The Joy E-Book

Paul Howard

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 288

Beschreibung

One man's story of life in The Joy -- compulsive, chilling and frank. A no-holds-barred account of a criminal's time in the notorious Dublin prison, as revealed to journalist Paul Howard. This extraordinary life story tells it all. The desperate lifestyle of a junkie; bullying and savage beatings among the prisoners; ingenious drug-smuggling ploys; the despairing cry for help of a failed suicide attempt. But alongside the pain there is humour -- from the hilarity of World Cup celebrations to the distraction of a beautiful aerobics teacher, from bingeing on altar wine to the shortest-ever "hunger strike". The first ever glimpse of Mountjoy Prison -- from the inside. Illustrated with black & white photographs.

Leseprobe

‘A compelling account of this antiquated hell-hole. It is rough and tough, sometimes funny and curiously inspiring … we were glued to it.’ Books Ireland

‘A gripping story, told in the vernacular, and should be a cautionary tale to any reader!’ Leinster Leader

‘This is a valuable addition to the dismal catalogue of works about prison conditions and the difficulties of rehabilitating heroin users. It is to the credit of both Howard and the anonymous addict that their book says more about life inside than a library of more academic tomes.’ IT magazine

‘Many will feel after reading these pages that they have stepped back into some den of iniquity, into some savage penal colony. The five star hotel and holiday camp myth is well and truly exploded by this book.’ The Sunday Tribune

‘A terra incognito that Howard has done well to capture with such authenticity.’ IT magazine

Praise for Paul Howard

‘Those who read The Joy will look forward to reading much more from him in future years.’ The Irish Times

‘We’d like to tell the guy who wrote this story that he’s done something useful and good, and to thank him.’ Books Ireland

THE JOY

Paul Howard

For Lesley, for everything

Table of contents

Title Page

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

PUNISHMENT

DETERRENT

TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC

REHABILITATION

GLOSSARY

Plates

About the Author

OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL HOWARD

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are a number of people whose involvement with this book, both directly and indirectly, I would like to acknowledge. A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the man whose story is contained within these covers, and to his family, for sharing with me so much of their time, and so many of their memories, many painful, so that this story could be told. I’d like to thank my mother and father, without whose love and support someone else would have written this book. Thanks to Lesley McGovern for the encouragement, advice and belief which helped me through some difficult days. To my brothers Vincent and Richard for reading through the original manuscript and for being such good friends. To Annie Kehoe, a big influence. To all the staff at the O’Brien Press, especially Frances, a great editor who even let me win some of the arguments. To Dave Hannigan, a quiet man and source of never-ending inspiration and humour.

And to the following people who suffered my obsession with this book with great understanding and, in doing so, proved themselves to be good friends: Paul Wallace, Tim Doyle, Neil Fetherstonhaugh, Lorna Dorsey, Colm Murphy, Fíona Dooley, Barry Conroy, Barry Dooley, Gillian Coffey, Lloyd Mullen, Catherine Heaney, Martin Clancy, Fionnuala McCarthy, Roisin Ingle, Fergus Cassidy, Chris McKevitt, Bill Malone, Bryan Cassidy, Tanya Smyth, David Cleary, Pam Miley, Paul Mahony, Gavin O.Connor, Mark Finnerty, Bernard Mullally, Zac Sloper, Liam Dynan, Joe and all the other Egans, and Kevin Fitzpatrick.

You’ve got to cry without weeping, Talk without speaking,Scream without raising your voice. You know, I took the poison From the poison stream, And I floated out of here.

‘Running to Stand Still’, U2

The criminal record, details of crimes and placenames relating to the man whose story is contained in this book, and those of all other characters mentioned, have been changed to protect their identities. Any similarity between the aliased characters in this book and persons living and not connected with it defies the author’s painstaking attempts to avoid such a happening and is purely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION

The Joy achieved a rather dubious distinction within weeks of its first publication in May of 1996. That summer, the book retailer, Eason & Son, announced that it was the most shoplifted book in its history. Given that the company was then in its 110th year of trading, it was quite a considerable achievement. So quickly had copies been disappearing from the shelves, in fact, that staff in Eason’s flagship store on O’Connell Street were forced to move the stock behind the counter, requiring customers – often former inmates of the prison – to actually ask for it.

As a freelance journalist struggling to make a living in the financially straitened 1990s, my priority, naturally enough, was to find out whether or not a stolen book constituted a sale when my end-of-year royalties were calculated. Once it was confirmed that it did, I started to regard this petty crime epidemic I had apparently inspired as the highest of literary compliments. People wanted to read my book about Mountjoy Prison – and they were prepared to risk being sent there for a spell in order to do so.

I still regard The Joy as my favourite of all my books, because it was the one that felt most like hard work. Readers who knew me as a comedy writer, and discovered the book by way of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly titles, sometimes tell me how shocked they were by its scenes of graphic violence, its brutal language and its rather bleak outcome. Which is entirely understandable because I felt much the same way while I was working on it.

The Joy wasn’t an easy book to write. In the eighteen months I spent on it, I never had one of those days where you sit down at the computer, flex your fingers and get a couple of thousand words written before you’ve even looked up. It was difficult, desperate, depressing work. There were days when I sat at my desk for eight or ten hours and didn’t write a single word, just listened to the recorded interviews and stared into space, then listened to some more interviews and stared into space again, then gave up and tried again the following day.

I can honestly say that every word I wrote was an effort.

It’s exactly twenty years since I first sat down with the man whose sadly truncated life story is told within the covers of this book. We were introduced by a mutual friend who worked in a treatment programme for former heroin addicts. I was told he wanted to tell the story of the years he spent in Dublin’s notorious Mountjoy Prison.

The hundreds of hours of interviews on which the book is based were conducted over the course of a year – in the Dublin flat where he lived since he was released from prison for the final time, and the hospital ward where he eventually died from complications relating to HIV, which he contracted while sharing needles with other addicts in the prison in the 1980s.

By the time we met, he was in his late 30s and had spent almost his entire adult life in Mountjoy Prison, mostly for shop and off-licence robberies that yielded no more than was sufficient to feed his heroin addiction for a week or two. He knew he wasn’t going to see middle age. In fact, he knew he was likely to die very, very soon.

Unsurprisingly, his mood differed from interview to interview. Sometimes, he was reflective and as brilliantly quotable as a young Brendan Behan. Once, I asked him about Mountjoy’s so-called revolving door policy and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re serving one week or one year: when you’re looking at the door from the inside, it doesn’t revolve fast enough.’

Other times, we laughed a lot. There were moments of high hilarity during his years in the prison and I hope I managed to capture these and that in some way they made the story, even in a perverse way, more enjoyable. His accounts of Mountjoy’s least successful hunger strike and watching the penalty shoot-out between Ireland and Romania during Italia 90 were worthy of Roddy Doyle and were reminders of that very Irish instinct to look for humour even in the darkest corners.

And then other days he was simply down and I captured nothing on my Sony dictaphone other than the laboured breathing of a man who realised too late what a woeful waste of life those years he spent in Mountjoy Prison had been.

As often happens when you’re a journalist and you spend long enough with an interview subject, we became friends of a kind. Sadly, he didn’t live long enough to see the fruits of all those hours we spent working on the book. He died not long before the first copies were being stolen from the shelves of Eason’s on O’Connell Street. It still makes me sad that he never got to walk into the shop and see the copies stacked behind the counter, beyond the grasp of shoplifters. I know it would have given him a laugh.

The book was published in May of 1996. I did quite a lot of publicity around it, speaking in newspaper interviews and on radio and television about the Victorian conditions in the prison, where two-man cells were being used sleep anything up to five prisoners and inmates still slopped out like characters from a Dickens novel.

Whenever the prison exploded in violence – as it did the following year, when Mountjoy was the scene of a rooftop protest that lasted several days – I was called upon regularly to speak as an ‘expert’ on conditions in the prison. Once, I was wrongly introduced as a former Mountjoy inmate. That took of a lot of explaining away to family and friends.

And then I moved on. That happens in journalism. You’re passion-ate about a particular issue or cause, but suddenly there’s another story to cover. There’s always another story to cover.

In the summer of 1996, I got a job as Chief Sports Writer with the Sunday Tribune newspaper, a job I did for nine-and-a-half incredibly happy years. It was the job I wanted from the time I was a boy. Then, in 2005, I gave up journalism to chronicle the adventures of a fictional rugby jock as my full-time occupation. I’d be lying if I said I’ve given Mountjoy Prison much thought in the almost twenty years since The Joy first appeared. I stopped reading about it. I don’t know if it’s still the same prison described within the covers of this book. I suspect that in some ways it’s better but in other ways it’s probably worse.

But, recently, I was approached by a playwright who was interested in putting The Joy onto a theatre stage. So I sat down and I read it for the first time since I corrected the page proofs in the spring of 1996.

It’s a very strange experience, I discovered, to re-read something you wrote at a remove of almost two decades. It wasn’t at all the book I remembered writing. In my mind, The Joy was an indictment of Ireland’s antiquated prison system and the failed policy of criminalizing addiction. But when I read it back, it read more like a novel. The play-wright said he thought it was Borstal Boy on smack. For me, it was just the story of a man. One of thousands who’ve passed through Mountjoy Prison on the way to an early burial. Sad and funny and tragic and everything in between.

Paul Howard March 2015

PUNISHMENT

THE GREAT ESCAPE

I’ve never been so happy to see a bird. I’ve never been so excited about seeing a babby either. The way I take it across the table and tenderly touch its cheek, you’d swear I’d seen the fuckin thing before. “Coo-chee coo-chee coo, who de big girl den?” I say, just for effect, like, in that stupid way parents talk to their kids. “You’re gettin a big, big girl, aren’t you?” The thing could have been twice that size when it was fucking born for all I know or care. I don’t have a clue who owns it or how me visitor persuaded them to lend it her. All I know is that as long as that screw, Hawk-eye, keeps his beady little eyes on me, then I’m going to carry on playing the role of the doting father.

“What’s the weather like out?” I ask without any enthusiasm at all, me junk apathy making even small-talk a chore.

“Not bad,” the bird says, with equal indifference. She knows that I’m so strung out I don’t really give a shite whether she walked into The Joy in a snowstorm. The pain that started in the pit of me stomach about half an hour ago is making its way up through the rest of me body. Me bones feel like they’re being crushed together in a huge vice grip that’s being tightened with every minute that passes. The energy in me body’s just draining away.

Hawk-eye’s after turning his head, so I slip me finger up the sleeve of the babby’s cardigan. There’s nothing there. I tug the elastic on the other sleeve and nothing falls out either. I know it has to be in the nappy then. I slip me hand up the thing’s skirt and in between the towelling and the plastic cover, thanking fuck that it hasn’t pissed itself today, or worse. A quick rummage around and the package drops into me hand. It’s quite a big one, even when flattened and wrapped in clingfilm. There must be enough there for seven or eight turn-ons. I grip the package in me fist, pull me hand out from under the babby’s skirt and hand the thing back across to the bird. “Getting bigger every time I see her,” I tell her. I am the king of glibness.

Now for the difficult bit. In me pocket, there’s a bit of jacks roll, onto which I’ve rubbed some butter. I use it to grease me middle finger and then sit jack-knifed forward in me seat, pretending to be interested in some titbit of information me visitor’s giving me about the price of fig-rolls, a car crash in which loads of people died or some other shite. I try me best to listen, but me glazed expression is a giveaway. I couldn’t really give a fuck about anything at the moment, except what’s in me hand and how I’m going to get it into me body.

The sweat’s blinding me and me t-shirt’s sapping. I fix the package around me buttered finger, slip me hand down the back of me trousers and into me jocks and then sit back. Relaxing me sphincter muscles allows me to get it up me arse quite effortlessly, the butter helping me slide me finger right the way up and leave the package where the sun doesn’t shine. I whip me hand down quickly just as Hawk-eye passes and I continue with the bit of chat across the table. He gives me a filthy look. If he only knew what I’d just shoved up me hole.

It’s actually behaving itself up there and the lack of discomfort makes a nice change, I must say. Maybe the walls of me arse are starting to develop a resistance to pain after all this time. I think about the time I watched one of the lads in the visiting room shove a package the size of a black pudding up his back passage without a lubricant and without even bringing tears to his eyes. There’s a theory in here that the anal capacity of your average heterosexual, heroin-using Mountjoy prisoner increases in direct proportion to the acuteness of his addiction. Still, I don’t need to know the diameter of me own hole to know how bad me need is. It seems like ages until the visit’s over but, when it is, I say a quick goodbye to the bird and babby and brace meself for the search by the screws. To say I’m nervous is the understatement of the century. Me arse is clenched so tight, you couldn’t fit an American Express card between me cheeks. It’s no more than the usual search, though, a quick frisk to make sure I haven’t slipped an Uzi into the pocket of me jeans.

Back in me cell, there’s no need to go rummaging about for the package, ‘cos I can feel an auld pony and trap coming on. So I just sit on me piss-pot in the corner and let nature take its course. The pony drops eventually, forcing out me little parcel. I pull it out of the pot and rinse the shite and piss off it with water from the jug on me locker. I move over to me locker, peel off the clingfilm and open out the cigarette paper. There’s not quite as much as I reckoned, but there’s enough to see me through the weekend anyway.

I switch on the radio and it’s Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Satisfy My Soul”. What a song. Too fuckin right, Bob. I am happy, all of the time. I sing to the brown powder on the table. A bit of Bob always goes down well. Liked a bit of blow himself, he did. Nesta Robert Marley, musical genius and druggie, this one’s for you.

I raise the volume so the screws don’t suspect what I’m up to. I open up the drawer of me locker, put me metal spoon in it and then slam it shut, jamming the handle in tightly and leaving the roundy bit sticking out. As delicately as me trembling hands will allow, I tip some of the brown powder onto it and, taking the needle off the end of me works, I draw about five millilitres of water from me jug and squirt it onto it. Me lighter is running short on juice, but there should be enough left to cook up this shot. I run the flame backwards and forwards underneath the spoon, using the prong of a fork to try and stir the water and powder into something I can inject. The particles are slow to dissolve and it’s obvious this gear I’m after getting is more Shake ‘n’ Vac than smack. I curse the bastard who cut it, but carry on heating and stirring.

Some juice, which I’ve squeezed from an orange, helps purify whatever the fuck it is I have on me spoon. Slowly but surely the grains disappear, which is just as well because the top of me lighter is so hot now I’ll have third degree burns on me thumb if I have to heat this shite any more. I break the tip off a cigarette, pull the cotton piece out of the filter and drop it onto the spoon, before blowing on it, sucking the liquid into the barrel of me works and then attaching the spike.

I move over to the corner, out of sight of the door, sit on me piss-pot and roll up me sleeve. Finding a vein isn’t a difficulty for me. Other junkies have told me they’d pay anything for wiring like mine. There’s a great big bulbous one on the inside of me left arm. Amazing considering the amount of shite I’ve put into it over the years, though I plan to rest that arm after this shot and inject into me right for a change. No point pushing me luck.

Me spike’s blunt and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve promised to get a new one. Twenty other prisoners must have used this in the six months I’ve had it. That’s the problem, though. Some of these fuckers have been using the point of the needle to stir the stuff when they’re cooking up, blunting the fuckin thing. When it’s some other cunt’s works you’re using, you don’t care. That’s understandable, because when you’re strung out you don’t look beyond getting the shite into you anyway. But fuck the bastard who blunted me spike. Sticking it in me is gonna hurt. Not sticking it in me would hurt even more, but. Another spasm of pain in me stomach reminds me of that.

I pierce me skin and, before easing the liquid out into me body, I suck some blood back into the works to make sure I’ve hit the vein. Then I let it go slowly, like a good ride, delaying the end for as long as possible to heighten the pleasure, until I decide to slam the rest of it home. Me lips start quivering. I fall backwards, me head hitting the floor hard. This wave of adrenalin runs right through me. Every sense is having an orgasm. Me body feels like it’s hurtling along somewhere. I don’t know where. But I’m out of this shit-hole for the night.

THE PUNCHBAG

One shower a week is all you’re allowed in here. One shower a week and one new pair of jocks. Or, I should say, one newly-laundered pair of jocks. That has to be unhygienic. If someone ever suggests rioting on this issue, I’ll be the first one up on the roof. Three days away from me next change, these ones are already heavily skidmarked.

I’m on me way down to the top cat on our landing to see would he put a word in with the screws about getting us a couple of pair a week when I hear whimpering coming out of Bucko’s cell. The lads must be beating the shite out of him. Me sick sense of curiosity gets the better of me and I tiptoe up to his door. Peering through the crack, I can just make out the shadows on the wall. I can hear loud voices and swearing, punctuated by these painful groans. I put me foot against the door to push it open a bit more, but I press too hard and it swings open. No-one notices, though. They’re enjoying themselves too much.

Bucko’s arms and legs are bound and he’s suspended upside down from the ceiling. Four of the lads are burying punches into him, like boxers hitting a heavy bag, while he swings backwards and forwards and around in circles on the rope, just helpless. One of the lads starts kicking him in the face, which quickly turns into a mask of deep red. Bucko keeps wriggling around like a fish on a line, trying to avoid the punches and kicks, but they’re coming at him from all angles now. Too sore and too tired to continue the struggle, his body just goes limp and he hangs there like an animal in an abattoir, waiting for the end, probably preferring it to any more of this pain.

I know all four of these lads, but I don’t recognise them today. It’s like they’re part of a lynch mob or something. The place is beginning to look like a fuckin butcher’s shop. One of the lads, who works out a lot and fancies himself as a bit of a Tyson figure, has completely lost the run of himself. He’s throwing digs at the rate of two or three a second, and giving a running commentary, Harry Carpenter style. At one point, he slips in a puddle of blood, but gets his footing again and gives Bucko this spiteful look, as though the poor bastard had bled there on purpose just to make him fall on his arse and look stupid. He calls him all the cunts under the sun and then starts beating him so hard I think he’s killed him.

The lads look wrecked, like they’ve just finished a marathon or somethin. Bucko isn’t dead. His eyes flicker, showing some vague signs of life and, as he hangs there, I can hear him faintly gasping for air. His breathing’s all wheezy, like. Then one of the lads produces a blade from his pocket. I don’t want to watch, but me body refuses to move. He walks over to him and tears off Bucko’s shirt, the buttons bursting off and flying across the floor. He steadies him on the rope and holds the blade to Bucko’s bare back. His eyes are fucking wild. And then he cuts him. From where I’m standing, it looks like he’s opened him up from the base of his spine right down to his neck.

Bucko squeals like a stuck pig and he bleeds like one too. The lads stand around to admire their handiwork. Just a few moments, that’s all the whole thing takes. I step backwards and run away. I don’t know what they plan to leave of him for the screws to find, but I’ve already seen enough.

WE SHALL OVERCOME

I can feel a beauty coming on. Me guts are in rag order. It’s the hooch that does it to you, corrodes away your innards. I whip down me trousers as I make a run for the piss-pot in the corner, sit on it and let it all go. The sound is like the noise a washing-up liquid bottle makes when the last drops are being squeezed out of it. I sit there for ages, dropping piece after piece, with the coldness of the pot sending shivers up me spine. After about twenty minutes or so, when I start to feel like I’ve crapped out half me organs as well, I stand up to have a look at me work. It’s kind of tan to yellow in colour, though it’s not quite as watery as it felt coming out. There’s tons of it, though. The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned, because I’m doing this for The Cause.

The dirty protest in The Joy is into its third day, with the Governor still showing no signs of shifting on our demand to be let out of our cells to the jacks if we want a pony in the middle of the night. It’s inhumane to expect me to sleep in me cell tonight with this kind of stench coming from me piss-pot. Rules are rules, they keep reminding us. Once we’re banged up at half-seven at night, there’s no getting out until eight o’clock or so the following morning. So we’re trying to change their minds. I tear off six or seven sheets of jacks roll in a long strip and fold them up, making sure it’s thick enough so as not to let the shit soak through onto me hand. I pull out a nice moist piece, open out the window and drop it to the ground below. I can see at least a dozen other lads doing the same and there are already about a hundred little piles all over the yard. I go back for more, collecting a longer piece this time, which splatters onto the ground below like a lump of cold custard.

Already, the smell outside is overwhelming. It takes me about ten minutes to drop the entire contents of the pot out the window and, as I let go of the final lump, I can see Skidmark opening up his window. Skidmark has the foulest rear-end any of us has ever smelt and that’s saying something considering that we’re entitled to only one change of jocks a week. I’d hate to have to pick up whatever little surprises he’s throwing out.

Not that the Governor will have any difficulty finding someone to oblige. The Bomb Squad, three knackers with a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a brush, will be around at the crack of dawn cleaning the shite up in return for a bit of tobacco. The fumes are powerful enough to knock you out, but these lads seem to be able to stomach it. Yesterday, they collected two wheelbarrows full of the stuff. All for a bit of burn. No amount of gold, never mind burn, could persuade me to clean up the shit of another man. I’ve got me principles. We’ve all got our principles. No man should be denied a good shite, even if it is in the middle of the night. I go back to bed and back to sleep, looking forward to eating a hearty breakfast in the morning, so I’ll have something to fuck out the window again tomorrow night.

IN VINO VERITAS

Leaving Redser in charge of the storeroom was a bit like having a pit-bull terrier babysit your two year old, if you know what I mean. Redser was a good bloke, though, who grew up and served his apprenticeship in petty crime in and around the same area as me, though we were only ever really on nodding terms as young fellas. This day, for whatever reason, he decided to confide something to me.

“You wanna see what I’m after finding down the stores,” he said, sticking his head around me cell door. I looked up from me newspaper. “Wine,” he said. “Loads of it.”

“Wine?” I asked, me mind racing as fast as his. “What’s that doin in the stores?”

“It’s altar wine. There’s six bleedin bottles of the stuff.”

“For the chapel?”

“Yeh … Listen, what’s it like? I mean, could you get pissed on it, could ye?”

“Well, there’s definitely alcohol in it,” I said, remembering some story I heard about a bunch of altar boys who were knocking it back in the vestry and were pissed at Mass.

“Thinking of robbing a couple of bottles of it today.”

“Would you throw us out one?” I asked him.

“Yeh, no problem, man … I’m still not sure if you’d get locked on it, though.”

“Listen,” I said, “after a couple of years in here without any gargle, you’d get pissed on a barman’s fart.”

He laughed on his way out. A couple of minutes later, he returned. “Shit. How am I gonna get it past security?”

That was a problem. The screws were so paranoid about things like razor-blades and forks going missing from the stores, they searched everyone who worked there. I had a brainwave, though. “Why don’t you give it to the Bomb Squad? They’d bring it in for ye, for a bit of burn or something.”

“Jaysus, that’s not a bad idea.”

“But Redser,” I called him back as he turned to leave again, “tell them not to go putting the bottles in the fuckin wheelbarrow, under all those shit parcels.”

“Come on, I know that, for Jaysus sakes.”

“By the way, who’s working with ye over there today?”

“Den,” he said.

Bollix. Den was a sound enough fella. But he was murder for the hooch, the gargle we brewed ourselves, and I knew if he found out about the wine I’d have no chance of seeing a bottle. “Don’t say a word to Den about it,” I said to Redser. “You know what he’s like. He’d rob the lot for himself.”

“I won’t. I won’t breathe a word, man.”

Redser was late back. I didn’t know what was keeping him, so I invented some excuse about needing some new soap to get out of me cell and downstairs to wait for him. From the second I saw him coming through the gate back on to the wing, I knew he was gargled. He couldn’t walk straight. It was like his legs had a mind of their own. One looked about four inches shorter than the other. He had this stupid smile on his face and he kept on asking everyone were they all right. I don’t know how he got through the security gate, but he did and when he saw me he greeted me like a bleedin long-lost brother or something. “Great to see you, ye cunt,” he said. His eyes were fucked and he was slurring his words. “Ah wonderful, man, wonderful. Fuggin wonderful. You’re a great guy, man. One of the best. One o’ the fuggin best. Tellin ye.”

One of the screws was doing his rounds, looking for the slightest breaches of prison rules to put you on report or get you banged up in the pad for the night. The other prisoners were being let out for their tea, so I knew I had to get Redser to his cell rapid. “Listen to me,” I told him, “I’ll go and get your tea, right? I’ll bring it up to your cell for you. But you go on up to your peter, do ye hear me?”

“Nah,” he hissed at me, “I’ll get me tea me–meself.”

“Look, you can’t walk around in that state. They’ll suss you like a light. You’ll lose your job as well.”

“Ah sure, I’m gonna fuggin lose me job … anny way,” he said. He threw his arm around me shoulder and then whispered loudly into me ear. “I’m after drinking all the wine, man. Me and Den.”

“Ye fuckin eejit, ye. I told you not to say nothin to him about it.”

“I know, I know. But he sussed me, man. When I was up the stepladder, getting the stuff down. So we fuggin drank it.”

“All of it?” I couldn’t believe it. Six bottles. Mind you, he looked drunk enough.

He smiled at me, his eyes only half-open now. “Every last fuggin drop,” he said. “Six bottles b–b–b’tween us. Whole fuggin lot’s gone, man. We’re fugged, so we are.”

I wondered about the state of his liver after three bottles of altar wine, would it be just pickled or glowing like a fucking apparition. I put me arm around his waist and walked with him up to his cell, him wobbling all over the gaff and me doing me best not to look like a man helping a drunk up two flights of stairs.

Now, Redser always had a cell to himself and he enjoyed being on his tod. That’s just the way he liked it. But even in his polluted state, he knew what was happening the second we got to his landing and he saw two mattresses leaning up against the wall outside his cell. He was off like a bleedin greyhound out of a trap, his anger getting the better of the calming effect of the three bottles of wine. By the time I caught up with him, he was screaming his head off at these two traveller lads, who were being moved into his cell. The poor blokes were trying to explain as diplomatically as they could that the caravan – our name for the cells where the travellers were kept – was full and the screws had told them to move in with him.

“He told the two of youse to move in?” I asked one of them.

“No,” the guy said, “the four of us, boss.”

I looked in – there were already two extra bunks inside, as well as the mattresses the two boys were trying to bring in.

“Well, you’re fuggin not moving in here,” Redser shouted. “Yiz can get the fuck out now, so yiz can.” He turned to me then: “Can ye fuggin believe it, man? Wanna put four knackers in me fuggin cell. Can ye believe the fuggin cheek of it, man? Can ye believe it?”

He worked himself up into a rage, disappeared into the cell and then came back out dragging the two mattresses behind him. He picked them up and threw them out on the landing. “I’ll give yiz five men to a fuggin cell, yiz cunts.”

The two lads were staying cool, but, which was amazing under the circumstances. “Listen, boss,” one of them said, “it’s not our fault. We’d rather be over with our own kind. But we were told to come over here.”

The two other guests duly arrived with their blankets and pillows. They saw their mattresses thrown out on the landing and started exchanging a bit of rapid-fire patter, which me and Redser didn’t understand. It’s like they have their own bleedin language or something, those knackers. I reckoned the upshot of it, though, was that we were going to get battered. One of the four, a huge guy who seemed to be the boss-man, asked, “What’s the problem here, boys?”