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Mr Morris looked at the seven bags of property that had arrived with me from Her Majesty’s Prison Albany. It was not so much that there were seven bags of stuff that caused a problem, it was the time. It was well past seven o’clock and lockdown was at eight. He looked at his watch. “Richards, can we sort this tomorrow?”
“Of course, Mr Morris,” I did not tell him that I intended to hand out five of the bags to my visitors as soon as a visiting order could be arranged. I would have had a visit the following day at Albany, and the bags would have been handed out then, but somebody had the bright idea of transferring me to HMP Leicester for local release eight weeks before I was due to get out. “But I do need that one.” I indicated the smallest of the bags.
“Ok, we’ll sort your property card out in the morning.”
I nodded in agreement. Mr Morris and I went back some time. He was the first prison officer I met after my committal on remand; he was on reception duty when I arrived at the prison. Now he was a Senior Officer. In the eighteen months I had been on remand here he had been my Personal Officer so I had got to know him quite well. He had arranged for me to be Seg Cleaner, without doubt one of the cushiest jobs in the prison. That was a lifetime ago, though.
Actually it was only six and a half years, but it felt like a lifetime, and for all intents and purposes it may as well have been. Nothing was left of my old life; it had all been lost. The partner of over fifteen years, who said he would wait for me, managed to wait all of six months. I couldn’t I blame him; in truth I was surprised that he lasted that long. At least he stayed in touch, which is more than a lot of my friends did. The business that had taken me twenty years to build up lasted about as many months after my arrest; people supposedly acting in my best interests managed to fuck it up totally, and that fucked up my pension at the same time. So, here I was, a few months short of sixty, facing release and… nothing.
At least I managed to keep myself busy in prison. More important, I kept my mind active. The biggest threat in prison, especially if you were over forty, was shutting down; I most definitely avoided that. I played the prison game for all it was worth, taking advantage of every educational course that was available to me. Prisons like to show that they are educational and the more passes they can show the better, so the education department found it useful to have a number of high achievers sitting around doing degrees or post docs who they could call in to make up numbers on exams. In my five years down on the island I had taken both the numeracy competence and literacy competence exams about eight times.
I had also completed a degree and was in now my final semester of a post graduate diploma, which was why I was in something of a bad mood about being shipped out so far in advance of my release. There was no way I would be able to finish my assignments up at Leicester prison, where you were not allowed even a word processor, never mind a laptop, for course work. My first act once I got to the pad they were putting me in would be to write to my course supervisor explaining the situation and asking for an extension.
Exacerbating my bad mood was the realisation that I would be sharing a cell. After over five years of having a pad of my own, I was not looking forward to having a cellmate.
I grabbed the one bag of stuff that I really needed and hoisted it onto my shoulder. Mr Lynch, who I also knew from my remand period, took me over to the unit and showed me to a cell. He opened the door and told the lad lying on the left-hand bed that he had a new pad mate. Well, that was one good thing; the cell had beds rather than bunks. It was a bit cramped but at least it avoided having to scramble up into a bunk at night. There was a basic prison rule: whoever got in last took the top bunk. At my age that could be a problem.
Walking past Mr Lynch I dumped my bag and bedroll on the unoccupied bed. He asked me if I needed anything, so I told him I had to get some hot water, as I looked in my bag for my flask.
“Things ’ave changed a bit since you were ’ere last. You’ve got a kettle.” He pointed towards the bench by the side of the TV, then shut the cell door.
No matter how long you’ve been inside, there is something about that final clunk of the bolt as it shoots home that gets to you. I’ve spoken to lifers who have done twenty or thirty years and are looking at doing as long again, and they all say it still gets to them. It is almost as if the locks have been deliberately engineered to make that clunk as the bolt is shot, just to remind you of where you are and why.
Turning, I took a look at the lad lying on the other bed. He was wearing only boxers, allowing me a good look at his body, though it was not that much of a body but not too bad. One glance showed that he was a user and that the drugs had taken their toll on him.
Age-wise he could have been anywhere from twenty to forty, but I guessed about he was about thirty. It was difficult to assess ages inside. You’d come across lads who looked like they were in their mid-twenties and behaved like teenagers, only to find out that they were forty-five and had already served twenty years. Then there were the old lags you took for sixty and you found out they were thirty and only in the second year of a five-year stretch.
I held my gaze on my cellmate for a few moments. A look of apprehension, then fear, moved across his face. He pulled himself up, scrunching back against the low partition at the head of his bed that separated off the toilet area. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, his eyes pleading to be left alone. It was a fear I had seen a lot in the previous six-odd years. The last thing I wanted was a pad mate who was terrified of me, and whose behaviour therefore might be unpredictable.
“Which is your locker?” I asked, there being two lockers in the cell, both at the end of my bed.
He indicated his, so I thanked him and started to unpack my stuff, leaving him to watch some drivel that was on the TV. It didn’t take me long to put everything away but by the time I was done I was sweating like a pig.
The cell was very hot. That was another design feature of the penal establishment: you either froze or you baked. If there was any heat at all in the cells it would be too much, otherwise they would be freezing. This prison was Victorian and there were two nine-inch cast iron heating pipes running through the rear of the cells. Ours must have been the first cell in the pipe run, getting the hot water direct from the boiler house. The result was that it felt like a sauna.
I stripped off to my boxers and sat on the bed to sort out my final bit of unpacking: teabags. The lad on the other bed was still scrunched up in his corner. When I asked if he would like a cup of tea he replied in the affirmative, so I filled the kettle and took a couple of teabags out of my stash. I always made sure that I had plenty of tea!
I asked my cellmate where his mug was; he pointed to a plastic one on the windowsill, so I got it, then made the tea. Another question, and he told me that he took milk and two sugars. No problem; I had lived in Germany long enough to get used to drinking tea without milk, and I had quickly got used to doing without sugar while I was in prison. As a result I had a stash of whiteners and sugars, which were always useful as trade items.
I handed the lad his tea and sat down on my bed. “I’m Mike, here for local release.”
As if it was local for me! Of the twenty years before my arrest I had probably spent three in this country, and most of that time had been down in London.
The lad told me his name was Steve, and he was on remand. I did not ask what for and did not want to know. The first thing you learned inside was don’t ask, don’t tell. Of course, no matter what you were in for it usually came out sooner or later; the screws were bound to let it slip if you hadn’t been outed by the press.
I glanced at my watch. Noting that it was nearly nine I asked Steve if it would be possible for me to watch Horizon. He asked which channel it was on and when I told him BBC2 he changed the channel and looked at me with a questioning expression.
“What?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you just take the controller and change channels?”
The question hit me like a ton of bricks. I would never have thought of doing something like that. I took a couple of seconds to think about it and then replied, “Because such action would be impolite.”
Steve looked at me with a blank expression on his face, as if I’d said something completely unfathomable.
The first few days with a new pad mate were always difficult. You had to work out what their boundaries were, and impose your own. After six years in the system I had become proficient at working it out, but Steve presented me with a problem; I had never come across anyone who was such a non-person. It was as if he just did not want to be noticed, being happy to curl up on his bed and keep out of the way. That is not how it works, however — at least not unless you totally want to be taken advantage off. I quickly got the impression that Steve was used to that.
That notion was confirmed at unlock the following morning. Just before the key was turned I heard a voice telling the screw to make sure that the new chap did his share of the cleaning. Not a problem; I like my cell to be clean, and that means cleaning it myself.
Steve was still in bed. I left him there, went to the sluice area and grabbed a mop and bucket, and a brush and dustpan. It was a good job I had been there before; at least I knew my way around.
When I got back to the cell Steve was out of bed. He gave me a puzzled look.
“Got anything under the bed?” I asked. He just nodded. “You better get it up on the bed before I sweep and mop. Then get out for a bit.” Steve smiled, pulled a couple of prop bags from under his bed and dumped them on top.
He turned to leave the cell but just before he did he turned back, “Mike, you’ll have to fill in your menu slip today, before lunch.”
I nodded to acknowledge that I had heard. Well, at least the boy could speak. After our exchange of names last night he had been totally silent and if I had not known better I might have assumed he was dumb. It didn’t take long to brush and mop out the cell. Well, how long does it take to mop a floor seven foot by twelve? Once finished, I took the cleaning stuff back to the sluice area.
When I got back to the common area Steve was standing by the pool table, and beckoned me over. A set of menus was laid out on the table and there was a pile of menu slips to be filled in. This was new, so I was grateful that Steve explained how things worked. I was even more grateful that he was speaking to me. It can be hell being stuck in a cell with somebody who won’t talk — or worse still, communicates in grunts. At least Steve appeared to have some command of the English language, unlike most of the younger inmates, and did not need to use fucking every third word.
I had just completed my menu selection for the week when the screw called out ‘behind your doors’. So, behind our doors we went. I noticed that Steve, like myself, was quick to get back in the cell. There are always some lads who hang around on the landing till the last possible moment, having to be ordered into their cells by the officer doing the lockup. I heard an officer shouting at somebody called Finnigan to get behind his door. A few moments later our door flap opened. The officer looked in, closed the flap and shot the bolt.
I got the kettle and started to fill it, asking Steve, who was lying on his bed, if he wanted tea or coffee. “Could I have a tea please? I don’t drink coffee.”
I made two teas and handed Steve his mug, then sat at my table and sorted out a text I needed to read for my course.
I had been in transit for three days and not had a chance to do any studying, which had been a pain. Although I was well ahead on things, one thing you learned in prison was to never assume that things would go the way you expect. There were too many ways things could go wrong, like some bloody security screw deciding, during a cell check, that the material I had for my course compromised security — just because he could not read the maths in the text book. That actually happened to me. It took eight weeks and the intervention of the Vice-Chancellor from the University I was studying with, to get that mess sorted out. Even then I don’t think anything would have been done had the Home Secretary not been a student at the same University and the Vice-Chancellor his tutor. From a couple of dropped hints I suspected that strings had been pulled behind the scenes — which resulted in the Governor not being very happy with the security screw.
Anyway, we were banged up and I had no idea how long for… but possibly till lunch. I decided I might as well get down and try to do some studying. It surprised me that Steve did not switch the TV on. Usually, that was the first thing the younger lads did when the bolt was shot. I glanced across at him and noticed he was reading — another surprise. Grateful of the chance to have some peace and quiet I turned to my studies.
About an hour later the flap was opened and a screw looked in, then the door was unlocked and opened. “Ramozis, education,” he stated. Steve got off his bed and got a folder out of the top of his cabinet. As he left he turned to me and said, “See you at lunch.”
The screw looked at me and glanced at his list. “What’s your name?”
“Richards, sir.” If you don’t know screws’ names you always call them sir or ma’am.
He checked the list again. “You’re not on my list. Are you doing any education?” I pointed to the textbook and papers on my table.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Structural Integrity Part Two.”
He came into the cell and looked at my work, then shook his head. “Rather you than me, lad, I couldn’t make head nor tail of all those squiggles. Right, you’ll be banged up till lunch.” With that he stepped out of the cell and locked the door.
I breathed a sigh of relief. It is always difficult when screws realise that you are more intelligent than they are. Some can be bloody resentful about it, especially if you are trying to do something to make use of your intelligence. Others can be damn right supportive, seeing the fact that you are doing something to give yourself a chance to improve your life as a positive thing. A few will actually go out of their way to help you. There was one screw at my last prison who, during a period when the External Studies Tutor was off on long-term sick leave, took it upon himself to research stuff on the internet and print it out for those of us doing external studies. It must have cost him a fortune in paper and ink as there were fifteen of us doing university level studies, and we all had a lot of stuff that needed researching.
I spent the next couple of hours working my way through the examples in the workbook, and looking up references in the textbook. This section of the course was giving me some problems; I was finding it difficult to understand the examples because I could not conduct the recommended experiments. HMP Albany’s educational policy might have been advanced for the prison service, but there was no way they were going to let me have hydraulic jacks, metal bars and cement beams to play around with — and definitely not an angle grinder!
The door was unlocked about ten to twelve. Steve came in; he did not look happy.
“Not a good morning, I presume?”
He turned and looked at me, “No, it was bloody shit. Maths and I don’t understand any of it. And she’s given us a pile of homework to do for Monday.” He placed his folder down on his table and pulled out a number of question sheets. He sat down and studied them, with a look of absolute despair on his face.
“Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
“It is. I’ll end up getting them all wrong and everyone will know what an idiot I am. I always fuck things up.”
“Would it help if I went through them with you?”
He turned and looked at me. “Would you?”
“Of course, why not?”
“Most people just ignore me.”
I was starting to get the feeling that Steve did not have a very high opinion of himself. Low self-esteem was not good if you intended to survive in prison. You needed to have a degree of self-confidence, otherwise the system would beat you into the dust, which was exactly what it was supposed to do.
Twenty minutes later we were unlocked to collect our lunch, then locked up again for roll check. I knew that we had at least an hour and an half. There were shift changes and officer lunch breaks to get out of the way before they did roll check, so they would not be phoning the numbers in to security till at least one forty five, and somebody would have the count wrong so there would have to be a recount. The earliest we would be unlocked would be two. That being the case, I thought I might as well help Steve with his maths.
It turned out that it was not mathematics but arithmetic. One thing that really gets me annoyed is people calling arithmetic maths. It’s not. Mathematics is a language that is used to solve problems. Arithmetic is a system of calculating using numeric values. It’s fair to say that you can’t do maths unless you have some knowledge of arithmetic, but you do not need maths to do arithmetic. Actually, you do not need all that much arithmetic to do maths. Look at Albert Einstein; he had trouble adding up his shopping list.
Anyway Steve had some arithmetic to do and it was not too hard. In fact, it was fairly simple so long as you knew the rules to follow. That was the problem. It appeared that the teacher had assumed a level of knowledge that Steve just did not have. She had explained everything in terms of numerators and denominators, without checking to see if her class understood what she meant. After helping Steve I had a strong suspicion that quite a few of her class would not know what she meant. Unfortunately nobody had asked, which is not surprising.
Well, it’s fairly obvious if you think about it. It is easy for somebody like myself, at fifty nine, to stick up my hand in a tutorial group and ask what internal distortion resistance means. I could be pretty sure that most of the group would have the same question. However, for a thirty-year-old in a class with other thirty-year-olds, all of whom are trying to not look stupid, it is not so easy to ask a question.
Once I had explained the basics of vulgar fractions to Steve, everything started to make sense to him. He was able to get on and make his way through the worksheet he had been set without any problems, or at least nothing major. He did need a bit of help sorting out improper fractions, but not much.
Unlock took place at half past two and the call went out for library. I took the opportunity to go along and get some books, as I knew I would be in the prison for seven weeks. It was Friday and I was a bit worried that I had not been called over to reception to sort out my property. Amongst my things were books that I was planning to read, but if I did not get over to reception it would probably be Tuesday before my stuff could be sorted out. Monday was always a busy day in reception with committals from the weekend, so it was unlikely that they would call for me then.
As it was I need not have worried. Mr Morris came to the unit for me just after three and took me over to reception.
I told him that I had intended to pass out five of the bags on the planned visit down at Albany, and I would be doing that as soon as I could arrange for my friend Paul to visit me in Leicester. That made life a lot easier for him as he just listed all five as sealed property bags to be handed out. He sorted out my visiting orders and made sure that my outstanding orders from Albany were transferred. That meant I could get a visit arranged as soon as possible
The sixth bag caused problems, because a pile of stuff we were allowed at Albany, like the word processor, was not allowed in this prison. I could understand that as it was a local facility; prisoners were not expected to be there long, so there was no provision for graduate external studies — or any external studies for that matter. The only educational provision was for basic literacy and numeracy. So, a number of things that were quite important for me were not on the facilities list, like my drawing board and geometry set. I could manage without my word processor — I always wrote my papers out long hand in the first place anyway — but I did need my technical drawing equipment to do the diagrams that were required.
Most people on the outside don’t understand that prisons work only if inmates and staff co-operate with each other. Most of the time they do. There has to be a degree of give and take on each side. Most officers will ignore the odd infringement of a prison rule so long as it is not likely to cause a problem. At the same time prisoners will not insist that officers do everything by the book all of the time. There are times when it is in everybody’s interest to bend the rules slightly.
So it was with Mr Morris. He phoned the governor and explained that I had a quantity of educational material which was not on the facilities list but which I needed to complete my studies. I noticed that he did not say exactly what the materials were, and that the governor did not appear to ask. As it was, I agreed to give up some stuff I did not need and Mr Morris put some stuff through on my property card as having the governor’s permission.
That avoided my having to use the request and complaints procedure, which would have involved an appeal to the Area Manager, then the Home Office, and probably a Judicial Review — all of which probably would not have got me anywhere, but would have caused an awful amount of paperwork for the prison staff.
I didn’t complain, and the staff didn’t look too closely at what I had; a satisfactory arrangement all round.
Mr Morris escorted me back to the unit, which appeared completely deserted, with no staff and no prisoners in sight. When Mr Morris unlocked my cell it was empty so I presumed Steve had gone to education or exercise.
On the way over to the unit Mr Morris had asked me about the studies I was doing and said that he was thinking of doing Open University. I had just completed a Cert Maths with the Open University, so showed him my some of my course work. He remarked that it did not seem to be too difficult. I told him it wasn’t, provided you kept up with the course work and the prescribed reading.
With that Mr Morris left, locking me in the cell. Being on my own I got my radio out of my prop bag and tuned into Classic FM. It was nice to be able to listen to some music and not have to have headphones on, which is the norm in a shared cell. I got down to sorting out my property and putting stuff in my locker, or in my prop bag under the bed. Then I put the kettle on to boil. Just then there was quite a bit of noise on the landing and I guessed that the staff and prisoners had returned. Once again I heard a screw shouting at Finnigan to stop chatting and get by his door.
The cell door opened to let Steve in and shut behind him. I picked up the headphones to plug them in, but Steve asked me to leave the radio on. He also asked me what the music was. It was Kilar’s Exodus.
“I like it; seems familiar,” he commented.
“Have you seen Schindler’s List?”
“No, is it from that?”
“No it’s not, but it was used as the music for the trailer.”
Steve confirmed he had seen that, which led to a conversation about the film. I was amazed to find that he had no understanding of the Holocaust; he thought it was just an incident where a pile of Jews were shot. I sat down on my bed and started to tell him the whole story: how not only Jews, but disabled people, religious dissenters, homosexuals, Slavs, Ukrainians and others were put to death, and that the Jews made up just part of the eleven million plus people killed.
It was during that conversation that I started to see another side to Steve. Clearly, he was not well educated; in fact, if anything his education was sadly lacking because he did not seem to have even a basic understanding of events in modern history. On the other hand, he was no idiot. Once he began to understand what we were talking about he asked some very pertinent and quite pointed questions… like why did the Dutch, Belgians and French allow the trains taking the prisoners to the camps to run? I told him there was no easy and simple answer to that. You needed to have lived in those countries at the time to even begin to understand.
From that point on things changed. I had not really paid much attention to Steve before but after that day I found that there was something more between us than one would normally expect in pad mates. Let’s be honest, most of the prisoners I came across there were morons, if that is not insulting morons.
The following Saturday and Sunday we were on lockdown most of the time due to staff shortages. A lot of inmates got worked up over lockdowns, but they never really bothered me. Having my studies and being able to get lost in a book kept me occupied. Being in a lockdown with a pad mate, especially one you don’t know well, can be a pain, though, and I must admit I was a bit worried when the unit manager came around just after Friday evening roll check to tell us there would be a lockdown over the weekend.
As it turned out the time we were confined to our cell was, if anything, quite helpful.
I spent hours talking to Steve and listening to what he had to say. In those two days he opened up to me in a way I don’t think he had to anybody before. He was, as I had guessed, addicted to heroin, although at that time he was on methadone as a substitute. Arguably that was worse, because it is harder to break an addiction to methadone than it is one to heroin. Why, oh why, does our government have a fix on not appearing to reward the addict? It would be a lot easier, simpler and cheaper if they followed the Swiss model and supplied addicts with heroin under clinically controlled conditions. I suppose it is too much to expect a government to act sensibly.
Anyway, it seems that Steve had been an addict for a long time and had been on the methadone programme for the previous couple of years, although he had relapsed a couple of times when he had missed appointments to get methadone scripts. The good news was that he had managed to get down to ten millilitres a day. He was about to move onto five millilitres a day, the final step before going clean, when he was arrested. The bad news was that he was back up to sixty millilitres. Apparently the prison service automatically put addicts on that dose when they arrived and did very little to reduce it.
I had never used drugs. Oh, I used cannabis once (all that did was trigger a migraine), and at a party somebody decided to drop some acid into my drink (which had no effect on me), but that was the extent of my drug use. As a result I was not au fait with the drug regime in prison.
Steve told me that there was a detox unit in the prison but that you could only get into it once you were sentenced… and there you hit one of the classical catch 22 situations that seem to abound in organisations like the prison service. The detox programme took three months, so you could only be admitted if you had at least three months left to serve. That meant you had to be sentenced to at least six months. If you received a sentence under four years you would be automatically released at the half-way point; a sentence over four years meant you would be released at the two-thirds point, although in both cases you would be on licence and subject to supervision once you got out till the end of your licence period. At least that was the case if you were sentenced to twelve months or more. Anything less and God help you, you were on your own. No licence, no supervision and no help with housing or jobs..
The problem was that the prison is a local and as such it did not hold people with sentences of more than one year. Given that any time spent on remand was set against your sentence, the chances were that once sentenced you would either have too little time left to serve to go into the detox unit, or your sentence would be such that you were immediately moved off to one of the training prisons. The result was that most of the time there was only a handful of prisoners who qualified for detox so half the unit’s cells were empty. Well, they were not empty, but they were not being used for detox.
The fact that Steve was a user should have put me right off him. I had had a couple of bad experiences with addicts and after that I had avoided anyone I even suspected might be a user. With Steve, though, somehow it did not make any difference. By time that weekend was over I knew quite a lot about him; although there was a lot I disliked about what he had done with his life, nevertheless I found myself liking him.
On the Monday morning Steve went off to education, and shortly after that Mr Lee, another officer I knew from my time on remand, came and took me to induction, or as he described it, “a fucking waste of time”. However, it was necessary to go through the motions and tick off the boxes on the check list.
One of those was education assessment, which was fun. The first question I was asked by the girl who was conducting the assessment — anybody under fifty looks young to me but she actually was a girl; I doubt if she was more than nineteen and I suspected she was on work placement from college — was how old was I when I left school?
I responded that I was fourteen.
She looked at me and remarked, “That means you’ve got no GCSEs then.”
I acknowledged that fact, because GCSEs did not exist when I was at school. Without asking any further questions she proposed that I should do Basic Literacy on Monday and Wednesday mornings and Basic Numeracy on Tuesday and Friday mornings. Thursday I would have IT skills.
In response to that I told her that I did not have time to do those as it would interfere with my studies.
She looked at me with an apparent attempt to assert her authority. “And what studies are those?”
“Postgraduate diploma in Material Engineering,” I responded. If she had bothered to look at my prison file she would have found that information in there.
“But you have to have a degree to do that,” she stated somewhat pointedly.
“I have three; five if you count degree equivalents,” I responded, enjoying the look of bafflement that passed over her face.
“How?” she exclaimed, as she opened my file and started to look through it.
“I went back to college in my twenties, and studied law and accountancy. I hold a BLaw and I have my Charted Accountant qualifications, which are recognised as first degree equivalents. I then got into information technology and wrote a couple of books, and did a Master’s degree in Computer Science. They admitted me to the Master’s course on the basis of my books. Whilst I was in Albany I did a Batchelor of Engineering and now I am doing a postgrad in Material Engineering. I hope to do a full Masters once I’m out, but it is not possible whilst inside.”
“You’re wasting my time!” was her response.
“No, you wasted your time by not reading my file before you started the interview.”
The problem with a lot of civilian staff in prisons was that they had a stereotypical image of what a prisoner was like. Probably ninety percent of the time they were correct; but the odd ten percent would catch them out — and it often caught them out badly.
After my comment she got up and left the interview room. Mr Lee returned. “You seem to have upset our Ms Simmonds.”
I nodded.
“What happened?”
“She had not read the file.”
“Typical, the more qualified they are the less likely they are to do the groundwork.”
“She’s qualified?” I asked.
“Oh yes, child genius, got into Oxford at sixteen and got her degree at nineteen, did a Master’s in Education last year… for all of which she knows nothing. Anyway, better get you over to the Health Centre, then we can get you back to the unit.”
The Health Centre visit was quick. The doctor knew me from my period on remand and he had made a point of reading my file. It took him about ten seconds to review and sign off on my meds. Then it was back to the unit.
Steve arrived back from education about half an hour after I got back, and immediately asked if I could help him with his worksheets. It was all fairly simple stuff and once I had explained it to him he quickly did the worksheet that he had to hand in at his next literacy class. However, a suspicion was starting to form in my mind.
Life dropped into a routine. Steve would go off to education in the morning; I would sit at my table and study. About quarter to twelve Steve would return and I would spend the next half to three quarters of an hour going over his worksheets with him. In the afternoon we would be unlocked at about two thirty for exercise, except on Fridays when we were unlocked at quarter to two so we could go to the library. Often in the evening we would lie on our beds and talk, or I would be writing letters with the radio on. Steve seemed to prefer the radio to TV and would often ask if he could borrow my radio and headphones if I wanted to watch a programme on TV.
Just before Christmas some stationery I had ordered whilst at Albany finally caught up with me. I had ordered it two days before I had been transferred out. Of course, it had arrived at Albany after I left and then had to follow me through the prison system.
With an ample supply of stationery on hand I decided to check out my suspicion about Steve. Whilst he was out at education I wrote a series of letters in different sizes on some white A4 card. Basically, I was constructing my own version of a Snellen chart — that set of letters of diminishing sizes you are asked to read when you go for an eye test.
Once lunch was over, I handed Steve one of the sheets and asked him to tell me what the letters were. He read them with no problem.
Then I put a card up in front of the TV and asked him to read that. He went to move closer to it, but I told him to stay where he was — about eight feet away from the chart. Steve started to tear up and said he could not read it. He started to cry. I went and gave him a hug and told him not to be upset. “You just need to see the optician.”
Unfortunately seeing an optician in prison was easier said than done. Mostly they had one who would attend periodically: if you were lucky, once a month; if you were unlucky, once a quarter. However, there was a way to short circuit the system, if you knew how.
When we were unlocked for exercise I approached Mr Roberts, another of the Senior Officers I knew from my time on remand, although he had not been an SO then. I asked if I could have a confidential word with him later. He agreed.
As we were returning from exercise Mr Roberts called out that he wanted to see me in the interview room. I went there and took a seat to wait for him.
A few minutes later, after doing lockup, Mr Roberts came in. “All right, Richards, what is it?”
“It’s Ramozis, Mr Roberts. I am a bit concerned about him.”
“Oh, what’s up?”
“He is getting very depressed over problems he’s having in education. In fact, I think he might do something stupid if it is not sorted out soon.” I sat back in my chair letting that sink in.
“Oh, shit!”
I had played the at risk card and that had got his attention. I could give him a way to deal with it, but first he had to ask for my help.
“Right, Richards, what’s the problem?”
I quickly explained that Steve was very short-sighted and could not read the whiteboard in education. Mr Roberts asked why he was not wearing glasses and I told him I believed he had lost them at the time of his arrest. I went on to say that he had put in an application to see the optician when he had arrived at the prison but nothing had happened. I was fairly certain that both those statements were false, but the number of applications that got mislaid in prison was beyond belief so nobody was going to be able to check up.
Once appraised of this information Mr Roberts said he would deal with the issue, and returned me to my cell.
I told Steve what I had done, and that, when asked, he should say that he had glasses on the outside but had not been wearing them when he was arrested. He was also to say that he had applied to see the optician the first week he was on remand. I assured him that Mr Roberts would sort something out.
One thing that always worried prison officers was having somebody who was likely to self-harm. They would go out of their way avoid any such problems, so I fully expected something to be sorted out quickly. I was not prepared for just how quickly!
About half an hour after I returned to the cell one of the Health Centre officers unlocked us and told Steve he had an appointment. I don’t know whether that was one of the days when the optician was in and they pushed Steve onto the list, or if they had called the optician in, but in just over an hour he was back in the cell with the news that he was getting glasses.
Somebody must have pulled something somewhere, for the following week, on Christmas Eve to be exact, Steve’s glasses arrived. In the intervening week I had managed to find out that he had never had his eyes tested.
The eye test incident brought about a change in my interaction with Steve. I had put my arm around him and given him a hug when he was crying. For anyone who hasn’t been in prison let me tell you that was a big no-no. Physical contact with other inmates was kept strictly to a minimum — and I mean a minimum — unless, of course, you were fucking their brains out. That is mostly the straights, though; most gay prisoners avoid that type of relationship.
However, the physical contact seemed to have broken a barrier on both sides. After that I found that if I was sitting at my table, drawing a diagram to explain something to Steve, when he looked over my shoulder to follow what I was doing he would often place a hand on my shoulder. I found myself doing the same when I was looking over his shoulder at the worksheets he was doing. Something seemed to be drawing us together, although I could not see what.
One thing was quite clear: Steve was not my type. For a start, I was nearly twenty eight years older than he was. More important, he did not have the intellectual capacity that I needed in my companions. I’m not saying Steve was stupid; in fact I had begun to think he was far from that, but there was no way he was up to my level. As far as I was concerned Steve was definitely not relationship material. There was also the minor matter of his being straight.
Strangely, though, having Steve around just seemed natural. Not in the way you got used to having a pad mate around; this was something more. He seemed to sense when I was stuck on something in my studies, and getting tense. He would get up and make some tea, forcing me to break from whatever was causing the problem.
Then came the day when I was having a particularly nasty time trying to calculate tension and compression forces on a structure; forces which I was sure could never have existed in reality but dreamed up as some fiendish plot by the author of the text book to give you the worse possible calculations to do. I had been stuck on it for a couple of hours and my neck and shoulders were really starting to ache. Steve came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders and his thumbs on the back of my neck, and started to massage me. After about twenty minutes I was really relaxed.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked.
“Oh, I worked in a sports place when I first left school. I learnt it there; they said I should train as a therapeutic masseur.”
“Did you?”
“No, it was about then that I started using. The moment they found out I was fired.”
That got us talking about his future.
I knew Steve liked to exercise — he went to the gym whenever there was a session available. That did not seem very often for our unit, but when there was one Steve went. Overall, although somewhat on the thin side, he did not have a bad body. It wasn’t one of the heavily-muscled body-building types you see a lot in prison, but there was clear defined muscle there. Steve quite liked exercise, and seemed to know a lot about it, so the obvious work for him would be in a gym or similar facility. That would require him to be registered on the Register of Exercise Professionals, and neither of us knew what that required. I told him I would look it up when I got out and send him the information.
There, I had done it; I had committed myself to staying in touch with Steve once I got out… a total breach of everything I had said I would do, or planned to do, once I was out. My idea had been to put prison behind me and forget about it as soon as possible. Clearly that was not going to be the case.
Christmas Day fell on a Thursday, so the previous Friday was our last chance to go to the library for some three weeks. As a result we were allowed to take out six books rather than the normal four. I had already taken out a couple of books which I knew were going to be fairly heavy reading, so I knew I had enough to last me over the Christmas period. I also knew I had a couple of books coming in from an online supplier ordered for me by my ex-partner in Holland. So, not needing any extra reading material I grabbed a book on IQ tests. I thought it might come in useful over the Christmas-New Year period.
It did. There were staff shortages again and we were banged up for most of Christmas Day and all of Boxing Day. We were given half an hour’s exercise on Christmas Day, as well as a half hour association during which we could make phone calls. Boxing Day was bang up all day. It was not a problem for me, and as it turned out, not really one for Steve either.
On Christmas day I got him to have a go at some of the IQ tests. The results confirmed what I had suspected: his IQ appeared to be above average. He was not a genius, but he was well up at the top end of the normal range. He touched on above-normal in a couple of the tests.
Once I had the results I tried to explain to Steve why he scored above-average on the tests but did so badly in class. I pointed out that surviving on the streets, as he had done for a number of years, took intelligence. A stupid person would not last very long; you had to have street smarts. IQ is not a measure of how clever you are; rather it is an indication of your potential.
The fact that he had an above-average IQ — and that I had been able to show him that — gave Steve much-needed confidence. We had talked about his future a few times but he had always been very negative about it. Whenever I had suggested that he should look at doing a course or getting some training his response had been that he was too stupid for that. With the IQ tests, I had shown him that he was not too stupid at all, and he began to realise that classes or training might be a real possibility.
In the week between Christmas and New Year there were no education classes, so Steve was in the cell all morning. As I had done everything I could on my studies, at least until I got out, I spent the time going through all his worksheets with him. I was pleasantly surprised at how much he was able to pick up once it was explained to him in a way he understood.
Education was open as usual after New Year, so Steve was back in class each morning. He had tests on the Monday and Tuesday and the following Thursday he came back to the cell with a big smile on his face. He had not only passed the tests, but had obtained a Level 2 Diploma in both Literacy and Numeracy. That evening we broke open one of my reserve bars of chocolate to celebrate, and to say goodbye, because I was to be released the following day.