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against the window staring down at the runway as we took off. Each passing minute was putting me more on edge. Was Reid right? Had I prepared enough? Could I handle this? Would I get stabbed to death the first time I went to the showers – or maybe they’d wait till I fell asleep in my bed? I’d been angry with Reid for voicing his concerns, but only because they were my own.
    Many years before, when I had been fighting the extradition and fearing the worst, I had signed myself up on a positive-thinking course called MindStore, run by a Glaswegian called Jack Black. Being run by a fellow Glaswegian gave the course an edge of realism I had failed to find in management or lifestyle courses run by Americans – Jack Black was down to earth, relating his coping techniques to everyday events in a ‘normal’ person’s life. He didn’t cover the topic ‘What To Do If You’re Being Extradited’, but I took a lot from the course and the books he recommended. I’d used some of his ideas when preparing for prison in Houston. My mum had always taught me when you had a difficult decision, or something was daunting, to take a blank sheet of paper and write it all down. Jack Black had taken this to a whole new level, more a form of mind-mapping, not simple lines of positives and negative columns. He’d use shapes and colours, arrows, highlighters – anything that would help you get a ‘feel’ for the problem. And this was one problem I needed to get a feel for. So one day, a few months before that final journey to jail, I got up and chose to deal with the problem in front of me. The problem was: I was going to prison.
    I sat in silence at my kitchen table in Houston with just blank sheets of paper and some coloured felt-tip pens. In the centre of the page, I wrote one word: PRISON. Using a red pen, I then wrote out all the words that held my deepest, darkest fears. I ‘brainstormed’ – or more accurately ‘brain-dumped’. Not asking why or how I came up with these words, I just wrote them out in bold, clear, red letters as they came to me. First of all I wrote ‘rape’, my number one fear. I really didn’t want to be raped. Then number two, ‘buggery’; pretty much the same as number one, but a bit more specific. ‘Shagged’. Very similar to number one and with a striking resemblance to number two, but these were just the words coming out and I went with the flow. Shagged, raped and buggered – decent scores in a Scrabble game, but not so great otherwise. And then number four: ‘darkness’. Would I be in darkness at night in the cells? How would I even begin to cope with that, especially if it came hard on the heels of an afternoon spent being raped, shagged and buggered? Then I wrote ‘buggery’ again (I’m not sure why), then ‘violence’, ‘darkness’, ‘murder’, ‘extortion’, ‘blackmail’, ‘bitch’, ‘knives’, ‘death’, ‘gangs’, ‘gang rape’. The words just poured out, often repeated. I didn’t know why, but each one more frightening than the last. I stopped and looked silently at the bright red pen against the pristine white paper. I was breathing heavily. A pretty depressing list, and yet it had helped to write it down. It was all there now, previously unspoken, but at least now acknowledged. And confirmation, if I needed it, that I was justified in being terrified.
    Next, in blue, I wrote out the other problems I faced – not so life-threatening, but problems nevertheless. First came boredom, then loneliness, fear, discomfort, then loss of choice. I drew branches out from these in green and got more specific. Little or no contact with Calum, or with Julie, or with the rest of my family. How would I survive that? Further away than ever from Cara. Would I ever find her? I’d made so little progress on her case. Perhaps the trail would go completely cold? No visits. Infrequent and short phone calls, if any. Long periods locked alone in a cell. No exercise. Poor diet.