Our Christmas tree is an indoor plant named Henry Bath. Henry Bath is an Australian weeping fig. Henry Bath is five feet tall when he sits in the terracotta pot Dad keeps him in. Dad likes trees and he likes Henry Bath, with all his cluttered green leaves shaped like canoes and a grey fig trunk like a frozen carpet snake. He likes to personalise his plants because if he doesn’t personalise them – picture them possessing human needs and wants in some tiny and whimsical part of a mind I am only beginning to realise operates with as much order and predictability as the insides of our lounge room vinyl beanbag – then he is less inclined to water them and the plant is more likely to succumb to the endless assault of Dad’s stubbed-out rollies. He named Henry after Henry Miller and the bath he was lying back in reading Tropic of Cancer when he thought of naming the weeping fig.
‘Why does Henry weep?’ I ask Dad as we slide the tree over to the centre of the living room where the ironing board stands, 24/7, our old iron rusting away in its square metal hand.
‘Because he’ll never be able to read Henry Miller,’ he says.
We push the pot plant in place.
‘Gotta be careful where we put him,’ Dad says. ‘Moving Henry to a new place kinda gives ’im a shock.’
‘You serious?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Different kind of light shines on him, new temperature in a new place, bit of a draught maybe, change in humidity, and he thinks it must be a different season. He starts shedding his leaves.’
‘So he can feel things?’
‘Sure, he can feel things,’ Dad says. ‘Henry Bath is a sensitive son of a bitch. That’s why he turns on the waterworks all the time. Like you.’
‘Whaddya mean, like me?’
‘You like a good cry,’ he says.
‘No, I don’t,’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders.
‘You loved to cry as a bub,’ he says.
I forgot this. I forgot he knew me before I knew him.
‘I’m surprised you remember,’ I say.
‘Of course I remember,’ he says. ‘Happiest days of my life.’
He stands back and assesses the new location of Henry Bath. ‘Whaddya reckon?’ Dad asks.
I nod. August holds two pieces of Christmas tinsel in his hands, one twinkling red and one twinkling green, both of them losing their tinsel fibres over time, like Henry Bath slowly loses leaves and Dad might be slowly losing fibres of his mind.
August lays the tinsel carefully over Henry Bath and we stand around the weeping fig, marvelling at the saddest Christmas tree in Lancelot Street and possibly the Southern Hemisphere.
Dad turns to us both.
‘I got a Christmas box coming from St Vinnies later this afternoon,’ he says. ‘Got some good gear in ’em. Can of ham, pineapple juice, some liquorice squares. I thought we could have a bit of a day of it tomorrow. Give each other gifts ’n’ shit.’
‘What, you got us gifts?’ I ask, dubious.
August smiles, encouraging. Dad scratches his chin.
‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘But I had an idea.’
August nods. Great, Dad, he writes in the air, urging Dad on.
‘I had this thought that we could each choose a book from the book room and we could wrap it up and put it under the tree,’ Dad says.
Dad knows how much August and I have been enjoying his bedroom book mountain.
‘But not just any ol’ book,’ he says. ‘Maybe something we’ve been reading or something that’s really important to us or something we think someone else might enjoy.’
August claps his hands, smiling. Gives a thumbs-up to Dad. I’m rolling my eyes as if my eye sockets were filled with two loose Kool Mint lollies from a St Vincent de Paul Christmas charity box.
‘Then, you know, we can eat some liquorice squares and read our books for Christmas,’ Dad says.
‘And how is this any different from any other day for you?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘Yeah, well, we can all read in the living room,’ he says. ‘You know, we can read together.’
August punches me in the shoulder. Stop being a dick. He’s trying. Let him try, Eli.
I nod. ‘Sounds great,’ I say.
Dad goes to the kitchen table and tears a TAB betting ticket into three pieces, scribbles a name on each piece with the pencil he uses to circle horses in the form guide. He screws the pieces up and holds them in his hand.
‘You get first pick, August,’ Dad says.
August picks a piece of ticket, opens it with a glint of Christmas spirit in his eye.
He shows us the name: Dad.
‘All right,’ Dad says. ‘August picks a book for me. I pick a book for Eli and Eli picks a book for August.’
Dad nods. August nods. Dad looks at me.
‘You will stick around for it, won’t ya, Eli?’ Dad asks.
August looks at me. You’re an arsehole. Really.
‘Yeah, I’ll stick around,’ I say.
*
I don’t stick around. At 4 a.m., Christmas morning, I place a copy of Papillon for August beneath the Christmas tree, wrapped in the sports pages of The Courier-Mail. Dad’s wrapped his book for me in The Courier’s Classifieds pages. August has wrapped his book for Dad in the up-front news pages.
I walk to the train station in the nearby seaside suburb of Sandgate – famed for its fish and chips and nursing homes – taking the shortcut crossing over the motorway to the Sunshine Coast, normally a frantic exercise of Evel Knievel–level insanity requiring Bracken Ridge kids to leap a steel guardrail, dodge four lanes of speeding traffic, leap another steel guardrail and slip through a hole the size of a dinner plate in a council wire fence, while going undetected by police or, worse, concerned parents who have been pressuring the local council to build a footbridge across the highway for years. But this morning the motorway is empty. I take my time slipping over the guardrails, whistling ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ as I go.
Beyond the motorway is Racecourse Road, edging the Deagon Racecourse where, this early Christmas morning, in the half-light of a slow-waking sun, a young female rider does trackwork on a plucky mahogany thoroughbred. An old man in a beanie watches her ride, leaning against the racecourse fence. He looks a bit like Slim, but it can’t be Slim because Slim’s in hospital. Houdini Halliday is trying to escape from fate. Houdini Halliday is hiding in the bushes, ducking down as the skeleton in the cloak with the sharpened sickle snoops around him.
‘Merry Christmas,’ says the old man.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I nod, quickening my pace.
Only four trains running today and the 5.45 a.m. train to Central stops at Bindha Station, beside the iron pipes and the exposed factory conveyor belts of the foul-smelling Golden Circle Cannery, not so foul-smelling today because the cannery is closed. There was a Golden Circle one-litre can of orange and mango fruit juice in our St Vincent de Paul Christmas charity box that was dropped off yesterday afternoon by a warm-faced woman with ginger hair and red polished fingernails. There was a can of Golden Circle pineapple slices also, canned and shipped by the good folks of the Golden Circle Cannery beside Bindha train station.
The old red truck is waiting where Slim’s note said it would be waiting. It splutters in neutral on the corner of Chapel Street and St Vincents Road. The front of the truck is all fat curves and rust, like something Tom Joad would’ve driven on the road to California. The back of the truck is four iron walls forming a rectangular box with a blue canvas top, the size of Dad’s kitchen. I grip the shoulder straps on the backpack I’m carrying and approach the driver’s side door.
A man sits at the wheel smoking a cigarette, right elbow resting out his window.
‘George?’ I ask.
He’s Greek, maybe. Italian. I don’t know. About Slim’s age, bald head and chubby arms. He opens his door and slips out of the truck, stubs his cigarette out beneath a pair of worn running shoes that he wears with thick grey socks that bunch at his ankles. He’s short and stocky but quick in his movements. A man on the move.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ I say.
He doesn’t say anything. He opens the back of the truck, swings the metal back door wide and latches it to the side of the truck. He nods me up. I climb into the truck and he climbs up behind me.
‘I won’t say a word, I promise,’ I say.
George says nothing.
The truck is filled with crates of fruit and vegetables. A box of pumpkins. A box of rockmelons. A box of potatoes. A pallet jack by the left wall. By the rear door is a large empty square crate sitting on a forklift pallet. George leans over into the crate and pulls out a false wood bottom two-thirds of the way down into the box. He nods his head right two times. I’ve read enough silent nods from August to know that what he means is, ‘Get in the box.’ I drop the backpack in the box and lift my legs over the side and lie down in the box.
‘Will I be able to breathe in here?’
He points to drilled air holes on each wall of the crate. It’s an impossibly tight fit, only achieved by lying on my left side with my legs pulled up hard to my belly. I cushion my head under my backpack.
George assesses my fit and, satisfied, lifts the sheet of wood that forms the crate’s false bottom and places it over my crowbarred body.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Do you have any instructions for what I should do at the other end?’
He shakes his head.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing. You’re helping me help my mum.’
George nods. ‘I’m not talking, boy, because you don’t exist, you understand?’ he says.
‘I understand,’ I say.
‘You stay quiet and you wait,’ he says.
I nod three times. The false wood bottom comes down over my body.
‘Merry Christmas,’ George says.
Then the darkness.
*
The engine rattles into life and my head bangs against the crate floor. Breathe. Short, calm breaths. No time for one of those nasty panic attacks of Dad’s. This is living. This is what Slim used to call living life at the coalface. All those other saps standing back from the coalface worried about the rock wall caving in, but here I am, Eli Bell, scraping the walls of life, finding my seam, finding my source.
There’s Irene in the darkness. A silk slip. Her exposed calf muscle, perfect skin and a freckle on her ankle. The truck speeds along the road. I can feel George’s gear changes, I can feel every bump in the road. There’s Caitlyn Spies on the beach now. And she’s wearing Irene’s silk slip and she’s calling me. She beams and she turns her head to see the eternal universe.
The truck slows, comes to a stop and I hear an indicator and the truck turns left into the bump of a driveway. The truck moves forward then reverses and I hear the sound of the reversing beep. The truck stops. The rear door opens and I hear George sliding an iron ramp from inside the truck and slamming it down on concrete. Then the sound of a machine, forklift probably, moving up the ramp. The smell of engine oil and petrol. The machine close to the crate. The crate shakes and rocks as two metal forks stab through the pallet beneath me and suddenly I’m elevated inside the box. I’m moving, my head banging against the crate as the forklift moves down the iron ramp and is dropped heavily onto concrete. The forklift teeth slide out of the pallet and the machine moves back and forth, so close I can smell the rubber in its moving wheels. Beep, beep. Zip, zip. Left, right. Then the sound of the forklift teeth raising another box in the air, then something heavy raining on the false bottom above me. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Buddddddderrdudddderrrr. The weight of the crate’s new cargo flexes the false floor and my heart races. There’s fruit above me. I can smell it. Watermelons. Then I’m floating again, elevated by the forklift, dropped back into the truck. And we’re moving again.
*
I close my eyes and I look for the beach but all I see is Slim and he’s lying on his side like he was on the bridge, old blood on his lips. And I see footprints in the sand and I follow these footsteps and I see that the footsteps belong to a man and that man is Iwan Krol and he’s dragging a man behind him along the beach and the man he is dragging is Lyle, wearing the same shirt and shorts he was wearing on the night we saw him last, the night he was dragged out of the house in Darra. I can’t see Lyle’s head because it’s hanging down as he’s being dragged but I know the truth. I’ve known the truth ever since he disappeared. Of course I can’t see his head. Of course I can’t see his head.
*
The truck brakes hard, takes a long turn right. Then a hard left, up a sloping driveway with what feels like speed bumps. The truck stops.
‘Season’s greetings, Georgie Porgie,’ calls a man outside the truck.
George and the man talk but I can’t hear what they’re saying. They laugh. I catch words. Wife. Kids. Swimming pool. On the piss.
‘Bring her in,’ the man says.
The sound of a large mechanical door or a gate opening. The truck moves forward, motors up a gentle slope and stops again. Two men talking to George now.
‘Merry Christmas, Georgie,’ one says.
‘We’ll make it quick, mate,’ says another man. ‘Tina making the cassata this year?’
George says something back to the men to make them laugh.
The door opens on the back of the truck. I hear the footsteps of two men climbing into the truck. They’re inspecting the crates beside mine.
‘Look at this shit,’ says one of the men. ‘These bitches eat better than us. Fresh cherries. Grapes. Plums. Rockmelon. What? No chocolate-coated strawberries? No toffee apples?’
They don’t even touch the box I’m in.
They step back out of the truck. Close the rear door.
The sound of a rattling roller door rising.
‘In ya go, Georgie,’ calls one of the men.
The truck moves forward slowly, takes several turns left and right, then stops. And again the rear door opens and the iron ramp slams down on the concrete.
And again I’m elevated and I’m moving, on the forks of George’s pallet jack this time, no engine, just rusting metal levers rattling. Down the ramp and onto a concrete floor. George brings down six more crates and drops them beside me. I hear him slide the iron ramp back up into the truck. I hear him close the rear door and then I hear his sneakers squeak as he walks towards my crate of watermelons with the false floor from some suburban Queensland spy book that nobody bothered to write. He whispers into an air hole.
‘Good luck, Eli Bell,’ he says. He taps the box twice and shuffles away.
The truck’s engine roars to life, echoing loud in this room I’m in, and fumes from the exhaust fill my cramped and increasingly claustrophobic spy space.
Then silence.
*
I make this time go fast with my fear. My fear makes me think. My thinking manipulates time. Where is she? Is she okay? Will she want to see me? What am I doing here? The man on the red phone. The man on the red phone.
What was that thing Mrs Birkbeck, guidance counsellor to the lost and restless, said about kids and trauma? What was that thing about believing things that never happened? Is this really happening right now? Could I really be here, trapped at the bottom of a box of watermelons on Christmas Day? Sublime to the ridiculous and the ridiculous to the bottom of a box of fruit.
How long have I been here now? One hour, two hours? If I’m this hungry it must be lunchtime. Must be three hours. I’m so fuckin’ hungry. August and Dad are probably having that canned ham as I speak. Reading their Christmas books and sucking on Golden Circle pineapple slices. August’s probably telling Dad how rugged and legendary prison escapee Henri Charrière was nicknamed ‘Papillon’ on account of the butterfly tattoo inked into his tanned and hairy chest. That’s what I’m gonna do if I get out of here. I’m gonna go down to Travis Mancini’s house on Percivale Street in Bracken Ridge and ask him to do one of his homemade Indian ink tattoos: a bright blue butterfly spreading its wings from the centre of my chest. And when other kids see me swimming down at the Sandgate swimming pool they will come up and ask me why I have a blue butterfly tattooed across my chest and I can say it’s my tribute to the will of Papillon, to the enduring power of the human spirit. I can say that I got that tattoo after I smuggled myself into the Boggo Road women’s prison to save my mother’s life and I got the butterfly tattoo because I was a cocoon that day, I was a boy larva trapped in a pupal casing of watermelons, but I survived, I busted out of those watermelons renewed, metamorphosed.
Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.
A door opening and closing. Footsteps. Rubber soles squeaking on polished concrete. Someone standing by the crate. Hands on the watermelons. The watermelons being removed from the crate. I feel the weight shifting on the false bottom. Relaxing. Light floods my eyes as the false bottom is removed. My pupils fight the light and focus on the face of a woman leaning over the crate, looking down on me. An Aboriginal woman. Big-boned and imposing, maybe sixty years old. Grey roots in her black hair.
‘Oh, look at you,’ she says warmly. She smiles and her smile is earth and sunshine and a blue butterfly flapping its wings. ‘Merry Christmas, Eli,’ she says.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I say, still crushed like a stomped Pasito can inside the box.
‘You wanna get outta there?’ the woman asks.
‘Yeah.’
She offers me her right hand and helps me up. There’s a tattoo of a Dreamtime rainbow serpent twisting colourfully up the inside of her right arm. We learned about the rainbow serpent in Year 5 Social Studies at school: giver of life, wondrous and majestic but not to be fucked with, not least because he might have regurgitated half of Australia into being.
‘I’m Bernie,’ she says. ‘Slim told me you’d be dropping by for Christmas.’
‘You know Slim?’
‘Who doesn’t know the Houdini of Boggo Road?’ she replies. A grave look on her face. ‘How is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘He’s still in hospital.’
She nods, stares warmly into my eyes. ‘I should warn you you’ve become the talk of the whole joint,’ she says. She brushes a soft hand across my right cheek. ‘Oh, Eli,’ she says. ‘Every woman here who ever had a cup o’ milk in her tit is gonna wanna hold you.’
I scan the room we’re standing in, stretching, clicking my aching neck back into a functioning place. We’re in a kitchen, part practical cooking space with sweeping metal benches and sinks and drying racks, industrial ovens and stovetops. The entry door to the kitchen is closed and steel roller doors have been pulled down over a service bain-marie with twelve compartments. We’re standing in a kind of storage room space flowing off the kitchen; there’s a roller door on the rear wall of the kitchen which I must have come through.
‘This is your kitchen?’ I ask.
‘No, it’s not my kitchen,’ Bernie says, feigning offence. ‘This is my restaurant, Eli. I call it “Jailbirds”. Well, sometimes I call it “Cell Block Ate”, that’s A-T-E, and sometimes I call it “Bernie’s Bars and Grill”, but mostly I call it “Jailbirds”. Best beef burgundy you’ll find south of the Brisbane River. Shit location for a restaurant, of course, but the staff are friendly and we get a steady stream of about a hundred and fifteen loyal guests every breakfast, lunch and dinner.’
I chuckle at this. She laughs, raising a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh, you gotta stay quiet as a mouse, you hear me?’
I nod.
‘Do you know where my mum is?’
She nods.
‘How is she?’
Bernie stares at me. There’s a tattooed star formation on her left temple.
‘Oh, sweet Eli,’ she says, her hands cupping my chin. ‘Your mum has told us about you. She told us how special you and your brother are. And we all heard how you wuz tryin’ to get here to see your mum but your old man wasn’t havin’ it.’
I shake my head. My eyes catch a box of red apples on the kitchen bench.
‘You hungry?’ Bernie asks.
I nod.
She steps to the apple box, wipes one on her prison pants the way Dennis Lillee shines a cricket ball, throws me the apple.
‘You want me to fix you a sandwich or somethin’?’ she asks.
I shake my head.
‘We got Corn Flakes in here. I think Tanya Foley down in D Block has a box of Froot Loops she had smuggled in. I could rustle up a bowl of Froot Loops for ya.’
I bite into the apple, juicy and crisp. ‘The apple’s great, thanks,’ I say. ‘Can I go see her?’
She sighs, pulls herself up onto the steel kitchen workbench, neatens out her prison shirt.
‘No, Eli, you can’t just go see her,’ she says. ‘You can’t just go see her because, and I don’t know if you’ve worked this out just yet, this is a fuckin’ women’s prison, matey, and it’s not some fuckin’ summer holiday resort where you can just wander on across to B Block and ask the concierge to page your fuckin’ mum. Now, get this straight, you’ve only come this far because Slim begged me to let you come this far and you better start telling me why I should let this crackpot adventure of yours go any further.’
The sound of a choir echoes outside the kitchen.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
A beautiful choir. Angel voices. A Christmas song.
‘That’s the Salvos,’ Bernie says. ‘They’re singin’ up a storm next door in the rec room.’
‘They come every Christmas?’
‘If we’ve been good little elves,’ she says.
The song gets louder, three-part harmonies squeezing through the crack beneath the door to Bernie’s Jailbirds restaurant.
‘What’s that song they’re singing?’
‘You can’t hear it?’
Bernie starts to sing. ‘Sleigh bells ring, are you listening, In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight. Walking in a winter wonderland.’ That song. That fucking song. She slides off the bench, moves closer to me, a dumb look on her face. She sways to me, smiling. Something about her smile is unsettling. There’s madness in Bernie. She’s looking at me but she’s looking through me too. ‘Gone away is the blue bird,’ she sings. ‘Here to stay is the new bird . . .’
There’s a knock on the closed kitchen door.
‘Come in,’ Bernie calls.
A woman in her twenties enters the kitchen. She has blonde tufts of hair at the front of her scalp and blonde tufts of hair at the base of her scalp and the rest of the hair in between has been shaved in a crewcut. Her arms and legs are bone with no meat and her beaming smile to me when she enters the kitchen is the greatest gift I’ve received so far this increasingly unusual Christmas Day. Then her smile fades when she turns to Bernie.
‘She’s not coming out,’ the woman says. ‘She’s fuckin’ vacant, Bern. She’s just staring at the wall, like she’s dead to the world inside her head. She’s not there at all.’
The woman looks at me. ‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘Did you tell her he’s standing right here in the kitchen?’ Bernie asks.
‘Nah, I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘Lord Brian’s letting her keep the door closed. He’s worried she’ll ’ave another spac attack.’
Bernie drops her head, thinking. She raises her arm at the woman, her head still down. ‘Eli, this is Debbie,’ she says.
Debbie smiles at me again.
‘Merry Christmas, Eli,’ Debbie says.
‘Merry Christmas, Debbie,’ I say.
Bernie lifts her head, turns to me.
‘Look, kid, you want it straight or you want it with the chocolate sauce and the cherry on top?’ Bernie asks.
‘Straight,’ I say.
She sighs.
‘She doesn’t look good, Eli,’ she says. ‘She hasn’t been eatin’ nothin’. She won’t come out of her cell. I can’t remember the last time she went outside for 3 p.m. rec. She was doin’ cooking classes with me here for a bit but she stopped doin’ that. She’s in a dark place, Eli.’
‘I know she is,’ I say. ‘That’s why I asked Slim to get me in here.’
‘But she doesn’t want you seeing her that way, you understand me?’ she says.
‘I know she doesn’t want to see me,’ I say. ‘I know that. But the thing is, Bernie, she does want to see me even though she doesn’t want to see me and I need to go down there and tell her everything is gonna be all right because when I tell her that everything will be all right – that’s what always happens. It always turns out all right when I tell her it’s going to.’
‘So, let me get this straight, you just go out there and tell your mum it’s all gonna be peachy for her inside this shithole and,’ Bernie clicks her fingers, ‘voilà, everything is all right for Frankie Bell?’
I nod.
‘Just like that?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Like magic?’
I nod.
‘You some kinda magic man, Eli?’ she asks.
I shake my head.
‘Nah, come on, little cuz, maybe you’re the new Houdini of Boggo Road?’ she says mockingly. ‘Maybe Slim sent us all the new Houdini to magically bust us all outta here. Can you do that, Eli? Maybe you could wave your wand and you could magic me right out to Dutton Park train station and I could go see one of my kids. I got five of ’em out there somewhere. I’d be happy to see just one of ’em. Me youngest maybe. Kim. How old would Kim be now, ya reckon, Deb?’
Debbie shakes her head.
‘C’mon, Bern,’ she says. ‘Poor kid’s come this far. Let’s just take him to see his mum. It’s Christmas, for fuck’s sake.’
Bernie turns to me.
‘She just needs to see me for a minute,’ I say.
‘I’m just looking out for your mum, kid,’ she says. ‘No mother in the world wants her kid to see her like she is right now. Why should I let you go down there and hurt her even more than she’s already hurtin’, you know, just to make your Christmas Day a little merrier?’
And I stare so deep and serious into her eyes I can see her steely soul. ‘Because I don’t know magic, Bernie,’ I say. ‘Because I don’t know anything about anything. But I know what my mum told you about my brother and me was right.’
‘What’s that?’ Bernie asks.
‘We’re special.’
*
The prisoners of B Block are performing a musical this Christmas Day on a makeshift stage in the recreation room, and the ladies from blocks C, D, E and the F Block temporary huts, where spillover newcomers go when the main cells are full, have all gathered for a joyous and well received post-lunch Christmas concert. The B Block Christmas performance is a fusion of the Nativity story and the musical Grease. The play features two female cons playing Mary and Joseph in the guise of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. The three wise men are all members of the Pink Ladies gang. Baby Jesus is a doll dressed in leathers, and instead of spending a night in a manger the future lord and saviour rests up in the boot of a cardboard Greased Lightning. The musical is called When a Child is Born to Hand Jive.
The play’s climactic showstopper, Mary singing ‘You’re the One That I Want For Christmas’, brings the house down and a thunderous cheer echoes through B Block. Even the screws, three heavyset men in green-brown uniforms standing at triangular points around the knee-slapping audience, find themselves immersed in the riotous cabaret stylings of the woman playing Mary in stick-on black leggings.
‘All right, let’s go,’ whispers Bernie, making the most of the play’s magnetic and colourful all-eyes-on-stage distraction.
I’m tucked inside a large black wheelie bin and Bernie is pulling me along, the bin’s lid closed above me. My feet squash down paper plates cleared from the prison dining tables at Christmas lunch. I’m up to my ankles in leftovers of canned ham and tinned peas and corn. She wheels me out of the prison kitchen area, past the dining room, crosses an open floor space behind the rec room, scurries past the audience with its head turned to Mary. She turns the bin on a sharp right and my body is mashed against the greasy and foul-smelling inside walls. She scurries thirty or forty paces along and sits the bin upright again, opens the lid, pops her head inside.
‘What’s my name?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘How the fuck did you get inside this place?’
‘I attached myself to the bottom of one of the delivery trucks.’
‘Which truck?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The white one.’
Bernie nods.
‘Outcha get,’ she whispers.
I stand up out of the bin. We’re in a cell block corridor lit only by the light of a frosted glass floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the corridor, some eight prison cells along. Each cell has a rectangular hard-glass window panel the size of Dad’s letterbox built into the centre of it.
I slip out of the bin, my backpack still over my shoulders. Bernie nods to the cell two doors along the corridor.
‘It’s that one,’ she says. She closes the lid on the bin and scurries away.
‘You’re on your own now, Houdini,’ she whispers. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Thanks Bernie,’ I whisper.
I approach Mum’s cell. The door’s window is too high up for me to see into, even on the tips of my toes. But there’s a recess in the thick door and I can grip my fingers on it and pull myself up, using my knees to help push me up higher. My right hand slips because it only has four fingers to hold on with, but I go again, clutching hard at the window space. And I see her. She wears a white shirt underneath what looks like a light blue painter’s smock. Her prison uniform makes her look so young, smaller and more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. She looks like a little girl who should be milking dairy cows in rolling Swiss hills. On the right wall of the cell is a desk and in the right rear corner are a chrome toilet and wash basin. There are two bunks bolted to the left wall of the cell and she sits on the edge of the lower bunk, her hands cupped together and being squeezed between her kneecaps. Her hair is everywhere, hanging over her face and over her ears. She wears the same blue rubber sandals Bernie was wearing. My arms can’t hold my weight and I slip off the door. I climb again, gripping harder to the recess in the door. A longer look inside this time. I see the truth of it all. The skeletal shinbones of her legs. The elbows like the balls of a hammer, arms like the sticks I’d use to spark the fire that would burn to the ground this long-life-lightbulb jailhouse home for mums on Christmas Day. Her cheekbones have moved higher on her face and her cheek flesh has disappeared, turned to a claypan of thin skin, and her face doesn’t look like it was grown by life but drawn, shaded by a humourless and macabre colourist in pencil that could be rubbed away by a drop of spit and a swiftly moving forefinger. But it’s not the legs or the arms or the cheekbones that trouble me; it’s the eyes, staring ahead at the wall opposite her. Blank staring. So lost in that wall it looks like her brain’s been removed. She looks like Jack Nicholson after the lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the setting fits. I can’t make out what she’s staring at on that wall but then I can. It’s me. It’s me and August, arm in arm. A photograph stuck to the cell wall. We have our shirts off, playing in the backyard of the Darra house, and August is forcing his belly right out with his right-hand fingers making alien gestures in his tiresome ‘ET phone home’ routine. I’m playing his extended belly like a bongo drum.
I tap my knuckle gently on the glass panel. She doesn’t hear. I knock, hard and quick. She doesn’t hear me. I slip off the door and I jump back on again. ‘Mummmmmm,’ I whisper. I knock again, knock twice then three times, the last one too loud, too hard. I look right, up along the corridor. Laughter and applause still echo around the corner of B Block as the stars of When a Child Is Born to Hand Jive make their triumphant end-show bows. ‘Mummmm!’ I strain in a whisper. I knock louder. Two heavy bangs and she turns her head to me. Finds me looking frantically at her through the window. ‘Mum,’ I whisper. I smile. And she lights up for a flicker, a light switches on inside her and switches off just as fast. ‘Merry Christmas, Mum.’ And I’m crying now. Of course I’m crying now. I didn’t know how much I needed to cry for her until now, hanging by my fingers to the door of cell 24 in the Boggo Road women’s clink. ‘Merry Christmas, Mum.’
I beam at her. See, Mum. See. After all this, after all these mad moments, after Lyle, after Slim, after you getting put away, it’s still the same old me. Nothing changes, Mum. Nothing changes me. Nothing changes you. I love you more, Mum. You think I love you less but I love you more because of it all. I love you. See. See that on my face.
‘Open the door, Mum,’ I whisper. ‘Open the door.’
I slip off and I climb back up and a nail splits hard on my right hand middle finger and blood runs down the top of my hand. ‘Open the door, Mum.’ And I can’t hold on now and I wipe my eyes and the tears make my fingers slippery but I cling on again just long enough to see her staring blankly at me, shaking her head. No, Eli. I read that. I read it like I spent a decade reading my brother’s silent gestures. No, Eli. Not here. Not like this. No. ‘Open the door, Mum,’ I spill. ‘Open the door, Mum,’ I beg. She shakes her head. She’s crying now too. No, Eli. I’m sorry, Eli. No. No. No.
My fingers slip off the door and I fall to the hard polished-concrete floor of the prison corridor. I struggle to find my breath in my tears and I lean back against the door. I bang my head twice, hard, against the door, which is harder than my head.
And I breathe. I breathe deep. And I see the red telephone in Lyle’s secret room. And I see the sky-blue walls of Lena Orlik’s bedroom. I see the picture frame of Jesus who was born today. And I see Mum in that room. And I sing.
Because she needs her song. I don’t have a record player to play her song, so I sing her song instead. The one she played so much. Side one, third thick line from the edge. That song about a girl who never said where she came from.
And I turn and sing into the cracks in the door. I sing into the light of a crack one centimetre wide. I lay down on my belly and sing into the crack in the bottom of the door.
Ruby Tuesday and her pain and her longing and her leaving and my cracking Christmas Day voice. I sing it. I sing it. Over and over. I sing it.
And I stop. And there is silence. I bang my forehead against the door. And I don’t care any more. I’ll let her go. I’ll let them all go. Lyle. Slim. August. Dad. And my mum. And I’ll go find Caitlyn Spies and I’ll tell her I’m letting her go too. And I’ll be dumb. And I won’t dream. And I will crawl into a hole and read about dreamers like my dad does and I’ll read and read and drink and drink and smoke and smoke and die. Goodbye Ruby Tuesday. Goodbye Emerald Wednesday. Goodbye Sapphire Sunday. Goodbye.
But the cell door opens. I can smell the cell immediately and it smells like sweat and damp and body odour. Mum’s rubber sandals squish on the floor by my side. She falls to the floor, crying. She puts a hand on my shoulder, weeping. She falls on me in the doorway of her cell.
‘Group hug,’ she says.
I sit up and wrap my arms around her and I squeeze her so tight I worry I’m going to break one of the weak bones in her ribcage. I drop my head onto her shoulder and I didn’t know I missed that smell, that smell of Mum’s hair, that feeling of her.
‘Everything’s gonna be all right, Mum,’ I say. ‘Everything’s gonna be all right.’
‘I know, baby,’ she says. ‘I know.’
‘It gets good, Mum,’ I say.
She hugs me tighter.
‘It all gets good after this,’ I say. ‘August told me, Mum. August told me. He says you just have to get through this little bit, just this little bit.’
Mum weeps into my shoulder. ‘Ssssssshhhhhh,’ she says, patting my back. ‘Ssssssssshhhhhhhh.’
‘Just get through this bit and it all goes up from here. August knows it, Mum. This is the hardest bit, right here. It doesn’t get any worse.’
Mum weeps harder. ‘Sssssssshhhhhh,’ Mum says. ‘Just hold me, sweetie. Just hold me.’
‘Do you believe me, Mum?’ I ask. ‘If you believe me then you’ll believe it will get better and if you believe it then it will.’
Mum nods.
‘I’m gonna make it better, Mum, I promise,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna get us a place where you can go when you come out and it will be good and it will be safe and we can be happy and you can be free there, Mum. This is just time. And you can do what you want with time, Mum.’
Mum nods.
‘Do you believe me, Mum?’
Mum nods.
‘Say it.’
‘I believe you, Eli,’ she says.
Then a female voice echoes down the corridor.
‘What thaaaaa faaaaarrrrk is this shit?’ barks a red-haired woman with a large belly and a backward lean, standing in her prison clothes, holding a plastic dessert bowl filled with wobbly red jelly, staring at Mum and me in the doorway of cell 24. She turns her head to the recreation area, hollering, ‘What sort of crèche you screws runnin’ here?’
She slams her dessert on the ground, furious. ‘How the fuck does Princess Frankie deserve a contact today?’ she barks.
Mum holds me tighter.
‘I gotta go, Mum,’ I say, pulling out of the embrace. ‘I gotta go, Mum.’
She clings to me hard and I have to pull myself away from her. She drops her head, crying, as I stand up. ‘We’ll get through this little bit, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s only time. You’re stronger than time, Mum. You’re stronger than it.’
I turn and run down the corridor as a tall and broad-shouldered prison screw rounds the corner into Mum’s cell wing, following the gaze of the red-haired woman. ‘What the fu—’ he says, stunned by the sight of me. I grip the arm straps of my backpack and sprint up the corridor. The screw has his hand on the top of the baton fixed into his belt. I see Brett Kenny in my mind’s eye – glorious five-eighth for the Parramatta Eels. I see all those backyard afternoons August and I spent practising Kenny’s blinding weave runs, his devastating right step.
‘Stop right there,’ the screw demands. But I sprint harder, weaving left and right up the corridor, making the most of a four-metre-wide space, snaking up it like Brett Kenny would snake through a Canterbury Bulldogs defensive line. I fade hard to the right side of the corridor and the lumbering screw with his big lumbering legs and his tractor-tyre belly fades with me into my line of movement. I’m within two metres of his reach when he props on both legs and puts his arms out wide to swallow me up, to net me like a slippery Bramble Bay flathead – a slippery eel – and it’s then that I step hard and quick off my bouncing right foot and zip like a shot bullet to the far left of the corridor, ducking under his ambitious and useless flailing right arm as I go. Brett Kenny finds the gap and the sea of blue and yellow Eels supporters in the western stands of the Sydney Cricket Ground rise to their feet. I turn left into B Block’s open recreation and dining hall area and the space is filled with forty prison women, standing and sitting around dining tables and card tables and chess tables and knitting tables. Another prison screw – a short man, but muscular and fast – spots me from across the hall and gives chase. I run through the dining hall, searching for an exit door, and the women laugh and holler and clap their hands. Another screw joins the chase from the left side of the dining room. ‘Stop!’ the screw barks. But I don’t stop. I sprint through the middle aisle of the hall as Mum’s fellow prisoners bash their hands in delight on their food tables, making afternoon-tea bowls of Christmas pudding, jelly and custard bounce between their fists. I find no exit door and the screws are circling in on me from either side so I turn back around and take a diagonal run across the hall’s steel dining tables. The screw I sidestepped in the corridor now enters the dining hall, angrily pushing through a sea of prisoners who have rushed from their seats before the Nativity-meets-Grease stage spectacular to see the surreal scene of the boy bouncing across Boggo Road tables and chairs like the hero of a Looney Tunes sketch. The screws angrily and clumsily hop onto the tables in chase and rush through aisles to head me off, barking threats I can’t quite hear beneath the roar of the SCG crowd. Kenny! Brett Kenny! Into space. The master, Eli Bell, heading for the try line. Certain to score. Certain to etch his name into rugby league legend.
I leap between tables like a Russian ballerina, evading the swiping arms of the hapless screws the way Errol Flynn evaded the blades of cinematic pirates, and the prisoners are inside a rock ’n’ roll show now, pumping their fists at the exploits of the dashing Eels five-eighth with the jets in the rubber soles of his Dunlop KT-26s. I leap off one table onto the polished concrete floor at the entrance to the dining hall where the women prisoners stand back – a parting of the sea of female cons – to form a loose guard of honour I can run through. And these women know my name somehow.
‘Go, Eli!’ they scream.
‘Run, Eli!’ they scream.
So I run and I run until I can see an exit door beyond the common area joining the kitchen and the cells and the dining hall. It’s a door that opens out to a lawn outside. Freedom. Kenny! Brett Kenny for the try line! Sprinting, sprinting. The screws on my tail and another screw, a fourth screw, coming at me from my right to block my access to the exit door. It’s the fullback for the Canterbury Bulldogs. The fullback screw. Every team’s last line of defence, the best technical defender in the team, agile and strong, always making arcing and streaking cover tackle runs across the field to end the grand final dreams of gods like Brett Kenny. Mum used to run as a girl, was a fine sprinter. Won sprint races at athletics carnivals. She once told me the way to get an extra kick, the extra edge, was to get lower to the ground, picture yourself as a plough and your legs are digging up the earth and you’re digging into the earth for the first fifty of a hundred-metre dash and digging yourself out again for the last fifty, leaning your head back and your chest out across the finish line. So I’m the plough now as the fourth screw arcs across the prison floor but I’m not a strong enough plough and his trajectory is certain to meet up with mine before I can meet up with the back door to the freedom lawn. But then a Christmas miracle, a holy apparition in prison clothes. It’s Bernie, slowly walking her wheelie bin, absent-mindedly but not absent-mindedly at all, crossing into the path of the raging fourth screw. ‘Outta the way, Bernie!’ the screw hollers, weaving around her.
‘What?’ Bernie says, turning around blind like a slapstick silent movie star, making a clumsy show of moving the bin backwards now, apparently unwittingly, into the screw’s line of chase. The screw tries to jump the slanted bin but clips a foot on the top of it and crashes spectacularly, belly first, into the polished prison floor.
I burst out of the rear B Block door and run out to a well-kept grass lawn rolling down to a fenced tennis court. I run and I run. Brett Kenny, man of the match for the third straight week in a row, running well past the dead ball line now, running right into history. Eli Bell. The elusive Eli Bell. Call me Merlin. The Wizard of the Boggo Road women’s prison. The only boy to ever escape that B Block shithole. The only boy to ever escape Boggo Road. I can smell the grass. There is white clover in the grass and bees buzzing in the clover. The kinds of bees that make my ankles swell when they sting me. But get over it, Eli. There are worse things in this world than bees. The lawn slopes down to the tennis court and I look behind me as I run. Four screws in frantic chase, barking things I cannot understand. I slip my right arm out of an arm strap on my backpack as I run. I unzip the backpack and reach an arm in and grip a rope. It’s time, Eli. The moment of truth.
*
I started with matches first, like Slim did in his cell. Matches and a line of string. Matches tied by a twisted rubber band in the centre to form a cross-shaped grappling hook. Timing, planning, luck, belief. I believe. I believe, Slim. Hour after hour I spent in my bedroom studying the science and technique of lodging a grappling hook against a high orange-brown brick wall. When I was ready, I fixed my own real-life roped grappling hook out of a fifteen-metre length of thick rope, knotted at fifty-centimetre intervals for grip points, and two roped pieces of cylindrical wood I cut up from an old rake handle Dad had lying under the house. I took the grappling hook down to the Bracken Ridge Scouts Centre on Saturday afternoons where they had a makeshift high wall that they ask young boy scout groups to scale in team-building exercises. Throw after throw after throw, I finessed my grappling hook wall-lodging technique. An uptight scoutmaster caught me carrying out these curious prison break rehearsals one afternoon. ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing, young man?’ the scoutmaster asked.
‘Escaping,’ I said.
‘Excuse me,’ the scoutmaster asked.
‘I’m pretending to be Batman,’ I said.
*
I take a sharp left turn at the tennis court, sprint into a small path leading between the prison’s C Block cells to my left and a sewing workshop shed to my right. Losing breath. Tiring now. Gotta find the wall. Gotta find the wall. I pass the F Block temporary demountable cells. I turn behind me. I can’t see the screws. I rush to the top prison wall. It’s an old brown brick wall, high and imposing. I’m not sure my rope is long enough for the wall I stand before so I rush along the perimeter, searching, searching, searching, for a space in the brown brick fortress where a higher stretch of wall meets a lower stretch. Bingo. I quickly unravel my grappling hook rope and leave a two-metre stretch of rope which will be my throwing segment. I look up at the wall corner where high meets low and I twirl the rope twice like a cowboy with a lasso, with the weight of the rake handle cut-offs acting as a guiding projectile readying for launch. I’ll only get one shot. Help me, Slim. Help me, Brett Kenny. Help me, God. Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope. Help me, Mum. Help me, Lyle. Help me, August.
A Hail Mary toss. An act of pure faith and ambition and belief. I believe, Slim. I believe. The hook sails up into the air and over the high wall fence. I step two paces to my right, holding the rope taut, positioned so the hook can do nothing else but lodge into the high–low wall corner when I pull down on it.
‘Oi!’ calls a screw. I turn to see him, maybe fifty metres away running beside the fence wall, another screw not far behind him. ‘Stop that, you little prick,’ the screw calls.
I grip a rope knot and pull myself with both hands up the wall, planting my gripping and reliable and blessed Dunlop KT-26s against the wall face, my back parallel with the grass lawn below me. I am Batman. I’m Adam West in those old Batman TV shows, scaling a Gotham City office tower. This is working. This is actually fucking working.
The lighter a person is, the easier this is. Slim was Slim when he made his climb up a wall like this one but I’m the boy, the boy who climbed the walls, the boy who fooled the screws, the boy who escaped from Boggo Road. Merlin the Magnificent. The Wizard o’ the Women’s.
Only sky from this angle. Blue sky and cloud. And flashes of the top wall. Six metres up now. Seven metres. Eight maybe. Nine metres. This must be ten metres all the way up here with my head in the clouds.
The rope is taut and burning my hands. The middle finger on my right hand aches with the stress of working overtime in the absence of his forefinger co-worker.
Two screws rush to stand below me, looking up at me. They sound like Lyle when he used to get angry with me.
‘Are you fucked in the head, kid?’ one calls. ‘Where do ya think yer gonna go?’
‘Come on down from there,’ says the other screw.
But I keep crawling up the wall. Scaling and scaling. Like one of those SAS soldiers in Britain who rescue all those people from terrorist hostage scenarios.
‘Yer gonna kill yourself, you idiot,’ the second screw says. ‘That rope ain’t strong enough to hold you.’
Of course this rope is strong enough. I’ve tested it seventeen times down at the scouts’ centre. Dad’s old rope I found beneath the house, sitting in his rusted wheelbarrow, caked in dust and dirt. Up and up I go. Oh, the air up here. Was this what it felt like for you, Slim? The thrill of it all? The sight of the top? The thought of what waited beyond these walls? The story of the unknown.
‘Come on down now and you won’t get in any more trouble,’ says the first screw. ‘Come on down, mate. Christ Almighty, it’s fuckin’ Christmas Day. Yer mum don’t wanna see you dead on Christmas Day.’
I’m a metre from the top of the wall when I pause to catch my breath, one last air suck before I make my triumphant crawl over the top, before I achieve the impossible, before Merlin pulls his last stunned rabbit from his hat. I take three deep breaths, my legs stiff against the wall. I pull myself higher, so high I can see the hook segments from Dad’s rake pressing against the wall. Straining against the weight but holding fast. The summit. Everest’s lonely tip. I turn my head briefly and look down for a moment at the screws.
‘See you on the flipside, boys,’ I say grandly, a stroke of roguish pluck striking me all this way up here in the thinner air of the wall top. ‘You go tell those fat cats on George Street there ain’t no wall in Australia high enough to hold the Wizard of Boggo Ro—’
A single segment of Dad’s rake handle snaps and I fall backwards through the air. The blue sky and the white cloud reel away from me. My arms flail and my legs kick at nothing and my whole life flashes before my eyes. The universe. The fish swimming through my dreams. Bubble gum. Frisbees. Elephants. The life and works of Joe Cocker. Macaroni. War. Waterslides. Curried egg sandwiches. All the answers. The answers to the questions. And a word I don’t expect spills from my terrified lips.
‘Dad.’