Strange how your past comes back to haunt you. Fifteen years ago, before my temples greyed, I was imprisoned in Albany on the Isle of Wight, serving a four-year stretch for burgling a brigadier's house near Colchester. In those days, Albany was a dumping ground for recalcitrants. I landed up there after a botched escape attempt from a prison in Suffolk. I stayed on the island for two years without a single visit. It was about this time in my criminal career that, to stop the rot of insanity, I began to write a journal. I'd write down conversations I had had with other prisoners; tell their stories; pen portraits of governors and screws; spew out on to the page all the accumulated shit of the day. It was, and still is, a cathartic process.
Rereading the Albany sections of my journals recently, I was struck by the many references to one of my fellow cons-a disturbed individual who sat at the next sewing machine to mine in the Albany's tailors' shop, where we laboured each day making dungarees.
To begin with my new labour-mate was companionable enough. We'd pace each other on the required stitches and, as was the custom in long-term nicks in those relatively-free-from-heroin years, disappear into the washroom at regular intervals to partake of a pipe or two of cannabis. When one morning my friend told me he was bisexual and looking for someone to "get it together with," I began to think he was trying to make a subtle pass at me. I was 28, and he was even younger-good-looking (in an undernourished sort of way), with blonde hair, a fleshy nose, piercing blue eyes and a pouting lower lip.
We were both on the same wing in the prison. During association periods we spent more and more time together, visiting each other's cells, listening to Pink Floyd and Dire Straits, playing chess, smoking joints, reminiscing about our earlier lives. I did most of the talking. My friend was diffident and rather awkward. It was difficult to get him to open up about his childhood, which sounded rough.
He was a Kentish lad by origin, from a broken home near Maidstone. He had spent many of his formative years in "care," where he was abused (so he told me) by those in authority. Inevitably he truanted from school, ran away from children's homes, became increasingly involved with petty crime and soft drugs. He had decided that he "swung both ways" shortly after reaching puberty. Sometimes, as he sat next to me on my bed telling me his sad, sometimes lurid tales, I felt a great compassion for him. Other times, when his mood swings made him unpleasant company, I was repelled and unnerved-especially when he recounted (in gory detail) the acts of violence which had led to various sentences of imprisonment.
I think I finally rejected any thoughts of a sexual relationship when he told me he'd received his first prison sentence for battering a queer with a hammer. This time he was serving four and a half years for stabbing one of his own friends in the chest. (All the poor fellow had done was to bang a little too forcefully on his assailant's front door.)
Most of the other cons on our wing thought he was crazy. The screws gave him a wide berth, and another friend warned me that he was "a dangerous cunt best left well alone." I decided the others were right and began to distance myself. This wasn't easy: he sensed my standoffishness and stayed away from my cell, sulking.
Next thing we knew, he had fallen "in love" with a boy (who became one of Reggie Kray's "special friends") from another wing-the star of our prison football team. But alas, his obsessive feelings were unreciprocated. Nightly you would see him hanging dolefully around the wing gate, if only to catch a few seconds' glimpse of his beloved.
As his frustration grew, so his moods became more unpredictable. He began to withdraw into himself; he dropped large quantities of pills; he took boiling hot showers that nobody else could stay under for longer than a few seconds. One night, quite unexpectedly, he dodged into my cell, shutting the door fast behind him. His eyes were wild-his pupils pissholes in the snow. His mouth twitched at both corners. Before I could say anything, he whipped out a toothbrush with broken razor blades melted into its end. Wielding it an inch from my face, he raged and cursed.
"It's you that done it, innit?" At first I didn't know what he was talking about. "It's you that's fucked me up wiv' Kevin coz I'll not go with you." I remonstrated. "Don't say nothing or I'll cut your face to ribbons." He left. I sat shaking. Later, I learned that he had visited a further five inmates after his call on me. Each had been accused of the same thing. Men began arming themselves in anticipation of another visit.
Fortunately I was transferred from Albany soon afterwards, although right to the end I was haunted by the threatening presence of my erstwhile friend. The night before I was due to leave he came to my cell again just before bang up. He was sweetness and light as he announced, eyes a' flutter: "If you want to give me a blow job before you go, you've got exactly seven and a half minutes to make me come." I could see the beginnings of an erection showing through his prison-issue jeans. Then I recalled the wielded blade and remembered the others' advice.
For years I neither saw nor heard of him. Then, last month, his face was splashed across every newspaper in the UK. Not recognising him at first, it took me a while to distinguish the ageing features, balding, bloated and distorted by a life of drugs and imprisonment. But there was no mistaking the evil glint in those pale blue eyes staring out from the mugshot, just as they had stared at me that night in the cell in Albany. The prisoner's name was Michael Stone.
