by David Mathew
I don’t know! Dott protests. Maybe I was there for two thousand years before I was dragged out of the desert. Two thousand years has a nice ring.
We have spoken quickly, like speeded-up records—we have lived the last few minutes in FF. Double arrow, pointing east. But I want to go double arrow pointing west: I want to Rewind. Let’s start again.
Two thousand years. Can it be Dott’s simply plucked that number from the air? It has such weight, that number; it tinkles bells inside my skull. Talk of faith, implications of devotion, a desert, it all sounds Biblical. And although I know I’m probably going to regret it, I say it anyway.
Are you the Second Coming? Are you Christ?
As predicted, Dott snorts laughter. What do you think, you daft bastard? he asks me. Did Christ rape joggers by the side of canals? If he did, it would certainly put a different spin on things, wouldn’t it? Me at the head of the table, and the rest of the Wing as my disciples. You make me laugh, Billy!
I’m not trying to, I reply, but Dott is on his horse.
Talk about a Last Supper, he’s saying now. Macaroni cheese and Um Bongo fruit drink. Brill, I must say. What’s for pudding?
Don’t boys me, Dott, I tell him; I’m getting vex.
Well, pardon me.
Back to your Wings, lads. I won’t tell you again, I’ll nick you, okay? I’ve been reasonable, says the courtyard screw, and he has a point.
Behind us the fire alarm is still blaring. Won’t be long before it’s discovered the evacuation is a falsey, but I ask the screw anyway:
Are we going back to class, sir? It was just some waste with a lighter.
This waste have a name?
The Cookery Gov see it all, sir.
Then probably, yes.
I’ll see you back in class, Dott! I call to the scrawny half-dead bird, splay-footing his way heavily from my stationary position.
Missing you already! he shouts back, over his shoulder.
Seven.
The cell spin comes back negative, of course—negative for all concerned. Unfortunately for me, so does my application for an outside visit to Patrice. INSUFFICIENT GROUNDS FOR PERMISSION is stamped diagonally across a photocopy of my original letter. Disappointed but not surprised, I take charge of the mop and bucket from Jarvis, my next-door, and start to clean the floor of my cell. Killing time. No more and no less. There is time to kill. While mopping, and taking my time about it, I remember something harvested from one of my few rare appearances in school, back on road: something in Physics. About energy. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, only translated into a different form of energy. Is that how it goes? And if so (or if not), is time a kind of energy? Dott is taking it from some of us, whether we like it or not, and he wants to use it to go backwards, to get older by getting younger; to return to the grass, to the dirt—to before he was anything in the scanty breezes and stink of desert. If I’m right I can help him die. And I want to help him die—I think. As long as it doesn’t mean I have to do so too. But how can I survive if my creator is scattered into atoms for the sand beetles to crawl over and mate upon? He says I came from there but I have a Mumsy, I have sisters; I was born in London. Up here in the hills, in Dellacotte YOI, is as exotic a place as I’ve ever seen, blood. Or not seen, as it is. I helped him escape from the prison ship, he says. He was trying to repay my kindness by protecting me. So what better way of Dott ensuring he gets what he wants than by reversing the entire lifelong process? By destroying me. But I’m his energy. He can’t destroy me. Only translate me.
Yo, Alfie! says my next-door Jarvis (as opposed to Screw Jarvis). You wanna play X-Box for a hot minute?
Sure, I say.
Using heavy duty laser fire, we obliterate each other’s rag-tag and bobtail brigades; heads purple open like cantaloupes. There is a quest for treasure and a quest for immortality. Give me the treasure every time, if Dott’s miserable reaction to the latter is anything to go by. Jarvis’s cell stinks of Golden Virginia by the time we’ve finished. When, days later, the fire alarm is raised by Roper and we are returned, first to the exercise yards outside our respective Wings, and then when the shouts come out—Everyone back to their cells!—I am so generally pissed off at not being allowed to continue with my lesson and more importantly, my discourse with Dott, that I challenge Jarvis to a re-match, the stake being two burns I don’t care if I win or lose. Feeling sick, I play badly; he engulfs my character in a well-aimed trumpet of acidic spray. Poor old Alfie falls, like Troy. As a result, on the screen, the rest of my troops wilt and wither, die screaming in molten pools of their own selves and essences.
How many times can you think a thought without wearing it out? Then again, a thought is like a muscle, perhaps, exercised, pumped up and strengthened by regular use. Whatever way, the thought returns—the one that runs like this. If Dott dies, what happens to me? And then: if I die, what happens to Dott? I don’t remember it yet but I will.
Being divorced from the meals we have prepared and half-cooked—this does not go down well with the ten lads in Cookery. Once we know we’re not going back to the Education Block, there’s a sour taste in the mouth. It tastes like I’ve licked a rat or the wings of a bird. Back in my cell, bored with playing computer games and with the door wide open, I take hold of my beads and settle down on to my knees to pray. I don’t know what to pray for. That’s disgusting. If I pray for my time to go faster, all I’m doing, quite likely, is getting Dott involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how he has found those yoots he’s worked with in the first place: by answering their prayers, of whatever denomination. Reaching out; swinging the radar. How else has he stolen people’s time? If he’s not careful, by executing the very deeds that are asked of him, he’ll be in danger of doing something helpful and nice; and we can’t have that, can we? But what’s the alternative? I can pray for my time to drag and go slower—it’s a madness, it’s a beef with your own logic, such a numb idea. Playing safe in the end, I pray for my Mumsy and my sisters. I pray for Patrice. Very carefully, using my mental scissors, I cut Julie out of my prayers. Whether it makes me look a cunt or not, I don’t wish for anything good for that girl. She has someone else to wish her well tonight and from now on. My job is done. Seeking privacy, I close the cell door, use the lavatory, nurse the nasty pain in my stomach with a soothing palm of cold water, and make tea. More than ever I am antsy, dissatisfied, longing for something to do, to say.
I thought I was close this afternoon. It’s my fault, really, we had to leave; and because of the class being today, I deliberately declined my lunch. I am starving now. Thirsty too. I want a break; I want a holiday. That trip to see Patrice, that would have done nicely. But it scares me somewhat, the depth of my feeling of utter passivity; what I mean is, I get the notification I’ve been unsuccessful with my application. Do I fight? Appeal? No; I say, fuck it. I’m not bothered. I’m disappearing into lethargy, I swear I am. Endeavouring to do something positive, I pray again—this time kneeling more comfortably on my bed. Beads in hand; hands together. It is sacrilegious to recapitulate the exact words—and the covenant, anyway, is shattered by such an action—but I can tell you I drift far. I float through distances— great distances. Using only what material I have managed to locate in the Library, I picture a desert—the combed dunes, a token camel. But something tells me I’m not being authentic. Or rather, someone does: Dott is with me. How long has he been here?
You’re thinking in clichés, Billy, he tells me. Don’t create it—it doesn’t need creation; it’s already there. Just remember it.
That’s easy for you to say, Dott!
You can do it. Kill off everyone else. Kill off everything. It’s only you and me. Jigsaw pieces of land; vast; separated by cracks. Can you see them?
Yeah, I can!
Can you smell it?
The aroma is as large as the eye can see. In any direction—I am flying now, over th
e baked void—I can sense the desert’s smell tickling my nostrils.
Noor? Why did you want to get beaten up? I ask as I move.
To get to hospital, he says.
The voice is close enough for the yoot to be in the same cell as me. It’s not like it’s in my head anymore.
I don’t see the connection, I tell him. How’s getting twisted up gonna get you back to the desert?
Not the town of Hospital: the hospital. Accident and Emergency.
He is not in my head, but he’s not talking to me either. This is something new. It’s an awareness of Dott’s comportment; it’s his energy, present, transferred into sound for my ears—but I’m reading his mood and not listening to words.
Why? That powerful word: why?
An outside view? A change of scene? he replies, rhetorically. But most of all because I knew you would have to follow me. There’s no choice now, Billy-Boy. You would follow anywhere. To the ends of the earth if necessary.
Am I following you now?
Or I’m following you. It doesn’t much matter which, does it, Billy?
I suppose not. Where are we going?
Where do you think?
The oasis the boy found, of course! Where you grew me.
Indeed. Where I grew you. Where I was dead. Until I grew you—yes.
So is everything dead until nature in some form takes hold?
I was only your nature, Billy. There’s nothing offhand about it.
Whizzing now! Faster and faster! God’s speed! There are words on the wind but I cannot make them out, I am travelling too swiftly. I’m losing focus; I’m getting hot—I’m hearing Dott’s voice, but I don’t know if the words are coming now or if they were in my ears from before, or from the future or from where they are.
But it was my mistake, he is saying— repeating? I needed bad things to do. Bad things.
I know.
Very briefly he pauses. I helped you with the bee-stings, he says.
I’m twisting the air behind me in a corkscrew trail; I feel like I’m going to burst.
I shouldn’t have. I should’ve smeared raspberry jam all over your face, Billy, to give them a feast.
That’s no way to talk to your king, Dott, I sort of joke.
Why do you think I lived so close to you for so long? Dott is saying now. Why do you think I got myself sent here to this dump? I thought a trip to the hospital might excite.
Like you had a choice, you mean? I ask.
I had a choice not to hurt those women.
But you need to do bad things to keep getting older, don’t you?
Bad things. How cute. I could have killed any one of them.
But you didn’t.
I should have.
Loops of discussion; are all of them real and true? Am I inventing any of them? The big question looms of course, and I ask it to the wind.
Dott sniggers and the air in my cell ripples like heat haze; the walls deliquesce, albeit briefly. He is scorning me and he is scorning my query.
You don’t think I’ve tried that, Alfreth? he shouts into my face. You don’t think I might just have bought enough headache tablets to floor a pissing elephant and swallowed them all at once with two bottles of vodka?Give me some fucking credit. It didn’t work! All that happened was I started again.
From the beginning?
From the very beginning, Billy! Dott replies.
There below! I see it! The patch of grass, as out of place as a squashed fly on a sheet of blank paper. It shouldn’t be there, but it is. Either with Dott or flying solo (I’m not positive which) I swoop lower, towards it.
If I see the desert, must I be dead? I wonder. Am I losing this time? Is it being sucked from bones, like meat off a chicken? Where will I be when I wake up? Call it illusion; call it reality. Call it something slipped into my drink. What I observe induces the gut reaction of more than a dream. The grass feels familiar; the small patch of roses—this patch feels familiar as well. The roses are climbing and winding around two small trees. Seeing them clearly, as I do right now, atomises any effect they once had upon me. These trees, I am sure, are the Amnesia Trees; by floating down into their orbit, and now—by touching them gently, the suppression in my head is neatly lifted.
When the screw comes to check on me, he finds me sleeping soundly on top of my covers—or so he thinks. I am resting. In an unusual move, he uses his baton to rap on the cell door.
Time to collect your dinner, he says.
I don’t even know which screw it is. Legs wobbling, I climb to my feet; I’m aching everywhere, blood. I collect a portion of beef stew that goes straight into my toilet—no middle man required. I feel too weak to lift my plastic utensils to eat. All I want is to relax. All I want is to sleep. Three more times that night I pray. Dreams come creeping.
Eight.
Am I building these thoughts from popular myth—from movies? I don’t know. But what I see is this:
The prisoners are working. They are shackled to the benches on which they will spend the remainder of the day. It’s a little after midday, but you wouldn’t know that, not down here, below decks. The light is all but non-existent; the air is thick, muggy and it stinks of male and female sweat. There is no gender demarcation aboard the ship. Here is Dott. Here is Noor. Callused hands on a long oar. Dott is sitting nearest the small portal, rowing in time with the other three men on his bench—one bench among scores of benches identical to one another. Male or female, torsos are exposed. Dott’s back is sliced red from where he’s been whipped and struck as part of his penal servitude. Why are they rowing? The ship doesn’t move as a result. This is punishment for the sake of punishment: backbreaking physical labour, intended to squash ambition, thoughts of liberty and body energy. He doesn’t see me. However, I can’t be invisible: other rowers see me, turning to face me as I walk down the aisle between the benches. Perhaps they think I am one of the jailers, there to whip. Scared of me? Who can blame them? My face is new to them, I’m sure of it. How can they know I mean no harm to anyone? How can they know I mean the opposite?
There is noise behind me, in the gloom. I turn. Descending the wooden stairs I once tripped and fell down is a large man with a face full of hair. The beard is matted and long, the moustache spanned out like seagull wings. Even his eyebrows are thick as adult thumbs, tied one to its partner with no gap between. He asks me what I’m doing. In fact, he asks me what I think I’m doing, which is a much more difficult question. Turning on my heels, I walk purposefully back in his direction. Although rowing doesn’t stop in this galley, there is a marked deterioration in effort and strength; prisoners want to see what is happening.
Change of leadership, I tell the hirsute slave-driver—he who is also a prisoner on board the ship, one who has risen through the ranks to be able to command the men and women who are newer to life on the water. The man is amused.
Do you think so? he asks me.
I know so, I say.
I remove the small shank I have secreted in my loincloth; I too am topless—pigeon-chested and weak-looking, but the power of my intention can’t be in doubt. The nights are long on board the ship. I have managed to fashion a knife of sorts by sharpening a piece of wood I have torn from the one of the walls of one of the living quarters, lower still than the galley, below our feet, in the bowels of the vessel. As with everyone else present, I am a prisoner. Rebel too; or so it seems.
We don’t need to do this, I tell the man whose name floats through the air in waves, from his head to mine.
His name is Ayaan. Along with several other stormtroopers (four or five, I think) he helps to run this boot camp. He has wielded authority over me before, I realise; this is my second time aboard the Oasis. I have served a previous sentence—for what I’m not sure. No more certain than I am of what I’m doing here on this occasion—unless my sole purpose is
that of liberation.
We don’t need to do what? he asks me, eyeballing the shank in my right hand. Stay where you are, he continues nervously.
Let them go, I demand.
You know I can’t do that, says Ayaan.
We’ll take our chances.
In the oil? Impossible! No one survives the oil.
How many have tried?
A good many. Now enjoy the remainder of your rest period. When it’s your turn to row, I assure you you’ll have an easy shift.
I don’t believe you. My back is stinging, where I was flogged yesterday.
Not by me!
It doesn’t matter who by.
Will you stand aside?
No.
Ayaan removes from a loop on his belt the whip that is coiled there like wire. The whip is only three-quarters unfurled when Ayaan flips the weapon with a wristy motion: the business end of the whip strikes out; there’s a warning crack of air about a palm’s width from my left eye. I’m aware of how accurate Ayaan can be with his weapon of choice; he’s a marksman with it. The shot, I know, is merely to frighten me back into submission—and it nearly works. The thin rope is on the floor after the assailment. Taking the force of what needs to be done as my spur, I stamp my bare foot down on to the whip—he tries to pull it back—and I attempt to pace along it like a tightrope walker, climbing up the weapon as I stride closer. The sharp end of the wooden blade—I dash it into Ayaan’s left upper arm. He whimpers with the discomfort, the pain lending him strength in his other arm. Pulling harder on the whip, he burns through some of the skin on my feet; I am knocked off balance as he retrieves the whip I’m standing on. A fight begins. Dissimilar to a fight at Dellacotte, there is no noise from the onlookers. Sure enough the rowing stops— that pointless, pointless exercise—which will shortly be noticed, but not one of the prisoners breathes a word of encouragement. They watch as Ayaan and I grip and wrestle, punch and bite. He is the stronger, no doubt about that, and I understand that my knife to the arm is no deterrent. Though I don’t wish to hurt Ayaan (as far as I know, he has done nothing wrong to me other than follow orders) a stark reminder of whose dream this is is required. I pluck my shank from his bicep. As we struggle on, it is like being in a waxwork museum: not only does no one speak, no one moves either. Though I don’t pay much attention to those around me, what I do see when I get a fraction of a second to glance—what I see are dead eyes, lifeless eyes. And two sudden movements. Ayaan and I are wriggling on the wooden floor; splinters bite at my exposed, rough and raw skin. I notice a woman with dark hair—a woman in her early sixties—make the sign of the cross on her chest. The second movement is Dott standing up. Ayaan is striving to prevent me from stabbing him again. And while I don’t want to have to stab him again, I can’t see a valid alternative. He has a job to do. His job is bringing his problems upon himself. I can’t tell him this. My sharpened piece of wood is aimed for his shoulder. It is my opponent’s deflective blow that knocks the point elsewhere: the wood slides effortlessly into the left side of his neck. Ayaan’s eyes are wide with horror. I hope what my eyes say is apology enough. As blood starts, first to trickle, leak, then to spurt, I roll away from his writhing body. When he starts to scream I understand that Noor and I will have to move faster than ever.
