Goatie 11

Acne face as he swung the torch around poked it in my face for the umpteenth time. He pried open my eyes. Wouldn’t let me sleep. Even Goatie was shunning me.

Don’t yeh huv better hings tae dae? I asked ‘Nah, no really,’ he replied. ‘I’m in this shitebox for twelve hours, regardless. I might as well keep myself amused.’

The older warden sniggered. He was supposed to make notes for the dayshift. When they took over suicide watch. 

 I went for Acne face. Grabbed his legs and tried to wrestle him down to my level. But he was younger and fitter.  

Nobody fucks you like fuck yourself. The staple of every AA and Al Anon meeting.

Solitary. An ouroboros wanted no company. Where you swallow yourself, chewing slowly on your thoughts until your mind bleeds thoughts.

The road to you always starts in the middle of someone else’s patch. The Goat Man slips himself inside your dreams and flips them around. My wife was almost pretty. I went all righteous on her when she cheated on me. The Goat Man reminded me, I was already compromised. I cheated on her.

I forgot lots of things, like her best friend’s name. But I didn’t forget that the air that she breathed made me breathless. Her voice swirled like water splashing on rocks. She was my siren. Even without heels, the kind of long legs a mermaid would push a man’s head under to walk on dry land. Married a smug dealer, we both knew. Her round cheeks didn’t even dole me out a smile when she was the pinkest flower girl at our wedding. She was soft and hard. We had to dance with each other and look as if we were an item for the pictures. I dragged her around the old wooden gym floor as boys we’d played football on. She held me like I was a bed of nails with halitosis attached. My ex-wife had probably got the pictures stashed. The Goat Man had us twirling forever in my head.

His voice was whispering. Calling her. Then he was fucking her on the dance floor. My ex-wife was watching and frigging herself, her hand a blur. The guests had gone beyond crazy. Like that bar in Spain, it turned into an orgy. No more than a wet dream, I kept telling myself. Then I levitated up to the ceiling. Looking down on my broken body. The whispering grew louder in my ears and spilled outward. Like waves coming and going. Whispering flowing out of my broken body and out into the corridors of the prison. Tangled up in the prisoner’s dreams, melding minds and bodies. Rolls over and harvested their hates and resentments, the intimacies of little injustices. Bitter fruits, hanging low.   

Acne face eats it up, when he wakened me.  An elbow to the kidneys. Sock to the eye. Knees swept from under me as I try to get up, and protect myself. A cripple lying in your own vomit, he reminded me. That can’t get up for wheezing to go for a piss. Couldn’t lie down because it hurts all over. Pain doesn’t track time or wait. Just some added extra hate from Acne face. Leaving me on the floor to piss yellow and pink. Rainbow colours on the inside. It was all good. The governor would be pleased.

I was willing to compromise. Tell the governor whatever he wanted to hear. Even though I don’t know what it was, or where, or with whom. Vic’s body was buried in the place between sleep and no sleep. Till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry, twanged like a chord in my head. If you plucked at the water, you’d find the silver sliver of souls beneath. My body in the cell burned as I turned and returned to myself leaving behind the crashing waves of hard memories. Little and frozen lives thawing out into spiked balls.

Then the marching and clatter of feet. The guards were coming for me. The beating of riot sticks on their shields made the walls vibrate. I was a coward. Squealed as I cowered in my corner. Holding myself. Waiting for the beating in my head to become the beat of my bones. But it passed me by, and I cried, with nobody to see or hear me. Running on empty. Not even enough rope to hang myself. Perhaps I was in the right place.   

Time jumped. I must have felt asleep. The older warden kicks at my feet. ‘Govenor want tae see yeh, sunshine,’ he tells me.

 Riot police stand outside the opened cell door in dribs and drabs. Their shields no longer taut. A defeated army. Their helmets askew. One limped past and disappeared from view.

‘Whit happened?’ I asked the old guard.

He turned his head to see nobody was listening. ‘Yeh must huv heard it,’ he said. ‘The cunts have took control of C-Wing.’

‘Who?’

‘Yer pals.’

‘I’ve no got any pals.’

He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Well, the crazies yeh hang about wae. They’re up on the roof.’

It was my turn to smile. ‘Like Strangways, when they hud to bring in the SAS?’

He held out his hand to help me stand. ‘Whit yeh talkin about? Yer goin tae see the governor, no the SAS.’

I tried to explain to him as he escorted me along the locked doors, halls and wings to his office. ‘It was Maggie Thatcher, she brought in the SAS.’

‘An they flung the prisoners fae the roof?’

He was old school. I saw on his face and the way he said it that idea appealed to him. I tried to remember what happened. ‘No, but I think they got them doon.’  

That idea didn’t appeal to him that much. ‘Waste of fuckin time. Probably, got a slap on the wrist and sent tae see a social worker so they can ogle her tits.’

I shook my head and ducked down as we passed another checkpoint. Habit. ‘Nah, I hink they got serious time. Usual shite about last man standing being ringleaders.’ I stared at the back of his head. ‘Where’s that other cunt? Yer spotty partner in crime?’

He wet his lips. ‘Hospital.’ But he was quick to tell me it was minor injuries. He wouldn’t admit that most of the wardens’ injuries were minor, but even the privatised were still canny enough to milk them for maximum gain. The equivalent of whiplash in a slow-moving car crash, with a rise for each paygrade, and more serious injuries. The only part of the union package that still existed, because it was insurance paid for wholesale.

‘He’ll be deid within the week,’ I said.

He stopped short and with my jarred knees, slow as I was, I nearly banged into him.

‘Is that a threat?’ he glowered.

‘Nah, that’s a fact.’ I didn’t know where it’d come from. But I knew it would prove true.

He scrounged up his face. Refused to believe it. ‘Nah, he’ll be fine. It was just a nick. Nothin tae worry about.’

‘Septicaemia,’ I said. ‘He’s a goner.’  Rubbed a shoulder. ‘He’ll lose an arm. Then another arm.’ I patted my busted knee. ‘Then a leg. Then his heart will gie way.’

He fumbled the keys in his hand. ‘Whit, ur yeh a prison doctor?’

‘Nah, I’m no that bad,’ I reassured him. ‘Whit does the governor want to see me about?’

We stood outside his office. Back in familiar territory and the same routines.

‘How the fuck would I know?’