I think I’m going to get through it. I’m steady. Just this past week I’ve been thinking like that. Maybe it can be an opportunity. Before that I was so depressed and before that I was ill, of course.

The first thing was coming down off the methadone. I’d been on a script for over a year. They put me on twenty-five mil and I’d come down a few mil a week, but of course I was using all the time as well. Well, not all the time. A lot of the time I was selling the methadone to buy smack; you get plenty of methadone users, too. Then I’d have a binge and tell the doc to put me back up to twenty-five or thirty. But in the last weeks before my case came up I was doing quite well. It was something to focus on, I suppose. I was thinking: don’t use needles, stick to chases if you have to, do your best not to take any at all. And I did all right considering I’d been in such a huge mess in the months leading up to it. I managed to get by without any junk at all in the last week, and that’s not bad because you can imagine how tempting it was – the last fling, make myself feel better, you know…

So coming down was the first thing and it was awful. Coming off methadone is worse than coming off junk. It really makes you feel bad. They’re crazy, because that’s what they give you to come off heroin – something that’s even more addictive and worse to come off. The only reason they give it to you is because you don’t get the same hit. It’s not fun. It’s medicine so it can’t be nice. It’s bonkers, really.

I spent a few hours rolling around groaning in my cell and they let me go to the pharmacy. I was in a horrendous mess – sweating this horrid yellow juice that stung and aching, and my teeth with this toothache that kept jumping from tooth to tooth.

I explained to the nurse what I needed and she just laughed at me.

‘We don’t have methadone in here, David.’ Stupid git that I am, my heart actually leapt. I thought, Yeah, they’re going to give me a diamorphine script – that’s the real stuff. You don’t get it any purer than the hospital gets it.

‘But I need something…’

‘You’ll live,’ she said.

I waited a few seconds as it began to dawn on me that the heartless bitch was going to give me nothing. My teeth started screaming in horror.

‘You don’t understand –’

‘I don’t suppose I do. But I do know we don’t give methadone to heroin users in a young offender institution.’

I said, ‘Some Valium.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Something,’ I croaked. She pulled a face and went to the medical cabinet and broke off a couple of tabs which she handed to me.

‘Two Paracetamol?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Doesn’t she know anything?

I tried to be patient and explain to her. ‘Two Paracetamol won’t do anything to me. I’m a big user, I need something a little bit stronger…’ I smiled encouragingly at her, which wasn’t easy when your bones are trying to break themselves up in your body. She’d just about had enough.

‘I’ve got a lot of people to see…’

I stood there staring at my miserable two tabs of headache pills until the screw pushed me back outside.

I was horrified. Two Paracetamol! It was monstrous. It had to be against the Geneva Convention or something. I mean, locking you up, I could understand that, maybe even electrodes up the bum. But giving me just two Paracetamol in the middle of methadone comedown was inhuman.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said to the screw as he slammed the door in my face. The thud of it went right through my spine; I thought it was going to snap in twenty different places.

‘Have a nice time,’ he told me. And they just left me there.

I’d have escaped. I’d have committed murder. I broke the Paracetamol into four halves and took a half then and saved the rest for later. When that’s all you have to get you through, you might as well go for the placebo effect. I even ground one of them up and snorted it, but that wasn’t much good either.

That’s the way it works. You’ll eat shit or go in the ring for ten rounds with Mike Tyson – slave, hero, rent boy, pimp, master of the universe – you’ll do whatever you have to do to get your next hit.

Looking back – some of the things we were doing. Rob was cottaging – you know? Selling sex to homos in the public toilets. Lily went mad when she found out, it totally did her head in. It was all right her doing it at home, but him doing it with men – she just went ape, running around screaming and crying. Me, I was nicking stuff. Not from the shops; I’d lost the bottle for that ages before. From Gemma, from Rob, from Lily. Anyone. I’d turn up late at a friend’s house, stay late, ask if I could stay and then get up in the night and sneak about opening drawers and digging around in cupboards and coat pockets.

Gemma was the only one who seemed to be getting better. She stopped doing jumps at the parlour. She was a heavy user, though. She was using as much as me, I reckon, and I was using a lot. And then, of course, she broke out. Trust Gemma.

There was all hell that night when the pigs turned up. Everyone knew, somehow. Lily was screaming at me, ‘Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!’ as if Gemma was sort of a part of me. Actually I had a pretty good idea it was going to happen. I didn’t know about the baby till much later, but Gemma had been going on about Lily using and having a baby, I think that really shocked her. I heard her going out of the front door that night and I knew all her clothes were in the bedroom, so it had to be something pretty weird. And she didn’t come back.

I lay there and I thought, Is this it? I just lay there. I thought I’d find out soon enough.

They hauled us all in. Me and Rob took the rap, or tried to. Lily tried to implicate Gemma but it didn’t wash.

‘It’s that bitch who rang you up – she did, didn’t she? It’s all hers, we’re just living here…’ Standing there in the middle of the floor in her short nightie with her beautiful legs all covered in needle bruises… yeah.

They’re both in care now. I’m the only one who got a custodial sentence. Lily and Rob didn’t even see the light of day, they never even got bail because they were considered to be so much at risk. Lily went with the baby into one detox centre, Rob went into another. Then straight into separate rehab centres. And there they are now, eight months later. Gemma says they’ll be moving into halfway houses in a few months. I don’t suppose either of us’ll ever see them again. Actually the comedown could have been worse. Like the nurse said, there was nowhere I could go and score. Well, that’s not strictly true. You can get any kind of drug in prison, it’s a user’s paradise, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. The thing was, I didn’t have that awful feeling – all I have to do…

Then I was depressed. I never was so depressed. Not much to say about that except I got through it. That’s one thing about being inside, you get through it, whatever it is, because you don’t have any choice. Gemma came in to visit me and I didn’t tell her how I was feeling. I just said I was keeping my head down, getting on with it, doing the things you do.

And then – like I say, I thought, Maybe it’s not so bad. Somehow my head popped up above water. I was getting through it. Look at it, after all – I’ve been clean for over three months now, for the first time in years. I might not have done it myself out of choice, but I am clean and that’s the important thing. It’s something to build on. I got a reasonable sentence. It was my second conviction, they could have given me a lot longer than eighteen months. With any luck I can be out in nine; that’s a third gone already. The other day one of the screws said to me as I was going past, ‘You’re doing well, David… keep it up.’ He smiled and nodded at me.

And I thought, Yeah… I am. I’m doing well. I was pretty pleased with myself. I’d been ill, I’d been depressed, now I’m doing all right. Some of the screws are okay. You get some horrific bastards, of course, but some are okay. And I was doing all right.

I told Gemma. She must have seen how proud I was because she laughed and said, ‘Hostage syndrome.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Loving your jailer,’ she told me, and I just smiled. She was right, I was proud I’d pleased a screw. It’s a bummer really, you feel grateful to them just for being human. But it helps and anything that helps is important.

Gems is as big as a house! She got bigger and bigger every time she came in and now she’s about ready to pop. Next time she comes in she’ll bring the baby with her. It’s due in about a week. Last time she was sitting in her chair beaming away and patting her huge turn. We sit at these little tables, and I put my hand on it so I could feel it kicking.

‘He’s gonna be a footy fan, I reckon.’

And she leaned back in her chair and slapped her big tum and pushed up her big tits and said, ‘And it’s all yours, boy… it’s all yours. You come out clean and it’s all there waiting for you.’

Like I say, I keep my head down and my nose clean. I just think… it’s all there. All I’ve got to do is time.