‘Is this all I was to you? Just a way to make some money?’
‘No, of course not,’ James replies. ‘At first, you were just a way for me to blow off some steam after I got out of prison. I wasn’t planning on seeing you again after we slept together the first time. But then you told me about the safe, and that’s when I realised that you weren’t just some stupid teenager. You could actually be valuable to me.’
There are a lot of things James just said that concern me, but one word jumped out the most. ‘You’ve been in prison?’
James finally stops looking at his phone and steps closer to the bed until he is standing right beside me, glaring down at me as I wriggle on the mattress and try to get free of my restraints.
‘That’s right. I was only in for assault, but I was around all sorts of people on the inside who had committed worse crimes than me, including murder,’ James says. ‘And let me tell you something. Once I got to know them, I saw that there wasn’t much difference between me and them. There wasn’t much difference at all.’
19
JAMES
ONE YEAR EARLIER
‘Didn’t your mother tell you it was dangerous to talk to strangers?’
As greetings go, it was an unfriendly one, but then I hadn’t really expected anything less in a place full of criminals, con men and cowards. The words from my cellmate when I met him for the first time didn’t put me off getting to know him, but I still remember them to this day, over two years on. Fortunately, we’re much closer now, which makes sharing a twelve-by-eight-foot room a little less awkward than it was when I first walked in here. I’ve since learnt my cellmate’s real name, but ever since his ominous greeting, I nicknamed him “Stranger”, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He wouldn’t be sitting across this table from me now playing poker if he did.
Reminding myself of something Stranger taught me, which is to stay present in the moment, I stop reminiscing on how we met and instead focus on the task at hand, shuffling the cards so we can play again.
I love this deck of cards. It’s the only thing I have in here that reminds me of my hometown. The back of each card features a photo taken somewhere around Brighton. The Pier. The beach. The high street. The train station. None of the photos are particularly exciting, and they certainly aren’t as explicit as the photos on the back of my fellow prisoner’s packs of cards, but they are a reminder of where I come from. I don’t miss Brighton particularly, but I do miss being free, and these cards are a reminder that there is a world outside these four walls.
‘Are you going to deal or what?’
I look up at Stranger staring at me impatiently for the next game to begin, and because this isn’t the kind of place where you want to irritate someone, I shrug and deal the cards quickly. Two each. Five face down in the middle. We don’t have anything to play for but pride and the tiny amounts of money we earn doing menial tasks every day inside here. So far, I’ve already lost the £1.70 I made working in the laundry room last week.
While I’ve always been used to dealing with pathetic amounts of money in the outside world, the man I’m playing with has not. Stranger has been my cellmate for the past two years, but before that he tells me he was quite the high roller in London. He was a grifter, targeting vulnerable marks and tricking them out of large sums of money, which is what landed him in here alongside me, but not before he had a great time flashing the cash in the capital. But just like me, he got caught, so now it’s all gone, and he’s just as broke as I am.
As I turn over the first three cards in the middle and we begin to play our hands, I study the man sitting opposite me. But it’s not from a poker perspective. It’s from a personal one. I’m only twenty-one, and my cellmate is nine years older than me, and that extra experience he possesses has taught me a lot since we have been in here together. I ended up behind bars because of a crime I committed with my fists, but my cellmate is here because of a crime he committed with his brain. That is something I am very interested in because I want things to be different when I get released back into the outside world.
I don’t want to go around beating people up for insignificant sums of money.
I want to be smarter, and I want to get some serious cash.
We’ve already agreed that we will keep in touch once we are both out of prison. We are both due to be released within the next twelve months, and we have decided to work together when that time comes. We might make an unlikely pair with our age gap and varied experiences, but we are different enough to complement each other, and we share the two same burning desires.
We want to get rich, and we don’t want to end up back inside here again.
As I turn over the fourth card in the middle and see my hopes of winning this hand shrink, I wonder what kind of schemes we will be able to run together when we are free men. I plan to spend a little time in Brighton when I first get released, seeing old friends and hopefully hooking up with a few old girlfriends before I join Stranger in London, where we will run cons together. At first, my prospective partner told me that I lacked the patience to be a grifter and that the key to successfully taking the
