Goatie 32

I tried to save Jordan. Went through the motions of trying to block and unlock death. Pulled the wire of out his mouth and got a jolt that shook me, but I put it down to experience Tried to stem the bleeding, my hands sticky with his blood as I filled the worst holes in his stab wounds with my fingers. But the wound to his throat was lethal. I was kidding myself.

Left him alone and spewed up in the bowl of the toilet. I’d nothing much in my stomach but bile. I looked around for bog roll. Felt angry, not about his death, but because there was never any toilet roll, not even the shiny stuff. I wiped the palm of my hands on my shirt and cried. I wasn’t sure if it was for myself or for him. It didn’t really matter.

I banged on the walls and shouted for the screws, but nobody came. Every other inmate seemed to be banging on the walls at the same time. I was in a shitehole and it was my fault.

Normal life was a wife that detested me and children that couldn’t see me far enough. Friends that became acquaintances who avoided me. Prison was far enough.

It exhausted me not thinking about her. I tramped the three-and-a-half steps to the end of the cell and turned back into myself. Avoided looking Jordan. I put him to bed and pulled the blanket over his head.

Sometimes, between the noise levelling out and dying down and my exhausted pacing, I thought I saw my wife. I’d suddenly go blank. Blink and she was gone. Twitch of the leg and she was loving, young and tender. All the things she wasn’t. Memories of her up until now had faded like the mask of a punctured blow-up doll with an abnormal-sized and circular mouth painted red. She chattered, inanely, even in memory she never shut up. That was part of her attraction. How she hooked onto people, gabbing about celebrities or what was on telly. Who was doing what to whom? And she’d a dirty laugh to show it was no joke. She was on the inside track. I was always on the outside track. Cheating on me couldn’t have presented much of a challenge or been much fun.   But I wanted to talk about her all the time like an adolescent with a fixation of a would-be lady killer. In prison, the problem was I might be talking to actual lady killers. I’d little or no control over my normal life.

My abnormal life seemed to have taken my normal life into witness protection by goatie. Large chunks of my life were missing. Hollowed out. Hidden away. The kernel of my life was hidden from other people, but also from me.

I lay on top of the bed and pulled open the file the lawyer left me, or I’d stolen, whatever it was still mine. It was mostly in note form, with sticker notes, some typed, other bits annotated win pencil. It was like reading her diary.

‘What some call superstition, religion calls belief,’ she wrote. And she noted apocalyptic thinking seemed to profilerate in times of economic hardship. William Wordsworth might have wandered lonely as a cloud, but he believed the world would end within his lifetime. Like William Blake he believed the spiritual plane would meet the earthly plane and the latter would burn. Methodists went stark raving mad with their religion. The French Revolution seemed a Sign of the Times. Madame Guillotine carried in stately procession like a holy icon. History was set back to year zero.

She’s underlined in red ink the words of the Prophet Joel (Act 2: 17): And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, and your young men shall dream visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

I suffered from the plague of dreams and visions, but I laughed at another passage in which the fulfilment of God’s plan had Jesus appearing before Emanuel Swedenborg. The Swede had been eating dinner with London friends. The Lord appeared surrounded by light. No one else could see Him. He showed him that the seven seals had been opened. The Great Beast had been let loose and a New Jerusalem had descended from heaven. But He admonished Swedenborg for eating so much and called him ‘Fatty’, in most unGod like language. God did not believe in political correctness in those days.

Issac Newton, she noted, had written over two million words on alchemy. And was obsessed with the coming of the anti-Christ. For the Second Coming to succeed the Jews had to return to the Holy Land. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland showed that Catholic men, women or children could expect death and endless misery. But for much the same reason as Newton, Cromwell’s Ironsides looked favourably on the Jews.

Words were deeds for Cromwell. As they were for a later English aristocrat, a niece of William Pitt the Younger. She left London for Lebanon and ordered her servants to keep two Arab stallions at the ready. One for her and the other for the Messiah.   

A list of Anti-Christs contained the usual suspects such as Nero, Napoleon, and Hitler. Their names spelled out to be the number of the Beast 666. But she also seemed to have played around with some numerology calculations with Donald J.Trump. In her tick box she’d listed the seven vices and added in capital letters COWARDICE.

I heard the hatch sliding open and an eye peering in at me. I was covered in blood and a terrible sight. I prepared myself for the goon squad to force their way into the cell and come and get me. Code Blue.