Read Online Billy Rags by Ted Lewis - Free Book Online

gate and gone through to the other side with Dave and then for us to make a mad dash across the catwalk. The ones in front would grab the PO and take his key and sling him out while the others were streaming in. Then we’d lock the gate. The screws outside would have to go away and find another key because we’d have the only one on the wing. But by the time the screws had come back we’d have got our barricade built. The whole bastard wing bar one out of reach. Untouchable. The only character who wasn’t in was Harry Read, the joker who’d knocked off three fuzz in Harrow. A real brave bastard he turned out to be. A mate of his had put round the word that Read was in bed with bronchitis. So consequently nobody had bothered to ask him if he was in. But on Saturday morning I decided to do some recruiting. I’d been to see him in his cell. He was sitting up in bed, smoking, talking to Ian Crosbie, a little vaseline-arse who was in for croaking his boyfriend with the sharp end of a chisel. Crosbie had always been a subject for speculation amongst the rest of us because the line went why put someone in the security wing when he couldn’t knock a hole in a pair of tights. However, Crosbie’d skittled when I’d arrived. I’d told Read that we were planning to make one the following evening, everybody in, was he with us? His face’d gone chalk white. God knows what he did to his underpants.
    â€œTomorrow night?” he’d said, as if he was really trying to fit it into his schedule. “Tomorrow night?” Head-shaking. Chin-shaking. “I don’t know, Billy. I don’t know if I’ll be all right.”
    I turned it a bit.
    â€œWhat do you mean, all right?” I said. “You look all right to me.”
    That made him turn even paler.
    â€œI’ll try, Billy,” he said. “Course, I’ll try.”
    He tried all right. He must have had the quickest relapse any bronchial sufferer ever had. It’s a wonder they never rushed him off to hospital. He kept his door shut and his head under the sheets for the next two days. Somebody who took his grub in for him on the Sunday evening said he still wasn’t capable of coherent speech. So much for the brave fuzz-shooter.
    But Read was the only one. Apart from the sex-cases, and they didn’t count.
    When Dave sauntered out of his cell to cotton the PO I got that marvellous singing gut feeling I always got on capers like this one. These were the kind of moments you lived for, especially in the nick. The feeling was so great it was almost dangerous: at a moment like this it didn’t matter what happened to you before or after the moment. Only the moment itself mattered. The tension, the assertion, the tangible danger. Before this kind of moment you were like a guitar with its strings slackened off. Then you moved into the moment of danger and you became tight, strung with the purpose and the risk, aware of every muscle and every nerve in your body, but in control of everything, thoughts progressing through your brain with the cool purity of spring water stroking subterranean rocks.
    The minute I heard Dave and the PO begin to climb the steps I lit up a snout and began to stroll across the landing to the TV room. Halfway across I saw the two of them rise up from the Ones, Dave’s face blank and white, the PO looking at me with that stare they all have. I flicked the match away and strolled into the TV room. Inside, it was a scene to remember.
    It was as if they were at the starting flag in a seaside handicap, crouched out of sight of the screws on the landings. Ray had given them the wink that Dave had gone to get the PO because now they were holding the buckets of water and trays of bread puddings and boiled eggs and fruit and cheese all wrapped in towels and Christ knows what else that had previously been hidden under the TV room chairs. When I drifted in past Ray every eyeball in the place