[WEDNESDAY JULY 7, 2010]

YOU WILL DIE IN TWO DAYS

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It’s quiet.

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You piss in the bushes and rub it into the ground with your shoe.

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You hide.

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It’s quiet again.

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People probably hate you.

That’s up to them.

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But they should hate you for the true reasons, not the bullshit in the paper.

…

Actually, you’ve no real interest in whether people love you or hate you. You could have some kids who think, yeah, you’re the best thing since sliced bread because you’re going around, you know, going to war with the police, out in the hills in Rothbury, and there are some kids who probably do want to put you on a T-shirt and have a fan club or something, that’s what you read, but fuck that. And you could have other ones who are totally ignorant, who’ve been fed this crap in the newspapers, and they think you’re this lunatic who stamped on Sam’s belly, you know. For fuck’s sake, that does piss you off. But this thing about going out in a blaze of glory, you couldn’t give a fuck about that, because there’s no prize here. There’s no blaze of glory on the crags. Nothing fantastic is going to be achieved out of this. Your kids are going to be disgraced for the rest of their lives for what their father did. Sam’s going to be disgraced for what you did. Six years with you, a fucking lunatic. All the people you care about are going to suffer through this. You can do what you can to make things right, but there’s no blaze of glory.

…

You get up and look around. Nobody can see you.

…

You lie in the crevice. You could hide here until the cows come home and they won’t find you, but at the end of the day you’ve got no food so something’s got to happen. It’s not like you can shoot a rabbit, not without them hearing, though if you could then you’d be fine, because you used to eat rabbit all the time when you were training properly. Rabbit curry. Rabbit pasta. Rabbit sandwiches. Rabbit and peas. Rabbit’s an excellent source of protein and it was essential when you were huge, much bigger than you are now. You lost a lot of weight in the past few months particularly. You’ve not half lost a lot of weight. Part of that’s jail, because you’ve got your meal times in there and they’re pathetic. The food’s fucking horrible, you know. You don’t get enough of it. You get no protein. But a lot of it’s the stress too, and also it’s harder in the gym when you get older, like in the past few years you’ve just been lifting a few weights to keep yourself looking nice for Sam and kids, because the kids like their dad to be muscly, but nothing like when you were on the doors at your peak and looked the part. You really did. Women loved it. The problem is, to look like that you had to treat your body like a machine, and if you treat your body like a machine it’ll break like a machine, so there were problems, like joints and tendons, and you lost an inch off your spine from doing ridiculous deadlifts, three hundred and fifty kilos. You’re six-three now, but you used to be six-four, and it was deadlifts that took that extra height off. You were gutted when you found out, which is why you backed off from that a bit. Actually, one of the worst things was the hunger pains. One week you’d have eight thousand calories per day, then you’d read some research and drop down to a strict fifteen hundred calories per day, and it was permanent worrying about strength gains, because it’s hard to get big. People think it isn’t, but it is. It’s easy to make gains of five per cent, little gains like that, but when you’re powerlifting and bodybuilding you’re going for seven per cent, preferably ten, and that’s not easy, not at all. Not many guys can do what you did, and it was a constant puzzle, trying to make gains, trying to figure out why gains were stagnating, working out whether it was because of the movement restrictions of a particular machine, or if you weren’t doing enough reps, or if you were tired from a lack of sleep or having sex the night before. You tried all kinds of things to keep the gains going. You tried Testosterone Cypionate [600mg per week], which was a black-market counterfeit version that didn’t seem very effective. You tried Ephedrine. You tried Nandrolone Decanoate [600mg per week]. And what was interesting actually, was you found out you’ve got these high levels of natural testosterone, which explained a lot of the problems you experienced when experimenting with steroids [you wrote in your training diary in 1997 that it caused you extreme anti-social behaviour and personality changes]. The other problem was your liver. You had these blood tests that showed your liver was being overused, and that probably could have been the steroids, which is why you laid off it for periods, to cleanse your system and allow hormonal functions to normalise. When you were off it you just used Creatine, to make sure the muscle didn’t atrophy. The general public goes on about steroids, but they’re a must for the classic bodybuilding ripped look. Unfortunately you always had problems with water retention, which decreased your definition, so you’d try different dietary intakes to fix that, and basically the perfect diet is forty per cent protein, thirty per cent carbs and thirty per cent fat, but the timing of food is crucial to prevent fat storage, and actually, you can also split it thirty-three per cent protein, thirty-three per cent carbs and thirty-three per cent fats, but anyway, you looked puffy sometimes, in the face especially, but you read about this Russian professor who had a theory that if you increased dietary fat you’d get more ripped, which you can remember having a bit of a reservation about, thinking it might increase your testosterone levels, which would mean temper tantrums and rage occurring off as well as on courses of steroids, and there’d be more stress on the liver and kidneys, but you gave it a serious try. The thing was though, a lot of the time these experiments just made you feel even more fatigued, or when you increased your fat intake it would make you look ripped, but there’d be a downside like a film of dietary fat over your body, which is why you’d experiment and try Gabba or Winstrol. Sometimes you worried it was making you ill, particularly if it was one you hadn’t tried before. Like, you had flatulence and diarrhoea for a bit, or bloating, and at one point you suspected you had a digestive disorder. And you had this weird burning sensation behind your nipples, and hard lumps, which was a definite cause for concern, and that’s why you switched to Sustanon [you weren’t using steroids at the time of the shootings]. Still, there’s not many guys that are twenty stone with abdominals, and it took a lot to get there. You weren’t big when you were little. The opposite in fact. You were a skinny kid and you had these granddad glasses with elastic bits that went around your ears, which you hated, and you remember pretending you’d lost them, and you had this bright ginger hair, like a carrot top. Nothing like you were once you were on the doors. Obviously there was teasing about it when you were a kid, and you still get that sometimes, which isn’t right, because you shouldn’t tease people for being different, and actually, just recently you woke up in the middle of the night because someone was shouting something about there being a big ginger bastard, so you went to the door in your boxers, but whoever it was had legged it. You hated being skinny though. You used to pray to the little Jesus nailed to the wooden cross. Jesus the Saviour you called it. You prayed to be big, so you could look after yourself, and that’s how you got into martial arts. You’d get the games imported from Japan, and you were into wrestling in your teens, which is why you had your hair like British Bulldog, and you had a hell of a talent for the martial arts. You did that for a lot of years, went semi-pro in cage fighting, could have taught it really, but that was when it first started, when you did it back home in France and in Crete, places like that. It hadn’t really taken off over here at the time. This is going back about ten years. It’s popular as hell now, but they’ve spoiled it as far as you’re concerned. The principle behind it originally was to have any style against any style. It was fantastic then, when the basic disciplines were Muay Thai and grappling. You were a worry for other fighters because that’s exactly what you did, but since then everyone’s realised they’re the two martial arts that win, so they’re all doing it, and when you get in the ring now there’s no advantages or disadvantages. It’s like a game of chess. They still fight abroad with any style though, like in Crete, but they’ve killed it here, made it into a proper sport, which is why you lost interest. Also you picked up a lot of injuries, the worst was your right hip, from doing the splits all the time. Your party trick was putting two chairs out and straddling across the lot, but you started to feel the pain in there, especially when you were doing your side kicks, things like that, and you did exactly what you shouldn’t, because you were busy working all over the country trying to earn a future, so you ignored it, and that was silly, thinking about it now, and it wasn’t until years later that you went to the doctor and he said, look, it’s not from training, it’s genetic, but of course when you said you needed it replaced so you could get back into the cage-fighting, it didn’t go down too well with the doctor, and you’d have had to get it done on private. But basically, the whole reason you got big was for the martial arts, and what happened was you got in the ring with this guy who was twenty-four or twenty-five stone, a big haymaker, this bar-brawler type, with hair everywhere. You can still remember him now. You’d seen tape recordings of his fights, and you were worried to be honest, because he was monstrous, buckling guys with shots to the body. You’d never seen anything like it. But you took him down to the ground, and as you were going down he hit you and everything just went bong. His hands were as big as your head, big windmills coming in from all over the place, but you got him in a chokehold, so it worked for you obviously, but you could feel that difference in size when he hit you, and that’s when you realised you needed to be bigger.

…

It’s getting dark. The helicopter’s gone.

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You’re hungry.

…

But stress makes you lose a lot of weight. It’s happened before. You lost five stone once through stress. Another time you lost three stone, a few years ago, when you told the psychiatrist you had this feeling you might snap, and obviously that could be dangerous, because you’re a big guy, and you’d been having these thoughts of smashing up a police car. When the police actually came to the house you almost did lose your temper. You picked up a loaded crossbow, though in fairness you put it down and discussed it with them, but clearly that’s not right. And you were having all these symptoms, like your memory wasn’t right, you couldn’t concentrate for more than a paragraph, you had shortness of breath, sweating, pacing a lot and crying. You couldn’t stop thinking about things people had done to you. You spent entire days angry about it, with these sensations in your head, and you were watching the CCTV cameras all the time, thinking about suicide, which you tried when you were a teenager [you told people you took an overdose of medication as a teenager, and you were taken to hospital after taking a deliberate overdose of medication in 1999], but nobody would help [you’d been referred to the psychiatrist after seeing your GP and a mental health worker, and the psychiatrist referred you for psychotherapy, but you didn’t show up for the two appointments you were given]. It was around then that you broke your hand and went to A&E. You told the doctor a heavy engine block had fallen on it, two hundred and fifty kilos, and the hand surgeon wanted you to stay in hospital because you were supposed to keep it raised, but you had too much going on with the family [that’s what you told them]. You started having problems with your allergies again too, which was making your asthma worse, so you went to the GP and asked for the desensitisation treatment you had when you were younger, and the GP said the specialist wouldn’t agree to it, but they referred you anyway [the GP wrote that he was referring you due to your insistence rather than his worries], and you went to the RVI [to the Department of Respiratory Medicine] where you told them that the bad asthma you had as a kid had come back, so they examined you and diagnosed you [the doctor wrote that you had moderate to severe asthma] and they said to come back for more tests [you were also referred for physiotherapy, but didn’t show up]. You got Achilles tendonitis as well, which you needed an ultrasound for, and you were getting headaches [the GP gave you codeine]. Anyway, you went for the respiratory tests at the RVI [the doctor said you were well oxygenated, but had mild wheezing] and they wanted to give you a drug, but you weren’t keen, because it had steroids in it and you’d seen this documentary about thinning bones and how steroids can speed it up, and actually, you’d been able to feel your bones getting thinner and weaker, so you told them you were worried about that because you’d been using your steroid inhaler since you were a kid. They said inhalers are fine, so you had to insist, look, you need a bone mineral density scan and you also want the desensitisation treatment for your allergies [the doctor noted that you said you were happy to accept any risk, including death], but they still wouldn’t give you the bone scan. It doesn’t matter now. Anyway, you got your skin tested [at the Immunology Department] and they realised you’re allergic to dust mites and cats and dogs, so you started treatment [they said it might not work as well as it did when you were younger] and then you had to go back to hospital because they thought you were inhaling too much corticosteroid, and what they did was split the medicine into two parts and told you to come back in three months [you didn’t attend the follow-up appointment or another scheduled test]. It was around then that your bicep became painful as well, so you went to see the GP about that [and while you were there you said English is your second language and mentioned you were having relationship problems]. Then you went to the GP again and said the police and the council were victimising you, so they referred you to a counsellor [the GP wrote that you might benefit from anger management], but you didn’t show up for the first session. You were missing appointments all over the place by then, due to the stress with the police and everything else going on [you didn’t show up for the second counselling session, or the third, but you showed up for a few after that, then missed a few, then went to one, then missed a couple, then turned up for a few], but in the end what happened is you went to jail so obviously the counselling stopped [you told the prison staff you needed your allergy medicine, which they got for you from the RVI, and you also asked for eczema medicine for your back, and a chlamydia check].

…

It’s night-time. You’re cold. You pull your hoodie up.

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It’s pitch dark. You pace backwards and forwards.

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You hide.

…

But being big worked against you with the social workers, because they were witches [there is no evidence that any social workers did anything wrong], writing you off as aggressive. In fairness, you’re an imposing man, intimidating, you can’t help that, and you told them that, but they put it down in this report, saying you’d intimidated them, and when it came up at one of the meetings you told them at no point did you take steps towards them or raise your hands or raise your voice or anything like that. Definitely. At no point did you threaten anybody. And if this social worker did feel intimidated, well that’s purely down to them. You found things like that offensive, to be honest, and what actually happened was the social worker was arguing the case, and you being you, and this was never intended as a threat, but you asked this totally rhetorical question, and it was clear you were just pointing out the ridiculousness of it all, but in it went, into the report, saying how you’d threatened them, and it got brought up in this meeting, so you told them, look, English is your second language, and fair enough, you speak it very well, but it’s still a second language for you, and you’d been worried that this could happen, because sometimes you do say things that get misinterpreted. But anyway, they asked you what you thought the solution to all this was and you told them how you just wanted to draw a line under everything, because if you kept fighting them they’d keep fighting back, and you knew you were going to lose, one hundred per cent, because it was a conspiracy, the charge was a conspiracy, so you told them that all you wanted was a psychiatrist or a psychologist, someone to have a word with you on a regular basis to find out whether there was an underlying problem you hadn’t seen, because it’s easy for you to say there’s nothing wrong, but you needed a professional, not a DIY thing, to come along and say what the problem is and what can be improved, someone to sit down with you, just in case, because they wanted to hang you from the highest height, and fucking hell, you can’t believe they’ve had you in jail over this, which is partly why you’re so pissed off, because you didn’t deserve to get fucked over, you tried your best, you did everything right, you worked hard and did what society wanted, and what did they do? They turned you into an ogre who lives under a bridge and eats goats.