MONDAY It doesn’t look like it’ll be a brilliant Christmas, to be honest. I’m being done for accessory to murder.
My counsel, Legal Brian, is brutally candid. ‘They got you bang to rights, mate. CCTV, witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, confession. I don’t know if you play poker at all but as evidence goes, it’s a full house.
‘My advice? Plead guilty but sort of look innocent and hope the courtroom artist doesn’t chalk you up like a kipper. Swear to God, half the time the judge is just checking Twitter on his phone, it could go either way, we did say cash, right?’
Legal Brian is the brother-in-law of Rock Steady Eddie, my fixer. Eddie has been anything but conspicuous lately. I’m getting Brian’s Mates’ Rates obviously. But it’s still going to cost more than sixty quid for what now seems like pretty flimsy counsel, if I’m honest.
TUESDAY On the other hand of course he’s dead right. All advice is irrelevant. My dear, reckless, stupid acquaintance Amy Blackwater has now cheerfully claimed responsibility for the deaths of ‘at least’ four ATOS assessors.
She hasn’t always been such a handful. I remember her in the pre-balaclava days, before she embraced angry ecomentalism. An easy-going archivist at the Soot Association, chronicling the rise and fall of particulate carbon as a cultural signifier.
Then something happened, nobody knows what it was, and everything changed. Amy became a snarling avenger, passionate in her many animal- and vegetable-related campaigns, meticulous in the calibrated severity of vengeance she meted out to a hitlist of absolute tossers. She became an anarchivist.
I admit her latest campaign overstepped the mark. Her temper’s got much worse since she became a wheelchair user, and I think the sheer indignity of being bullied by the DWP’s thick, spiteful agency bouncers was too much. You can’t excuse murder, even if the victims were horrible sadists trying to hit targets for witholding benefits from the most vulnerable people, you know what? Sod it, you CAN excuse it.
Obviously like all sane people I drew a line at her plan to shoot Iain Duncan Smith in the face, though I’m not saying which side I drew it on.
WEDNESDAY Text from Rock Steady Eddie: ‘Best keep our distance til all this shit blows over dubais coming up again ill be staying at the burj whateverthefuck take it easy son yeah r s eddie.’
THURSDAY Amy’s been sentenced to a long stretch in a private prison. I’ve heard it’s pretty grim, despite being designed by chartered architects. She’s been invited to upgrade for an extra grand a month, which would pay for someone to help her in and out of the wheelchair occasionally.
After lunch, my doctor’s note – from Medical Sonia, another of Eddie’s family finds – goes down badly. The judge sounded quite sarcastic, reading it out in a Radio 4 Cockerney drama voice.
‘Please excuse Ian from prison. He had one of them Fugue States, I don’t know if you’ve seen Breaking Bad but like what Walt had in that. Yours, Dr Sonia Kedgehog MDMA.’
I am sentenced to one year in an open prison, on condition that I don’t become disabled.
FRIDAY Brilliant luck. HMP Archer is very middle class, stuffed with distinguished fraudsters, tax-dodgers and insider traders.
Quite a few of us from the epic space industry, too. My cellmate is Gav, a ‘panterior designer’ who’s in for aggravated window dressing. By lunchtime we’ve formed a partnerhip with a view to rethinking the prison and maybe getting some time off our sentences.
One brainstorming session later, we’ve rebranded the whole place as a boutique kibbutz with scope for secure affordable housing, a permanent pop-up, or ‘stay-up’ craft fair and a civil partnership centre.
The governor’s pretty receptive. As he says, in a hypermonetised private prison sector it’s all about unlocking those doors to increased margin through innovation and outpush.
SATURDAY Five-a-side interdisciplinary prison football. Artistic Insularists 4, Professional Claustrophobes 5, after seasonal name-weighting and casual match-fixing.
SUNDAY Horizontal brainwork in the bunk. Am told unofficially I could be out by next spring if I behave myself, do the prison makeover with Gav on what the governor calls ‘a pro bono shareholdico basis’ and stop communicating satirically with the outside world. Fingers crossed.
December 20, 2013