by David Mathew
What are you thinking about? Dott asks me. You’re miles away.
Did you put it there? I reply immediately, suddenly flaky with new panic.
Put what there? Put what where?
Me and the doctor. In my head. Me and the Psychologist.
Working lazily, Dott smiles. Bless you for the compliment, he says, but I’m not sure I’m that good.
You’ve done it before.
Not a memory, Billy! Dott replies. An impulse, a thought.
Get on with your work, the Cookery Gov tells us.
We have to get back to our dishes. But the class will be nearly three hours, like all of them. I’ll have time to re-connect, to re-link.
What else did she say? Dott asks.
My first reaction is that he’s on about Kate Wollington, but of course he means Kate Thistle. All the same, I decide to keep him waiting. I have been kept waiting for long enough by him.
Clutching my midriff, I stop at Kate Wollington’s door in the middle of the early hours. I have been given an aspirin; I’ve had my mouth checked to make sure that I’ve swallowed it. My performance has not been good enough to get me sent outside the gates to go to hospital. Instead I am holding a teacup-sized bottle of water with a second aspirin dissolved in it. The consultation has taken quite a few minutes because the doctor has needed to check my medical records for notes of any allergies.
Come in, Alfreth, Kate Wollington says.
From the door I see that what she has in front of her is a standard black text-on-white paper form, and the few strides I take towards her do nothing to make me change my mind. The screw waits in the corridor.
Just check what I’ve written and sign at the bottom if you would, Kate says, issuing me with a ballpoint.
Instead of picking up the form I lean over and read it on her desk, not understanding the game at all. It is quickly obvious. In the space under NAME she has written the words I can and under PRISON NUMBER she has written help you. In the box left for today’s date is her handwritten with. The rest of her message follows in the larger boxes for PSYCH HISTORY and REPORT. And it reads: your problems on the outside—with Julie, with your mother—but only if you decide to talk to me. To help me. I want to know why what you remember of the night of your crime is different from what was seen on CCTV. Was there more than one crime that night? Were you more coked up than you have told me? Help me. And I will help you.
It just needs you to sign to agree, Kate Wollington tells me.
I sign my name in a badly-shaking a scrawl as I now continue with my meal in the Cookery Class. Dott is still waiting for me to answer his question.
We were still in the Library, I reply, and I say Kings?
Two.
Kings? I repeat. Did you say kings could be grown in the desert?
That’s exactly what I said.
I don’t understand. Ducks now kings, this is insane.
Kate is appearing somewhat dreamy now. She’s reminiscing; she’s lost the hardness of fact and is soft with a different focus—the lens of memory.
Everyone there was obsessed with time. And time meant something slightly different for all of us. Time is strange in the Hola Ettaluun… She giggles naughtily. Bloody understatement of the year! Another cigarette?
The craving of a few seconds ago has already left me in its dust. We’ll get caught, I tell Kate Thistle.
You’re already in prison. What’s the worst that can happen?
Seg? Loss of earnings?
But she’s not listening. Besides, I’ll take the rap, she says, lighting up again. I decline the polite offer nonetheless.
So what did it mean for you? I ask. Time, I mean. I am struggling to hold all of the pieces in my head; it’s like holding onto pieces of a storm.
It meant needing to change my life every few years— completely change my life… I could murder a gin and tonic.
Allow it.
Would you like one? she asks me.
You’re getting it twisted. You’ll get fired, Miss.
You’re right. I’m not supposed to know where it’s hidden anyway.
This takes a second to filter through. You mean it’s the Librarian’s gin?
Oh yes. Quite the Liz Taylor, she is. Little bar behind the DVD Returns trolley. I found it by accident, says Kate. She sometimes has a little evening party with the guards—sorry, officers—on B Wing. She exhales.
Angela?
Kate laughs. Well, she probably won’t thank you for using her first name, she tells me, but yes—Angela.
So much has rattled around in my head for the last little while that I cannot tell anymore when someone is lying to me. Surely Kate Thistle isn’t being serious. Or has she had one already?
All right, I’ll have one. I call her bluff.
No, you’re right. Too risky. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.
She has smoked less than half of her burn. She doesn’t want it. Making a sort of yech sound that you might more commonly associate with a child refusing its dinner, she crushes out the butt. Let’s sit down over there.
I don’t care how she intends to dispose of the remains of these smokes—my head is ringing. My voice is whiney when I say: Please make me make sense of all of this. Don’t help me. Make me.
Okay. But she takes bare time to breathe in deeply through her nose—like she’s sniffing the bouquet of a well buff burgundy, blood.
And then we’re interrupted. The door is opened and in walks an officer, his face the physical equivalent of a fart. Everything okay, Miss, he asks.
Fine, officer.
But he doesn’t leave us alone immediately. The smell of smoke must be in the air, as much a giveaway as dirt on your boots. I can see his frown pose the question that his mouth fails to release.
Anything wrong? Kate Thistle calls.
We’re left alone—but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that he’ll be back, doing his rounds, much sooner from now on than he is required to do. Why? Because he’ll want to catch us. Because that’s what screws are like.
Could you give me a job to do, please? I ask.
Why’s that?
For a prop. For when he comes back.
Kate gives a brisk little nod of the head. I think that pile of books there need new issuing stickers inside them, she says. And could you report any damage to the pages on the slip at the back.
It feels good to be given something to do. Despite everything—or maybe because of it—I do not feel comfortable looking at Kate’s face while she speaks. It is as though I have developed some sort of phobia. I start working as Kate starts speaking.
I had Usher’s Syndrome, right from when I was a girl, she says. It’s a condition that meant my eyes were getting worse— getting worse quickly. It was frightening. Imagine: there I was, still in school, and some days it was darker than others, even at the height of summer. I was a miserable child.
I’m not surprised.
It got worse. By the time I was entering puberty it was starting to affect my hearing as well—sometimes my balance. There were good days and bad days but the darkness—the internal darkness—really scared me. On a good day I could go to school and do maybe half the timetabled lessons. Then the page might start to darken, the words swim. Or I wouldn’t be able to hear my name being called and I’d be accused of being naughty. So it was easier to say nothing at all. On a really bad day I couldn’t hear my own voice.
You ain’t been diagnosed, Miss, not at this point?
No. That didn’t happen until I was nearly sixteen, says Kate.
And the air is charged dry—not only as a result of the extractor fans. There is promise in the air, I think—something that is about to be said. It can’t be any longer than a second that I close my eyes, but man, it feels like a whole bunch of hours. It feels like I’ve gone to sleep.
Because I dream. Burning as with a fever, I am skimming over broken, bony land—cracked and parched. My feet are not touching the ground. I have no feet. I am mind and consciousness only; my one point of view is what I should by rights be treading on. But I am six feet up, and moving at a remarkable speed towards what? Towards water. I can smell it. Not the fresh, salty smell of the sea—or at least not what I can remember from my one and only visit to the shore, when I was a boy. Or more of a boy, anyway. No. This is ripe with repugnance; the stench is that of an animal’s body torn open and left to rot. There is fear on the wind. Decay and rotted promises. My motion slows. And now I am swimming through the air, doing breaststroke: surge and glide, surge and glide, I top a rise crowned with coffee-coloured sand and the small bleached bones of the unfortunate, and there it is, down at the far, far bowl of this particular dune: the Oasis. Waves of stinking oxygen. The water gently lapping in its riparian way, leaving curves of dark grey oil with every tonguing. I want to bathe. In order to get closer I need to scratch my way through an invisible membrane barrier. I am swimming as hard as I can, my limbs pumping. I am running out of air, and I know that I cannot sink to the hot dry desert floor. It feels like drowning and I am panicking. There is nothing to breathe. For the first time I am aware of a terrible sun on my back; I’ve become flesh. Proximity to the Oasis has watered me whole: from desiccation to solidity. Dusty ash to skin and bone, like the process of death in reverse. Living backwards. Like Dott.
Kate is shaking me back to the living.
Billy!
Cool air floods my lungs and I cringe with a sudden graze of heartburn. I clutch my chest. The bellyache I never had—the one that I fabricated in order to get a meeting with Kate Wollington— strikes up its big band now. Still seated, I bend over so that my elbows are on my knees. My piece has shrivelled back into my pubic bone, a frightened rodent.
Fuck that, I’m saying to no one at all. What happened? I say to Kate.
You stopped breathing, Kate tells me. You were going blue.
Catching my breath, I look up—at Kate’s breasts—but keep looking up until I find the underside of her chin; she is leaning over me, her left hand still on my right shoulder from where she’s been pulling and pushing me back to consciousness. I focus on a tiny birthmark on the right side of her jaw. I don’t want to meet her eyes—not directly, not so soon.
You do that? I ask.
Do what? she wants to know. Nicotine breath: reassuring. But I can still smell the brackish stench of the Oasis—the water, the oil in it, or maybe it’s the smell of the animals I haven’t seen, or of the dead I haven’t seen.
Take me there, I clarify.
Take you where? she asks, now backing away from me, sitting down.
To the Oasis.
No. Is that what happened? She sounds excited.
Fuck. Man feel like man run a sprint, blood.
You were there.
Yes, Kate. Miss. I was there.
My breathing has returned to normal; if anything, in the silence that ensues, it sounds too quiet in the no-chat. I picture the scene again. I rummage through my memory. It’s like putting on costumes, or fancy dress plucked from a trunk. There they are: some filthy ducks on the water, some ducking their heads for polluted fare; a lady duck grooming her guy. Babies—chicks—in the murk, black tennis balls. More than ever I want a slug of Angela’s gin. I was there: Kate has told me so—as if I don’t know it. What’s she waiting for? Why the moon-eyes? Why the thin- lipped smile? You were there. The idea is enough to knock me sideways if I let it. She must see something on my face—that eureka! moment— because now she nods her head.
I was there, wasn’t I? I ask her.
Be clear, Billy, she tells me slowly. What exactly do you want to mean? Be as clear as you’ve wanted me to be with you.
I was there… with you. Wasn’t I?
Kate says, Yes. Yes, Billy. We first met at the Oasis.
Too much. I want to go home, Kate.
Well you can’t.
To my pad, I mean. I want to go back to my cell.
No you don’t, Billy, says Kate. You told me to make you understand.
It’s not worth the brain cells, I protest.
You’ll lose more brain cells worrying about what you can’t get.
Get?
Understand, I mean. We might not have another chance like this, Billy. Think of it like an affair. I can be the scratch to your itch. I already am.
You already are, I confirmed. If I was there. . .
Why don’t you remember?
Yeah. Why don’t I remember? When was I there?
Kate shrugs her shoulders. My guess? she says. My guess is you were there in the future, she tells me.
I grasp my head in my hands. Tell me about your blindness, I say.
Three.
Association Time. Sosh. Six p.m.
It being Tuesday, it is my Wing’s—E Wing’s— turn for evening Gym. Bucking a trend, I don my sports shorts and a too-tight T-shirt, awaiting the question at my door flap. When it comes to exercise I prefer to go it alone in my cell. Gyms are demeaning. Man has no business watching another man perspire. Plus there’s the ego ting: the boys who watch, the boys who judge. So what? So what if I can’t bench eighty kilos? Don’t I have more important things to worry about? The flap is flipped open.
Gym, Alfreth? asks Screw Jones.
Yes please, sir, I reply.
Well bugger me.
In the freezing cold I cross the yard, side by side with Shelley. He has already remarked on how unusual it is to see me going to the Gym.
Getting flabby innit, I tell him. Need a workout buddy.
As predicted, Shelley takes this as a compliment. Shelley has biceps like coconuts. Pretty soon we’re in the warm (scent of bodies and shower gel), and you can feel the competition in the air; it’s as noticeable as the clanks of weights dropping, as the whirr of the rowing machine wire. I’m here to do myself an injury. I’m here to overdo it. I’m here to pull a muscle—all the better to get a visit to the outside. I want to go to hospital.
Take it easy, cuz, Shelley warns me shortly after I’ve started.
I have not worked up to the workout; my body will ache in the morning, but I don’t care. I want it out. I want to sweat out all of the badness, the memories.
Did you hear about Ostrich, blood? he asks later.
Ain’t seen him today. Wogwun?
Man going, blood. Big Man Jail.
Shut. Up!
It’s true, rudeboy. Told him before dinner, says Shelley.
Is that why he’s not out of his cell for Sosh?
Probably.
Shelley is on the machine next to where I’m benching. Shelley is overacting on his thighs. With every closed-leg action he’s emitting a tennis player’s grunt or a childbirthing howl. He’s overdoing it too.
Wish man told me, I say to my partner.
Probably packing his see-through sack.
Even so.
You’ll still get to say goodbye at breakfast, says Shelley.
But I don’t just want to say goodbye. Opportunity knocks but once, and all that; if Ostrich is going out, albeit in cuffs, albeit in the wagon, then at least there’s a chance that he can be used in some way.
A letter?
Pumping the weights, I think on. I hurt my brain and not my back; and the thoughts lead me back to Kate Wollington. She is willing to help me as long as I help her. She has seen the CCTV footage of me and others attacking a helpless victim, but it hasn’t happened. It didn’t happen. Not like that. I don’t think so.
Was I really attacked? That’s the story I have told all along. What I remember is stabbing that yoot’s arm, but is that the truth? If not, what is? For a second or two I disappear into my memories. No. ‘Thoughts’ is probably better than ‘memories’.
How can something be a memory if it hasn’t yet occurred?
By now I am punishing those weights: clank. Whirr and then clank: over and over again. My heart is a stressed-out motor. Eyes now opened, I am easily able to see what has got the Gym Govs so spooked. There are three of them watching us. One is puzzled, one looks fearful, the last one angry. I don’t know how it has happened but all of us yoots—all twenty or so of us—have fallen into a workout rhythm. The sound of synchronicity is nothing but chilling. My weights are banging down at the same time as Shelley’s; that alone might be seen as peculiar. But twenty-five inmates? How has this come about? A revving hum as the wires are stretched—on bench, on seat, on bike, on rower—and then the sound of weights bumping down. It’s like a rally of some sort; we are in this together, comrades. And it’s frightening. When I cease my exercising it’s like I’ve hit a bum note, singing at the back of the choir. Savage but brief are the looks the yoots throw me. Relieved are the same from the screws. A hench sadistic bastard name of Pequod takes the lead as the rest of the yoots stop their own exertions.
Showers, lads! he calls.
Even the boys down below, beneath the balcony, playing shirts-and-skins, three man-a-side basketball—even they have been playing in time with the exercises up above: bouncing the ball in good time and in contrapunt. What the hell is going on? I want to know, acting the innocent.
What’s going on, Alfreth, says Pequod, is the shower tap. Get stripping. And don’t forget to wash underneath the arches. Go.
In the showers I am still next to Shelley. He has forgotten to bring his shampoo, and asks to borrow mine.
You ain’t got no hair, bruv, I tell him.
Got a goatee and knob-brush, though, innaye? he retorts.
Fair dues. I hand him my Head and Shoulders, thinking: I’m about due for a haircut myself.