It’s the Cookery Gov’s voice, in my ear. Makes me jump.
When I blink my way back, two lively tears spring from my eyes into my bolognese.
I could nick you for that, he informs me.
For what, sir?
Misuse of prison property.
I’m still not quite certain what he means. What, the chilli, sir? I ask.
Yes, the chilli, sir. You got a deathwish or something?
I just like it spicy, sir, I improvise.
You’d better had, Alfreth: you’re eating the fucking lot.
The walk from the Education block to the Wing will be a race with the Devil, as I struggle to hold into my intestine what desperately wishes to crash out. The noise inside my cell will be like a tractor dropped into a duckpond. But first there is another ordeal. First I have to eat the fucker. Twin agonies, in fact. I can’t bear Ronald Dott’s indifference to me as he works on his cheesey pasta bake. Is he taunting me? Indirectly, maybe, but not full on. He’s in his own little world, and no one’s invited. No one’s speaking to him. When the dish is done he sits down with the rest of us to eat what he has prepared. Eating in the Cookery Room is the only quiet time of the session. We are no more likely to speak than lions around a fallen zebra are to flirt or play. We guard our prey avidly.
I spoon in the first forkful of lava. Towards the end of our meals we take it in turns to claim the attention of the Cookery Gov—asking dumb questions, usually—so that some of us can stuff what we’re too full to eat into our boxer shorts for later on—either to eat or to sell. I won’t be doing the same (I imagine the feel of solid fire and it turns my stomach) but I’m not surprised to notice Dott fisting the last portion of his bake beneath the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms. It is better to conceal your food quite close to your scrotum. When we leave the room and the screws pat us down for hidden tools, they are not allowed to touch our bollocks. But other methods are used. I know of at least one inmate whose chosen style is to cook curry to a ripe old density and then smear it all over his upper thighs on a visit to the toilet before the end of the lesson. I have never favoured this approach myself, but each to his own.
It is time to go back to our cells. Bowels screaming and lassooing, I hobble alongside Dott, simply hoping for something—some exchange, a raise of the eyebrow even still.
He leaves it till the very last instant. Just before our paths have to part in order for us to aim for our Wings, Dott moves slightly closer and says, Hold out your hand, Billy. And I do so.
I can’t look down—but I identify what he has placed in my right palm anyway. I close my fist on it and reposition my hand inside my pants—the fashion statement is so widespread that the screws don’t give it a second glance. It’s not until I get back to my cell that I can comprehend why Dott has squidged some of his pasta bake into my grip. Does he think I’m hungry?
My position is secure on the toilet, but my body doesn’t care about comfort or convenience right now. I will be there some time. Plenty of time to read the letter that Dott has stuffed inside his meal.
Five.
Darkness has fallen by the time my lower body has recovered. It is one of those feverish evenings that sometimes shatter the monotony; one of those evenings when bizarre but unquestioned matters arise. For no reason at all a yoot on G Wing starts singing ‘I Want to Break Free’ at the top of his voice. It is spooky that no one seems to have a TV blaring or a bass-line tumping. The sound carries. It’s an anthem for us, of course; and before long the lone voice—which I can just about hear at first—is joined. One yoot, two yoots, seven yoots more. It’s like an epidemic the way it spreads from Wing to Wing. From A to H, via Puppydog F Wing: eight Wings and four hundred versions of Freddie Mercury. Singing our lungs to bursting. Mindless. I can even imagine the dead rising from their graves, in the cemetery yonder, rattling their long brown bones on the headstones, keeping time and keeping rhythm.
The boys on C Wing take the guitar solo.
Though it’s happened before—this kind of spontaneous singalong—it has not happened for a while, and now, with Dott present, the singularity of the exercise assumes an eerie new implication. I sing anyway. The last time it happened it was ‘Jailhouse Rock’; the time before that, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’: old songs that somehow (it’s on the wind, it’s in our food) we all know the lyrics to. I sing along to ‘I Want to Break Free’ for, I don’t know, the first thirty or so repetitions, into the night. The chant is still going strong when I decide to call it an evening and re-read what Dott has handed me—stopping reading only when a screw whose eyes I don’t know (he or she must be short) opens my flap and regards me and my silence with brief suspicion. Not wishing to cause trouble, I start to sing again.
I can’t get used to living my life, living my life, living my life without you, by my side.
It’s two sheets of A4 lined paper, both sides covered, the script miniscule; in some places Dott has even written two lines of print between a set of lines, the words on top of one another like motoring wrecks.
I start to read again.
Entr’acte:
The Prison Ship and the Oasis
Oil trapped on water is what I remember most clearly. The slicked rainbows and the water-bound constellations. The dreams that the smears seemed to incorporate. I was there—and I recall it all vividly.
In the distance we could sometimes hear bombs detonate. We didn’t care. The oil and the water—they were what we lived for.
Something pretty. Something pretty in the relentless gloom.
I was thirsty. We all were. All two hundred of us.
You think you know about cramped, Billy Boy?
Fuck double bang-up. Fuck bunks and shared privileges.
You don’t know how lucky you’ve been, son.
We were there on that ship, all two hundred of us, fighting for a place to sleep, and dreaming of the water in the oasis. Imagine that: every day. A fight—a physical fist-fight—for somewhere to lay your head when you got weary.
Some tried to vault the barriers. Granted access to the upper deck—the equivalent of an Enhanced—some abandoned their mops, climbed the rails, and belly-flopped into the stagnant tide. To escape.
They died.
The oil was a treat and a curse.
It was smeared across the water like marmalade. It stank of offal and aftershave. But it was my guiding inspiration.
They drowned. Or they took a bullet in the shoulderblades. Either way.
The Prison Ship was called The Oasis. And we were moored in the Oasis. Rumour ran that the rowboats surrounding our ship were manned by robots and electronic personnel. I have nothing to prove it either way. There was a rumour that when one of our jailers spontaneously exploded in his rowboat it was because of water in his circuitry. But I can’t prove that.
The Oasis is two miles wide. Skinny ghost that it is, it’s about a half of that long. And no one has ever asked me where I came from.
I made certain of that. I chose my crimes carefully.
What is more likely to eclipse an interest in a past than a present that is so repulsive and abhorrent? I chose rape and mutilation.
You’ll ask me why. You’ll ask me many things, Billy.
And I will try to explain.
Just like I did, you came to Dellacotte in the back of a padded van. In the desert there are no padded vans. My crime was theft. Prometheus stole fire and was punished for eternity. But me, I stole water—and was sentenced to a lifetime on top of it, in the hold of a ship. My equivalent of a padded van was a pre-programmed boat. To cheers and boos I was manhandled into my rowboat but I had no need of oars. The boat knew which way to go: towards the hulk in the distance, looking liquid under the noonday sun.