MARTIN
The first evening wasnt too bad, I suppose. I was reized once or twice, and ended up wearing JJs baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, which depressed me. I am not a baseball-cap sort of a chap, and I abhor people who wear any sort of headgear during dinner. We ate so-so seafood in a tourist trap on the seafront, and the only reason I didnt plain about just about everything was because of the look on Maureens face: she was transported by her microwaved plaid her warm white wine, and it seemed churlish to spoil it.
Maureen had never been anywhere, and Id had a holiday just a few months before. Penny and I went away for a few days after Id e out of prison, to Majorca. We stayed in a private villa outside Deya, and I thought it was going to be the best few days of my life, because the worst three months were over. But of course it wasnt like that at all; to describe prison as the worst three months of ones life is like describing a horrible car crash as the worst ten seds. It sounds logical, a; it sounds truthful. But its not, because the worst time is afterwards, when you wake up in hospital and learn that your wife is dead, or youve had ys amputated, and that therefore the worst has just begun. I appreciate that this is a gloomy way of talking about a mini-break on a perfectly pleasaerranean island, but it was on Majorca that I realized that the worst was nowhere near over, and might never be over. Prison was humiliating and terrifying, mind-numbing, savagely destructive of the soul in a way that the expression soul-destroying o longer vey. Do you know what quizzies are? her did I, until my first night. Quizzies are when drugged-up psychos hurl questions at each other across the blocks, all of them tred around what the partits would like to see doo unpopular and /or celebrated newers. I was the subject of a quizzie on my first night; I wont bother to list even the more imaginative suggestions, but suffice to say that I didnt sleep very well that night, and that for the first time in my life I had intensely violent fantasies of revenge. I focused everything on the day of my release, and though that day brought with it an overwhelming relief, it didnt last very long.
Criminals serve their time, but with all due respey friends in B Wing, I was not a criminal, not really; I was a televisioer who had made a mistake, and paradoxically, this meant that I would never serve my time. It was a class issue, and Im sorry, but theres no point iending it wasnt. You see, the other inmates would eventually return to their lives of thieving and drug-dealing and possibly even roofing or whatever the hell it was they did before their careers were interrupted; prison would prove to be no impedimeher socially or professionally. Ihey may even find their prospects and social standing enhanced.
But you dourn to the middle class when youve been banged up.
Its over, and youre out. You dont go ahe Head of Daytime TV and tell her youre ready to reclaim your seat behind the Rise and Shine desk.
You dont kno your friends doors ahem that youre once again available for dinner parties. You even bother telling your ex-wife you want to see your kids again. I doubt whether Mrs Big Joe would have attempted to deny him access to his children, and I doubt whether many of his mates in the pub would have stood in the er muttering their disapproval. Ill bet they bought him a drink and got him laid, in fact. I have thought long an