[THURSDAY JULY 1, 2010]

YOU WILL DIE IN EIGHT DAYS

They release you from prison at 10.55am. The North East is bright and sunny [as it often isn’t]. Your mission [as you explained it to another prisoner] is to get the gun, shoot Sam, shoot her new boyfriend, shoot Sam’s mum for trying to split you up, shoot the social worker who pissed you off, shoot the psychiatrist for giving you a negative report [though you can’t remember their name] and point the gun at the police until they shoot you.

Stevie [a friend] picks you up at Durham Prison and drives you to Fenham [a suburb in the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne]. The local bricks are red. There are green trees and gardens. You live at 128 Fenham Hall Drive, a semi-detached [council] house with a garden and a bus stop outside the front gate — which you wrote to the council to complain about, because junkies hang around the bus stop injecting heroin and throwing needles over your wall, crowds of school kids make access to your property hazardous, teenagers congregate there at night to drink, swear, fight and abuse, someone destroyed your £565 leylandii, and the covert camera in your hedge recorded drunken teenagers having sex in your garden, Lambrini bottles getting thrown at your house, and people vandalising your vehicles and the bus stop, footage and stills of which you handed to Northumbria Police [at the end of the letter you add that you want to build a driveway and getting planning permission would be easier if they moved the bus stop].

Stevie drops you off. You look around. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. The garden is overgrown. Maybe you’ve come out of prison a different kid. You walk inside. Karl appears with his girlfriend [Tara]. You say hello. They say hello.

Karl’s a good friend [his full name’s Karl Ness and he’s twenty-six years old]. He does odd jobs for you. He’s been staying at your house to feed the dogs, pay the bills and keep things tidy, but everything looks dirty and unkempt. He passes you the phone. He says the gun is at Lana’s house [Tara’s daughter]. You tell him to go and get it.

Karl and Tara leave. It’s lunchtime. You don’t feel like eating. You haven’t felt like eating for weeks. You walk across the road to the barber’s and ask for a Mohican, like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. The barber starts to cut your hair. You look in the mirror. Your face is tired and gaunt. You don’t look well. Prison made you ill. You tell the barber and anyone listening that you’ve just done a stretch and will probably be back inside by Friday [tomorrow] because you’ve got arses to kick [nobody laughs].

Ha ha ha

The barber finishes your hair. You walk home and sit on the couch. Karl gets back with the gun. It’s in a blue bag. You take it out. It’s an old sawn-off shotgun, double-barrelled, with one barrel over the other. Karl sorted it out while you were inside [you supervised via the prison phone, being careful as you knew the calls were recorded]. The cartridges are in the bag.

You drive to town, which is only five minutes away. You park on Grey Street [in the city centre] and walk to Bagnall & Kirkwood [a gun and tackle shop] where you buy fishing weights [at 2.09pm] — just small metal spheres, like ball bearings.

You drive home. Karl and Sean are in the street [Sean is Karl’s friend; his real name’s Qhuram Awan; he’s a twenty-three-year-old bouncer; you’ve met him a few times]. They load your BMW onto the recovery truck. They’re taking it to get repaired because Karl, like a monkey in a rocket ship, put normal cooking oil in it rather than the special biodiesel you manufacture in the garden. You help them load it onto the truck and go inside.

You call Sam. Sometimes it’s hard to get a signal in the house because of the lead-lined bricks, but you get through and she answers, but she won’t listen. She just goes on about the puppies, saying how she can’t look after them so Karl needs to go to her house and pick them up, but you can’t go over there, and she shouts and hangs up, and you’re left thinking: Is this a bad dream? Where’s Sam gone? She was your best friend. Who was that? And you sit on the couch using a lock-knife to open the plastic casings of some of the shotgun cartridges. You remove the shot and put a fishing weight inside instead. You take some of the powder out too. You seal the casings back up and wonder how somebody who had it all ended up in a situation like this, everything just a pile of chaos.

You phone the GP and book an appointment for Monday [nobody knows why]. Karl gets back. He’s fixed the BMW. He sits on the other couch. You Google Sam’s new boyfriend. You know he teaches karate, and you guess the classes are somewhere near Sam’s new house [she lives in Birtley, just over the river, south of Gateshead].

You type on the laptop,

taekwondo Birtley

Chester le street martial arts

martial arts clubs durham

You get the names of five possible dojos [church halls and sports centres] as well as instructors. It’s hard to know the right one. Maybe it’s this one, William McElhone [it isn’t]. You call Birtley Leisure Centre for confirmation, but they’re no help, so you write the addresses on a piece of paper and hand it to Karl and walk out to the van [at 7pm] with the gun in a bin-liner. Karl programmes the addresses into the TomTom and you drive onto the A1, over the river, past the Metrocentre, turning off by the Angel of the North. Karl’s phone keeps beeping. It’s Tara. He texts back and calls her a psycho.

You drive to each dojo and do your recon, but it’s getting late [10pm] and all the classes have finished, so you abort the mission and drive to Tesco’s car park for a debrief [in Chester-le-Street, a small town three miles south of Birtley]. Karl wants to see Tara, who’s at Lana’s house, so you drive to Lana’s in Lemington [back over the river, in the West End of Newcastle]. You go inside and Tara and Lana are in the sitting room. You tell them what Sam’s done to you and how she’s changed. Lana says you just need a good night out, but no, that’s not it. Karl drives you home.

…

It’s 11pm. You call Anth [Anthony Wright; you met him at a gym fourteen years ago and worked on the doors together; now he owns a garage in Byker; you earn money by using your recovery truck to drop off vehicles there; he’s thirty-four years old]. You talk to him for two hours. He’s your best friend and he’s been here for you before, particularly last year, when Sam moved out. It had you in bits, that. She left while you were at work, just disappeared and switched her phone off, giving you no option but to track her down, which you did, because there was stuff on Facebook, and you found out she was at her gran’s house and you drove down there and sat outside, but she wouldn’t come out, not until Anth got on the phone to her, and even then, when she came out [you had the gun on the passenger seat], she still wouldn’t agree to move back in, but Anth is always there for you, which you tried to say thank you for in the letter you wrote, back when things got bad [sorry for being a tit] but you never gave it to him [it was a suicide note], just like you never gave the others their letters, like the one to Karl [all tools etc are yours if you want], and one to Richard [you’re a good mate], another for Duncan [you are welcome to whichever dog you want], one to the council asking them to look after your kids [I have failed them both and don’t wish to do so any longer], and the longest to Sam [I don’t know what to say except I love you, always have and always will]. That night, when Sam wouldn’t move back in, Anth says he tried to call you, but you’d switched your phone off, so he thought you’d gone ahead with it [killed yourself], but eventually Sam agreed to see you. The point is, Anth helped a lot, because he knows your one weakness is women [you once visited a hypnotist to get over a girlfriend dumping you], but this time it’s not like that. It’s more than that. He can tell you’re depressed. Your voice is breaking. You’re thirty-seven years old, too old to start again. You’ve come out of prison with nothing. And for the first time he doesn’t have an answer. Tonight is unpleasant.

…

There’s an attic upstairs. You were going to convert it into an office. And you told the girls you’d convert it into a dream bedroom for them. Not anymore. There’s a noose up there.

…

You’re not going to kill yourself tonight. You’ll give it one last try with Sam. It’s you and her against the world.

…

You can’t sleep. You’ve always had trouble sleeping. You used to spend sleepless nights playing Xbox or looking through the keeping box of cards from the kids, watching the shopping channel, or the Mr Bean DVD, the one where he gets sent to an art gallery in America and they think he’s a boffin, but he hasn’t got a clue really. He ends up sneezing on Whistler’s Mother, and when he tries to rub it off with turps the painting blisters up, and they have a grand unveiling, but there’s just this terrible hand-drawn picture that he’s done instead of the masterpiece. It’s hilarious. You don’t always sit and laugh all the way through a film, but that’s one of the funniest things you’ve seen, definitely as good as Laurel & Hardy, which is the kind of humour you like, especially Them Thar Hills, which is their classic, where they get in a fight and double-team this guy by putting treacle down his pants. You like that sort of thing much more than modern humour, which you don’t get at all, though a mate sends you jokes all the time, and he’s not a racist, but there’s one he sent you about two Pakistanis in a people-carrier who have a fatal crash on the A1, and there’s outrage because there were five spare seats.

Another joke that’s stuck in your head over the years is about a tramp sitting in front of a jewellery shop. Suddenly an elephant comes along and kicks the shutter down, sucks up all the jewels through its trunk, and escapes down the street. A policeman turns up and asks the tramp if he saw anything. The tramp says, yes, he saw an elephant do it, and the policeman asks what the elephant looked like. The tramp says it just looked like an elephant. So the policeman says,

Well, there’s two types of elephant. An African elephant has big ears and an Indian elephant has little ears. What kind was it?

And the tramp says,

Well, how are you supposed to tell if it’s wearing a balaclava?

Ha ha ha

And there’s this other one, about a Pakistani who arrives in England, and as he’s going through customs a guard comes over and gives him a hundred grand to welcome him to the country.

There you go, there’s a hundred grand.

In the next queue someone from the housing department comes over and gives him a house,

There you go, there’s a house.

In the next queue someone from the job centre comes over and says,

There you go, there’s a job.

At the final desk the Pakistani gets a stamp in his passport saying he’s officially an English citizen now, so all the departments come over and take it all back, saying,

Nah, you get fuck all.

…

You haven’t slept for weeks. You couldn’t sleep more than an hour a night in prison. It was harder than you expected, harder than the public thinks, surrounded by junkies and scum, locked in a tiny cell for twenty-three hours a day with people dropping like flies around you. In a single week one slit his throat, one cut his wrists and another hanged himself, because they couldn’t hack the consequences of one mistake [the Ministry of Justice recorded one apparent self-inflicted death and forty-six incidents of self-harm at Durham Prison while you were there]. You kept busy, weight training, helping other kids train, and you got a job, cleaning, because nobody can say you’re not a grafter, but you couldn’t cope with being away from Sam, so you phoned her and wrote her every day, but an hour is like a week without her, and you started to sink, which is why you popped on the wing a few times, and they gave you medication [20mg of a fluoxetine anti-depressant]. That’s probably not helping with the sleeplessness. You’re still gnashing your teeth from it now, like you’re on pills [that’s your diagnosis, but the gnashing could be caused by stress]. Anyway, you talked to someone [on June 22] and told them about all of this, but they said they couldn’t comment on the legal side of things and you should take it up with your solicitor, so you got frustrated and raised your voice, fair enough, saying you had no life to look forward to, because once you got out everything was gone, and you ended up reading the Bible and talking to the chaplain, because you’ve always been a bit religious. True, you lost your faith over a lot of years, but it’s back now, and you definitely believe in the afterlife and God and Jesus, because when you were suffering as a kid you prayed to be massive and all that came true, and while you were inside you prayed to God, and he did give you signs. When people say things like that, about getting signs from God, it’s easy to think they’re nuts, but it’s true. What it was is, since getting this charge, for hitting a kid, everyone had been making you jump through hoops, and you’d been having to go over to the council offices, sitting in these tiny rooms that smelled of curry and farts, like an Indian family had been in there, not being racist or anything, and there were little beasties in the carpet biting everyone, and some little Hitler writing down what you were saying, distorting the truth and turning their paper away if you looked over, like you were copying off the swotty kid at school, and they kept complaining about you being late or missing appointments, even though they knew you were working all over the country, making sure there was something for the future, like, this one time you had to go down south to pick up a car, which is what you do with your vehicle recovery business, so you left Newcastle early in the morning when the weather was terrible, and you assumed the afternoon session would be cancelled, so you didn’t show up, but they complained about that and said you should call them next time to check if it’s cancelled, but whenever you tried to call, someone else picked up this woman’s phone and they’d monkey you around, saying she’s on the phone or she’s going to ring you back or she can’t come to the phone, and you know fine well they were just doing it because they recognised your voice and wanted to mug you off, yet they had no problem with scumbags, people with TVs as big as caravans, gold around their necks, nothing in the cupboards but sausages and beans, no carpets on the floor, they had no problem with them. They just let people like that do as they please, in fact they’d probably rather you were a junkie or a bum, that’s the way it seems to work these days, rather than someone like you, who’s got none of these flaws, but all you hear is how much of a bad man you are, and they started coming out with tales only a retarded kid could think of, saying you’d threatened them, acting like witches around the coven, treating you like some kind of evil Willie Wonka, and you got shafted and shafted and shafted, and it was all about how Raoul Moat’s just a loudmouth arsehole, because you are big, to be fair, and you do get animated, but anyone can be made out to be a monster, the whole tabloid thing. They see how you are in public and think you must be worse when they’re not watching you, but that’s just you being honest, and what happened is, you started thinking about just leaving the country once you got out, just getting out of jail and going abroad, taking the kids with you, but God sent you this sign. It wasn’t a burning bush or walking on water or anything like that, it was just this desperately unhappy little girl. She was in the paper because her dad had taken her abroad and her mum had murdered her. She looked exactly like one of your daughters, and it made you realise that if you took them to live in France they’d be unhappy, just like the little girl in the paper. God was saying it was a bad idea. The next thing that happened, the second sign, came quickly after the first. It was Derrick Bird whacking all those people in Cumbria. He killed twelve of them and disgraced himself really, shooting old ladies with bobble hats and people like that, randomly killing, rather than picking targets, and all he achieved was make people hate him. That was a sign from God that you shouldn’t go about blasting random targets. Though something must have pushed him to do it, for this supposedly normal guy to go mad like that, but we don’t know what it was, and what you do know is there’s nothing wrong with you. You know that for a fact, because when you were seeing the psychiatrist at the Collingwood a few years ago you asked them to check you were on the same page as everyone else, just in case something down the line wasn’t right, and they thought you might be paranoid and delusional [a mental health worker referred you to a psychiatrist and suggested you be assessed for psychosis and paranoia], but when they looked into it they discovered you were right, the police do harass you, and it’s gone on for years [the psychiatrist said it appeared you were experiencing significant trouble with the police], but there was nothing they could do [you were referred for psychotherapy, but didn’t show up], even though it was making you stressed and depressed. They suggested drugs, but you didn’t want to start with that, because once you put your hand in the fire it might get burned, and being honest, you are a bit emotionally unstable, you do get over-the-top happy. You have your bad times as well. Like, when someone mocks you or accuses you of something you haven’t done you do overreact, which is why this charge and conviction was hard to take. It was all part of the conspiracy, a set-up. It was a ridiculous charge. You were being done for something you didn’t do, because if you’d really hit a little kid it would have killed them, which is why you started recording everything, so you could go to the Chronicle or on TV, and hit them with everything you had, like you did last time [in 2003 you told the council your daughter fell from your second-floor window and you asked them to put locks on the windows, but you thought it took them too long so you visited their offices], which is when the council accused you of being aggressive and threatening, and you had to tell the reporter it was just anger, but not out of control anger, and all that went in the media, but you didn’t go to the media this time. Even so, your whole body language should have told them you never hit a little kid. You were tried, convicted and crucified before you even got to court. Your solicitor said to get your head around the fact that people get booked for things they didn’t do, but how can an innocent man accept being hanged? That’s why you wanted to do a lie detector test, but your solicitor said no judge would look at it, and the police wouldn’t look at it, so you wrote to Jeremy Kyle and asked to go on there and do a lie detector test on TV, because how would they have all felt then? How would they have felt if you’d gone on Jeremy Kyle to do a lie detector, and when he asked if you hit that little kid you turned around and said, NO, I DIDN’T HIT THAT LITTLE KID, and the lie detector showed you were telling the truth? How would they have felt then? Because you didn’t do any of this. You’re the most innocent bloke around, but your best wasn’t good enough for them or Sam or the children or yourself. You spent your whole life wanting a family after all these years being alone, and now you’ve had to watch them slide further and further into the Devil’s belly, and you’ve got nobody to cuddle into, and you miss them so much.