Dada 116

There were people worse off than me. .It was Dada’s saying that anyone could get used to anything.  He always told me that when he’d got a bad ship or the Engineer was nasty and called them all Chinks, which he wasn’t anyway, and got as much bad stuff from them as he ever did from the whites, it wasn’t the point. You could always  get your own back somehow even if you only kept quiet and looked. Things settled down and you settled with them but you did not forget. He’d seen the older ones toiling under the Japanese soldiers on the river during the war and that was no picnic but he’d got on with it. Surviving was everything and swerving at the right moment just as important as the wooden staves they had driven into the septums of Japanese soldiers after 1945.

Most of the times I didn’t think about much at all and the first few months were difficult because of this. But when I woke up to what Dada was telling me I started to think different. During that time I was obsessed by the idea of having a man or woman, it was natural, I was young. It was strange I had never given it thought but now it occupied everything, it wasn’t particularly Mo I was thinking of but anyone!!!! They told me later there were sixty different ways of ‘doing it’ behind bars.

I thought so much about them that they became real again to me, all the men and women I had known and loved, I could feel their presence beside me, their faces arousing all my wants in my small cell. It upset me at first but it killed the time, then I thought if I can do this with my feelings of desire, I can do it for anything, the ships, the sun, the river, my life, my Dada’s life, even those people who became my parents life and all their grand thoughts of aggrandisement.

If you took it step by step  it all killed time, moment by moment and filled the room with pictures. It sometimes made me laugh, the wealth of it all, the way you could spend thoughts like shillings. I had not even started to think about my work on the dock or the transportation of fish.  

I managed to win over the head guard who accompanied the kitchen boy when he brought me my meals. Only the ‘specials’ get this treatment. He was the one who first talked to me about the need. He told me it was the first thing that everyone complained about even those who had gone without before. I told him I was the same and that I found it unfair to be treated this way. Surely there could be a way around this.

‘But this is exactly why you are in prison’ he said.

I asked him why, it had nothing to do with my crime and he said ‘exactly’ again.