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8
    Ben
    My first night of freedom is bad.
    Night is always the hardest part of the day. Even in secure I was always most worried as I lay in bed, fretting over what the newest arrival might do to me the next morning in the showers, more scared than I ever was when it was actually happening. Held fast under the tepid water, waiting for the dull thump on the jaw as he proved himself by ragging on the fragile. Because they always found out, in the end, that I wasn’t a burglar or car thief. Once, at a secure unit in Birmingham, a kid came in from Lincoln and recognised me from some Panorama Special that had been on the previous month called ‘Kids Who Kill’. I’d been the main focus of the programme, so I was told. I never watched it myself but Mum ranted about it in another of her letters, the ones she’d write when she was drunk and angry and feeling sorry for her lot in life. Anyway, this new lad remembered the artist’s sketch, the one drawn in the courtroom that has hounded me ever since. I still had my Hull accent back then. He put two and two together and yelled “Hey, Humber Boy B!”, right across the dining hall so everyone saw when I looked up. They moved me overnight. ‘Ghosting’ they call it, whisking you away like you never existed, spiriting you in a van through the night, full of fear, to somewhere new. New but the same.
    It’s fear I feel now, waking to my first day in my new home. I wish I could hear the lock turn, have the safety of knowing I can’t leave. I could make this flat another prison, but what kind of life would that be? No. I have to go out. Besides, Cate told me that I have to collect my giro at ten and even though it’s not yet eight I need to find the benefit office. Start to get my bearings.
    At half past ten I’m staring at the money on the post office counter, £20 notes which I’ve never seen before and £2 pound coins, which I have – though I haven’t handled too many. I can hardly believe this money is all meant for me.
    “Thank you so much,” I say to the grouchy woman behind the glass, guiltily scooping up the notes and coins. Fifty-seven pounds and forty-five pence seems like a fortune to spend in one week. I don’t even have a wallet so it all goes into my back pocket and I instinctively look around for anyone who might nick it, but there’s only an old woman with a shopping trolley and a mother looking at birthday cards with her toddler. She glances up at me and I tense, but then she looks back at the cards and I breathe out. She doesn’t know who I am, what I did. No-one here does. I reach for a random card, which happens to have a picture of bright balloons on the front and a bottle of champagne with the word ‘Congratulations’ underneath. I push it under the grille to the grouch.
    “And this please, with a first class stamp.”
    Outside there is a brisk breeze and I gulp it in, tasting the warm then cool that must be what September is like, this air that can’t seem to settle on being summer or autumn. I’ll soon need a jacket, and that will eat into my fifty-seven pounds and forty-five pence. Despite this, I long for rain, for snow, for blistering sun and all the other types of weather I’ve missed, I want to know the seasons, to recognise winter and spring. I want rain on my skin and sunburn too because that’s what it means to be free and even though seasons changed throughout the years I was locked away, it all happened beyond the bars. My clothes never changed, I never needed a coat or sunscreen. My world was a constant cool, always the smell of bleach and cooking fat.
    I’m finding the noise of birds to be deafening, the sounds of traffic and people and the world is too loud. It’s as if my senses are just waking up.
    With my body weighed down by the fortune of cash in my back pocket I walk from the post office towards the town centre, forcing myself to look up. It was in prison that I began looking at the floor, a way of trying to