The Glorious Freedom of Wormwood Scrubs

A short story about a man who is happy to be in prison

The Glorious Freedom of Wormwood Scrubs

 

I am writing this in the inmates classroom of Wormwood Scrubs. That’s a prison in west London, for those of you that don’t know. I am detained here “At Her Majesty’s Pleasure”, on a conviction for second degree murder. I bludgeoned someone to death with a chair. You may have read about the case in the papers. If I behave well and don’t make any trouble I may get out in twenty years. It probably sounds strange to hear me talk about the glorious freedom of a prison but it is only here that for the first time in my life I am free of him. He is that curse, that affliction, that has ruined my life so far, and he is the one that put me here.

 

He’s an evil little b*****d, that’s what he is. Was, I should say, he’s dead now. I’m pretty sure of that. Although sometimes I dream that he is still out there, waiting for me.

 

I couldn’t tell you when I first became aware of the demon that was ruining my life. I think he was always there. My mother tells me I was a difficult baby from the beginning. She had a long and painful labour, the doctors told her the little one “didn’t want to come out”, and they had to go in with the forceps and surgical knives. Then I was a troublesome baby, sickly and noisy, always crying at the slightest provocation and difficult to get off to sleep. I take this as a sign that he was with me even then, poking me to make me restless, pinching me to make me cry, and wrapping my baby blankets around my head so I woke up screaming and half suffocated.

 

The first clear memory I have of him is when he threw my toy car at my little cousin. It was a baby’s toy, a sturdy, heavy, plastic thing in primary colours, and he threw it hard and accurately. Hard and accurately enough to give my one year old cousin a very black eye and make him howl the place down. Of course my mother and Auntie Jennifer, who had been concentrating on the television, assumed the car had been thrown by me. After all, who else could have thrown it? I was given a spanking, which made me cry too, and was sent to bed without any dinner. My Aunt Jenny never really forgave me.

That is just the first of my many, many memories of the demon getting me into trouble with my parents. He would wait until whoever was looking after me had turned their back for a second, and then he would act.

He chucked handfuls of my food around, so my parents would turn around and see me, my spoon still in my hand and a fearful expression on my face, sitting in the middle of what appeared to have been an explosion of my dinner. I tried to explain to them that it wasn’t me and they’d ask me, “Well, who was it, Adam? Who else is in this room?”

He threw my toys around, and broke them. He touched all the things I was forbidden to touch, he knocked the hot iron off the ironing board and onto the floor, he turned on the gas taps in the kitchen and pulled the electrical plugs out of their sockets in the living room.

He got me into trouble in just about every possible way. He turned the TV on and turned the volume up when my parents were busy on the phone. He fiddled with the knobs on daddy’s stereo and pulled mummy’s things out of her chest of drawers. He left the taps running in the bathroom. He pulled out the cat’s whiskers and he kicked our dog down the stairs.

My parents were at their wit’s end with what they thought was their uncontrollable child. At the age of four I was taken to a child psychoanalyst, and I was diagnosed as having a behavioural disorder. I was also tested for autism, Asperger’s syndrome, hyperactivity, hearing and sight problems and motor irregularities. The results of these tests showed that physically I was a normal child. I was just a very naughty boy.

 When the time came I was started at a normal primary school. School gave the demon a whole new arena into which to expand his mischief. He threw sand into the faces of other children if I played in the sandpit. He spilt my milk at break-time, he grabbed my coloured crayons and scribbled the words “F**K” and “WANKER” across my drawing of a spaceship. I spent a lot of time at primary school standing in a corner facing the wall.

I grew up a solitary and withdrawn child. I could not make friends, the demon drove them away. He threw things at them, he spat on them or knocked them over. I would sit at my desk, alone, still, staring at the floor, not making a sound, willing and praying that the demon wouldn’t get me into anymore trouble that day. My teachers disliked me, considering me a troublemaker, a liar, and strange to boot. I grew up miserable, and alone.

 

Secondary school was no better. On my first day, the demon stole a new and expensive pen off the boy on the next desk to me, and slipped it into my bag. When the inevitable search came and the pen was found in my bag, I was sent to the headmaster’s office. I was labelled a thief, on my first day. I tried to explain that someone else had put the pen in my bag, and was then labelled a sneak, as well.

I was bullied, of course, endlessly. Few school bullies have the advantage of a supernatural assistant on their side. I was punched and kicked, teased mercilessly, and had my bag, coat, books and pens stolen or hidden. People threw things at me. My school shirts were torn and stained, my mother was in despair at constantly having to buy me new uniform.

 

When I was fourteen, and trying to cope with teenage angst and puberty on top of the misery induced in me by my tormentor, I decided to kill myself. I ran a bath, locked myself in the bathroom, and sat in the tub, fully clothed, with my specially sharpened penknife in my hand. But the demon would not grant me even that release. He grabbed the knife out of my hand and flew up to the top of the bathroom cabinet with it, where he sat, chattering with displeasure and hissing at me through his pointed teeth. Then he threw my knife out of the open window. I screamed and raged at him, I begged him to just let me end it. He hissed and spat. He never said a coherent word to me, indeed I am not even sure he could speak. Many were the times I had pleaded with him as a young child. He never showed any sign of understanding. I made my soggy way back to my bedroom, took off my wet clothes, flung myself naked onto the bed and wept bitterly for hours. My life was in the hands of a gremlin. It was his to do as he liked with.

 

I am now, and seem likely to remain, a virgin. As a murderer, I am exempt from the strictly man-on-man “tough love” that is sometimes forced on others here in prison. I expect by the time I get out of here I shall be past it, an old man, removed from society and incapable of inducing desire in even the most unappealing of females. I missed my chance. I was terrified of girls, at school. They looked so cool, confident and remote. I was a friendless loner in a ripped shirt. When I once got up the courage to take one out, the demon screwed it up for me. She was a quiet mousy girl called Sarah. I think, when I asked her out, she was so shocked that I had spoken to her at all that she just agreed without thinking. I took her to the Italian café around the corner from our sixth form college for coffee. So sophisticated, I thought at the time. We sat opposite each other at one of the little round tables and ordered cappuccinos. When they came, the demon spilled mine down my sleeve. I went to the toilet, mopped up my shirt and blazer as best as I could, went back and ordered another cup.

We sat in uncomfortable silence. I took a sip of my coffee. The coffee was strong, so strong I almost gagged, and horribly bitter. I reached for the little dish of individually wrapped sugar lumps. I remember that each wrapper had a different picture of a grinning cat on it. As I moved my hand towards the dish the demon kicked it, so the lumps of sugar flew all over the floor and under the table.

I apologised and bent awkwardly down under the table to retrieve the scattered lumps. My demon jumped down under the table with me. As I stretched to reach a sugar lump that had fallen by Sarah’s foot, the demon stuck his hand up Sarah’s skirt. Right up.

She gasped, pushed her chair back and jumped to her feet. I tried to straighten up quickly and smashed my head on the underside of the table. People in the café turned to see what the noise was. Sarah was red in the face, livid.

“You bloody pervert.” She hissed. “What do you take me for?” There were tears in her eyes.

“It wasn’t me. Sarah, look, you don’t understand, I’m sorry”. I tried to explain myself.

“You’re disgusting.” She grabbed her school bag and coat from the back of her chair and ran out of the open door. The next day at school, “pervert” was added to my already-extensive list of humiliating nick-names.

That is the closest I have ever got to intimacy with a woman.

 

I left school at eighteen, with a couple of pretty poor A’ levels, and went to find myself a job. My parents were by this point pretty sick of me. I was depressed, sullen and unhelpful around the house. I think they thought that living on my own and supporting myself might force me to interact with people more. I got a job as a filing clerk in a distributions company. I think the demon found my job as mind-numbing as I did, for he didn’t bother to cause too much trouble for me at work. He sometimes knocked the potted plants off the shelves in the office, he often spilled my tea and he made me drop my lunch-time sandwiches on several occasions but he didn’t cause nearly the chaos he might have. Which sometimes made me think that maybe, just maybe, he was slowing down. I watched him, and waited.

 

 

I had tried to kill him before, of course. I tried many times to hit him or squash him, but he was too quick for me. Once, when I was twelve, I tried to kill him by spraying flykiller into his face. He stood still as a rock, waiting for the cloud of insecticide to clear, and then he attacked me. He flew up, grabbed my hair, and slammed my face into the sink, and then into the floor. I needed 27 stitches and temporarily lost the vision in my left eye. I didn’t try to kill him again for a long time after that.

 

 

I went to a therapy group on Wednesdays, to help with my depression. Of course, I never mentioned the demon to anyone there. I had learnt not to talk about him very early on in life. Doctors may call it “delusional” and kids may call it “mental”, but whoever you are talking to, mentioning that you have a small demon flying around you and f*****g up your life doesn’t get you far. The group therapy did help me a bit, I suppose. People in my group were drug addicts, or had been sexually abused, or had multiple personality disorders. Sometimes the tortures my demon inflicted on me seemed trivial compared to what humans inflicted on each other and themselves. A collection of the mad, the abused and the tormented, we sat in a circle on Wednesday nights and took it in turns to talk about our personal darkness.

 

The night it happened it was David Taffler’s turn to spill his guts. And later his brains, as it turned out.

David was gay, skinny, and had been bullied at school. Sent to a top public boarding school by his parents, he had been persecuted for his ginger hair, his sexuality, and his ability to get top marks in everything without apparently trying. In particular, kids used to pull his hair. In one incident, he had a large chunk of his hair ripped out by two prefects in the year above him. They had been using his head in an improvised tug of war, with one on either side of him holding a fistful of his hair each and pulling.

As David recounted this experience to us he ran his fingers through his blonde hair. He had to bleach and cut his hair himself, he explained, as he couldn’t bear for anyone to touch his head after that. If anyone touched his hair he lost it, went mental, started fighting. A boyfriend of David’s had given his hair an affectionate tug once. This innocent act of lover’s play had landed the boyfriend in casualty, with bruises around his throat and a broken wrist.

 

Therapy ended at 9pm. We tidied our chairs against the wall, picked up our bags and made our way home to our squalid flats, or our lonely bedsits, or our broken homes.

That night, David and I were among the last to leave. He picked up his chair and carried it over to the others already lined up against the wall. I dragged mine along the carpet. I avoided lifting things off the ground if at all possible, the demon would only make me drop them. The chairs were quite heavy, and I didn’t want a broken foot. I stared at the back of David’s head, at his badly bleached, ill-cut hair, the frayed collar of his trendy denim jacket, and I saw my demon. He was standing on David’s shoulder, light as a feather, and stretching out a hand to pull his hair. The b*****d was looking at me, taunting me.  There was no-one else anywhere near us in the room. David was going to think I pulled his hair. David was going to try to strangle me.

 

No, I mouthed silently at the demon, while rage and fear exploded within me, please, no. Why did he always do this? I was going to get beaten up, again. I was going to have to leave the therapy group, with everyone thinking I was the most ghastly kind of sadist. This small, fragile reason I had to feel good about myself occasionally was about to be shattered. By him, again.

 

And then I noticed it. David’s jacket was of a kind very fashionable in those days. It was frayed and ripped, and had random pockets and bits of metal in impractical places. The demon, when he had landed on David’s shoulder, had put his foot into a mass of torn and frayed threads of denim, which tangled up around his ankle. He was caught, loosely, but caught nonetheless, and what was more he didn’t realise he was caught.

 

There wasn’t a moment of moral dilemma in me. There was no internal struggle. David’s welfare didn’t even enter my head. I just saw that now, finally, I had a chance. A chance to free myself from him. I tightened my grip on the chair. I brought the heavy chair quickly over my shoulder and smashed it into my demon, and, incidentally, into the back of David’s head.

He was almost too quick for me. He flew up, but his tangled foot held him back for just a millisecond. One of the legs of the chair caught his right foot, crushing it. I had never managed to touch him before. I brought the chair up again and smashed it down, onto David who was on the floor and onto my demon who was clutching onto the back of David’s neck. This time I caught the gremlin square in the midriff, and he burst.

 

I don’t remember much of the aftermath. In court, witnesses said I sat down and laughed. David lay dead on the floor, his neck broken, his skull shattered, and I sat on the rough carpet that was stained with his blood and I laughed until I wept. The police came and took me away. I went quietly, answered all their questions, sat in my cell like a good boy. Those first few hours, I was scared I would wake up. Wake up to find this was all just a dream and he was still with me. Then I started wondering if I had really killed him. What if he was just hiding, teasing me? But as the days went by and no demon appeared I realised it really was all over. He was gone, and though he had taken an innocent life and my liberty with him, I was happier then I ever remembered being.

 

Life in here is regulated and dull. My fellow convicts resent the monotony, the lack of privacy, the lack of control they have over their lives in here. But for me this represents a blissful release, and a freedom previously unimaginable to me. Given the choice, the opportunity to rewind time, I’d do it again, no question. The demon spent his life getting me punished for things I hadn’t done. It is a relief in here to be able to say truthfully:

“I did it”

and know that the sentence I am serving is my own.

 

 

 

Reviews

[Senseless whatever]

Excellent write. The perspective is done very well and the character seems at ease. The way this is written, one sided conversation, works perfectly.