David Mathew: O My Days

Screw Jones gets his radioed orders. In the exercise yard, in the gloom, under the impotent floodlights, he responds with a barked out command:

Okay, fellas. Everyone in. Time for night-night.

We get to our feet. We are all dressed in grey. We are already in our pyjamas, but we’ll have to get out of them to turn in. Some of us will stay up all night. Some will pray; some will play—the X-Box, the PlayStation; some will read and improve their minds; some will bash their bongos until nothing comes out but water. But we’re all the same. That’s what this place does. That’s its job. To neutralize us.

I’ve timed it to perfection, I think. I’ve timed it so that Ostrich and I have less than two minutes between the yard and our adjacent cells on the ones. I’ve waited two days to say what I’m about to say, but the time has been important; I’ve needed the time in order to firm up the deal with Shelley: the same one that I’ve just lied to Ostrich about. Two minutes. Less than that now, as we enter the disinfected atmosphere and start our climb up the first set of metal stairs.

Ostrich-man? I say. Are you listening, though? I’m risking a lot so I keep my voice down.

I’m listening.

What I win tomorrow, man, yeah?

Yeah? he says cautiously. He knows he might be in as much trouble—for conspiratorial silence, for duplicity—as I am if it becomes known that he is aware of my gambling pact with Shelley.

It’s yours, Ostrich, I whisper. Three burn.

At the top of the flight of stairs we turn left and he looks into my eyes, his bloodshot orbits neatly framing two pupils shaped like question marks.

If you tell me about the others you killed, I tell him. Three burn.

I enter my cell, drop down to my knees for prayers. The door closes and the night begins.

My life begins.

I mean that. Night time brings on the truth and the spray that dissolves all of the glue that I need to use in order to hold my day together. My dreams are like balm, like salvation. My dreams are vivid. My dreams give me clues about how best to go on and how I’ve royally messed up. But there’s a life I enter—briefly—before I even touch my dreams. That place between prayer and coma. You’re not quite awake but you’re not quite asleep either. Jerked this way and that, you’re a puppet at the whim and the beck and call of the stronger forces in your head. I like that feeling. That drifting, dozing feeling. I feel at home there. In one dream I take it all back. In one dream I swim back to Bricky—or Brixton if we’re still on formal-names terms—and I do it all in reverse. Take my pen-knife from his arm, watch him un-punch my beak, and slur my way backwards through my demand for cash. The film stops. Then it starts the right way again, but this time my co-Ds and I are not mugging; we’re giving him directions to the museum or something. We’re helping. I like that dream. Most of my dreams I like, in fact, even the bad ones. Even the ones where I’m climbing a hill and I keep falling down, sliding down to the foot; or being chased by an animal; or trying to lift something that squishes me. Because they’re not real, the dreams, and reality is the worst horror when you can’t control it or understand it. Dreams are oases. I lie about my dreams when I have my monthly psychiatric report. It’s nice, if not vital, to have something to myself. Something not in the notes that will wriggle their way into my Parole Report. Not that I’m going to get parole; I’m not stupid. I did it. I pleaded guilty. And I did it for money.

She asks me how I’m feeling and I say sick. What’s wrong with you? she’ll ask. And I’ll say nothing, man, I’m sick. Sick good. Yeah, blood, I’ll answer—as though she hasn’t heard it before. And then I’ll realise I’m just a case study number and she’s forgotten me since last time; and what’s worse is that I haven’t even charged up enough respect for her to consult the notes that she made at the previous meeting.

Your dreams, she’ll sometimes ask. Tell me about them.

And that’s where I lie. I tell a fib. Because it doesn’t matter much if I do or if I don’t and if there’s one more thing that unites all of us here, it’s the element of needing something to call our own.

I name an actress or a pop star. I tell her she’s sucking my dick. She records the information with a penciled smile, because it’s what’s expected. I tell her I come on her breasts. She writes it down. I wonder, parenthetically, what she feels when she interviews the nonces and ponces on Puppydog Wing, where the questions are presumably an equivalent. What does a four- eyes dream of? I know there’s a yoot on Puppy who raped a puppy. What colour are that cunt’s dreams? A colour I don’t understand and whose flavour I don’t like. Oh. Oh, and he happened to rape his sister and his mum as well. Nice guy. I’ll send a Christmas card.

When I deliver the magazines to Puppydog, I always wish for a few more extra minutes than I get when I go to all of the other Wings. A few more minutes with which to light up some kind of firebrand and burn the dirty fuckers in their customised homes. The perverts.

Anyway. Where was I? Where was I, in the night?

Her name is also Kate, by the way. Kate Wollington. But her accent is foreign and she married into the surname, is my guess, like someone marrying into a family business. My psychologist, I mean. Married or not, we still call her Miss. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone called Mrs.

Won’t happen to me. The marrying bit, I mean. I’m tired, yat.

Sometimes the Night Screw opens the flap and I pretend to be asleep. It’s a way of warding the cunts off, no pun intended. Umleitung . It’s a German word, meaning diversion, that I learned doing my German GCSE, here on the in. I got a B. Accent poor but delivery clear. Swear down. Can’t wait to see how my German GCSE will help me on the out. When I hit road, as Ostrich might say. A boon, no doubt. My tongue is in my cheek like a pestle and mortar. What am I warding them off from? From my freedom.

Only free when you’re asleep, in this place.

I miss my mum. I miss her resembling a Rottweiller chewing a chilli, but most of all I miss her laughing and gassing and giving it a good time innit. I miss her arms, I miss her smile. I don’t miss my dad. I never knew him. Not many of us miss our dads.

I’m going to sleep.

I’m going to dream.

This bastard’s my favourite. I’m a pulse of electricity, I think, without weight and without physical form. I’m dusting large: here, there, yay under the stair. No wanker can stop me yat. And I approach the wire mesh surrounding the Wing; I sail through it. I approach the thirty-foot walls; I sail through ’em. Not over them, is it, but through ’em. It’s beautiful. It’s my vindication.

For what precisely, I don’t know. Because I did it.

Sometimes I dream I didn’t, but I did. He wouldn’t give me his wallet. I stabbed him quickly, three times in the right arm. Five years. High on drink and bare sniff at the time. But as ever, when I think about that night, I get the memory mangled with another, in which I am being attacked. I am fighting for my own life. It’s what I’ve said all along. I can’t shake free of the idea.

It’s Saturday morning, and I pray in my crackers, bare- chested.

Always feels like a new beginning, does a Saturday. I’m there in nothing but tattoos, boxers and beads. It’s the closest thing to peace I get, some weeks, outside night-time.

Short-lived.

Door opens. Screws Jarvis and Jones. I’m thinking: twist- up.

On your feet, Alfreth, says Jarvis. Middle-aged; red nose of the hardened drinker I want to be and would have been.