One day he cornered me in this quiet little area in front of the bedding store where there was no surveillance. He had one of his gang with him holding a broom handle sharpened at the end. They looked like a couple of overgrown school kids, pair of fucking twats. People like him are evil, they could do any sort of damage to you and walk away happy, whistling to themselves. He gave me three choices, have my eyes and god knows what gouged out with the fucking sawn-off broom handle, get him some drugs, or suck him off.
To some extent I felt it didn't matter what happened to me any more, and part of me was shit scared. So I sucked him off. Three times he cornered me, the fucking cunt. Anything else you want to know?'
The intensity of his voice told how bitter these memories were. I gently patted his lips with two of my fingers, and lightly kissed the corners of his mouth. 'Sorry, I shouldn't have...'
'Maybe I should have taken the beating. Humiliating myself like that.'
'Whatever you did it would have been awful. At least you still have two eyes to see the world with. Did he know you were gay?'
'It's hard to keep secrets when you're with other cons who are watching you twenty-four hours a day. They notice how you react when a big pair of boobs turns up on the TV. There's such a close atmosphere in there. Everyone is looking for some way of scoring little advantages over everyone else, sometimes you get the impression people are talking about you, but maybe they're not. They probably all thought of me as another small time con doing his bird, another loser. Trouble is if you cross someone like Stomper, you're the one who's going to end up worse off. He's got too many people who owe him favours or are scared of him. If you want full remission you have to keep yourself away from trouble and put up with being treated like dirt.'
'Sorry, I didn't want to make you relive the worst moments of your life.'
'You're the only person I've ever told about Stomper. For a while I used to dream about tracking him down and causing him serious injury, but something like that will take over your life and ruin you if you let it. In the end the best thing to do is to force yourself to forget about it.'
His experience of the criminal 'justice' system appalled me. What right had a judge or magistrate at his trial to inflict punishment of that kind on him? Was being forced to have sex with a man like Stomper regarded as fair redress for the crime of stealing cars? If I had known him then, been to visit him in jail, and he had told me what was going on perhaps I could have done something to stop it, or more likely like Tom himself would have been powerless against a system governed by rules and customs that were strange to me.