Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (26 page)

14

BIGGLES

W
ITH A FEW PEOPLE AROUND WHOM
I could consider as friends, and my job settled in the library at last, life was becoming almost bearable. I had begun work on re-organising the books alphabetically, much to the initial amusement of AJ, but by ‘C’ he had started joining me and that kept us busy and helped the time pass most mornings. Apparently, the books had been in alphabetical order years ago, but since so many of the inmates couldn’t read (between 60 to 70% illiteracy levels, AJ reckoned – about double the level in UK prisons) they had decided there was no point. I was perplexed by this – surely people who couldn’t read wouldn’t go into the library in the first place?

I’d probably said this too triumphantly because he just shook his head and mumbled about me being a naive Scottish asshole. He liked to mumble things like that about me a lot, and he was usually right. He was in this case. Illiteracy was shameful for many of the men, and he’d known dudes that had been coming to the library for years and changing books regularly but who could barely read. ‘It’s a pride thing,’ he said, in a way that made me embarrassed at all the opportunities I had had in my life.

‘You have a Master’s degree in Business, right?’ he asked me one day as we shuffled books about. We were on the Ds by that point.

‘Uh huh,’ I grunted.

‘An’ you got a Distinction or some shit for that right?’ he probed.

‘Mmmm . . .’ I concurred, regretting deeply that I’d ever shown him the stupid CV I’d prepared for Miss Reed.

‘And you had another degree before that right?’ he continued. By now I was down to nodding, understanding where he was going with this.

‘Well, by my reckoning, that just about makes you the dumbest person ever to have set foot in Big Spring,’ he announced triumphantly as he tossed me a copy of
Days of Our Lives
.

I couldn’t help but lower my head a little and nod in agreement as I stacked another book away. The opportunities I had been given, and look what I’d done with them.

The hardest thing was still the heat – which seemed to be rising every day but was, according to old hands like Chief, nowhere near its peak. Another frustration was the mosquitoes, which gorged on my exotic Scottish blood every night, and spent the day dozing provocatively on the wall by my bed.

These were slightly less disgusting than the biting spiders and the cockroaches – all of which seemed to thrive in the fetid conditions of the Range. The female spiders had a vicious bite and would often nest in or around the cold steel frames of the bunks or the lockers. The inmates were genuinely freaked out by them, especially those who had been bitten already, and the earnest way in which they searched and re-searched their beds each night convinced me that this was one small spider worth worrying about.

The females had brown markings on their hairy backs, and the word was they laid their eggs just under your skin, the young ones eventually exploding out of your arm one day when you were least expecting it. I wasn’t too sure about that, but I was certainly buying the rest of it, and completed a nightly inspection with Ramon around our bunks.

The cockroaches used to freak me out, appearing in a wondrous array of shapes and sizes every time I moved something while cleaning the toilet rooms. In the beginning, I’d spent half my time trying to kill them, but they seemed to be made of rubber, and if you did succeed in crushing one, the mess was ghastly to clean up. I overheard one of my bunkmates saying something one day about how the cockroaches were the only species to have survived ground zero at Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and after that I just decided to give up and try and get along with them.

Unfortunately, my peace treaty with the roaches was interrupted by two events. Firstly, I found one in my tortilla at lunch one day which was greeted by a shriek of terror from AJ. Two other big tough black dudes at our table all shrieked like babies as they realised I had half eaten it.

‘Jesus, Scotland, you one dirty motherfucka!’ said AJ, standing up and looking at me with his hands held up at his chest in horror as if I had just sprinkled Tabasco on the beast. The other two guys were now also standing up, slack jawed and staring as I spat as much of it out as I could.

‘Shit, Scotland!’ one of them said. ‘Why you done eat that shit for?’ I ignored him and kept spitting out everything I could, convinced I could feel thirty of its little legs still rolling around my tongue and mouth. The reaction of the kitchen staff when I showed it to them confirmed to me that we usually ate such things in our tortillas without noticing. Without so much as a word to me one of the kitchen porters grabbed the half-eaten tortilla, scooped the residual parts of the cockroach out with a dirty forefinger, then handed it back to me. I threw it ceremoniously into the bin and walked away to the sound of uproarious laughter from the rest of the kitchen staff. I’d need to start cooking my own food, I thought, as I stumbled out of that lunch, suddenly not hungry anymore.

The second event pertained to one individual cockroach; I’ll call him Biggles. I spent over an hour with New York strategising and chasing this unfeasibly large thing, black and red and about two and a half inches long, around my bunk one Tuesday afternoon before finally trapping it in a corner. By now, a growing crowd of well-wishers, including Chief, Kola and some more of the other Natives, had all crowded onto Chief and Kola’s bunks, and were chipping in with advice and ideas while noticeably keeping well away from it. We had been in lockdown for nearly five hours at this point and this had been the most entertainment we had had. There had been some kind of retribution beating over in Sunrise. It was the sort of gang fracas of great interest to the ‘players’, but to most others (including myself) the three injured bodies – all apparently stabbed or ‘shanked’ – that we’d seen being stretchered out of the neighbouring bunkhouse, signified only that another period of more intense boredom and frustration was about to begin. Was I becoming immune to such sights already?

For now, though, we were entertained with a beating of our own, and having surrounded our prey and asked everyone to keep quiet (thinking for some reason that might help), we started slowly moving in towards Biggles for the kill, with rolled-up copies of
The
New York Times
in hand. It was a remarkably big cockroach, bigger than any I had seen or eaten. It seemed to know that this was it, the denouement, and contracted itself into some kind of ball, making me feel a little bit sorry for him. That feeling quickly changed though, when it lurched, contorted and suddenly metamorphosed into a different life-form altogether. Suddenly Biggles was airborne and flew right at me and New York.

‘Ahhhh!!’ we shrieked – I think half the room joined in as well – as it headed right towards us, my newspaper automatically swishing out at it. Nothing like as fast or nimble when airborne, it connected with the sports page of
The Times
, and was sent spinning in the direction of Chief’s bed. The Indians all shrieked, then started clearing off the reservation far quicker than any cowboys had ever managed to shift them, and we all stood aghast for a few moments, taking stock.

‘Where the fuck is it?’ asked Chief, tentatively stepping back towards his and Kola’s space. Kola was half hiding behind Chief, with his arms up covering his chest.

‘Erm . . .’ I pointed towards his messed up bed, deciding to say no more.

‘Shit, Scotty. What the hell did you do that for?’ He shot me an angry, aggrieved look, as if I’d just punched him. All the other Natives, including Kola, were looking at me just as accusingly. I turned to New York for solace, but he was looking at me accusingly as well.

Chief gingerly pulled his top blanket back. There was no sign of Biggles. A smart, as well as multi-faceted cockroach, he seemed to have cleared off in the melee. Chief started to strip the bed bare as the other inmates began to slowly disperse, today’s entertainment over for the day. I had already stopped smiling. In the furore surrounding Biggles, I hadn’t initially noticed John, the chomo, but as things calmed down and Chief strip-searched his bunk, I saw John lying prostrate on the floor near his own bunk, unconscious. Obviously someone had taken the opportunity of hitting him – from behind more than likely – as the rest of us had been focused on the cockroach hunt. Chief caught my eye-line and glanced towards John. I could tell, like me, he struggled with this, but we both continued with what we were doing – me attempting to write a positive letter back home, Chief to search for Biggles among his bedding. After a minute or two, John started to regain consciousness and for an uncomfortable few seconds he began to audibly moan, and my discomfort level heightened. I wasn’t stupid; any attempt to help a chomo would take me beyond the wrath of even the gangs and I would have the entire inmate population to deal with. But I felt my inaction lessened me, stripped away my humanity. Maybe I would become like everyone else in here soon enough.

Mercifully, John regained his strength and his composure and stumbled his way to the bathroom – ignored, as was the rule, by everyone. I saw Joker looking at me and averted my eyes, a feeling of shame coming over me as, putting my letter aside, I lay back on my bed and tried to think of something else; anything else. My mind kept coming back to the same thing however: that the decision to put paedophiles and sexual predators into our unguarded, unmanned dormitory was a conscious one. That this was society’s choice: to expose people like John to the random and almost constant beatings and abuses they knew – no, they wanted – the other inmates to inflict upon him.

I had often heard this argument made in newspapers and radio shows in the UK, that ‘those kind of people’ should be sent to a prison where the other prisoners ‘will make sure their lives are a living hell’ and I can imagine most of us, at some level, can see a certain attraction to that idea. But even if you put aside the degree of punishment someone like John should receive, it still left other equally troubling questions. What form of rehabilitation can ever work when you give inmates carte blanche to beat another inmate as and when they want to? How do you teach someone that violence is wrong if you implicitly suggest it’s alright on certain occasions? John was put in there with the expectation that the other inmates would beat him and abuse him. When the judge sentenced him, he should have added: ‘You will be placed in a facility where for large periods of the day and most of the night there will be no guards or officers present, but up to a hundred other inmates will have free access to you, where we expect you to have regular and constant beatings, possibly even leading to your death.’

By now, I’d seen John being hit a few times, usually by the same few people. There was nothing in their action that suggested to me their rage was anything other than indiscriminate – they were hitting John not because they were angry with him, just because they were angry. This was no moral crusade – John was an institutionally appointed punch-bag. He also fulfilled another important role for the inmates – he was the lowest of the low, a base point that allowed many of the inmates some solace. ‘At least I’m not a fucking chomo!’ was a frequently heard comment when the heat was on.

But I turned my back to John as he stumbled into the bathroom and everyone in the room got back to the extraordinary business of killing time.

Chief stripped his bed bare, and then stripped it again, mumbling my name all the time in disgust, but Biggles would never be seen again. Chief reckoned it took him three weeks before he could sleep again without scratching. As for me, after the giant flying cockroach, the extra protein in my tortilla, the fat mosquitoes and the biting spiders, even the noise of the rats running through the air vents at night couldn’t affect me anymore. Like so much else in Big Spring, a ‘world-class shithole’ as New York called it, I taught myself to ignore it and just hoped my sanity would hold, even though that was getting harder by the day.

Killing a few mosquitoes who’d spent the night eating me just became part of my morning routine. I’d follow it by gazing out of the window, mumbling a quiet prayer to ask for the strength to get through another day, and taking a pen to mark another chunk of time served on the window ledge.

After a few minutes I would stumble down from my top bunk, careful not to disturb Ramon, whose ‘privileged’ job of clearing the bins at night (which took all of ten minutes) allowed him the luxury of a lie-in. Resisting the temptation to enter the ubiquitous queue for the toilet, I would hold on a bit longer until it was less busy.

If Mendiola or Big City were getting dressed at the same time as me, we would all have to negotiate this in the tiniest of spaces, each precariously balancing on one leg to put on a sock or pull on a trouser leg, not even room for a chair in the cramped spaces between the bunks. Often we would bump into each other, my sweating damp skin rubbing against theirs, and of all the things that freaked me out,
that
freaked me out the most. I hated it. I hated the lack of space. I hated the lack of privacy, I hated the feel of another man’s skin slightly sticking against yours, his breathing, my breathing, the awkwardness of an intimacy none of us wanted nor could avoid. I found that the hardest thing; the part of the day when I had to really fight not to scream.

But I’d never scream. Instead, temporarily dressed in shorts and an old T-shirt, I would head to the kitchen and use the microwave to quickly cook myself some porridge and make myself a coffee. Occasionally Mendiola would have ‘obtained’ some fresh milk for me from the kitchen in exchange for three stamps – which should give you an insight into the quality of the training shoes he sold me for two – otherwise it was a powder mixture for both the coffee and oatmeal. With space at a premium, and people still chaotically milling around, I would climb back up onto my bunk, careful not to disturb either Ramon or to spill my coffee. Often I would just look out of the window and watch the birds swing into action as the other inmates would gradually stir.

Always at this time I would end up thinking of Calum and Julie and the other loved ones in my life; wondering where they were and what they were doing. It would already be lunchtime back home. Sometimes I would close my eyes and think of Calum, try to feel him, thinking that maybe if I could just concentrate hard enough I might in some way sense him; sense how he was feeling. Of course it never worked, but I seemed to get some comfort from trying. Occasionally on those early mornings I would allow myself to think of Cara too, but having no idea what kind of life she had, where she was, the kind of school she attended or what friends she had, I found it hard even imagining. Instead, all I could do was remember her. Her cheeky smile, her bravado, her strength and independence. Remember how close we were.