Chapter 21

Despite all our good intentions, we have failed, utterly, to evict the bird. All it takes is one piteous tap at the windowpane and one of us—usually me—will inevitably break and let him in. Even when he’s apparently content out there, as he is right now, scrambling for spiders in the ferns and shouting at the neighbor over the garden fence, I often find myself beckoning him back inside. The sight of the bird behind wire makes my muscles tense up and sets my heart thudding uncomfortably in my chest. Even though it’s what the experts on the forum have told us to do, I can’t escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong. More than wrong: I feel trapped, hemmed in on all sides, and only partly on Benzene’s behalf.

I turn my attention from the bird to Heathcote’s wedding gift, the miniature Cenotaph, which now stands on top of a pile of papers on my desk. Wrongness emanates from this object too. As one of the only things I’ve ever received from Heathcote that isn’t an autographed book of his poetry, it’s precious in a way, but it doesn’t exactly inspire cheerful thoughts. After the incident at the real Cenotaph, I found myself behind wire. Not in a psych ward, where I perhaps should have been, but in a high-security adult prison. Long before I even arrived, I’d worked myself up into a state of nervous agitation. A lot of the letters and messages I’d been getting from strangers in the eight months between my arrest and my trial focused in detail on what they hoped was going to happen to me in jail. “Your arse is going to look like the Japanese flag,” one correspondent crowed. I was young for my age, and at twenty-one I’d be one of the youngest inmates in the prison. I told myself I’d make a weapon and use it if I had to, but I suspected I didn’t have much of a chance. I had limited physical strength and somewhat feminine features—often mistaken for a girl, in fact. I comforted myself with the thought that suicide was an escape hatch that would always be within reach.

The judge found me guilty, obviously, and after he handed down my sentence of sixteen months, I was cuffed and led through a door that had opened up behind me to the dungeon beneath the court. The prison officers waiting below slow-clapped as I shambled down the stairs, skinny, pale, and terrified. They seemed grimly pleased to have me. The first memorable thing that happens after the prison van, after the enormous mouth of the prison swallows you up, is that you are forced to strip naked. Bend over. Pull back your foreskin. Lift up your penis. Show underneath your tongue. All armor stripped. Vulnerable as a snail without a shell. Prison clothes: thin gray tracksuit, no pockets. Then a quick medical evaluation. Suicidal? “Not yet.”

The barrier between now and then is thin and permeable. The prison wing breathes into the present. The smell of cannabis smoke in the air, alarms, screams, the stamping of boots running up metal stairs. The wire netting spread between floors to catch the people who jump. A prison officer slaps a bald inmate across the head; another snoozes in a chair while on suicide watch; an inmate repeatedly slams his bare fists into a pay phone. A thought: I’m dead. The only sharp object I have is a ballpoint pen. I keep it cupped in one of my hands, or tucked into my waistband, at all times, even at night. I don’t know how much use a pen is. I’m not sure if I have it in me to stab someone’s eye out with one but, even so, its presence is the only reassurance I have. The prison officers welcome me, in their own particular way. One stops me on my way to collect lunch. He wants me to know he has the power to perform a cavity search whenever the mood takes him. Later, another beckons. “Come with me,” he says. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.” He locks me in a cell with a known killer. “He’s asked me to break your neck,” the killer says, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes. His eyes are cold and gray as lead. There is what feels like a very long, long silence. I measure the space between us, weigh my options. There are none. “And are you… are you going to do it?” I force myself to ask. He grins a little wider and claps me on the shoulder. “Course not,” he says. “I hate that wanker.”

One long month later, I get transferred to a lower-security prison where, I’m told, things will be easier. When I arrive, an inmate is screaming that he’ll murder anyone put in a cell with him. A prison officer shoves me in and locks the door. My new cellmate glowers at me angrily, doesn’t say a word until late that night when his voice growls from the darkness. “I’m gonna bite your fucking nose off, you cunt.” I grope for my pen and sit bolt upright, as ready as I’ll ever be. There’s a pause, and then his voice sounds again: “Dada loves you,” he says. “Dada misses you.” He begins snoring. A sleep talker. No place and no moment is safe: Balanced on the toilet with my trousers around my ankles, someone rushes in wearing a balaclava and brandishing an enormous knife; sleeping on my cot, I wake to find a hulking great lifer, sixteen years into his sentence, towering over me and demanding a blow job.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. There were drugs in prison, and I got a certification in art and design. A serial killer in the same class helped me mix the right red for the arterial spurts in an Otto Dix painting I was copying. It was possibly thanks to him that I passed, although whenever he picked up a craft knife or a pair of scissors he did make concentration a little difficult. According to a book about serial killers I found in the prison library he’d beheaded a priest with an ax and stabbed around a dozen more victims to death. There were moments of genuine goodness and beauty, too. Unexpected instances of kindness and tenderness that I clung to and tried my best to replicate. But the good is easy to forget; it’s the other that keeps bleeding through.

The morning of my release came five days after my twenty-second birthday, on the same day as Heathcote’s birthday, oddly, although that fact couldn’t have been further from my mind. I didn’t quite believe I was going to be let out. It’d only been four months. The rest I was due to serve at home, with an electronic tag around my ankle, and then I’d be on probation. Freedom by increments. Some of the prison officers hadn’t seemed very keen on letting me go. In the days running up to my release, the frequency with which my cell was trashed by security officers performing surprise searches markedly increased. My cellmate, the sleep talker, who turned out to be a somewhat loquacious serial offender, warned of prison’s strong gravity. “If you’ve been once,” he said, “it’s much easier to come back a second time. Prison pulls at you.” There were, he continued, ways to deflect it. Superstitions to obey. Don’t eat breakfast or you’ll return for tea. And when you leave, whatever you do, don’t look back—or you’re guaranteed to come back. “And if you do come back,” he said, “I promise I’ll actually bite your fucking nose off.” He presented me with a parting gift: a wooden lighter case he’d made from matchsticks, its handle embossed with a snake winding itself around the blade of a dagger. The symbol of healing, although not according to him. “Prison cuts deep and leaves venom in your heart.” I thanked him, and left.

Out in the cold November sunlight, my parents were waiting in a car with blacked-out windows. They were overjoyed to have me back. In some ways, this whole thing had been harder for them than it had for me. There’s no limit to the horrors the imagination can conjure up. And I’d been tight-lipped. In my calls and letters home I’d presented as rosy an image of prison as I could, partly in an effort to spare them, and partly because I’d decided never to admit that this place held any power over me. If I believed it, then it would become true. As the car pulled away from the prison, I turned around and looked back.

The bird lets out a rattling cry and I leap from my desk. Something’s wrong. I hurry to the window. Benzene is flying through the air after a bumblebee that has foolishly buzzed into his domain. I watch as he snaps its life shut, stuffs its body into the crack between two paving slabs, and gently lays a leaf over the grave. Nothing is wrong. He’s totally fine. And yet the sight of the bird behind that wire netting triggers a silent alarm inside my head. It doesn’t take much.

I had no scars to show from prison—no visible ones, at least. The solidarity between inmates counts for more than the spite of the guards, and I was lucky that potential bullies never tried to call my bluff when I raised my hackles. The big mouth had spat me out unchewed. But not unchanged. On that drive home, we pulled over on a hill that looked out over the county. I stood in the wind and waited for a great rush of freedom and release to hit me. But nothing came. I felt as gray and empty as cigarette ash. No feelings, no release—perhaps because I hadn’t really left. My mum noticed it first. The way my eyes darted around, never resting, always anticipating attack. I had a new outlook on life, one that involved constant, 360-degree vigilance, and a new motto: Paranoia keeps you alive. It was comical, really. I walked like a crab down stairs and escalators so I could see assailants approaching from either end; followed a zigzag pattern down the street, ducked behind lampposts, or else walked as close as I could to other people, to make it harder for someone to shoot me; scanned every single person walking toward me for signs that they might be a threat, and mentally prepared myself in case they were and I had to jam the pen still cupped in my right hand into their throat or eye socket. I felt like I was being watched all the time. “You’re like a mad person,” a friend observed sadly when he came to visit. “Stop asking why everybody is looking at you. That’s why they’re looking at you.”

If part of my drug psychosis had involved a belief that I could harness the power of symbols, symbols now had an unfortunate power over me. The summer after my release, Britain hosted the Olympic Games and celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The streets were full of happy people waving Union Flags and wearing Saint George’s Cross. To my eyes, every single one of them was a potential killer. Anything to do with British nationalism, the Cenotaph, Remembrance Day, the armed forces, was a warning. Red for danger. All cars with remembrance poppies on their bumpers were going to try to run me over. All men in England hoodies were members of far-right organizations who were going to stab me in the kidneys. The revenge of the symbols. Some might say there’s justice in that.

Operating on this level of tension, my fight-or-flight response went haywire. I alarmed friends and family by diving under the table in cafés or at restaurants or just running out the door and down the street, spooked by things they couldn’t see, reacting to events that had happened months ago.

I should probably have sought help of some kind—for my sake and for the sake of those around me. Flight is a harmless enough response; fight less so. In the same way that the slightest thing could send me running off down the street, so my temper began to run away from me in a new and very unpleasant fashion. I didn’t recognize the person screaming at the mildly obstructive ticket inspector that he was going to tear his fucking eyeballs out and use them as anal beads—but it was undeniably me. Me screaming like someone possessed, like someone who should be in a straitjacket, unable to stop. Me running as fast as my legs could carry me away from the British Transport Police. My former cellmate’s prophecy nearly came true very quickly indeed—and it wasn’t an isolated incident. I struggled to make sense of explosions like these. They didn’t fit with the story I wanted to be true. So, I drew a circle around them and tried my best to pretend they hadn’t happened. I should have talked to someone about it. But to do so would have required me to admit that something was wrong, and there was no chance of that. I was never going to show vulnerability or weakness again. I convinced myself—against all the evidence—that I was stronger than the state. I stared into the abyss and the abyss blinked first. Memories that didn’t fit into this picture I simply rewrote. Thinking back, I convinced myself that I could almost taste the ecstatic rush of freedom and release I’d expected to feel when looking out from that hill on the way home from prison. But there was no feeling. Strong gravity held me down.

According to a well-meaning but unobservant friend, I’d undergone a classical katabasis: a mythical hero’s journey to the underworld in which the hero defies death and returns with divine wisdom. I liked this analogy, but I must have lost my portion of divine wisdom somewhere along the way back. The truth was, all I’d brought up from the depths were paranoid delusions and an unpredictable temper.

These gifts from the underworld haven’t left me in the years since. They’ve ossified into habits. It’s only very recently that I’ve reluctantly begun to admit that something might not quite be right. That it isn’t healthy or normal to keep a knife as long as my forearm on the bedside table, and another one by the front door, and the back door, and on my desk, and in the bathroom. That it isn’t fair to the mailman to interrogate him through the letter box every time he calls. That the rumble of a van, or a knock at the door—or the sight of a bird behind wire—shouldn’t precipitate a corporeal feeling of panic. Yana has been integral to this change. Her patience has kept us together. But it’s the moments where she’s lost patience that have helped me to begin seeing things the way they really are, when she’s been appalled and embarrassed by something I’ve done, fight or flight.

Not that self-awareness is proving to be of very much use. I come away from the window, sit back down at my desk, and try to concentrate but it’s no good. The silent alarm is blaring, and I don’t have the key to shut it off. I catch sight of the miniature Cenotaph again and, cursing, sweep it into a drawer and out of sight. Outside, the bird clatters. I jump up from my desk, go downstairs, and clamber out of the kitchen window. The bird peers down at me from a branch above my head. I hold out my hand and he drops to it, a reassuring weight that fixes me in the present. The silent alarm goes dead.