All fired up

If you're writing about prisoners, remember this: hell hath no fury like an inmate scorned

I think it's fair to say that Richard is not an overly sensitive man, but he does have feelings and I seem to have hurt them.

"Why is it that you never write about me?" This came out of the blue after he read a piece in which I'd mentioned a couple of the other chaps.

"I do write about you."

"Yeah, one lousy line, that's all I get. These have been in the class five bloody minutes. I've been here 10 months and I get one lousy line."

"All right, then, I'll write the next one just about you."

"Yeah, all right then," he says, looking sheepish as the daftness of it strikes him, and off we go with a bit of John Locke.

Richard is really into Locke; he likes him for the notion that if you can't remember doing something, you can't be held responsible for it. He points out the possibilities this holds for a defending barrister.

Aaron is stunned. He picks up his book. "I'm keeping this book" - he shakes it a couple of times - "for my brief."

I'm quite interested to see just how far he takes this. How will the officers react? How will it go down if he has an adjudication? But Richard interferes and points out the absurdities and the consequences, and I think once more about this business of him being sensitive. Something must have happened.

He reacts again when we get on to Locke's uncertainties about the nature of objects and I drift off into Bertrand Russell's "five-minute hypothesis": "There's no way you can deny that everything, if that includes all your memories, came into being five minutes ago."

It touches him on the raw, a raw I'd never noticed before. "What was he doing? Sitting having a shit, thinking, this'll fuck the lot of them up? It's into everything, isn't it, this philosophy; it just can't leave anything alone, can it? The world, the world, it's just the world. It's not complicated."

I think I'll let it go, for the time being. But then I start to tell them about the Glorious Revolution. Richard stands up, strips off his T-shirt, turns, and there, tattooed in big letters across his back, is "No Surrender 1690". Nobody else has the faintest idea what it means and so he gives them a quick history lesson, which I must say is pretty good. Then he stops, as if something has struck him suddenly out of the blue.

"Alan, you don't reckon I'm going to hell, do you?"

"Why should you?" I know he's in prison, but he's not a bad bloke.

"I went up to the chapel the other night. I got talking to these guys and they said, as I wasn't a believer, I'd be going to hell."

"Richard," says Smalls. "I'm a Christian and I'm telling you you're not going to hell. There's no way, man."

"But everybody's telling me I'm going to hell. I was talking to this Muslim geezer and he said it as well. If I didn't say the prayers and do all that, then I was going to burn in the fires of hell."

There's not much I can do about hell, Richard, but I hope you like the article; it's all about you.

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