David Mathew - O My Days

What I learned from the whispers behind hands, when people didn’t wish to be seen mouthing such filthy ideas—but at the same time couldn’t resist a gossip—was he would go down to the water. A hundred and one, this was! He was learning how to walk, shuffle, crawl. He was a baby, after all. Townsfolk used to look after him with soup and potatoes, but the story goes that there was a great, great sense of relief when he started to work out how to put one foot in front of the other.

How can I put this politely? Okay I won’t. He was wanking in the Oasis. Just for fun, as far as anyone could tell. Maybe, in his world, in his skin, he was a teenager; he was going through puberty, learning how to satisfy himself. It’s impossible to say: there’s no logic there. That’s the beauty of it.

How long do you think we’ve got left? Angela could be back any second so I’ll speed up a bit—just like I slowed down a bit in my time there, in Umma.

What I went there for I got: a slowing down in the deterioration of my eyesight—and even an improvement, over the course of the months I was able to eke out my earnings. See? My eyes got better—or at least time stopped them getting any worse. The effects slowed my body down. You know I’m older than I look; I’m an old bird, Billy—an old ting . But my eyesight is so-so. The Oasis healed me. Time healed—or as I say, stopped me getting any worse. Nothing’s perfect. I’ve had laser treatment and you wouldn’t believe the strength of these lenses, but there you go. I wasn’t supposed to be talking about me. I was talking about Dott. Damn it. We’ll have to wait for her next piss-break.

Ask him one question , is what I say to Julie, back in the Visits Room.

I return to my pad—this is when the shakes and twitches kick in. After about an hour of praying with my beads, I hit the night alarm, although it’s far from being night. I’m in fear of night arriving.

Screw Oates comes to my flap. What is it, Alfreth? he asks.

Permission to get under my covers, sir.

Why, what’s wrong with you?

Gut rot again, sir. I know everyone will be aware of my visit to Health Care and my complaint will carry weight. Besides, I’m not exactly lying. A lie-down and maybe even that rarest of beasts, a sleep, will do me some good. But we’re not allowed to get under the covers without permission.

He takes a second before he says, Granted, Alfreth. Need a visit?

Just had one, sir.

From Health Care, I mean.

Oh. No, sir. Paracetamol won’t do it, sir. Need to rest properly.

Okay. I’ll check on you in a while.

My bed is warm as toast and exactly as scratchy as the same. It dawns on me I can’t remember the last time our linen was changed. Rest? The very concept feels alien to me. I am tired to the point of distraction and even sickness. Relax . I let my thoughts float and chatter. This is fever sleep: the thoughts choose me . They bang and clatter and din. My thoughts play with me, not the other way around. And I go to that place, I go to that place I often find when I am dropping off to sleep: that state of mind that’s like a magic spell. A bit like when I’m having sex (if memory serves) and I’m trying to hold back, to make Julie come first, that emotional mantra I repeat inside my skull, to stop me busting a nut too early. Try to explain it and the spell is ruined and warped. Same with sleep. I travel into a dry, warm place before I know I can close more than my eyes—I can close my mind. I can shut down for the night and re-boot. Dry, warm place: like a desert.

The connection is enough to wake me up again; it frightens me. Lying still beneath my Redband-enhanced prison duvet, I try to imagine Ulla. I try to imagine a town called Hospital. Or rather, the Oasis is trying to imagine me . I can feel its pull as sleep gets closer.

Inevitably, the face of Ronald Dott enters my head. He is getting younger—he is disappearing, little by little, towards what we call birth. For him it’s death. Or is it? He needs to perpetrate evil deeds in order to keep him at the age he is, roughly speaking, give or take a year or two. He has what Kate Wollington would call ‘serious sexual concerns’. He uses us. He uses anyone. He wants to get older, older—much older. And he needs us, as well as uses us. He takes our time. We sleep and sleep. He induces mad actions. Screws kiss each other in the Cookery Room and Ds erupt into spontaneous acts of violence.

But what does he want with me? If he fouls and fouls he will manoeuvre in the direction that we all do, one year plus one year equals two years. He wants to go back to his beginning. To find what? To start again? What good will he be as an old man, commencing the journey for the second time? Or maybe not the second time. The third? The fourth?

Dott? I call to him. Can you hear me?

There is of course no answer. I can’t sleep. Can’t as in mustn’t. I kick off the duvet and pull on my tracky bottoms. I light a burn from my emergency stash. I start a short routine of sit-ups, roundhouse kicks and push-ups.

You recovered quickly enough, you lazy cunt…The voice is from the flap on my door. Screw Oates’ eyes, scrutinizing my workout. Pull a fast one on me like that again, son, and you’ll be tripping down some stairs.

He thinks I’ve lied to him. He thinks I’ve used my aches and pains as an excuse for a crafty kip. But what can I tell him? The evidence is right before his eyes.

I tell him: I can’t sleep, sir. Need to wear myself out.

When he disappears I notice how quiet the Wing is again. Can it be everyone is asleep? I overhear, once, two screws talking together, after the Prison Officers’ strike, when hardly any uniforms come to work and there is no one to wake us up in the morning. Everything cancelled for the day. Fucking eerie, one screw says to another. And I feel, at that time, as though I’m on a desert island—or in the desert—on my own. Awake and red-eyed: staring out my barred window. Same now. Same now, too, the conversation between two screws, outside my door—or near it.

Fucking eerie, I think it’s Herman says.

And then I hear Oates agree with him: What’re they planning?

No music is blaring. No one is shouting. But we’re not planning anything either. I could tell the screws this but I won’t. They think they’re whispering—maybe they are—but I can hear them perfectly.

Me, I was no more than your gardener , are Dott’s words.

They echo inside me—and not just in my head. They make my stomach lurch, and my dick grow tumid. Dott. Dott is saving up favours. He is taking away yoots’ time to make the days and weeks go faster for the inmates, but they will owe him, and more than a packet of burn or a bash mag. It will take a great, a creative act of wrongdoing to get him back to the age he wants to be—wrinkled, weak-bladdered, diabetic possibly, and ailing. Why not stay at the age he is now? I don’t know. But he talks about Prometheus. He wants to die, I am sure of it; and I think he is striving to wriggle and leap back to where he started—to a point before he started, in order to end the whole game.

Ask him one question , is what I say to Julie, back in the Visits Room.

Miss Patterson’s next piss-break doesn’t arrive; it seems for the moment that her bladder has been adequately evacuated. So I face the stark understanding that it’s going to be another twenty-four before I speak to Kate Thistle again. But I am desperate—desperate to hear my own side of the story. I want to know what Dott meant about gardening for me. I’m baffled. The day is like chewing gum—pulling chewing gum off your shoe, stretching it until it breaks, only to find that some’s been left there on the sole. Dinner is a lonely affair, with Ostrich shipped out to Big Man Jail, following Carewith along their time-lines. I talk to Sarson a bit, but my heart’s not in it. We stand outside for a while when we’re allowed to, during Sosh—in the chipping-away, dust-carrying wind. The air is freezing. Stinking, too. We talk about the rubbish bins again. They are piling higher and higher, as if they’re reproducing and not just being added to; no one is collecting them. The outside world, on the out, is on strike, it seems. Between us we spy three rats and I’m certain I see, over by the perimeter wall to my left, a solitary squirrel, blown off course somehow on its crumb-trail for a nut or two.