David Mathew - O My Days

I couldn’t believe some of the things I saw! I mean, Billy, what would you expect if someone said she was going to the desert? Sand? Well, of course sand. And the fact that I was there to witness—to be influenced by—a storm of time , not to mention a body of water in the middle of the dry land, well, this suggests that I would have had my eyes open, right? But nothing could have prepared me for some of the things that were there.

There were computerised river taxis—though the Oasis obviously wasn’t a river. What else? Robot bartenders!—in these shacks—and even the word shacks is over-selling those dumps to be honest—ramshackle dumps selling rose-wine and fermented camel milk.

And the politics you wouldn’t believe! I remember a war between two rival groups of bus drivers. Two groups . You wouldn’t have thought that one bus was needed in the… sorry, I shouldn’t laugh; this isn’t a laughing matter, is it? In the town called Hospital, was what I was trying to say. The Healing Town.

Yeah, right. Take a look at the walnut-faced poor bastards who live there and tell me how much they’ve been healed. So I suppose the people searched for distractions, like in any other community. Violence is one key to that particular lock, isn’t it, Billy? You should know that as well as I do. If not, better. But there were bus trips around the township for the elderly and the infirm—and occasional trips away, for supplies and so on. And these two different companies set up against one another. It was bloody.

There was no sure way of knowing whereabouts to go in the Oasis to be affected by a particular influence of time. If you wanted to go back, for example—back two years to say goodbye to your father before he passed away—you didn’t just form an orderly queue at Point A. It wasn’t a scenic tour or anything like that. It seemed random.

And as I think I said before, we mustn’t forget that the Oasis, for most people, was their home . They weren’t pilgrims searching for a Messiah. This wasn’t Mecca . This wasn’t Lourdes . Generations—sometimes—had grown up there, though not always at the speed we would know it. Three score years and ten, Billy? Forget it. I heard about a clan that lived in two adjacent fenestrated huts, with blankets on the roofs. The patriarch, the matriarch, seven siblings, all of them married with children of their own. Three generations, Billy—and the oldest and the youngest had been born within eight years of each other. Rumour had it they looked like raisins with limbs. It had fallen to the wives and husbands who had married into the family to look after the entire brood. A sixteen year-old, for example, taking care of her twelve year-old grandfather. Again, it’s only rumour—but this one went that neither the grandmother nor the grandfather could remember their parents; that they hadn’t actually had any—it’s not as though they’d died or anything. The family was born in and of the dirt and rocks surrounding Umma —or Mostashifa Tamaninat , if you prefer.

So where should I go? Where would you have gone, Billy? You ask around, right? Well, I did—and that got me little more than blank looks, until I heard the story of Noor Aljarhalifaro—the old man, the gentleman thief. The one who stole the water . Yeah, that’s Ronald Dott to you and me. And I’ve been obsessed with him ever since, or until then, depending on your point of view.

He was older then, as you know. And he was something of a legend in the town, let’s put it politely. One old woman, her body was changing ages at different speeds, divided at the waist. She was treating some wounds I had one day when I fell down and gouged my knee on a bleached cow’s skull. She was something of a local G.P. Didn’t think much of her bedside manner, mind you. For the stitches the needle was sterilised at the end of a lit cigarette. There was no anaesthetic. As I was being stitched up, in fucking agony by the way, she was like a hairdresser asking me if I was going anywhere nice on my holidays. It didn’t matter much, not to her at least, that she couldn’t speak English very well. She knew some basics. And I guess she was trying to keep me occupied while she savaged me with her surgery. In hindsight I should have known better, seeing’s she had a needle in one hand and my knee in another, but I was intrigued by the story of the geriatric burglar. In this country we’ve got Care in the Community programmes to help the elderly into suitable employment. But to tell you the truth, Alfreth, I would find it rather cute, if I had to be robbed, if it was some old guy who did it. Shows there’s life in the old dog yet, and all that. What I found out, getting my knee stitched up, is that Noor—or Dott—how should I refer to him here? Okay, Dott. Dott was by no means considered a quaint old duffer with a magpie penchant for valuables. ‘Cause there were no valuables, or at least not as we would know them. No doubt some family heirloom, or family importance stuff; but nothing like rubies or gems. The valuable commodity was water itself. And Dott nicked some.

So it was a bit foolhardy of me to mention the recent incarceration of this thief, out there on the prison ship. If I understood my surgeon’s Pidgin English correctly, the message was along the lines of: I hope they release him quickly so I can kick him to death before my legs get too old to do so. Her lower body was ageing faster than her torso. Of course, this sort of reaction could only make me more determined to learn his story—or even to meet him. I mean, what else was I going to do in Umma while I waited for time forces to have their way with me? Get a job? I had money to last me a while—a month or so—because while I might not have been earning well in England, in the desert I was a rich woman. A white-skinned princess, no less, as one dirty old man who was actually five told me.

I swear I saw more spittle sizzling on hot ground in the following week than I have ever seen since—and certainly had ever seen before. Because that was the reaction from some that the story of Noor provoked: spontaneous spitting . The name acted like an emetic, especially among the citizens of Umma who really were older and not just looked like it. It was felt, sort of, that he’d let the side down a bit. Elders—even if they were elders like Noor, a bit wayward, rootless, a bit maverick—really should know better. They should—don’t laugh—they should act their age.

That said, some were willing to talk to me—as long as I kind of crept up on the question. As long as I wasn’t too full on. How do you boys put it? As long as I wasn’t point blank . No one could tell me where Dott, or Noor, had come from. And I don’t mean geographically, necessarily—as I say, there were people who’d been at the Oasis for generations—but no one knew anyone who knew anyone who had been there before Dott. But this sparked me up. I mean, think about it, Billy. If Dott is moving backwards, living his life from old back to young, where did it start? How old is old? Was he another one borne of the desert? Okay; it’s weird as hell to us but it happens there. But where did he start? Aged what we would call two hundred? Aged what we would call two thousand ?

There were even stories about him, Billy—not like stories in books but more like fairy tales, I suppose. Myths. The story of the old man who got younger was told to children at bedtime, although God knows why. There’s no message to it. No moral. Not as far as I can see. His daring life of crime—joke!—began, as far as anyone could estimate, and after I’d sort of collated the answers, his life of crime began when he was about a hundred and one. The crime was public indecency, Billy—repeated public indecency. If he’d been in this country at the time, oh and eighty years younger, he might have got the very cell on the Puppydog Wing that he actually has got.