David Mathew - O My Days

Where are you going to tie the horses? I ask Dott.

Any suggestions? he answers me with cool sarcasm.

It doesn’t matter that the air is bruising up; I have seen the immediate vistas when the light’s good, and I know there are no trees to be used as hitching posts.

What if they run away? I continue.

Then we walk. The exercise’ll do us good.

Why is he still behaving in such an offhand fashion? I wonder. I’ve not said or done anything wrong. I’ve not said or done much of anything at all. Surely the nervousness he felt back in Umma has dispersed. I check myself. No. This is more than a big deal, I have to remind a portion of my own brain. This is literally a matter of life or death—for him. And for me? The question stings and makes my nose sneeze.

Hope you’re not catching a cold, he tells me—the first time he’s initiated a snippet of discourse since he met me at the water’s edge.

Allergic to wool innit, I lie.

I should’ve brought you silk.

No, no, I’m not ungrateful, blood. Don’t get it twisted.

Forget about it. We’ve got a few hours. Light the fire, would you?

A test of initiative, no doubt. Brain ticks. I recall what I can of TV survival programmes—celebrities in the wild, trying to kid us there’s no film crew around to bail them out of a bind. Collect wood; scrape stones together for a spark to work on something flammable. As I look for suitable fuel and a means to ignite it, Dott asks me with that petulant voice of his:

Where you going?

I explain my actions.

His response is not exactly friendly. Fucking hell, Billy, he says, this ain’t The Flintstones. Look in my saddlebag. Lighters and slow coal.

Allow it.

I feel stupid. Brain ticks, but not fast enough, it seems. In fact, brain feels bogged down in a mire that’s like jetlag or flu drowse. I can’t stand the thought of Dott winning this not-even-argument.

Why we lighting a fire, I ask him, if we’re only staying here a couple hours?

You won’t need to ask why once your body’s cooled down from the ride, he tells me. Forget what you can of the hills around Dellacotte. That’s not cold. The desert is where winters come to learn about cold.

Nice image, I give him. Seriously. There’s something poetic about that.

I collect rocks anyway, despite the fact Dott’s twitted me for so dumb an idea: we need a cradle to put the coal on before I light it. It won’t burn properly on the sand, or that’s my opinion at least. Collecting rocks for this ad hoc barbecue, I also pick up dried pieces of brush, a few twigs, and the dried-out remains of what I think was a desert fox. If I haven’t made up that species. What is left of its skin (the organs are punctured, eaten away—resembling nothing more than sun- dried tomatoes in olive oil) burns adequately. The food Dott’s brought is lamb in pitta bread. Neither of us waits to heat up the meal in the flames; we are starving marvin. We are hank. And lamb I haven’t tasted in time. I tell him it’s good.

You know what I could murder for? I ask him.

He laughs—the first time he’s laughed, laughed properly as opposed to sardonically, as I remember, since before the riots kicked off in the nick—and says:

Me! Me I hope, cuz!

Apart from that. Man can kill for a beer.

In the dancing firelight Dott’s face comes over straight as apologetic. No can do, he tells me. Couldn’t think of everything.

No, you’re blessed. Not a criticism, blood. Just an observation.

Dott falls silent as the dunes. We eat our meals.

I wonder what creatures are out there tonight? he thinks aloud, finally.

You should know, cuz.

Why?

You been here before!

So’ve you! Besides, I don’t have any of that—either going there or coming back—in the old memory bank, Dott says.

What happened to it?

Wiped. Too much shit in the intervening years, he answers.

Allow it. How long are we travelling, Dott?

Till we get there.

For fuck’s sake, blood, why do you do that? Every time.

Man’s asking you an honest question. Why can’t you just give me the solution point blank?

You’re assuming I know things I don’t know, Billy.

That’s King Billy to you, I tell him, shuddering slightly with the warmth of déjà vu.

I fall silent. Wipe my greasy lips on my sleeve. Watch the horses doing not much of anything—unless you count horsey sniffles and horsey snoozes. I throw the brown paper the food came in onto the dying blaze.

What did you leave behind you? Dott asks quietly.

Chaos. You stuck it to ’em, Dott, I can’t take that away from you.

Dott is shaking his head; his shadows stretch like ghosts morphing.

Not at the prison. In your life, he clarifies.

For the second time I say: You should know. You’ve been hanging off my leg like a lovesick turd for half my life!

I want to hear the words, Dott says, weirdly.

Taking stock in a moment like this is sobering, really. What have I left behind, bar nick existence? (I won’t say nick life. That shit’s not life. It’s breathing and blood moves, but it ain’t life.) Mumsy and my sisters, I tell him.

What are their names?

I’m indebted to one of the horses—I don’t know which one—for breaking wind at this precise second, the better to grant me an extra second to rifle through the drawers and diaries of my head. It scares me a little—and will do so considerably more, I have no doubt—that the names don’t come to me as eagerly as my own does. When you don’t use a language, you lose a language; it’s like any other skill. Gets rusty.

Their names are, Roberta and Justine.

What do they do? Dott wants to know.

I have to crawl back to one of Mumsy’s visits, oh a long time ago—in the past, when I still had interest to show in anything.

Roberta works in a boutique. She gets ten per cent off her clothes, but they cost a fucking fortune in the first place, but she won’t be told. Justine’s at college: beauty therapy.

Dott nods. Not continuing the family business then? Crime.

That’s only me, I say. The girls are good girls. Mum does her best.

Your old man’s a one, though, innee, Billy?

Why am I nonplussed and agitated by this? Of course the cunt knows about Bailey. Cunt knows everything. This late in the day, fuck it won’t surprise me much if Dott is Bailey. Two miserable, sad little doppelgangers.

He’s had a madness or two, I concede, putting my head down.

Okay, I’ll watch.

Watch for what? My voice is maybe a little too rattled.

I don’t know. Snakes? Scorpions? Fucked if I know or remember. Maybe there are roaming carnivorous anteaters, Billy!

Allow it taking the piss.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Dott’s eyes as wide as all else. He smiles. Go on, seriously, Alfreth. Rest up. Three hours enough?

Should be.

Then it’s my turn.

Fine.

Long as the sand hedgehogs don’t bite my face off first.

I lie down on my hands, which are pressed together as if for prayer. I don’t have my beads with me—they are not part of this world. But for the sake of healthy communion, I pray anyway. Pray to reach the end of this donnybrook of the nerves—of the soul, salts and tissues. This last chapter. Symmetrically I guess I dream of the prison. Not the prison ship. I dream of Dellacotte YOI. The fires have melted away the walls between cells; all eight Wings, plus the Seg, are ablaze, people waxing like candles; every Wing resembles a crematory pyre. Air shifts in cow’s breath heat; haze warps the picture. Screaming everywhere. Screws on the ends of spears, being heated in the flames like marshmallows, by yoots who are too tough to die. I wake before I’m woken up. Dott doesn’t know I’ve opened my eyes; I see him staring up into a flawlessly black sky. There are no stars. No moon. There’s no weather. Other than what hasn’t yet burned of the sacrificial lamb I tossed onto the fire—and which won’t ignite now in the petering embers—there’s no proof of anything else alive in the world. As the song says, it’s just the two of us. And we can make it if we try.