Byker Books

My day starts at 7.30 with a roll call. We’re kept in our cells for this. The guards come around and make sure everyone is accounted for and everyone and everything is where it’s supposed to be. Providing everything is in good order, we go down for breakfast at 8 and at 8.30 we have 20 minutes of trudging around the yard, which for most of us is the only moment of respite from the fetid air that blasts through the steel grey wing of the prison.                   

Everyone goes off to their jobs just before nine. But for me this means being confined back in the wing until lunchtime. I am a new inmate and - although I have applied for a job in the workshop assembling wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs for the local health authority, for which I will get something like £5 per week - the application hasn’t yet been processed and allocated. So without a job my days are currently mind numbingly dull. I have little to do until dinner at 5.30. After dinner most of the others have some free time and they’re allowed to use the gym, library and other such pursuits. But for me, this means being sent to see either the drug and alcohol rehabilitation specialists or the shrink. This was deemed by the judge to be a key component of my incarceration.

I have a cellmate called Danny. He’s a big hefty fucker from up north with a shaved head and a blind right eye. From just beneath the blind eye a jagged scar runs around his cheek tracing a line all the way to his ear. He has a faded blue tattoo of a snake coiled around his neck. We are allowed a stereo in our cell. Danny listens to the Exploited a lot. He’s an okay bloke, I think. I don’t ask what he’s in for and so far he hasn’t questioned me either.

When I first got in he gave me a toothbrush with a slither of razor blade glued into it. “Little skinny bastard like you, yull fookin’ need it, brutha. Trus’ me,” he laughed. “Keep two in yr’pocket. Jus’ don’t pull out the wrong ‘un... ha ha ha ha... an’ brush your fookin’ teeth wi’it.”  He also advised me if any twat starts not to think twice about taking their eye out. “It’s the only way yull get respect an’ they’ll leave you alone.”

Danny also tells me he can get his hands on some speed or a bit of blow. All I have to do is give him the nod.

So this is where I am right now. But let’s go back.

***** 

We drank Night Nurse a lot, me and Trip. In liquid form the green cough medicine, supplied with its little measuring cup, resembled methadone in a spectacular way. Night Nurse is an antihistamine notorious for its powerful sedative side effects; and we used it expressly for the purpose of sedating ourselves – drinking it straight from the bottle. It also contained dextromethorphan; a drug that causes euphoria and hallucinations due to its effect on the central nervous system; acting on the body’s principle receptors. You didn’t even have to drink a serious amount. I mean, this stuff was so fucking good I couldn’t believe it could be purchased legally over the counter without prescription. I don’t recall a pharmacist ever questioning their customers about what they wanted certain medicines for. We usually went in early on a Saturday evening and bought three bottles each. I would call it naivety, but two skinny-looking speed freaks walking into an all night chemist’s and buying bottles of the stuff was obvious to anyone. But we used those dirty city chemists you find on the edges of town with red neon signs in the windows, open 24 hours and situated next door to taxi offices and kebab joints – they’d sell almost anything to anyone with either minimal enquiry or, more usually, with utter nonchalance and resignation. It was a cheap and easy high. To me and Trip, the days seemed good.

“Thing is, Shoe,” Trip said. “Ain’t gonna be long before they cotton on to the fact that kids like us are drinking the stuff for fun. Then the bastards’ll take it off the fuckin’ shelves or make it a prescription drug or something.” But that possibility didn’t particularly bother us either because we had Guss. Guss could get his hands on anything. Aside from the speed and acid he also got us prescription morphine or codeine. Quite often he’d chuck us pills and we had no idea what they were; we’d just swallow them anyway. Guss’s place was like an apothecary. Shelves stacked with big sweet jars full of colourful pills and potions. For as long as there were shoddily run chemists and people like Guss, getting drugs was like shooting fish in a barrel. 

Guss was more than twice our age or thereabouts. I think told me he was fifty two but it was hard to tell because he was so wizened looking. He played drums in our band, the Queen-Mother Slags. Trip and I were both early twenties. Trip was lead guitar and vocals and I played bass. Trip at least had a Strat. A nice blue one. A classic ’57. Myself, I had some piece of shit Avon Rose Morris bass that I took a paint brush to and wrote, Mother Slags - Underground Heavy Groovin’ across its paint-chipped body. I’d never even heard of the fucking things but I bought it for ten quid in a junk shop along the same street as my flat in Erdington.  I tuned it right down, strings all loose. It gave me a rough, dirty sound and fed through a Boss turbo-distortion pedal turned up to max it hardly mattered what I played.

Guss looked like an old hippy type – he dressed in a lot of suede and corduroy like a remnant from the sixties and he became the drummer after I met him at a bar. He always wore a red beret with his long grey hair hanging from under it down to his shoulders. Guss had done so much acid over the years he couldn’t keep his eyes still. His pupils jittered about quickly from side to side like amoebas pulsing under a microscope.  He’d played in various garage bands over the years and was a great drummer. The way he attacked the drums, weaving his own little flourishes and idiosyncrasies into the rhythms always reminded me of Clem Burke or Keith Moon. Guss wasn’t just a good solid drummer; he was a truly creative musician. He was wasted in the Queen-Mother Slags. But speaking truthfully he’d missed his boat years ago. Fucked him self up on acid and Christ knows what else.  Together we were an odd and befuddled ensemble. Trip and me – we had no real idea what we were doing. We could just about hold together simple repetitive rhythms swept under a carpet of reverb and distortion but that was about it. We made a noise and called it punk. The band was just an escape from the drudgery of everyday existence. Trip had this little yellow Ford Escort van that we couldn’t fit much in. It was just the three of us with the Avon and the Strat, a drum kit and two Marshall amps. 

We’d concocted stage names. Guss was Mr. Magoo, Trip was Bertie Boop and I was The Shoe. Mr. Magoo, Bertie Boop and The Shoe: together, we were the Queen-Mother Slags.   

My black Cuban heeled Chelsea boots were always highly polished; unless I’d given someone a good kicking in a brawl and gotten blood all over them. Those pointed toes and heavy heels had come in handy on more than one occasion in some of the rough clubs we’d played in. You don’t get a name like The Shoe for nothing. I enjoyed playing in the band but I enjoyed giving someone a good shoeing even more.

The eighties had come to a close and the new decade begun but the decor in Guss’s living room at his flat looked like it hadn’t changed since the early seventies. Red leather sofas with chrome legs and faux leopard skin throw-overs were arranged around the perimeter of the room. Over in one corner he had a massive yucca plant that sprouted from its pot right out into the centre of the room where the top of it had to be supported by a cord fastened to a hook in the ceiling. Guss claimed he’d had the yucca for twenty five years. On the shelves amongst a vast collection of vinyl, Guss had various disco lights that bathed the room in shifting hues. It was a dreary, brown looking block of flats he lived in and I suppose all that swirling psychedelic lighting did much to create an atmosphere that concealed the less palatable reality of damp walls and rotting woodwork.

We’d visited the chemist shop earlier that afternoon. “Who exactly wants all this medicine?” asked the pharmacist behind the counter, peering over her half-moon glasses at Trip who was standing there hunched over with his spiked green hair and nose stud, sniffing profusely like he’d been snorting coke all morning. “I do,” I stepped in, slapping a twenty in her palm. “I’m stocking up. Gotta beat this flu bug that’s been going ‘round, you know?”  I stuffed my three bottles in the pockets of the green USAF jacket I was wearing and we sauntered out of there.

Guss poured the whiskey and handed out E’s. I usually took my whiskey straight but I was mixing it with the Night Nurse and swilled two tabs down with it. We had a gig that night at a place in Walsall called the Wheatsheaf, opposite Blue Coat School.  When we had a gig we always used to sit around and get out of our skulls beforehand.

Guss had cats. I don’t know how many cats he had but there were a lot and each time you visited his place there seemed to be countless numbers of them creeping out from under various items of furniture. It was a first floor flat and Guss had constructed this rickety wooden ramp that ran from an always open rear window to the ground outside. The flat had a constant infestation of fleas. You’d come away with flea bites around your ankles and up your legs. But Gus claimed he didn’t have an infestation. He had a method of dealing with them.

“Ensuring a perpetual high level of alcohol content in the blood provides round the clock protection,” he explained. “They’re the hardest creatures to defend against,” he flicked a strand of grey hair from his face.

“Not as hard as a lion,” Trip butted in.

“Yeah, they are,” Guss retorted. “Shoot the balls off a lion. You can’t shoot what you can’t see, man.” He shook his head emphatically. “Greedy little bastards that they are, one flea can bite up to 300 times during the night. And they breed so fast each female can shit out... get this... 10,000 eggs in a 9 day life-cycle.” He squinted, seriously. “They lay ‘em in the carpets, see?”

Gus said he’d studied the subject thoroughly. “They’re like the Russian army: pissin’ millions of ‘em.” He swept a finger over the room. “Deployed in strategic positions in a very short space of time... yeah... they go for your legs usually.” Gus swigged his whiskey. ”But I Sort the little cunts out by drinking a bottle of whiskey during the evening before I roll into bed.”

“Yeah,” on Guss’s blind side I winked at Trip. “Let them suck on that!”

Trip threw his head back and laughed mockingly. Guss really could be boring at times.

“Ha ha. Exactly!” Guss persisted. “I’ve estimated it’s possible to wipe out an army of 10 million fleas in only 3 weeks of consecutive night’s whiskey consumption.” He sparked up a joint and pointed with it. “I reckon that green shit you’re drinking would do the trick as well.” His darting little amoeba eyes flickered in the multi-coloured lights. He drew deeply on the joint and passed it to me across the glass coffee table, tightening his lips to keep the smoke down. In turn I took a drag and handed it over to Trip’s awaiting hand that was stretched out like a baby bird’s beak.

After polishing off the Night Nurse and whiskey cocktails I was feeling a little... shall we say... indistinct. But after about half an hour the haziness was counteracted when the E’s truly started kicking in and lethargy was punctuated by periodic sudden rushes of blood to my head. I felt as though the world around me was alternating back and forth between slow-mo and fast forward. When the time came to load up the van with our gear I could hardly get out the chair. But since we were such a rudimentary outfit to call it loading up was an exaggeration! It was nothing more than a 15 minute chore. We slung in the gear and made a move.

Heading along the Birmingham Road into Walsall Trip was struggling to hold a straight line.  “Can’t see a fucking thing!” he slurred, wrestling the steering wheel and swerving heavily left to right. I was rolling about with the gear in the back. I shared Trip’s wavy interpretation of reality. Guss was sat next to Trip in the passenger seat.

“You just press the accelerator,” Guss ordered, leaning over, grabbing the wheel. “And I’ll steer.”

We travelled like that, the pair of them sniggering and sharing a half bottle of Vodka until we reached the Wheatsheaf. We lurched to a halt and we all staggered out onto the pavement outside the place. At this point I realised I was quite seriously chemically induced. It was about 7pm and there was a group of straggle-haired indie kids standing outside with their beers. They started snorting at us as we fell about trying to lug the stuff inside and up the staircase to the upstairs room.

We got set up and then sat at the bar having a couple more whiskeys before kicking off about 9pm. It was a full house. People had piled raucously into the small room and started chanting. We launched into our first number Sleek Black Cadillac and managed to get through two more songs before the spitting started and glasses were hurled towards us. A few stray missiles slammed into the optics at the back of the bar sending splinters of glass spinning. The barman quickly rolled down the shutters. We attempted to play through the rampage but the two Marshalls were drowned out by the shouting and Trip and me had un-strapped our guitars and were using them to bat away the projectiles as Guss cowered behind his kit, pulling faces at the crowd, goading them on and laughing.

Some skinhead came towards me gritting his teeth and lunged at me with the serrated remains of a pint glass. I took hold of the bass and thrust the machine heads hard into his face. It ripped his cheek wide open, red raw like a piece of steak, and I heard the sound of his teeth breaking. He slumped heavily to his knees with his head in his hands. Blood pumped out through his fingers and poured down his faded denim jacket. His broken teeth fell onto the floor in front of him like pieces of a jigsaw. I gripped the bass tightly by the neck and swung it around the side of his head, opening up another gash. He fell onto his side and I swung again, thudding the bass into his ribs. The room had frozen around me and everyone watched in dead silence as I stood over him and pressed my boot into his throat. He was trembling uncontrollably and he turned his eyes up at me and whimpered simply, “stop.”

*****

So here I am serving my first jail term. Six months in Featherstone prison for ABH. My defence got me off a charge of malicious intent on account of the fact that my first attack, ramming the machine heads in the skin-head’s mouth, was in self-defence against someone brandishing a weapon. It was for sustaining the attack when he was down that I’d gotten the charge of ABH. Translated into common parlance, the judge said I was a cunt and bought down his hammer.

They say the hardest part of prison is being away from your family. I didn’t have a family to speak of. I mean, I had a family of course. I just didn’t speak of them. There were no excuses. I didn’t have a hard or difficult childhood. In fact, my parents were quite wealthy. They lavished attention on me. Sent me to the best private schools and gave me everything I wanted. And in doing so, they have created a monster of insensitivity. I don’t care about anyone. I’ve never been able to empathise with other people in any kind of human capacity.  I’m trapped inside myself. An island from which there is no exit.

This morning, after going down the mess hall for bacon and eggs, I was having my 20 mins in the yard. I was standing by the wall smoking a cigarette. Even the air outside, around the prison, is a foul mixture of steel, disinfectant, sweat and human effluence. Danny saw me and walked over. “Hey,” I said, offering him a smoke. “I think I’ll have some of that speed as soon as you can get it.”

“No problem,” he nodded slowly, looking ruminatively across the yard, staring at the guards staring at the men. “I’ll start thinking of something you can trade for it.” He placed the cigarette between his lips.

Superb, I told him. I turned and walked back here to the wing, where I’m sitting now, whittling away the time, waiting for my £5-a-week job to materialise.