Goatie 15

At night, the prison was quiet as a pay phone off the hook. I tugged at the sheet. Guards had beaten me. Now they set out to humiliate and had me wearing a smock with my arse showing, and ties at the back only a monkey could reach. I watched the light in the ceiling and closed my eyes, but I could still see the pink dot. Hear Harry the Hatchet as he fell, but he wasn’t scared. He was euphoric, and trying to tell me something. Somebody was playing a tinny radio. In the space between thoughts, I turned my head. Boner was watching me.

I was pretty sure I’d seen him hugger-mugger with droopy eyes. She’d a mannish face, but floppy big tits falling out of her unbuttoned uniform. She was giving him a blow job. It was still moist on her face. He held her head down, a faint smile on his face, delighted I was playing voyeur.

She hitched up her boobs into her bra, buttoned her blouse and I was pretty much forgotten, and wiped away like his jizz. She left us to talk.

‘You want me to tell her to give you a blow-job?’ Bonner asked. ‘Maybe fuck her ass?’

I considered it like a man drinking in silence that had drunkenly forgotten what he was asked. My head and heart were doing a different dance. The weight of a thousand feet pressing down on me. Dry eyed. I wanted to boak, but I’d a stubborn dryness in my throat. The most I could manage was a cough fit. I struggled to sit, angling my back against the wall.

‘If she gave me a blowjob, I’d probably end up marrying her. That’s whit yeh did in oor day. But blowjobs hudnae been invented, yet. We’d sex standing up. That way she couldnae  get pregnant.’

He laughed at my little jokes and asked other questions. Probing like a man that had dived down to depths of cynicism and came to the surface waving a first-class prison degree.

I tried explaining that I was sixty. Hardly in my dotage. But out of love with desire. It was disorientating in that different way to when you’d a crutch of a hardon. Your very own pocket-rocket fizzing with testosterone, pointing skyward. The alienation of the unknownable. But also a sense of freedom as you listened to Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love. Switching radio stations so you could hear it on repeat and drown in static, because you couldn’t wait. Couldn’t wait. Now you’d all the time in the world. Too much time to think, but none to feel.

 ‘You’re weird,’ was his diagnosis. ‘But ever man chooses his own kind of fuck-up.’

‘Whit’s yours? I asked.  ‘We believed a bed was for sleeping on. The mattress sagged. We were a sorry looking hing in striped pyjamas. Hemmed in by blankets. Lemonade bottle for a hot-water bottle. But for us, this was the hame we rolled into at night. During the day, a makeshift trampoline. We believed if somebody shot at yeh and yeh hid beneath the mattress, the bullets would bounce off and kill them, automatically.’ 

‘Did you hide behind the mattress a lot?’

‘Aye, I did. Is Vic still alive?’

‘What makes you think that?’

I slapped my chest as I coughed. ‘Yeh, make me hink that?’

‘Do I?’

‘Aye.’ I changed tack. ‘Let me put it another way.’ I stressed the word, ‘hypothetically,’ and played to his ego. He let me ramble on.

He swung his legs out and sat on the edge of the bed. Smiling at me and picking his words, carefully. ‘Hypothetically, it’s s no brainer. An old guy in a body bag. You get what you see. Basic misdirection. He’s dead. You’ve been here long enough to know what the wardens are like. Hiding their phones. Cradling their phones. Staring at the screen constantly, like a mother looking into the eyes of her newborn, while secretly watching porn.

Brain boiled by the internet. Body set to permanent hard-on mode. Everything clickable. Nothing fixable.

They’ll leave that kinda thing to guys in a nine-to-five job. Dead easy, Doing fuck all. The kind of job their jealous of, while taking a bit of sniff and a job as a bouncer to make ends meet. And who provides the cocaine? Who provides the gear? Us. Then we’ve got them where we want them, by the goolies.’ 

My head hurt and it wasn’t just from the beatings. ‘Yeh sayin he’s still alive?’

He scratched at a scab on his elbow. ‘Let me put it this way, if Vic asked you to do something real soon, what would you say?’

‘I’d say it’s no my place. An I don’t work wae ghosts. I’ve got enough on my plate dealin wae goatman. I don’t want tae add another dead man to the crew.’