Dead Like You

back into the community after serving your time. But the reality was that the community didn’t want you, not really. Rehabilitation was a myth. Although he played the game, went along with the concept.
    Retraining!
    Ha! He wasn’t interested in retraining, but he had shown willing while he had been at Ford Open Prison these past six months in preparation for his release, because that had enabled him to spend days out of prison on their work placement scheme. Working Links , they were called. He had chosen the hotel handyman course, which enabled him to spend time in a couple of different Brighton hotels. Working behind the scenes. Understanding the layouts. Getting access to the room keys and to the electronic room-key software. Very useful indeed.
    Yeah.
    His regular prison visitor at Lewes, a pleasant, matronly lady, had asked him if he had a dream. If he could ever see a life for himself beyond the prison walls. And what was it?
    Yeah, sure, he’d told her, he had a dream. To be married again. To have kids. To live in a nice house – like one of those fancy homes he burgled for a living – and drive a nice car. Have a steady job. Yep. Go fishing at the weekends. That was his dream. But, he told her, that was never going to happen.
    ‘Why not?’ she had asked him.
    ‘I’ll tell you why not,’ Darren had replied. ‘Cos I’ve got one hundred and seventy-two previous , right? Who’s gonna let me stay in a job when they find that out? And they always do find out.’ He’d paused before adding, ‘Anyhow, it’s all right here. Got me mates. The grub’s good. The electricity’s paid for. Got me television.’
    Yeah, it was all right. Except…
    No women. That’s what he missed. Women and cocaine were what he liked. Could get the drugs in prison, but not the women. Not very often, anyway.
    The Guv had let him stay in over Christmas, but he’d been released two days after Boxing Day. To what?
    Shit.
    Tomorrow hopefully he’d move. If you played by the rules at St Patrick’s for twenty-eight days, you could get yourself into one of their MiPods. They had these strange plastic pods in there, like space capsules, taken from some Japanese hotel idea. You could stay in a MiPod for another ten weeks. They were cramped, but they gave you privacy; you could keep your things safe.
    And he had things he needed to keep safe.
    His mate, Terry Biglow – if he could call the shifty little weasel a mate – was safeguarding the only possessions he owned in the world. They were inside a suitcase, with three padlocked chains holding its contents a secret – the chains and padlocks were a mark of how much he could trust Biglow not to open it up.
    Maybe this time he could stay out of jail. Get enough money together, from burgling and drug dealing, to buy himself a little flat. And then what? A woman? A family? One moment that seemed attractive, the next it was all too much. Too much hassle. Truth was, he had grown used to his way of life. His own company. His own secret kicks.
    His dad had been a roofer and as a kid he’d helped him out. He’d seen some of the posh houses in Brighton and Hove his dad worked on – and the tasty women with their beautiful clothes and their flash cars who lived in them. His dad fancied that kind of lifestyle. Fancied a posh house and a classy-looking woman.
    One day his dad fell through a roof, broke his back and never worked again. Instead he just drank his compensation money all day and night. Darren didn’t fancy roofing, that wasn’t ever going to make you rich, he figured. Studying could. He liked school, was good at maths and science and mechanical things, loved all that. But he had problems at home. His mother was drinking too. Some time around his thirteenth birthday she clambered into his bed, drunk and naked, told him his father couldn’t satisfy her any more, now it was his job as the man in the family.
    Darren went to school every day, ashamed, increasingly disconnected from his friends. His head was all messed up and he couldn’t concentrate any more. He didn’t feel a part of anything, and took to spending more and more time alone, fishing, or in really bad weather hanging about in his uncle’s locksmith’s shop, watching him cut keys, or running errands, and occasionally standing behind the counter while his uncle nipped along to the bookie. Anything to escape from home. From his mother.
    He liked his uncle’s machinery, liked the smell, liked the mystery of