O My Days

by David Mathew

  With my very best wishes.

  Billy

  Four.

  There is no slow-motion commencement to the atrocities. Like flash fires leaping from one dry shrub to the next, the sounds of all-response alarms moves swiftly from Wing to Wing. The silence is detonated. Panic noise rises, swarms and swells. Then the screaming begins. Screaming and roars: the zoo sounds of squirming, writhing animals noticing the vipers in the grass that are now making their moves. Takes seconds for me to understand what is happening. It is of course night, and the yoots are banged up. Fights are not possible—neither fights between prisoners, nor fights between prisoners and screws. The only conflict on the menu is between a yoot and his cell. I am still at my window. But the concept is meaningless: I am everywhere else too. I’m with Dott in the ambulance; I am also in the prison graveyard, where the ground is shivering, though not in response to the evening’s frigidity. No. There are pulses abroad. A single pulse, rather—a magnified heartbeat, or so it seems at first. It’s probably in keeping that I’m walking the corridors on the ones on Puppydog Wing: the corridors I have strolled for time as part of my duties delivering reading matter. There are screws in a panic, wondering what to do; wondering where to start. Not inside every cell, but inside quite a few, the prisoners are bumping their heads on the walls, in unison. And it’s a highly contagious disease: the thumps are on the ones, but they are also upstairs, on the twos—and inside many cells on the other Wings as well.

  Bump! Bump! —Like a bass drum keeping time to the wicked techno ghastliness of the sirens.

  Radios beep into life— I can hear them on the waistbands of screws outside my very own cell.

  Papa Alpha doesn’t know where to dispatch the response units; everything’s happening at once. Not that self-harming is the extent of the insurrection. As foreheads split against bare walls, or against nudey posters decorating bare walls, there are other acts of mutiny inside Dellacotte Young Offenders this night. Noise rises up, like a rocky sea mounting a wave-break. Televisions are turned on to full blast; stereos too. In the cells to my left and right, my next- doors flick on their radios, tuned to staticky unborn channels. Full force ten transmission. Hot water taps are twisted to the max; steam rises—more steam, surely, than even a night as chilly as this should encourage.

  Bump! Bump! The headbanging continues.

  I flit from corridor to corridor, from cell to cell, between one Wing and its neighbour—along familiar paths but now viewing yoots I haven’t even clapped eyes on before: the ones Dott has got to and used. There are many more of them than I’ve had any reason to expect. So enthusiastic is one victim in his endeavours that between every butting of the wall, he takes the time to spread his own blood on the paint thereon. He has broken the front fence of his skull—chipped at it as he might do a wall itself, with a spoon, in an attempt at escape. But this is an escape: for Dott’s disciples, it’s an escape from themselves. To what? I have no idea. I have to turn away—fly away, rather—when the yoot, with one final collision, causes the flanks of his skull to crumble. Porridge-like brain starts to seep from the rift. At this point, unconvincingly dying, he starts to punch the brick instead. As the trend for mutilating one’s forehead against a wall fizzles out as fast as it’s sparked up, new acts of auto-terror become fashionable. CD cases are shattered against toilet cisterns; the resulting shards of plastic are used to gouge lines in flesh. Yoot on G Wing slashes himself a Chelsea Smile. Yoot on A Wing attempts a circumcision. More than one prisoner spikes himself up the fundament, blood leaking down into his shorts, running down his calves. It all comes to my senses with the force of a bad dream. Am I holding my breath or is there smoke in the air, making it hard for me to breathe? Both. I skate my eyesight left and right. There! Six cells to my right, and Sarson has managed to set fire to a pillowcase, using the fluid from an obliterated lighter. The flames catch; smoke reaches out of his cell via the only egress possible with the window closed: in the gaps around the door. I watch him for a moment—his expression neutral: this is simply something he needs to do—as he assists the conflagration with a cremation of the food products he hasn’t yet eaten. The cup-a-soup packets catch quickly, the paper wrinkling like weather-beaten flesh. The cell is full of smoke, but the same smoke is also inside my own cell; it is difficult to get a good lungful of clean air. Like a man possessed Sarson whirls around the limited confines of his pad, searching for combustible fuel. He finds it in the shape of a book on gang warfare, a book called Solitary Fitness by Charles Bronson (the prisoner, not the actor), and the toilet roll he reels out in gluts of ten sheets at a time. I leave Sarson alone to his bonfire. If being occupied without pain is as close as we get to true happiness, then Sarson is happy. So is everyone. In the collected madness and brew, there is not—as far as I can see or can tell—so much as a hint of dissatisfaction. There are jobs to do. There are fires to light. There are cells to flood by blocking sinks with underpants and socks and leaving the taps running. Before long—within minutes, in fact—the corridors on the ones and the twos are slippery with water. Prisoners are applying their entire month’s allocation of shower gel and shaving foam to this tide, the better to create a jacuzzi-like froth on the tiles for the screws to slip in. The flap on my door is whipped open. Eyes peer in to see what? A prisoner at his window, behaving. Why me? Why’s he looking at me? Immediately I grasp I’m an easy target, here and now. Depleted and divided as the prison staff is—the resources stretched thin over eight Wings that have combusted into a unilateral forceful riot—the screws nonetheless have to be seen to be doing something. I’m doing nothing wrong; therefore he can bother me with clear conscience, earning his salary while doing fuck all. It pains me to do it. But I have to do something. I have to join in with the beef. Returning my attention to the window and my limited view, I hook my rig out from the slit in my boxers and take a piss up against the cell wall.

  I’ll see you later, Alfreth! the screw shouts above the noise.

  Now the prisoners are shouting—shouting and screaming, roaring; some are laughing.

  How long has this been going on? A matter of minutes? Or has a fingernail or two of time been clipped away? For sure, that smoke spread quickly; that water from other cells has appeared in my own cell fast enough. Maybe I’ve lost a few seconds, a few minutes; maybe I’m not scrutinising this as hard as I should be. The screws are taking action. But what are their alternatives, contradicting this tidal wave? All or nothing. They can either gang up on a prisoner, two or three per yoot, for health and safety purposes no doubt, and thrash the fucker purple until the message gets round that everyone’s going to be getting a turn; or they can threaten until the squads arrive from other jails—which could take hours. Who can say what might happen in the next minute? They aquaplane and slide down drenched corridors, banging batons on metal doors and warning of long stretches in the Segregation Unit. But how many can fit in there?— especially, now, as the Seg itself seems to have joined the party. In particular because of my visit there, following my slap to Julie’s face, I know that corridor of powerlessness; I can smell it now—a scent all of its own, even here among courtyards and paths of throttled ambition and pent-up testosterone. What is it? A scent of rage; the aroma of the untameable. The Seg holds the most dangerous. They will be our foot soldiers tonight—our front line. With screws like insects drunk on fermented filth, scurrying around, bumping into one another, there is no one calling the shots. Not quite yet. Two boys in the Seg swing a line. I don’t know their names. I think they call one of them Jiffy; it’s not important. When his next-door swings the twisted-up bedsheet from the window, it takes Jiffy—let’s call him Jiffy—three attempts to catch it, with the bars on the window making it possible for only his hand up to the wrist to reach through. The line is weighted with a lasso through the handle of a full and boiling kettle. Logic dictates Jiffy won’t be able to pull the kettle through the bars, but he tries to do so anyway. His fingers and wrist are
rubbed raw on the flaking paint of the bars. He gives up trying. Instead, he unties the kettle—it falls to the ground with a heavy splat of water spilling out—and he pulls the bedsheet inside. The sheet is barely long enough for both Jiffy and his provider to tie themselves nooses. I leave the scene of their compacted suicide—a kind of tug-of-war—and move towards the court of law at the end of the corridor, and back again. Reinforcements are arriving. Most I hear, but some I see—flatfooting it across the yards between Wings. This is full- scale riot; this is what screws think they want, until it bites them on the face. I’ve never been there, so I can’t see it now, but I believe the Control Room is empty; the night staff have left their posts, I reckon, apart from someone, anyone, who’ll be needed to man the phones. The Gate Staff, a similar story. In due course a van will pull up to the front gate and honk its horn; a fire engine or two will show its presence. Given the state of the emergency, even the prison Governors will be woken up at home and will be fiddling with socks and braces, de-icing the windscreen on the car, forming a strategy. Someone will have to be on the Main Gate to let these vehicles and people in; but other than that someone, all available staff are on call to attend the uprising. Problem is, nothing’s been prioritised. How can it be? Every act of rebellion looks the same, Wing to Wing. The homogeneity striven for by the prison has finally been attained, I think; all it’s taken to achieve it is the effort of spontaneous and simultaneous destruction. The hullaballoo is astonishing. Music is blaring, cross- feeding, distorting the very air—the smoky air.Second, third, fourth, fifth and six fires have been set on my corridor on my Wing alone. I cannot count how many blazes are being fed, but I can tell you a popular source: the physics of lighter plus bogroll. One popular method is to unroll the entire supply; set it up. Watch it burn! Once the flames have caught on, feed it more, feed it your stash of dried rice and desiccated noodles, and the packets they came in. One lad on B Wing seems to have been saving his loo rolls for this very explosion of activity. He has unravelled all four of them in a spiralling circle around his cell, over the hill and dale of his desk, can and bed; when he sets fire to the paper it makes for pretty patterns, in the middle of which he stands, tossing in chunks of stale cheese crackers as though he’s feeding birds in the park. The birds that live outside—the ducks—are fighting among themselves, confused by the din, their body clocks shocked, breathing smoke from the cells where windows have been left open—or opened for the occasion. They cackle at one another, laughing at how silly we all are. I must do something myself. In the midst of hysteria such as this, compliance with the general order of things can only be regarded as suspicious. My contribution is lightweight, but it will do: I flood my cell. Hardly original, but I’m in no mood to cast myself to the flames—not yet at least. As I say, who knows what will happen a minute from now? Who knows how I’ll feel? So I block the plughole using The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; I turn on the taps—full pelt—and watch the tide rise, thinking back (a genuine memory) to that time in ‘99 when we had the solar eclipse and I stood outside the Language School on Acton High Street, watching the dogs go mad and chase their tails, whining; when the tramps outside the supermarket were stunned into rare silence and momentary sobriety. How the air dimmed. And how it’s dimming now! The paradox is, already it’s night, and lights have come on since the troubles began; all the same, it’s as though a thin veil has been drawn over my vision. Can’t only be the effects of smoke, can it? I don’t know. My breathing is fast and heavy. Claustrophobia is something most prisoners lose all comprehension of, oh a week or so into a sentence, but it returns to me now: that pinching feeling at the top of my chest. It’s a feeling I know I might experience if my life is suddenly dependent on something. It’s similar but sharper to how I feel on being doused with petrol, then threatened with ignition. There are prisoners, prison-wide, now sacrificing their flesh to rising flames, but I’m not about to be one of them. I have too much to do. Too much to do I can’t do! That’s what’s frustrating. I run the length—some length!— of my cell, colliding with metal door, crashing into wall. Before long the same short journey requires skidding, rather than striding; my floor is sopping. The screws have no alternatives—or this is what they’ll argue later on. Where personnel is at hand, they form duets and choose cells at random. Hamfisted, they go in; they use what they’ve got—batons and panic-fuelled indignation—to stop whatever that prisoner happens to be doing. Even if what he’s doing is nothing more than shouting and shaking the window bars like a monkey in its cage. In fact, these are the simplest victories. Nothing says Shut up! more effectively than the round end of a baton in sharp concussion with a set of teeth. Where pieces of sharp plastic have failed to pierce skin—where resistance has been high, perhaps, to the waves rolling round the nick—the blood flow is still high. Mouths and gums leaking blood as part of the donation. My door is opened. I’ve been aware that this will happen for the last few seconds: I’m a Redband, a good boy, and I don’t cause trouble. Therefore, in a stampede like this, I’m gonna be an early target, as I say. Two screws looking for something to do while the wilder cats play solo games of self- terrorisation. I try to protest that I don’t want no trouble, but the words come out of my mouth in a tongue that’s not my own. The air is gluey and harsh with wafting smoke, with mist—with the porky and sweet smell of barbecuing meat. The screws look from my face to my exposed dick. Decide what I’ve shown them is good enough for a kicking—I will have resisted something in the reports to follow, if they are written—and the air dims again; light is draining. The noise level rising yet higher. Tables overturned, Wing on Wing; they are mercilessly kicked, either for the pleasure inherent in destruction itself, or to produce some kindling to burn. In more than one cell, prisoners are using their desks and tables as launching pads: they are jumping from them—tuck up your knees!—and crashing down onto their sinks, to break them from the wall. After repeated efforts, some sinks succumb to the inevitable— as surely as I must—and they fragment in dirty great chunks, with spears of porcelain garrotting through ankle bones and shins; with water jets shooting off insanely, pipes busted and ruptured. Screw Jones and Screw Oates are my friendly antagonists tonight.

  Five.

  Dear William,

  It breaks my heart that you don’t want to see me until you get out, and I have no choice but to respect your wishes—but I wish I could respect your reasons too. Then again, how can I respect reasons when none are offered? I have stuck by you through thick and thicker. You have hurt me more than one boy has ever hurt his mother, I think. You should know this. Not because I want to make you feel bad, although I probably will, and I’ll probably regret sending this letter as soon as I’ve put it in the pillar box; but because I want to make you feel good as well. Are you confused? I am. I suppose what I mean is this: if my staying away helps you in some small fashion then a mother’s love for her offspring compels me to act in the way you wish, as stinging to my heart as it is. I know you’re a good boy, William, deep down—and I know that one day you’ll want to come back to me and to the sisters who love you. I don’t know when—I wish I did—but I am confident that you are working your way through some sort of crisis. If my absence is a torch through that darkness then at least I’m still of use. That’s the positive statement I can make about my own state of mind. Forgive me if it sounds cold. There is not a lot of heat in my heart right now. You doused it when you called me and told me to stay away. If I am as you say, a reminder of all the things you haven’t got anymore, then pardon me for not stabbing someone in the arm. I can’t be part of your world, son, because I don’t understand it. I tried my best for you. I don’t know where I went wrong. I didn’t go wrong anywhere, you’ll say—you’ve said it before. But William, I did. I did go wrong with you. Because you were never the same after your father left, when you were tiny. Who else can I blame but myself? And don’t tell me not to blame anyone—every action is a result that has someone to blame, like it or lump it. Julie was frightened
by your most recent—and it seems, final—letter. She asked me if she was reading something in code. She asked me if there was something she was missing between the lines. She couldn’t believe that you could be so uncaring towards her and Patrice, and frankly, son, neither can I, but I told her—all you can do is wait for him to come round. You will come round, won’t you? Please don’t tell us you’re abandoning us. I know you think Julie let you down but surely your daughter hasn’t. She’s an innocent in all of this. Don’t leave her, son. It’s not fair on you or her.