Ignoring the puffed-up hubris, I reply: Try what?
Those silly mind games. They won’t work.
I’ll tell her, I confirm. If you tell me what you mean.
She knows what I mean. Ask her; you might get lucky enough for a response. Alfreth, do you know that a bee can only sting once—then it dies.
I’m thrown off-balance by the question. I’ve heard something of that nature, I answer.
Unlucky for some, no? he says. Wasps get greedy. I frown and ask him what he’s been smoking.
I’m the wasp, Billy. You’re the bee.
I wait for a second, churning that one over, like a cow chewing grass. And then he drops what is to be another bombshell.
Forget about alligators and deer, he tells me, and turns away.
I’m shaking so much—that noisy kind of shaking that makes you forget where you are for a few seconds—that I don’t hear Screw Jones mount the stairs to this landing. He has to say my name a second time before I hear him.
Stop talking to your boyfriend. It’s time for his afternoon wank.
Yes, sir.
I heard that, sir, Dott shouts. The closing of the flap clips his voice off.
How has the man read my mind?
What are you doing? Jones asks. Proposing marriage or summing? Get the fuck down those stairs and on your way.
Yes, sir, I reply.
Little queer that you are, Jones adds, fishing for an argument.
Yes, sir, is all that I’ll give him.
For the next two weeks I don’t see Dott. He is down block for a punishment: he has damaged Jones’s left cheekbone with his toilet seat.
Nine.
I dream about Dott. We are sailing some endless waters. Up ahead, squalls; there are sharks in the water and octopi waving for attention. I have on a pirate’s hat. I am the captain of a voyage that feels like pain, and I am carrying a cutlass and I’m chewing tobacco. The waters drain away. We are sailing through the graveyard that rumour has it exists to the south end of Dellacotte Young Offenders. As the ship ploughs the land, the ghosts of the prisoners who were hanged here rise up like gusts of mist and genie-smelling wraiths. The ghosts start dancing. In the dream, Dott is the ship. It’s even called The Little Dot.
When I wake up I don’t want my cereal. I ask to go to Health Care but I’m told to put up and shut up. Not even the sweat on my body is convincing. Further dreams follow—increasingly horrific—for the next fourteen days or so. I serve bird in the sub-jail of my own fevered imagination. The riven ground now offers up, not ghosts, but the rotten remains of the hanged themselves. In reality those dead will be pale as a nun’s tits; in my dreams they hug their own flesh to their brown bones like mugging victims clutching their handbags and purses. Or their knife wounds. The dead walk towards me. The dead steal parcels of loose skin and muscle from each other. The dead meet me for a pow-wow in the Cookery Room.
Why have you found me? I ask in one dream. Why are you here?
Because, answers one, the bone of his jaw quickly slipping away from the remainder of his skull, like an O.G. sucking back a set of dentures, we don’t want to be in the ground anymore. We’ve done our time.
Part Three:
A Million Years of Bee-Stings
One.
Ostrich is waxing lyrical, once again, about the benefits of Big Man Jail.
None of this bullshit, he is saying, about once-a-week Sosh, bloodfam. He is irate. Man a big man? Sosh automatic, blood. Swear down.
It’s still a prison, bruv, I inform him—as though the cunt’s an imbecile.
My mind is on other things—on Dott, specifically—but I’m drifting. At first I notice that Ostrich hasn’t noticed that I’m noticing something other than his overused opinion on the relative benefits of YOIs and Big Man Jails. I don’t know what it is, but I want to talk to Dott.
Allow it. But none of this softly-softly magic. Regular Visits.
Though I’m not entirely sure what Ostrich means by ‘softly-softly magic’—there’s not much suppressed around here, and for sure nothing softly—I nod my head in agreement. I want to return to my pad and think quietly. Ostrich is having none of it. Regular Gym, regular Cookery Class. It’s a privilege you earn, whether you want it or not, on becoming friends with a yoot in a prison: the privilege of compulsory ear-lending. To leave Ostrich now is a sin, now that he’s on a roll. Nevertheless. Change the CD, I’m thinking.
It’s back on, I tell him. As of a.s.a.p.
This brightens the man’s mood. Allow it, fam, he says.
You see the new yoot? The what’s-his-name, Marris. On Induction now innit.
It disturbs me slightly that I’ve been so preoccupied that I have all but overlooked the arrival of a new prisoner. I’m aware of the background, vaguely, but that’s about it. Even the name rings unfamiliar.
What he get? I ask Ostrich.
Eighteen do nine.
This sounds harsh. You’re dropping that on me? I want to confirm.
Swear down, blood. Already tired of the subject, Ostrich spits out a slimy string of snot; he’s getting a cold. But fuck him. Man’s a waste.
It’s a most peculiar evening. It’s only now, this evening, when everything seems chaotic—like a ball of random shoelaces being violently unpicked, with yoots dusting from one pocket, one clique, one landing, to the next—that I realise Association Time is usually much more structured. Disregarding the occasional fireworks, of course. Forgetting the sporadic pool cue to cranium scenarios. For no reason at all, or at least for no reason that’s immediately obvious, I find myself thinking of swallows in flight. Is it swallows? The ones that seem to go haywire in the air—go nuts—but you don’t worry too much (or at all) because they all know the codes and the map. The same as in a beehive. The same as in a wasps’ nest. We all have a role and a function—and a price. But bees can only sting once, Dott reminds me, and wasps can bang and bang in their papery home.
I’ve finished rolling a burn. Bust me a lighter, I say to Ostrich.
He’s smiling. Hustle me harder, he replies.
Please bust me a lighter.
Spoken like a true gentleman innit.
For a few seconds we pull on our burns, probably both relieved that a comfortable silence has settled between us. We’re getting more like an old married couple every day—a marriage that has lasted four or five decades. Forty years of food on the table at six. Forty years of finishing each other’s sentences. Forty years of slippers and milky drinks and early nights. Becoming comfy is not such a good thing, still. Screws notice that shit and they don’t like it. In order to avoid getting shipped out to a different Wing—one of us—we’re going to have to engineer some beef pretty soon. Among ourselves. Maybe even a swing, still. Man comfortable, way it goes; man don’t want to move pad. So only a war of words will convince the screws that we’re not exactly knitting woollen booties for our children’s children, yat. We’re not ready for the shared grave. For they like to keep us tense: tension they can monitor on paper; they can control. Happiness, not. We’ve discussed this. One day, with malice aforethought but no malice intended, one or other of us is going to accuse the other of something. In good grace we’ll take the nickings and the time spent down block. We’ll each lose a few points on our Wing files—I might even lose my Redband, but only briefly: fights are dick, everyone knows it—but we’ll be able to share Sosh for a good while longer. I’m tempted to swing him right now, when he says:
The news ain’t out. What happen to Roller and Meaney?
I sizzle out my burn in the wet sand in the ashtrays provided. Down to Basic, I tell Ostrich. No TV. No fucking visits. Depriving man of rights, innit.