David Mathew - O My Days

When I wake up I don’t want my cereal. I ask to go to Health Care but I’m told to put up and shut up. Not even the sweat on my body is convincing. Further dreams follow—increasingly horrific—for the next fourteen days or so. I serve bird in the sub-jail of my own fevered imagination. The riven ground now offers up, not ghosts, but the rotten remains of the hanged themselves. In reality those dead will be pale as a nun’s tits; in my dreams they hug their own flesh to their brown bones like mugging victims clutching their handbags and purses. Or their knife wounds. The dead walk towards me. The dead steal parcels of loose skin and muscle from each other. The dead meet me for a pow-wow in the Cookery Room.

Why have you found me? I ask in one dream. Why are you here?

Because, answers one, the bone of his jaw quickly slipping away from the remainder of his skull, like an O.G. sucking back a set of dentures, we don’t want to be in the ground anymore. We’ve done our time.

Ostrich is waxing lyrical, once again, about the benefits of Big Man Jail.

None of this bullshit, he is saying, about once-a-week Sosh, bloodfam. He is irate. Man a big man? Sosh automatic, blood. Swear down.

It’s still a prison, bruv, I inform him—as though the cunt’s an imbecile.

My mind is on other things—on Dott, specifically—but I’m drifting. At first I notice that Ostrich hasn’t noticed that I’m noticing something other than his overused opinion on the relative benefits of YOIs and Big Man Jails. I don’t know what it is, but I want to talk to Dott.

Allow it. But none of this softly-softly magic. Regular Visits.

Though I’m not entirely sure what Ostrich means by ‘softly-softly magic’—there’s not much suppressed around here, and for sure nothing softly—I nod my head in agreement. I want to return to my pad and think quietly. Ostrich is having none of it. Regular Gym, regular Cookery Class. It’s a privilege you earn, whether you want it or not, on becoming friends with a yoot in a prison: the privilege of compulsory ear-lending. To leave Ostrich now is a sin, now that he’s on a roll. Nevertheless. Change the CD, I’m thinking.

It’s back on, I tell him. As of a.s.a.p.

This brightens the man’s mood. Allow it, fam, he says.

You see the new yoot? The what’s-his-name, Marris. On Induction now innit.

It disturbs me slightly that I’ve been so preoccupied that I have all but overlooked the arrival of a new prisoner. I’m aware of the background, vaguely, but that’s about it. Even the name rings unfamiliar.

What he get? I ask Ostrich.

Eighteen do nine.

This sounds harsh. You’re dropping that on me? I want to confirm.

Swear down, blood. Already tired of the subject, Ostrich spits out a slimy string of snot; he’s getting a cold. But fuck him. Man’s a waste.

It’s a most peculiar evening. It’s only now, this evening, when everything seems chaotic—like a ball of random shoelaces being violently unpicked, with yoots dusting from one pocket, one clique, one landing, to the next—that I realise Association Time is usually much more structured. Disregarding the occasional fireworks, of course. Forgetting the sporadic pool cue to cranium scenarios. For no reason at all, or at least for no reason that’s immediately obvious, I find myself thinking of swallows in flight. Is it swallows? The ones that seem to go haywire in the air—go nuts—but you don’t worry too much (or at all) because they all know the codes and the map. The same as in a beehive. The same as in a wasps’ nest. We all have a role and a function—and a price. But bees can only sting once, Dott reminds me, and wasps can bang and bang in their papery home.

I’ve finished rolling a burn. Bust me a lighter, I say to Ostrich.

He’s smiling. Hustle me harder, he replies.

Please bust me a lighter.

Spoken like a true gentleman innit.

For a few seconds we pull on our burns, probably both relieved that a comfortable silence has settled between us. We’re getting more like an old married couple every day—a marriage that has lasted four or five decades. Forty years of food on the table at six. Forty years of finishing each other’s sentences. Forty years of slippers and milky drinks and early nights. Becoming comfy is not such a good thing, still. Screws notice that shit and they don’t like it. In order to avoid getting shipped out to a different Wing—one of us—we’re going to have to engineer some beef pretty soon. Among ourselves. Maybe even a swing, still. Man comfortable, way it goes; man don’t want to move pad. So only a war of words will convince the screws that we’re not exactly knitting woollen booties for our children’s children, yat. We’re not ready for the shared grave. For they like to keep us tense: tension they can monitor on paper; they can control. Happiness, not. We’ve discussed this. One day, with malice aforethought but no malice intended, one or other of us is going to accuse the other of something. In good grace we’ll take the nickings and the time spent down block. We’ll each lose a few points on our Wing files—I might even lose my Redband, but only briefly: fights are dick, everyone knows it—but we’ll be able to share Sosh for a good while longer. I’m tempted to swing him right now, when he says:

The news ain’t out. What happen to Roller and Meaney?

I sizzle out my burn in the wet sand in the ashtrays provided. Down to Basic, I tell Ostrich. No TV. No fucking visits. Depriving man of rights, innit.

They had it coming, Ostrich tells me dismissively.

What do you mean? It was beef, blood.

We all do it. From time to time, he expands.

It’s as though he’s been reading my mind.

The news is out that the fight started over a shared colander that both men wanted at the same time. And it don’t explain the kissing.

Straight, I concede.

No one is speaking to Roller and Meaney, of course; they’ll be spending a further few days minimum going through the cold turkey of conversation withdrawal. The overall opinion seems to be that Meaney has come off worst due to Roller’s unprovoked attack and is already sporting a bruise like a sunset on his left orbit. To balance things out, and for fairness in the light of the fact that Cookery has been cancelled—although not for as long as anyone imagined it would be—Roller has found himself some new abrasions to trace with his fingertips in the small hours: left temple, lower jaw. Perhaps I’m desperate, perhaps I’m dumb, but I decide to allow Ostrich into the inner sanctums of some of my thoughts about Dott.

That yoot the new fish. What do you really know?

The question foxes the man. Has time gone all twisted? he asks. Don’t man just have this conversation?

Not Marris. I mean Dott.

Okay, he says slowly. What do you need to know?

I’ve only got what I read in the papers.

Well, same here, rudeboy. Why does man wanna know?

My face, I suppose, is contorted with confusion.

There’s a lot of damage out for the cuz, I say to Ostrich. On Puppydog. I want to know why.

Ostrich laughs. Just possibly because of his crimes? he asks.

Nar. More serious than that, blood. Not beef on road. Not the crime—we’re talking Puppydog Wing, fuck’s sake; they’re all eligible for electrocution, cuz. Nar. It’s something else, something local.

Man have no idea, says Ostrich, and even less inclination to find out.

Allow it.

You can’t force a man to have an interest in something, but you can’t force him not to either. We all need a hobby. And knowing it’s going to make me seem perverse but I’m going to be the only one who wants to speak to Roller, to Meaney; and the only one who wants to speak to Dott.