Street Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page B

and then, Aargh! Light speared into your eyes.
    Light and sound combined were a pretty good way of wrecking the sleep of every inmate in the block. The screws’ way of saying: OK, you’ve had your beauty sleep, time to get on with the day.
    Sean grunted and forced his eyes open. Every morning he felt like it took a bit more energy. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept properly. His first night – well, thank fuck there had been no repeat of that . His second night, he had expected to be so tired he would just switch off.
    No such luck. It wasn’t that the bed was uncomfortable.He had slept on worse – or sometimes just passed out, which was more or less the same thing.
    It was just that he was in prison. End of.
    But if he just lay there, he had the horrible feeling that he would be absorbed into the walls. He would become part of the place. An old lag.
    Not going to happen.
    He threw back the duvet and slunk over to the sink to wash his face in icy cold water. It was that, or wait five minutes for something lukewarm to trickle its way from the boilers to his cell and out through the hot tap. Sunken grey eyes stared at him from the stainless steel mirror screwed to the wall above the sink, beneath a fringe of blond bed-hair, all crushed on one side and matted to his forehead. It wouldn’t get sorted out until it was his turn to have a shower. Face like uncooked pizza dough. Fucking hell, he looked ancient.
    Sean stepped back and studied the A4 sheet of paper Blu-tacked to the wall next to the TV. He had listed the days of his sentence, 1 to 182, and put a smiley face at 23, 46, 69 . . . every 23 days, all the way to the end. Each one was roughly an eighth of the total. Days 46 and 138 – the quarter and three-quarter marks – had an extra smiley, and the halfway mark at day 92 had a big PARTY-Y-Y!
    His mouth forced itself into a smile and he crossedoff day 33. Over one eighth of the way through, and in less than a fortnight he’d be at the first quarter.
    ‘Yep,’ he muttered. ‘Sean’s coming home.’
    ‘Hey, Gaz! Heart-attack special!’
    Sean put his tray down on the table and dropped into the chair across from his mate. Tables and chairs were all screwed to the floor, to deter anyone from thinking they’d be just the thing to use to cave in someone’s head. The canteen air was rich with every smell the prison could throw at the inmates. Stale breath and sweat was mixed up with unwashed clothes, food, milk and coffee. Through this came the cold tang of air pushing in through open windows, bringing with it hints of the world beyond. Car fumes, damp earth. If the wind was blowing just right, Sean had sometimes caught wafts that reminded him of the baker’s back on the Mills. Most days he’d have killed for a baked-bean-and-cheese slice, or just a decent mug of coffee.
    But Sundays were a break from the breakfast pack that everyone ate in their cells. It was a decent fry-up in the canteen, even though it wasn’t a real fry-up because nothing got fried. It was cooked in the oven – no one trusted inmates around hot oil. But at least it was a meal that filled you up. And it was a day off lessons. Weekdays, they were obligatory, starting at 8.30. The only goodthing was you got 40p for every class attended to spend on chocolate or phone credits; Sean had never been one for school – as the three he had been to since age eleven could all confirm.
    ‘Problem, bro?’ Sean asked after a moment, when it became clear that Gaz was saying nothing.
    The other lad looked up from his untouched tray and stared at Sean with dark, empty eyes. ‘This place,’ he said. ‘It’s doing my head in.’
    ‘Uh, yeah?’ Sean held his hands out as if presenting Gaz with the basic facts. ‘It’s supposed to. You just got to get through it. Don’t let it get to you.’
    Gaz shook his head. ‘When you get out of here, Sean, what’re you going to do? You’re going to go back to the Guyz, right?’
    ‘Hell,