We stepped on to ‘D’ wing, where the central area was taken over by a seating arrangement, the kitchen and several ping-pong tables. There were two tiers of cells, and on the upper-tier balcony I could see prison guards leaning on the rail, twirling their keys and watching us carefully.
‘This is the first in an experimental Media Tropes prison,’ said the governor, ‘designed in order to make inmates feel that they are not being brutalised by a barbaric and outdated system of incarceration, but involved in something more along the lines of a reality TV show.’
‘I’ve heard of this,’ I said, looking around curiously.
‘The layout on the wings is just one of the many TV Prison Tropes that are promoted here at HMP Leominster,’ said the governor. ‘You’ll find the prison is pretty much as you’d expect: the guards are generally mean and unpleasant – except one who is meek and easy to manipulate. The prisoners, instead of being those with a shaky grasp on the notion of consequences, mental health issues or having the misfortune to belong to a marginalised minority, are mostly pastiches of socio-economic groups mixed with regional stereotypes. And rather than fume about the vagaries of providence that got them here before descending in a downward spiral of depression and drug addiction, they prefer to philosophise about life in an amusing and intelligent manner.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Recidivism has dropped eighty-six per cent,’ he said, ‘so yes, it seems so. It’s certainly a lot easier on the prisoners unless you get caught up in Gritty Realism Month when it all gets dark and dangerous and we have riots and people end up getting shivved. That’s just been, so you’re fairly safe for another ten months.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘Don’t count your chickens. Understated violence that counterpoints a wider issue in society can break out at any time, and we have the biennial Prison Break Weekend in eight weeks, so if you want to be part of that, you have to prove yourself with the right crowd.’
‘Thanks for the tip.’
‘My pleasure. The rabbits are over in “R” wing and you’ll mix at outdoor break – mostly serial burrowers,60 which offers us a unique set of challenges. They’ll probably want to make friends, but the rabbits in here are different to the rabbits out there. They’ll pretend to be your friend over the whole fox-killing issue, but don’t get mixed up with them and never accept any carrots. Once you owe them a carrot, you’re in their pocket, and you don’t want to be in a rabbit’s pocket. Well, cheerio.’
I had been carrying my things all this time – blanket, tin cup, roll of loo paper – and the prison guard who had been tailing us showed me into my cell.
I was relieved to find that I wouldn’t have to share it with anyone.
I arranged all my stuff, had a pee then lay down on my bunk, expecting to feel anxious. That I didn’t was probably due to my attendance at a terrible public school which I now realised had furnished me with useful transferable skills.
I ventured out of my cell an hour later for dinner, and after fetching my tray sat on my own. I was not alone for long, however, as two men approached my table. They looked utterly respectable and were chatting in educated accents about how they missed their Agas and their Volvos and badminton and the opera. They also had ‘shallow and extremely transparent’ tattooed on their forearms, which related to a much-repeated quote that Beatrix Potter had made about rabbits. It didn’t occur to them that it might have been self-referential. In any event, the tattoos marked them out as TwoLegsGood.
‘You’re Peter Knox, aren’t you?’ said the first as they sat down either side of me.
‘Nope.’
‘Sure you are. The one who killed Mr Ffoxe, right?’
‘Look, I don’t want any trouble.’
‘Understandable,’ he replied, leaning closer, ‘but we don’t like people who side with rabbits. Humans have been improving themselves in a continuously unbroken chain of evolutionary advancements from the moment life first flickered into being, and are now the high point of evolutionary perfection. That achievement was hard won, and we will defend that struggle against all comers.’
I didn’t think it was the right time to point out the fatal logistical flaw in his argument, but instead repeated something that Pippa’s friend Sally had once said:
‘All life is one, and there is no objective truth that suggests we have a greater right to life than a lichen.’
They both stared at me and blinked a couple of times.
‘That’s bullshit, Mr Knox. This is our planet, and we’ll do with it what we wish. You’re just an … apostate of your species.’
‘I’m not sure that word works outside a religious context, you unbelievable twat.’
I’d have liked to boast that I’d said that last line, but I hadn’t. It was said by the larger of two other prisoners who’d just turned up. They were muscly, bald, bearded, and both looked as though they could comfortably strangle a tractor. Their tattoos – of which they had many – were not Elmer Fudd-related or anti-rabbit slogans, but normal sort of stuff: Celtic thingummies, skulls and the dates of their children’s births. Significantly, they were both staring at the fox sympathisers in a way I emphatically would not like them to be staring at me.
‘Another time, Knox,’ said one of the supremacists, and they left, grumbling about how they never served quinoa in the canteen, and how much they missed the GQ lifestyle awards.
‘Upper-middle-class entitled parasites,’ said the first new arrival as he sat down. ‘Tristran Reeves there is doing six years for rebadging Rayburns as Agas and flogging them off to unsuspected buyers, and his associate, Jeremy Fink-Grottle, had been forging National Trust membership cards.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘middle-class crime.’
In another inversion of generally accepted stereotypes, the heavily tattooed prisoners with what would be termed back in Much Hemlock ‘a rough manner of speech’ had no issue with my friendship with rabbits at all.
‘My sister was seeing a rabbit until they rescinded his work permit,’ continued the prisoner, whose name I learned was ‘Razors’ McKay, on account of his hobby of collecting seashells. ‘Nice lad and looked after our Stacey well. Don’t see the harm in it myself – love is love – and to be honest, anything that knob Smethwick is against is totally fine by me.’
‘Yeah,’ said his friend in a Liverpudlian accent, ‘we’ll see youse all right, man. Friend o’ the rabbit is a friend of ours.’
His name, I learned, was ‘Bonecrusher’ Malloy, which related to his previous employment making bonemeal for the pet food industry. They were both inside for employing undocumented rabbit labour, and then illegally paying them above the maximum wage. They’d both been warned six or seven times, and prosecuted twice each. They’d carried on regardless and eventually were given custodial sentences.
After I found all that out, we got on really well. For the most part they were curious about what had happened to me, agreed that, yes, twenty years was likely for murder and intimate association, then asked me what it had been like.
‘Killing a fox?’ I asked.
‘No,’ they said, ‘the other thing.’
The first three days were relatively uneventful, but on the fourth I lost both my thumbs to Reeves and Fink-Grottle, who came to my cell, gagged me with a towel and then removed both thumbs with a bolt-cutter. I only remembered them cutting off the first; I was unconscious by the time they took the second. I was found an hour later in a pool of blood and rushed to hospital.
The Trials of Lance deBlackberry