David Mathew - O My Days

The metamorphosis of Dott commences as briskly as the horrors he perpetuates in the prison. What his deeds have summoned—the anti-world, the erased existence beyond the boundaries of the grass—it surges in closer now. Air is squeezed tighter. Is this what deep-sea diving is like? My lungs are like I’ve had the snorkel to the canisters pulled from my lips. Dott and I are in an ocean of air, but it’s too close; twin wings of agony start flapping at my temples, my nose erupts with a menstrual cycle’s-worth of greasy blood. Every pain and indignity suffered about my person, my whole life long—every punch I’ve received, every kick, every half-hearted stabbing—every pain comes back to revisit me, unlocking my throat and the vomit I’ve been holding down. And Dott seems not to notice a thing. His skin is tightening. Like those games you play when you’re kids, pulling back the flesh that flanks your eyes to pretend you’re Oriental: that’s what he looks like. But this shape doesn’t last long. As the grey, bloody curtain inches closer, compressing what air that’s still in here, Dott starts to wrinkle. Slices of laughter lines, deepening now, as if it’s revenge time; the execution needs to be swift. I don’t know why it takes me so long to figure it out, what is happening; I’ve been waiting for this a long while. All my life?

Dott is ageing. And ageing rapidly.

The frequency of my inhalations is increasing by the beat; I am too scared to watch Dott’s façade get older (while inside he is moving back to his birth) but I am too short of air even to move my gaze away, to turn my head. If I squint I can see beyond the man beside me. The grey curtain, swizzing now like a dead TV channel: transmission bollixed: it is sweeping and lurching, no grace in the movements, here to eat us. Without moving my head—for I’m not sure I can, and the failure will panic me too much—I refocus on what’s closer to hand. Dott is shrinking in his garb. I want to say his name, but I don’t have to: he knows I can’t speak. Indeed, the very action of opening my mouth fills my throat with the stench I smell back from the prison—burning flesh. The blood in the grey curtain has clearly come a long way: briefly altering my attention once more I see more than what the yoots let out of their bodies, back in Dellacotte. I see pieces of the bodies themselves.

What has happened there? Dott? I try again to say. The word is stillborn.

He mouths the words— Be strong, Billy —but they do not come out either.

I long for noise; it’s too quiet. I prefer the outlandish din of a full-scale riot. This approach from my enemy—this approach from Dott’s deity, or so I guess—is too frightening in its wordless potency. Honest dread is what I feel.

Hold tighter, Billy , Dott mouths.

I want to tell him he doesn’t need to keep using my name—to save his breath—but Dott doesn’t want to save his breath: he wants to spend his breath, quickly. I can’t stop him now—or stop anything else—even if I want to. The effects are brutal in their efficacy. Dott ages in appearance from the twenty year-old I leave behind in the ambulance, to a man of forty, sixty, eighty—the time scale required to do so being puny. Has even a minute elapsed? How much time in real time? He’s getting smaller. But so, I notice with a start, regarding my arms for a second, am I. The pains I feel re-surface. I will find him, or he will find me, I remember, understanding in my bones the important message. I am dead before he makes me; I am dead when I unmake him. Dott’s my blood.

Don’t do it, Dott , I scream, brain to brain.

My eyesight is wavering, blurring; what I see inside the curtain is obviously a contagious image—it is filling my vision. I’m passing out, I realise. It takes all my effort to move my right arm a tiny bit, in order to scratch my skin deeper on the rose thorn—that way to wake myself up. It doesn’t work. The last thing Dott’s eyes say to me before they cloud over with cataracts long overdue—for Dott by this point must be two hundred years old to look at—is this:

Too late, Billy. Can’t you see? It was always too late.

What starts as haze and static, behind us, around us, getting closer, is palpably physical. It is present, pushing down on my curved spine. I’m shrinking. I’m getting slightly older as well (sun spots manifesting) though at nowhere near the rate that Dott is disappearing from me. His outward demeanour is no longer even human. My eyesight fades to black. I am blind. Dott’s skin hasn’t rotted away, as I have expected will happen, to leave the bones behind. Quite the opposite: the bones that hold him up have disintegrated under the pressure he feels so much more keenly than I do. He is an abandoned overcoat of flesh, leaking blood into the grass as we hug his stupid tree. He is getting what he always wanted—but what about my wants? All I can see now is what I see with my imagination—and with my memory. I remember being born of the ground; I remember it! The pains, too—I remember them. Literally speaking, it’s all coming back to me. As the curtain makes its final leap forward towards us, it folds in over our heads. There is no breath in my lungs. I’m going to die with my maker. Who is now leaking into the grass of the oasis, taking pieces of the rose’s stalk and the tree to which it has wedded itself with him. All is dark. All is silent. It’s night or day. Dott is dead. But then again, so am I. It has worked. And yet, at the same time, it hasn’t worked.

Dear Miss Wollington,

Allow me, if you would, a brief moment of disrespect; but shall we cut to the chase? Shall we? You now know everything about me you need to know, and yet I know so very little about you. I have tried my best to be honest throughout, scrabbling around for memories the size of dust particles sometimes; because you asked me nicely and you said I would reap the benefits. With all due respect, Miss—when? Where’re them benefits? In your office that night, when you were playing classical music and I was pretending to have a bellyache? Did you know I was coming? You appeared composed—dare I say it, even flattered I’d swing by. Or at least that’s how I recall it when I’m here, away from it. How many memories, though still, do we cheat ourselves on? It’s like that old philosophical thing about colours, innit? How do we know we all see the same colour? My blue could be your gold, vice versa. But how I remember it is this: you said you’d help me. If I tell you everything, you will help me. We sign a contract, though still. Well, you now know everything I can think of. Your turn. I have referred to you in the third person throughout but there’s a reason for this, I’m sure; I can’t quite put my finger on what that might be but I know there was one. Easy, it would be easy to ask you—I’m sure you know yourself—if you ever have me over to the Health Care rooms again. When’s my next appointment? When do you want to see me? Do you want to see me? Some days, Miss, I am not even certain you exist. Have you left the prison? If so, can someone reading these words please put on file I need a new Psychologist assigned. And if you’ve left, Miss Wollington—Kate, you said I can call you Kate—I wish you’d said summing. While I’m not claiming I went through this only for you, I did do so a bit.

Hit me back when you get a chance, please?

ALFRETH, WILLIAM.

The words I apparently mumble before I wake fully are these: I live with failure . Then I’m spluttering—spluttering like that time I drank methylated spirits for a dare. I don’t know who might have dared me to do such a thing, but I know it happened, way back when, when the past meant the past and it was something to run from frightened. And then it was something to ignore.