Goatie 37

‘Tainted Love,’ I belted it out and gave it a kind of twist at the end for extra kudos that Mark Almond in his pomp couldn’t have managed. It helped I could vaguely remember the words for Soft Cell’s Number 1 single. And they were repetitive.  

Prisoners in other cells were banging the walls and threatening me with all kind of violence. I took it they wanted an encore. Kajagoogoo was always good for something. I was never sure what. ‘Catch the eye. Too shy, shy.’

I didn’t mind other prisoners thinking I was a nut job and off my rocker and all that malarkey. That was just normal prison rules. You were a genius if you could read and write. I was no genius, although I could read more than The Sun and drool over more than Page 3. I wondered if they had Page 3, or if they’d done away with it and just send you a picture of a young girl instead, or perhaps even a young guy’s cock. There seemed to be a new thing for dating sites. Sending private parts. Who needed faces?  I hadn’t been keeping up with the smart-phone age where everything was instant. In my day, it was two pence into the box and a bit of sniggering down the line. Not that everyone had a line.

I slugged it out with Je Ne Rien Pas. Bit of Edit Piaff. I wasn’t much good at French and couldn’t spell maths. I spiced the song up a bit with Shag-A-Lang twang, which was the kind of jokey wee men in tartan with braces and budgie trousers used to pull birds. Les McEwan let us in on the joke, which wasn’t to take life too seriously or it’d kill you. I was always glad when it was morning and I could rest my voice. I shouted out final orders for last requests.

‘Aye, fuckin shut up.’

I was very aware of the needs of my audience. The encore, which didn’t bring the walls down like the biblical tin flute of Jericho, but frequently brought the ire and grumbles, of  even the turnkeys, was The Birdy Song. I knew all the words, of course. All the moves. Those I didn’t know, I made up. The high notes were beyond me as a feel of Marie Osmond’s tits, but was satisfied with my showing. It was easier fare than a little exotic French bird of genius.    

‘Fucking die a painful death, ya fat cunt.’ One of my critics through the wall reminded me, I’d put on a bit of weight since the psychiatrist had upped my medication. And I no longer recognised the twenty-four-hour clock as having any validity. As long as I kept singing and awake, most of my visions disappeared. I trolled through the hits of the seventies and eighties and created goatie’s greatest hits. Non-stop-mad medleys for all times.

My psychiatrist was a he-she. Not in the conventional sense. ‘Call me Mary,’ she’d said when I met her in a too-warm and beige, windowless room, we used for our meetings. She was a small dumpy woman wearing a blouse and grey slacks with short, dark hair. She’d never have been pretty, even as a child. In the defensive way she held her shoulders I also recognised male patriarchy. She’d always have been easily passed over for promotions. Her eyes were troubled with all the case files she was carrying in her head. And wasn’t sure about. As she wasn’t sure about many things. She nodded at the escort, a signal he could leave and she would conduct the interview alone.

Only she wasn’t alone. Her face blurred and peeking out was ‘Ted,’ the name came into my head. He shared her body. But he was bigger than her. Double the size of me. Red faced, he glared at me as if he was going to drag me across the desk with my files on it and pistol whip me.

‘Just to let you know,’ he spoke with a New York drawl. ‘Sammy Davis Jnr sent me a bucket of champagne to my table at the Copa.’

‘Sammy’s deid,’ I told him. ‘So ur you.’

Sometimes I got confused. That was before and after. After the medication had kicked in, I’d have probably given him the full monty of Wham’s ‘Sun and sunshine, there’s enough for everyone. Young guns go for it!’ But that was before his time. Although to be fair, Frank Sinatra, the old mafia don, did keep singing and touring longer than George Michael spent swinging.

‘Fuck you!’ Ted growled. ‘Fuck you. I’ll rip your tongue out and feed it to my dogs, with your head attached backwards. Crazy mother fucker!’  

I thought he was going to attack me. Getting up from my chair, I stumbled, knocking it and myself over.

Mary looked at me over the top of her glasses, the corner of her eyes wrinkling. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Are you hurt and who exactly is this Sammy you’re talking about?’

Ted was gone and she was waiting for an answer. I righted the chair and sat across from her, licking my lips before I answered. She was ready for me, a pen and notepad on her knee. ‘Sammy’s em, was my best mate at school. I loved that guy. Although I didnae really know im.’

She wrote that down. I made some other stuff up, which she also wrote down. I was beginning to enjoy myself. Wondered how long I could stretch it out. It was much more entertaining than sitting in a cell. Just as it was easier to sing. More difficult to stay silent. No time for thinking or talking or a career in pop music. No time to allow a haunting to break through.

Ted snarled at me.

‘Fuck off,’ I cried.

Mary wrote that down too. I was a misunderstood motherfucker with a mummy complex.