Wouldn't know what to call this.

I can't claim to be any manner of expert when it comes to suicide notes. I have met with only one in my relatively short years and this could hardly be tagged the definitive version, having been merely chanced upon and maddeningly abstract in device. It was a compound of hopeless dirge and doggerel; a wrangle of frets and accusation which would have been terribly tiresome was it not so morbidly lyrical and so pricked into compulsion my fascination in the genre. I am resignedly jilted in the assumption that I will never encounter another (save for this heady document) and that the lion's share of these offerings are reserved for the perusal of stony coroners and cynical inquests.

I would suppose that the great majority of suicide notes tend not to dawdle in revision. That most are scurried in a spurt of despair and sway from discourse by their very essence. Wouldn't it be a bold, deranged body of work which reached its fruition with the author's oncoming outgoing? Why, in pursuing oblivion, would one pit-stop for punctuation or swerve for syntactic elegance? That would suggest a twinge of vanity and betray to didactic eyes a desperate, clinging reluctance endemic to troubled adolescents and diagnosed neurotics. However, this argument chokes and the fire-side Freud reddens, dumb as a brick, when his patient's loose-lipped fancy becomes a bug-eyed, blue-lipped fact. It is a tardy analyst who plies at a successful noose-knot. The industrious corpse marks a fullstop to any hopeless diatribe and signs off in an authoritative flurry.

Why, I wonder, do these unfortunates evacuate their lives insisting, more often than not, upon this haunting residue? They leave behind a grotesque, ambivalent ectoplasm; unnerving in its simplicity and completeness. It would be tempting and perhaps correct to embellish these signatures beyond their pertinence. Yet how accurate (having been inscribed in the grim absence of reason) a portrait of the artist can they possibly be? It is an exclusive, ingenuous school; as obscure as it is prolific.

I, catalyst that I am, strive in this narrative to depart from conventional self-destruction and its predictable paraphernalia and present to an indifferent public an intact, contented cadaver, complete with instructions; a tailored, untelescoped goodbye.

It would be a fair assumption, I think, to say that someone possessed of the relevant erudition will sooner or later labour over this opuscule and when he does I hope him not to be too wry as regards my reasoning. I hope him to be of delicate, amiable temperance; patient enough to laugh with me through this sad barrage and forgiving enough not to slight my wretchedness, as I by design, slight another's. If this not be the case, please, alight this manuscript now and pass it to a softer hand. A corpse I may be, but a vain, bashful one nonetheless.

I am spurred (or goaded), I suppose, by the terrible tedium this place imposes. I am certain that under less restrained circumstances that this testimony would still have been penned. It is given ignition by the same spark that tells the fetus that it has to be born (or the turd it has to be moved). Prison belays the urgency and permits geometry for a more fruitful rumination or a more fanciful farewell. I have never been a slave to creative outburst. Rather, discerned prose is sporadic at best. However, the welcome rogue Lethargy is less frequent in his visits and I can feel, as the clouds clear, my thoughts accelerate and my HB pencil diminish into the page.

Prison, to me, had always been one of those gaseous, intangible places to be glimpsed, finger-pointed, as a comfortable blur on some speeding train. To fathom its intricacies, to bask in its artificial light was always a ludicrous scenario for which I was naturally unqualified. As a child I had skirted its perimeters on visits to unfamiliar bearded uncles. Long Kesh with its trinket exports of hand-crafted, cheap-wooden harps and sublimely ornate tobacco tins I recall with a patchy infant mind. Quite young enough to extract excitement from body searches and barbed wire.

Little shrines punctuated the corners of our home where the products of my relatives' ennui were reverently displayed. Unshaven, ochre-fingered cyphers and restless bus journeys were the extent of my wonder. It was with an altogether new, amplified awe, however, that I watched my own fingers yellow and my own shoulders slouch into the same defeated posture of those around me.

This cell has anchored generations of thieves. My cot has slept murderers but when lock-up comes with the dusk, the gloom can close this little room like a confessional and the chime of keys and slap of footfalls are but fissured, disembodied birdsong, too fragmented to disturb my specific silence. A volatile hush, so fragile that it sobs to be cherished more than endured makes the lank evening a pleasure in prison and the morning a shellblast of wicked sunlight.

A dubious etiquette, exclusive to Northern Irish jails swells political correctness to a sublime, sacrosanct imperative. The un-versed wise-acre learns quickly to modify the fervour of his convictions to accomodate the farrago of taboos which vary from cell to cell and in some precarious cases, from upper to lower bunk. Of course, universal leanings still apply: sex offenders are despised with relish and soft drug abuse is almost a prerequisite to conversation. Yet a polite veneer covers all conversation and dilutes insults to jibes concerning physicality and mental capacity. Any petty apolitician who expects to encounter some notorious or celebrated terrorist during a stint in a prison like this is likely to be disappointed. These men, upon sentencing, achieve almost exotic status and are duly exiled off to Long Kesh to resume anonymity in the segregated, watch-towered wilderness. We, the ordinary, the bogey-men, freebooters, hooligans and landsharks (never having proclaimed our dispositions in acts of wanton terrorism) stay here in Darkest Derry and co-exist with a pretense of comradeship and a benevolent reallocation of bigotry.

We are watchful and we are wary. We are weary of yet insistent upon the jingoism and swank which lurks and squats amongst us; so common that it is overlooked and so familiar that it is embraced. Each has a wound that shifts so quickly from heart to head to hand to another that no-one complains to any audible degree. Yet still we bleed an aura which leaves these corridors slick with pain.

My Grandfather shook hands with God on eight wondrous occasions. Sadly though, the pair had a falling out and the old man went early to senility a disenchanted, doddering wretch years before a climactic stoke stole his wits. Had I never sidled into existence on the Spring equinox of 1971 it is my firm belief that the old man would never have labelled God a malign trickster and thus damned me to disillusionment for the remainder of my days. Had my timely genesis fallen either way of March 21st then all would be well and old God would be in his heaven instead of sharing the latter stages of decomposition, amid a swarm of crosses, with a tacky, miraculous cuckoo clock, under the Milltown Cemetary on the Falls Road in Belfast.

If boy-kings have a herald then mine was the cuckoo clock that my Grandfather received on the day of my birth. I have long pondered on this fact and hindsight has braided our destinies back as far as a synchronized conception. I favour a vision of my mother untampered by age, trembling beneath a nameless blur while a thousand miles away an equally anonymous watchmaker tinkers with springs and strings and loads the clock like a trap.

As I was being slapped and washed and tagged and plugged into my mother's heaving breast for the first time, that clock was tucked snugly under the wing of a passenger plane; a happy refugee, infinitely more than a souvenir from Switzerland.

An aunt of mine, notorious for her dubious eye for kitsch and her unrepentant expeditions in bad taste had become instantly enamored with the hideous timepiece when she had espied it gathering dust in a gift shop during her snow-bound honeymoon. She had nurtured the thing and had (as the immune host will) transmitted it into our God-fearing household.

My Grandfather, bound by courtesy and the pride he afforded to the only one of his offspring who had the foresight to marry before she became a pot-bellied embarrassment, nailed the clock to an inconspicuous wall and hoped for short-sighted, tasteless visitors. It was true that my aunt had married a useless shit-kicker from a neighbouring street but he was at least a respectful shit-kicker who could see beyond the tenements which seemed to trammel everyone else into tight flailing orbits of the area.

He had long despaired at the happy portrait of my swollen mother who refused to name the phantom nomad who had left me budding within her. He had spent his arsenal of paternal menace, a considerable cache, in trying to expose the culprit. But my mother, who was composed of the same stern stuff, remained resolute and shirked the shame gracefully. He had reeled at her indignation, expounding the virtues of impenetrable petticoats and impossible anachronisms of knickers which chaffed the knees.

He had always been secure in the belief that his daughters' thighs would remain jammed together by some moral adhesive his words secreted. He was often seen to bluster about the house in a palsy of frustration when one of my mother's mute rebukes would detonate his anger. The doors would billow in their jambs and the nervous cur that was the family pet would slink behind the sturdiest furniture at hand.

Although my mother's silence vexed him greatly, he was a compassionate man in those days and when the ambulance had swished her away, flush-faced and almost ashamed, he couldn't help himself from squelching to and fro on the stained carpet where her waters had broken. It was an evermore cruel coincidence that on that first day of Spring, after having replaced the telephone reciever, resignedly delighted to have become grandfather to a boy-child, Matthew for want of a better name, that the little wooden bird appeared behind him and gave more of a hiccup than a cuckoo; as if to congratulate him. It immediately vanished back into the coils of the clock and was not seen again until, remarkably, one year later, on the day of my first birthday, precisely to the minute.

Nothing very miraculous about that, you might say.
And you'd be right. For every miracle proclaimed by some gormless fanatic as a flare in dark awareness, there is a smirking sceptic familiar and bored with Christian myopia. However, in West Belfast in the early seventies, a place not much noted for its free thinkers, superstition reached medieval proportions and miracles were delivered to its denizens with almost postal efficiency.

And like a letter from a distant lover whose sickly endearments warp wonderfully upon each new reading to fill a gap or quench the heart, such was the liquid nature of unforseen events in Ballymurphy. British papatroopers, policemen, locals, yokels and politicians were obediently dying a petrol-bomb throw away. Young men, their patriotism buoyant upon beer-suds found their flesh a commodity and their paddling brains redundant as catapults. I suppose it could have gone either way but the women who moved like light on shopping trips through the shrapnel persevered with idiot grit and saw beyond sight, an Irish god with an Irish sense of humour.

My Grandfather must have been covertly gladdened to notice that the cuckoo, upon its initial pronouncement for existence had promptly resumed a state of perrenial hibernation. I can imagine those sallow trenches in his forehead almost overlap in an expression of curious amusement when, as my drooling bottom lip flummoxed to extinguish a single candle, the bird flew outwards from the clock to encourage me. All heads present then must have pivoted to place the hollow toot and then back to my lolling, gurgling efforts. I have heard this story many times from the incongruent angles of two of those present; lampooned with my mother's conspirator scoff and deified with my grandfather's venerable , evangelist glee. For him, it must have been then that the tick-tock of that clock was transfered forever to the calendar on the opposite wall, above which burned the Sacred Heart.

Before I came to be here, despite the worldly vigour I could fetch in conversation, I was happily ignorant of the thraldoms which throb through even the most fledgling of perverts. I had never knowingly met one so I attributed them with the same vague, mythical resentment I reserved for nudists or the conspiracy of Christian Brothers who drop-kicked me through my schooldays.

With even a rudimentary understanding of these warped wretches one can hardly fail to become intrigued by what is possibly the strictest conceivable limbo that they find themselves adrift in. I had always thought that the physical act of shuffling ones feet was little more than an aping, ironic gesture performed by the cartoonishly downtrodden. Yet shuffle they do. These men count their shuffling steps at mealtimes. One almost expects to hear the chink of shackles behind them. Their timid eyes veer urgently from every face. Their palour becomes translucent, anemic almost. Their features become pointed and honed and hesitant.

However, I do not wish to dwell too long on these creatures. I am of the popular opinion that they receive only a ration of the torment they deserve. I campaign rigorously for castration. Moreover, some crusading kink inside me demands that the offending testicles are served to their owner on a platter. No, what concerns me is a monster of an altogether unique stature.

I have much to say on the subject of Jeff Horton. If anyone had suggested to me a year ago (even in a drunken aside)that a reasonable portion of this epilogue would feature the prison antics of an unremarkable molestor of children, I would have laughed and then become quite offended.

After all, I harbour responsibilities. My own song may lack a certain syncopation. The key, I know, is slippery and the audience, I'm sure, fidget politely in their seats. Yet somehow I had always conceived this as a solo performance. Now I find myself poised for some pitiable duet. Matthew Marley and his amazing singing paedophile bear. It is a small mercy that the harmonics of this place rarely carry a Londonderry air past the front gate.

Jeff Horton, for the most part, was able to swerve the servitude which aligns the average savage in jail. He managed this not by cunning; the man by his nature was incapable of even a modicum of resourceful circumvention. He had a small deposit of diaphanous, swampy-founded lies which no-one would have believed even if they were extracted under torture. It was plainly obvious what the man was. Nor was it any fawning entente he may have embarked upon with the screws. They tend to collaborate with the more erudite of informants. He knew nothing of interest to them. What made Horton a tolerable parasite was the sheer size of the bastard. The effette jackals who stalk these halls stick to smaller prey. Those toothless runts who emerge from their cells in the morning like grey-capped toadstools and pray not to be picked.

This is not to say that Horton wasn't reviled like the rest of them. On the contrary, he was a great lolliping cynosure of contempt on the wing. It had disturbed me for several months that this hulking "sasquatch" (as he was called but never to his face) was as oblivious to us as some overfed jungle cat languidly swatting flies with its tail. I had observed, from a safe distance, reluctant, ephemeral conspiracies clot and dissolve with a curt curl of his lips.

Some people in prison succumb to tradition by marking the depletion of days on a cell wall. I have noticed, many times, a neat, discreet assemblage of days on the walls of even the most insoucient of inmates. They cromprise four rickety verticle lines and a binding slash to indicate a tidy bushel of five days. How weak-willed and torturously hopeful. Revelling in relativity we make clocks become calendars and we cheat these calendars with sleep and narcotics. These practices are,of course, illegal. As are the whimsical correctional ambushes suffered by paedophiles and rapists but they are things I think I can confess to without a twinge of regret. It is a manageable karma. Not justice per se but natural order, the way a pariah like me can be given scope (and even encouragement) to dispense these occupational thunderbolts on an even lower genus of criminal.

The attention of the warder skewers theatrically when a newly convicted sex offender becomes a novelty on the wing. They cast their knowing eyes newspaperwards and whistle absently to absorb the screams. It is only when the snooker balls resume their proper allignment on the table or the iron goes back to ironing clothes instead of flesh that a token scrutiny is restored.