O My Days

by David Mathew

  Four.

  So what do you wanna know? Ostrich asks.

  About the others still, I tell him. The ones you squash up.

  We are eating our baguettes during Sosh. It’s the nearest we get to going out for dinner: saving our baguettes for an hour until we’re unlocked. If we’re unlocked. So tonight Mr Ostrich is my dinner date. We’re an item.

  O my days!

  Sure I’m busting chuckles, but swear down, blood, it’s nice to eat together, rudeboy. It’s amazing the things you miss. While it might not be an Indian meal with a nice glass of beer, it’s pleasant to watch the muscles pulse on Ostrich’s left temple— as he chews, as he swallows. As he prepares himself to honour his side of the bargain. I watch his deep eyes: they’re searching for something in the noisy distance. No one is bothering us. We must appear too serious to be disturbed. It’s crisis talks.

  You know when you have to do something, Ostrich intones, regardless of the consequences innit.

  I nod my head.

  We’re all here for precisely that reason, I tell him.

  Ostrich shakes his head. Nar, man. I ain’t talking about normal crime madness.

  He is fingering what’s left of his baguette; he is like a child mashing up play-dough. The action speaks of distraction and inner pain. It makes me feel like a waste to hurt a friend, but a deal’s a deal. Man needs the knowledge. Man’s thirsty for that knowledge.

  So what are you chatting? I ask.

  Ostrich sighs. The salami we’ve just munched comes out in a flow of garlicky bad breath.

  We’re criminals, blood.

  Allow it.

  But are you listening, though? We made choices, blood. We took chances, we do what we have to do. We gamble.

  Allow it, I repeat.

  But we didn’t have to do it. We might have come into some beef. We might’ve, fucking, lost some face, rudeboy. Name be mud innit. But we didn’t have to do it, bruv.

  Swear down, I tell him.

  Then imagine a situation, yeah — a ting where you know the consequences are gonna be deep, blood. But you have to do it innit. There’s not like there’s no freewill about the madness, he says, sighing again.

  I tell Ostrich that I’m puzzled. Then I come across the only logical response. Are you talking about a family ting? I ask.

  Yeah yeah. A straight down, confrontation, mad astronaut shit family ting. Ostrich laughs. But this is lips-is-sealed, right?

  I’m surprised you have to ask, I answer.

  Check it. Ostrich nods his head. He holds out his left knuckle; I tap it with my own. Matter closed.

  It was a ting with my Mumsy innit. Gets herself a new man, right? And he all right! She has a few before him. The sniff he gives is dismissive, disdainful. Just there to take up space, bruv.

  I laugh.

  To make up the numbers, the quota, he continues.

  Some, rah, some exclusive pricks innit.

  I hear you, man, I’m listening. Sounds familiar, bruv.

  But he’s not giving me stodge about staying out too late. You’ve got to go to school: all that. You’re disappointing me. Allow it, man! Those other wastes, boy, they try too hard, rudeboy. This Anthony guy was okay. He tosses the remains of his baguette to the floor: a sign of disgust rather than of satiation. He’s on a roll, ha ha. Check the chuckles, blood.

  I still don’t know where this is going. Journeys through the dark are only swish if you know the destination like the skin on your dick. I’m getting busy.

  Man was even preparing his Father’s Day present, blood. I’m there, out at all hours, jacking cars and licking stereos for some peas to buy man a nice present. Show my respect innit. I go to bare trouble, rudeboy. I buy man a nice set of matching cufflinks and a duster ring. Cost me bare peas, blood! And what does the waste do? Man leave my Mumsy. On Father’s Day!

  So what did you do?

  Well, Mumsy’s ruined, rudeboy. Obliterated, says Ostrich, so I’m in the market for buying up a nine-millimetre strap and going over to his yard and putting a hole in his heart.

  Allow it.

  But Mumsy’s no, no, don’t do it, Maxwell innit. Why not? I know where to sell the motherfucker’s present. Get man some peas. And I know where to buy a strap. Friend of a friend, bruv. Not in my ends but I know where man live; it won’t take long. Man can get it in a hot minute. So I’m all for dusting over and showing the waste what time it is.

  I’m nodding my head. This stands to reason: I myself have seen the need, back in the day, to teach a paramour or two of my mother’s a lesson. It’s what a good son does. Because a good son is the man of the house, and a good son hates seeing his mum bust a tear. It’s not right.

  I’m with you, cuz, I tell Ostrich, aware that Sosh time is spinning fast.

  So man dust over to man’s yard. Somewhere in Stepney, yat. Man driving enhanced two-litre whip in them day.

  With a strap?

  Nar, man. Just going over to polish the man’s face, blood. Seeing my Mumsy on the vodka at ten in the morning. She’s fucked. Gives man a toot on the mobile. Don’t do it, Maxwell— I’m begging you, innit. And I’m like, rah. Why, Mum? And she does it: she drops her fucking bombshell.

  I haven’t seen it coming.

  He’s your dad, Maxwell. Anthony motherfucker is my blood, rudeboy.

  O my days! I say.

  Yeah, man. My own dad leave my own mum on fucking Father’s Day, Ostrich informs me. It beggar belief innit. He is shaking his head.

  Are you going to pick that up, Thomas?

  Our attention is drawn to Screw Jones, who has approached with the stealth of a viper. For a fraction of a second neither of us know what the troublesome piece of lamb manure is referring to, and Ostrich even says: Pick what up, sir? Genuinely confused.

  That piece of bread.

  The abandoned baguette; our sustenance until the buttered toast in the morning. And we’re growing boys. Sorry, sir, says Ostrich, doing as he’s told.

  Point made, Jones strolls away.

  Ostrich rolls his head in a figure eight to get rid of the clicks. Enhanced though we might be, we’re not privileged to the sort of personal, tension-relieving massages that I used to like, back on the out.

  So you punched him out?

  Eventually. But I find out, says Ostrich, what the game is first. And I find out that Father’s Day. He busts a chuckle. Is not exclusive to me.

  Meaning what exact?

  Man has other yoots. Man ring his bell and he’s there, giving it the lemon. Shit didn’t work out. Sorry, son, rah. I say, Anthony? You’re my dad and it Father’s Day and I want to give you a fucking present. What’s that, son? he ask. Bam! Give the waste five knuckles to the chin. Cunt drops, rudeboy. But who’s there? Babymamma number two, with her yoot. And babymamma, fucking, number three—who just happen to be cousins—and I’m rah. What’s a man to do? I go in knowing and there’s no way of going out not, innit.

  You killed the babymammas? I ask.

  Nar, man. Point I’m making is, I have no choice. This was family, cuz. Ignoring it is not an option. I know I’m gonna bedevil a good day for two chicks who’ve done nothing to me. Man know this, rudeboy. But man can’t help it.

  That journey through the blackness has not finished. Not by a mile.

  Because he hasn’t left me once, man, Ostrich says slowly, in a different voice from the one that he usually uses, but twice. That’s fear. That’s fear of me, blood. It’s suddenly got nothing to do with Mumsy. It’s me.

  The picture is clearing. He hit his head on the way down, didn’t he?

  Yeah, man. The little table with the phone on it, Ostrich answers. A chance in a fucking million. Damage his neurons innit. Cunt die. I kill my dad.

  That’s a tough call, I remark.

  I ain’t finished, rudeboy. I dust that shit
. Man dust the fuck out of that place. Babymamma’s not seen shit. I’m a free man. Conscience excepted.

  Allow it.

  Man not know that man’s new dad has siblings, innit.

  Unexpectedly, Ostrich starts nibbling at the baguette. It’s a way of wasting time.

  Uncles. They come to my ends, then to my yard. An explosive situation, I’m all but certain you’ll agree.

  That cheap meat in Ostrich’s baguette is like nose poison. But this is newsworthy. If Ostrich has managed to wipe out the alpha male line of a perfectly respectable family, where is the bulletin?

  I had to do some mad shit, rudeboy. Kept myself to myself but the truth was as known as riding a fucking bike innit. I had some strangers to leave out in the cold. Or they were going to the feds. Man know it was wrong. Man weak, I reckon. I squash out three man. Happy Father’s Day, blood.

  The third one you got caught, I wanted to know.

  That’s the deal, Ostrich tells me.

  Swear down trust? I ask.

  Swear down trust, he says.

  I don’t know why but I think that Ostrich is lying. One minute he’s bemoaning the fact that he’s only done whatnot and would have enjoyed doing more; the next he’s being criminally restricted.

  Is Ostrich responsible or is he not? This is all getting peculiar.

  Five.

  As predicted, the Cookery class is cancelled. We’re kept banged up. In protest, Cawthorn and Williamson start simultaneous fires. Unplanned synchronicity, but that’s the funny way of this place sometimes. Smoke like a bad dream. I’m getting emphysema innit. I have a pray and then a bash. I hoist myself up to the window and hang from the bars, in order to watch the Garden Party—sorry, the Estates Party—doing their thing, cleaning up duck crap and chopping back hedges. I watch a few members of the Education Department having roll-ups outside the block door. I watch a few of the screws scuttle by, doing whatever the fuck they do when they’re not tormenting us. I’m bored as a man can be. The screws involved in the lipsing incident in the Cookery Room are Sinclair and Mews. And I find myself struggling to remember their faces.

  Yo, Alfreth! someone calls.

  I’m at the window anyway so I do what I don’t usually do. I answer.

  Wogwun.

  You got burn?

  It’s my next-door, Jarvis. Inside for three for handbag theft and computer fraud. What used to be called a granny- basher, before the market expanded to teenage girl victims and foreigners carrying change in a sack while delivering pizza in oversized boxes to boardrooms and the slums. He’s nearly a millionaire but will it cheer him up? Will it fuck.

  I’ve got burn. A pinch or two; no more than a prison ration. So I say, almost honestly, No, man. Give it away innit.

  Who to?

  Ostrich.

  Turn the music down, man. Can hardly hear you, bruv!

  Sorry.

  The decibelage and rap carnage deteriorates to no more than a whining jet engine sort of level.

  Twos on what you’ve got, still, Jarvis says, for my ham baguette.

  He’s bargaining on a straight exchange: nothing ventured, nothing gained; and no one’s the loser, let the buyer beware, not to mention, waste not want not, fair exchange is no robbery and other long-tried and abandoned petty bullshit philosophies. What he’s hoping for is for a swing: a highly risky—block-visit-likely—enterprise that extols the virtues of comrades sharing, and which involves tying a named object of booty inside a knapsack made from the end of your bed sheets. Then you dangle the sheet and the prize out your window and start swinging the noose for enough momentum for it to carry up to the window, either of your own next-door, or—if you’re particularly famished of self-destructive impulses—on a double-length twine to the pad beyond that. At the best of times I don’t care too much for that noise.

  I tell him: No deal. I’m on a diet, cuz.

  There’s nothing of you, fam! he protests, evidently eager for a smoke. Desperate, in fact. In protest, the volume of his music rises up—like a flood.

  I return to my thoughts. Having lost my weekly extra meal—the meal that I would have cooked personally and might not have burned; the one that Jarvis would have known I’ve been deprived of (he’s picked his moment well)—I am obviously starving. It’s psychological, no doubt; but it’s curdled my stomach lining and I’m livid with Roller and Meaney. Who are returning to their respective Wings this afternoon. God help them. Time passes, and I’m viewing an afternoon movie about the American Civil War, when to my surprise the heavy key turns in the lock. It’s a screw name of Wayne.

  Stop wanking, Alfreth, he tells me, and put your jacket on.

  I’m not, sir. What’s happening?

  A visit, is all he wants to reply.

  But visits don’t happen on a Wednesday. Even someone as new to the prison as Dott—especially Dott—knows that visits are Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Nonetheless, I pull on my denim coat and brush my hair quickly.

  A shower might have been nice, I say to Wayne. Who’s coming to link?

  Wayne frowns his doughy face. How the fuck should I know? he says.

  Thus it is that I’m led from my pad, past the Servery, and through the opened gate and outside door. The air is as cold as a Puppydog crime. Leaves from the trees are shifting this way and yonder. I can smell the duck pond on the gale: the birds themselves and the fresh cement of the Bricks Department’s refurbishment—the one I have yet to see and might never will. Expectantly I turn right, towards the Visits Hall—near the main gate. But I’m corrected in my assumption.

  Over there, says Screw Wayne.

  Towards what? The laundry? The recycling depot? The Estates Party changing rooms? Then it hits me: I am being taken to the Education block. It’s Kate Thistle who wants to see me.

  Six.

  In my time I have heard a host of opinions about where it is hardest to live. Ilford is gritty. Acton is bare road shit beef, blood. Tyneside is full of maniacs who will carve you up for the price of a kebab. Roads is nuts, cuz. That’s the common consensus.

  I’d invite any one of the roads gangsters to sniff one day inside the fucking dump that is Dellacotte Young Offenders.

  Allow it.

  I have witnessed attempted murders: inside. I have witnessed rapes: inside. I have witnessed four kidnapping attempts: inside. None of this I saw on the out. It doesn’t happen if you don’t chat it. Here we live with the paradox of possibility and no possibility.

  I’m weak with hunger but the sickness I feel can sense a release, one way or the other. I enter the Education block with bare sweat busting. A classroom is as frightening as a tenement. But not the Cookery Room, which is where I am headed, as it turns out.

  Seven.

  Later on in the interview, I am yet again asked to repeat what I saw. In front of Roller and Meaney, each in cuffs, and the screws in question—and even in front of the prison governor (a rare and no doubt post-prandial appearance)—I am asked to repeat myself. Leaving out the bad bits, I do so. Kate Thistle is also present. As is Kate Wollington. A boy called Cello is also there. He was one of the lads in the class itself, and he’s so-named because of his low notes. No one can work out how he makes a living, selling at such reasonable prices.

  Cello says, Nothing happening, innit.

  I’m not so sure. But I don’t know the equation either.

  Governor Mannidge says to Roller and Meaney: What made you do it?—as if their behaviour has been controlled by freak weather conditions or by additives in their yoghurts. The words that Dott used come back to me. As do the words of Ostrich, from a few months earlier. At the time we’re working together in the Education Department, Ostrich as a Cleaning Orderly and me as an Induction Redband. Which means that I’m there to run errands, like photocopying chores and donkey-work carting, for the Education Manager; and Ostrich comes to empty the
classrooms’ bins and occasionally hoover the filthy carpets.

  One day he chats: Has man heard the word?

  What word? I ask him.

  We’ve got, like, ten seconds before the Gov adds something like, That’s enough, Maxwell, and throws him out of the room and locks himself (and me) in again with the lads.

  Mobile found, he whispers.

  Who the yoot?

  Some yoot on Honeymoon Wing, Ostrich tells me.

  He’s referring to H Wing, in which some of the pads are co-occupied: two random strangers sharing a twelve-by-twelve and one khazi, with the only space available being vertically. Sky-walking. You want to get out of each other’s faces, you climb on to the top bunk and you try to forget about the floor for a while—at least until the sweats subside like a summer storm. It’s not pretty. But what is? Unless you’re a Mr and Mrs Smith, of course. So named—and excuse the digression—on account of the fact that it’s like they have checked into a fucking motel. They’ve got it sick. Not only are they co-Ds from road, they’re actually a couple. Pearce and Trent. One vast and one man tiny: sexual partners. And yes, it does make a man sick to the stomach. I wish I could hate them but Pearce (the senior partner) is okay. I don’t know Trent from a boil on my bum. He has never attended Education as he already has four A Levels and is never called up.

  You don’t mean Mr and Mrs Smith? I wish to clarify.

  Nar, man. Some other yoot. Keep the phone secluded up his arse on a piece of cord, innit, Ostrich answers. For four munt.

  O my days!