Python

Mrs Helen Sattar, the Community Member of the Parole Panel listens. Writes messages to herself, but until now remains silent. ‘How do you feel about release?’

‘Fucking love it.’

Feel. The word felt awkward as a papier-mâché bird. But Hamish’s spontaneous response brought smiles to the faces of Dr Prasad, who chairs, and Dr Fiona MacLeod, who consults.

Old Sweats they used to be called. With shut windows and patches of air rationed like the scrofulous smell that clung to prisoners and wardens alike.

The morning bell for unlock, Hamish hears it in his sleep. Not that he ever sleeps. Dozes. On and off.  Knows better than his own breathing the order of things. Not loud, not soft. Flattend out. That tired old clang that travels along the corridor and settles in your chest like an unfriendly moggie. It carries the smell of the place with it. Boiled cabbage from the servery, bleach from last night’s scouring mop, the sour note of sour things and men crying that nobody speaks about.

Hamish lolls on his bunk and rubs his tongue along his teeth. Morning taste. Rough metal fillings, sleep, the ghost of a cigarette past, even though he hasn’t had a fag in twenty years. He swallows and stands. Spits in the sink. Rinses. Spits.

The screw on the landing is Cromwell. Everyone calls him a cunt. Hamish doesn’t mind him too much. He’s doing his time too. Already counting the months until his retirement. The only reason he was back was because his sick days ran out.

He’s got a harsh Glaswegian accent and a bit of reputation but a way of standing now that says he’s well-past looking for trouble. He smells faintly of coffee and All Spice, something clean and astringent that cuts through the prison chaff.

‘You nervous, Hamish?’

‘Aye,’ Hamish saunters beside him. ‘But I shoudnae be. I know whit tae expect. That’s the killer blow.’

‘Och well. Yer no goin anywhere and it’s a day oot. You’ve nae chance anyway. It’s a Paki chairing it.’

‘Scratch a racist and you’ll find another racist.’

‘Scratch a Paki and you’ll get three other Pakis, all shouting for jihad. I’m no racist anyway. I don’t mind black cunts.’  

Door followed clanging door. The note that followed dependent on the thickness of the wall and the ring of metal against metal. Familiar ground. Panoptican stairs reached higher or went lower in a hive of noise and heat that settles to stabbings on the landings.

Hamish licks his lips. ‘Whit about Eastern Europeans and Asians?’  He clings to the conversation to keep from overthinking.

Cromwell doesn’t break step. ‘Pakis in disguise.’

Time didn’t exist. Men holding on. No two the same but all with previous. Waiting for the next moment to appear like men standing on the track in a train tunnel.

Off-kilter waiting room outside the parole board. Carpets. Furniture polish. A lemon spray trying to pretend the place hasn’t seen itself. The chair sighs when he sits. Squashed in. Softness in a way that makes him uncomfortable about being soft.

Cromwell sits beside him. Mercifully, he doesn’t speak, but stands when it’s time.  Hold opens the door to let him past. A brush of humanity.

‘I’ll be right here,’ he says. ‘Waiting.’

Hamish’s glib reply doesn’t come.  

 

 

 

‘Well, thank you for your input Mr Murdoch,’ Dr MacLeod’s expensive perfume emerged like lilies in a stone church. She included her colleagues in her summation with a sharp turn of her dyed blonde hair. She was past forty and aiming for the thin enough to be thirty look of catwalk or junkies.

When Hamish spoke of his welding certification, and work in the kitchens, her pen tapped a rapid rhythm on her notepad—a vacant sound, a clinical psychologist should have been aware of—and she was doing it again. ‘We’ve covered a lot of ground. And I’m sure we’ll all agree that much progress has been made. But if I can just take you back to the index offence?’

‘Aye,’ Hamish sat up a little straighter. ‘We already huv. Several times. A multitude of times. I’ve already told you. I don’t remember. I was only a wee kid.’  

She tapped on her pad and licked her lips. ‘Well, we’re not really much further on. Are we?’

Hamish glared at her and leaned forward, his left hip brushing against the desk.   ‘Well, we’re here. Urn’t we?’

Dr Prasad sets his folder down with a slap and exhaled. ‘Mr Murdoch bear with us. What my colleague is trying to say. What we’re all trying to say, is we’ve got a duty to the community. You’ve spent most of your adult life in prison, for offences committed in prisons. Offences that have included extreme violence. But your index offences also includes your past and…’

‘Can  I jist stop you there.’ Hamish was finger pointing. ‘My lawyer said that shouldnae be included cause I was so young.’

‘Well,’ Dr Prasad swelled up with importance. ‘I’m a lawyer too. Quite a high up one, in my previous incarnations. And what I would say here is we have a Social Work Department that produces reports and we have access to those reports. Part of our duty it to look at the whole picture—as it were. And we have a verbatim statement that you made in the Clydebank Office’. He looked at the date and sighed, over 50 years ago. Would you like me to read it out?

‘Nah, fuck off.’ Hamish held out his hand, waiting for him to pass photocopied copies of pages that held more ghosts than ink. ‘I can read, I’m no a dummy.’

He sorted through them first, scanning details, making them wait. The chair scraped louder than it should. Hamish felt it echo in his arthritic bones and fingers as he clutched the papers. His faltering voice growing into his childhood self.    

 

“As a precocious eight-year-old the only nudey body I’d seen had been my own. Dougsie, my mum’s latest boyfriend, nodded in the direction of the telly. My mum used to shout at him that he was ‘a fat, baldy, useless bastard’.

Seeing was believing. I already knew that.

I’d grown so used to their drunken fights or ‘antics’ as she used to call it, when she was explaining things in the morning, before I had my Cornflakes, with exactly three table spoon of sugar and milk from the doorstep that not only did he not exist. Neither did Mum. Dougsie would soon be gone too like all the others. I couldn’t tell Mum that. Because everything upset her.

Instead I said, ‘I’ll miss his car.’ An Austin 100 with engine problems that needed a power of welding. And would never pass an MOT. Not in a month of Sundays.  

Mum cackled and ruffled my hair, which I didn’t appreciate, which she knew— I didn’t like being touched or pawed generally—but she was always caught halfway between laughing or crying, it made no difference what I liked or didn’t like. It never had. She was always telling me, she wished she never had me, cause her life would be so much easier.      

But I was already watching. The woman’s threshing and grunts and groans drawing my eyes to her more-naked- than-life pink flesh. Several men, including the greengrocer, that nice Mr Adair, were sticking bulls with their spunkies or feeding on her big gozonko breasts and stroking themselves.

Dougsie snorted, which was his way of laughing at his own joke, through the gaps in his stained teeth and the missing bottom plate. ‘Best bits are yet tae cum.’

There he was on the telly too hairy to contemplate. He was also sitting in front of me holding the remote and reaching for a doobie that smouldered in the overflowing ashtray.

I remembered St Peter the Martyr. He could spot a man reeking of heresy and Protestantism, which was the same thing, from a mile away. He’d an axe buried in his head. But it didn’t stop him from doing good work. Neither did it stop the grunts and groans coming to a crescendo.  

If I could reach for the video pull out the Betamax and unspool the tape, I could stop time, wound it backwards and make it not happen.

I prayed for a second—that was not a second—for God to come and help me.

And He did. A big foot came out of heaven and squashed Dougsie like a bug.

I must have been lifted up to heaven. When I came back to myself, Dougsie had been sent to hell, twice-over with an axe through his head and the telly and the video smashed to smithereens.”

 

‘Don’t you see,’ Mrs Helen Sattar, says gently. ‘The big flying foot coming down corresponds to a scene from Monty Python’s Flying Circus?’

Hamish shut his eyes to compose himself. ‘Don’t you see Ms Sattar, all religions have a big foot that  comes down and squashes somebody sometimes? I don’t believe in all that shit now. But I did then. And I did see it happen. I’ve had a million specialists droning on about the same old crap. And it fair wears you out. It’s actually easier when it’s a vicar or priest, especially if they’re so up their ain arse they cannae find their tonsils. They believe, absolutely that they know best. And I’m the devil. I’m  getting the impression you three charlatans ur from the same evangelical wing?’