by David Mathew
You’re all free! I shout.
Not only a gross exaggeration, but an oversimplification to boot. We remain on a ship in the middle of a vast body of polluted water. There is no way back to shore, other than to swim; and once ashore? There is no home remaining for prisoners, however close to the ends of their sentences some of them might be. I try to read the mood of the gathered slaves. Attempting to rile them to mutiny, it seems, has been as effective as nailing the oil to a wall. If anything, what fills the eyes in those few not stunned to inertia by months and years of pointless physical abuse, is resentment. I have torn the status quo.
Come on! I say to Noor. You can be free!
We ascend the wooden steps, but Ayaan’s screams— possibly even the unexpected stench of his blood, as if the wound I hope won’t be fatal has unleashed the rotting insects of his soul—have alerted his muchachos. Three more men, similarly hairy as this particular watch’s driver, arrive near the crest of the stairs. One of them—the youngest, I would guess—is carrying a strap: a snub-nosed automatic pistol that seems out of place, but I’m confident will be no less convincing for it.
I shout to Noor: Run!
Not one heroic bone in his body does Dott contain, it seems, for he doesn’t wait for me to offer the chance of escape a second time. Bewilderingly light on his feet, he makes a sprint for the stern. The three jailers set to: on me. Nobody has taken the chance to overcome the powers that be. For all the lack of noise from below deck, I might be travelling on a ghost ship’s maiden voyage. Trying to keep hold of my wooden shank, I lash out, fearing a bullet might pierce my skin and a major organ. I fight with relish, but the hullabaloo is concluded, almost before it begins. No show of concern is shown for Ayaan, bleeding away his life, downstairs. Nor does any one of the three go in pursuit of Noor, smugly comfortable in the notion that he has no place to run to. Though I’ve managed to scrape and poke with my shank, I am forced at gunpoint to relinquish my hold on it now. Weapon-free, I am now taught the error of my ways. The beating, still at gunpoint, is savage and enthusiastic. I have heard no splash; no sound of Noor’s entry into the water. What can he be doing, the ingrate? I am taking this beating in order to liberate him, and he doesn’t have the common decency to flee when he has the chance! Will they beat me and then put a bullet in my head?
They are certainly making sport of the first half of the retribution for my actions. I am rolled up into a ball, the kicks landing thick and fast. The blood in which I wriggled—Ayaan’s blood—I smear on the deck, smudging it around like paint. Finally I hear the splash of a body striking water: Noor has jumped for it. Between blows to my system I have a crack at informing my attackers I’ve given up. Gladly I will take Noor’s place on the chain-gang, working his shift after my own. Little by little the assault wanes. I try to imagine him swimming. Oily as a seabird, his arms already weakened from rowing, pumping hard and painfully through the muck.
I am left alone to examine my injuries—or for them to examine me—leaning against a mast that feels cool to my forehead’s touch. For the moment I can’t remember Noor’s voice; it’s an effort to remember his face. But what is clear enough, moments later, is the manner in which the prisoner spent his last moments on the ship. The follow-up kicking is as equally severe. I am told it will happen after dinner, so that’s a nice dessert to look forward to. Not that I receive any dinner. The upper echelon of the ship’s hierarchy dines and rests. When the meals have gone down and the food has been digested, it is time for me to have my chain unlocked so I can cease hugging the mast. And the reason for this second onslaught? On his way to freedom, before he crash-landed into the oasis, he stole more water. He stole a bottle from Ayaan’s own supply. In a surrogate fashion, I received the brunt of the jailers’ bad tidings.
Dott tells me I helped him escape, and I did. What he omits is the part where I nearly lose my eyesight to do so. Where my testicles are cramped by kicks, pushed up into my torso; where my scrotum is scratched open. But after half an hour, the viciousness desists; the attackers have grown bored. Again, I am chained to the mast, there to stay—whatever the weather; weather come what may—for the next seventy-two hours.
What’s in it for me? I can’t help wondering as I wake up.
Nine.
The days following the aborted Cookery Class are like torture—like a slow-acting poison against my will and resolution. I am crabby. I am jumpy. Repeatedly I turn down Jarvis’s offers of an X-Box games competition, or Sarson’s attempts to get me chatting during Sosh. As the cliché goes, I’m a shadow of my former self. Perhaps I’m in love, ho ho. Sure as hell, I’m not eating anything much more than the bare essentials to keep alive. On the other hand, I’m drinking water as if the supply’s being turned off any day now. Since dreaming of the desert, the Oasis and the ship, I have a thirst on me that’s as dry as a camel’s hoof. Leaning over my sink, every five or so minutes when I’m in my cell, I scoop up water, eschewing the uses of my plastic mug, and gulp in water and air in equal measures, so that I’m bloated and gassy—the eructations you won’t believe—and then, a short time later, I am doing precisely the same thing over again. I can’t wait for Friday. Dott is not picking up the psychic phone. Not listening to me. Nor has he ordered any reading matter that will necessitate my visiting his cell. I can’t even count on that for a chat—for a resumption of what he has to say. In fact, generally speaking, there’s been a marked reduction in yoots ordering much of anything to read in their cells. The only thing to say is, it’s in keeping with the air of weirdness circulating around Dellacotte of late. Even the ducks are acting peculiar. Yet knowing what’s to blame doesn’t help me, does it? Doesn’t help me get to DottThe days drag like songs on a melted LP. There’s no better way of putting it. In the meantime, on my arrival in the Library, Kate Thistle shows me she’s trying to be cute by saying Wogwun at more or less every opportunity, until it starts to become a pain in the hole. Miss Patterson weaves her way through the day, setting me tasks and no doubt (now I’m aware of her fondness for the spirits) fantasising about her first glass of Gordon’s Gin when she gets home. Or before. Until she’s of pensionable age, she’s killing time. There is nothing unpredictable in the days, this Wednesday to this Friday. Now I’ve established that the weary pessimism that’s infected the YOI is here to stay, it’s something like observing an army, four hundred strong, of harmless zombies. Shared thoughts? Perhaps. I don’t know. All that’s clear is, when Movements started before Dott was around, it would take the screws on both landings of the Education Block fifteen minutes to get the motherfuckers settled. And it’s piss-easy to sympathise with the disruptions. Give me a job to do or be a six-wanks-a-day man, decomposing spiritually in my pad, I choose the former, on every account. But for others—not Redbands, and without Enhanced status— the choice is simply not there. They wait and rot; they rot and wait. An excursion to Computer Literacy or Maths is like a Greek holiday. Hardly anyone speaks as they enter the Education Block. Murmurs, mumbles—if anything at all. I’m no different. I take my place in the holding area, climb the stairs to the twos landing, enter the Library, where I spend the remainder of the morning, before setting off on my bored expedition back to the pad for lunch, before returning again in the p.m. Cups of tea and snatched moments of dialogue with Kate Thistle— these are the punctuation marks to these slow, slow days. For me, one who thinks he conjectures slowness quite nicely, quite thank you. Slow has a new meaning now. Kate Thistle listens patiently. Aware our time alone is limited, she neither interrupts nor interrogates. She holds her mug of tea with both hands and lets me babble and spurt. Simultaneously I find myself both liking and disliking her, day by day. She looks older than when we met. An actual conversation—as opposed to a gobbet of reportage—has become a rare-ish beast, but it shows its pretty head, late in the day during Second Movements on the Thursday afternoon. Miss Patterson has ventured out on the scrounge for a rubber. It’s good to know, despite everything, old habits
die hard and that someone’s lifted her eraser like this. So we’re not all brain dead, after all! It will be some time later that evening before, while reaching into my trackies for a lighter, I find the self-same tool. I have stolen it without even being aware of the theft: a habit I don’t want to get into.
Can I ask you something, Miss?
Course you can, Billy—long as you’re brewing up at the same time. Kate smiles, but she is serious about another cup of tea.
I don’t know anyone who can drink tea like Kate and Angela. I struggle to keep up.
How much longer you got?
To do what?
Be here.
The kettle remains half full from the last round of drinks so I simply flick the kettle and settle down on Angela’s twirl around chair.
I mean, you say you’re writing about prison language.
I am writing about prison language, Kate corrects me.
But you won’t be allowed to stay here forever, Miss, will you?
I don’t want to, thanks!
So what’s your cut off point?
My thesis should be ten thousand words long, or thereabouts, she tells me. I think I’ve got material enough for about eight.
I’m surprisingly touched and proud. So I’ve really been of use to you?
Without question, Billy. You’ll never know how much.
Will you put me in the Acknowledgements?
If I’m allowed to.
Thanks.
But what about the other two thousand words?
Kate shrugs. If I don’t find them here, Billy, I’ll either make it all up—or I’ll use what I know of the Hola Ettaluun.’ She laughs. Who’ll check?
Glad to know you take your studies seriously. Here’s your tea.
Ta. But I do take them seriously, Billy. It’s just that I’m more interested in the project you’re involved in than dissecting the difference between Allow it and Respect me. Do you see what I mean? she asks.
Suppose I do. Allow it. My stab at a silly little joke.
Kate doesn’t answer; deep in thought, she stares into her hot drink. I don’t know what to say next, but I know it can’t be long before Angela returns from her mission.
Kate spares me the embarrassment of further silence. Not looking up from her inspection of the cup’s contents, she says: It was more like a world than a township, for the people who lived there in the desert. Some of them—I’ve never told you this before—some of them treated me with hostility and suspicion. For them it was hard to believe there were other places to live.
Fact is she has mentioned this before; I don’t contradict her. I have spoken enough—I’m pleased she’s taking a turn.
A world before ours, perhaps, Billy. What do you think?
I can’t answer her question; I ask one of my own. What about Dott saying I was dead before he made me with the rose?
That’s what I’m getting at, she says. You were potentia. Dott needed to find you to help himself get back there—even if it’s a state of mind.
But wait a minute, Kate. The desert’s a real place. You were there!
She nods her head. And there alive and well. Can I say truly that’s the same as everyone I met? Everyone who spoke to me? Who can tell how many others are dreaming of existence, there, while they go about their everyday chores? It’s something I didn’t think to look into.
Waiting to be born, you mean? I ask.
Yes. Somewhere in this world or another.
You’re creeping me out, Kate!
Only now? She smirks.
No. Not only now. But including now. It sounds like Hell.
Placing down her half-finished cup of tea, Kate is so good as to look at me again as we talk. While I won’t say the expression is unfriendly, I can’t claim there’s a good deal of warmth there either.
You’re being too literal, Billy. There’s no Hell. Grow up! The Oasis is half wood and half memory, I think. Half water and half notion.
That’s a lot of halves, I remark.
She is not in a punning mood. You may be right.
Kate, what’s wrong? I venture. You’re in a peculiar mood.
She shakes her head. Something came to me last night, she says. Something I’ve thought about before but haven’t managed to articulate, even to myself. I wonder how many other Dotts there are running around.
God, I hope not!
But there must be others, she answers me excitedly. Surely we can bank on that. It can’t be only our Ronald Dott. Others must have got out.
Others moving their way backwards?
Perhaps. No, let’s be positive. Undoubtedly. Without doubt. It’s just that most of them don’t spend nearly so long being a nomad, country to country, trying to find an equivalent of you. They live with their lot.’
With disappointment? I say.
Yes—Like the rest of us.
Ten.
Starved of attention, in addition to being starved of food that my system can’t keep down long enough for it to do me any good, I am all but braying at the moon in the early hours of Friday morning. It’s all I can do not to hit the night bell: at one point I suffer what experience tells me is a mutually- complementary epileptic fit and asthma attack. In the dark I roll a burn; the smoke hits my chest like a harsh rugby tackle, if not worse: I can feel where the three yoots on the ship, the other night, pounded me, kicked me ragged. It’s all real, I tell myself. Even the bits in my head—they’re real. Nearly thirty minutes pass, the pains sparking over my body, and with me using my newfound powers of communication, however base and unreliable, before I welcome with my mind’s eye the news that Dott, at this moment, right now, is being bent over and twisted up by a couple of screws, batons drawn. There is no show to watch. I cannot see the fight. I cannot view the storming onset. And I have no idea what’s prompted it. But Dott is getting fucked up good, blood. He has said or done something bad, something bad. How can I sleep after that? Still my breathing regularises once more—very slowly, but it does—and I can sense the bags under my eyes darkening slightly. So tired. No snoozing! I chide myself. At this early hour the siren the ambulance wears like a flashy gown is all but certainly not required. Up here in the hills, how much traffic’s there gonna be in the dead of night? The stretched klaxon noises lap at the edge of my consciousness for a few seconds, before I pull myself back from the grip of a brief wee-hours nap. I hear the vehicle get closer—there it is! Midnight Rambler sheep scamper out of its way! Night birds witness the white and yellow, mechanised beast with head-turning disdain. It arrives at the front gates. The siren is doused. Me, I’m getting cock-heavy ready. Why is this? Have I developed some vile kink for cars? Inside these walls I’ve heard worse: the Puppydog with his erection in the soapsuds tray of the industrial washer in the Laundry; the yoot soulfully knocking one out in the exercise yard on C Wing, watching the ducks. But no: what I’ve got here is the thrill of the chase, it’s clear as. Dott has managed to get the shit kicked out of himself. He’ll be going to hospital.
How do I follow you? I ask him—then again, six, eight, ten times.
A spy is no bloody use without senses. I get out of bed. From my window, rolling my eyeballs as far right in their sockets as they’ll go, I can make out maybe the first ten centimetres of the offside front bumper of the ambulance. It’s parked at a rakish angle to the mesh surrounding the Puppydog Wing exercise yard. Stay banged up long enough with someone, or in my case—as I never want to share a cell—keep your next-door for long enough, and you start to come alive to one another’s rhythms. Like women prisoners, coming on together— beginning their menstrual cycles within a day of each other. Jarvis knows, I believe, I’m already awake, but he hisses and calls my name just to be sure .
Are you listening?
Wogwun, bruv, I call back.
The dialogue won’t be allowed to con
tinue for long; nor do I want it to. But I’m thinking—Jarvis might be of some use to me at this point.
You watching the show, blood?
Allow it. What you see?
Just the bandage wagon.
Bait. Can you see it all?
Near enough, blood. Back doors are open. They’re taking someone out, he informs me—or wants to inform me.
It’s Dott, I tell him.
How do you know?
Rumour has it innit, I tell him, effectively closing the subject.
Jarvis doesn’t wish it to be closed. What he do? Snitch? yoot asks.
Your guess, blood. Now I’m concentrating.
It’s something like relief courses through me when a baton taps on the metal door. The night screw tells me to shut up and go to sleep, then repeats his orders next door. So now I’m concentrating. On what? On everything Dott has told me so far. Every sentence I can recall; every riddle, every instant I’ve wanted to paint his nose knuckle red. Every time he’s boysed me, annoyed me, stolen from me. Cramming all those thoughts is like Julie (she pops into my head, unwelcome now) packing a suitcase for a couple of days away from London: too much for the space available. Won’t all fit in. I rearrange the memories for better packing, hoping as I do so to find some new ones—some uncovered ones. This unveiling is a muted, mixed success. Random—or seemingly random—snippets of conversation, like confetti in the wind. Like trying to catch raindrops. Like climbing the tallest sand dune in the desert.
