But not for much longer. I went to see my friend today in the small hospital they’ve put him in a couple of miles away from the prison. He was so frail. Me and the Gambler went to see him in the same place three weeks ago and he was frail then, but at least he could get out of bed and into a wheelchair. The Gambler pushed and I followed. We sat outside in a small patio area. It was sunny, but too bright for Rinty to sit in the golden rays.
Conversation was hard going – until I got the photo album out. “I’ve got some pictures to show you,” I said. I’d only opened a couple of pages before he made a typical Rinty comment. ”I am terminal don’t forget.” I turned the pages faster - of course he was kidding. But I found it so hard to judge the humour between us. He didn’t look like the Rint – he looked like a fragile old man with his thick, unkempt silver beard, his sad sunken eyes and his mottled, yellow, paper thin skin. We managed to talk for a bit, the three of us. I swore. Rinty scowled and shushed me – “there are old people in there,” he said pointing to the common room. We’d passed them on the way out to the patio. Real elderly folk with various serious debilitating illnesses sat around a flat screen televison that had the sound turned down. I was touched that he was still considering the feelings of others. We kissed him when we left, thanking the prison officer guarding him for being so discreet. When they first took him out he had two prison officers guarding him. The only surprise was that he wasn’t chained to the bed like he was when they took him out for tests last year. We were grateful for that.
The Gambler went to see him on his own last week. He’d go every day if Rinty would let him, but the big man gets so tired, too tired. He has good days and bad days, like all sufferers of serious diseases as they near the end. He told the Gambler on the phone to bring him luxury prawn mayonaise sarnies from a well know up-market grocery store. A prison officer guarding him had given him one of his one day – Rinty had never tasted anything like it. The Gambler took him the sarnies, cola and fruit and the Rint wolfed it all down.
Since then his throat has swollen so that he can barely speak or swallow or cough even. When I walked into his little room today he was still asleep in his bed. The prison officer guarding him nodded. I had a bag of goodies with me. Luxury prawn mayo sandwiches, seedless grapes, bananas, trifles, cola, fizzy orange. I put the bag down and whispered, “Rintyheed…” I saw an eyebrow flicker and a minute or so later he slowly raised a withered arm, still with his eyes closed and gave a laboured thumbs up. I welled up immediately. I was trying so hard not to cry – his courage has made me feel so puny. He managed almost fourteen years back in the closed system on a not guilty verdict – he stayed mentally strong and lucid, in the face of the most convoluted and distorted psychological “assessments” of his character – he kept going. And he was undefeated, until cancer did for him. That’s the bit that gets to me the most – he was handling all that the system was throwing at him, carrying the weight of his unjust situation like a champion weightlifter, (odd analogy since for all of the thirty two years he’s spent incarcerated, never once did he ever step foot in a prison gym.) But his strength was more than physical, or mental – it was psychological. I think his psychological stamina was the most enduring of anyone I have ever met. And then cancer pulled the rug from under him.
I walked over and took a hold of his hand, squeezing my eyes to hold back my tears. I reached down and kissed his fingers. I was trying to tell him not to move, to keep dozing, but I couldn’t speak for sobbing. “Dont…. get…. upset,” he said. The prison officer guarding him told me that when Rinty coughed he coughed up some unpleasant dark mucousy stuff – “He always warns me,” said the officer. “He won’t cough when I’m eating my lunch or having a snack.”
I’m so touched by Rinty’s consideration for those around him. He expresses no bitterness, no anger. He just lies there accepting that there is no hope of a reprieve. ”I’m… ready… to… go…,” he said. I reached over and kissed him on the forehead. “We don’t want you to go,” I said. I told him the Gambler told me to tell him that he loves him like a brother, “and I do too,” I said, by now tears running down my face. Rinty closed his eyes again. I thought he was going to doze, but then he began to push himself up into a semi-sitting position. I tried to help him, but everywhere I touched him was sharp bone and stringy sinew. I didn’t feel confident enough to put even the slightest bit of pressure on any part of him. Eventually he was sitting up after a fashion. I had to listen ever so carfully when he spoke. ”I get confused,” he said. “I only found out a couple of hours ago it was Sunday.”
His application for “compassionate release” was turned down last week for reasons that were spurious: the address he gave for release was not suitable, (it was my address,) and he wasn’t yet “bedridden.” Well he’s bedridden now, he hasn’t been out of it since he got his knockback and the only place he can go if they release him is a hospice. He told me the prison is doing all it can to get him released to the hospice – they are embarrassed at having to guard him, my lovely friend: a broken, defeated, cancer-ridden wreck who can barely breathe, let alone speak. The prison has done its best by him. But for the Ministry of Justice to decide that it is appropriate to pay for a prison officer to sit and “guard” him when he is lower in life than on his knees is pathetic.
I kissed him again before I left.