by Will Self
‘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. Peppiatt’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 leg
s 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 impossible 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.’
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 addre
ss, 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.
