The Voices are coming thick, fast, deadly, and snake-like. Venomous even. They begin with a gentle whisper and are now spitting violently from the Sandman’s coal pit of treacherous black shadows. On this night of nights, where only angels and demons dare tread.
The Voices surfaced after a fiendish nightmare: of evil spirits chasing my soul in flight; down familiar northern terraced streets of dead relatives; up kinky narrow stairways, through gloomy cobwebbed lofts; in a desperate and futile attempt to escape over the dark unforgiving rooftops of the ‘mare.
The dream is airbrushed with black paint spray on waking in the dead of night. Paralysed in a swastika pose, I contemplate doubling-down on downers as demons scratch manically at my subconscious.
But instead, I choose to wrestle till dawn. A fitful deathroll. Till a welcome window of sleep shuts down the white noise.
The grateful dawn eventually breaks, sunshine winking through slatted blinds, as I surface in the warm morning air feeling like the grateful walking dead.
Twelve hours earlier. I am binge watching Jimmy McGovern’s ‘Time’ on the iplayer. The BBC drama is an eagle-eyed, warts and all examination of the UK prison system. A modern ‘Crime and Punishment’ for the ages. The story is told through the four-year sentence of Sean Bean, a comprehensive teacher racked with guilt, consumed by the sins of the father, steeped in northern grit, and broken by alcoholism. He is banged-to-rights for killing a man by drink-driving in a miserable cold night of fate.
Sinking deeper into the sofa chair, digging nails hard into its leather arms, I am drawn deeper into the prison dramas violence and paranoia. And – as the key rattles in the lock, the cell door is slammed shut and the sun permanently locked-down on Bean’s wing – so the flashback begins.
Fifteen years ago, almost to the day, I spent the baking hot summer weeks cramped in a single cell, seven by seven foot, painted a clinical blue with cynical chipped graffiti all over the walls. I would chain smoke hand rolled cigarettes and wait for the prison riot squad to pile through the cell door. I had wound up in Lewes Prison for the crime of hearing Voices, having extraordinary visions, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sipping on a brew the following morning, I observe the seagulls swarming overhead, stark against the ultra-blue sky, wondering how to fathom out these titanic nights of night terrors, torment, and twisted tales.
I study the flowerless sunflower in its pot and wonder whether the Voices, as some say, come from buried trauma in the bones of the sufferer. Trauma, or PTSD, is in the eye of the beholder – so the thought occurs – as I process five mindful positives, to burn up the negativity of last night’s ordeal in the welcome sunshine.
And as the holiday jet cuts through the vivid blue sky, leaving a hot white cloud trail in its wake, I water the flowerless sunflower to the tune of the street birds tweeting out their greatest hits.
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