Goatie 18

Pushing the panic button, meant code blue. Never my favourite colour. Prison guards alerted all over the prison. Tumbling into the medic’s room as if it were a slit trench. Blunt-faced men squeezed into single file. I recognised a few that mauled me earlier. They avoided meeting my gaze even though I shook like I’d worms rattling about in my guts. I couldn’t keep still and retreated to my bed, clutching the blankets.

Droopy Eyes howling, wide-eyed and clutching her sides. I almost felt embarrassed for her. Boner a goner. There was no longer any hurry, nothing to do and nowhere for the wardens to go. Code blue, was no longer blue.

The wardens whispered to each other, out of the sides of their mouths. One or two smirked. They stood down and began to slip away in groups that worked in the same wings. You could hear their laughter as soon as they stepped outside the room.

I rolled out of bed and put a hand on Droopy Eye’s shoulder. She clasped my wrist and nuzzled it with the side of wet cheeks. ‘C’mon,’ I said. ‘Let’s get him sorted.’

In trying to resuscitate his heart, without paddles with an electrical current passed through them, she had resorted to brute force. I understood the reasoning, if he was dead, you couldn’t hurt him. From where I was standing, the way she rolled him off the bed and was pounding him, it was like a barroom brawl in the Club Bar and Boner was taking hell of a beating.

She sweated swore and grunted. ‘C’mon yah fucker,’ in the most unladylike way.

Glancing up at me she snarled, ‘Press the buzzer.

‘Whit buzzer?’

She gave up on me and left beating him to go and press it herself. I was all out of gumption or I’d have made an escape bid. I thought maybe Boner was faking it, like Vic, and he’d open his eyes and wink. Let me in on his secret.

I mentioned it to her when she came back. Waiting together was a kind of intimacy. She’d given up weeping and wailing. And beating him, but when I told her that she was possessed by a different kind of rage. I thought she was going to start beating on me.

‘You’re so full of shit,’ her eyes narrowed. ‘I guess I should feel sorry for you. I get all sorts in here. Murderers. Rapists. Paedos. Losers mostly. But you know what? You’re dumber than most. Vic was as dead as dead could be. I seen his body.’

 I licked my lips, ‘But—I.’

She cut me off. ‘But nothing. There ain’t no Lazarus in this life. Or any other life. I heard those stories too. You know where they came from?’

A slight tilt of her head. She was including Boner in the conversation, even though he too was dead.

‘But why would he?’ I stammered.

‘He’s full of shit too? Just like you with your flying pigs. God knows what was going on in his head. But, believe it or not, he’d a good heart.’ She shook her head, realising what she’d said. ‘I mean he was compassionate and loving man?’

‘Yeh, that’s true.’

I didn’t sound convincing and she stared at me, checking for sarcasm.

‘But whit happened to the body?’

Her snort missed the funny bone. ‘What always happens to the body? He’d no living relatives. Nobody that wanted to pay for a service. He was cremated in the normal way. Cheap as cheese.’ Her lips set to a straight line. ‘Well, cheap by funeral-parlour standards. Whoe’er gets the contract makes a shitload of money.’

‘But that doesnae make sense. Whit about Boner?’

‘Prisons ne’er make sense. But, yeh, he’ll get a decent enough funeral. Some of his lady friends that were still writing to him, still smitten with him, will pay for the whole works. He’d a number of them on the go.’  

‘Would you contribute something?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be so stupid.’ She teased at her thumbnail, picking at it with the corner of her mouth, before conceding. ‘Oh that! I used him for sex. He’d this Casanova complex—I guess like most West of Scotland guys, after ten pints—but he really believed it, and it made him more interesting that most. And it meant he didn’t feel the need to brag.’

She changed fingers and nibbled at the nail of her pinkie. ‘But the truth was, he wasn’t that good in bed. All plumage, no passion and no know-how.’

I was glad when the ambulance service arrived, because I didn’t have ten pints in me. The taller of the two men made a few enquires in a syrupy West Indian accent. His colleague, whom I heard him call, ‘Colin,’ seemed glad to stay in the background.

Droopy Eyes took charge, but the ambulance men weren’t listening. They’d their own way of doing things. They picked Boner up as if he was drunk and they were rolling him face down on a stretcher and taking him to the drunk tank.  

She started to complain, but then the pastor arrived. The regular Reverend was on holiday. His replacement wasn’t so cheery or gung-ho. He wore tradition religious uniform. A threadbare black suit, with the plastic of a Fairy Bottle cut up and turned inside out for a Reverend’s collar that never needed washed. But he was so old he should have been carpeted in moss. I was ready to tell the ambulance men to for God sake put Boner down and take the Reverend in the stretcher. But I kept my mouth shut.

Droopy Eyes seemed to know him. She wiped at her eyes as they crinkled up. ‘Reverend Souttar,’ she said.