Thacker cut off his baby brother's forefinger. That was why they bought him to The Instution. His brother was two months old and his Mother already had another one on the way. When they asked him why he did it, he told us he couldn't look at the baby without picturing his parents going at it. He hoped the trauma would stop them from having any more. Some people had big reasons for being at The Unit, others just drifted in with the wind. We lost one to suicide after 9/11 and that's what brought me on to thinking about Armageddon. I wasn't going to die in that godforsaken place, oh no Siree. So I figured I'd tell you my version of events first. Before the papers, the people from my past, the psychoanalysists and criminal experts who think they know me so well. Lord knows it's been hard keeping silent when people think they have you all figured out.

I'd been in the Institution for two years and nobody really knew why. I played truant a lot in school but no more than most of the other kids from the sink estates. Only problem was, I didn’t come from a sink estate. I came from a typical 2.4 family with a house with no mortgage. My parents were older than my friends’ parents, and one of them is even pretty famous here inside Wales. He's a writer and won acclaim in his twenties for his novel 'Icarus Rising' - a story about a man and his son who build war machines together. Thirty years later a band even wrote a song about it. They won a major music award and my Dad became cool again for a while. There was even talk of a film with Christian Bale optioned to play Icarus. The local newspaper came over and interviewed him, so did some major publications but things went pretty quiet again after that. His second burst of fame cheered him up for a while but he fell back into his usual eunni once the fuss died down. He refuses to write now and used to tell me off when I started writing lyrics for my band (The Jilted Wanted) - 'Writing is the bastardization of life' became his mantra. I never really knew what he meant, well, until I came to the Instution and they started giving us writing therapy.

A PhD student from the local college called Tim used to come in and urge us to spill our guts on paper. Some of the girls thought he was really all that but it was only because there was a real lack of choice at the vicinity. To me he was the epitome of a plain oat, sort of indescribable, just like a drawn stick man kinda guy. Oh, and he had an Irish accent which made the girls here think he was edgy. I guess I don't need to say they didn't get out much. But anyway, he was all about feelings and getting them out of you. Mine were knotted up so deep inside me that I didn't know where to start. I refused to write in his lessons, and Staff thought this was hindering my recovery somehow, so I got put on isolation. In that time I came to the conclusion that my Dad was right. I'll tell you about that later mind, I don't want to preach to you before you've even decided if you like me yet.