Four

‘Gunton?’

There had to be something of course, even today, just to let him know that nothing changed, until eight o’clock the next morning.

He turned.

Hickley was holding up the garden fork. ‘Call this clean?’

Andy Gunton went back into the long shed where all the tools were kept. He had cleaned the mud off the fork as carefully as he always did. If Hickley, the one screw he had never managed to get on with, had found a blob of dirt between two of the tines, then he had stuck it there himself.

‘No dirty tools, you know how it works.’ Hickley shoved the fork into Andy’s face.

Go on, the gesture said, go on, try me, answer back, cheek me, have a go at me with the garden fork … do it and I’ll have you in here another month, see if I don’t.

Andy took the fork and went over to the bench under the window. Carefully, he wiped every prong and probed the cloth down between the blades, then he rubbed the handle over and over. Hickley watched, arms folded.

Beyond the window, the kitchen garden was empty, work over for the day. For a single, strange moment, Andy Gunton thought, I’ll miss it. I’ve sown seeds I won’t harvest, I’ve put in plants I won’t tend as they grow.

He caught his own thought and almost laughed.

He turned and handed the recleaned fork to the screw for inspection. He didn’t resent Hickley. There was always one. Hickley wasn’t like the other screws here who treated them more as teachers with pupils and got the best out of them as a result. To Hickley, they were the still inmates, the enemy. Scum. Was Andy scum? The first few weeks behind bars, he had felt like it. He had been shell-shocked by everything, but most of all by the reality he could not get his head round, that he was inside because, in the middle of a botched robbery, in panic he had shoved an innocent man and the man had crashed to the concrete, fractured his skull and died. The word killer had rung round and round his own head like a marble in a basin, killer, killer, killer. What else was a killer but scum?

He waited while the man inspected the garden fork. Go on, get your microscope out why don’t you, you won’t find an effin speck.

‘Put it away.’

Andy Gunton slid the handle slowly into the metal holder on the shed wall. ‘Last time,’ he said.

But Hickley wasn’t going to wish him well, would have choked sooner than congratulate him on his final release. ‘Don’t let the bugger wind you up,’ someone had advised on his first day out here eighteen months ago. He remembered it again as he walked, without a word or a backward glance at Hickley, out of the shed, through the market garden away to the east wing of Birley Open Prison.

Through one of the ventilators in the kitchen block came the smell of boiled egg; through an open window the sound of a ball to and fro across a table tennis table, pock-pock, pock-pock.

Once, overhearing him say, ‘There’s always a first time,’ one of the screws, during his first week in Stackton Prison, had snarled back at him, ‘No, Gunton, there isn’t always a first time but there’s sure as hellfire always a last one.’

In the raw and still shell-shocked state he had been then, almost four years ago, the words had thwacked into his memory like an arrow on to a target and stuck there.

There’s always a last. He stopped at the door to his own residential block and looked round. Last working day. Last time he’d clean a garden fork. Last eyeball-to-eyeball with Hickley. Last warm boiled egg with beetroot and potato. Last game of pool. Last night on the bed. Last. Last. Last.

His stomach churned momentarily as the giddy thought of the outside world came to him again. He had been there, first on shopping trips with a screw, then on the greengrocery run, delivering, but it wasn’t the same, he knew that. Open prison began to loosen your shackles bit by bit but you still had them, you still belonged inside and not out, you were still conditioned by where you ate and slept, the company you kept, your past, the reason you were there.

Your body might be allowed out, but your mind stayed behind, your mind could not, dared not, take it in.

He unlocked his door. The late-afternoon sun touched the mushroom-coloured wall making it look even dingier. The whole place needed painting. They must have tried quite hard to start with, someone had probably been proud of themselves for their efforts to make it look as little like a prison cell as possible, and the public areas more youth club or office block. Now, though, everything needed recovering, repainting, refurbishing, replacing and never seemed scheduled to get it.

Last time, last time, last time. Out of here. Out …

Andy opened the window. He remembered the first few days and how he couldn’t get used to that little thing, being able to open his own window when he wanted to. He’d kept on doing it, opening and closing the window, opening and closing it.

He leaned out. Tomorrow, this room would belong to someone else. Another man moved from closed to open prison would do it all over again. Open the window. Close it. Open it. Close it, over and over. Tomorrow.

There was a bang on the door and Spike Jones was in the room before Andy had time to call out. Spike was OK.

‘They’re getting up a five-a-side.’

‘Nah.’

‘You what?’

‘Anyway, I’ve handed in me boots.’

‘Right. You taking Kylie Minogue?’

‘She’s yours.’

Spike laughed, picking up the rolled-up poster which was propped against the cupboard. He wouldn’t be leaving Birley for another ten months. He’d always had his eye on that picture.

‘You ent brooding?’

‘Get off.’

Brooding. Andy turned back to the open window. Brooding. No. That had been at the start, in the first days and weeks at Stackton, when he hadn’t known day from night and thought his mind was going. Brooding. He hadn’t done that since coming here and getting out into the market garden. He wasn’t about to take it up again.

The evening passed, like all the rest of them, and he was glad of that. He wouldn’t have wanted anything to be different. He ate in the canteen, stood outside with a couple of the others watching the floodlit five-a-side, having a roll-up, went back in and played pool for an hour. At ten he was in his room, watching The West Wing.

He woke confused and sweating out of a nightmare. Security lights round the perimeter meant that it was never completely dark. It was just after three.

Then the shock of what was going to happen hit him again and he was terrified so that his stomach clenched and his throat felt tight. Four and a half years of prison life, of learning to conform, putting on a front, keeping his own real self so concealed that now he scarcely knew who that self was, of routine, of rules, of learning, and of every emotion there was played out, four and a half years swinging from rage to despair to acceptance to hope and back again. In five hours the four and a half years would be over. In five hours he would be out there. In five hours this room, this place would be nothing to him and, even more, he would be nothing to any of it. History. His name off the registers, his face forgotten.

Five hours.

Andy Gunton lay on his back. If it was like this after four and a half years of a sentence, how was it for the ones who came out after fifteen or more? Did they feel this sudden wash of panic at the thought of being without walls, without props, without the deadening routine which after a short time became the only thing you clung to for safety?

He remembered the first week at Stackton. He had been twenty. He’d known nothing. The stench of the place and the racket, the dead faces and suspicious eyes, the need he had had not so much to break out or run away but simply to vanish, to dissolve, the droning snores of Joey Butler, his first cellmate, that he never got used to, never slept through deeply enough, the red scaly patches on his skin which erupted in eczema after a couple of nights on the prison mattress and did not properly heal until he had come here – all of it came back to him, he lived through it all again, lying awake looking at the dull glow of the lights on the wall. They said it did one of two things to you. It took your soul away so that you never belonged to yourself again, you belonged in prisons for ever after and just went on doing whatever it took to get back there, or it scared the lights out of you, changed you, chewed you up and spat you out. Cured you.

He had been cured from the moment he had handed in his own clothes and put on the prison uniform. He could have been let out then. It had worked. He wasn’t coming back.

How could he have dreamed he would feel like this, four and a half years on, terrified to go, clinging to the familiar, half longing to be told of a mistake, that he had another term to serve, that this room would be his tomorrow night after all?

He went on staring at the light on the wall until it began to change and soften to pale grey as the dawn came up.