Extradited (18 page)

‘
Fileh mou, koita
– My friend, look.’ He pulled out a tray from under his bunk that had two objects wrapped in tin foil. One was about the size of a tennis ball; the other was bigger – about the size of a small melon. ‘You see this,’ he said, pointing at the smaller one. ‘This is €10,000. I sell this.’ He unwrapped it, pouring out a pile of a brown, lumpy powder. ‘There are kings in this prison. I am the king of the Greeks. No business is done without me knowing.’

I couldn’t believe that he’d referred to himself as a ‘king’; it was pathetic. I think that he may have been using the wrong word. Apollo was probably attempting to translate the word ‘
Varonos
’, which means Baron – a title of honour. Either way, he was trying to tell me that the drug-dealing ring in Korydallos Prison was very organised, and that he was at the top of the hierarchy.

He used a plastic pre-paid telephone card to rack up a small line, then put a segment of a plastic straw up his nose and snorted it. I didn’t even know that heroin could be snorted. ‘You see this,’ he said, unravelling the bigger tin-foil ball, ‘this is
Depon
’ – a brand of effervescent paracetamol. ‘When you burn it, it looks just like
prezza
. I cut this 70/30,’ he said, holding his nose and taking a deep sniff.

I didn’t say anything. I lit another cigarette and stared at the
little TV in the corner of the room. A Greek game show with general knowledge questions was on. I tried to phonetically read the question that was written on the screen aloud, but couldn’t understand it. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked him, changing the subject.

He squinted at the screen. ‘Which
mosquweetoes
bite people, male, female or both?’ he said, mispronouncing the word ‘mosquitoes’.

‘I didn’t know there was a difference, did you?’ I asked.

He ignored me and grabbed the plastic card to rack up another line. I shifted my attention back to the TV. The answer had been revealed. ‘What’s the answer? I can’t read it.’

Apollo glanced at the TV again, his eyes starting to look glazed and dopey. ‘Females,’ he said, before racking up another line of heroin.

‘Maybe you were right then,’ I said.

‘Yeah? Right about what?’

‘Maybe they
are
all fucking whores then!’ I tried to joke. I didn’t believe a word I was saying – I was just scared and nervous.

He smiled. ‘Of course I’m right.
Reh Andrea, auto einai diko sou
– Andreas, man, this one’s yours.’

I looked at the line of heroin in front of him; it was smaller than the one he’d just snorted. It was a little taster for beginners. ‘No
prezza reh
, oxygen is my drug,’ I said – plagiarising my cellmate Vasilis’s expression.

‘OK,’ Apollo said. He pushed the line back into the pile of heroin and grabbed a plastic card to cut it with the bigger pile of paracetamol. ‘
Eisai roufianos?
– Are you a rat?’

I tutted.

‘
Eisai kalo paidi
– you’re a good kid; I can tell I can trust you. Now can you leave me? I have some business I need to deal with,’ he said, brushing me off.

At the front of the wing, on the right, was a staircase that led down to the communal shower area. Other than being absolutely disgusting, having a shower in Korydallos Prison was a bit like listening to the Middle Eastern version of
The X Factor
. There were usually inmates singing in there, very badly, in different languages. It wasn’t an open shower room that all inmates shared; there were five or six shower cubicles that were separated by a concrete structure. There were no cubical doors, so most of us would hang a sheet over the doorframe for privacy. It was better that way, considering privacy is almost non-existent when behind bars.

Inside the cubical, I would take off my clothes and hang them over the concrete frame, above the sheet where the cubical door should have been. It made it easy for inmates to steal clothes. Luckily it happened to me only once – just a pair of boxers. I always wore flip-flops and made sure that I never touched the shower walls because they were always covered with semen. On a positive note, the water was lukewarm, a lot warmer than the water in Avlona (the
Archi Fylakas
there was right in that sense). I would turn it on and let the water run first, which poured out of a rusting tap. The only downside was that (occasionally) the water would stop running. There would be a clogging sound, then the tap would spit out a spray of brown liquid and I’d have to quickly move my body to the side so that it wouldn’t cover me.

Each cubical shared the same drainage system: an open gutter on the floor that channelled the dirty water from each cubical to a drain on the left side of the room. Unfortunately, inmates would use the showers as a toilet, probably because they couldn’t afford toilet paper. When I showered, lumps of shit would often flow past through the gutter that ran on the floor, against the wall. Sometimes the faeces would be so big that they would get stuck in my cubicle. The smell was unbearable! I would fill up both my hands with water and try to splash the crap away – back into the ever-flowing stream of piss and spunk. Ashmul used to shower with no flip-flops and no sheet – butt naked for everyone to see. He didn’t seem to care about what he was standing in barefoot.

If I took a while showering, the inmate waiting to use it would start shouting and force me to hurry up. The queue of inmates in the shower room was always long because the wing was far too overpopulated. I would rush, having to put my clothes back on when I was still wet. Sometimes I would drop them, which would upset me because they were now covered in different bodily fluids. I would walk back through the chilly wing back to cell forty-nine, which was more often than not full of Stelios’s friends. If I then needed to use the toilet, I would have to ask everyone if they could leave the cell for a few minutes. We all did it for each other – it was a rule that we could use the toilet only to urinate when we were locked up.

On one occasion, when I got back to my cell after a shower, a man with a perfectly hooked nose and hunched back was lying on my bunk with his back against my pillow. On the chair next to Stelios’s bunk sat Thoma, a man with long oily hair I’d previously met, who was smoking a cigarette. He didn’t talk very much and seemed always to be in his own world. Vasilis told me that he had recently moved to Gamma from the psychiatric wing. Staring into space, he looked like a broken man.

The three of them were in the middle of a conversation, but stopped as I walked into the cell.

‘
Peirazei?
– Do you mind?’ asked the man lying on my bunk, referring to whether he should move.

‘
Katse fileh mou
– Sit my friend,’ I replied, brushing a cockroach off the end of my bunk with my palm. The truth was that it did matter – I wanted him to leave. It was so frustrating not having my own space; all I wanted was a bit of privacy and space to change into some warm clothes. I sat down on the end of my bunk and began to dry my feet with a towel before sliding on a clean pair of socks.

The hunchbacked man was called Nicos, but Stelios had nicknamed him ‘methadone man’. Methadone was the substitute drug for heroin that the prison doctors would give the addicts to wean them off without going ‘cold turkey’. While on a course of prescribed methadone, ‘methadone man’ was still buying heroin from Apollo’s guys and taking it regularly. On top of that, he was taking any pill he could get his hands on. Stelios handed him a pill; I had no idea what it was. Methadone man crushed it up on the table using a plastic pre-paid telephone card, racked it into a line and snorted it using a segment of a plastic straw.

‘What’s he snorting?’ I asked Vasilis, who was lying on his top bunk.

‘Andrew, I don’t know; he’s a very stupid man. He snorts everything, even painkillers.’

Thoma and methadone man would be in our cell every day, sometimes for hours on end.

I’d waited for three days to see Marios (the social worker) and I desperately needed to speak to him. Riya was flying to Greece and I still didn’t know if she’d been accepted as a visitor yet. In Korydallos Prison, only outsiders who share an inmate’s surname are allowed to visit them without a previous application made to the social worker. To book an appointment with Marios, an inmate had to write his name on a piece of paper and post it into a box at the front of the wing – this procedure could take weeks. On the day that Riya had arrived in Athens, I noticed Marios walking into the Gamma wing office. There was no point in asking the
ypallilos
if I could see Marios briefly – I would have been forced to book an appointment again. Instead, I caught the attention of the
ypallilos
and shouted ‘
farmaca!
– medication!’ He buzzed me through, thinking that I needed to take my medicine. Rather than going to the doctor’s office, I quickly knocked on Marios’s door when the
ypallilos
wasn’t looking.

I pleaded with Marios that he allow Riya to visit, but not only for one visit, for as many as possible! At first he was sceptical, but told me that he would try his hardest. When I suggested an open visit he said, ‘Now you’re pushing it!’ Nevertheless, my little stunt
managed to have Riya approved for visiting, and he allowed her to come and visit me three times.

I remember my heart thumping as I walked into the visiting room and I saw her face behind the dirty pane of glass. She was a foot away from me, but between us was a clouded force field, stopping me from holding her in my arms again. A Skype video call would probably have offered a better-quality image, but nevertheless, seeing her in front of me was amazing – and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. I was filled with happiness. We spent our visits talking about anything other than prison, as though I wasn’t even in prison at all. She told me that I looked really different, probably because of the unshaven stubble and rugged hair.

When she wasn’t visiting me, or seeing many of Athens’ beautiful sights, I would call her hotel for a tenth of the cost of a call to England. I was over the moon for the entire week she was there. I didn’t care about sleeping with cockroaches, I didn’t care about shit in the showers, I didn’t care about living with criminals and I didn’t care about being wrongly accused of murder any more – all I cared about was knowing that when I woke up, I would see her face. The week ended, she flew back to the UK and everything turned to shit again. I was the most depressed I’d ever been.

For the first time since my arrest, the fear of being found guilty started to gnaw at my mind. I was already a murderer in the eyes of the Greek authorities – what if witnesses in court were to tell lies? What if Jonathan Hiles’s friends were to claim that it was me who killed their friend? Would their South Wales Police statements be accepted in a Greek court? Or would their false words (along with those of the Zante police) absolutely destroy my life? I had no control over their actions and it was eating me alive. I was facing twenty years’ imprisonment for a crime
that someone else had committed. What would be the point of living? I would be institutionalised and branded a murderer, I would have a criminal record and I would be in my forties with no work experience or degree. What would be the point? Riya would move on and marry somebody else, my friends would settle down with wives and kids, my family would move back to north London and carry on as normal. If I were to be found guilty, my life would be over. The constant battle between positive and negative thoughts had become too exhausting and I started to realise that being found guilty was a possibility. It was the first time that I’d imagined a scenario of the trial verdict – sitting in the courtroom and discovering that I’d been wrongfully found guilty. How would I feel? Just thinking about it devastated me in ways that I couldn’t even describe. In the twenty-first century, how could anything so unjust even be a possibility?