David Mathew - O My Days

Allow it.

Man not know that man’s new dad has siblings, innit.

Unexpectedly, Ostrich starts nibbling at the baguette. It’s a way of wasting time.

Uncles. They come to my ends, then to my yard. An explosive situation, I’m all but certain you’ll agree.

That cheap meat in Ostrich’s baguette is like nose poison. But this is newsworthy. If Ostrich has managed to wipe out the alpha male line of a perfectly respectable family, where is the bulletin?

I had to do some mad shit, rudeboy. Kept myself to myself but the truth was as known as riding a fucking bike innit. I had some strangers to leave out in the cold. Or they were going to the feds. Man know it was wrong. Man weak, I reckon. I squash out three man. Happy Father’s Day, blood.

The third one you got caught, I wanted to know.

That’s the deal, Ostrich tells me.

Swear down trust? I ask.

Swear down trust, he says.

I don’t know why but I think that Ostrich is lying. One minute he’s bemoaning the fact that he’s only done whatnot and would have enjoyed doing more; the next he’s being criminally restricted.

Is Ostrich responsible or is he not? This is all getting peculiar.

As predicted, the Cookery class is cancelled. We’re kept banged up. In protest, Cawthorn and Williamson start simultaneous fires. Unplanned synchronicity, but that’s the funny way of this place sometimes. Smoke like a bad dream. I’m getting emphysema innit. I have a pray and then a bash. I hoist myself up to the window and hang from the bars, in order to watch the Garden Party—sorry, the Estates Party—doing their thing, cleaning up duck crap and chopping back hedges. I watch a few members of the Education Department having roll-ups outside the block door. I watch a few of the screws scuttle by, doing whatever the fuck they do when they’re not tormenting us. I’m bored as a man can be. The screws involved in the lipsing incident in the Cookery Room are Sinclair and Mews. And I find myself struggling to remember their faces.

Yo, Alfreth! someone calls.

I’m at the window anyway so I do what I don’t usually do. I answer.

Wogwun.

You got burn?

It’s my next-door, Jarvis. Inside for three for handbag theft and computer fraud. What used to be called a granny- basher, before the market expanded to teenage girl victims and foreigners carrying change in a sack while delivering pizza in oversized boxes to boardrooms and the slums. He’s nearly a millionaire but will it cheer him up? Will it fuck.

I’ve got burn. A pinch or two; no more than a prison ration. So I say, almost honestly, No, man. Give it away innit.

Who to?

Ostrich.

Turn the music down, man. Can hardly hear you, bruv!

Sorry.

The decibelage and rap carnage deteriorates to no more than a whining jet engine sort of level.

Twos on what you’ve got, still, Jarvis says, for my ham baguette.

He’s bargaining on a straight exchange: nothing ventured, nothing gained; and no one’s the loser, let the buyer beware, not to mention, waste not want not, fair exchange is no robbery and other long-tried and abandoned petty bullshit philosophies. What he’s hoping for is for a swing: a highly risky—block-visit-likely—enterprise that extols the virtues of comrades sharing, and which involves tying a named object of booty inside a knapsack made from the end of your bed sheets. Then you dangle the sheet and the prize out your window and start swinging the noose for enough momentum for it to carry up to the window, either of your own next-door, or—if you’re particularly famished of self-destructive impulses—on a double-length twine to the pad beyond that. At the best of times I don’t care too much for that noise.

I tell him: No deal. I’m on a diet, cuz.

There’s nothing of you, fam! he protests, evidently eager for a smoke. Desperate, in fact. In protest, the volume of his music rises up—like a flood.

I return to my thoughts. Having lost my weekly extra meal—the meal that I would have cooked personally and might not have burned; the one that Jarvis would have known I’ve been deprived of (he’s picked his moment well)—I am obviously starving. It’s psychological, no doubt; but it’s curdled my stomach lining and I’m livid with Roller and Meaney. Who are returning to their respective Wings this afternoon. God help them. Time passes, and I’m viewing an afternoon movie about the American Civil War, when to my surprise the heavy key turns in the lock. It’s a screw name of Wayne.

Stop wanking, Alfreth, he tells me, and put your jacket on.

I’m not, sir. What’s happening?

A visit, is all he wants to reply.

But visits don’t happen on a Wednesday. Even someone as new to the prison as Dott—especially Dott—knows that visits are Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Nonetheless, I pull on my denim coat and brush my hair quickly.

A shower might have been nice, I say to Wayne. Who’s coming to link?

Wayne frowns his doughy face. How the fuck should I know? he says.

Thus it is that I’m led from my pad, past the Servery, and through the opened gate and outside door. The air is as cold as a Puppydog crime. Leaves from the trees are shifting this way and yonder. I can smell the duck pond on the gale: the birds themselves and the fresh cement of the Bricks Department’s refurbishment—the one I have yet to see and might never will. Expectantly I turn right, towards the Visits Hall—near the main gate. But I’m corrected in my assumption.

Over there, says Screw Wayne.

Towards what? The laundry? The recycling depot? The Estates Party changing rooms? Then it hits me: I am being taken to the Education block. It’s Kate Thistle who wants to see me.

In my time I have heard a host of opinions about where it is hardest to live. Ilford is gritty. Acton is bare road shit beef, blood. Tyneside is full of maniacs who will carve you up for the price of a kebab. Roads is nuts, cuz. That’s the common consensus.

I’d invite any one of the roads gangsters to sniff one day inside the fucking dump that is Dellacotte Young Offenders.

Allow it.

I have witnessed attempted murders: inside. I have witnessed rapes: inside. I have witnessed four kidnapping attempts: inside. None of this I saw on the out. It doesn’t happen if you don’t chat it. Here we live with the paradox of possibility and no possibility.

I’m weak with hunger but the sickness I feel can sense a release, one way or the other. I enter the Education block with bare sweat busting. A classroom is as frightening as a tenement. But not the Cookery Room, which is where I am headed, as it turns out.

Later on in the interview, I am yet again asked to repeat what I saw. In front of Roller and Meaney, each in cuffs, and the screws in question—and even in front of the prison governor (a rare and no doubt post-prandial appearance)—I am asked to repeat myself. Leaving out the bad bits, I do so. Kate Thistle is also present. As is Kate Wollington. A boy called Cello is also there. He was one of the lads in the class itself, and he’s so-named because of his low notes. No one can work out how he makes a living, selling at such reasonable prices.

Cello says, Nothing happening, innit.

I’m not so sure. But I don’t know the equation either.

Governor Mannidge says to Roller and Meaney: What made you do it?—as if their behaviour has been controlled by freak weather conditions or by additives in their yoghurts. The words that Dott used come back to me. As do the words of Ostrich, from a few months earlier. At the time we’re working together in the Education Department, Ostrich as a Cleaning Orderly and me as an Induction Redband. Which means that I’m there to run errands, like photocopying chores and donkey-work carting, for the Education Manager; and Ostrich comes to empty the classrooms’ bins and occasionally hoover the filthy carpets.