Cry Myself to Sleep by Joe Peters

Author:Joe Peters [Peters, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0007275048
Amazon: B008W2XRIA
Publisher: Harper Element
Published: 2009-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

My Kind Defender

My court hearing wasn’t until the middle of April, by which time I had been in Lewes prison for two months and staring at four walls was really beginning to get to me, pressing in on my mind like a vice. To relieve the frustration and anger, I started cutting myself, just as I had seen Lisa doing back at the squat. Now I could understand exactly why she, and so many other desperate young people, wanted to harm themselves: how it relieved the tension and vented some of the anger and hatred I felt towards myself. Matt said the authorities were talking about sending me to the prison hospital, but Frank spoke up for me and talked them out of it.

‘Leave him with me,’ he told Matt. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’

They agreed to his suggestion, although they put me on suicide watch, which meant officers would look through the spyhole into the cell every hour to check that I was OK. I got fed up with being watched and stuck a piece of toilet paper over the inside of the hole.

‘You’ll get into trouble for that,’ Frank said, sighing, when he saw what I was doing. ‘Take it down.’

‘Fuck ’em,’ I said. ‘They’re only screws.’

He just shook his head like a tolerant but despairing parent.

‘You’ll just get more days on the end of your sentence if you wind them up. It won’t go in your favour.’

I knew he was right, but I was so bored and hyped up I was unable to control my impulses much of the time. Unable to sleep, I kept pressing the buzzer in the night and waking the screws up, just for the hell of it. It was partly boredom, partly bravado and partly because I just didn’t know any better. Matt had been made my prison liaison officer and I had managed to build a relationship with him, as I had with Frank. They both gave me serious talkings to and I took in some of what they were saying. I guess they were both having to make up for more than ten years of me lacking a father figure. If my dad had still been alive I would probably never have ended up in that state because he would have steered me in the right directions. I knew that and I was grateful to both of the men for caring enough to try to show me the error of my ways, even though I didn’t intend to show either of them that I was taking any notice.

Matt spent a lot of time with me, coaxing me to tell him more about my past, taking me into his office, which someone had tried to make look less threatening by putting curtains up at the window to hide the bars. To begin with I didn’t want to tell him any more than he already knew. It was embarrassing to tell other men about the things that had been done

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