m
It was another patient it seems.
I got the news this morning.
It came from under the door.
Mister Licky dead – kilt.
That is what it said.
Apologies for the spelling of my co-inhabitants. They are a dreadful motley crew, a ghastly breed, I am sure.
Thought I do not know them and have never laid eyes on a single one of them.
Upon all hearing of the death of our primate sadist, there was a great tumult with extended roars of joy. For he was not called Mister Licky for nothing. And licks were far from his only forte, if you catch my drift.
I am sure you do.
Naturally, we all wanted him dead but we knew in our hearts we would miss him until a proper replacement was found.
All day long, I heard other inmates screaming.
This was a first for me.
For I have never heard a single sound in this place other than voice of Mister Licky.
This is true.
And you get so used to one voice that you take that one as gospel.
Such is life.
Mister Licky.
He will not be forgotten. And I am sure I will speak of him again, if only in the past tense, since he no longer occupies any other.
But why mourn Mister Licky?
He would have gladly seen me dead. As with many of the other inmates, of which I know nothing about.
Mister Licky.
He was like a father to me. He beat me went I was bad and he beat me went I was good.
What a perfect world.
Get on with it.
Of course.
Nothing happened over the next few days or weeks, and we soon forgot all about Mister Licky. The guilty party was never found guilty nor even ever found full stop. Maybe it was the Matron who had killed him. We all thought that. And the odd time when I heard he monstrous cackle I was sure I heard the words, Fuck you Mister Licky haha haha. But I could have been wrong.
So we went on with life in this maze.
I went on filling my room with pages and pages about myself and all sorts of other imaginary things and the rest of the crew seemed to find the silence they had treasured in a pre-the-death-of-Mister-Licky-world.
So was it, it was.
Mister Licky’s replacement arrived a number of days or months later.
We were all starving by then, as the Matron never fed us, unless we were particularly good.
And since I had refused to arrange my illustrious memoires for the old cow, I was being slowed starved by the fat bitch.
There is a confusion of nouns in the above sentence.
No matter.
Get on with in.
Mister Licky’s replacement.
His name was Douglas.
Douglas Johnson.
Douglas Johnson McGonagall.
He was from the North, from that infamous site so contested by Irish and British culture. A site so sacred that they really believe that someone really does have a right to it.
Ha!
But I gave no fuck for that, and to be sure the only history I was interested in was the history of the knob of a father of mine.
What he did to me and what I was going to do (or already did) to him.
McGonagall’s accent annoyed me. The music in it was like a rat slowly dying.
But it did amuse me to hide the things he needed for his daily rounds, if only for him to notice me and hit me more often than he was scheduled to do.
He fed us only wild greens in the beginning and for a while, to be perfectly honest, I was sure he was slowly poisoning us all. In order to take over the place completely and marry the Matron and build a new kingdom devoid of geriatrics and dwarves.
He fancied himself as a new-age type of man, self-sufficient in every way.
But it was all horseshit.
He wanted us all dead. That was the truth of the matter.
And what’s more, he cared nothing for my writings, my poems and other paraphernalia.
—I want this room clean by tomorrow or I will set fire to everything.
—Go ahead, I said.
So he did.
He came back in the middle of the night and dosed the entire contents of the room in petrol. Then he lit a match.
Naturally, I was not in it at the time, but scheduled to have my evening bath.
I left thinking I would see everything again.
I didn’t.
Such is life.
