Billy Rags

by Ted Lewis

  Of course, I shouldn’t have said that. That really let him in.

  “Perhaps that’s why they’re to be enforced. As a reminder to everyone that happiness is not the main aim of this establishment.”

  He began to walk by me. The two screws were grinning all over their faces. And that kind of thing I can do without.

  “Sir,” I said.

  Creasey carried on walking away.

  “Sir,” I said. This time my voice rang round the gallery.

  Creasey stopped and half-turned. I put on my innocent face.

  “Hope Mr. Moffatt knows what he’s doing.”

  Creasey’s face went black. He strode back to where I was standing.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I hope Mr. Moffatt knows what he’s about. I mean, happiness isn’t the main purpose of this establishment is it? On either side.”

  “Meaning precisely what?”

  I shrugged.

  “Cracken,” Creasey said, lowering his voice in inverse proportion to his anger, “we have your file. From time to time we even read it. Not a lot in it, really, as far as any remission’s concerned. But at the moment it’s an open file. It would take very little to close it.”

  I smiled at him. He turned away again and marched off.

  “So now what?” said Ray Crompton.

  “So we keep asking Creasey why the new regulations.”

  “What for?”

  “So that eventually he’ll get so sick and tired of the same bleeding question that he’ll pass the buck on to Moffatt and Moffatt will have to answer us himself.”

  “Where will that get us?”

  “I dunno,” I said, going back into my cell. “But at least we’ll have the satisfaction of getting Moffatt on the spot.”

  I sat down on my pit. The bastards. They’d do anything to remind you what you were. Well, maybe we could remind them back.

  Suddenly a thought struck me, and for a moment I didn’t feel so bad.

  “Here,” I said to Ray. “Does Walter know the news?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ray, getting it and beginning to smile. “I don’t think so.”

  I smiled back.

  “Walter’ll take it especially hard,” I said. “All that mohair going to the wall.”

  “Why don’t we go and tell him?” said Ray.

  “Just what I was thinking,” I said.

  So we kept on at Creasey until the buck was finally passed. Moffatt called a meeting.

  The meeting was set up in one of the visiting rooms on the end of the wing. Moffatt kept us waiting for a good twenty minutes before he showed up. Eventually he swept in flanked by Creasey and Bastin, the chief screw. Bastin whipped up a wooden chair and the Chief sat down, self-composed, almost prim, waiting for the murmuring to stop. Creasey and Bastin stood either side of him, slightly to the back, like advisers to the king.

  Moffatt was in his mid-forties, slim, about five foot ten inches. He was a bit like Walter in the care he took with his clothes. His suits were nothing like as expensive as Walter’s but because of the way he wore them and looked after them you could hardly notice the difference. Outside, he wore snappy, Sinatra-type felt hats that gave him a misleadingly rakish effect; in fact he was an extremely self-controlled, unyielding man, a man who didn’t care very much for other people and cared less about what they thought of him.

  When all the rhubarb subsided, Moffatt flicked at his knee to remove the non-existent fluff and said:

  “I have called this meeting to enable you to put to me any questions that might clear up misunderstandings or confusion arising from the new orders which come into effect next Monday.”

  Of course, he knew there wasn’t any confusion. Just objections. So it was apparent how the meeting was going to turn out.

  There was a short silence after Moffatt’s first statement. Then the first con rose. Eddie Brooks, fifty-eight years old, four years to run, preferred it inside to out, a screw pleaser.

  “Only one thing, sir,” he said. “The shoes. My feet aren’t too good and the baseball boots ease them up a bit for me. I mean, is that section absolutely, er, compulsory?”

  Moffatt clicked his fingers and Creasey leant forward and gave him a copy of the regulations. Moffatt’s fingers snapped the paper into some kind of authoritarian stiffness and he made a scene of flicking his eyes up and down the list as if he couldn’t immediately find the relevant section.

  When he finally chose to discover it he read it out, word for word, then looked at Brooks. Brooks said: “Yes, sir, I know what it says, but . . .”

  “If you know what it says you know what it means. So in that case it must be perfectly clear to you that prison shoes will be worn at all times.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Brooks sat down. Terry Beckley stood up.

  “Sir,” said Terry, “is there any particular reason why we have to wear prison shoes? As opposed to what we usually wear.”

  “The rules are laid down by head office. It is not my function to justify them.”

  “Yeah, right, but you don’t have—”

  Moffatt cut right through him by reading out the regulation again. When he’d done that he said:

  “Does that seem clear to you, Beckley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  Terry sat down. After that other cons stood up and talked, their expressions ranging from disobedient apologetic to outright defiance but nobody got anywhere at all. Moffatt listened to them all but he never answered anybody. He just read out the appropriate regulation and that was that. You bloody bastard, I thought. This was nothing to do with Head Office. In fact the Council for Penal Reform had recommended that Security Wing Prisoners should be regimented as little as possible. Dress had been specified as one area in which they should be given some choice.

  I sat there and stared into Moffatt’s face. The only emotion he was showing was a mild arrogance, described in the way he moved his head from speaker to paper to speaker. But underneath I knew how he was feeling. He was practically creaming himself with this power he had. It was almost orgasmic. Moffatt, one man, could sit on a wooden chair in front of a load of hard cons and say no to every single one of them. Nothing anyone could do about it. He was tense with the pleasure of it. If everyone had gone silent all at the same moment we could have heard his heart pumping the joy around his body.

  More and more, the cons around me were allowing Moffatt’s tactics to frustrate them into thoughtless reputation-making rhetoric, something I wanted to stop; Moffatt had got enough out of them. It was time for me to ask my question.

  “You’re absolutely rigid about the dress regulations, Governor?” I said.

  Moffatt gave me a long look. He was probably wondering whether or not to ask me to stand if I’d got something to say to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am. Absolutely.”

  I stood up.

  “In that case,” I said, standing up, “there seems no further point in continuing the mystery.”

  This, with the exception of free-thinkers like Walter, was what the other cons needed. A lead to a piece of positive action, something to latch on to, a move to self-assertion. Leaving the meeting was just the job.

  Everybody began to shuffle out, the noise growing and flowing out into the corridor, drowning the noises the Big Three were making about not having given us their permission to leave.

  Outside Walter drifted towards me through the crowd.

  “So there we are, Billy boy,” he said, looking very unhappy indeed. “The bastard’s sticking.”

  “Can’t you un-stick him, Walter?” I said. “I would have thought if anybody had the muscle, you could.”

  “If I go for this then it’s
likely to cock up everything else,” he said, not liking the question. “I have to spend my money very carefully these days.”

  “What you saving up for, Walter? Your old age? Or your holidays?”

  Walter didn’t answer. At that moment I knew I was on to him. The bastard had already made his plans. That was why he didn’t want to use any influence in this area. It was stretched tight enough already. And whatever they were, he was keeping his plans to himself. For which you couldn’t blame him. There were always too many cons with flaps for mouths, whichever nick you were in. But knowing Walter, safety and secrecy wouldn’t be his only motives for keeping things to himself. The power thing would be just as important. Sitting around in his cell, day after day, watching the different cons turn up at his door, hopeless, brave sometimes, sometimes eating shit for a good word or a favour from Walter, Walter knowing that they would always be in, but that one day he would be out, and that even in their moments of deepest despair, they’d still admire number one, Walter, the number one that got away.

  But I didn’t want Walter to know that I’d got any of this weighed up and worked out. For him to know that I was on to him would make things that little bit harder for me when I discovered the ways and means to get myself out. Because if he thought I might screw up anything for him by doing a fast moonlight he’d pull all the strokes he knew to keep my ankles tied to my bunk.

  So I let it pass and turned to Tommy Dugdale and said: “Well, what about it, Tommy? What’s the answer to this one?”

  “Dunno, Billy. We either take it or we don’t take it and what’s the fucking point of taking it?”

  “Right,” I said. “So we show that cunt Moffatt that he can’t ride twenty-six winners past the post all at the same time.”

  “What you got in mind, Billy?” Walter said, glad to be out of the earlier bit of facing-out.

  “A demo,” I said. “A real one. A barricade. Somewhere they can’t boil us out of without taking the building to bits.”

  “Where, Billy?” Tommy asked.

  “The annex,” I said.

  Walter looked at the floor and thought about what I’d said.

  “You’ve got some idea of how to get in there, Billy?” Walter said.

  “I’ve got ideas of how to get in and out of every fucking where in this bastard nick, Walter,” I said. “It’s just that there’s no point to demonstrating it with that thing all around the outside they call a wall.”

  Walter wriggled that statement in and out of his mind, wondering if it meant that I’d weighed everything up and decided that I’d have to get myself moved to another nick before I tried to take off. Which was what I hoped he’d think. He must have been fairly chuffed with the speech because he brightened up and stopped looking at the floor and decided to indulge my idea for the demo. But at the same time he had to make a gesture that reminded the others of who Walter was as far as the nick’s structure was concerned so he said:

  “Why don’t we all go and chew it over down my cell,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder, implying that he would be the decider, he would yea or nay whatever I had to tell everybody. I went along with it because I didn’t mind Walter scoring his petty points to keep himself going. My satisfaction would be much deeper, much more lasting, the day I went over the wall without him.

  “Come in, Cracken.”

  The Headmaster steps aside to let me through the door. His study is hushed and dusty, sound-proofed by books. Instead of going behind his desk, he perches on the edge of it, hands thrust in the pockets of his trousers. He asks me why I was fighting; I don’t want to tell him. He’d never understand. He can’t see why it is right to hit someone who insults you. He can’t see that it’s the only answer. Pride is the motive. To deny pride, to back down, devalues self. But he insists. So I lie to him. I blame myself entirely. I tell him it was all my fault.

  When I’ve finished there is a long silence. Then the Headmaster stands up. He begins to wander around the room, deep in thought. Then he speaks. There is no anger. Just a kind of pained bewilderment, laced with an indefinable kind of sympathy. He asks me about my mother, the effect my behaviour is likely to have on her. He asks me why, in view of my academic record, do I have to spoil things by letting myself down in this way. Everybody expects great things of me. When I go to the Grammar School, he would like not only to recommend my academic strengths, but also my personal ones. Beneath it all, he knows, I am a nice boy, full of good, a credit to my mother, potentially an influence for good in my year, throughout the school, a hero, supported by my classmates, my athletics, my position in my class. What he can’t understand is why, when I have all these advantages, I should spoil them with my aggression, when after all, I could go far, be a credit to my family, and to the school, and to him. Why should I let them down, when they expect so much?

  His words are worse than the cane, cutting far deeper. The sentences touch on deep-embedded nerve-ends, fraying, releasing unexplainable tears, less controlled than if the cane had caused them, causing him to offer consolation, which only makes me feel the worse. I sob out my promises to be better, to try, to be a paragon from this day on, but later, when the tears have dried, I resolve another way. No one can touch me. No one has the right. No one pulls that one on Billy Cracken. No one has the right.

  Sunday night. Almost quarter past eight. I stood in my door, smoking and looking across the landing. Opposite me was the door to the TV room. Ray Crompton was standing there, leaning against the jamb. There was no one else at their doors or on the landing. We must have looked like a couple of bookends.

  Prison noises filtered through from the other wings but on our wing there was no sound at all.

  Then at quarter past eight, dead on, Dave Simmons strolled out of his cell and across the landing and down the stairs. Ray and I stayed where we were, looking at each other or at the empty stair well. Then, a minute or two later, we heard the sounds we’d been waiting for. Two sets of footsteps coming back up the stairs. Dave on his way back with the PO. In five minutes’ time we’d be on our way.

  The Annex was a new two-storey building grafted on to the end of the wing. The bottom half housed two visiting rooms and the PO’s night room. On the second storey there was a chapel and the office. The second storey could only be reached by passing through a steel gate on the end of the Twos. This gate opened into a small passageway about twelve feet long. Halfway down the passage, on the left, was the door to the office, and on the other side of the passage was the door to the chapel. The office was our objective. The plan was to get into the office and erect a barricade. We would use the massive altar and the rows of chairs from the chapel, and the four big steel filing cabinets in the office and if we could use all this to seal off the passage we would be virtually impregnable as the windows of the chapel and the office were barred and bullet-proofed and there was no other way into the passage except through the steel gate.

  We decided to have the demo on the Sunday night before the new regulations came into effect on Monday. All we’d had to do was figure out a way to get beyond the steel gate ourselves.

  All the cells were fitted with piped radio, similar to the type they have in a hospital; you plugged earphones into the mains and you got one or other of the stations, whichever happened to be on at the time. And that was determined by the main radio that was housed in the office. If someone wanted the station changed they’d get the PO to take them through the steel gates and up into the office. While whoever was changing the station the PO always left the gate open until he brought the con back and only then he’d close it and lock it behind them.

  So the idea was to get Dave Simmons to ask for a change of station. Dave had been selected for drawing the PO in to re-tune the wireless as this was a regular late night touch of Dave’s. On this particular occasion we’d worked it so that nearly everyone had filtered into the Twos TV room. Everyone except for a f
ew of the lads we’d stationed in cells on the Twos just to spread the load a bit. And, of course, Dave, and Ray, who was to tip us the wink.

  The idea was to wait until the PO had unlocked the gate and gone through to the other side with Dave and then for us to make a mad dash across the catwalk. The ones in front would grab the PO and take his key and sling him out while the others were streaming in. Then we’d lock the gate. The screws outside would have to go away and find another key because we’d have the only one on the wing. But by the time the screws had come back we’d have got our barricade built. The whole bastard wing bar one out of reach. Untouchable. The only character who wasn’t in was Harry Read, the joker who’d knocked off three fuzz in Harrow. A real brave bastard he turned out to be. A mate of his had put round the word that Read was in bed with bronchitis. So consequently nobody had bothered to ask him if he was in. But on Saturday morning I decided to do some recruiting. I’d been to see him in his cell. He was sitting up in bed, smoking, talking to Ian Crosbie, a little vaseline-arse who was in for croaking his boyfriend with the sharp end of a chisel. Crosbie had always been a subject for speculation amongst the rest of us because the line went why put someone in the security wing when he couldn’t knock a hole in a pair of tights. However, Crosbie’d skittled when I’d arrived. I’d told Read that we were planning to make one the following evening, everybody in, was he with us? His face’d gone chalk white. God knows what he did to his underpants.

  “Tomorrow night?” he’d said, as if he was really trying to fit it into his schedule. “Tomorrow night?” Head-shaking. Chin-shaking. “I don’t know, Billy. I don’t know if I’ll be all right.”

  I turned it a bit.

  “What do you mean, all right?” I said. “You look all right to me.”

  That made him turn even paler.

  “I’ll try, Billy,” he said. “Course, I’ll try.”

  He tried all right. He must have had the quickest relapse any bronchial sufferer ever had. It’s a wonder they never rushed him off to hospital. He kept his door shut and his head under the sheets for the next two days. Somebody who took his grub in for him on the Sunday evening said he still wasn’t capable of coherent speech. So much for the brave fuzz-shooter.