Hell (A Prison Diary 1)

‘Well, now they’re threatening my fuckin’ mum, telling her that if she doesn’t supply a fuckin’ photo of me, they’ll make it worse.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘By telling their fuckin’ readers what I did.’

‘I’m afraid you must phone your mother and explain to her that they’ll do that in any case. By the way, what are you in for?’

‘Murder,’ he replies. ‘But it wasn’t my fuckin’ fault.’

‘Why, what happened?’

‘I was out drinking with the boys at my fuckin’ local, and when we left the fuckin’ pub we came face to face with a bunch of fuckin’ Aussie backpackers who accused us of stealing their fuckin’ wallets. I promise you, Jeff, I’d never seen the fuckin’ bastards before in my life.’

‘So what happened next?’

‘Well, one of ’em had a fuckin’ knife, and when my mate punched him, he dropped the fuckin’ thing on the pavement. I grabbed it and when another of them came for me, I fuckin’ stabbed him. It was only fuckin’ self-defence.’

‘And he died from one stab?’

‘Not exactly.’ He hesitates. ‘The coroner said there were seven stab wounds, but I was so fuckin’ tanked up that I can’t remember a fuckin’ thing about it.’ He pauses. ‘So make sure you tell your fuckin’ readers that I’m not a vicious criminal.’*

Once Richard returns to his cell, I go back over William Keane’s words, before turning to the latest round of letters, still running at over a hundred a day. When I’ve finished them, I start reading a new book, The Day after Tomorrow, recommended by Del Boy – somewhat ironic. It’s over seven hundred pages, a length that would normally put me off, but not in my present circumstances. I’ve only read a few pages, when there’s a knock on the cell door. It’s Paul (credit-card fraud). They’re transferring him tomorrow morning back to the drug-rehab centre in Norfolk, so we may never meet again. He shakes hands as if we were business associates, and then leaves without another word.

I place my head on a pillow that no longer feels rock-hard, and reflect on the day. I can’t help thinking that hurling red balls at Australians is, on balance, preferable to sticking knives into them.

Day 16

Friday 3 August 2001

6.07 am

Silent night. Woken by the Alsatians at 6 am. Should have been up in any case. Write for two hours.

8.00 am

Breakfast. Rice Krispies, long-life milk and an orange.

10.00 am

Avoid the workshop. It’s not compulsory to do more than three sessions a week. Continue writing.

12 noon

Turn on cricket to hear CMJ telling me that Australia are all out for 190, giving them a lead of only five runs on the first innings. England are still in with a fighting chance.

12.15 pm

Lunch. The rule for lunch and supper – called dinner and tea – is that you fill in a meal slip the day before and drop it in a plastic box on the ground floor. The menus for the week are posted on a board so you can always select in advance. If you fail to fill in the slip – as I regularly do – you’re automatically given ‘A’. ‘A’ is always the vegetarian option, ‘B’ today is pan-fried fish – that’s spent more time swimming in oil than the sea, ‘C’ is steak and kidney pie – you can’t see inside it, so avoid at all costs. Puddings: semolina or an apple. Perhaps this is the time to remind you that each prisoner has £1.27 spent on them for three meals a day.

When I leave my cell, plastic tray and plastic plate in hand, I join a queue of six prisoners at the hotplate. The next six inmates are not allowed to join the queue until the previous six have been served. This is to avoid a long queue and fighting breaking out over the food. At the right-hand end of the hotplate sits Paul (murder) who checks your name and announces Fossett, C., Pugh, B., Clarke, B., etc. When he ticks my name off, the six men behind the counter, who are all dressed in long white coats, white headgear and wear thin rubber gloves for handling the potatoes or bread, go into a huddle because they know by now there’s a fifty-fifty chance I won’t want anything and will return to my cell empty-handed.

Tony (marijuana only, escaped to Paris) has recently got into the habit of selecting my meal for me. Today he suggests the steak and kidney pie, slightly underdone, the cauliflower au gratin with duchesse potatoes, or, ‘My Lord, you could settle for the creamy vegetable pie.’ The server’s humour has reached the stage of cutting one potato in quarters and placing a diced carrot on top and then depositing it in the centre of my plastic plate. Mind you, if there’s chocolate ice-cream or a lollipop, Del Boy always makes sure I end up with two. I never ate puddings before I went to prison.

But today, Tony tells me, there’s a special on the menu: shepherd’s p

ie. Now I am a world expert on shepherd’s pie, as it has, for the past twenty years, been the main dish at my Christmas party. I’ve eaten shepherd’s pie at the Ivy, the Savoy and even Club 21 in New York, but I have never seen anything like Belmarsh’s version of that particular dish. The meat, if it is meat, is glued to the potato, and then deposited on your plastic plate in one large blob, resembling a Turner Prize entry. If submitted, I feel confident it would be shortlisted.

Tony adds, ‘I do apologize, my Lord, but we’re out of Krug. However, Belmarsh has a rare vintage tap water 2001, with added bromide.’ I settle for creamy vegetable pie, an unripe apple and a glass of Highland Spring (49p).