RuKsaK

Stink’s third home in life was as different again as the first two had been. Everything was old and cheap, but clean – aggressively clean, with the stench of high-street chemicals clinging hard to everything. Double wooden doors opened into the long room with eight metal beds down each side, equally divided either side of a peeling window. This room didn’t care what year it was, despite the time-counting that went on inside it. Only one bed had nobody sitting on it and it was the furthest on the left for Stink.
‘Right – that’s yours down there Donny. Off you go.’

Fifteen faces followed Stink as he went to the bed - hatred, trained by tradition, on every one of them. Even an idle head scratch was violent in this place. Hate is an emotion with lots of offspring who’ll take work anywhere it’s going - this place was always hiring.

Stink reaching the bed was synchronised with the slamming of the wooden doors.

The big one, with a nose buttered wide across his face by meanness, stepped in front of the others, making the head of a human triangle. He’d have stood on Stink’s feet if Stink hadn’t stepped back.
‘Do you want a dorm beating or a chicken run?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Answer The Hammer and just choose one you fucking weasel!’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t know' is gay shit, you fucking puff!’

He brushed a punch on the side of Stink’s head, above his ear. Stink was surprised it didn’t hurt more – so his words sidestepped his brain:
‘My mum hits harder.’

The Hammer only used half a second to look incredulous. He used the next four-hundred to direct fifteen boys’ feet into Stink. His head ticked from foot to foot like a fast balloon, his limbs couldn’t get to each fresh blast of pain fast enough, although they jumped to them as quickly as they could. The beating finished with a mallet-slap down on Stink’s left ear – he felt it vibrate against his head and knew it was bleeding from all over it.

‘You’ll get a chicken run as well before you leave you little gay prick!’

Stink became The Hammer's mark for his three months in the borstal. He only ate half the food he was given, got at least three ear clouts a week – by the end of the first week his ear felt like part of his head, not just sitting on the side, but welded to it with thickened skin.
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He took to counting while he was there. When the hours and days left and the hours and days done got boring, he’d count the legs on all the chairs in the rooms, the window panes, the floorboards, the stripes on his pillow case – anything that wasn’t about to move, he’d count. It was a habit he never quite got rid off.
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He hardly spoke all the time he was there. At the end of his three months the sentence about his mother had been the longest he'd volunteered.

‘You’re getting out in two days you cock-sucking rim-master, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll have to let your fucking gay mum know what a chicken run looks like then, won’t we?’

Any answer, even a nod, would have only increased the severity of the chicken run. So, Stink kept still and quiet again.
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I’d be seeing Stink again in just a few days. I was nervous, because he was in there because of me. A conversation I’d started in an orange tent, six months before, had led to this.
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You can find Stink and the suicides - part 6 here.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Stink and the suicides - part 5