Goatie 14

Sometimes you’re aware of an absence when you come round. Sometimes, but less often, a presence. He wasn’t much to look at. Shaved cue-ball head. Biceps, but not near the Harry- Hatchet-step-class league.  Five o’clock shadow. Bit of a bent nose, but not so you’d notice too much. Joe average, aka Boner. Some of the women he’d conned didn’t even have a sell-by-date stamped on their ass, still fuckable. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. I wondered why he’d checked into the hospital wing.

He started asking question, like moving furniture around in my head. Staring at my fuddled face like I was a zoo animal. More to amuse himself than for any reason I could guess. I’d no earthly goods. But he’d the tongue of a druid. His accent began somewhere and went nowhere. It was easy to pick up on how he was such a successful conman. He claimed to respect a man of my capabilities, and was just trying to work out how I worked. Damned if I could tell him, but I started at the beginning with my dreams and nighmares.

There was no need to argue about who was going for help. It rained hard. A proper Biblical downpour. One of the jumpers made a noise. It sounded like gurgling laughter. I listened, but it didn’t seem possible among all the unnatural angles bodies can make. Rock, paper, scissors, skin. Nobody wins, and I found myself laughing too in the rain.

No need for doctors and nurses and medics. Although, no doubt, they were rushed to the scene. Just three stretchers. After the silence, ploughing the cast down into one jumbo body-bag to pick up the pieces.

The nurse came and asked me about pain. She wasn’t too old for Boner. Baggy eyes that saw little or nothing, but knew enough that she couldn’t send me to proper hospital or questions would be asked. As a compromise I was given water out of a plastic cup, and something to dope me. It didn’t work, but it didn’t hurt much when I swallowed.  

After the hush and crush, I was dragged away by the older warden to be disposed of later. The governor stayed shivering at the crime scene, and had to be helped away. His career another, less bloody, causality. Coming through the prison with him, I was untouchable. That passport had expired. Hour after hour, the guards had stood scratching and waiting. The grapevines spluttered to life. They found out about Brodie before his last breath. That’s how it seemed. Their aim was to bury me in the same coffin. The spat their hatred, fitfully on my face. A marathon run of British Bulldog proportions through open gates and long corridors. Again and again, I was sure I wouldn’t make it to the other end. They hammered my head and body with fists, boots and clubs, chiselling bones to black and blue to make a shroud of my body. Pulling me up, fling me down. Playing pass pissy pants, the bloodied parcel. Until the cacophony quieted. 

A momentary apocalyptic vision but a fixed point, I could almost taste. Goat man and goal woman on the Spanish beach. She wears both the beauty of the Madonna and the gloaming on the waves that tears through the cobbled streets and rises above the red roofs. Those left behind drown. In the dappled light of the higher ground, the cathedral spire glows. Inside the basilica, the villagers gather in a circle around the monk I’d met on holiday. Their hands are clasped over their ears. But his vestments are faded parchment, the chasuble torn. Backwards and forward, he swings the chains of the thruible. Incense rises slowly up.  A gelded angel on top of the steeple, his sword points towards heaven. They need to shield their eyes from the ethereal light. The tip of the blade explodes and all around is desolation.  

‘If you believe in god, weird shit happens,’ Boner explained. ‘Most cons are based on the placebo effect. We might hope we’ll go to heaven. But we know deep down we’re going to hell. We make our own hell. We make it happen. That’s why we’re sharing this ultra-expensive accommodation.’

I would have laughed if my ribs would have let me.  

‘That’s the conjuring trick with the ladies. Just pick up on their habits. Let them do the work. If you’re rich you think you deserve it because you’ve worked hard and climbed the greasy pole. You don’t say I’ve got lots of money and I’ve had an expensive education, few can afford.  

Poverty is the best propaganda. When guys like you and me can’t get a leg, or arm, on the greasy pole, because we keep sliding down lower than a skid mark. The bleating of a scapegoat—doesn’t that sound familiar? It’s the wankcraft and state of mind of every nice middle class girl that wants to make it right. They’re offering themselves as realists, saying the “fuck word” lots to show their working-class credentials. If you’re going light a bonfire, you’ve got to poke the mantle. It’s not all bad.’  

‘Fuck aff,’ I said and tried to turn over on my bed, to get away from his prying grey eyes.

‘You’re such a fuck up,’ he said. ‘I’m almost tempted to help you.’

I coughed and it felt as if I’d swallowed a roll of razor wire. I tried to imagine grey clouds and falling into a therapeutic coma.

Boner laughed out loud. ‘In the olden days they’d have burned you at the stake. So you can think yourself lucky. You’re not proving to be much of a scapegoat. Not proving to be much of the legendary Goat Man I’d heard so much about from Vic.’