David Mathew - O My Days

What’s in it for me? I can’t help wondering as I wake up.

The days following the aborted Cookery Class are like torture—like a slow-acting poison against my will and resolution. I am crabby. I am jumpy. Repeatedly I turn down Jarvis’s offers of an X-Box games competition, or Sarson’s attempts to get me chatting during Sosh. As the cliché goes, I’m a shadow of my former self. Perhaps I’m in love, ho ho. Sure as hell, I’m not eating anything much more than the bare essentials to keep alive. On the other hand, I’m drinking water as if the supply’s being turned off any day now. Since dreaming of the desert, the Oasis and the ship, I have a thirst on me that’s as dry as a camel’s hoof. Leaning over my sink, every five or so minutes when I’m in my cell, I scoop up water, eschewing the uses of my plastic mug, and gulp in water and air in equal measures, so that I’m bloated and gassy—the eructations you won’t believe—and then, a short time later, I am doing precisely the same thing over again. I can’t wait for Friday. Dott is not picking up the psychic phone. Not listening to me. Nor has he ordered any reading matter that will necessitate my visiting his cell. I can’t even count on that for a chat—for a resumption of what he has to say. In fact, generally speaking, there’s been a marked reduction in yoots ordering much of anything to read in their cells. The only thing to say is, it’s in keeping with the air of weirdness circulating around Dellacotte of late. Even the ducks are acting peculiar. Yet knowing what’s to blame doesn’t help me, does it? Doesn’t help me get to DottThe days drag like songs on a melted LP. There’s no better way of putting it. In the meantime, on my arrival in the Library, Kate Thistle shows me she’s trying to be cute by saying Wogwun at more or less every opportunity, until it starts to become a pain in the hole. Miss Patterson weaves her way through the day, setting me tasks and no doubt (now I’m aware of her fondness for the spirits) fantasising about her first glass of Gordon’s Gin when she gets home. Or before. Until she’s of pensionable age, she’s killing time. There is nothing unpredictable in the days, this Wednesday to this Friday. Now I’ve established that the weary pessimism that’s infected the YOI is here to stay, it’s something like observing an army, four hundred strong, of harmless zombies. Shared thoughts? Perhaps. I don’t know. All that’s clear is, when Movements started before Dott was around, it would take the screws on both landings of the Education Block fifteen minutes to get the motherfuckers settled. And it’s piss-easy to sympathise with the disruptions. Give me a job to do or be a six-wanks-a-day man, decomposing spiritually in my pad, I choose the former, on every account. But for others—not Redbands, and without Enhanced status—the choice is simply not there. They wait and rot; they rot and wait. An excursion to Computer Literacy or Maths is like a Greek holiday. Hardly anyone speaks as they enter the Education Block. Murmurs, mumbles—if anything at all. I’m no different. I take my place in the holding area, climb the stairs to the twos landing, enter the Library, where I spend the remainder of the morning, before setting off on my bored expedition back to the pad for lunch, before returning again in the p.m. Cups of tea and snatched moments of dialogue with Kate Thistle—these are the punctuation marks to these slow, slow days. For me, one who thinks he conjectures slowness quite nicely, quite thank you. Slow has a new meaning now. Kate Thistle listens patiently. Aware our time alone is limited, she neither interrupts nor interrogates. She holds her mug of tea with both hands and lets me babble and spurt. Simultaneously I find myself both liking and disliking her, day by day. She looks older than when we met. An actual conversation—as opposed to a gobbet of reportage—has become a rare-ish beast, but it shows its pretty head, late in the day during Second Movements on the Thursday afternoon. Miss Patterson has ventured out on the scrounge for a rubber. It’s good to know, despite everything, old habits die hard and that someone’s lifted her eraser like this. So we’re not all brain dead, after all! It will be some time later that evening before, while reaching into my trackies for a lighter, I find the self-same tool. I have stolen it without even being aware of the theft: a habit I don’t want to get into.

Can I ask you something, Miss?

Course you can, Billy—long as you’re brewing up at the same time. Kate smiles, but she is serious about another cup of tea.

I don’t know anyone who can drink tea like Kate and Angela. I struggle to keep up.

How much longer you got?

To do what?

Be here.

The kettle remains half full from the last round of drinks so I simply flick the kettle and settle down on Angela’s twirl around chair.

I mean, you say you’re writing about prison language.

I am writing about prison language, Kate corrects me.

But you won’t be allowed to stay here forever, Miss, will you?

I don’t want to, thanks!

So what’s your cut off point?

My thesis should be ten thousand words long, or thereabouts, she tells me. I think I’ve got material enough for about eight.

I’m surprisingly touched and proud. So I’ve really been of use to you?

Without question, Billy. You’ll never know how much.

Will you put me in the Acknowledgements?

If I’m allowed to.

Thanks.

But what about the other two thousand words?

Kate shrugs. If I don’t find them here, Billy, I’ll either make it all up—or I’ll use what I know of the Hola Ettaluun.’ She laughs. Who’ll check?

Glad to know you take your studies seriously. Here’s your tea.

Ta. But I do take them seriously, Billy. It’s just that I’m more interested in the project you’re involved in than dissecting the difference between Allow it and Respect me. Do you see what I mean? she asks.

Suppose I do. Allow it. My stab at a silly little joke.

Kate doesn’t answer; deep in thought, she stares into her hot drink. I don’t know what to say next, but I know it can’t be long before Angela returns from her mission.

Kate spares me the embarrassment of further silence. Not looking up from her inspection of the cup’s contents, she says: It was more like a world than a township, for the people who lived there in the desert. Some of them—I’ve never told you this before—some of them treated me with hostility and suspicion. For them it was hard to believe there were other places to live.

Fact is she has mentioned this before; I don’t contradict her. I have spoken enough—I’m pleased she’s taking a turn.

A world before ours, perhaps, Billy. What do you think?

I can’t answer her question; I ask one of my own. What about Dott saying I was dead before he made me with the rose?

That’s what I’m getting at, she says. You were potentia. Dott needed to find you to help himself get back there—even if it’s a state of mind.

But wait a minute, Kate. The desert’s a real place. You were there!

She nods her head. And there alive and well. Can I say truly that’s the same as everyone I met? Everyone who spoke to me? Who can tell how many others are dreaming of existence, there, while they go about their everyday chores? It’s something I didn’t think to look into.

Waiting to be born, you mean? I ask.

Yes. Somewhere in this world or another.

You’re creeping me out, Kate!

Only now? She smirks.

No. Not only now. But including now. It sounds like Hell.

Placing down her half-finished cup of tea, Kate is so good as to look at me again as we talk. While I won’t say the expression is unfriendly, I can’t claim there’s a good deal of warmth there either.