Mistress of the Game

chapter Fifteen

GABE MCGREGOR STEPPED OUT OF THE GATES OF WORMWOOD Scrubs Prison onto the street. It was six-thirty on a cold November morning. It was still dark. A light drizzle of icy rain was beginning to soak through his thin gray woolen jacket.

It was, without question, the happiest moment of his life.

"Got somewhere to go?"

The guard at the gate smiled. Wormwood Scrubs was a shitty place to work. The screws hated it almost as much as the inmates. But watching men like Gabe McGregor savor their first taste of freedom in eight long years, reformed young men with their lives still ahead of them, that was a joy that never got old.

Gabe smiled back.

"Oh yes. I've got somewhere to go all right."

Thanks to Marshall Gresham. I owe that man my life.

On his first night in prison, Gabriel McGregor tried to kill himself.

Michael Wilmott, his lawyer, had told him not to panic. That the sixteen-year term handed down by the crown-court judge would likely be reduced on appeal.

"If it goes down to twelve, chances are you'll be out in seven or eight."

Seven or eight? Years?

The longest Gabe had been without heroin was seven days. The worst seven days of his life. It was his first week on remand, and he had not yet learned how to buy drugs inside. Once you knew the system, heroin was easy enough to come by. The big dealers all had guys working inside on a commissioned-sales basis. Heroin and crack were both priced at a 30 percent markup. As long as you had money and a friend on the outside who could make regular payments to the gangs, you were okay. But those first seven days! Gabe would never forget the misery. Nights spent screaming, convulsed by cramps so violent he felt like he were being hanged, drawn and quartered. The sweats, the vomiting, the hallucinations.

A figure on a white horse was coming to get him. Jamie McGregor! In his hand was an ax. As he rode, he swung it to the left and right, slicing off the limbs of the screaming women who surrounded him. Gabe knew the women. There was Fiona. Angela. There was Caitlin, pleading for her life as the man on the horse laughed maniacally, severing her head with a single stroke. All the girls Gabe had used to feed his habit suffered the same fate. Then he saw his mother's face, contorted with terror. She was crying out to him: "Gabriel! Save me! It's Jamie McGregor! He's killing me, he's killing us all!"

Gabe woke up. His sheets were drenched in sweat. He wanted to scream, but his throat was so dry and sore he felt like he'd swallowed a pack of razor blades.

The next day one of his fellow prisoners had given him a hit. On the outside, however desperate he got, Gabe never shared needles. Here, he practically wrenched the syringe from the guy's hand.

The night before he went back to court for sentencing, he heard two of the remand prisoners talking.

"If they send me to the Scrubs, I'm finished. Mike says it's like a bloody desert in there."

"I heard the same thing. The new warden used to work for the drug czar. That place is cleaner that a nun's arsehole."

Gabe thought: That's it. If they send me somewhere where I can't get drugs, I'll kill myself.

Like all British prisons, Wormwood Scrubs was overcrowded. The twelve-by-eight-foot cells had been built by the Victorians to house a single inmate. Now the same cramped space was home to three or even four men, each sharing a single lidless toilet.

Gabe's two cell mates did not look up when he entered. Both were black, in their midtwenties and of the same heavyset build as Gabe himself.

At least they don't look gay, Gabe thought. Then he remembered that it didn't matter anyway.

By this time tomorrow he'd be dead.

Climbing silently onto his bunk, he lay back and stared at the ceiling. His original plan had been to hang himself with torn up sheets, but he realized now that that wasn't going to work.

These guys might not be what you'd call sociable, but they aren't gonna sit by and do nothing while I choke myself to death.

Gabe scanned the room. It was bare. No pictures, no hooks, no curtains, no lamps, no nothing. He started to panic.

What the hell can I use?

Then he saw it.

Perfect. It'll hurt, but at least I can do it quickly, while they're asleep.

Gabe was scared. He did not want to die. But anything was better than cold turkey.

Mike says it's like a bloody desert in there.

I'll do it tonight.

Nelson Bradley, the bigger of Gabe's two cell mates, awoke to the sound of groans.

"Keep it down, jock. Some of us is trying to kip."

A few seconds later, Gabe projectile-vomited onto the floor. He started to shake, then convulse.

Nelson Bradley sat up.

"Duane. Wake up, man. Something's wrong."

Duane Wright turned on his handheld reading lamp, pointing it first at Gabe, then at the pool of vomit. Except it wasn't vomit. It was blood. On the floor beside Gabe's bunk was an empty bottle of bleach. The screws must have gotten lazy and left it by the loo after sluicing out.

"Oh, shit. He's only gone and necked the bloody Dettol!" Duane Wright hammered on the cell door. "Get someone in here. Now!"

When Gabe woke up in the prison infirmary, the first thing he thought was: Christ alive, my stomach is on fire. The second thing he thought was: I'm still alive. I failed. Depression washed over him.

"You're a very lucky man," the doctor told him. "A few more minutes before we pumped your stomach and you wouldn't have made it."

Oh yeah, that's me. Lucky.

The psychologists asked him why he'd done it and Gabe told them the truth. There didn't seem any point in lying.

"You bloody prat." The chief psychiatrist wrote Gabe a prescription for methadone. "You think you're the first addict to walk through these doors? We can help you. There are programs..."

But Gabe didn't want programs, and he didn't want methadone. He wanted enough H to put him out of his misery.

When he was well enough, he was transferred to another wing of the prison. This time he had only one cell mate, an ex-junkie lifer named Billy McGuire. Billy was Irish, a former jockey whose life had careened spectacularly off the rails after he got mixed up with drugs. What began as a few "innocent" thrown races and betting scams ended up as internecine gang warfare on the streets of Belfast. An innocent father was killed and Billy was sent down for a minimum twenty-year sentence.

"The IRA aren't what they used to be," Billy told Gabe.

"I'm confused. What did they use to be? Weren't they always a bunch of murdering terrorists?"

"Ah, well, sure they were. But right or wrong, they had a cause. Now it's all about the money. Money and drugs." Billy shook his head in disgust. "That's what heroin does to you, lad. Makes you forget who you are."

Gabe couldn't argue with that. The only trouble was that he wanted to forget who he was: a loser with no qualifications, no skills, and now, with a serious criminal record, no future.

I thought my dad was pathetic, wasting his life in the docks.

He was twice the man I am.