Goatie 31

I’m that age. Got confused. Get easily lost. But it seemed the screw was leading me away from the medical block. I’d grown used to and familiar with what I had. Sweat tricked down my back as we entered back into the main block. It was still in lockdown. But there was a rhythmic beating of the metal doors by the prisoners that made the fillings in my teeth vibrate. I still held onto the lawyer’s file as the guard opened a door and pushed me inside.

The light was on dimmed setting for sleep. But nobody was sleeping. My cellmate sat on his bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulder. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said as if he knew me.

‘Aye,’ I said, peering back at him. He was pink skinned and thin as a skeleton with skin. Alopecia took both the hair on his head and his eyebrows and added about thirty years to his age which could have been between forty and seventy. His eyes floated in his head and glowed with a bluish intensity.

I put the folder down and sat on the edge of the bed beside it. At least he’d left a blanket. He’d dragged the furniture over to his side making the cell seem tipped over. A small table and a chair. Framed photographs formed a collage of his family. Two young kids under five were playing in the snow. The older kid had a snowball in his hand. The baby of the family in an anorak with his padded hood up, making a bowl of his face, already bawling as if to say this is the way the world is going to be, full of cold hurting.

‘Jordan,’ my cellmate introduced himself to me.

We went through the usual dance of what we were in for. His crimes were most burglary that wasn’t his fault just bad luck. I found it difficult to concentrate.

‘Mum told me Jesus took my bad attitude away,’ he was telling me with the earnestness of a man that hadn’t talked in a while.

‘I felt like He did,’ he said licking his lips. ‘But yeh know whit happened?’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a vision of his mum hanging nude around his neck, chocking the life out of him. That was why he was so thin. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t eat. Her fuzzy ginger hair and reddish ball face magnified by black-framed NHS specs staring back at me. Enormous breasts bigger than soup tureens were grasped in her hands to show me their magnificence. Her lipstick was post-box red. She licked her lips with an undulating tongue that slithered as she spoke. ‘You want to fuck me, big boy?’  

‘Nah,’ I said to his mum shaking my head.

But he thought I was talking to him. His young-old man lips quivered and settled into something resembling a thin smile. ‘That’s right,’ he admitted. ‘I relapsed but aw that o’er sick stuff they said about me and my ma was totally untrue. It shows a lack of respect.’

He was working himself up, trying to get angry. A homemade shiv he’d fashioned appeared from god knows where. He clenched it in his fist. ‘That’s why I don’t believe aw that shit about yeh being a goat or a man, or some shite. It’s jist takin the piss. Yer takin the piss.’

‘I’m no askin yeh tae believe anythin,’ I told him.

His mum wrapped her enormous legs around his head, choking him, his face an inner agony as he lurched towards me with the chiv in his hand. I slid from the bed and looking for something to defend myself, and held out the folder like a shield as I backed against the door.

‘Moira,’ I said. ‘Yer mum’s name was Moira.’

He seemed puzzled. I could no longer see her bloated form. I was worried where she’d gone and what she was doing now. The battering of metal on metal in the other cells stopped. Sudden silence disorientated us.

‘That’s right.’ He stopped advancing on me. ‘How’d yeh know that?’

‘She’s red hair.’ I spotted the confusion in his squint eyes and pushed it home. ‘Quite a good-lookin big woman.’ I told him the kind of lie he needed to hear even although she looked like the moron’s moron former President Trump, but in drag and female form. ‘And she said that Jesus was willin tae gee yeh another chance and take away yer bad attitude, again.’

His knife-hand fell to his side. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Yeh don’t know er. Yer jist makin that up. I heard about yeh been able tae walk through walls.’

‘I jist seen her.’

He was bowed down peeping at me like a wee boy. ‘Whit wiz she daeing?’ He wandered back to his side of the room.

I followed more slowly. ‘Oh, she was cuddlin yae very, very, tight.’

‘Aye,’ he sniffed and started blubbering. ‘It wiz a tragedy her dyin like that. An I wiz in here. There wiz nothin I could dae about it.’

‘She knows that,’ I said. ‘But she loved yeh very much. That’s how Moira showed herself tae me in aw her glory. So yeh could no an be freed o aw yer guilt.’

 He wiped his nose with his hand. Pushed the shiv into a hole in his bedding. He stumbled across and flung his hands around my neck, bawling on my shoulder. ‘But I miss er that much. I miss er so much.’

I patted his bony shoulder blade and told him she loved him very much. That started him off with more weeping.

‘Yer no a bad cunt,’ he admitted through more tears. ‘I could make yeh a cuppa tea.’ He nodded over a contraption I’d seen before sitting inside a Sport Direct mug to heat the water like an electrical geyser.

‘Aye, that’d be good.’ I shuffled over to my side of the room and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘I’ve got biscuits!’ He dived into the hole where he kept his chiv and pulled out a packet with one or two Ginger Nuts and held them up. ‘My boys don’t know I’m in ere.’

I glanced at his family photos. ‘Probably for the best,’ I kept the tone of my voice neutral.

He mucked about with the spike and fitting on the mug before the water started to simmer to his satisfaction. ‘That fat cow doesenae tell them nothin. Lazy, fuckin cow.’

He was getting worked up again, spit coming from the side of his mouth. I said nothing, let him rant on and worked out he wasn’t talking about his mum, but his wife. She was in two of the pictures. Jordan had hair in them and was muscled. Unfortunately, his wife looked like his mum, which threw me at first because I thought it was a thinner and younger version. But I guessed it was confirmation of those cases of dog owners looking like their dogs or husbands melding into their wives.

The water was boiling in the cup. ‘She speak tae me, yeh know.’

‘Who?’ I asked as I watched him ransacking his mattress again. I thought for T-bags, but but he pulled the knife out again. I flinched.

‘My mum.’

‘That’s nice.’ I picked up the folder and put it on my lap.

‘She said she knows yeh.’ He sniggered as the water boiled over. ‘She said yeh know about the glory. She’s showed me heaven. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’

He picked up the Sports Direct mug and pulled the wires out. I whipped my knees away from him, screwed up my eyes and held the folder out; sure he was going to toss the boiling water over me. But he poured it over his bald head turning his skin crimson and blinked repeatedly, before picking up the shank and stabbing himself in the throat. His hand running with blood he gurgled, ‘I believe in the coming apocalypse.’

He picked up the wires and he stuffed the live connections into his mouth and bit down on it. Jolting his face and knocking him sideways. The burning smell was of melting plastic.