Ross Raisin - Gods Own Country

There’s a small smear on the ceiling I’ve never marked before. I gawp at it a time, studying what it is. Damp-rot, shite, blood — sod knows how it got there, or if it’s mine. What’s queer is, I feel something frammled, thinking about it. Spent all this time never noticing it and now I’m off out and there’s sudden a new piece of muck on the ceiling, and I don’t feel ready, somehow, I need everything settled familiar before I leave it.

He’s got the television on next door. I’m not much capped at that, mind, he’s always got the bleeding television on, he watches it right through the night sometimes — if that is what he’s doing, watching it — so I can go forty, fifty hours straight with that noise piercing through the wall. Sometimes I wonder how it is the whole wing can’t hear it, but he’s a big bugger and I don’t say anything any more.

I keep my stare on the smear. He’s not going to bother me now. I’ve spent four years waiting for today and I’ve gradlier things to think on now I’m about free. He can have his television as loud as he sodding likes — he’s as cloth-headed as the rest of them if he thinks I’m twined about that any more.

♦

I didn’t rightly know where I was at first, it took a time for my brain to stop jenny-wheeling — the last I remembered before the police cell I was fetching fish and chips back to the cavern. All I had aside from that was snags of memory. Norman showing off his new vehicle; bruises on my wrist like the one I’d gave her; dinner on a plastic tray under the door and it was the best thing I’d ever ate; the driver taking me to the prison. They love beasts where you’re going, lad.

If they’d put me straight in a maximum security, it wouldn’t have been worse. Even a Category A would’ve been snug compared with where I went first off, down the valley. They all knew there, course, what I’d done. They read about it in the recreation room in The Blatherskites’ News , them that knew how to read, and for them that didn’t, there were plenty fain glad to tell the story. Brutal abduction ordeal over. Girl recovering at home with parents. Abductor on remand in local prison. Motivation may have been sexual.

They knew about Katie Carmichael and all. There was a nimrod I’d been at school with, Ricky Morlock, was in for selling drugs in the toilets of the After Dark in Thorpe Head. He’d a gob on him like a muck-spreader, scuttering my history about the wings until the whole place was teeming hate for me. No matter they weren’t better than a pitful of robbers and muggers and drug dealers themselves, I was the foulest of the lot, was their opinion. The first week, a mob of them came in my cell and dragged my kecks and my pants down and pushed me against the wall, then this grinning fucker called Swiss punched me in the knackers, enough times I pissed blood the next two weeks.

I learnt quick enough after that where to hide myself after breakfast was finished. Recreation room until midday, while the officers were in watching the television, and then the library, where no one else ever went save for an old boy who was always there falling asleep over Maps of the British Empire . Every day, he was in his spot reading that same book, he must’ve known it arse-uppards. The choice wasn’t too gradely, mind. The months I was there, I read The Scorpion Man, Angels and Demons, Strange Fishing Tales , and plenty others besides — they were better than pissing blood, for all they were bad. One day I was reading a book about haunted castles in Scotland, and on one of the pages somebody had wrote along the side: Barnes is a dickhead bully and a coward and if he touches me again I'll stab the bastards eye out with this pencil . I didn’t know who Barnes was, and the writing was faded from age, but it seemed I wasn’t the first who’d hid out in the library.

♦

I get up off the bed, marking the position of the smear, and go over to the window. It’s an open prison, so there are no bars blocking the view, but that just makes me laugh — I’ve never seen what’s so open about it, myself. It’s not like I’ve been able to come and go as I please, pop to the shops, go on a wander, unless it’s been approved and planned out by the warden, and even then I’ve always had to heel to my soppy sod of a parole officer. Well, it is a prison, after all, isn’t it, we do have to respect that — you can’t swing a cat in an alleyway, can you? No, you can’t, very true.

It’s a bastard of a day, shuttering rain, but I can still shape up the hills off in the distance. First thing I’ll do, tomorrow, is go to them hills. The time I’ve spent, staring at them, thinking that must be why they put the prison here in the first place, so they’re just in eyeframe, teasing. Come for a walk over here, the hills are saying, but the moment you walk toward them you realise all the land’s level for miles around like a mighty tablecloth pulled flat, pulling you away, so the further you walk, the further away they seem. All you’re allowed to walk in is three acres of landscaped grounds full of ponds and fountains, you’d think it was a prison for second-home owners. I took a walk around the grounds this morning, said goodbye to the ducks and Fat Lip the gnome, then I came indoors and that’s when I noticed the smear.

I turn away from the window and go to the shelf, where my few books are propped up and, lodged between, the booklet they’ve given me — Adapting to Freedom . I pull it out and take it over to the bed. Some gradely advice in here. You may find these first few months a frustrating time. There will be moments when you might feel lonely, and bored, before you regain employment and a social network. Don’t let yourself become inactive during this time. Develop a hobby: a sport, a volunteer group, a cookery class — not only will you learn new skills, but you will also meet new people … a perfect opportunity to start new friendships .

Cookery class, they’d love that one, wouldn’t they? I flick through until I get to the picture, tucked in the middle the booklet, and I take her out, waiting a moment listening that no one’s in the corridor. Then I unfold it, laying it on the bedsheet and spreading it smooth so it’s perfect straight and neat, except for the fuzzed edge one side where it’d been careful torn out a magazine by one of the perverts.

♦

Once I’d learnt I was safe in the recreation room and the library, I mostly avoided many more dobberings. I rare saw any other prisoners the whole day through, except for Maps of the British Empire — it was like twenty-four-hour bang-up, apart from at meals. Even then, though, they mainly ignored me. They were concentrating too hard slotching up their dollops of food, and anyhow, they couldn’t do much on me with all them wardens about. There was piss in my mug a couple of times, when Morlock was serving the line, but I learnt fair sharpish to check for the slummery layer on the surface before I took a sup. He’d always gleg over at me from his bench, Morlock, nudging the rough-arsed skinhead next him, their faces creasing with halfways smiles. It was like being at school again. The food was shite there and all.

Any bother like that didn’t last long, though. Morlock, Swiss and the rest moved on before I did, to higher security prisons across the country, or back out, to mind to their drug rings.

And I had the court case to go to and all. A great wood-lined hall full of folk I’d never seen before, all of them ready with their tuppence-worth. Mr Marsdyke, you understand the seriousness of the charge brought against you? Oh, no doubting it, Your Honour, but the problem is you’ve got the wrong person — that’s him, Mr Marsdyke, up on the balcony there in his funeral best, he understands the seriousness of it, certain enough, for who’s looking after the farm while he’s stuck here, eh? Sal? Not likely, Your Honour, you see she’s nothing but a withered sack of an animal now he’s worked her half to death. It’s true, it’s true. True? What the fuck do you know about it, bald sod? She was just the distraction, we planned it together, you never worked that one out, did you? But there’s no stopping him once he gets going, she was clearly under duress, I could see that from the moment they came in. Then he’s off with the story of the beans again, we’ve heard that one before, but the lawyer wants to examine it some more, he even asks him what kind of beans it was, like that’s the key to it all, and the bald sod goes all serious-faced a moment — they were Heinz beans, Your Honour. I didn’t see her. They’d set the room so as we couldn’t look on each other, or, more rightly, so she didn’t have to look on me, it was too distressful for her, was what the lawyer said — I didn’t even know where she was, they’d hid her someplace. The times she had to go up on the stand I was took out by a pair of lugger-buggers and we sat in a small room with a list of Right Honourables carved into a board on the wall. The lugger-buggers were itching to give me a clobbering, I could tell, waiting for me to try something, but I didn’t give them chance. One of them had a piece of snot rattling in his nose the whole time, but he didn’t even realise, the great plank.