In the first of an occasional series of short stories, a prisoner fails to heed a piece of friendly advice. Illustration: Una Gildea
I WAS HANGING AROUND the circle when the runner brought him in. He was wiry and brown. He carried all his belongings in two paper sacks with his name and prison number scrawled on the outside in felt tip. I knew he’d just been sentenced, which was why he’d been brought over from Remands: in my block we were all sentenced men.
“New boy on,” the runner shouted. He left. Hayes, the day screw, sauntered out of the officer’s pod.
“Chalky,” said Hayes.
“Yes.” I stepped forward.
“Chalky’s our orderly,” Hayes explained to the new prisoner. “He’s got your cell ready.”
The prisoner bowed solemnly. “Thank you, sir,” he said. He spoke like an actor in an English black-and-white film from the 1940s.
I issued a bedroll and a welcome pack to the new prisoner and led him to cell 8. It smelled of the nasty pine disinfectant with which I had washed the floor earlier. A small block of watery sunshine floated on the wall about the iron prison bed. The cell was small, square and bleak.
“What do they call you?” I said.
“Engine.” He was Sri Lankan, he said, in his beautifully enunciated English, and he had a Sri Lankan name, but as he was a ship’s engineer by trade, Engine was his jail name.
We dropped what we carried and shook hands. “Chalky,” I said, “from Chalkman.”
“Like chalk, as used on a blackboard?”
“Exactly.
I offered him a roll-up. He accepted. We sat on his iron bed with the metal bin as an ashtray at our feet and smoked and talked. He was open and genial and I decided I’d risk it.
“What brought you here?” I said.
Engine shrugged. “I have a partner,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, correction, I had a partner. Irish girl. We lived together in Belfast when I was not at sea. We had a daughter. We were not married. This was a mistake, not to marry. One day she asked me to leave the house. I fetched a knife and went to cut myself. She tried to stop me. We fought. I pushed her away. I slashed her. She found our daughter and she fled. I cut my wrists. Ten minutes later the police came. I was arrested and charged with attempted murder. I was found guilty yesterday. I got 10 years. My lawyer doesn’t think an appeal is worth it: he says I just do my time and go home to Sri Lanka when released. I will in all likelihood be deported anyway.”
“And your child?”
Engine shook his head. “I haven’t seen her since I was arrested. It is unlikely I will ever see her again.”
After his arrest, he said, on the advice of the police, his ex-partner got a non-molestation order: Engine was prohibited from phoning, writing or approaching his ex-partner or his daughter. If they’d been married he’d have had some access rights but as they weren’t he didn’t.
***
Because of his engineering background, Hayes sent Engine to the metal workshop, where he was put to work making pokers, fireguards and ornamental gates. Five days a week Engine left the wing at eight and came back at five smelling of engine oil and Swarfega. At the weekends he mostly stayed in his cell, meditating, saying his Buddhist prayers and practising yoga. On those occasions when he came to association in the dining hall, he played table tennis and chess. He was open and, unlike a lot of the other prisoners, he would speak to anyone. As far as the other cons were concerned, he was a slightly weird middle-aged brown bloke, screwed over by his woman (an old story) and badly missing his daughter.
***
Engine had been on the wing a year when, one evening, as I walked past his cell, I was surprised to see he’d visitors: our resident drug barons, Red Ken and Tiny. As soon as they left I put my head around his cell door and said: “Can I come in?”
“Yes, Chalky,” said Engine. “You want to convert to Buddhism?”
This was one of his jokes; he thought if everyone in the North went Buddhist we’d stop being bigots.
He patted the bed. I sat. “The two scumbags who were just here,” I said. “Don’t buy any drugs off them.”
“Why would I?” said Engine. “I don’t do any of that.”
“And don’t have anything to do with them either,” I said. “Don’t even have them in here.”
“You’re saying I am not even to talk to them?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But I am not like other prisoners,” said Engine, “who won’t speak to this man because he’s a sex offender and that one because he is a tout. I talk to everyone. That is my way.”
“Engine,” I said, “talk to anyone, just not them.”
“Your concern is touching,” he said, “but I reserve the right to talk to them just like I talk to everyone else.”
Over the next few weeks Red Ken and Tiny were often to be seen in Engine’s cell. There was something bad in progress. I knew it.
Two months later, a Saturday evening in June, I was on my bed, listening to the pigeons on the roof, when I heard screaming in the dining hall and the alarm bell going off. A few minutes later the whole block was locked. That was SOP – standard operating procedure – when the alarm went.
I heard Garrett, a housebreaker, moving in the cell beside me. I knew he’d been in association. I banged on the wall. “Go to your window.”
He went to his window. I went to mine.
“What’s happening?”
“Red Ken and Tiny,” Garrett shouted. “They attacked some bloke. He’s from downstairs. I’d never seen him before. They said he owed them money and he’d touted and they gave him a terrible beating. They’d knuckledusters.”
I was incredulous. “Knuckledusters?”
“Yep.”
Half an hour later I heard the wail of the ambulance that had come to take the victim to hospital, then the heavy tread of six riot screws as they traipsed down our wing. Because of what had happened (again SOP) I assumed we were all going to be strip-searched and all our cells searched as a sort of collective punishment, but to my surprise the riot screws went straight to Engine’s cell. His door was unlocked, there was a lot of banging as they searched his cell, and then I heard them leave for the punishment block, hauling Engine, who was sobbing by this stage, with them.
***
Over the week that followed, eavesdropping on the screws’ talk (I’m very good at that), and reading their logbook on the sly (I’m very good at that as well), I got the whole sorry tale.
Red and Tiny had somehow discovered Engine’s story as well as where his ex and daughter lived. Armed with this information, they’d gone to Engine and made him an offer: they’d get any letter he wrote delivered to his daughter without her mother knowing if, in return, Engine made them weapons in the workshop. Engine agreed, of course, as Red Ken and Tiny had correctly calculated. His letters were then smuggled out and he began making knuckledusters in secret. The first ones weren’t right (they didn’t fit: apparently knuckledusters are very tricky to make) and it took Engine several goes before they did fit, and then, stupidly, rather than dumping the prototypes, Engine kept them hidden in his cell.
After the attack, during which the victim, a boy called Dessie Hogan, had his cheekbones, wrists, fingers and several ribs broken, plus half his teeth knocked out, Red Ken and Tiny (because co-operation suited their interests) told the screws Engine had made their knuckledusters in the metal workshop (a serious offence) and to search his cell. The riot screws did, and they found the prototypes. Engine went to adjudication (the prison court) and got a year – a whole year – cellular confinement in the punishment block, while Red Ken and Tiny (because of their willingness to co-operate) only got three months.
That was more than a year ago. After he’d finished his sentence they didn’t return Engine here. They couldn’t; Red Ken and Tiny were back on the wing. They sent him somewhere else, and I lost sight of him until yesterday, when, as I was taking rubbish to recycling (we are so green in HMP Loanend), I saw Engine standing outside the laundry. He wore a walker’s pass (a red plastic ID that hangs on a lanyard around the neck) and he was waiting to go in.
“Hello, Engine,” I said. “You working in the laundry now?”
He wore a baseball cap, something I’d never seen him wear before. He had the cap pulled down and his eyes were in shadow.
“Worse fucking luck,” he said. I’d never heard him swear before either; moreover, which added to the incongruity of this moment, the voice was still the smooth, beautifully articulated English matinee-idol voice I remembered. “I’m in the laundry, with the fucking roots,” he said.
I nodded. The laundry was one of the places where the sex offenders, or roots as we called them, worked.
“And if I get the chance,” said Engine, “I’m going to throw one of those fuckers inside the big washing machine, press the fast-spin button and kill the cunt.”
“That doesn’t sound very Buddhist,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“What happened?” said Engine. “You mean I was not like this when you knew me.”
“No, no, you weren’t,” I said. I could have added that when I first knew him the difference between him and most other men was his tolerance: they judged, whereas Engine, remarkably, did not.
“Well, after the knuckleduster business,” he said, “I started my sentence in the punishment block. It was horrible.”
“It’s supposed to be,” I said. The cells in the block were smaller than our sentenced cells, the regime was much more restrictive, much more punitive, and the screws were much less forgiving.
“I thought, Engine, how are you going to survive this?” he continued. “And then I realised: there was a root at the end of my wing, a rule-32 man, kept in the block for his own protection. The others on the landing hated him. I started slagging him like they did, you know, shouting at him, banging on his door, making threats. Suddenly, they loved me and I saw I belonged and I would get through now because it would be me and everyone else on the landing against him at the end. In a word, I became a fucking con. But the trouble is, once you put it on you can’t put it away. So now I’m stuck and that’s what I am, I’m a fucking con.”
