O My Days

by David Mathew

  Kate Thistle and I are alone at last. It almost feels romantic. She looks me in the eyes. She places one hand on my thigh.

  We don’t have long, she tells me.

  Nine.

  I went there to heal my eyesight, Billy. Cause you know what they say: time healing everything and all that. So what? It’s a cliché. I buy that. And I bought it then as well, after that visit from the guy who wanted to sue the Oasis. I went out there. I was desperate, Billy, you have to understand that. But time heals everything, and I wanted the healing that time’s supposed to bring.

  My family and friends thought I’d gone insane. Trust me: these weren’t the days when it was normal for a single young woman to bugger off to the desert, with no plans that didn’t revolve around getting a suntan. I ignored them all; I was hooked.

  Have you ever been addicted to anything, Alfreth? It’s nasty—but that’s what I had: an addiction. When you’re miserable without something and then getting that something makes you feel happy, then I reckon you’re an addict. I was addicted—to the idea of time being my healer.

  I couldn’t believe some of the things I saw! I mean, Billy, what would you expect if someone said she was going to the desert? Sand? Well, of course sand. And the fact that I was there to witness—to be influenced by—a storm of time, not to mention a body of water in the middle of the dry land, well, this suggests that I would have had my eyes open, right? But nothing could have prepared me for some of the things that were there.

  There were computerised river taxis—though the Oasis obviously wasn’t a river. What else? Robot bartenders!—in these shacks—and even the word shacks is over-selling those dumps to be honest—ramshackle dumps selling rose-wine and fermented camel milk.

  And the politics you wouldn’t believe! I remember a war between two rival groups of bus drivers. Two groups. You wouldn’t have thought that one bus was needed in the. . . sorry, I shouldn’t laugh; this isn’t a laughing matter, is it? In the town called Hospital, was what I was trying to say. The Healing Town.

  Yeah, right. Take a look at the walnut-faced poor bastards who live there and tell me how much they’ve been healed. So I suppose the people searched for distractions, like in any other community. Violence is one key to that particular lock, isn’t it, Billy? You should know that as well as I do. If not, better. But there were bus trips around the township for the elderly and the infirm—and occasional trips away, for supplies and so on. And these two different companies set up against one another. It was bloody.

  There was no sure way of knowing whereabouts to go in the Oasis to be affected by a particular influence of time. If you wanted to go back, for example—back two years to say goodbye to your father before he passed away—you didn’t just form an orderly queue at Point A. It wasn’t a scenic tour or anything like that. It seemed random.

  And as I think I said before, we mustn’t forget that the Oasis, for most people, was their home. They weren’t pilgrims searching for a Messiah. This wasn’t Mecca. This wasn’t Lourdes. Generations—sometimes—had grown up there, though not always at the speed we would know it. Three score years and ten, Billy? Forget it. I heard about a clan that lived in two adjacent fenestrated huts, with blankets on the roofs. The patriarch, the matriarch, seven siblings, all of them married with children of their own. Three generations, Billy—and the oldest and the youngest had been born within eight years of each other. Rumour had it they looked like raisins with limbs. It had fallen to the wives and husbands who had married into the family to look after the entire brood. A sixteen year-old, for example, taking care of her twelve year-old grandfather. Again, it’s only rumour—but this one went that neither the grandmother nor the grandfather could remember their parents; that they hadn’t actually had any—it’s not as though they’d died or anything. The family was born in and of the dirt and rocks surrounding Umma—or Mostashifa Tamaninat, if you prefer.

  So where should I go? Where would you have gone, Billy? You ask around, right? Well, I did—and that got me little more than blank looks, until I heard the story of Noor Aljarhalifaro—the old man, the gentleman thief. The one who stole the water. Yeah, that’s Ronald Dott to you and me. And I’ve been obsessed with him ever since, or until then, depending on your point of view.

  He was older then, as you know. And he was something of a legend in the town, let’s put it politely. One old woman, her body was changing ages at different speeds, divided at the waist. She was treating some wounds I had one day when I fell down and gouged my knee on a bleached cow’s skull. She was something of a local G.P. Didn’t think much of her bedside manner, mind you. For the stitches the needle was sterilised at the end of a lit cigarette. There was no anaesthetic. As I was being stitched up, in fucking agony by the way, she was like a hairdresser asking me if I was going anywhere nice on my holidays. It didn’t matter much, not to her at least, that she couldn’t speak English very well. She knew some basics. And I guess she was trying to keep me occupied while she savaged me with her surgery. In hindsight I should have known better, seeing’s she had a needle in one hand and my knee in another, but I was intrigued by the story of the geriatric burglar. In this country we’ve got Care in the Community programmes to help the elderly into suitable employment. But to tell you the truth, Alfreth, I would find it rather cute, if I had to be robbed, if it was some old guy who did it. Shows there’s life in the old dog yet, and all that. What I found out, getting my knee stitched up, is that Noor—or Dott—how should I refer to him here? Okay, Dott. Dott was by no means considered a quaint old duffer with a magpie penchant for valuables. ‘Cause there were no valuables, or at least not as we would know them. No doubt some family heirloom, or family importance stuff; but nothing like rubies or gems. The valuable commodity was water itself. And Dott nicked some.

  So it was a bit foolhardy of me to mention the recent incarceration of this thief, out there on the prison ship. If I understood my surgeon’s Pidgin English correctly, the message was along the lines of: I hope they release him quickly so I can kick him to death before my legs get too old to do so. Her lower body was ageing faster than her torso. Of course, this sort of reaction could only make me more determined to learn his story—or even to meet him. I mean, what else was I going to do in Umma while I waited for time forces to have their way with me? Get a job? I had money to last me a while—a month or so—because while I might not have been earning well in England, in the desert I was a rich woman. A white-skinned princess, no less, as one dirty old man who was actually five told me.

  I swear I saw more spittle sizzling on hot ground in the following week than I have ever seen since—and certainly had ever seen before. Because that was the reaction from some that the story of Noor provoked: spontaneous spitting. The name acted like an emetic, especially among the citizens of Umma who really were older and not just looked like it. It was felt, sort of, that he’d let the side down a bit. Elders—even if they were elders like Noor, a bit wayward, rootless, a bit maverick—really should know better. They should—don’t laugh—they should act their age.

  That said, some were willing to talk to me—as long as I kind of crept up on the question. As long as I wasn’t too full on. How do you boys put it? As long as I wasn’t point blank. No one could tell me where Dott, or Noor, had come from. And I don’t mean geographically, necessarily—as I say, there were people who’d been at the Oasis for generations— but no one knew anyone who knew anyone who had been there before Dott. But this sparked me up. I mean, think about it, Billy. If Dott is moving backwards, living his life from old back to young, where did it start? How old is old? Was he another one borne of the desert? Okay; it’s weird as hell to us but it happens there. But where did he start? Aged what we would call two hundred? Aged what we would call two thousand?

  There were even stories about him, Billy—not like stories in books but more like fairy tales, I suppose. Myths. The story of the old man who got younger was told to child
ren at bedtime, although God knows why. There’s no message to it. No moral. Not as far as I can see. His daring life of crime—joke!—began, as far as anyone could estimate, and after I’d sort of collated the answers, his life of crime began when he was about a hundred and one. The crime was public indecency, Billy—repeated public indecency. If he’d been in this country at the time, oh and eighty years younger, he might have got the very cell on the Puppydog Wing that he actually has got.

  What I learned from the whispers behind hands, when people didn’t wish to be seen mouthing such filthy ideas—but at the same time couldn’t resist a gossip—was he would go down to the water. A hundred and one, this was! He was learning how to walk, shuffle, crawl. He was a baby, after all. Townsfolk used to look after him with soup and potatoes, but the story goes that there was a great, great sense of relief when he started to work out how to put one foot in front of the other.

  How can I put this politely? Okay I won’t. He was wanking in the Oasis. Just for fun, as far as anyone could tell. Maybe, in his world, in his skin, he was a teenager; he was going through puberty, learning how to satisfy himself. It’s impossible to say: there’s no logic there. That’s the beauty of it.

  How long do you think we’ve got left? Angela could be back any second so I’ll speed up a bit—just like I slowed down a bit in my time there, in Umma.

  What I went there for I got: a slowing down in the deterioration of my eyesight—and even an improvement, over the course of the months I was able to eke out my earnings. See? My eyes got better—or at least time stopped them getting any worse. The effects slowed my body down. You know I’m older than I look; I’m an old bird, Billy—an old ting. But my eyesight is so-so. The Oasis healed me. Time healed—or as I say, stopped me getting any worse. Nothing’s perfect. I’ve had laser treatment and you wouldn’t believe the strength of these lenses, but there you go. I wasn’t supposed to be talking about me. I was talking about Dott. Damn it. We’ll have to wait for her next piss-break.

  Part Six:

  Sleeping Among the Amnesia Trees

  One.

  Ask him one question, is what I say to Julie, back in the Visits Room.

  I return to my pad—this is when the shakes and twitches kick in. After about an hour of praying with my beads, I hit the night alarm, although it’s far from being night. I’m in fear of night arriving.

  Screw Oates comes to my flap. What is it, Alfreth? he asks.

  Permission to get under my covers, sir.

  Why, what’s wrong with you?

  Gut rot again, sir. I know everyone will be aware of my visit to Health Care and my complaint will carry weight. Besides, I’m not exactly lying. A lie-down and maybe even that rarest of beasts, a sleep, will do me some good. But we’re not allowed to get under the covers without permission.

  He takes a second before he says, Granted, Alfreth. Need a visit?

  Just had one, sir.

  From Health Care, I mean.

  Oh. No, sir. Paracetamol won’t do it, sir. Need to rest properly.

  Okay. I’ll check on you in a while.

  My bed is warm as toast and exactly as scratchy as the same. It dawns on me I can’t remember the last time our linen was changed. Rest? The very concept feels alien to me. I am tired to the point of distraction and even sickness. Relax. I let my thoughts float and chatter. This is fever sleep: the thoughts choose me. They bang and clatter and din. My thoughts play with me, not the other way around. And I go to that place, I go to that place I often find when I am dropping off to sleep: that state of mind that’s like a magic spell. A bit like when I’m having sex (if memory serves) and I’m trying to hold back, to make Julie come first, that emotional mantra I repeat inside my skull, to stop me busting a nut too early. Try to explain it and the spell is ruined and warped. Same with sleep. I travel into a dry, warm place before I know I can close more than my eyes—I can close my mind. I can shut down for the night and re-boot. Dry, warm place: like a desert.

  The connection is enough to wake me up again; it frightens me. Lying still beneath my Redband-enhanced prison duvet, I try to imagine Ulla. I try to imagine a town called Hospital. Or rather, the Oasis is trying to imagine me. I can feel its pull as sleep gets closer.

  Inevitably, the face of Ronald Dott enters my head. He is getting younger—he is disappearing, little by little, towards what we call birth. For him it’s death. Or is it? He needs to perpetrate evil deeds in order to keep him at the age he is, roughly speaking, give or take a year or two. He has what Kate Wollington would call ‘serious sexual concerns’. He uses us. He uses anyone. He wants to get older, older—much older. And he needs us, as well as uses us. He takes our time. We sleep and sleep. He induces mad actions. Screws kiss each other in the Cookery Room and Ds erupt into spontaneous acts of violence.

  But what does he want with me? If he fouls and fouls he will manoeuvre in the direction that we all do, one year plus one year equals two years. He wants to go back to his beginning. To find what? To start again? What good will he be as an old man, commencing the journey for the second time? Or maybe not the second time. The third? The fourth?

  Dott? I call to him. Can you hear me?

  There is of course no answer. I can’t sleep. Can’t as in mustn’t. I kick off the duvet and pull on my tracky bottoms. I light a burn from my emergency stash. I start a short routine of sit-ups, roundhouse kicks and push-ups.

  You recovered quickly enough, you lazy cunt. . .The voice is from the flap on my door. Screw Oates’ eyes, scrutinizing my workout. Pull a fast one on me like that again, son, and you’ll be tripping down some stairs.

  He thinks I’ve lied to him. He thinks I’ve used my aches and pains as an excuse for a crafty kip. But what can I tell him? The evidence is right before his eyes.

  I tell him: I can’t sleep, sir. Need to wear myself out.

  When he disappears I notice how quiet the Wing is again. Can it be everyone is asleep? I overhear, once, two screws talking together, after the Prison Officers’ strike, when hardly any uniforms come to work and there is no one to wake us up in the morning. Everything cancelled for the day. Fucking eerie, one screw says to another. And I feel, at that time, as though I’m on a desert island—or in the desert—on my own. Awake and red-eyed: staring out my barred window. Same now. Same now, too, the conversation between two screws, outside my door—or near it.

  Fucking eerie, I think it’s Herman says.

  And then I hear Oates agree with him: What’re they planning?

  No music is blaring. No one is shouting. But we’re not planning anything either. I could tell the screws this but I won’t. They think they’re whispering—maybe they are—but I can hear them perfectly.

  Me, I was no more than your gardener, are Dott’s words.

  They echo inside me—and not just in my head. They make my stomach lurch, and my dick grow tumid. Dott. Dott is saving up favours. He is taking away yoots’ time to make the days and weeks go faster for the inmates, but they will owe him, and more than a packet of burn or a bash mag. It will take a great, a creative act of wrongdoing to get him back to the age he wants to be—wrinkled, weak-bladdered, diabetic possibly, and ailing. Why not stay at the age he is now? I don’t know. But he talks about Prometheus. He wants to die, I am sure of it; and I think he is striving to wriggle and leap back to where he started—to a point before he started, in order to end the whole game.

  Ask him one question, is what I say to Julie, back in the Visits Room.

  Two.

  Miss Patterson’s next piss-break doesn’t arrive; it seems for the moment that her bladder has been adequately evacuated. So I face the stark understanding that it’s going to be another twenty-four before I speak to Kate Thistle again. But I am desperate—desperate to hear my own side of the story. I want to know what Dott meant about gardening for me. I’m baffled. The day is like chewing gum—pulling chewing gum off y
our shoe, stretching it until it breaks, only to find that some’s been left there on the sole. Dinner is a lonely affair, with Ostrich shipped out to Big Man Jail, following Carewith along their time-lines. I talk to Sarson a bit, but my heart’s not in it. We stand outside for a while when we’re allowed to, during Sosh—in the chipping-away, dust-carrying wind. The air is freezing. Stinking, too. We talk about the rubbish bins again. They are piling higher and higher, as if they’re reproducing and not just being added to; no one is collecting them. The outside world, on the out, is on strike, it seems. Between us we spy three rats and I’m certain I see, over by the perimeter wall to my left, a solitary squirrel, blown off course somehow on its crumb-trail for a nut or two.

  Health hazard innit, says Sarson, bored—and I know we are about to embark on the same discussion as before.

  There’s no choice. Nothing changes. I share a burn and consider provoking a fight. In the evening I take my thoughts for a walk. I sit on the can with the seat down, leaning forward to help ease the pain in my stomach, and I close my eyes, for something to do, tracing every step I know of Dellacotte Young Offenders, up here in the hills. In my mind’s eye I stroll back and forth to the Gym, to the Education Block, to the Segregation Unit. Nothing’s satisfying. I feel like I felt when I came in, drying out from alcohol for a few days. I am nervy, jumpy, tired. I visit, not in any way in the order of geographical convenience, but rather the opposite—to make the operation longer and more drawn out—the Wings, from A to H, backtracking on myself, crossing courtyards, following the yellow lines on the ground, inside which the delivery trucks and food trolleys must remain. And it’s still only nine. Nine o’clock, tick tock. Come on, life.