Chapter 25

I began to toughen up. I would never be hard-bitten like Steve, but I could soon hold my own in an argument, and I could give as good as I got. I started going to the prison gym and working out, so I hardened physically too. I never had a full on fight, but I found with time that I could exert a certain authority of my own. The fact that I was sharing a cell with Steve and surviving gave me quite a few points. Sometimes, to keep up her image, during social hours Steve would have a goad and pick on me mercilessly, hurling insults about my background, my money; my supposed revolutionary ideals. Sometimes it felt very real, but I knew that when we were alone together, she would clearly prove that she loved me again.

I had been in Galloway for nearly a year when I had my severest test. It came as such things do, at the most obvious and least appropriate moment, and was mostly own stupid fault. I was back on drugs. Not addicted, not shooting smack or anything as bad as that, not more than what is now termed recreational use, and it was only occasional. The trouble was, Steve would go through cycles of depression, not surprisingly, today she would be called bi-polar, and when she was down, what she needed was to get right out of it, and spent a night in the rush of speed or the wildness of acid, this wold generally send her back on the upswing again. Apart from that, if sleep was unobtainable, or just because they made us feel soft and cuddly, and Steve increasingly liked me that way, there were downers.

All of these were available if you knew the right people, and could trade the goods, which she certainly could. Sometimes, with the right suppliers - and I was given my own veto - I was used as currency, and had interesting hours in other cells than our own when used as payment in kind. It all helped the deception, and as I made two very good friends that way due to Steve's hunger for chemical thrills, I wasn't complaining. Anyway, I couldn't resist Steve urging me to get high with her for long, and the first few times were truly awesome.

We must have been mad to mix powerful black microdots of acid with methedrine. Madder still to do the cocktail in a small locked cell, but with Steve, it somehow made perfect sense. In the timeless depth of a tripped out night, just a little light throwing surreal shadows into the cell, we cuddled and hallucinated in a precious moment of clarity between acts of depravity, when I heard a commotion outside, voices, clangs, shouted warnings from other cells. Steve sat up sharply, eyes wild. Normally she had amazing hearing and could identify a screw by his or her footsteps alone. Our absorption in each other had fatally muffled her senses.

"The screws are comin'! Shit ... get up ... there's a whole fuckin' regiment of 'em ... they're headin' this way!" she cried.

My luck, if you could call it that, had just run out. Barely able to see from the overpowering hallucinations of the LSD and soaring buzz of the speed, I just managed to pull on some knickers and a tee shirt before the door was kicked wide open. I went into shock. My eyes were black pools of drugged oblivion.

I heard fighting, I recognised a voice ... Steve ... Begging me for forgiveness... 'why?' I thought, 'she hasn't done anything wrong.' Her voice was silenced under a welter of baton blows. I looked up, and laughed. It was Porky the Pig, dressed as a prison officer ... a female prison officer, the fearsome Sgt. Preston.

"7978645 Prisoner Gaskell ... Attention! Get on your feet you useless piece of shit!"