O My Days

by David Mathew

  We stop at a ramshackle bar. Outside, a rotund European-looking woman is breastfeeding her son. Or a boy at any rate. Reminiscences tell me not to take too much for granted, to take anything at face value.

  Noor hands me a warped copper coin, the shape of a fifty pence but lighter in the palm.

  Get me one as well, he says. Be quick.

  I need something to eat.

  I have food.

  Where?

  With the horses.

  Which are where?

  In the stable.

  Christ, Dott. Which is where? I ask, exasperatedly, pulling on a door that feels like it’s about to fall off its hinges.

  Close by. Don’t’ worry: I didn’t steal them.

  How do you get them then?

  Worked for them. I’ll explain on the way!

  This is the extent of my rehabilitation, my integration back into society: a long drink of water in a busy but not packed bar that smells of peanuts, then a walk outside, the shirt I’ve been given glued with perspiration to my spine, and a terse review of my welcome-home repast:

  You took your fucking time.

  That’s King Billy to you, I want to say. Have I said it somewhere before? I’m not sure. All I know is, there doesn’t seem to be much love lost between Dott/Noor and me at this instant. I tell myself he’s nervous. He has worked as a blacksmith’s apprentice for six months. He has busted toil for no peas, rudeboy. The blacksmith asks if he’s a leper; he tells man no—but he’s been on the island. Why’s he been? Hiding. Wanted. Some blackguards are after his gizzard in a pie. Why, what’s he done? He’s had sex with a woman and left her pregnant. Not the end of the world, the blacksmith opines. The husband doesn’t agree with you, Dott tells him. The horses are on loan—and they’re not the most spritely of creatures. Dott has told the blacksmith, who waves us off (cutely) with a red-hot poker in his mittened hand, standing beside an anvil and sweating cobs. Not far out of earshot I say to Dott:

  These horses’ll never make it.

  I made it on foot the last time. With a boy to look after.

  These horses’ll never make it, I repeat. He won’t see ‘em again.

  Dott shrugs his shoulders and flips back his hood. Or us, he says, kicking the sides of his steed with sandaled feet.

  The horse bolts. Mine follows suit. The difference is, Dott appears to be a competent rider. Me, apart from a bicycle when I’m young and the occasional stolen motorbike I’ve crashed while joyriding, me I’ve never steered anything other than cars I’ve driven without a licence or insurance. Cars are easier than horses (though not as difficult as motorbikes). Takes some breath- catching lurches and near-falls before I learn to ride the animal’s rhythm. Takes skill. The township deliquesces in haze. By looking in glimpses over my shoulder I am able to see it first retreat, then dissolve, then get swallowed up by the yellow and white ground. The patches of sand thicken—stitch together—carpet outwards, the desert proper is what we’re in, and it hasn’t taken long at all. The horses’ hooves pound, their nostrils dilate; the sand is harder to negotiate than the chipped, cracked, lifeless, dry earth. For the riders, too. I for one feel my mount’s heart- meant endeavours and tribulations. I am breathing as hard as the stallion is, I reckon. The sand looks silvery in some directions, from some angles; time is passing, taking its toll on man and beast.

  O my days!

  The journey takes place in real time, which comes as an unpleasant surprise. What have I been expecting? Spiritual transportation? Well, yeah, I suppose I have. This riding lark’s for the birds, that’s for sure. Heat from the horse’s back is corrosive on my inner thighs, chaffing away at the underhang of my midriff travel bag. My balls are going crazy with jolts of pain.

  I need to rest up! I call to Dott.

  No time!

  What’s the hurry fuck’s sake? Where’s the fire?

  Night soon! Dott shouts—he is some ten metres ahead. Rest then!

  Soon is no exaggeration—no palliative measure. Desert twilight does not really exist: as with cows sensing rain, the horses’ moods change abruptly as they foresee the end of their working day. At first I regard their slowing down as no more than a sign of fatigue, and fair enough; they’ve charged hard, they’ve earned their oats. But it’s something more instinctive and raw. It’s their body clock—it’s their telepathy with one another that causes them to kill their strides from gallop to canter to trot. They stop. Dott accepts defeat, dismounts and by flipping open his horse’s panniers he wordlessly prepares to camp out for the night. It falls dark and cools down in minutes. Opening my own horse’s panniers—it’s as close to receiving a birthday or Christmas present as I’m likely to experience anytime soon. Dott has been thorough. There is food in brown paper; there are plastic bottles of water. There’s a thick woollen sweater that smells rather too much like its original source for my liking, but which I don gratefully all the same.

  Where are you going to tie the horses? I ask Dott.

  Any suggestions? he answers me with cool sarcasm.

  It doesn’t matter that the air is bruising up; I have seen the immediate vistas when the light’s good, and I know there are no trees to be used as hitching posts.

  What if they run away? I continue.

  Then we walk. The exercise’ll do us good.

  Why is he still behaving in such an offhand fashion? I wonder. I’ve not said or done anything wrong. I’ve not said or done much of anything at all. Surely the nervousness he felt back in Umma has dispersed. I check myself. No. This is more than a big deal, I have to remind a portion of my own brain. This is literally a matter of life or death—for him. And for me? The question stings and makes my nose sneeze.

  Hope you’re not catching a cold, he tells me—the first time he’s initiated a snippet of discourse since he met me at the water’s edge.

  Allergic to wool innit, I lie.

  I should’ve brought you silk.

  No, no, I’m not ungrateful, blood. Don’t get it twisted.

  Forget about it. We’ve got a few hours. Light the fire, would you?

  A test of initiative, no doubt. Brain ticks. I recall what I can of TV survival programmes—celebrities in the wild, trying to kid us there’s no film crew around to bail them out of a bind. Collect wood; scrape stones together for a spark to work on something flammable. As I look for suitable fuel and a means to ignite it, Dott asks me with that petulant voice of his:

  Where you going?

  I explain my actions.

  His response is not exactly friendly. Fucking hell, Billy, he says, this ain’t The Flintstones. Look in my saddlebag. Lighters and slow coal.

  Allow it.

  I feel stupid. Brain ticks, but not fast enough, it seems. In fact, brain feels bogged down in a mire that’s like jetlag or flu drowse. I can’t stand the thought of Dott winning this not-even-argument.

  Why we lighting a fire, I ask him, if we’re only staying here a couple hours?

  You won’t need to ask why once your body’s cooled down from the ride, he tells me. Forget what you can of the hills around Dellacotte. That’s not cold. The desert is where winters come to learn about cold.

  Nice image, I give him. Seriously. There’s something poetic about that.

  I collect rocks anyway, despite the fact Dott’s twitted me for so dumb an idea: we need a cradle to put the coal on before I light it. It won’t burn properly on the sand, or that’s my opinion at least. Collecting rocks for this ad hoc barbecue, I also pick up dried pieces of brush, a few twigs, and the dried-out remains of what I think was a desert fox. If I haven’t made up that species. What is left of its skin (the organs are punctured, eaten away—resembling nothing more than sun- dried tomatoes in olive oil) burns adequately. The food Dott’s brought is lamb in pitta bread. Neither of us waits to heat up the meal in the flames; we are starving marvin. We are han
k. And lamb I haven’t tasted in time. I tell him it’s good.

  You know what I could murder for? I ask him.

  He laughs—the first time he’s laughed, laughed properly as opposed to sardonically, as I remember, since before the riots kicked off in the nick—and says:

  Me! Me I hope, cuz!

  Apart from that. Man can kill for a beer.

  In the dancing firelight Dott’s face comes over straight as apologetic. No can do, he tells me. Couldn’t think of everything.

  No, you’re blessed. Not a criticism, blood. Just an observation.

  Dott falls silent as the dunes. We eat our meals.

  I wonder what creatures are out there tonight? he thinks aloud, finally.

  You should know, cuz.

  Why?

  You been here before!

  So’ve you! Besides, I don’t have any of that—either going there or coming back—in the old memory bank, Dott says.

  What happened to it?

  Wiped. Too much shit in the intervening years, he answers.

  Allow it. How long are we travelling, Dott?

  Till we get there.

  For fuck’s sake, blood, why do you do that? Every time.

  Man’s asking you an honest question. Why can’t you just give me the solution point blank?

  You’re assuming I know things I don’t know, Billy.

  That’s King Billy to you, I tell him, shuddering slightly with the warmth of déjà vu.

  I fall silent. Wipe my greasy lips on my sleeve. Watch the horses doing not much of anything—unless you count horsey sniffles and horsey snoozes. I throw the brown paper the food came in onto the dying blaze.

  What did you leave behind you? Dott asks quietly.

  Chaos. You stuck it to ‘em, Dott, I can’t take that away from you.

  Dott is shaking his head; his shadows stretch like ghosts morphing.

  Not at the prison. In your life, he clarifies.

  For the second time I say: You should know. You’ve been hanging off my leg like a lovesick turd for half my life!

  I want to hear the words, Dott says, weirdly.

  Taking stock in a moment like this is sobering, really. What have I left behind, bar nick existence? (I won’t say nick life. That shit’s not life. It’s breathing and blood moves, but it ain’t life.) Mumsy and my sisters, I tell him.

  What are their names?

  I’m indebted to one of the horses—I don’t know which one—for breaking wind at this precise second, the better to grant me an extra second to rifle through the drawers and diaries of my head. It scares me a little—and will do so considerably more, I have no doubt—that the names don’t come to me as eagerly as my own does. When you don’t use a language, you lose a language; it’s like any other skill. Gets rusty.

  Their names are, Roberta and Justine.

  What do they do? Dott wants to know.

  I have to crawl back to one of Mumsy’s visits, oh a long time ago—in the past, when I still had interest to show in anything.

  Roberta works in a boutique. She gets ten per cent off her clothes, but they cost a fucking fortune in the first place, but she won’t be told. Justine’s at college: beauty therapy.

  Dott nods. Not continuing the family business then? Crime.

  That’s only me, I say. The girls are good girls. Mum does her best.

  Your old man’s a one, though, innee, Billy?

  Why am I nonplussed and agitated by this? Of course the cunt knows about Bailey. Cunt knows everything. This late in the day, fuck it won’t surprise me much if Dott is Bailey. Two miserable, sad little doppelgangers.

  He’s had a madness or two, I concede, putting my head down.

  Okay, I’ll watch.

  Watch for what? My voice is maybe a little too rattled.

  I don’t know. Snakes? Scorpions? Fucked if I know or remember. Maybe there are roaming carnivorous anteaters, Billy!

  Allow it taking the piss.

  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Dott’s eyes as wide as all else. He smiles. Go on, seriously, Alfreth. Rest up. Three hours enough?

  Should be.

  Then it’s my turn.

  Fine.

  Long as the sand hedgehogs don’t bite my face off first.

  I lie down on my hands, which are pressed together as if for prayer. I don’t have my beads with me—they are not part of this world. But for the sake of healthy communion, I pray anyway. Pray to reach the end of this donnybrook of the nerves—of the soul, salts and tissues. This last chapter. Symmetrically I guess I dream of the prison. Not the prison ship. I dream of Dellacotte YOI. The fires have melted away the walls between cells; all eight Wings, plus the Seg, are ablaze, people waxing like candles; every Wing resembles a crematory pyre. Air shifts in cow’s breath heat; haze warps the picture. Screaming everywhere. Screws on the ends of spears, being heated in the flames like marshmallows, by yoots who are too tough to die. I wake before I’m woken up. Dott doesn’t know I’ve opened my eyes; I see him staring up into a flawlessly black sky. There are no stars. No moon. There’s no weather. Other than what hasn’t yet burned of the sacrificial lamb I tossed onto the fire—and which won’t ignite now in the petering embers—there’s no proof of anything else alive in the world. As the song says, it’s just the two of us. And we can make it if we try.

  Dott? I call out.

  Can you feel it, Billy?

  Your turn to nap.

  I said, can you feel it? grinning broadly. Something’s tickled him.

  No. Feel what? I want to know.

  It’s working. I can feel it—I’m getting older again! God, Billy.

  Not God. King Billy is sufficient, I say again, not much appreciating for the once the awestruck tone my travelling companion’s adopted.

  It takes a few shakes of my head to knock the sleepiness from my senses. Not that I don’t acknowledge this has probably been the best snooze I’ve had in a month.

  Suddenly Dott is on his feet. Let’s go, Billy! It’s catching up on us!

  My first thought is of desert animals, but up till now Dott has shown no more than an acerbic interest in what lives in the dunes; this isn’t about wildlife, instinct tells me. Following Dott to where the horses are lying down, I demand of him the answer to the question of what’s catching up on us.

  Time, Billy, time! Come on!

  You haven’t slept!

  I might never need to sleep again!

  With which he boots his horse in the left flank; the animal whinnies and stretches up to its full height, its own companion copying the action.

  We have to get to the roses first!

  What about the rest of the food? I ask, pointing back towards the fire.

  Fuck the food! Your belly full? Dott inquires brusquely.

  For now. It won’t be forever.

  We won’t be riding forever! We’re close!

  It took you weeks¸ Dott, the first time you went there, I protest.

  But then I didn’t know where I was going, he answers. I didn’t have time chasing me down. I do now.

  He mounts his horse in the sort of fluid motion I can only wish for. I clamber aboard my patient steed with all the grace I exhibit when lugging my frame onto a prison ship.

  Which way are we going? I ask as Dott’s horse takes off.

  Which way, Billy? Dott shouts. Towards death, of course!

  Seven.

  Dear Bailey

  If you’ve as much as half a brain in your head, and I think you must have because I’ve got my intelligence from somewhere in addition to Mum, you won’t be in the least bit surprised to learn I could happily—quite happily—slap you purple, slap you blue. Let me count the reasons; in advance, let me count my excuses. I’ll give myself an alibi. I’ll plan it carefully. I’ll find you one night
when you are vulnerable, and I will strike you down for your crimes against the family you helped create. Does that sound irrational? I’m feeling irrational. When I got Mumsy’s letter I experienced what I can only describe as a fit. I was dragged off to Health Care. Now I’m not saying categorically that my reaction was entirely the result of what Mum wrote, but to be blunt about it, it didn’t help—not on top of the couple months I’ve just been through. I read it twice. I was halfway, roughly, through my third reading when my vision—it kind of overlapped and I was reading everything twice or not at all. The words did not make sense, and as for the sentences— forget it! No way, Jose! Then I started on a spastic seizure on the floor; I banged my head on the curve of the toilet bowl; I bit my lip open. And though it only lasted less than a minute, it left me exhausted and feeling sick, and next month, apparently, I’ll be taken out of the prison to get a brain scan for signs of epilepsy. Define ‘irony’. I’ve been trying to get out—out in physical body as opposed to spirit (don’t ask)—for what seems like half a lifetime, and it takes the actions of a wasteman like you to wave the enchanted wand. Indirectly, granted, but it’s the behaviour of Bailey that’ll set me free for a day. Bailey? Well, I never knew you as Harvey so I’ll stick to Bailey, at your request. Why not ‘Dad’? You’ve got to be pulling my leg. That’s a word you earn, mate—please don’t think you’re getting the key to the kingdom just yet. Am I being harsh? I do hope so. I intended to be harsh; if I’m failing in any way, do let me know—seriously. I want you to understand precisely how disgusted I am in your ethics and savoir-faire. Perhaps you’ll visit. Why would I want you to visit, you may well ask. Number one reason—obviously!—is to give you that slap. I really will hit you, Bailey, when I see you—for what you did to the mother of your children, and for your cowardice. Don’t for a second believe I’m exaggerating. You’ve had it coming for nearly twenty years so don’t pretend you’re in any way subjugated by my mysterious words and deeds. If ever you were a man of honour—which is in dispute, but let’s give the notion the benefit of the doubt—then you will understand. The knock-on effect will be I’ll not be permitted any visits in the immediate future—not after I slapped Julie that time for spending all my money, which I’ll come on to shortly if I can sluice the bad taste from my mouth.