by David Mathew
Now. Who’s this Reginald Dott? she wants to know.
Ronald. You know when I had that bee sting when I was seven or eight? There was a guy downstairs.
You were seven.
Seven then. There was a guy downstairs.
Put water on it. I remember, boy. Why you ask?
What was his name?
It’s not often you hear laughter in the Visits Room. The job of the visitor is to shuffle and deal out some memories for the inmates; but most of them, well-intentioned or not, arrive carrying a card reading: This is what you ain’t got no more, Jack. Lick the plate clean because it’s all you’re getting.
My mother laughs with one of the good, rare ones. It’s genuine. And she adds to it: Billy. Have you any idea how many people have been there?
Like I’m some sort of prick.
A lot, I know. But I thought you might remember something like that.
Mumsy frowns. If you recall, young man, I was more worried at the time about your eyesight, and how you might need spectacles.
Spectacles?
The problem was, I couldn’t get good enough evidence of how you saw the whiteboard at school.
I was never there. I know, Mum, I’m sorry.
My point exactly, she adds—not without a shirtiness of her own, I might say. She knows the best way to make me feel worse about myself and my surroundings is to ignore an apology—especially one that’s been repeated to the nth degree.
Cooling my temper, I ask: Could it have been Ronald?
She waits for a second or two. It could have. Relieved by the appearance of a quiz, her favourite, her tone is softening. She seems to shuffle her own hands. She strokes her own hair. What up?
But was it? I push.
Her appearance is anguished. I don’t know, baby boy! she tells me in response.
I nod my head. I breathe out loud for a few seconds. What’s the name at the bottom of the letter you’ve been asked to bring here today? I ask.
The sentence takes her by surprise. She has yet to produce the article. She is not sure how I know there’s correspondence to be handed over.
It’s unnamed. But it’s not exactly a letter, she adds.
I call out to a screw called Rapattas: Permission to take a letter from Mumsy, Gov!
Ordinarily he’s all right. He can beat me at ping pong and he knows it. This gives him an unworthy and worthless point over me and I enjoy him enjoying it. You learn quickly to give in to the little things, with screws. Sod’s Law that this is one morning when he’s bored (the Visits Room is very quiet) and/or he has been asked to keep an extra-special eye on the visitors of anyone currently in the Segregation Unit. Usually calm and collected, this morning Rapattas wants to know the colour of your tears, your stools, and everything else in between, so he approaches like a polar bear preying on quarry. Holding out his right arm, he wants to know what I want to read.
Me first, he says pedantically—and Mumsy, good as gold, hands the squidgy dollop of dough the sheets of paper she has produced from her bag.
I would like to point out to the Governor that there are members of staff who would do worse than to visit an optician’s office or the diagnosis studio of a first class teacher of dyslexics. Screw browses the writing as though it’s Finnegans Wake. The anticipation as he studies is like a toothache. What has Dott written? I want to go back to my cell to read it.
Pardon me, Rapattas says to my mum, but what’s this?
A letter, I’m about to say.
It’s a work of fiction, my mum interrupts. Rapattas accepts the information with a nod of the head. A work of fiction? The screw’s brow is furrowed and twitching. I’m about to find out why but for the moment I am ignorant. Mum adds: It’s from his sister. It’s a story for her GCSE English.
Rapattas nods again. Big-minded literary critic that he obviously is, he replies, She’s got talent. But love stories aren’t really my thing.
A love story? I’m thinking as he hands the two sheets of paper to me. I can remember the first time he held me in his arms, I read quickly.
The handwriting is tidy, tight and discreet. It occurs to me that I have never seen Dott’s own handwriting but since learning that I’m to receive the message I’ve imagined the script to be the chaotic cloud formations and heroin scratches of a mid-career mass-market rapist. Yeah. I’ve expected the writing to be a scream. I’ve even expected the writing to look like Dott himself. I’ll come back to that so-called ‘letter’—this Mills and Boon romantic fantasy—in a moment. Why? Because I only glance briefly at it for a couple of seconds and I don’t know the full score. It’s an empty moment. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The thought strikes me once again. Whoever sent what’s been sent knows Mum’s address. How can this not add weight to Dott’s argument?
There are two letters, actually, Mum tells me. Or two things. She’s out of her depth somewhat, and she knows it.
Ashamed of myself—just acting up, really, and putting on a show, playing the giddy goat—I’m getting bolshy. In my mind I’m going Jesus, let me have them then!
The first ‘letter’ is on standard issue lined A4, with the blue ink scoured deeply into the weft; but the second has been typed. It’s full of typographical errors. But as Dott has not been allowed into the Education block, I am wondering how he’s had access to a computer and a printer.
The last line of the fourth paragraph of the handwritten letter—after a lot of waffle, breeze and guff about a moonlit night, a clinch on a beach, the scent of his aftershave and the bristles on his chin—reads as follows: Please go to a search engine and enter ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Hair Shirt’.
I printed the results out for you, Willy, says Mum, busting proud. That’s as far as I read. Promise.
I see what Dott has done: he’s covered his arse. That’s what the cunt has done: he’s covered his rapist arse. He has assumed (correctly) that no one will want to read more than a few paragraphs of pseudo-erotic bullshit, and he’s started his message proper from that point on. The instruction to seek out Prometheus and Hair Shirt—it’s not directed at me. It’s Mum’s. It’s Mumsy’s property.
Thanks. Have you any news to bring me, Ma?
I’m jealous to be sharing these facts. Plus, I don’t want her involved. I can’t help but believe that knowledge—sniffing its rim—is a dangerous ting.
Not really.
Allow it.
The second piece of writing is a printout—or a copy-type of a printout: as I say, full of typos and that. The instruction, it seems to me, to consult websites was for Mum’s benefit and not mine. She confirms this theory.
I typed directly from the screen, she says. And I knew I was part of your game, Willy. Rightly or wrongly. I knew.
There’s no game.
I didn’t read any further, I swear, she tells me. I knew the first bit was disguise. I’m not stupid.
She’s not. I stuff the pages into my tracky bottoms. Confined as I have been down block, I am keen to receive a second opinion about what I have done to Julie. For the moment I want to forget the letters and I want to know how the outside world is viewing my behaviour.
Do you blame me? I ask Mum, knowing that with a mother’s innate fifth-gear drive towards intuition, she will understand what I’m getting at.
I don’t approve, Willy, she says, after a pause.
That not what man ask.
Talk properly.
That’s not what I said, I try again.
Mum disagrees with my verdict. She invested your money, William; that’s hardly worth a slap.
She invest it with another man as my motherfucking banker!
Don’t use that language in front of your mother. I deplore violence.
Envy drives my next question. What’s he like? I ask.
Who’s, Bailey? No, the Pope, I think. Yes, Bailey, I say
to Mumsy.
I’ve never met him. Why do you ask?
Nothing.
What a grave disgrace I must truly be, I have seconds to consider. In for what I did, and not for what they comprehend nothing about whatever.
That was always your father’s answer as well, she adds, all uppity.
No further comment is necessary, I feel. I don’t even ask after my sisters as I can’t see the point. As grim as it is, I want to get back to my cell. I know that Mum must have sat for nearly four hours on a train to get here, up in the hills, and then the taxi from the tumbleweed station, but I don’t want to speak to anyone anymore. Apart from Ronald Dott. Allow it the cunt wins.
I remember my manners. Thank you, Mumsy, I say.
There’s nothing more to add, really, is there? Except this.
Ten.
Billy.
Forgive the four paras of gobshite. Necessary work. Boring but you know how it goes. I’m sure you’ve guessed the reason yet. Now listen. Prometheus was a cunning, deceitful piece of work. No awe for the gods, ridiculed Zeus, although he was favored by him for assisting him in his fight against his father Cronus. The Ancient Greek means ‘forethought’. Got that? Thinking about it before the act, until. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, P is credited with the creation of man ‘in godlike image’ from clay. Some say Zeus. But it was P who hit Z on the head with a rock.As a result, from Z’s head popped the Goddess Athena. Some say. Others say Zeus demanded a sacrifice from Man to the Gods—to show willing and that. P would’ve earned your scribble of approval, Billy. Slashed an ox and counted it out into two piles. One with meat and most of the fat; the other, the bones covered with fat. Choose, Zeus, choose! Zeus knew that if he claimed to be duped he’d have an excuse to vent his anger on mortal man. He chose the bones. Denied men the secret of fire. Prometheus felt sorry and took fire from the hearth of the gods. Taught us to cook. And this really pissed Z off. P is taken to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle pecks at his liver. Forever, Billy. Imagine that. What’s the nearest you’ve got? Fuck incarceration. Imagine a million years of bee stings. That was P’s sentence. We’ve got off lightly. Or you have, anyway. Even the Greeks back then understood that the liver is one of the few bits of the body that can regenerate itself spontaneously. That’s creative cruelty, that is. That’s World War Two cruelty. It’s what I need but I can’t find, Billy Alfreth. By the time I’m freed, there will be nothing more left than cockroaches, army ants and wasps - which sounds impossible, right? You need an ecosystem, right? I’m not sure. Prometheus got 30,000 years, the poor bastard. My sentence isn’t so far away from that, I fear. Same as that poor bastard.
I experience a shiver of remorse, knowing that Mum might have read this too, despite her claim to the contrary.
And then I read:
Save me, Billy.
I am sitting in my cell in the Segregation Unit, wondering how or why I should save a man who has mutilated fourteen women. I clean my windowsills with my fingertips. There has to be more to life than this, ho ho. So he’s suffering? Join the club, Dott, I want to holler. He goes on to inform me of what I already know about a Hair Shirt: ‘An adornment worn at various times in the history of the Christian faith, for the purposes of the mortification of the flesh rough cloth, generally woven from goats’ hair, worn close to the skin, itchy a breeding-ground for lice, which would have increased the discomfort worn by ascetics, saints, monks, and lay persons.’
What’s he getting at? A self-realised sensation of victimhood?
The next bit is what gets me to the gut.
I was there, Billy. It was me. No one else. I used to think kindness was the way, but I was wrong. I was travelling the wrong way with kindness. I’d be closer to the end if I’d slit your throat. The water was useless. Some people make their way through time; some people make their way through people. It’s my only shot. I’m sorry I’ve hurt who I’ve hurt. So sorry. But I really wish I’d smashed you up a bit when I had the chance. You have no idea how much kindness has hindered me so far.
He kissed her and she melted in his arms. The moon was an uncommon sight of cheesy blue.
I am starting to get a feel for what’s going on.
Part Four:
Grow Your Own Kings
One.
Returning from the Segregation Unit is like returning home from another country. I arrive back to certain pieces of extraordinary news. Carewith is gone. Carewith has been shipped out—to Big Man Jail, Lincolnshire. While I can’t imagine a place with more hills than this, I hear the news with a rigorous sensation of misplaced nostalgia, as I’ve been there. It’s not just a case of the grass being greener; it’s the case of injustice that I share with Ostrich—that someone has earned his promotion before me.
Ostrich is incensed. What man have to do? he asks me.
I am trying to keep him sweet when I say: It just a jail, blood.
Wrong response by a big fucking yard.
It Big Main Jail! He’s irate that I don’t take part in cutting up and distributing his cake of impotent rage. I fear the worst. I have seen Ostrich livid at losing a gramme of Golden Virginia tobacco at chess or draughts. I have seen what he’s capable of with a melted-down CD case.
Whatever the weather, I tell him. Do you want a burn?
He regards the question with no small amount of suspicion. Indeed the question is foolhardy and misplaced on my behalf.
For what? he wants to know.
We are sitting on the steps that lead up to the next landing.
To smoke, bruv, I reply.
What’s the price?
He’s got a point: kindness and generosity is as conspicuous as bacon in our chocolate mousses. Tastes funny. Looks even iller.
No price. Gratis, cuz.
Ostrich gives me one of them ones where you don’t know if he understands he’s been a victim of a piss-take. Right now, in the din, it’s touch and go. He wants and wants not to take it all broadside.
Here. I hand him a smoke. Lovingly rolled. And I do mean lovingly. Fact barges into my brain with the force of a shank through skin—I will miss Ostrich deeply if he goes to Big Man Jail. I’m glad it’s Carewith on the one-man train south, back to a normal life of smoke in the air and dust.
Fuck this healthy oxygen shit.
You’ve seen the wildlife documentaries: the fox on the railway line, night-time, eyes burning the sick colour of virulent pus. He’s out there cautious, blood. Wary. That’s how Ostrich accepts his burn.
Allow it, he tells me.
I nod my head in agreement.
When man back in Library? he asks.
Tomorrow.
I have work to do before then. Desperation as my whip— whip as in whip and not as in car—I start to compose a list of questions for Kate Thistle. I’m going to start flirting with her again, in a fresh style.
We go back and I realise I don’t have any writing paper left. Screw Nickels is an old-hand but he knows the ropes. I ask him for paper.
Use your bumwad allocation, he informs me.
So I do. Microscopic script on absorbant loo roll. Ready.
Two.
Good things come to he who waits. Granted access to the Library, I am informed by Miss Thistle that Miss Patterson has called in sick. In the absence of an authorised member of prison staff, the Library will not open for visits today. Miss Patterson has left a phone message detailing my administrative duties for the next six hours. For three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon it’s going to be just me and Kate. Result. I can scarcely believe my fucking luck. After a welcome that is as warm as it is wary, Miss Thistle invites me to put the kettle on—to ‘brew up’ as she puts it. In order to squash any thoughts in her mind that I am taking her presence here as anything other than ordinary, I pretend I can’t remember how she takes her tea.
Milky. Two sugars, she tells me.
I spoon three heaped teaspoons of coffee granules into my usual cup. The coffee is better than the prison issue crap I get in my cell and I’m not one to look a gifthorse in the mouth. The black coffee has me buzzing, and I need it, fam. I have been up half the night learning my questions and script for Kate.
You look well, Billy, she says, two hands curled round her cup. The steam rises up into her face as she lifts it, blurring the beauty of her eyes.
Do I, Miss? I reply. I feel awful.
She nods her head. Was the Segregation Unit so bad? Like a million years of bee stings, I give her.
The simile almost floors her. She has not expected me to know that she’s read Dott’s letter. Don’t know where she’s read it, but she has. It deals an opponent an important blow—to realise that the other person is closer than imagined. Less elegantly, it does me good to know that I can still shit her up peculiar. Sometimes the relationship between predator and prey is more complex than it looks from the outside. I’m the wasp. Kate Thistle is the skin I want to land on.
What a funny way to put it, she tells me eventually.
I keep her gaze. Is it?
Yes, I would think so. She is sifting through the information.
I tell her I can make it all so much easier and she looks at me with a quizzical expression.
Let me help you, I offer.
And what makes you think you can help me? she asks.
I know Dott. Or I’m getting to know him.
Maybe it’s not much of a hand but it’s the only one I’ve got. I haven’t been able to research the full range of my themes but I’m on a roll. Or so I believe. Evidently Kate isn’t as impressed as I’ve thought she might be.
She shrugs now and says, So?
So you want to know him better. (Which brings me to some of what I have spent the wee, itchy-eye hours rehearsing. Firming my grip around my drink, I plough on.) I might believe, I say, you’re some sort of psychologist, Kate, but you’ve got nothing to do with education.
Then what am I? she demands.
I’ve touched a nerve. Getting nearer.
You’re investigating the fact that Dott doesn’t age, I say to Kate. You’re talking to people who knew him. People who’ve been affected by him.