19

Metamorphosis

IBARELY slept. Images of Aaron and I together tortured me throughout the night, parties we had been to, jobs we had done, our time in Spain. I felt lost. An urge rose in me to lash out, to smash everything. I resisted, gripping the sides of my bunk with such madness my forearms felt they would burst, burying my face in my pillow. I did not want to be one of those prisoners that loses control and behaves like an animal, but for the first time in my life I had no idea what to do.

Those dark, lonely hours became an endless void into which I sank and sank and sank. They took an eternity to pass. As night crawled towards morning I would look at the bars on my window and the giant shadows they cast across the floor and wonder. What was I doing? What were we all doing? In reality, away from the bluster and cockiness, who did this work for, this way of life?

There was adrenaline and danger and moments of great triumph, but at the end of it all, what? Aaron was dead. Micky had spent a large part of his life in jail. Billy and Kevin were locked up. Roger would be inside until he was an old man. I had already spent most of my youth behind bars.

I began to see it, really see it. It was not just a platitude repeated by police and authority figures, a lie propagated by the system. It was true.

There was no happy ending.

We were not all going to end up cruising around the world on yachts, with luxury villas in Barbados and supermodel girlfriends. In this life I had chosen there were only two outcomes. Sure, you might have a few good years, but ultimately you would either lose your freedom, or your life. It did not end any other way.

That night stripped layers from off me and when the sun rose, what remained was formless, raw and vulnerable. As I emerged, bleary eyed and sweaty from my cell, the world was not the same as it had been. While I queued to collect my breakfast, neither was I.

I phoned Mum and she confirmed it all with a shaking voice. Aaron had been around to see her only a few weeks prior and helped her out with money. I asked her for details, if she knew exactly how it happened. But at that stage neither she nor anyone else had any idea.

I called my cousin Bill again. He had spoken to Johnny and a couple of others and pieced together some information. It seemed Aaron had been on a robbery out in Holland, as during his time on the continent he involved himself in work outside of drugs. The job had been initially successful but a problem had arisen on the getaway. Everyone suspected the police had rammed him off the road.

Throughout the day I seesawed between anger and grief. Andy and a couple of other guys on the wing tried to console me, but there was nothing anyone could say to make me feel better.

That evening, the story was reported on News at Ten. They talked of a gang of British robbers that were killed attempting a getaway and still photographs were shown of them in action, close-ups taken from CCTV cameras.

They wore balaclavas, but even so I could tell which one he was. Through the opening in the material I could see his eyes. He had a can in his hand, spraying the camera lenses to obscure the footage.

Seeing him like that, in the very last moments of his life, brought home the finality. Aaron was doing exactly what you would expect him to do in that situation. I could put myself in his position. I would have been doing the same thing.

When the lights went out that night, my second night, the image recurred in my mind constantly. Aaron in the balaclava, Aaron on a job, Aaron alive – his eyes kept me awake.

I had looked in those eyes and promised loyalty. I had seen them happy, excited, frazzled on drugs and narrowed in concentration. I had seen them light up when a pretty girl walked by, but now no one would ever see them again.

I found myself replaying the scene from Plaza beach like a movie in my head.

We are gonna make this. I can feel it in my guts.

If anything ever goes wrong, if you go down, I’ll come for you, all right? That’s the way it has to be.

Of course mate. Me too. I’m always there if you need me.

At the time it had meant so much. Now it seemed like hollow, drugged-up nonsense.

The following morning, shattered from two nights of poor sleep, I came down for breakfast, got my tray and sat at a table with a bunch of the lads, as usual. I had no desire to talk, so just listened to what went on around me. It was typical prison chatter, stabbing so-and-so because he did this, where to get drugs, mates doing robberies on the outside. As I sat there picking at my food, I felt suddenly and acutely aware of the huge weight of their negative energy.

A voice inside my mind said, ‘This is all shit. Listen to these boys, to their concerns and interests. Aaron threw his whole life away for this. For fuck all. For piles of pieces of paper covered in pictures of the queen. This is where it ends.’

For the next few weeks solitude became my habit and I cut a detached figure on the wing. Battles raged within me. How many times had I been involved in chases, had police pointing guns at me? How close had I come to the same fate as Aaron?

I looked at my environment, really looked at it, at the people I lived with. It was nothing more than a human storage unit and I was rotting in it. I was a young man. Guys my age were meeting girls, forming friendships, building lives. I was around scum, people who thought of nothing but themselves, their own needs, their urges. I looked at myself, at all I had done, at the Rolex on my wrist and no longer liked what I saw.

There had been some nice cars and some top nights out, but should life only be measured in things like that? I had so many questions but few answers. At times I was almost depressed.

I continued training, but from then it became something I did alone. When I went to the gym or out on the yard to do circuits, I would gently shun other inmates who came to join me. It was about me, my process and forging something new.

They brought Aaron’s body back for the funeral but I was unable to attend. His sister asked me to write a eulogy and I expressed myself as well as I was able.

My education had been Billy’s lessons, Billy’s knowledge, not Shakespeare and poetry. I wrote simply that Aaron was a good person, a funny, charming, talented young man who got swept up into our life. He had found out where that life really ends and by finding out, he had showed me. By dying, Aaron taught me the one lesson that Billy never could.

In place of going to the service I asked to visit the Catholic chaplaincy at the prison, so I could speak to the priest. He read a prayer and told me to share my feelings if I wanted to. It was nice of him and gave me some closure, but I knew my answers were outside the Bible.

As a kid I had regarded myself a Catholic, as a matter of upbringing. Even when I was out robbing, I used to pray to God to protect me, which sounds crazy, but I never really had faith. My change had to come from within.

As I neared the end of my five million metres, with Darren’s encouragement, I began to notice that my stints on the rowing machine took on an almost mystical aspect. Throughout my time in prison I exercised as a form of escape, but now it was myself I was escaping from, as much as the walls around me. When I rowed, my mind would clear of all the searching and questions and ruthless self-examination.

I would push myself harder than ever before, find the pain barrier and row through it. When I did that I felt free of everything, becoming a better, cleaner version of me, like putting coffee through a filter.

There was a guy on the wing called Hussein, a well-educated, middleclass kid from Bournemouth, convicted of organising a massive drugs ring. They had given him a long sentence but his background meant he kept his distance from others. Our mutual isolation brought us together. I went down to association one day and found him there on his own.

‘You know what,’ I told him. ‘I’m done.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am never committing another crime. I’m finished with this.’

We sat in silence for a while.

‘It’s very hard, you know John,’ he said at last. ‘You say that, but you’ll come out and have all the old faces around you. If you haven’t got a trade to fall back on, it’s tricky. You have to make a living somehow.’

He had a point. I left school with no qualifications and had never had a proper job. There was no obvious way for me to make it work. I just knew that I had to.

Down in the gym I began talking more and more to Darren, who showed himself to be a genuinely interesting, deep-thinking man. In my state of need I welcomed his input into my life and came to see him as more than just a screw. It was the first relationship I developed with an officer in all my time in jails.

Outside of work he led an active life, taking on a number of extreme challenges. He had been on expeditions to the South Pole and Everest. He was one of the first men to have climbed the Watkins mountains in Greenland and had cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats. The breadth of his experiences fascinated me.

Darren read a lot of books on endurance sport and human endeavour. He began telling me stories about Lance Armstrong, James Cracknell, Graham Obree and others. I found them fascinating and he would bring some in for me to read, which I took back to my cell and consumed hungrily. One, called Formula by Geoff Thompson, affected me deeply.

The book talked of the changes that were needed in life to find a measure of happiness, of the things that should be avoided, that sap your energy, like fast food and soap operas. How selfishness and thoughtlessness create a spiral. Within it I recognised so many things that were relevant to me. Need for renewal made me absorbent and I soaked up everything.

My respect for Darren grew as I recognised how he was one of the few officers to treat work as a vocation, rather than a job. He was not earning a few quid to pay the bills. He really wanted to help people. He ran personal training courses for inmates, so they could gain PT qualifications and hopefully find work when released. Assisting young men to break out of the destructive cycle of crime, prison and re-doffending mattered to him and you could see that in the way he spoke and moved.

National figures placed recidivism at 59 per cent, meaning that more than half of UK inmates would go on to be re-convicted for something else. Once you had been inside a couple of times, as I had, particularly at my level of crime, the perceived wisdom was that you would never break out of it. You would spend most of your life behind bars.

Few would have given me a chance, but Darren’s positivity drew him to see something in me. His sincerity and willingness to help started getting through. The fact he was in a uniform was irrelevant. He expanded my horizons.

We spoke in depth about my rowing and how well my stamina had developed. Darren was convinced I had talent, that I was capable of achieving something notable. By the time I finished my cross-Atlantic indoor row, we had discussed the possibility of challenging some of the times we looked at before. Both of us found the idea exciting. Breaking records from the prison gym would be a wonderful statement both about me and Lowdham Grange.

Darren phoned Concept 2, the world’s leading manufacturer of rowing machines, who maintained the database of indoor rowing records. They confirmed it would be possible, as long as there were at least two witnesses, a photograph was taken of the machine’s digital display and my results were validated by an independent party.

The news thrilled both of us and within a couple of days we decided I would attempt the British record for rowing a marathon (42km), held by a naval officer called Vincent Brumming. I did no special training as I spent so much time on the rower anyway. We simply sat down, switched the machine on, Darren and another officer stood by with stopwatches and off we went.

In no time I got into a zone, finding my rhythm quickly and flying through it for a couple of hours, all the way to 35km. At that point my energy levels depleted and I started cramping. Officers sent an inmate to grab a few sachets of sugar from the canteen, not necessarily a solution I would recommend, but on this occasion, with no alternative, throwing refined sugar down my neck did the job. My pace picked up again and I finished strongly. As I replaced the handle into the bracket and relaxed, the officers and gym orderlies erupted into applause. Darren smiled proudly. I had smashed the record by eight minutes.

I felt incredible, the same way, if not better, as I used to feel coming off a job with £200,000. I had done what I set out to do and not only achieved it, but exceeded it. At that point in time, there was no one in Britain who could indoor-row a marathon faster than me. Not bad for a chubby kid who hated PE.

Around the prison, people were shocked by my accomplishment. Wholesome success stories were not the sort of thing that happened in that world. Some were unsure how to react, but the recognition I did receive gave me contentment. When I sat alone in my cell that night, with my aching muscles and blistered hands, I acknowledged a private truth to myself.

I was really, really good at something.

Concept 2 sent me a certificate which I placed on the wall and soon Darren and I planned my next move. We chose the half-marathon, which would mean rowing at a higher intensity and using more power as opposed to raw stamina. Like the first time we made no special preparations, but I obliterated the previous record, smashing it by four minutes.

After becoming a double British record holder, I started to read more endurance sport specific books, eager to find out about training methods and nutrition. Obviously in prison I was hampered to a large degree and unable to explore these things as fully as I would have liked, but carbohydrates, protein, muscle recovery and physiology began to occupy my consciousness in the same way that robbery plans and escape routes once had. It fired my enthusiasm and excitement.

I learned about electrolytes and body fluids, so would get bottles of water then add a small amount of Ribena, some sugar and salt to simulate energy drinks. I even experimented with protein-rich versions by adding a little tuna. I became conscious of the food that I ate, which in prison was rarely healthy, but tried to increase my intake of lean protein as much as possible. People like Lance Armstrong, James Cracknell and Ben Fogle became my heroes. Armstrong may have been discredited because of drugs, but his mental strength inspired me. These were people who had literally pushed the boundaries of human endurance. It blew my mind how physically and mentally strong they were, how much they were prepared to commit to achieve their goals. I lapped up everything I could about them, sometimes reading 500-page books in a weekend.

The walls of my cell were soon covered in quotes. ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.’ ‘If you worry about falling off the bike, you never get on.’ As I did all of this, I reached even greater levels of intensity in my rowing. Two other British records followed quickly, the 10,000m and the most amount of distance covered in 30 minutes. Darren made repeated comments about my extraordinary cardiovascular capacity and unshakeable mindset. He was enjoying the ride as much as I was and at national level, I was sweeping all before me. The momentum helped me leave Aaron’s death behind.

Over the months, as my inner conflict fermented into intense passion for sport, I watched a programme in my cell about Ironman triathlon. The whole history of the event fascinated me, having come about through an argument over whether long-distance runners, cyclists or swimmers were fittest. The resulting tri-discipline competition was considered the toughest one-day endurance challenge in existence. When they ran the first one, in Hawaii in 1978, it was a struggle simply to finish, but over the years it had developed very much into a race.

A marathon on its own has a certain mystique, perhaps because the first ever marathon runner, Pheidippides, died after completing it, but for Ironmen the marathon was just the final act of an epic three-part play. The sheer distances involved presented such an extraordinary challenge. It was said that during the race, athletes were at war with themselves, not competing with each other so much as the course, the weather conditions and the inner compulsion to quit when things got tough.

The programme showed clips of the world championship race in Kona, Hawaii, giving a sense of the enormous ordeal competitors endured. Some collapsed, some ran on through cramps and delirium. The winner yelled in triumph then broke down in tears.

‘A sport that forever changes those who attempt it,’ the commentator said. Shivers ran up my spine.

‘One day,’ I said to no one, in my cell, ‘one day I will do that race.’ It was a hope, rather than an expectation, but proclaiming it made it seem real.

I mentioned the idea to Darren, my confidante. He approved. Grinning, he then produced another sheaf of paper. He had taken the time to print off the biographies of all the people whose times I had beaten in collecting my four British records. One name in particular stuck in my head – Hywel Davies, a Welshman, a highly respected endurance athlete. These were men who had run marathons in two hours and 30 minutes, completed Ironman races in under nine hours and achieved many other feats of athletic excellence. I read them avidly.

‘Think about this,’ Darren said. ‘You’ve beaten them. Look at these men and what they’ve achieved. You’re better than they are.’

I nodded as a strange feeling grew inside me. The same sort of feeling I had all those years before when I watched Fool’s Gold and found my grandad’s newspaper clippings.

So this is who I am?

‘It’s a big deal John. You’ve got no real sporting nutrition, you’re in a massively stressful environment and you’re beating men like this. What does that say about you? Imagine what you can do when you get out.’

Suddenly, I had positive goals and an understanding of the discipline required to achieve them. It awoke something in me I had not known was there and we discussed where we could go with it. I felt strangely drawn to really big distances, wanting to stretch and test myself as far as possible, to establish my limits. I told Darren I wanted to tackle the world record for the longest distance rowed in 24 hours. The man who held it was a guy called Nigel Roedde, a 23-year-old from Northern Ontario in Canada and a real-life trans-Atlantic ocean rower. He had actually set the time while training for an attempt to cross the ocean between Morocco and Barbados.

Darren was initially sceptical, not because he didn’t think I could do it, but because he couldn’t see how I could attempt such a thing within the confines of the prison regime. I was still a category B inmate and for me to be allowed out of my cell for a full 24-hour period would require a major bending of prison protocol.

Darren spoke to the governor, pitching it to him on the basis that it was excellent publicity and would provide a boost for prisoner morale. From the viewpoint of prison inspectors, it would demonstrate that Lowdham Grange was a forward-thinking establishment that could demonstrate real rehabilitative powers. Such opportunities are rare.

Bearing in mind my prior successes, the governor cleared permission, provided Darren stayed up through the night with me, as no other gym staff would do it. That meant Darren sacrificing his day off on an unpaid basis, which he offered to do without hesitation.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Darren said. ‘I’m going to put the exercise bike behind you and I’ll cycle while you row. We’ll keep each other going.’

A date was set – Saturday 19 February 2011 – and it was on. Everyone in the prison knew about it and my exploits became the subject of banter and discussion. Could I do it? Could a regular prisoner break such a demanding world record? It gave the boys something to talk about other than home-made knives and where to score their heroin.

On the morning I arrived in the gym ready, focused and a little unsure of what to expect. I had never even been up for 24 hours straight, apart from when I was off my head on drugs, let alone exercised for that long. The longest row I had completed was the marathon, which took me two hours 39 minutes.

I knew there would be a pain barrier, maybe several of them, but other than that I was in the dark. I had no clue how my body would react, or my mind.

We decided to start at 4pm so my sleep cycle would not be too messed up. The idea was when I finished I would be able to have a bit of food, then go to bed and get a normal night’s sleep. Darren seemed to know what he was talking about so I trusted him.

We planned that I would row 50km in one hit, have a short rest, then row another 50km. At that point, if everything was working, I would already be ahead of the world record. We knew the splits I had to hold to beat the time and Darren had written it all out on to the whiteboard in the gym.

I bought supplies from the canteen to keep me going – Mars bars, flapjacks, a few bags of sweets – and laid them out next to me, along with several bottles of my home-made sports drinks. It was not a perfect set-up, by any means, but I would need to put fast energy into my body during the attempt and they were the best options available.

I climbed on, sat down and waited with a sense of total focus. At 3.55pm Darren stepped forward. ‘Okay John, you’ve got the ability to do this,’ he said, ‘and I believe you’re going to do it. It’s all about being steady. Remember to eat and drink at regular intervals. I’ll keep you on top of it all, so don’t worry about the numbers.’

The minute hand ticked around to four, Darren gave me the signal and I began assuredly, with power and drive. Quickly I entered my inner space, where nothing mattered other than movement.

After the first seven hours and 100,000m, I felt brilliant. Alive, sweaty, but full of energy and resolve. Yet I knew it was still only 11pm and the toughest part of the row lay ahead. Darren warned before I started that the period from midnight to six was when the real test of my psychological strength would occur. It doesn’t matter how physically fit you are, but at that sort of time, your brain starts telling your body that it’s time to go to sleep. As a result, everything slows down. If you can force your way through that trough, by morning you start peaking again.

Every hour I would take in some sugar and fluids, but that could not stave off the inevitable. By 12.30am I began to feel seriously weary and by 1.30am, I was toiling. An hour after that, I found myself in a very dark place, barely able to keep my eyes open. My head lolled.

I never liked to ask others for help but felt the need to utilise Darren’s experience.

‘I feel like shit,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

‘Listen John,’ he said. ‘I promise you, if you keep going, you will feel fine in three or four hours. Your body can do this, no problem, but if you let your mind shut down, you’re done for. Just grind it out, keep telling yourself you can do it. You’ll get there, I know you will.’

I ploughed on grimly. Darren spoke now and then, just to make sure I was awake. Mostly I didn’t reply. All sorts of things passed through my mind, memories of Aaron, being with Elodi in Spain, growing up with Billy. People talk about life flashing before your eyes and I guess it was something like that. I was lost, cocooned in a little internal world while I pulled and pulled that handle.

At around 3.30am my bubble was popped when the door opened and a DST (designated search team) strode in, a small group of officers who patrol the prison at night. They scour the building with dogs, opening up toilets, checking light fittings and searching behind radiators. It’s their job to unearth any illicit items stashed around the premises by inmates, in particular drugs or weapons.

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ one of them asked.

‘We’re attempting a world record,’ replied Darren. Briefly, the officer didn’t know what to say.

‘You what? That’s a prisoner there. He shouldn’t be out of his cell, it’s three in the morning.’

‘I know, it’s been cleared by the governor.’

‘No one told us. Are you sure you’re all right to be with him on your own?’

‘Thanks lads,’ Darren said. ‘I think I’ve got this.’

His sarcasm made me smile and they left us to it.

Soon I found myself sinking again and at about 4.30am, everything went briefly black. I paused, taking a shaky sip of my energy drink. Shadows danced behind my clouded vision. My back and legs screamed for me to stop. I could have fallen asleep in a second.

It may have been a dream, a sudden lapse into unconsciousness, but before me I saw the home office lady who came to visit Belmarsh.

People like you do not change.

As she faded away I picked up the handle again. I tried to look in front of me, to raise my head. Darren was talking in the background but his words failed to register. Through the darkness DCI Currie from the Flying Squad appeared, smiling at me in all his smugness and self-satisfaction.

Listen me old mate and listen well. You are fucked. Well and truly. You do know that don’t you?

And then the judge.

I have no option but to pass down two life sentences.

Suddenly I was rowing, stronger than before. Pulling with the back and pushing with the arms. ‘Fuck you, Currie,’ I thought, gritting my teeth. ‘Fuck all you cunts.’

The desire to prove them wrong, a fierce, desperate, all-consuming desire re-energised me. They didn’t know me. They had no idea what I was capable of. I could feel myself waking up.

As I rowed on into morning and the darkness left, my thought patterns returned to normal. I didn’t hate Currie, not really. I didn’t hate any of them. In some ways I owed them one.

Currie may have thought he destroyed my life, a fact he seemed to derive enjoyment from, but that destruction had started my recreation. A new John was emerging and I was reaching my potential in ways I never thought possible.

By ending me, Currie resurrected me.

At 6am the gym officers arrived to start their shift, shock on their faces that I was still going. Their surprise, excitement and encouragement spurred me on further. Just as Darren had said, my brain aligned with my normal sleep patterns and I felt great again. As the staff chatted among themselves around me, I knew I was going to do it.

By mid-morning, fellow prisoners started showing up. Andy from Manchester appeared and a few others. They became my cheering section as I neared my goal.

It was around 2pm, 22 hours after starting, that I was informed I had broken the world record. I no longer felt tired. All that was long behind me and after 243,000m, I let out a yelp of delight.

‘Forget you’ve broken it,’ Darren said. ‘You’ve got two more hours to put as much distance between yourself and the rest of the world as possible. Make your record unbreakable. Everything you’ve got left, give it now.’

From then on I rowed on pure euphoria, adding an extra 21,000m. When I finally climbed off that machine on weak legs, shook Darren’s hand and thanked him, I was giddy, light-headed, almost as if I could float away. All the boys wanted their photo taken with me. In some ways it didn’t seem real.

I had become a world record holder.