I know that, Dott. Faith but not reason. You were overdosing on the sun; you were delirious—you said it yourself. You weren’t thinking straight.
You know who you are, Billy, he replies. You just can’t see the whole picture yet. You will. I built you from clay, dust and grass. You’re like me. And you told me you’d find me or I’d find you. And you found me.
Wait, Dott. You came here, I tell him. That means you found me.
No. You were born, Billy—on your estate. You think you can’t remember but you can, if you try hard enough.
Being born? Of course I can’t remember!
You can. And I was waiting for you to arrive, kicking and screaming into the world, Billy. I even prayed for you and for your mum, the night she went into labour. I watched you grow up on that estate. It was me who convinced your dad to leave you. You didn’t need him.
I stop walking. You did what? I demand.
He was violent. I didn’t want to risk him hurting you, so I thought I’d do the right thing for you by getting him to leave. To tell you the truth, he didn’t need much persuasion. He all but had his coat and hat on anyway.
To my astonishment there are tears in my eyes. What you do? I ask Dott. Mind control? Beat him up? Threaten him?
Money.
You paid him? And he went?
Move along back to your Wings, lads!
Dott and I start walking again—shuffling rather—and Dott’s saying, attempting philosophy, I think, Every man has his price.
I don’t ask what that price was; I don’t want to know.
Dott is continuing: You see, I thought if I was kind and good I’d be able to get older again. I was scared of getting younger again; going through that horror again.
Again? I ask.
This isn’t my first time round the block, Dott tells me. Every time I go around it’s different, but it’s still full of terror and angst.
So how old how old are you?
Who knows?
Come on, please, Dott.
I don’t know! Dott protests. Maybe I was there for two thousand years before I was dragged out of the desert. Two thousand years has a nice ring.
We have spoken quickly, like speeded-up records—we have lived the last few minutes in FF. Double arrow, pointing east. But I want to go double arrow pointing west: I want to Rewind. Let’s start again.
Two thousand years. Can it be Dott’s simply plucked that number from the air? It has such weight, that number; it tinkles bells inside my skull. Talk of faith, implications of devotion, a desert, it all sounds Biblical. And although I know I’m probably going to regret it, I say it anyway.
Are you the Second Coming? Are you Christ?
As predicted, Dott snorts laughter. What do you think, you daft bastard? he asks me. Did Christ rape joggers by the side of canals? If he did, it would certainly put a different spin on things, wouldn’t it? Me at the head of the table, and the rest of the Wing as my disciples. You make me laugh, Billy!
I’m not trying to, I reply, but Dott is on his horse.
Talk about a Last Supper, he’s saying now. Macaroni cheese and Um Bongo fruit drink. Brill, I must say. What’s for pudding?
Don’t boys me, Dott, I tell him; I’m getting vex.
Well, pardon me.
Back to your Wings, lads. I won’t tell you again, I’ll nick you, okay? I’ve been reasonable, says the courtyard screw, and he has a point.
Behind us the fire alarm is still blaring. Won’t be long before it’s discovered the evacuation is a falsey, but I ask the screw anyway:
Are we going back to class, sir? It was just some waste with a lighter.
This waste have a name?
The Cookery Gov see it all, sir.
Then probably, yes.
I’ll see you back in class, Dott! I call to the scrawny half-dead bird, splay-footing his way heavily from my stationary position.
Missing you already! he shouts back, over his shoulder.
Seven.
The cell spin comes back negative, of course—negative for all concerned. Unfortunately for me, so does my application for an outside visit to Patrice. INSUFFICIENT GROUNDS FOR PERMISSION is stamped diagonally across a photocopy of my original letter. Disappointed but not surprised, I take charge of the mop and bucket from Jarvis, my next-door, and start to clean the floor of my cell. Killing time. No more and no less. There is time to kill. While mopping, and taking my time about it, I remember something harvested from one of my few rare appearances in school, back on road: something in Physics. About energy. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, only translated into a different form of energy. Is that how it goes? And if so (or if not), is time a kind of energy? Dott is taking it from some of us, whether we like it or not, and he wants to use it to go backwards, to get older by getting younger; to return to the grass, to the dirt—to before he was anything in the scanty breezes and stink of desert. If I’m right I can help him die. And I want to help him die—I think. As long as it doesn’t mean I have to do so too. But how can I survive if my creator is scattered into atoms for the sand beetles to crawl over and mate upon? He says I came from there but I have a Mumsy, I have sisters; I was born in London. Up here in the hills, in Dellacotte YOI, is as exotic a place as I’ve ever seen, blood. Or not seen, as it is. I helped him escape from the prison ship, he says. He was trying to repay my kindness by protecting me. So what better way of Dott ensuring he gets what he wants than by reversing the entire lifelong process? By destroying me. But I’m his energy. He can’t destroy me. Only translate me.
Yo, Alfie! says my next-door Jarvis (as opposed to Screw Jarvis). You wanna play X-Box for a hot minute?
Sure, I say.
Using heavy duty laser fire, we obliterate each other’s rag-tag and bobtail brigades; heads purple open like cantaloupes. There is a quest for treasure and a quest for immortality. Give me the treasure every time, if Dott’s miserable reaction to the latter is anything to go by. Jarvis’s cell stinks of Golden Virginia by the time we’ve finished. When, days later, the fire alarm is raised by Roper and we are returned, first to the exercise yards outside our respective Wings, and then when the shouts come out—Everyone back to their cells!—I am so generally pissed off at not being allowed to continue with my lesson and more importantly, my discourse with Dott, that I challenge Jarvis to a re-match, the stake being two burns I don’t care if I win or lose. Feeling sick, I play badly; he engulfs my character in a well-aimed trumpet of acidic spray. Poor old Alfie falls, like Troy. As a result, on the screen, the rest of my troops wilt and wither, die screaming in molten pools of their own selves and essences.
How many times can you think a thought without wearing it out? Then again, a thought is like a muscle, perhaps, exercised, pumped up and strengthened by regular use. Whatever way, the thought returns—the one that runs like this. If Dott dies, what happens to me? And then: if I die, what happens to Dott? I don’t remember it yet but I will.
Being divorced from the meals we have prepared and half-cooked—this does not go down well with the ten lads in Cookery. Once we know we’re not going back to the Education Block, there’s a sour taste in the mouth. It tastes like I’ve licked a rat or the wings of a bird. Back in my cell, bored with playing computer games and with the door wide open, I take hold of my beads and settle down on to my knees to pray. I don’t know what to pray for. That’s disgusting. If I pray for my time to go faster, all I’m doing, quite likely, is getting Dott involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how he has found those yoots he’s worked with in the first place: by answering their prayers, of whatever denomination. Reaching out; swinging the radar. How else has he stolen people’s time? If he’s not careful, by executing the very deeds that are asked of him, he’ll be in danger of doing something helpful and nice; and we can’t have that, can we? But what’s the alternative? I can pray for my time to drag and go slower—it’s a madness, it’s a beef with your own logic, such a numb idea. Playing safe in the end, I pray for my Mumsy and my sisters. I pray for Patrice. Very carefully, using my mental scissors, I cut Julie out of my prayers. Whether it makes me look a cunt or not, I don’t wish for anything good for that girl. She has someone else to wish her well tonight and from now on. My job is done. Seeking privacy, I close the cell door, use the lavatory, nurse the nasty pain in my stomach with a soothing palm of cold water, and make tea. More than ever I am antsy, dissatisfied, longing for something to do, to say.