Vestiges

(CW: swearing, violence, suicidal thoughts)

I didn’t recognise the stranger, but my body did. My gut squirmed and the vein in my temple began throbbing. Then my fists and jaw clenched and the muscles in my arms started spasming like in the days when I used to hit the gym obsessively – to ‘clear my head’, I had told the therapist, leaving out the faces I envisioned on the punching bag.

But who was the stranger? He had passed me in the park. Late twenties. Longish, strawberry blond hair. Aquiline nose and a beard straddling the boundary between loathsome Hackney hipster and wannabe Greek philosopher.

A split-second, but apparently that glimpse had been enough for my body to remember, even if I still couldn’t place his face. The encounter bothered me all day. And the next. And for two days after that.

But after four caffeine-fuelled evenings and hours of googling, I worked out how I knew him.

He was in a viral video.

Wind back eight years. Me and my ex are on the sofa. She’s watching some crappy soap opera and I’m trawling through Facebook on my laptop. Your typical modern couple.

Then I come across a video.

I click through to YouTube, where it’s already got over 12 million views. Just a minute long. Some clip from a talk on capitalism given by an American economist, captioned ‘HOW CAPITALISM HELPS THE POOR’. Half the time, the camera’s on him as he explains how by buying an iPhone, he helps kids in Africa as they battle through mines to gather the metals that’ll go into his mobile; the rest is a closeup of the strawberry blond hipster (although he was more of a hippy back then, wearing some technicolour dreamcoat from Asia, where he’d probably just found himself). Why the cameraman has a thing for his acned face, I don’t know, but you wouldn’t believe the smugness of this SJW. You can tell what he’s thinking: This economist is an utter moron. I know better.

Can you blame people for posting threats in the comments? There’s everything from castration to death. It’s delicious.

Suddenly I find my own fingers typing. Out it comes, letter by letter:

I wanna smack that hippy’s nose so hard it flattens against his fucking face

The comments are flooding in, but when I refresh, I found I’ve made top comment. Fourteen thumbs-up in thirty seconds! I smile as my chest swells. Try hard enough, and you can boast about anything.

But my glory’s short-lived. My wife is staring at the screen, mouth open. Then she turns slowly to me, eyes bulging, and gives me I look I’ve never forgotten:

Who are you?

I’ll never know if that comment was the cause or the final straw, but she asked for a divorce two days later. Apparently she didn’t think I would be a good role model for El, our three-year-old daughter. Judge saw it that way, too. Throw in a redundancy and you’ve got a classic – albeit early – midlife crisis: pizza boxes littering the lounge floor every evening; crumpled beer cans infusing the stale air with the smell of apathy and pathetic self-pity.

And do you know who was to blame? That hippy (and my wife, of course).

Or that’s how I saw it back then. I’d rant and rave about them in the shower, to the mirror, to my diminishing group of friends. I fetishised the idea of getting my own back on them, especially that hippy.

Some nights, I took my troubles to the pub. Must have drunk away most of my meagre redundancy package in a month. I’d start with lager, before hitting the whiskey.

Nothing fires the blood like ethanol. I can’t remember who started the brawls, but let me tell you, they were vicious. I can still hear the bottle smashing on the table (from an upstroke, not a downstroke – that’s a rookie error). I told myself I won most of them, but truth is, I was too drunk to see anything other than my misdirected rage. Even got a lightning-bolt scar on my forearm. I think that was the night they didn’t open the cell at sunrise. Turns out the Old Bill isn’t so lenient when it’s your third fight in a week. Add a track record of petty crimes and you wind up with 18 months behind bars.

Have you ever seen a mugshot of yourself? It’s eery as fuck. You’ve almost certainly been through some shit beforehand, know you’re probably facing time, are hungry and thirsty and possibly drunk, and in my case, Bad Cop has just elbowed you in the ribs – because he can.

The result is some alien staring back at you. He’s obviously you, but at the same time, he’s not you – at least not any self you’ve seen before. You don’t want to recognise him, and he looks such a mess that you’d believe him guilty of anything. Seriously, say I’d just carried out a mass murder and no one would’ve doubted it. They’d want to believe it. Life’s easier to categorise when it’s the ugly who commit the crimes and the beautiful who solve them.

Prison is a … transformative experience. It’s kinda like a life within life. You have your work, your downtime, your superiors, and people from every shade of society (but no women – that’s probably the main difference). The novelty of it all wears off pretty quick, though. Then it’s a grind. The work is shit (like in life), your downtime is never long enough (like in life), your superiors are dumb power addicts (like in life), and most of your peers are people you don’t want to know (like in life).

Some inmates were lucky enough to have people on the outside who cared about them. Spouses. Kids. Family. Friends. Technically, I had all of those as well, but my spouse only came to see me about divorce matters and always left El with her boyfriend; Mum came just once to say she was disowning me; and most of my friends wrote me off as soon as they heard the news. I’d like to say that I guess they weren’t my true friends. But truth is, I lost them.

I’m not sure if it was just me or whether every prisoner asks himself this, but the question that was always ricocheting around my mind – even more than whether they’d release me early for good behaviour or whether life would still be worth living when I got out – was whether I was one of them. I was sharing meals with murderers, rapists, fraudsters, and every criminal in between. But was I really like them? Did I belong with them?

You can’t help but start explaining to yourself why you’re different, why they’re different. And you get very close to convincing yourself that you’re not like them at all, but there’s always a nagging inner voice saying, ‘You’re here, aren’t you? All under one roof.’

To be straight with you, I had always thought the whole idea of reforming and reintegrating the convict was stupid. Before my stint in jail, I was all for punishing the guilty – make an example of him to deter others – and whenever anyone had disagreed, I had silenced them with a favourite refrain: ‘How can you reform the criminal when it’s society that creates him?’

But now, having been through His Majesty’s justice system, I can honestly say that prison was about the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Or maybe it was just the reality check I needed to turn my life around.

They offered courses inside the county jail, so I started a plumbing apprenticeship, which I completed once I’d got out. Now I’m a fully qualified plumber and earn stacks more than I did before. Best of all, I’m self-employed, meaning I have no boss.

I also tried something my old self would never have done. I chanted. Some Buddhist monk came to the jail and led a meditation session, followed by chanting. The meditation didn’t do it for me, but I got something out of the chanting. It was uplifting, somehow. Now I chant every day. I wouldn’t call myself a born-again Buddhist, but I have joined a local group and do stuff with them. They accept me, more than I could have expected, and I’m grateful for that.

Obviously, I never see my daughter, even though I’ve tried to tell my ex that I’m a changed man, and Mum refuses to see me, too (she claims my incarceration is what caused Dad’s heart attack). But at least I’ve got some new friends. In fact, I’ve managed to move on pretty well, obliterate almost everything about my pre-prison life.

Just sometimes – when I’m bending down to fix Mrs Wills’ toilet and see that jagged scar on my forearm, or when I spot a face I’ve known for years, causing some involuntary thought or reaction – only then does that alienating past rush back to me, swallow me, engulf me. That person I try to suppress and even feel estranged to … my old self.