Читать книгу The World I Fell Out Of онлайн

71 страница из 98

We had some laughs, most in very bad taste. Joker was a serial offender with velvet brown eyes and winsome long eyelashes who had broken his neck falling through a roof. He was one of the brightest people in the unit, subversive in a way that challenged common perspectives. He just didn’t care about anything or anyone. He said he quite liked having a broken neck because it meant that he got looked after.

‘I’ve been in Y— [a young offender’s institution] thirty-seven times,’ he announced one day, sitting opposite me and flapping his elbows for balance as he reached up to try to rearrange an abacus.

‘Ooo,’ I said. ‘What for?’ My tongue was sticking out with concentration. I was doing my best to play Chinese chequers with rubber bands around the wooden pegs for grip.

He looked pityingly at me, across our different worlds.

‘Stealing cars.’

I found him fascinating. He told me the best makes to steal and how easy it was. He said it had been fun for a while but then it got boring and he didn’t like being on the streets, so he would steal a car deliberately to get caught, knowing it meant a warm bed and hot food. I always feared he would take his own life when he left the unit, but in fact, with proper care in place for him and a new sense of being valued, he forged a career online.