Death's Jest-Book Read Online Free Page B

be accepted as an equal not envied
as a favourite. I knew as long as I played my cards, and my pieces,
right, I'd got a fully paid-up ticket to ride my stretch as
comfortably as I could hope.
    But make yourself as comfortable
as you like in a noisy stinking overcrowded iron-barred
nineteenth-century prison and it's still a fucking jail.
    Time to turn my energies to my
next project, which was to get myself an exeat.
    You can see why I didn't have any
time for the luxury of plotting revenge! I had a delicate balancing
act to perform, staying .Polchard's friend and at the same time
getting myself a sufficient reputation as a reformed character to get
a transfer to a nice open prison. Despite all evidence to the
contrary, the Powers That Be still have a touching belief in a
correlation between education and virtue, so I did an Open University
degree, opting for a strong sociological element on the grounds that
this would give me the best opportunity to impress the PTB with my
revitalized sense of civic responsibility. Also it's the easiest
stuff imaginable. Anyone with half a mind can suss out in ten minutes
flat which buttons to press to get your tutors cooing over your
essays. Whisk up a froth of soft left sentiments with a stiffening of
social deprivation statistics and you're home and dry, or home and
wet as the old unreconstructed Thatcherites would see it. With that
out of the way, I started on an MA course on the same lines. My
dissertation was on the theme of Crime and Punishment, which gave me
the chance to really strut my born-again-citizen stuff. But it was so
deadly dull!
    It would have been all right if I
could have told them the truth about my fellow cons, which was that
to most of them crime was a job like any other, except there was no
unemployment problem. Treating prison as a retraining opportunity is
pointless when you're dealing with people who think of themselves as
out of circulation rather than out of work. Better to spend all that
public money sending them on holidays abroad in the hope they'd get
food poisoning or Legionnaire's. But I knew that advancing such a
theory wasn't going to get me letters after my name, so I dripped out
the usual gunge about socialization and rehabilitation and in the
fullness of time became Francis Roote, MA.
    But I was still in the Syke,
though by now I'd hoped to have smoothed my way out to Butlin's,
which is what my ingenious fellow felons called Butler's Low,
Yorkshire's newest and most luxuriously appointed open prison on the
fringe of the Peak District.
    I couldn't understand why I
didn't seem to be making any progress in that direction. OK, I played
chess with Polchard, but I wasn't one of his mob in the heavy sense.
I put this to one of the screws I'd sweet-talked into
semi-confidential mode.
    'You lot can't keep giving me
black marks for playing chess,' I protested.
    He hesitated then said, 'Maybe
it's not us who're giving you the black marks.'
    And that was it. But it was
enough.
    It was Polchard who was making
sure I didn't get a transfer.
    He didn't want to lose the only
guy on the wing, probably in the whole of the Syke, who could give
him a run for his money on the chessboard and all he had to do to
keep me was let the screws know that losing me would make him, and
therefore everyone else, very unhappy.
    I could see no way of changing
this, so I had to find a way of countering it.
    I needed some big hitters in my
corner. But where to look?
    The Governor was too busy
watching his back against political do-gooders to have any time for
individual cases, while the Chaplain was an old-fashioned whisky
priest whose alcoholic amiability was so inclusive he even spoke up
for Dendo Bright, who, thank God, had been transferred to some
distant high-security unit.
    As for my obvious choice, the
Prison Psychiatrist, this was a jolly little man with the
unreassuring nickname of Bonkers, whom it was generally agreed you'd
have to be mad to consult. But then came a Home Office