David Mathew - O My Days

Milky. Two sugars, she tells me.

I spoon three heaped teaspoons of coffee granules into my usual cup. The coffee is better than the prison issue crap I get in my cell and I’m not one to look a gifthorse in the mouth. The black coffee has me buzzing, and I need it, fam. I have been up half the night learning my questions and script for Kate.

You look well, Billy, she says, two hands curled round her cup. The steam rises up into her face as she lifts it, blurring the beauty of her eyes.

Do I, Miss? I reply. I feel awful.

She nods her head. Was the Segregation Unit so bad? Like a million years of bee stings, I give her.

The simile almost floors her. She has not expected me to know that she’s read Dott’s letter. Don’t know where she’s read it, but she has. It deals an opponent an important blow—to realise that the other person is closer than imagined. Less elegantly, it does me good to know that I can still shit her up peculiar. Sometimes the relationship between predator and prey is more complex than it looks from the outside. I’m the wasp. Kate Thistle is the skin I want to land on.

What a funny way to put it, she tells me eventually.

I keep her gaze. Is it?

Yes, I would think so. She is sifting through the information.

I tell her I can make it all so much easier and she looks at me with a quizzical expression.

Let me help you, I offer.

And what makes you think you can help me? she asks.

I know Dott. Or I’m getting to know him.

Maybe it’s not much of a hand but it’s the only one I’ve got. I haven’t been able to research the full range of my themes but I’m on a roll. Or so I believe. Evidently Kate isn’t as impressed as I’ve thought she might be.

She shrugs now and says, So?

So you want to know him better. (Which brings me to some of what I have spent the wee, itchy-eye hours rehearsing. Firming my grip around my drink, I plough on.) I might believe, I say, you’re some sort of psychologist, Kate, but you’ve got nothing to do with education.

Then what am I? she demands.

I’ve touched a nerve. Getting nearer.

You’re investigating the fact that Dott doesn’t age, I say to Kate. You’re talking to people who knew him. People who’ve been affected by him.

She takes her time replying. She sips. And that’s you.

That’s me. As you know. The bee-sting.

Have I gained an advantage—any advantage at all? I’m not sure. Miss Thistle is proving as impossible to get inside as ever and just when I thought I had an in. Man think she penetrable, not im-. Man wrong.But I can’t give up now, surely to God. And Kate thinks the same.

While she waits, I ask her: And how come, by the way? How come you’re allowed to be a non-prison employee with sole charge of an inmate?

I don’t follow, Kate tells me, picture of innocence yat.

Question simple enough innit. How come? I say for the third time. Not like I’m in for fucking money laundering or bullshit. I’m a violent YP.

Kate places down her cup. Your records, she replies, are exemplars.

Which you’ve read.

Which I wrote, Billy. Grow up! Or helped to write anyway.

I’m lost, I confess. Hereby I lose any mastery I’ve gained. Comes a point when it simply doesn’t matter anymore. You slug a brew, say fuck it.

You’re halfway there, says Kate.

It’s a bit like raking leaves. Allow it taking the piss, I’ve had my jobs. I know what it’s like to scoop half a broomful and then lose it in the breeze. Keep most of what you’ve got together in one place.

You’re shaking, Kate informs me.

I’m scared, I confess, losing every point I’ve scored up till now.

Don’t be.

I can help you, I say.

I know, she replies. I’m just not sure how to use you.

I wait for another word—another insult. Finally I say, You can use me to brew up again. We’ve got no one coming.

Brew up again, Kate instructs me with a nod of the head.

I aim to please. Do I say this or only think of saying it? Not sure. There are bare things I think I say, sometimes, and I never do. Bare things I never say but imagine otherwise. I wish I could be a doctor, to look at my own head.

Miss Thistle? You’ve got power.

I’m not sure I would go that far, Billy, she replies.

I’m not like some of the other lads in this nick, I’ve come to realise. Some of the other lads reach their most eloquent and dramatic turns of phrase at the point of maximum vulnerability: when their backs are against the wall. Me, I’m different. In the possession of price-raised information, I’ve realised, I’m a veritable Camus or Sartre. I know my shit. So I say:

I think you are, Miss. Either Governor Glazer or Governor Manners has okayed you to be in sole charge of a perpetrator of a violent crime. I stabbed-

I know. You stabbed someone in the arm.

So what’s the arrangement? I want to know.

I’m not sure I follow you, Billy, Kate replies—and I like her style.

What do I get for helping you out? I ask slowly.

What do you think I can give you?

My pace is calm; my tone pure buttermilk and whipped yoghurt. Temperament-wise, I’m a fucking dessert. I want to be bruleed. Toasted in brandy, innit.

A meeting with Dott, I reply.

Swiftly on the defensive, Kate informs me she’s not certain she can swing that one around. I tell her she can, if she wants to. It’s my only hope.

I’ll see what I can do, she tells me after a longish pause. Would this do in the meantime? A visit.

To where?

To his cell in the Seg. His TV magazine.

Has he ordered one? I ask.

Yes. It would normally go to his cell on the Puppydog Wing—he paid in advance for the month—but it’s worth a Try. Why are you smiling?’

I like it, I confess. Like rubbing salt in the wound.

I don’t follow, Billy.

We’ll be giving him a TV mag in a place where he’s explicitly forbidden to watch TV, I tell her. It’s beautiful.

It’s not quite what I had in mind.

I’m still smiling. But then again, Miss, I say, you don’t have my mind.

Which point, the scary thing happens. Kate Thistle responds with:

No. No, I don’t. Not yet.

What was that nonsense I heard about you slapping your bird? I am asked.

His name is Screw Oates. I have mentioned him before but the names don’t really matter. We’re deaf to prison officers’ names, half the time. (Maybe you are as well.) They’re not deaf to ours but we’re deaf to theirs. And it’s not just the yoots who are immune to the charms of screws’ monikers. In the past I have overheard the occasional conversation between members of the Education Department, in which one will admit to another that he or she doesn’t know the name of the screw on the landing corridor with them. Consider that. You’re in a room of convicted killers, say, and your guard’s your best shot if something kicks off. And you don’t even possess the civil and self-preservative courtesy of learning the cunt’s name.

Anyway. Oates is my unofficial guide around the Dellacotte grounds as I hump my day-glo sack of reading goodies to the wankers and the nice guys. Don’t usually qualify for a chaperone, but after the slapping incident, they’re covering their arses so thickly it looks like pork rind.

She stole my money, sir, I reply accurately.

How much?

We’ve reached the Segregation Unit. It’s ugly how the feelings from such a recent encounter with the god-forsaken place rear up in me now.

Eighteen grand, sir.

Oates turns to me as he uses the first of his two keys to get us in there, out of the murmuring rain.

Eighteen grand. He even whistles.

Yes, Gov.

I would’ve killed her, Alfreth. Get in there. Do what you need to do.