Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing by Gary Mulgrew Page A

inmates unescorted, but tried to look at it positively – hopefully I would assimilate more quickly left to my own devices. It was intimidating walking through the other inmates, trying to look assured but feeling that each one looked more sinister than the last. Many of them were staring at me, or ostentatiously eyeing me from top to bottom, and a few asked me where I was from or when I’d got in, but I ignored them. I tried to concentrate on maintaining the stern expression I had practised early that same morning. I worked my way through a warren of narrow corridors, which twisted and turned with different rooms jutting out at each turn, trying to find my cell, but being unsure of the numbering system.
    All last traces of hope or positive thought came crashing to the floor as I entered a smaller corridor with a large ‘4’ painted on it (for Range 4, I assumed), walked up six short steps and turned to view my new living quarters for the foreseeable future. I stood rigidly still, too shocked to move. No cosy cell for me – I had entered an enormous noisy room about 80 feet long and 40 feet wide, crammed with nothing but cast-iron yellow bunk beds, all screwed to the floors, with small lockers squeezed in between. As I started to stumble through it in a daze, stupefied at the thought of being constantly surrounded by so many people, I could see the room could hold roughly eighty men. To the side there were two small adjoining rooms which housed the bathrooms and showers. There were maybe three or four toilets in each, no more than six or seven showers and no privacy anywhere.
    I was totally crestfallen. All my coping strategies, all my preparation, all my mental cajoling, had been built on the premise that I’d be kicking back in a cell at the end of each hellish day and able to block it out for a few hours. I only had ever figured on dealing with one inmate; one cell-mate, maybe two at the most. I’d always felt I could handle one or two inmates no matter how demented or dangerous they were, but this . . . This wasn’t punishment, it was an experiment: the Big Brother house with wall-to-wall psychos.
    I realised I’d started wandering round and round in a bit of a trance, unable to properly concentrate on finding my bunk, and people were looking at me, the new fish. So I started to look again for my bunk, this time focusing more on that than on my surroundings. What looked like a native Indian guy was sitting on his lower bunk close to me, drawing something . . . Indiany – all feathers and buffalo and stuff. It looked great, even when viewed from upside down.
    ‘You the new Scotty guy I heard about?’ he asked, looking up to face me, smiling. He had the demeanour of someone who had been there a long time. ‘My name is Gabriel, but you can call me Chief. Everyone else does.’ He pushed a fist out to me. Shifting my blankets from my right to left hand, I bumped him right back. He looked like he was in his early thirties, a little overweight, with a weatherbeaten face. Something in his deportment and the awkward way he sat suggested an injury of some sort.
    ‘How you doin’, Chief?’ I responded, trying to seem relaxed. ‘Nice drawing.’
    ‘You like it?’ he viewed it himself critically. ‘It’s symbols from the Zuni, my tribe. I hear your tribe is from Scotland, right?’
    ‘Er yeah, I suppose,’ I responded, not really seeing Alex Salmond in the same light as Geronimo or Sitting Bull.
    ‘Gabriel, er, Chief, do you know where bunk 003U is?’ I asked.
    ‘Right behind you in the corner there. That’s a good spot, Scotty. You can keep your back to the wall and you got that little window to look out!’ he said, still shading a piece of his drawing.
    ‘How comforting,’ I said, without quite meaning to. I’d read that even the simplest jokes could lead to many of your biggest problems – and the Americans weren’t always the best with British-style sarcasm. I had to keep that sort of thing