrounded them, plus a notorious “white shirt” called Paddy Joe, screaming obscenities at the naked, inverted man. One of the screws was probing the prisoner’s anus, while two others pulled his buttocks as wide as possible.

  The park is packed … a group of children play cowboys and Indians … my brothers Joe and Danny are waving at me, along with Dad. Don’t let the bastards beat ye, kid, they are all shouting. You’re better than them.

  The prisoner in front of me was thrown on top of the table, the one the screws were using. It was covered in shit and blood. They grabbed his hair and smashed his face against the table’s top. His nose broke easy; blood was everywhere.

  My brothers are still waving at me, except it isn’t them, it’s the screws in front indicating for me to move.

  It was then that I made my decision. Run! Run for all you’re worth, ye bare-arsed bastard!

  The screws were immobilised with disbelief as I ran, moving so fast I had to prevent myself from slamming into a wall. It was Peter Kelly’s again. Me running like fuck and Dad timing the event. The urine-covered floor was slick as oil on ice, but my feet held well as I precariously raced for home, pursued by a couple of greyhound screws who were within arm’s length of catching me.

  One of the screws kicked out at my feet, narrowly missing. Instead, he lost his balance, slipped and slid, propelling himself onto the urine-covered floor. As I ran into the cell, a look of horror came over my cellmate’s bloodied face. He had heard the commotion and thought they were coming to do him again. His relief was short-lived when he saw it was just me.

  “Brace yourself,” I told him. “They are coming again!”

  The screws were soaked in urine and sweat as they stood at the door, panting and heaving like carnivorous hounds finally trapping their quarry.

  I could only wait.

  The first thing they tried was pulling me out of the cell so they could get a better go at me. But I held onto the pipes with a death grip, thanking God that the screws had turned the pipes off in winter, otherwise I would have had nothing to hold.

  Deep down, I think my cellmate wanted to chop my fingers off – anything, just to get the screws out of the cell. But he held my head and neck tightly – a bit too tightly, I thought later – forcing the screws to give up their tug-of-war with my legs and settle for giving me a kicking instead.

  It was all over in a matter of minutes.

  “Did ye see the bastard run?” said the urine-covered screw, walking like John Wayne up the wing. “Ha-ha! Think his arse was on fire! Ha-ha!”

  “All that fuckin’ runnin’,” replied the other. “I could go for a nice pint now.”

  Couldn’t we all? I thought, as their voices began to fade.

  In less than an hour it was all over. Inventory revealed broken noses, cracked ribs, teeth knocked out. Almost everyone had a black eye. I was lucky. I escaped with a few forget-me-not bruises and a nail ripped clean from my toe after the chase. My ears and mouth were bleeding badly, but I’d survive. No one mentioned the anal search afterwards. We were too mortified. My cellmate refused to look at me. He knew what I saw and blamed himself somehow for what the screws did on that table of horror. We were suddenly living a parallel insanity between violent reality and an even more violent psychological madness.

  It was fast approaching midnight, and our soggy mattresses and blankets had yet to be thrown into the excrement-covered cells. To try and keep warm we jumped up and down, but the futility of this quickly became evident, as the water and urine on the floor became ice, making our feet adhere to it. The joints in our bodies succumbed first, as the drills of ice burrowed into the knees, then elbows, forcing us to kneel in mock adoration, then stand, anything to ease the pain of cold.

  “How much longer do ye reckon before we get a blanket?” asked my cellmate through chattering teeth, bloody nose now frozen.

  I didn’t want to talk. Every pathetic part of me was shivering.

  “Have ye gone deaf?” he asked.

  “How the fuck would I know! I’m not a screw, am I?” As soon as I said it, I regretted it, but I didn’t apologise.

  Like an invisible wrestler, the cold forced both of us on to the floor. Slowly, painfully.

  The sound of wind was all we could hear. Tiny birds flew in our heads, telling our brains that, yes, we could feel the cold and the pain and no amount of bluffing by us would change that. Offer it up to God, the Angel of Death was whispering. Remember, I
told you: Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

  If only we had him now, that bastard of a priest, naked with his shit kicked in. See how much he believes in God and cleanliness.

  I smelt Colditz even before he came to the window. The sweet, sickly smell of marijuana had become his trademark, and it could be smelt through the stench of shit and piss.

  “Fine mess this is, wot, Millar? You people are a glutton for fackin’ punishment.”

  I strained to stand, thinking my knees would snap at any moment.

  Colditz had his overcoat pulled up, covering most of his face. His cap was pulled down. Only his nose and shadowed eyes were visible, as was the joint of marijuana in his mouth.

  “Fackin’ freezin’, aint it?” he laughed, blowing out dove-grey smoke.

  “When are we getting the blankets back?” I asked. “It’s been almost two hours. Men are freezing to death.”

  “Don’t be tryin’ that thick paddy act with me, Millar. Of course you’re freezin’ to fackin’ death. That’s the whole fackin’ idea, ain’t it! I mean, you go and stiff one of their mates and expect kid-glove treatment? C’mon the fack! They’re hopin’ one or two of you facks will be as dead as their mate come mornin’.”

  Even after all those years, Colditz still reminded me of Clint Eastwood, as he had when I first saw him as I descended from the van that night in the yard. He always referred to the other screws as “they” rather than “we”, deliberately distancing himself from them. The home-bred screws hated him almost as much as they hated us. Being English, they regarded him as a bounty hunter, moving in on their territory and with dubious loyalties. They needn’t have worried on that score. ‘I won’t give you the Queen and Country speech,’ he would say. ‘I don’t believe in it. I’m here for the money. Pure and simple.’

  Before I could ask another question, he was gone, deep into the night.

  The truculent wind was now gathering momentum. Small slivers of ice steadily crystallised the dampness of the walls, preventing us from leaning on it for support.

  At 3am, a screw clicked the key in the time guard. It is repeated every hour on the hour. Still no hairy blanket or skinny mattress.

  Echoes. Childhood echoes. Dig deep. Find them. Allow them to sustain you, balancing the madness with a perfect pinch of shaky sanity. You can do it. You know you can do it.

  How the fuck can Kojak do that?

  Do what, for fuck’s sake?

  You know. That thing with the match. The way he lights it with a flick of his thumb. How the fuck does he do it?

  Are Sooty and Sweep real? Who is Doctor Who? How do Jacobs get the figs into fig rolls? Are the Hulk’s balls green? Are the Thing’s orange?

  4am. Click! Still no blanket.

  Now you know how meat feels in the deep freeze! Serves youse fuckin’ well! Gluttons for punishment …

  Gud lads, gud lads, those boys in the Kesh! said The Fisherman.

  Give me another Black Bush, Goldilocks, me bucko! said He Who Must Be Obeyed. Let’s have a nice warm drink fer them gud lads on a terrible night like this, agrees The Poison Dwarf.

  Gud lads, Gud lads. Another whiskey for Mother Ireland. These gud lads will get us into Stormont one day, the stupid fuckers, says Tom-Tom The Graveyard Man. We’ll all live in grand houses – except them, of course, the fucking eejits. Gud lads.

  5am. Click!

  “God is dead: of His pity for man hath God died,” whispered Nietzsche, into my ear.

  6am. Click!

  Fuck Mother Ireland, the Whore, and all who sail on her, She with her knickers exposed green, white and fucking orange, her suckling tits filled with blood. Fuck the priests, the paedophile bastards, fucking altar boys at every given chance. Fuck all politicians, fucking us more than anyone else. Fuck them all. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  7am. Click!

  “If I’d my way, ye fuckers would get nothin’!” Ape Face said, throwing two damp blankets into the cell. His flaming red hair looked like it was about to burst into flame, such was his anger.

  “Fuckers!” he reiterated as he slammed the cell door.

  The blanket is absolutely useless now. We are beyond that stage. Too cold. A flamethrower, perhaps, could help and knowing Ape Face, he would be more than willing to use it. But despite it all, we knew we had beaten the Beast and everything it could vomit out at us.

  “Can … can … can, ye believe we … we … we … survived that?” my cellmate grinned through chattering smashed teeth and busted nose, sounding like Marlon Brando. “I think we’ve all become infuckingvincible! Yes! Yesssss!”

  His eyes were glazed. There was no doubt that he was slowly losing it. I simply looked on in horror, the soles of my feet glued to the frozen floor.

  7.20am. “We’re movin’!”

  Moving? A sick joke? No. We were moving. Again. This time we weren’t just moving to another wing. The vans coming into the yard told us it was another Block, and this adventure would probably be as ghastly as the previous.

  8.05am. We arrived in the Block. A welcoming committee of screws greeted us with the customary kicks and punches, which were impotent after last night’s baptism of fire. The cells were wet with paint, such was their rush to move us. It wasn’t long before the fumes caused torturous headaches.

  3pm. Our blankets and mattresses were thrown in after seventeen hours of terror in record-breaking freezing weather.

  We have prevailed, yet again, despite the screws’ proficiency to brutalise.

  We have won. Unconquerable. Just like the fucking Spartans! We will never be defeated. Never.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Word in your Ear, Much Later in Time

  No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.

  Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald

  Excerpts from Michael Ferguson, ex-POW and Blanket Man, being interviewed on “Ancient Circles”, USA:

  “As the beatings continued, the screws systematically beat every prisoner the whole way down the wing. I remember the screws coming up my side of the cell. I was at the third cell from the bottom, and there was a man next-door to me called Sammy Millar – funny enough, he’s a man I’ve never seen, though I would know his voice anywhere. I remember the screws opening his door, dragging him out and down the wing, kicking and beating him as they bounced him off the other cell doors. And when the screws were throwing him back into the other cell, I swear to this day, he must have bounced off the walls, because they hadn’t even had his cell door closed when he was up at the window of his cell, screaming my name out, ‘Massey! Massey!’ at the top of his voice – Massey was a nickname the prisoners gave me, after Massey Ferguson tractors.

  “So, he’s screaming out his window and I’m standing at my cell door, and I can’t even speak at this stage because of the anxiety and the fear, I can’t even swallow because I’ve no saliva left! Just as the screws open my door, Sammy’s screaming my name out at the top of his voice, ‘Massey! Massey!’ And all of a sudden, all the fear and anxiety just swelled out of me, and I screamed, ‘What the hell do ye want!’ [laughter from the interviewer and Massey] And I heard his voice come back to me saying, ‘If you find an ear up there, will ye bring it back – it’s mine!’ [more laughter] They’ve taken me out of my cell, booting and kicking me, and I’m laughing the whole way, I’m laughing the whole time the screws are doing this, and I’m not laughing because I think what the screws are doing to me is funny, I’m laughing at the sheer relief of it all because this man – just an ordinary guy, like myself, in the next cell to me – had managed to rise above all the fear and all the terror, and so I knew, when, after Sammy had said that on that day, the screws would not be able to break me, and I would be able to endure what was happening to me, and for every other prisoner coming after me in that wing, they too would be able to survive what was happening to them on that day, because on this occasion one of the prisoners had risen above the terror of it all and helped the rest of us to surviv
e.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Angel of Death Comes A-Strutting Minus Strutts

  JUNE 1980

  Hell is paved with the skulls of priests.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  I said “a line will take us hours maybe Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

  Yeats, Adam’s Curse

  “Cowboy?” whispered the raspy voice of Seamus.

  “What? Whaddya want, Seamus?” Cowboy’s voice sounded forlorn, apathetic, as if preparing for sleep. He didn’t want to be bothered. He knew Seamus didn’t have a visit for at least three more weeks. Besides, he wasn’t bringing back any snout, anyway, now that the screws had more or less effectively shut down all means of obtaining snout on the visits.

  Those who smoked found the lack of tobacco agonising, and resorted to extreme measures. Some rolled the fluff they managed to pluck from their hairy blanket into bible pages and smoked these “holy smokers”, only to throw up an hour or two later. Others tried their hand at the skins sometimes left on baked potatoes with their jackets on. When the screws discovered this little trick, they quickly put an end to baked potatoes. One man even claimed to be smoking the dried excrement as it flaked from the wall. Two days later he squeaky-booted, leaving us to ponder if the special cigarettes had influenced his decision and causing Finbar to comment, wryly, that the squeaky-booter was either smoking shit or talking it.

  “Cowboy. I can see a ‘strutt’, just a couple of –”

  “Where, Seamus?” Quick as a flash, Cowboy was at the door, his voice animated with newborn enthusiasm. “My God, where, Seamus?” He sounded like a hunter stalking his prey.

  Strutt was the slang given to a cigarette butt, sometimes – albeit rarely – discarded accidentally by a screw. A good-sized strutt could make at least two, possibly three, Blanket cigarettes. To the smokers, it was worth its weight in gold.