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    Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing
    Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing
    Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing
    Ebook66 pages49 minutes

    Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing

    By Andy Croft

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    About this ebook

    Barry is looking forward to his first weekend on the out. Free at last!
    He has nothing to lose but his £46 discharge grant, a bag of dirty washing, and all the promises he has made to himself in prison…
    You can find out what happens to Barry next in the sequel to this book, Bare Freedom also by Andy Croft.
    This book is particularly suitable for adults who want to improve their reading skills. It includes ‘What do you think?’ questions at the end of each chapter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSPCK
    Release dateMay 15, 2014
    ISBN9781908713162
    Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing
    Author

    Andy Croft

    Andy Croft has written over forty non-fiction books (mostly about football) and four novels for teenagers. He has also written nine books of poetry and edited many poetry anthologies. Dead Wood is his second title for A & C Black's Wired series.

    Read more from Andy Croft

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      Book preview

      Forty-Six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing - Andy Croft

      1

      Freedom

      Barry was grinning like an idiot. Today was going to be brilliant. How could it not be? He was a free man. Free at last!

      Anything could happen today. He could do anything he wanted. And whatever he did would be brilliant, because it would be his choice. He had been allowed so few choices for so long. And now he could choose anything on the menu. The right to make decisions felt like an under-used muscle. He needed to start exercising it. Bring it on!

      He felt the warm sunshine on his face as he stared out of the window at the unfamiliar landscape of flat fields and straight roads. The bus was passing through small villages whose names he didn’t know. It was funny to think that he had lived just down the road for so long. The people getting on and off the bus had been his neighbours. But he had never met them. They didn’t know his name. And now he was suddenly leaving without saying goodbye.

      The roads were busy. Barry had never seen so many SUVs before. People were going to work. Taking their kids to school. Going shopping. Running. Walking their dogs. All the ordinary things that other people did every day. As they passed a primary school he watched a man bend down to tie his son’s shoelaces. The little boy looked up and waved at the bus. Barry started to wave back, then he stopped, embarrassed.

      He suddenly felt like a stranger. All the years he had been in prison, these people had been getting on with their lives. Growing up, getting jobs, falling in love, having children, falling out of love. Meanwhile his life had been on hold. It was like someone had pressed the Pause button on the video of his life. And now they had suddenly pressed Play. Not for the first time in his life, Barry wished he could find the Rewind button.

      A woman got on the bus and sat down opposite him. She was a bit old for Barry, but she had nice legs. He could smell her perfume. He tried to imagine her life. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Did she have children? Was she happy? Had someone told her they loved her this morning? He hoped so.

      Barry smiled at the woman, but she looked away. He knew what she was thinking. It must be obvious. His clothes for one thing. The plastic bag of washing for another. And of course prison had its own special perfume. Chips, paint, floor polish and fags. The lad in the laundry had washed Barry’s clothes last night, and this morning he had begged a bit of aftershave from Gaz. But he knew it would take a long time to wash the smell of prison out of his skin.

      Right now the lads would be in the workshops. Mo would be doing his Toe-by-Toe in Education. Gaz would be sorting out the books that had come into the library last night. Mr Banks would be arguing with someone about last night’s football. He grinned at the memory of the men with whom he had shared so much time.

      It was strange to think that he wouldn’t see them any more. It was even stranger to think that they were all still there, while he was out. Here he was on a bus, trying not to stare at the legs of the woman opposite, and they were still stuck inside the machine.

      They said that a good prison worked like clockwork. But then prison was like a huge clock. Everyone inside was just a tooth on a cog on a wheel. Serving time. Doing time. Wasting time. Most of the lads inside, Barry included, had wasted their time before they went to prison. And what was their punishment? To waste even more time. Watching daytime TV, staring out of the window, dreaming of fast cars, fast bucks and a quick leg-over. It didn’t make any sense.

      Barry had grown up on this last sentence. He was no longer the daft lad he

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