David Mathew - O My Days

Thanking the Lord for the female menopause—the one that causes Miss Patterson to take such frequent toilet breaks—I use my computer and my few stolen minutes to research a portfolio of books on the subject. No longer do I flirt with Kate Thistle. She thinks she has done something to hurt me, but hey—you have to treat them mean to keep them keen. She wants to know what I’m doing but I refuse to tell her. By not forcing the issue, which she can certainly do, she makes me even more suspicious of her intentions. But I’m not scared of Miss Thistle anymore; it is strange that I ever was.

I’m approaching his cell in the Segregation Unit.

Thank you for coming to see me, darling! Dott shouts.

And I know that if I flip back his flap he’ll be there. Teeth or eyes to the meshed glass. I don’t even tell Dott to fuck off. Flanked on either side by my superstar minders, I continue to walk to my designated cell. I’m pulsing with anger and fear; but I have no intention of showing it to anyone. With good grace I will accept my Seg cell: its bucket, its mattress. And I will promise my advisers that I have learned my lessons and it won’t happen again. I will be a good boy. I will show anyone who wants to know that I’ve learned my lesson. And in secret I will plot my revenge.

But Dott isn’t finished. Fancy seeing you here! he calls. And: Do you fancy going out tonight? he calls.

Motherfucker, I whisper.

The screw to my right agrees. Shut the fuck up, Dott! he shouts, and the taunts cease immediately. But I can feel him laughing behind the steel. When my cell is unlocked I say to the officers: I’m sorry, sir. And then again, turning slightly: I’m sorry, sir.

For what?

For having to listen to that from Dott, I say. It was for my benefit.

The screw to my left—Peterson, I think his name is—regards my admission as a sign of something possible in the future.

You two cunts got beef? he asks me and squashes up his face. Beef will entail a rethinking of my sleeping arrangements.

I shake my head. Nothing serious, I tell him, hoping for it to be so.

Only the night, I think, or the following nights, will say for sure.

The door opens. I have seen inside a Segregation Unit cell on more than one occasion, on business, on my travels as a Library Redband. But viewing through a flap does not prepare you for the narrowness of the room, nor the low ceiling, the hum of the empty pot in the left far corner. Not since I arrived at Dellacotte have I experienced such a sensation of dread. I am wringing wet and starving and poor, let’s not forget. The sort of poverty that most people live with every day—I’m with you brothers.

My cell is two away from Dott’s. The previous inhabitant has made his escape by creating a noose from a pillowcase and getting transferred to the Psychiatric Wing of a prison forty miles away. His name is Henry. I won’t see him again, and I wonder if anyone is thinking in similar terms about me. The door closes. The chunky clunk of a heavy lock. I lie down on a mattress that smells of sweat and semen; I plump the pillow against the cold brick wall. There is nothing to do. That is why it’s called Seg.

Night brings a different collection of noises. I’m used to music, the blur of late-night TV, and hollered conversations from cell to cell. I am not used to the wailing and the moaning of the yoots on this Wing. The pain; the endeavour. Never in my life have I heard young men suffering so. I’m trying to ride it; I’m trying to blow ignorant. It’s not easy.

How has Dott done it? What he’s done is create a system of mass hypnosis and hallucination, so that at the beck and call of the bruv’s finger—or a signal of some kind—my cuzzes do what the fuck he wants them to. And I can live with that. I have heard more far-fetched: the yoot in the burka and the face- veil, pretending to be a Muslim matriarch and holding up the Post Office; the yoot whose dad works in an agency for security guards, getting a job and robbing a Woolworth’s depot of nine grand’s worth of kids’ clothing. It’s not the audacity that stymies me; it’s the not knowing that breaks my heart. I can’t wait any longer. In the middle of the night I call his name.

Dott refuses to answer. I call again and the night-screw (face unknown, name unknown) bangs on my door and tells me to can it immediately. I leave it an hour before calling Dott’s name again. It’s four a.m. He doesn’t answer in words but in an action that makes me jump. He has created a swing-line from his bed sheet, using a roll of toilet paper as a weight. Like a raven the package thumps at my window. I get up off the floor and open the slits. The night air is chilly, blood. Dressed in nothing more than boxers and perspiration, I await his second swing. It comes but I miss it; I cannot reach out far enough. Increasingly riskily, awaiting another thump on the door, it’s not till the fourteenth swing, my right arm by now raw from friction with the slits, that I manage to take hold of what Dott is sending me. Stuffed inside the toilet roll is a pillowcase. I pull it out.

There are clichés aplenty in the books to which my job allows me easy access—clichés about fear and about wanting. Especially fear. So what is my heart like? A drum? A thunderstorm? It’s beating so fast that I cannot hear anything else as I squint at the pillowcase. It’s marked with something dark but the light is too poor to be able to see for sure what it is. Turning on my lamp will illuminate a tiny light on the power board in the office and a screw will come along, wondering why I’m awake so early; all I can do is hold the pillowcase up to the slits, and then wondering how Dott has managed to smuggle a pen into the block, I rely on a different sense. I sniff the pillowcase. Blood. I will later find out that Dott has written his message to me with blood from the sole of his left foot, using a short sewing needle that he has secreted in the flesh behind his right shin. Drop by drop. Stitching bloodstain to bloodstain, for my benefit. The letter must have taken the better part of an evening: little wonder that he has been quiet. He has been working.

But I can’t read it! I have to wait until first light at 5:47 before I get any relief from the biting frustration I’m feeling. But I still can’t read it properly. My new next-door is a Czech lad named Jacob. I don’t know if that’s his first name or his family name, but he clearly believes he owns the Seg Block, the cunt. At 5.50—rise and shine!—he shouts for attention; it’s almost as though he knows something is going on that he wants to ruin, but he’s probably been sleeping. He rings the night bell. Footfalls on polished tiles, the screws come running. Jacob is on suicide watch and he’s attempted before, bare times. It will be a matter of seconds before they arrive. It’s in those seconds that I realise Jacob has given me my reason for turning on my light; other inmates will be doing the same, protesting against their sudden alarm call. If the screws are with Jacob, they can’t be with me. Thank you, cuz, I’m thinking as I light up the room.

I’m faced with a series of worries and dilemmas. In no particular order. Before I face Number One Governor at the Adjudication I am sweating in my cell, fearful of losing my Redband and my Enhanced status. Lose those and it’s no Library job for me. In a few days’ time I will enter the small court of law at the end of the Seg corridor, limbs trembling, eye sockets twitching no doubt through lack of sleep.

Take a seat, Alfreth, the Governor will tell me without looking up from his paperwork. Hands on the desk. You know the routine.

Yes, sir. But no, sir, I will want to protest. I don’t.

The desk faces his; there’s a space of two metres between the two facades. In addition to me and the Governor, there are officers to my sides in case I make a sudden violent movement; there’s the officer who will read the charge, and the officer who will give the eye witness statement.