David Mathew - O My Days

Kate is shaking me back to the living.

Billy!

Cool air floods my lungs and I cringe with a sudden graze of heartburn. I clutch my chest. The bellyache I never had—the one that I fabricated in order to get a meeting with Kate Wollington—strikes up its big band now. Still seated, I bend over so that my elbows are on my knees. My piece has shrivelled back into my pubic bone, a frightened rodent.

Fuck that, I’m saying to no one at all. What happened? I say to Kate.

You stopped breathing, Kate tells me. You were going blue.

Catching my breath, I look up—at Kate’s breasts—but keep looking up until I find the underside of her chin; she is leaning over me, her left hand still on my right shoulder from where she’s been pulling and pushing me back to consciousness. I focus on a tiny birthmark on the right side of her jaw. I don’t want to meet her eyes—not directly, not so soon.

You do that? I ask.

Do what? she wants to know. Nicotine breath: reassuring. But I can still smell the brackish stench of the Oasis—the water, the oil in it, or maybe it’s the smell of the animals I haven’t seen, or of the dead I haven’t seen.

Take me there, I clarify.

Take you where? she asks, now backing away from me, sitting down.

To the Oasis.

No. Is that what happened? She sounds excited.

Fuck. Man feel like man run a sprint, blood.

You were there .

Yes, Kate. Miss. I was there.

My breathing has returned to normal; if anything, in the silence that ensues, it sounds too quiet in the no-chat. I picture the scene again. I rummage through my memory. It’s like putting on costumes, or fancy dress plucked from a trunk. There they are: some filthy ducks on the water, some ducking their heads for polluted fare; a lady duck grooming her guy. Babies—chicks—in the murk, black tennis balls. More than ever I want a slug of Angela’s gin. I was there : Kate has told me so—as if I don’t know it. What’s she waiting for? Why the moon-eyes? Why the thin- lipped smile? You were there . The idea is enough to knock me sideways if I let it. She must see something on my face—that eureka! moment—because now she nods her head.

I was there, wasn’t I? I ask her.

Be clear, Billy, she tells me slowly. What exactly do you want to mean? Be as clear as you’ve wanted me to be with you.

I was there… with you. Wasn’t I?

Kate says, Yes. Yes, Billy. We first met at the Oasis.

Too much. I want to go home, Kate.

Well you can’t.

To my pad, I mean. I want to go back to my cell.

No you don’t, Billy, says Kate. You told me to make you understand.

It’s not worth the brain cells, I protest.

You’ll lose more brain cells worrying about what you can’t get.

Get?

Understand, I mean. We might not have another chance like this, Billy. Think of it like an affair. I can be the scratch to your itch. I already am.

You already are, I confirmed. If I was there…

Why don’t you remember?

Yeah. Why don’t I remember? When was I there?

Kate shrugs her shoulders. My guess? she says. My guess is you were there in the future, she tells me.

I grasp my head in my hands. Tell me about your blindness, I say.

Association Time. Sosh. Six p.m.

It being Tuesday, it is my Wing’s—E Wing’s—turn for evening Gym. Bucking a trend, I don my sports shorts and a too-tight T-shirt, awaiting the question at my door flap. When it comes to exercise I prefer to go it alone in my cell. Gyms are demeaning. Man has no business watching another man perspire. Plus there’s the ego ting: the boys who watch, the boys who judge. So what? So what if I can’t bench eighty kilos? Don’t I have more important things to worry about? The flap is flipped open.

Gym, Alfreth? asks Screw Jones.

Yes please, sir, I reply.

Well bugger me.

In the freezing cold I cross the yard, side by side with Shelley. He has already remarked on how unusual it is to see me going to the Gym.

Getting flabby innit, I tell him. Need a workout buddy.

As predicted, Shelley takes this as a compliment. Shelley has biceps like coconuts. Pretty soon we’re in the warm (scent of bodies and shower gel), and you can feel the competition in the air; it’s as noticeable as the clanks of weights dropping, as the whirr of the rowing machine wire. I’m here to do myself an injury. I’m here to overdo it. I’m here to pull a muscle—all the better to get a visit to the outside. I want to go to hospital.

Take it easy, cuz, Shelley warns me shortly after I’ve started.

I have not worked up to the workout; my body will ache in the morning, but I don’t care. I want it out. I want to sweat out all of the badness, the memories.

Did you hear about Ostrich, blood? he asks later.

Ain’t seen him today. Wogwun?

Man going, blood. Big Man Jail.

Shut. Up!

It’s true, rudeboy. Told him before dinner, says Shelley.

Is that why he’s not out of his cell for Sosh?

Probably.

Shelley is on the machine next to where I’m benching. Shelley is overacting on his thighs. With every closed-leg action he’s emitting a tennis player’s grunt or a childbirthing howl. He’s overdoing it too.

Wish man told me, I say to my partner.

Probably packing his see-through sack.

Even so.

You’ll still get to say goodbye at breakfast, says Shelley.

But I don’t just want to say goodbye. Opportunity knocks but once, and all that; if Ostrich is going out, albeit in cuffs, albeit in the wagon, then at least there’s a chance that he can be used in some way.

A letter?

Pumping the weights, I think on. I hurt my brain and not my back; and the thoughts lead me back to Kate Wollington. She is willing to help me as long as I help her. She has seen the CCTV footage of me and others attacking a helpless victim, but it hasn’t happened. It didn’t happen. Not like that. I don’t think so.

Was I really attacked? That’s the story I have told all along. What I remember is stabbing that yoot’s arm, but is that the truth? If not, what is? For a second or two I disappear into my memories. No. ‘Thoughts’ is probably better than ‘memories’. How can something be a memory if it hasn’t yet occurred?

By now I am punishing those weights: clank . Whirr and then clank: over and over again. My heart is a stressed-out motor. Eyes now opened, I am easily able to see what has got the Gym Govs so spooked. There are three of them watching us. One is puzzled, one looks fearful, the last one angry. I don’t know how it has happened but all of us yoots—all twenty or so of us—have fallen into a workout rhythm. The sound of synchronicity is nothing but chilling. My weights are banging down at the same time as Shelley’s; that alone might be seen as peculiar. But twenty-five inmates? How has this come about? A revving hum as the wires are stretched—on bench, on seat, on bike, on rower—and then the sound of weights bumping down. It’s like a rally of some sort; we are in this together, comrades. And it’s frightening. When I cease my exercising it’s like I’ve hit a bum note, singing at the back of the choir. Savage but brief are the looks the yoots throw me. Relieved are the same from the screws. A hench sadistic bastard name of Pequod takes the lead as the rest of the yoots stop their own exertions.

Showers, lads! he calls.

Even the boys down below, beneath the balcony, playing shirts-and-skins, three man-a-side basketball—even they have been playing in time with the exercises up above: bouncing the ball in good time and in contrapunt. What the hell is going on? I want to know, acting the innocent.

What’s going on, Alfreth, says Pequod, is the shower tap. Get stripping. And don’t forget to wash underneath the arches. Go.