solitary

When you've spent 16 years in jail for murder and emerge as a drug- addicted timebomb, just how do you fit back into society? Writer Hugh Collins opens up about heroin, guilt, love and a life where he is still locked in the prison of his own mind

THE man once billed Scotland's most dangerous prisoner pours himself a coffee and wanders over to an armchair in the living room of his studio flat. As he sits down, his vision becomes blurred, then everything goes black and he collapses on the floor. Regaining consciousness a few minutes later, Hugh Collins is bewildered and scared, unsure what has caused him to lose control.

In the following days, he imagines the worst. He has a brain tumour. He has weeks to live. He is finally getting his reward for taking the life of his gangland rival William Mooney more than two decades before.

Sitting in a darkened corner of his favourite Edinburgh bistro a year after his black-out, Collins smiles wryly at his reaction to what he later discovered was a panic attack. He realised the truth when he saw the lead character in the American mafia drama The Sopranos go through the same experience.

"I took a coffee and fell off the chair, couldn't focus," Collins says. "It lasted 15 minutes. My ma had had a brain haemorrhage, and I was convinced I had a brain tumour. There was a side of me going, 'Ah well, rob a bank, quick'. I thought panic attacks were breathlessness and hyperventilating, but I conked out. When I saw The Sopranos, I thought, 'That's what happened to me'."

Seven years after Collins emerged from a 16-year prison sentence for Mooney's murder, he is determined to dispel the image of the hard man manufactured by Hollywood, in films from Scarface to The Godfather. The reality of the male ex-lifer is far less impressive - he is likely to be a nervous wreck, almost certain to return to violence. Forget Tony Montana, Tony Soprano is much closer to the mark.

"He's the nearest I've seen to the truth," says Collins. "What he displays is really what the criminal world is like. You're sitting with your heid nipping going, f**k, I've done this and I've got to deal with this, and it's the constant nightmares ... I know a few guys I've grown up with who've all experienced the same things, the pain across their chest. When you're younger, you think you're tough. As you get older, the stress you've been living through catches up on you."

Fifty-year-old Collins is speaking about the reality of being an ex-lifer days before the the second instalment of his autobiography is published. Three years after HarperCollins paid a #25,000 advance for his critically-acclaimed first book, Autobiography Of A Murderer, Canongate is publishing Walking Away in its Rebel Inc imprint. And the small Edinburgh company's faith in Collins doesn't stop with its #7000 advance for his latest book. Next year it will publish Collins's first works of fiction - a trilogy of novels set in Glasgow's criminal world, and the story of an ex-lifer's struggle with his violent past and his religious beliefs.

Collins risks facing the same accusations hurled at him by the press when he published his first memoir - that he is exploiting his status as a murderer to make money. Having told the story of his childhood, the murder and his imprisonment in his debut book, Collins is resurrecting Mooney's memory again, this time in an account of life after prison.

Even though Collins has moved the story on, the dead man's ghost haunts the pages of the second book just as much as the first - Collins says Mooney was at his shoulder every day of writing it. "Wullie Mooney and I played with fire," he writes in Walking Away. "He got burned - I'm still burning."

Sitting before an untouched coffee, Collins explains that he wrote Walking Away for two reasons - political and personal. He wanted to expose the state many long-term prisoners are in when they emerge from the Scottish prison system, and to resolve his feelings about his family. Even so, days before the book is published, he has mixed feelings about having done it at all.

"I actually regret writing these two books," he says of his autobiographical double bill. "But I had to write them to try and make sense of my life. I'm no Harold Robbins or anything, and I hated writing those books, but I feel in Walking Away that I'm no' the callous murderer that the tabloids portrayed me as, and Wullie Mooney isnae just another thug in the gutter."

Besides Mooney, Collins had another ghost to exorcise in Walking Away - his unresolved relationship with mother, Betty Norrie, and his father, William Collins, who died two years ago. He dedicates the book to them, and uses it to pick over the emotional minefield created by what he once interpreted as their abandonment of him. Collins's mother handed her young son over to his paternal grandmother after his father began a ten-year sentence for his part in Glasgow's notorious razor gangs.

"This book was to try and make sense of my mother's life, my da's life," says Collins. "I thought my mother abandoned me when my da got the ten years - supposedly as a deterrent against razor slashings. She was just 17, 18. She went back to her parents' with me and they just closed the door on her and told her, 'You've made your bed, lie on it'. At that age, in these kind of communities, a single woman, an attractive looking woman, is a threat to married couples, so they get hounded out."

He continues in his unmistakably Glaswegian rapid-fire voice - which marks him out from the group of artists, lawyers and writers he socialises with in Edinburgh. "I've had a hatred towards her and my da. I thought I was their wee boy, they should have looked after me, but they were just 17, just young kids."

Collins now speaks about his parents with compassion, saying he regrets the years of fighting with his mother, who is frail after a brain haemorrhage and surgery. Even so, he has a difficult relationship with his family - he last saw his mother nine months ago.

He doesn't blame his parents for his violent past, even though he followed his father into the hard man role and then into prison, surpassing the older man's actions by crossing the line from slashings to murder. "I can't blame other people for what I've done - blame my parents, my granny or anyone else. I f**ked up, no one else."

Besides confronting his emotions about his parents, Walking Away is Collins's attempt to show how the Scottish prison system fails to rehabilitate offenders. It is five years since the Scottish Office closed the door on Barlinnie Special Unit, and its policy of trying to reform prisoners through creativity, discussion and therapy. Collins once had great faith in a regime that taught him to question his violent mentality, to sculpt and to write, but which he says was allowed to deteriorate into chaos before being abandoned. He is angry about the present system, which he believes brutalises lifers then spits them out into society.

Walking Away tells of how Collins emerged from prison a damaged and potentially violent man, addicted to drugs and desperate to escape his past. He was, he says, typical of other long-term prisoners who are propelled back into the community - a time bomb ready to detonate at any time.

The difference is that he had the luxury of a new life in Edinburgh, insulated from his Glasgow gangland roots, with a woman who loved him to help make the transition. Collins had met the artist Caroline McNairn in the now defunct 369 Gallery during day release from prison. She was attracted to him before she knew who he was, having watched him at work as a sculptor in the gallery, and stuck by him when he told about his past, which included attacking prison warders in retaliation for being beaten in jail. The couple married in 1993 and now live in a studio flat on the Royal Mile.

"When I stepped outside the jail, I'll be honest with you, I couldn't wait to get back in again," he says. "It freaked me out. I was just lucky I had Caroline. We've got a compatible relationship. We share the same interests, I still fancy her, I'm still in love with her. I'd break my heart if I lost her. That's what my values are all about now."

It hasn't been easy, though. McNairn watched Collins struggle to break a heroin habit and settle for a reliance on the pain killer temgesic instead, buying it from an ex-prisoner. He quit the drug only months ago.

"I came out a complete junkie. I was on heroin, temgesics," he says. "When I came out, I couldn't get access to them, so I hit the booze, then I became volatile." He adds: "Caroline was at risk from me. I was a volatile junkie."

He is candid about how useful temgesics were. Using the drug as a crutch, he could mix with Edinburgh's art set with confidence, and concentrate on carving a reputation as a writer and sculptor, albeit in the shadow of Jimmy Boyle, who was Collins's mentor in the Special Unit.

"Temgesics kept me away from the heroin and the booze," says Collins. "I got through a lot of writing when I was on them. I would get out and meet people without my nerves getting the better of me. The temgesics helped me put a front on - a front I knew couldn't go on the rest of my life."

His lowest point came when his latent violence erupted soon after his release. After being challenged by two bouncers in an Edinburgh bar during a heavy drinking session, he went back to the 369 Gallery where he and Caroline were living temporarily and strapped a knife to each wrist, intending to return to the bar. Walking in on the scene, McNairn tried to restrain him but during the struggle, fell against a window and shattered the glass. Collins admits if there hadn't been bars behind the panes, she could have crashed through, onto to the street below. Instead, she sustained minor cuts to her hands.

In Walking Away, he writes of his feelings on waking up the next morning in the studio, surrounded by broken furniture and ornaments, and realising what had happened. "How I haven't stabbed or injured her is a miracle. My head's throbbing blindly, my stomach feels queasy with that hollow burning feeling, but questions are surfacing in the hangover. What if the window hadn't been barred? What if she hadn't stopped me from getting out?"

He hasn't forgotten the shame he felt then, and on other occasions, when only his pride got hurt. "I smashed up a couple of studios," he says now. "Somebody would say something and the f**king rage would just come right up out my face. And then in the morning I was trying to hide from people. It was the embarrassment of it all."

Collins says he has learned to channel his anger into writing, and avoids situations that might re-ignite the violence within him. "Everybody is capable of killing," he says. "But I've killed and I'm aware of what causes it. So if I smell it coming, I run a f**king mile."

He is adamant that other ex-lifers might not be as able to avoid trouble. Since being released, Collins has helped five of them during their first weeks of freedom, including, most controversially, Archie McCafferty. Dubbed "Mad Dog" by the British press, McCafferty was repatriated to his native Scotland after serving 24 years in Australian prisons for the murder of three vagrants. Collins was criticised for befriending McCafferty and trying to involve him in the art world of Edinburgh.

Looking back, he admits he was out of his depth with McCafferty, who had a whole different league of problems from those Collins had experienced on release. The first was trying to live up to the Mad Dog label he had been given.

"He enjoys the identity they gave him, that's all he's got," says Collins, who no longer sees McCafferty. "I made the mistake of trying to take that away from him and guide him into the art world, but it's too heavy for people to take on."

Collins says he was sickened by the media reaction when McCafferty and his wife Mandy had a baby. "Archie's got a wee boy and the newspapers are calling him Mad Puppy. See if that had been me, I'd have f**king murdered the journalist that wrote that." Realising what he has just said, he pauses, aware that he can't use such a common figure of speech flippantly, at least not without others visibly flinching. He continues: "That guy's killed these people, now he's got to protect his son from that stuff. They're turning it into a joke."

Collins regrets that he hasn't had children of his own, speaking gently of the close relationship he has with his nephew, which forced him to reassess his priorities in life. "I've realised through my wee nephew that you need boundaries for kids - a father and mother, and an auntie and uncle, so you can bounce off each other and reinforce the boundaries. I fell in love with this wee boy and I feel responsible. I began to say, I do believe in law and order."

He insists, though, that the tabloid press would have made it impossible for he and McNairn to have a child. "I'd have loved to have kids," he says, "but can you imagine growing up in this country in this climate with me as his da?"

Collins lives every day with the label of murderer. He still dreams about Mooney's death and wrestles with guilt over the killing, but has never apologised for it. His logic is that the only person who has the right to forgive him is his victim.

"Jail protects you from grief," he says. "If you kill a guy you don't see the grief that his family goes through. You might see a tabloid, but you can avoid it. Or somebody in your family dies and you get taken to a graveyard in cuffs and straight back again, but you don't see the grieving process. I feel worse now that I ever did about killing Wullie Mooney.

"There's a side to me that still wants to be punished and that's the Catholic in me. When I go to bed I go, where's Wullie Mooney? Is that where I'm going?"

Collins wants to be recognised as a writer, not as a murderer desperate to make a quick buck out of his past. "I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. If they want me with a gun in my hand, no problem, but I'd rather try and earn a living and just be a normal guy."

He is angry at newspaper reports that he was enlisted as an expert panelist on Channel 5's docusoap Jailbreak, in which contestants attempt to escape a purpose built jail for a #100,000 prize. "Channel 5 approached me, but I knocked it back," he says. "Jailbreak trashes any idea of rehabilitation. It also overlooks victims' families. What are we doing turning crime into entertainment now? It trivialises it."

The books he is writing, whether fact or fiction, are different, he says. But he knows that ultimately, the reading public is his judge and jury Walking Away is published by Rebel Inc, #9.99

Copyright 2000
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