Catch a burning star

Dermot loved Mary, wild Irish pair they were, so much courage and heroin between them the prison system couldn’t cope. Dermot would smuggle drugs into Holloway when he visited her, God knows how because the officers knew who he was. She escaped once, jumping off the chapel roof and sliding down a wall. Another time they were banged up together in a jail in Jersey; it was awful, he said, no relief from each other and no one to bring them any gear.

Mary is dead now. Dermot doesn’t think he has long himself. He is bitter about that; about what happened 40 years ago in the children’s home in Dublin; about the way the police kicked off his door one night on some fool’s errand and the council still haven’t repaired it and he’s been away in prison for three months in the meantime. He came back and there it was, hanging off its hinges. Luckily he’s got nothing to steal.

He won’t conform, but he’ll belong—popular in prison, popular in probation, every con you meet knows Dermot. But the only relationships he’s ever been loyal to were the gear and Mary, and the two sort of fused in the end.

When my wife Emma met him in Pentonville during that last stretch she knew she’d found a star. He would spring to his feet to tell a story with such a graceful ungainliness, such a watchable confidence; but nothing of the show-off. He wore the same ancient jumper every day, and 1970s slacks; he looked like he’d just stepped out of old news footage of Bloody Sunday. In the street you’d miss him completely.

We doubted he’d manage to learn a part, let alone play it—30 years on the brown and his memory so wrecked. But he did: he took the main part in a play we did with ex-prisoners from Pentonville; one of the governors came to see it and she couldn’t believe what Dermot had done.

“I told you I’d do it,” said Dermot to Emma, “I told you I wouldn’t let you down.” And, “that was the best thing I’ve done in my life.” We haven’t seen him since the end of the project. He didn’t show up for the celebration lunch the following week, or for our member dinners. He answers the phone sometimes but he’s not on the radar right now. His son is a pilot, very proud of that he is, maybe he got him a ticket somewhere nice.

You lose some.