O My Days

by David Mathew

  Allow it, blood. Apparently, man’s screams could be heard from A Wing to the motherfucking Bricks Workshop.

  When what?

  When man, says Ostrich, tell him to squat, and then man see the cord and give it a playful yank. Like giving birth, rudeboy, through your rectum.

  Heinous.

  Allow it. But imagine. He spits a guffaw. If it’s Mr and Mrs Smith. Mrs Smith is behind him, reminding fam what fucking time it is, and then the phone goes off inside blood’s intestine.

  We laugh.

  Is that for you? I bust a chuckle.

  Tell the motherfucker I’m busy, Ostrich elaborates.

  He’s bumping his purple against technology, I tell him.

  Leave the room, Ostrich is told.

  It’s the same as now—in the Cookery Room: something is being hidden. I don’t like it. Something small inside something larger. A case of chicken escalations, once again. Shit always starts midget. Then expands. I’m not laughing now. I am terrified. I am risking a lot.

  Getting up to leave the room, I turn to Kate Thistle. How well do you know Dott on F Wing? I ask, and with effort I keep my gaze on her face.

  She retains her composure. I don’t know what you mean.

  With respect, Miss, I think you do. He certainly knows you.

  Governor Mannidge pipes in: What the fuck has that got to do with this, Alfreth? He is perched on the room’s one stool, for the old guy teacher.

  I tell him that I’m not entirely certain. This is not chatting shit.

  Questions will follow, Alfreth, Mannidge informs me.

  Indeed they will, sir, I tell him. Such as why this interview has been conducted in a classroom and not in your Adjudication Suite. Which does not exactly fill me with confidence, sir.

  Watch it, Alfreth.

  But I’m in my full flow, four-cylinder.

  What I’d really like to know is, why the change of location? If this is a disciplinary, sir, then please discipline me. Even if I’ve done nothing wrong. And if it’s not, please inform me of what precisely is going on. Is that fair, sir?

  I expect a comment along the lines of what a cheeky swine I’ve been.

  Mannidge says, Fair enough, Alfreth. And then I’m led back to my pad.

  Eight.

  Morning, Billy.

  Kate Thistle acts as if nothing but ghosts and ash have passed her way. The dislike I feel for her and for this reason is intense. Fuckable bitch or not.

  Good morning, Kate, I return. Any more interviews for me?

  The Library Manager looks up from the wishing well of her computer screen. Her smile is of a sated state. She is relieved that we’re not getting on. Intrigued by what I mean by interview. The remark goes unmentioned. I am sent, with my fluorescent sack, on my Wing duties. I am calmly aware of Dott’s TV guide inside the sack. You don’t do it in order but sooner or later you get to Puppydog Wing. And Dott’s cell. I’m just about to push the publication under his door, when I hear:

  Open the flap, Alfreth.

  Though distinctly repelled to the notion of a direct command, I grudgingly do so. I give him a Wogwun and I try to slake my fears. The pussy is shaving his oxters in front of me.

  What time is it? Dott asks.

  About ten. Blood, you could stop doing that for thirty seconds, yat.

  Yeah I could. It’s ten-fourteen, he says, still looking into the mirror. And thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four seconds. He has not consulted a clock.

  Then why’d you fucking ask me, dickhead?

  It’s like the song says, he replies. I’m just checking you out. I’m just making sure. The raised eyebrow that he now offers me is like an arrow. It goes through the flap-glass and straight into my eyes.

  What fucking song, cunt?

  Before your time, he tells me. It was in the 70s. Billy Joel, Billy Alfreth. With which he turns back to the mirror and raises his left arm.

  Dickhead, I repeat. I slam shut the metal flap.

  The previous night I watched a documentary about wildlife. An alligator swallowed a baby deer. Right now, he’s the alligator. I’m the deer, I feel.

  Oh, Alfreth, he calls out.

  What do you want? I ask. Against my better instincts, I open up the flap. He is there: eyes to the glass. It disturbs me something peculiar.

  A message, he says, for Kate Thistle. If you don’t mind relaying it on my behalf. Just tell her: Don’t try it. She’s nowhere near as smart as she thinks and I’ve left smarter women than her in a city car park. Bleeding from internal injuries and wondering what the hell they’ve done to deserve me.

  Ignoring the puffed-up hubris, I reply: Try what?

  Those silly mind games. They won’t work.

  I’ll tell her, I confirm. If you tell me what you mean.

  She knows what I mean. Ask her; you might get lucky enough for a response. Alfreth, do you know that a bee can only sting once—then it dies.

  I’m thrown off-balance by the question. I’ve heard something of that nature, I answer.

  Unlucky for some, no? he says. Wasps get greedy. I frown and ask him what he’s been smoking.

  I’m the wasp, Billy. You’re the bee.

  I wait for a second, churning that one over, like a cow chewing grass. And then he drops what is to be another bombshell.

  Forget about alligators and deer, he tells me, and turns away.

  I’m shaking so much—that noisy kind of shaking that makes you forget where you are for a few seconds—that I don’t hear Screw Jones mount the stairs to this landing. He has to say my name a second time before I hear him.

  Stop talking to your boyfriend. It’s time for his afternoon wank.

  Yes, sir.

  I heard that, sir, Dott shouts. The closing of the flap clips his voice off.

  How has the man read my mind?

  What are you doing? Jones asks. Proposing marriage or summing? Get the fuck down those stairs and on your way.

  Yes, sir, I reply.

  Little queer that you are, Jones adds, fishing for an argument.

  Yes, sir, is all that I’ll give him.

  For the next two weeks I don’t see Dott. He is down block for a punishment: he has damaged Jones’s left cheekbone with his toilet seat.

  Nine.

  I dream about Dott. We are sailing some endless waters. Up ahead, squalls; there are sharks in the water and octopi waving for attention. I have on a pirate’s hat. I am the captain of a voyage that feels like pain, and I am carrying a cutlass and I’m chewing tobacco. The waters drain away. We are sailing through the graveyard that rumour has it exists to the south end of Dellacotte Young Offenders. As the ship ploughs the land, the ghosts of the prisoners who were hanged here rise up like gusts of mist and genie-smelling wraiths. The ghosts start dancing. In the dream, Dott is the ship. It’s even called The Little Dot.

  When I wake up I don’t want my cereal. I ask to go to Health Care but I’m told to put up and shut up. Not even the sweat on my body is convincing. Further dreams follow—increasingly horrific—for the next fourteen days or so. I serve bird in the sub-jail of my own fevered imagination. The riven ground now offers up, not ghosts, but the rotten remains of the hanged themselves. In reality those dead will be pale as a nun’s tits; in my dreams they hug their own flesh to their brown bones like mugging victims clutching their handbags and purses. Or their knife wounds. The dead walk towards me. The dead steal parcels of loose skin and muscle from each other. The dead meet me for a pow-wow in the Cookery Room.

  Why have you found me? I ask in one dream. Why are you here?

  Because, answers one, the bone of his jaw quickly slipping away from the remainder of his skull, like an O.G. sucking back a set of dentures, we don’t want to be in the ground anymore. We’ve done our time.

  Part Three:

&nb
sp; A Million Years of Bee-Stings

  One.

  Ostrich is waxing lyrical, once again, about the benefits of Big Man Jail.

  None of this bullshit, he is saying, about once-a-week Sosh, bloodfam. He is irate. Man a big man? Sosh automatic, blood. Swear down.

  It’s still a prison, bruv, I inform him—as though the cunt’s an imbecile.

  My mind is on other things—on Dott, specifically—but I’m drifting. At first I notice that Ostrich hasn’t noticed that I’m noticing something other than his overused opinion on the relative benefits of YOIs and Big Man Jails. I don’t know what it is, but I want to talk to Dott.

  Allow it. But none of this softly-softly magic. Regular Visits.

  Though I’m not entirely sure what Ostrich means by ‘softly-softly magic’—there’s not much suppressed around here, and for sure nothing softly—I nod my head in agreement. I want to return to my pad and think quietly. Ostrich is having none of it. Regular Gym, regular Cookery Class. It’s a privilege you earn, whether you want it or not, on becoming friends with a yoot in a prison: the privilege of compulsory ear-lending. To leave Ostrich now is a sin, now that he’s on a roll. Nevertheless. Change the CD, I’m thinking.

  It’s back on, I tell him. As of a.s.a.p.

  This brightens the man’s mood. Allow it, fam, he says.

  You see the new yoot? The what’s-his-name, Marris. On Induction now innit.

  It disturbs me slightly that I’ve been so preoccupied that I have all but overlooked the arrival of a new prisoner. I’m aware of the background, vaguely, but that’s about it. Even the name rings unfamiliar.

  What he get? I ask Ostrich.

  Eighteen do nine.

  This sounds harsh. You’re dropping that on me? I want to confirm.

  Swear down, blood. Already tired of the subject, Ostrich spits out a slimy string of snot; he’s getting a cold. But fuck him. Man’s a waste.

  It’s a most peculiar evening. It’s only now, this evening, when everything seems chaotic—like a ball of random shoelaces being violently unpicked, with yoots dusting from one pocket, one clique, one landing, to the next—that I realise Association Time is usually much more structured. Disregarding the occasional fireworks, of course. Forgetting the sporadic pool cue to cranium scenarios. For no reason at all, or at least for no reason that’s immediately obvious, I find myself thinking of swallows in flight. Is it swallows? The ones that seem to go haywire in the air—go nuts—but you don’t worry too much (or at all) because they all know the codes and the map. The same as in a beehive. The same as in a wasps’ nest. We all have a role and a function—and a price. But bees can only sting once, Dott reminds me, and wasps can bang and bang in their papery home.

  I’ve finished rolling a burn. Bust me a lighter, I say to Ostrich.

  He’s smiling. Hustle me harder, he replies.

  Please bust me a lighter.

  Spoken like a true gentleman innit.

  For a few seconds we pull on our burns, probably both relieved that a comfortable silence has settled between us. We’re getting more like an old married couple every day—a marriage that has lasted four or five decades. Forty years of food on the table at six. Forty years of finishing each other’s sentences. Forty years of slippers and milky drinks and early nights. Becoming comfy is not such a good thing, still. Screws notice that shit and they don’t like it. In order to avoid getting shipped out to a different Wing—one of us—we’re going to have to engineer some beef pretty soon. Among ourselves. Maybe even a swing, still. Man comfortable, way it goes; man don’t want to move pad. So only a war of words will convince the screws that we’re not exactly knitting woollen booties for our children’s children, yat. We’re not ready for the shared grave. For they like to keep us tense: tension they can monitor on paper; they can control. Happiness, not. We’ve discussed this. One day, with malice aforethought but no malice intended, one or other of us is going to accuse the other of something. In good grace we’ll take the nickings and the time spent down block. We’ll each lose a few points on our Wing files—I might even lose my Redband, but only briefly: fights are dick, everyone knows it—but we’ll be able to share Sosh for a good while longer. I’m tempted to swing him right now, when he says:

  The news ain’t out. What happen to Roller and Meaney?

  I sizzle out my burn in the wet sand in the ashtrays provided. Down to Basic, I tell Ostrich. No TV. No fucking visits. Depriving man of rights, innit.

  They had it coming, Ostrich tells me dismissively.

  What do you mean? It was beef, blood.

  We all do it. From time to time, he expands.

  It’s as though he’s been reading my mind.

  The news is out that the fight started over a shared colander that both men wanted at the same time. And it don’t explain the kissing.

  Straight, I concede.

  No one is speaking to Roller and Meaney, of course; they’ll be spending a further few days minimum going through the cold turkey of conversation withdrawal. The overall opinion seems to be that Meaney has come off worst due to Roller’s unprovoked attack and is already sporting a bruise like a sunset on his left orbit. To balance things out, and for fairness in the light of the fact that Cookery has been cancelled—although not for as long as anyone imagined it would be—Roller has found himself some new abrasions to trace with his fingertips in the small hours: left temple, lower jaw. Perhaps I’m desperate, perhaps I’m dumb, but I decide to allow Ostrich into the inner sanctums of some of my thoughts about Dott.

  That yoot the new fish. What do you really know?

  The question foxes the man. Has time gone all twisted? he asks. Don’t man just have this conversation?

  Not Marris. I mean Dott.

  Okay, he says slowly. What do you need to know?

  I’ve only got what I read in the papers.

  Well, same here, rudeboy. Why does man wanna know?

  My face, I suppose, is contorted with confusion.

  There’s a lot of damage out for the cuz, I say to Ostrich. On Puppydog. I want to know why.

  Ostrich laughs. Just possibly because of his crimes? he asks.

  Nar. More serious than that, blood. Not beef on road. Not the crime—we’re talking Puppydog Wing, fuck’s sake; they’re all eligible for electrocution, cuz. Nar. It’s something else, something local.

  Man have no idea, says Ostrich, and even less inclination to find out.

  Allow it.

  You can’t force a man to have an interest in something, but you can’t force him not to either. We all need a hobby. And knowing it’s going to make me seem perverse but I’m going to be the only one who wants to speak to Roller, to Meaney; and the only one who wants to speak to Dott.

  Assaulting Ostrich might be a solution to two problems.

  Two.

  So what’s the word about me, Billy?

  The question is aimed at my back: I am stacking the shelves marked Quick Reads—the bowdlerized versions of the classics, for the div kids with learning impediments.

  The word, Miss? I call over my shoulder.

  Yes, Billy, the word. I’ve been here a good few weeks now. And I know how you fellows talk among yourselves… What’s so funny?’

  Miss, I ain’t heard fellows in time. I pretend to take an inordinate interest the diet-down version of David Copperfield.

  That can’t be true. The guards say it every day, Kate Thistle replies.

  With a smile on my face I turn to her. She is sitting behind the desk, her fingers poised on the keyboard.

  One, Miss: it’s officers and not guards. And two: they say fellas and not fellows. Say fellows in here and you’re likely to be mocked at the very least.

  Thanks for the tip, Kate replies.

  If nothing else, she is gracious enough in defeat—even if the victory is hardly worth menti
oning, if not for the conversation that follows. I see some mileage from her question.

  Trade down, I suggest.

  The relay of rapid blinks that she offers implies a quick-lit fuse of thought and repercussion. But we’ve already established something of a wary understanding; we have started to engage in conversations when Miss Patterson is out of the room, as she is right now, on a comfort break. Like boyfriend and girlfriend caught in coochy-coo conversation by teacher, we close our mouths when the door handle turns: therefore we have a secret. Therefore we have a bond.

  What are you proposing? Kate asks.

  I will tell you, I say carefully, slowly, holding the rest of the Quick Reads in front of my chest like a shield. Might be I look like confidence itself, but there’s an echo in my chest that sounds like an Electrolux. I’ll tell you what man saying about you, Miss—if you tell me why you’re studying Dott.

  She’s not shocked; she’s not offended. Worse still, she’s not confused. Up until the very last syllable I’ve been hoping— somehow—that I’ve got it all wrong; wishing for a puzzled expression.

  You first, she says.

  I tell her straight: We think you’re a fed.

  And that’s when the Library door opens. In walks Miss Patterson, snapping shut the conversation between me and Kate. It’s like being caught red-handed. For a second that copper is banging on my yard again. And Mum’s screaming: It wasn’t him. It wunt my boy. Please don’t take him away. My sisters are standing behind Mumsy. He’s a good boy, Mum’s shouting. And I can’t believe I’ve been caught; I can’t believe my mother’s defence, despite what I’ve done.

  So angry am I at this interruption, this torn circumstance, that I spit the first thing that comes to mind.

  I’m just filling up the shelves, Miss, I say—too quickly.

  That look of perplexity I hoped for on Kate’s face, is here now on Miss Patterson’s features. I can see that, Alfreth, she tells me. She turns to Kate and asks her if everything is all right. Phoney smile follows. If we ever had it in the first place, I get the impression that we have just lost the Librarian’s trust. It creates a certain sense of irreparable loss. But then, life’s full of disappointments. Innit?