Shards of glass shot in every direction as the window began to shatter, the small portable television set I had thrown hit its surface. Up until that moment the others in the room felt almost relaxed in the control they had over the situation but now I had taken that from them, you could see in expressions in their faces. First a shocked blank look followed by that realisation of the shift of control, and now fear of the unknown events that would now ultimately follow. Without time to dwell on this any further I flung my badly beaten body at the window aiming for the largest glass free section, it was a long way down but after what had happened I felt free for but a moment and totally in control. I didn't think of landing my thoughts too caught up in the event that had driven me to jumping out of a second storey window consumed my mind. Even as I hit the floor I felt a sudden pain in my legs as they crumpled with the impact, but not a pain that was unbearable. The euphoria of escaping a situation that only moments early I thought I would never leave were short lived as I got up to run through the gate only to find both ankles completely shattered and my feet now limp lifeless entities hanging off the ends of my legs giving way under me as I tried to stand on them, and the pain, oh the pain. Not just a physical one but one of fear knowing what I had done to my body. We all make mistakes and do things we regret but we can usually walk away thinking oh well I made a mistake I wont do that again. This was different, this was serious, this was going to have an impact on every day for the rest of my life, I had permanently damaged my body and there was no turning back.
Realising I couldn't run away I began to scream help, praying someone would hear me as I crawled up my garden path pulling my body with my arms. I could hear my captors hurtling down the steps desperate to stop me bringing my predicament to anyone's attentions. I could hear them erratically fumbling with the wood they had earlier used to barricade my front door to prevent my escape, which was now preventing them from leaving. They managed to prize open the door and both grabbed me and told me to shut up as they tried dragging me into the house. By now I had crawled to the front gate and fixed both my arms around it, despite them both pulling me and kicking me in the head I clung on with a new strength that I some how mustered deep with in, almost like a climber hanging off a rock face by one hand knowing if he let go he would fall to his death. What would they do to me if they got me back into the house, they had gone too far they know they had, there was no turning back, this had reached the damage limitation stage, this could only get worse to cover up what they had already done.
As people began looking out of the windows of neighbouring houses my captors, realising they weren't going to get me in the house, panicked and ran back into the house then out again and up the street. People came running out of their houses to help me. For a moment I felt an amazing relief that they had gone, but I knew this was short lived, I was laid on the street in a pool of blood with both my legs shattered outside my house that had every single room in it stacked with thousands of pounds worth of stolen goods and half the cities police and medics on its way.
You didn't need to be an eastern religious philosopher to know that perhaps Id just been dealt a bad hand of karma. I knew as they ran up the street this wasn't the end but more like the beginning and things were going to get much worse before they began.
This had all started much earlier when I met one of my captors Manny. We met through a friend, who's house we would both congregate at to take drugs. Manny who was ten years my senior at first didn't like me, we used argue all the time, he didn't like this young arrogant lad with quick tongue who could make him look bad. But in time we worked together and he realised I was good at making money, I came up with good plans and had balls to pull them off. It was a mutual arrangement as Manny had quite a good car which could get me around to execute my plans, and he was quite handy with his fists which meant I could go about my daily business of ripping people off without having to suffer any violent consequences. Over the time I saw him turn on quite a few people, he could be friendly one minute than snap and seriously hurt someone, it was never me, however I had met people like this before and I knew if you stayed around them, eventually your time would come and you would be on the receiving end.
He had a nice house and his wife had a nice sports car, which she couldn't park near the shop that she managed because it would get broken into so Manny would drive her to work drop her off then have the car all day. It was very useful because we could get all over the place committing crimes anywhere we wanted, plus it looked nice so didn't draw attention to us. We made a lot of money for minimum risk for some time.
Though it all came to an end when his old friend Alex was released from prison after a long prison sentence for robberies.
Alex was a small stocky guy with a slightly too well groomed pony tail, he took the small man syndrome to new level and had a definite chip on his shoulder which had only been hardened by the long sentences he had served. He had different views to me, and wasn't about to be told otherwise by some one as young as me. He thought he was a proper criminal as he had spent so long in prison and was more into the more serious crime that gave better returns though if you caught as he seemed to be you would be dealt with harshly. Prison has an internal status style pecking order based on the crime you are in there for, the more severe the crime the higher up you were, this moulded criminals into only committing these more severe crimes upon their release, almost seeing a return to prison as inevitable and therefore looking to increase their social standing within the criminal classes. To me, I had no interest climbing the prison corporate ladder, being looked up to and respected by a bunch of inmates who would stitch you up as soon as look at you had no appeal to me. I mean if they were so good at crime why were they always locked up. They had spent so much time in side they had barely even committed any crime. Anyway Alex's release was the beginning of the end for my partnership in crime with Manny. They began committing burglaries on a night time, the only reason I remained of any use to them was because I rented a room in a large empty house that was perfect for storing stolen goods. The house I was living in was perfect I rented a room off a local thug name Dean Thorne not a man to be crossed, it was some kind of fraudulent affair I believe he was claiming rent money off the government for renting the other rooms to imaginary tenants, I never quite got to find out exactly what scam he was running but it was probably best I didn't Alex and Manny soon started turning up with cars full of stolen good from houses and sorted me out for keeping the stuff at my house, they would occasionally return to pick up goods to sell, but they seemed to be stealing more than they were selling, quickly the house was rapidly filling with goods and soon the high performance cars they were turning up in with were also stolen from the same houses and with the keys, these also started to litter the once empty parking spots of my road. As my earning spree through the day started to tail off with Manny, I began to waken every morning with the sickness of the drug withdrawal taking its toll and with no way of earning any money, It didn't help to be surrounded by thousands of pounds of stolen goods. At first I would take small amounts nothing too significant, hoping they wouldn't notice. I didn't see them for weeks but they were still dropping goods off when I was out because every time I came back, there were more goods. Eventually what I took was getting out of hands as I began to take larger items. Life was momentarily good, I would wake up, phone a taxi grab a couple of video players go sell them, buy my drugs then return back, even the Pakistani taxi drivers that gave me a lift started buying bits off me, I would bring them into the house open up a cupboard door and say take your pick, before I knew it they would be back with their friends also wanting a great deal. All good things have to come to an end they say and they surely did.
The night of my down fall started off like any other, after a particularly easy day I left my dealers house on the estate the other side of town. I had become by now well known to the local police, not just the beat coppers but also the local plain clothed drug squad and higher level detectives. They knew that nearly all of my day revolved around drugs or crimes to fund drugs, so they knew if they every saw me the chances of catching me doing something I shouldn't or in possession of something illegal were high. If they caught me with the smallest amount of drugs they knew they could lock me in the cells whilst my sickness worsened so they could try and prize information out of me due to my weakened state or search where ever I was living in the hopes of finding something even more incriminating. This made travelling too and from my dealers house with drugs a cautious journey. Although buying a large amount off the dealer , he only had it in small wrapped deals which made it difficult to conceal. I decided to place each wrap between my fingers, so if I was stopped I could lift my heads above my head with my hands open but with my fingers pressed together so it appear my hands where open and empty as they searched my clothes. I even did a practise run in the entrance of the dealers before I walked away. My pre-planning and practise run were not to go to waste as within ten minutes of walking down the road that all too familiar unmarked police car pulled up. It was the usual two CID detectives who always seemed to turn up everywhere. The older one was a bald man with a thick moustache that only law enforcement or military men seemed to have, he had been around the block enough times to have seen almost everything and had been hardened by it all, his general belief in human nature was not a good one as he had seen the depths of human depravity time and time again. His partner was much younger and more active, fit looking not that much older than me and a face that wouldn't look out of place on a policeman or a criminal. He always tried to relate to me, as I suppose he wasn't much older, maybe if things in life had been only been slightly different we could have almost traded positions maybe. Any way they gave me the usual questions as they began to search me, as I had already planned I held my hands above me in a slightly cupped but open fashion as me fingers pressed together holding in place the wraps. My heart beat hard and I did everything to calm my voice and not give anything away as I talked to them. A combination of training and experience had made them very perceptive of human behaviour and how it unconditionally gave away things about the individual, which would make them step up, there search. Eventually they found nothing and jumped in their cars and drove away. I felt relived and almost cocky as I had got one over on them as I strolled down the road. However if they had of found the drugs on my, they would have arrested me taken me in, then gone to my house to search it, finding Manny and Alex, who unknown to me where waiting in my house for me, surrounded by stolen goods, then the events of the evening that would later unfold would never happen. I would have been convicted of possession of drugs and handling of stolen goods and and would have thought it had been a bad night, however I would never of known how lucky id been. This wasn't to happen however as they didn't catch me and instead I skipped home to my house of horrors.
As I walked through my front door I sensed something was right, there were pieces of wood next to the front door and the lights were on upstairs, as I walked into my room Alex and Manny were waiting there faces looked angry. Manny ran down stairs and began boarding the door up with the wood as Alex picked up a wooden bat and started screaming at me asking where his stuff was. Manny ran up and they both began saying the same. I began to lie saying someone else must have taken the goods but they didn't belie me, Alex began to swing the piece of wood at me with all his force as Manny punched and kicked at me as Id seen him do to so many others in the past. In a panic my body's natural reflexes began to kick in as I cowered and flayed my arms to minimise the blows to my body, I dint feel the punches and kicks but as the wood bat struck me each time I felt cold pain in each point. As he kept hitting me with it the pain from the previous hits didn't go away but was merely added to as it repeatedly connected with my head and body. As the blows continued I managed to squeeze in a corner between the wall and a large wardrobe, it meant I was completely trapped but limited the directions in which blows could be directed at me. Now they could only come from the front and they fumbled with each other as they tried to strike me at the same time, however the amount of room only allowed one to hit me at a time. Alex could also no longer swing the wood at me to gain momentum as he struck me and could only raise the wood into the air then bring it crashing down on me. He was aiming for my head with all his force I remember thinking he is trying to kill me and this is way over the top for taking a few of his things that he had already stolen. The attack went on for some time, I held my forearms above my head to block the blows from the wood, I looked at my forearms and they were swollen already like balloons in severe pain but yet I held them there above my head. When I thought it would never end they both stepped back out of breathe, there attack had been so vicious and sustained they literally couldn't continue. Alex sat on the bed and lit a cigarette and looked at me. Manny lit a cigarette and said when he had finished smoking this I had better tell them the truth as he was going to fuck me up. I continued to lie, what else could I do the stuff was gone I couldn't get it back, what was going to happen if I confessed I would just give them more justification to continue to fuck me up. My entire body was racked with pain, my eyes flickered around the room as my mind working on over time tried to think of a way I was going to get out of this. I looked at the window and thought I just going to have to get out of here one way or another. I'm going to have to jump through the window, but the glass would cut me to shreds I must break it. Alex was sat smoking, sneering at me talking aggressively. I walked over to the small portable black and white TV and began to unplug it. Alex looked at me mockingly as though I was going to try and give him the TV as some kind of compensation even though it was worse less that the plug on the end of the lead. As I threw the television he knew I had taken control from him, and what happened now was up to me.
As I was driven up the road in the ambulance the gas I sucked on did nothing for my pain only allow my mind to drift occasionally from conscious thought. Like the true junkie I was the first thing I did was check that the drugs I had so easily managed to sneak past the police were still in my pocket despite being bounced around my house by two attackers and plunging two floors to the ground through my own bedroom window. It meant everything to me as in the depths of my pocket those little packets of pain relief sat undisturbed. All I could think of was that some time soon I would be able to take them and momentarily relieve myself from my present situation.
My legs weren't just broken they were shattered at both ankles with the two legs bones that join at the knee separated. The hospital staff worked through the night fixing my legs repositioning the bones and drilling them to position steel rods to fix the bones together permanently in place. As I woke up the next day the whole situation began to dawn on me as the pain from my legs began to take hold of my body. My whole body was battered and bruised and any movement caused great pain, the palms of my hands were cut to shreds from the glass and had fresh stitches all over them, despite the pain I had to see my legs, I had to see what I had done to them, and what I needed to do to them. The pain was unbearable as I pulled away the blankets, my legs were purple and along the front of them were two long cuts with the excess skin from either side pulled together tightly then held together by a long row of metal staples, from the wounds protruded two large tubes with drew away the excess blood and bodily fluid and ran it into two bags suspended next to the bed with a brown reddy fluid already gathering inside. They had put me on methadone to ease the withdrawal symptoms which seemed to take away the withdrawal feelings but without the pain eliminating or euphoric feelings. My senses again felt exposed to my unforgiving surroundings, I just wanted to curl up and hide from the world but instead I was laid on a bed in a very busy ward surround by people and I was unable to move.
Realising I couldn't run away I began to scream help, praying someone would hear me as I crawled up my garden path pulling my body with my arms. I could hear my captors hurtling down the steps desperate to stop me bringing my predicament to anyone's attentions. I could hear them erratically fumbling with the wood they had earlier used to barricade my front door to prevent my escape, which was now preventing them from leaving. They managed to prize open the door and both grabbed me and told me to shut up as they tried dragging me into the house. By now I had crawled to the front gate and fixed both my arms around it, despite them both pulling me and kicking me in the head I clung on with a new strength that I some how mustered deep with in, almost like a climber hanging off a rock face by one hand knowing if he let go he would fall to his death. What would they do to me if they got me back into the house, they had gone too far they know they had, there was no turning back, this had reached the damage limitation stage, this could only get worse to cover up what they had already done.
As people began looking out of the windows of neighbouring houses my captors, realising they weren't going to get me in the house, panicked and ran back into the house then out again and up the street. People came running out of their houses to help me. For a moment I felt an amazing relief that they had gone, but I knew this was short lived, I was laid on the street in a pool of blood with both my legs shattered outside my house that had every single room in it stacked with thousands of pounds worth of stolen goods and half the cities police and medics on its way.
You didn't need to be an eastern religious philosopher to know that perhaps Id just been dealt a bad hand of karma. I knew as they ran up the street this wasn't the end but more like the beginning and things were going to get much worse before they began.
This had all started much earlier when I met one of my captors Manny. We met through a friend, who's house we would both congregate at to take drugs. Manny who was ten years my senior at first didn't like me, we used argue all the time, he didn't like this young arrogant lad with quick tongue who could make him look bad. But in time we worked together and he realised I was good at making money, I came up with good plans and had balls to pull them off. It was a mutual arrangement as Manny had quite a good car which could get me around to execute my plans, and he was quite handy with his fists which meant I could go about my daily business of ripping people off without having to suffer any violent consequences. Over the time I saw him turn on quite a few people, he could be friendly one minute than snap and seriously hurt someone, it was never me, however I had met people like this before and I knew if you stayed around them, eventually your time would come and you would be on the receiving end.
He had a nice house and his wife had a nice sports car, which she couldn't park near the shop that she managed because it would get broken into so Manny would drive her to work drop her off then have the car all day. It was very useful because we could get all over the place committing crimes anywhere we wanted, plus it looked nice so didn't draw attention to us. We made a lot of money for minimum risk for some time.
Though it all came to an end when his old friend Alex was released from prison after a long prison sentence for robberies.
Alex was a small stocky guy with a slightly too well groomed pony tail, he took the small man syndrome to new level and had a definite chip on his shoulder which had only been hardened by the long sentences he had served. He had different views to me, and wasn't about to be told otherwise by some one as young as me. He thought he was a proper criminal as he had spent so long in prison and was more into the more serious crime that gave better returns though if you caught as he seemed to be you would be dealt with harshly. Prison has an internal status style pecking order based on the crime you are in there for, the more severe the crime the higher up you were, this moulded criminals into only committing these more severe crimes upon their release, almost seeing a return to prison as inevitable and therefore looking to increase their social standing within the criminal classes. To me, I had no interest climbing the prison corporate ladder, being looked up to and respected by a bunch of inmates who would stitch you up as soon as look at you had no appeal to me. I mean if they were so good at crime why were they always locked up. They had spent so much time in side they had barely even committed any crime. Anyway Alex's release was the beginning of the end for my partnership in crime with Manny. They began committing burglaries on a night time, the only reason I remained of any use to them was because I rented a room in a large empty house that was perfect for storing stolen goods. The house I was living in was perfect I rented a room off a local thug name Dean Thorne not a man to be crossed, it was some kind of fraudulent affair I believe he was claiming rent money off the government for renting the other rooms to imaginary tenants, I never quite got to find out exactly what scam he was running but it was probably best I didn't Alex and Manny soon started turning up with cars full of stolen good from houses and sorted me out for keeping the stuff at my house, they would occasionally return to pick up goods to sell, but they seemed to be stealing more than they were selling, quickly the house was rapidly filling with goods and soon the high performance cars they were turning up in with were also stolen from the same houses and with the keys, these also started to litter the once empty parking spots of my road. As my earning spree through the day started to tail off with Manny, I began to waken every morning with the sickness of the drug withdrawal taking its toll and with no way of earning any money, It didn't help to be surrounded by thousands of pounds of stolen goods. At first I would take small amounts nothing too significant, hoping they wouldn't notice. I didn't see them for weeks but they were still dropping goods off when I was out because every time I came back, there were more goods. Eventually what I took was getting out of hands as I began to take larger items. Life was momentarily good, I would wake up, phone a taxi grab a couple of video players go sell them, buy my drugs then return back, even the Pakistani taxi drivers that gave me a lift started buying bits off me, I would bring them into the house open up a cupboard door and say take your pick, before I knew it they would be back with their friends also wanting a great deal. All good things have to come to an end they say and they surely did.
The night of my down fall started off like any other, after a particularly easy day I left my dealers house on the estate the other side of town. I had become by now well known to the local police, not just the beat coppers but also the local plain clothed drug squad and higher level detectives. They knew that nearly all of my day revolved around drugs or crimes to fund drugs, so they knew if they every saw me the chances of catching me doing something I shouldn't or in possession of something illegal were high. If they caught me with the smallest amount of drugs they knew they could lock me in the cells whilst my sickness worsened so they could try and prize information out of me due to my weakened state or search where ever I was living in the hopes of finding something even more incriminating. This made travelling too and from my dealers house with drugs a cautious journey. Although buying a large amount off the dealer , he only had it in small wrapped deals which made it difficult to conceal. I decided to place each wrap between my fingers, so if I was stopped I could lift my heads above my head with my hands open but with my fingers pressed together so it appear my hands where open and empty as they searched my clothes. I even did a practise run in the entrance of the dealers before I walked away. My pre-planning and practise run were not to go to waste as within ten minutes of walking down the road that all too familiar unmarked police car pulled up. It was the usual two CID detectives who always seemed to turn up everywhere. The older one was a bald man with a thick moustache that only law enforcement or military men seemed to have, he had been around the block enough times to have seen almost everything and had been hardened by it all, his general belief in human nature was not a good one as he had seen the depths of human depravity time and time again. His partner was much younger and more active, fit looking not that much older than me and a face that wouldn't look out of place on a policeman or a criminal. He always tried to relate to me, as I suppose he wasn't much older, maybe if things in life had been only been slightly different we could have almost traded positions maybe. Any way they gave me the usual questions as they began to search me, as I had already planned I held my hands above me in a slightly cupped but open fashion as me fingers pressed together holding in place the wraps. My heart beat hard and I did everything to calm my voice and not give anything away as I talked to them. A combination of training and experience had made them very perceptive of human behaviour and how it unconditionally gave away things about the individual, which would make them step up, there search. Eventually they found nothing and jumped in their cars and drove away. I felt relived and almost cocky as I had got one over on them as I strolled down the road. However if they had of found the drugs on my, they would have arrested me taken me in, then gone to my house to search it, finding Manny and Alex, who unknown to me where waiting in my house for me, surrounded by stolen goods, then the events of the evening that would later unfold would never happen. I would have been convicted of possession of drugs and handling of stolen goods and and would have thought it had been a bad night, however I would never of known how lucky id been. This wasn't to happen however as they didn't catch me and instead I skipped home to my house of horrors.
As I walked through my front door I sensed something was right, there were pieces of wood next to the front door and the lights were on upstairs, as I walked into my room Alex and Manny were waiting there faces looked angry. Manny ran down stairs and began boarding the door up with the wood as Alex picked up a wooden bat and started screaming at me asking where his stuff was. Manny ran up and they both began saying the same. I began to lie saying someone else must have taken the goods but they didn't belie me, Alex began to swing the piece of wood at me with all his force as Manny punched and kicked at me as Id seen him do to so many others in the past. In a panic my body's natural reflexes began to kick in as I cowered and flayed my arms to minimise the blows to my body, I dint feel the punches and kicks but as the wood bat struck me each time I felt cold pain in each point. As he kept hitting me with it the pain from the previous hits didn't go away but was merely added to as it repeatedly connected with my head and body. As the blows continued I managed to squeeze in a corner between the wall and a large wardrobe, it meant I was completely trapped but limited the directions in which blows could be directed at me. Now they could only come from the front and they fumbled with each other as they tried to strike me at the same time, however the amount of room only allowed one to hit me at a time. Alex could also no longer swing the wood at me to gain momentum as he struck me and could only raise the wood into the air then bring it crashing down on me. He was aiming for my head with all his force I remember thinking he is trying to kill me and this is way over the top for taking a few of his things that he had already stolen. The attack went on for some time, I held my forearms above my head to block the blows from the wood, I looked at my forearms and they were swollen already like balloons in severe pain but yet I held them there above my head. When I thought it would never end they both stepped back out of breathe, there attack had been so vicious and sustained they literally couldn't continue. Alex sat on the bed and lit a cigarette and looked at me. Manny lit a cigarette and said when he had finished smoking this I had better tell them the truth as he was going to fuck me up. I continued to lie, what else could I do the stuff was gone I couldn't get it back, what was going to happen if I confessed I would just give them more justification to continue to fuck me up. My entire body was racked with pain, my eyes flickered around the room as my mind working on over time tried to think of a way I was going to get out of this. I looked at the window and thought I just going to have to get out of here one way or another. I'm going to have to jump through the window, but the glass would cut me to shreds I must break it. Alex was sat smoking, sneering at me talking aggressively. I walked over to the small portable black and white TV and began to unplug it. Alex looked at me mockingly as though I was going to try and give him the TV as some kind of compensation even though it was worse less that the plug on the end of the lead. As I threw the television he knew I had taken control from him, and what happened now was up to me.
As I was driven up the road in the ambulance the gas I sucked on did nothing for my pain only allow my mind to drift occasionally from conscious thought. Like the true junkie I was the first thing I did was check that the drugs I had so easily managed to sneak past the police were still in my pocket despite being bounced around my house by two attackers and plunging two floors to the ground through my own bedroom window. It meant everything to me as in the depths of my pocket those little packets of pain relief sat undisturbed. All I could think of was that some time soon I would be able to take them and momentarily relieve myself from my present situation.
My legs weren't just broken they were shattered at both ankles with the two legs bones that join at the knee separated. The hospital staff worked through the night fixing my legs repositioning the bones and drilling them to position steel rods to fix the bones together permanently in place. As I woke up the next day the whole situation began to dawn on me as the pain from my legs began to take hold of my body. My whole body was battered and bruised and any movement caused great pain, the palms of my hands were cut to shreds from the glass and had fresh stitches all over them, despite the pain I had to see my legs, I had to see what I had done to them, and what I needed to do to them. The pain was unbearable as I pulled away the blankets, my legs were purple and along the front of them were two long cuts with the excess skin from either side pulled together tightly then held together by a long row of metal staples, from the wounds protruded two large tubes with drew away the excess blood and bodily fluid and ran it into two bags suspended next to the bed with a brown reddy fluid already gathering inside. They had put me on methadone to ease the withdrawal symptoms which seemed to take away the withdrawal feelings but without the pain eliminating or euphoric feelings. My senses again felt exposed to my unforgiving surroundings, I just wanted to curl up and hide from the world but instead I was laid on a bed in a very busy ward surround by people and I was unable to move.
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