David Mathew - O My Days

Noor? Why did you want to get beaten up? I ask as I move.

To get to hospital, he says.

The voice is close enough for the yoot to be in the same cell as me. It’s not like it’s in my head anymore.

I don’t see the connection, I tell him. How’s getting twisted up gonna get you back to the desert?

Not the town of Hospital: the hospital . Accident and Emergency.

He is not in my head, but he’s not talking to me either. This is something new. It’s an awareness of Dott’s comportment; it’s his energy, present, transferred into sound for my ears—but I’m reading his mood and not listening to words.

Why? That powerful word: why?

An outside view? A change of scene? he replies, rhetorically. But most of all because I knew you would have to follow me. There’s no choice now, Billy-Boy. You would follow anywhere. To the ends of the earth if necessary.

Am I following you now?

Or I’m following you. It doesn’t much matter which, does it, Billy?

I suppose not. Where are we going?

Where do you think?

The oasis the boy found, of course! Where you grew me.

Indeed. Where I grew you. Where I was dead. Until I grew you—yes.

So is everything dead until nature in some form takes hold?

I was only your nature, Billy. There’s nothing offhand about it.

Whizzing now! Faster and faster! God’s speed! There are words on the wind but I cannot make them out, I am travelling too swiftly. I’m losing focus; I’m getting hot—I’m hearing Dott’s voice, but I don’t know if the words are coming now or if they were in my ears from before, or from the future or from where they are.

But it was my mistake , he is saying—repeating? I needed bad things to do. Bad things .

I know.

Very briefly he pauses . I helped you with the bee-stings , he says.

I’m twisting the air behind me in a corkscrew trail; I feel like I’m going to burst.

I shouldn’t have. I should’ve smeared raspberry jam all over your face, Billy, to give them a feast.

That’s no way to talk to your king, Dott, I sort of joke.

Why do you think I lived so close to you for so long? Dott is saying now. Why do you think I got myself sent here to this dump? I thought a trip to the hospital might excite.

Like you had a choice, you mean? I ask.

I had a choice not to hurt those women.

But you need to do bad things to keep getting older, don’t you?

Bad things. How cute. I could have killed any one of them.

But you didn’t.

I should have.

Loops of discussion; are all of them real and true? Am I inventing any of them? The big question looms of course, and I ask it to the wind.

Dott sniggers and the air in my cell ripples like heat haze; the walls deliquesce, albeit briefly. He is scorning me and he is scorning my query.

You don’t think I’ve tried that, Alfreth? he shouts into my face. You don’t think I might just have bought enough headache tablets to floor a pissing elephant and swallowed them all at once with two bottles of vodka?Give me some fucking credit. It didn’t work! All that happened was I started again.

From the beginning?

From the very beginning, Billy! Dott replies.

There below! I see it! The patch of grass, as out of place as a squashed fly on a sheet of blank paper. It shouldn’t be there, but it is. Either with Dott or flying solo (I’m not positive which) I swoop lower, towards it.

If I see the desert, must I be dead? I wonder. Am I losing this time? Is it being sucked from bones, like meat off a chicken? Where will I be when I wake up? Call it illusion; call it reality. Call it something slipped into my drink. What I observe induces the gut reaction of more than a dream. The grass feels familiar; the small patch of roses—this patch feels familiar as well. The roses are climbing and winding around two small trees. Seeing them clearly, as I do right now, atomises any effect they once had upon me. These trees, I am sure, are the Amnesia Trees; by floating down into their orbit, and now—by touching them gently, the suppression in my head is neatly lifted.

When the screw comes to check on me, he finds me sleeping soundly on top of my covers—or so he thinks. I am resting. In an unusual move, he uses his baton to rap on the cell door.

Time to collect your dinner, he says.

I don’t even know which screw it is. Legs wobbling, I climb to my feet; I’m aching everywhere, blood. I collect a portion of beef stew that goes straight into my toilet—no middle man required. I feel too weak to lift my plastic utensils to eat. All I want is to relax. All I want is to sleep. Three more times that night I pray. Dreams come creeping.

Am I building these thoughts from popular myth—from movies? I don’t know. But what I see is this:

The prisoners are working. They are shackled to the benches on which they will spend the remainder of the day. It’s a little after midday, but you wouldn’t know that, not down here, below decks. The light is all but non-existent; the air is thick, muggy and it stinks of male and female sweat. There is no gender demarcation aboard the ship. Here is Dott. Here is Noor. Callused hands on a long oar. Dott is sitting nearest the small portal, rowing in time with the other three men on his bench—one bench among scores of benches identical to one another. Male or female, torsos are exposed. Dott’s back is sliced red from where he’s been whipped and struck as part of his penal servitude. Why are they rowing? The ship doesn’t move as a result. This is punishment for the sake of punishment: backbreaking physical labour, intended to squash ambition, thoughts of liberty and body energy. He doesn’t see me. However, I can’t be invisible: other rowers see me, turning to face me as I walk down the aisle between the benches. Perhaps they think I am one of the jailers, there to whip. Scared of me? Who can blame them? My face is new to them, I’m sure of it. How can they know I mean no harm to anyone? How can they know I mean the opposite?

There is noise behind me, in the gloom. I turn. Descending the wooden stairs I once tripped and fell down is a large man with a face full of hair. The beard is matted and long, the moustache spanned out like seagull wings. Even his eyebrows are thick as adult thumbs, tied one to its partner with no gap between. He asks me what I’m doing. In fact, he asks me what I think I’m doing, which is a much more difficult question. Turning on my heels, I walk purposefully back in his direction. Although rowing doesn’t stop in this galley, there is a marked deterioration in effort and strength; prisoners want to see what is happening.

Change of leadership, I tell the hirsute slave-driver—he who is also a prisoner on board the ship, one who has risen through the ranks to be able to command the men and women who are newer to life on the water. The man is amused.

Do you think so? he asks me.

I know so, I say.

I remove the small shank I have secreted in my loincloth; I too am topless—pigeon-chested and weak-looking, but the power of my intention can’t be in doubt. The nights are long on board the ship. I have managed to fashion a knife of sorts by sharpening a piece of wood I have torn from the one of the walls of one of the living quarters, lower still than the galley, below our feet, in the bowels of the vessel. As with everyone else present, I am a prisoner. Rebel too; or so it seems.

We don’t need to do this, I tell the man whose name floats through the air in waves, from his head to mine.

His name is Ayaan. Along with several other stormtroopers (four or five, I think) he helps to run this boot camp. He has wielded authority over me before, I realise; this is my second time aboard the Oasis. I have served a previous sentence—for what I’m not sure. No more certain than I am of what I’m doing here on this occasion—unless my sole purpose is that of liberation.