The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  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 careful 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, and 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.

  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!’