I once
overheard a guy whose incarceration had forced him to go
cold-turkey off heroin describing to another inmate how every night
he dreamt about holding a spoon between a lighter and a lump of
brown, sucking it up into a syringe, tying off his arm and plunging
the needle into his vein, then, at the exact moment he was about to
press down on the plunger, he’d wake up. Every night, without fail,
he’d get to the precipice of smack-addled nirvana, then find
himself suddenly dragged back into the world of the living – into a
dank, prison cell, sweating and yearning for something he’d never
find again. If I hadn’t built up a reputation for silence, I
might’ve put a hand on his shoulder and assured him that he wasn’t
alone.
I’ll be in my
mid-forties by the time I’m eligible for parole, so it’s not like
the domesticated nightmare-fantasy is entirely outside the realm of
the possible. Even if I made parole the first time around, though,
it still wouldn’t leave much of a window in which to re-civilise
myself, build a life from scratch and find a wife. And, given the
inclination towards violence that I’ve shown over my time here,
making parole on my first attempt is an unlikely scenario.
It’s thoughts
like this which make me wish I hadn’t been such a pretentious
dickhead in court. If I’d played the game and pled guilty, like
Charlie, there would’ve been less use of adjectives such as
‘unrepentant’ in the press, and there might’ve been some incentive
for the judge to serve me the sort of justice that would’ve seen me
stepping into free air again when I was in my early thirties.
Instead of grabbing one of life’s better decades back like a scrap
from the master’s table, I chose to represent myself at trial. My
defence, in essence, was a reiteration of the ‘if we’re made of
atoms, we’re being toe-punted towards the heat-death of the
universe’ school of determinism preached to me by Charlie all those
years and months ago. Every time the prosecution tried to ruin my
flow by bringing up the pertinent facts of the case, I’d plead the
Fifth. When the prosecution pointed out that the Fifth Amendment
wasn’t something that held any relevance in a British courtroom, I
would point out that I couldn’t be held responsible for the
stupidity of my remarks if I was predestined to give them, and the
whole cycle would repeat itself. Eventually I think the judge
sentenced me to 25 years just to get me to shut the fuck up.
Well, I think
it was partly that, and partly because of the overwhelming physical
evidence against me. Perhaps the evidence even weighed slightly
more heavily. The gun found on me at the time of my arrest matched
the bullets dug out of both the ceiling of Marks & Spencer and
Sid’s kitchen cupboards. The phone records placed Sid at the scene
of the robbery. I was apprehended whilst digging up a box
containing a map of Marks & Spencer with the entire robbery
scrawled across it. They even found traces of my DNA at the scene,
from when I scraped my hand on the Christmas tree. Lionel Hutz
could’ve scored a conviction. So why didn’t I play the game? Why
did I save the silent tears for the nights in the cell, rather than
the days in court?
I ask myself
those questions every night, when the lights go off and I count off
in my head the days left until I’m eligible for parole, the days
left until I’m likely to get it, and the days left until I’m likely
to die.
I wonder if
Freddy gets the questions, too. I know Charlie does. This is not
merely because the latter went to prison and the former escaped it.
If anything, I’d think that a more draconian punishment would quiet
down the voices trashing hotel rooms up in Charlie’s head. He was
the only one to plead guilty to the charges levelled at us. The
only problem was that there weren’t all that many charges for him
to be found guilty
of
: He never took a hostage; he never
even set foot in the building Freddy claimed we didn’t rob; as it
turned out he hadn’t even broken into a car, like he was supposed
to. For all I know, he stayed at home and watched movies on the day
of the robbery itself. He played a significant part in the
conspiracy, of course, and he spent a significant part of the
gains, and he did a significant amount of shoplifting in the run-up
to the job, but those things – again - turned out to be somewhat
difficult to prove.
The powers
that be offered Charlie a reduced sentence if he would add his
testimony against the rest of us to the confession he made against
himself. Had it not been for the overabundance of other evidence I
still had to weasel my way out of, I might’ve seen that as my
deliverance. Even if Charlie was tempted to rat me out, he wanted
the punishment far more. Shit, he might’ve asked for the death
penalty if they still offered it.
It’s somewhat
ironic that the only one of the three of us involved who actually
wanted to go to prison was the one who would’ve had the easiest
time drilling a reasonable doubt into the heads of the jury.
Freddy, on the other hand, must’ve breathed a gargantuan sigh of
relief when he found out that Charlie wouldn’t be testifying.
Despite playing against the parallel justice system for rich white
men and their sons, I doubt that even Freddy’s lawyer – or, more
precisely, Freddy’s father’s lawyer – could’ve jury-tampered his
way out that one.
Johnny was
probably justified in proclaiming his innocence, seeing as how he
had nothing to do with any part of the enterprise. Perversely, and
maliciously, I found myself half-hoping that he’d be found guilty.
Why? Lingering resentment over his feelings for Liz? No. Not having
the balls to do anything about that was its own punishment. A
desire to see an innocent man punished, to prove that the system
which put me away was just as corrupt and malignant as myself? No
again. I could just as easily play that card with Charlie, since –
morally if not strictly legally speaking – he didn’t do anything
wrong either.
My abject
certainty of Charlie’s innocence makes it much harder to understand
why he would plead guilty. I understand why I should feel guilty; I
murdered Sid in cold blood. The more time I’ve spent in here,
surrounded by the only people in the civilised world who wouldn’t
judge me too harshly for such a thing, the sicker I’ve felt at the
memory of it. The facial expression I recall wearing at the moment
I pulled the trigger. Knowing how futile it turned out to be.
Seeing the poorly-repressed disgust etched into the creases of my
father’s face when he came to visit. Would I still feel guilty if
that one murder had kept me out of prison, or if my father had
never found out what he spawned? Is it a selfish guilt, in that I
didn’t regret what I did to him, but rather what it did to me?
Perhaps the
most pathetic thing is that I keep asking these questions, in an
attempt to convince myself that I don’t have the answers. At the
bottom of the whirlpool lies the obvious, inexorable truth: Out of
my entire life, I spent about a week of it free, and, in that week,
I murdered someone. I don’t deserve freedom. I deserve punishment.
The conclusion follows, inevitably, from the premise.
In that answer
must also be contained the reason I claimed determinism at trial. A
part of me wanted it to be true, wanted that week of liberty to
have been nothing more than a lucid dream. Again, I try to make
myself believe it, but the belief never quite comes.
Movies and television
have taught me three things about prison: that it turns even
civilised men into savages, or else it drives them to suicide, or
else they get shanked in the shower; that it carves routine and
discipline so deeply into you that even after your release you
can’t piss without say-so; and that the identity you brought in
with you will be checked-in at the gate along with the lighter you
had in your pocket, and will be misplaced just the same, as the
grey walls and fluorescent lights grind you down into nothing more
than a number.
I can’t speak
for anyone else, but in my case only the first two of these are
true. I may be a savage, and I might not be able to take a shit
without permission, but I’m certainly not a number. If anything,
incarceration has only served to freeze my half-formed character in
carbonite. My descent into savagery has shown me what I’m really
capable of doing when my surroundings call for it. The enforced
discipline has only served to prove that discipline can’t quiet
what goes on in my head, nor impose order upon it. My isolation
from family and friends, both the fictitious friends and the
factual, has turned me even further inwards than I was before. No
longer do I have to moderate my thoughts to fit the mould they’d
have me fill – and, indeed, nor could I, even if I wanted to. I
haven’t read an argument about politics on Facebook in half a
decade. I couldn’t tell you who the president of the United States
of America is, nor what bands the kids are listening to nowadays,
but God damn it, I know what sort of creature I am.
Much as the knowledge
of my own guilt has rendered Charlie more and more incomprehensible
to me as time has gone on, so the knowledge of the solid,
unchanging ‘me’ at the centre of my existence has made Phoebe ever
more alien, more inscrutable the more that I think about her. You
might’ve noticed that Phoebe didn’t feature in my recollection of
the court cases, and that’s for the simple reason that, what with
me pleading the Fifth, Charlie forgoing his chance to testify,
Freddy feigning ignorance and Johnny actually being in possession
of said ignorance, she didn’t feature in the court cases
themselves. She flitted out of our lives just as quickly as she’d
flitted into them, like a spectre whose name we were all afraid to
mention, in case it summoned her back.
These are the
questions I will never have the answers to, no matter how deep down
in my psyche I burrow: Is she really that spectre, taking on a new
form with every new group of people she falls in with? Is it just
the veneer that changes, or does she look upon those discarded
personalities in the same way that I do the old friends and enemies
I’ve left by the wayside over the years? Is there really no anchor
at the centre of her: no love, guilt nor shame, holding it all
together? Do the old memories come back to haunt her at night, or
is she like a Buddhist tree, or a sub-atomic particle, only
existing when observed? When the acid rain has finished washing all
the letters off my grave, in what sense can it be said that I ever
existed at all, and, in that case, in what sense can it be said
that ‘Phoebe’ ever existed, either?
A thought like
that could break your brain. Or maybe it’s a stupid thought, to be
dismissed after a moment’s consideration, and ‘Phoebe’ was nothing
more than your garden-variety psychopath. It’s hard for me to tell,
cut off as I am from the outside world – and the Internet - where
there are always people on hand to let you know how dumb your ideas
are.
The door to
that outside would was slammed definitively shut when my parents
stopped visiting. For the first year that I was in here, on the
third Sunday of every month, their names would appear on the
visitor’s list. The fact that their appearances were so rigidly
scheduled suggested to me that they were done more out a misplaced
sense of duty than any lingering sense of affection. It certainly
wasn’t for the conversation, which would usually centre around
whatever injuries I’d picked-up over the previous month, or my
father’s incomprehension of why I hadn’t let him assist with my
legal representation. My mother would inevitably begin crying right
at the beginning of each visit, as she tried to choke out a
‘hello’, and I would almost never be able to tease anything further
out of her until it was time for my father to lead her back to her
life, and the guard to lead me back to my cell, whereupon she’d
manage to choke out a ‘goodbye’. The one exception to this pattern
was when she, in fits and starts, informed me that she didn’t feel
as though there was any of ‘my baby’ left in there. The choked
‘goodbye’ which followed that pronouncement was the one that stuck.
When the next third-Sunday rolled around, I refused to leave my
cell. Two third-Sundays after that, their names stopped appearing
on the list of visitors.
That was four years
ago. Only once since then has a name appeared adjacent to my own on
the list of visitors. It wasn’t either of my parents; it wasn’t
Liz; it wasn’t an old friend or acquaintance; it wasn’t anyone, in
fact, who I could recall having encountered before. Had this been
during the first six months of my sentence, this might not have
struck me as odd; during that period, when my dubious celebrity had
not yet waned, there were rumblings of journalists trying to secure
an interview with me, but being barred by the authorities.
Presumably they thought I’d use an interview, and the corresponding
opportunity to publish a picture of my many injuries, as propaganda
against the prison system. They needn’t have bothered; I had no
desire to keep my face in the papers for any longer than I could
avoid. This student, though – I found out that she was a Masters
student from the letter asking for the interview, which I abandoned
a few lines into reading – managed to seek me at the moment when
the boredom and the loneliness of life at Her Majesty’s pleasure
were beginning to get the better of me, and the opportunity was too
much to turn down.
Somehow, even
amongst the crowd of people filing into the visiting hall, and
despite having never met her before, I recognised her immediately.
She was beautiful in exact proportion to my loneliness, and meek in
exact proportion to my scarred savagery. As she walked towards me
with fast, short steps I tried to scrutinise her, but it soon
devolved into a leer. She had dark patches beneath her eyelids, as
though she hadn’t slept too well the previous night, and the chair
trembled slightly as she tried to pull it out. She was wearing an
engagement ring on one finger. She didn’t shuffle the chair back up
to the table after sitting on it; it took me a few moments to
realise that this was probably because I was leaning almost the
entire way across to her side. I forced myself backwards into my
seat.