Dear Eli,
Greetings from B16. Thanks, as ever, for your correspondence. Your letter was the best thing about a month I was glad to see the back of. Worse than Northern Ireland in here lately. Few blokes have gone on hunger strike, protesting about cramped conditions, overpopulation in the cells, not enough activities for rec days. Yesterday, Billy Pedon got his head dumped in the 4 Yard shit bucket for giving a bit too much lip to Guigsy, who was bitching about the cold outside. Now they’ve put a little rim inside all of the shit buckets so they’re too small to fit a human head inside. I guess that’s what ya call progress? Big scrap broke out in the caf on Sunday. Old Harry Smallcombe drove a fork into Jason Hardy’s left cheek because Hardy took the last of the rice pudding. All hell broke loose and, as a result, the screws took away the television from 1 Yard. No more Days of Our Lives. Take a Boggo con’s freedom, take his rights, take his humanity, take his will to live, but for God’s sake, please don’t take his Days of Our Lives! As you can imagine, the boys went apeshit over that and started dropping shits throughout the prison like they were apes. I wonder if that’s where apeshit comes from? Anyway, all the boys are keen on hearing any updates outworlders might have on Days, so any insights would be greatly appreciated. Last we saw, Liz looked like doing a lag for shooting Marie – dumb slut she is – even though it was an accident. She still hadn’t found the silk ‘C’ scarf that I reckon will be her undoing. My shitter broke on Tuesday because Dennis had the runs from a bad batch of lentils they fixed us. Dennis used up his toilet paper ration and he had to start using pages from an old copy of Sophie’s Choice we had lying around. Of course the pages didn’t break down and just choked the shitter so the whole of One Division could smell Dennis’s inner demons. Did I tell you about Tripod in the last letter? Fritz found a cat creeping through the yard a while back. Fritz has been behaving well lately so the screws let him look after the cat during day rec. We all started keeping a bit of food from lunch to feed the cat and now it skips on through our cells at its leisure during day rec. Then one of the screws accidentally closed a cell door on the cat and the poor blighter had to be taken to a vet who gave Fritz’s little kitty a troubling ultimatum: expensive surgery to have a leg removed or it was a bullet between the eyes (not quite what the surgeon said, but you get the picture). Word spread round about the crippled cat and we passed a hat around and we all put our month’s wages into surgery for Fritz’s bloody kitty. It had the op and came right back to us walking around on three legs. Then we had a lengthy discussion about what we were gonna name the cat whose life we all saved and we all settled on the name of Tripod. That cat’s become bigger than The Beatles in here. Glad to hear you and August are doing so well at school. Don’t slack off on your studies. You don’t want to end up in a shithole like this because you don’t want to find yourself all souped up on chloral hydrate and butt-fucked through the laundry fence by the Black Stallion because that’s what can happen to kids who don’t keep on top of their studies. I’ve told Slim to keep me posted on yours and August’s report cards, good and bad. In answer to your question, I guess the best way to know if a bloke is wanting to knife you is by the speed of their steps. A man with a killin’ on his mind starts to show it in his eyes, there’s an intent to them. If they’re carrying, you’ll see them approach their victim slowly, eyeballing them like a hawk from afar, then, when they get closer, they’ll quicken their steps. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. You want to be coming at the victim from behind, shove the shiv in as close as you can to the kidneys. They’ll drop like a bag of spuds. The key is to shove the shiv in hard enough to get your point across, but soft enough to avoid a murder charge. A fine balance indeed.
Tell Slim his garden has never looked better. The azaleas are so pink and fluffy it looks like we’re growing fairy floss for the Royal Show.
Thanks for the picture of Miss Haverty. She’s even prettier than you described. Nothing sexier than a young schoolteacher in spectacles. You’re right about that face, like a dawn sunrise. I guess you won’t tell her if you know what’s good for you, but the boys from D wing send their regards. Well, gotta go, matey. Grub’s up and I better get my share of bolognese before it goes the way of the dodo. Climb high, kid, tread lightly.
Alex
P.S. Have you phoned your dad yet? I’m not the best man to judge father–son relationships but I reckon if you’ve been thinking about him so much, there’s a fair chance he’s been thinking about you.
*
Saturday morning letter writing with Slim. Mum and Lyle are out at the movies again, keen film buffs that they are. They’re going to see Octopussy. August and I asked to go. They said no again. Funny that. Fucking amateurs.
‘What’s Octopussy about?’ Slim asks, his right hand furiously crafting his letter in a remarkably neat longhand cursive.
I pause from my letter to respond.
‘James Bond fights a sea monster with eight vaginas.’
We’re at the kitchen table with glasses of Milo and sliced oranges. Slim’s got the Eagle Farm horse races playing through a wireless by the kitchen sink. August has an orange quarter skin stuck across his teeth like Ray Price’s mouth guard. Hot and sticky outside because it’s summer and it’s Queensland. Slim’s got his shirt off and I can see his POW-chic ribcage, like he’s slowly dying in front of me from his diet of cigarettes and sorrow.
‘You been eatin’ Slim?’
‘Don’t get started,’ he says, a rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
‘You look like a ghost.’
‘A friendly ghost?’ he asks.
‘Well, not unfriendly.’
‘Well, you’re no bronze statue yourself, ya little runt. How’s your letter going?’
‘Almost done.’
*
Slim spent a total of thirty-six years in Boggo Road. He wasn’t allowed letters for much of his lag in D9. He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection. Humanity. It means waking up. He’s been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years, using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, a man who knows how to escape their red-brick-wall fortress better than anyone.
Slim met Lyle in 1976 when they both worked at a Brisbane car repair shed. Slim was sixty-six then. He’d served twenty-three years of his life sentence and was on a ‘release-to-work’ scheme, working in a supervised environment outside by day and returning to Boggo Road by night. Slim and Lyle worked well on engines together, had a shorthand for motor mechanics like they had a shorthand for their misspent youths. Some Friday afternoons Lyle slipped long handwritten letters into Slim’s daypack so he could find them over the weekend and they could carry on their chats via Lyle’s piss-poor handwriting. Slim once told me he’d die for Lyle.
‘Then Lyle went and asked for something more troubling than dyin’.’
‘What’s that, Slim?’ I asked.
‘He asked me to babysit you two rats.’
Two years ago I found Slim writing letters at the kitchen table.
‘Letters to cons who don’t receive letters from family and friends,’ he said.
‘Why don’t their family and friends write to them?’ I asked.
‘Most of these blokes don’t have any.’
‘Can I write one?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you write to Alex?’
I took a pen and paper and sat beside Slim at the table.
‘What do I write about?’
‘Write about who you are and what you’ve been doing today.’
Dear Alex,
My name is Eli Bell. I’m ten years old and I’m in Year 5 at Darra State School. I have an older brother named August. He doesn’t talk. Not because he can’t talk, but because he doesn’t want to talk. My favourite Atari game is Missile Command and my favourite rugby league team is the Parramatta Eels. Today August and I went for a ride to Inala. We found a park that had a sewage tunnel running off it that was big enough for us to crawl into. But we had to come out when some Aboriginal boys said the tunnel was theirs and we should get out if we didn’t want to cop a flogging. The biggest one of the Aboriginal boys had a big scar across his right arm. That was the one that August bashed before they all ran away.
On our way home we saw a dragonfly on the footpath being eaten alive by green ants. I said to August that we should put the dragonfly out of its misery. August wanted to leave it be. But I stood on the dragonfly and squashed it dead. But when I stood on it I killed thirteen green ants in the process. Do you think I should have just left the dragonfly alone?
Yours sincerely,
Eli
P.S. I’m sorry nobody writes to you. I’ll keep writing to you if you want.
I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received six letter pages back from Alex, three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex’s childhood when he’d been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked Slim just who it was exactly I had become pen pals with.
‘That’s Alexander Bermudez,’ he said.
Sentenced to nine years in Boggo Road Gaol after Queensland Police found sixty-four illegally imported Soviet AK-74 machine guns in the backyard shed of his home in Eight Mile Plains, which he was about to disperse among members of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang, of which he was once Queensland sergeant-at-arms.
*
‘Don’t forget to be specific,’ Slim always says. ‘Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life shit they don’t get any more. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ’em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ’em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushy, did you go by foot, did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you ate a good meat pie last week, was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.’
Slim keeps scribbling across his page. He drags on his smoke and his cheeks compress and I can see the shape of his skull, and his short back and sides with a flat top haircut makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s alive. But for how long, Slim?
‘Slim.’
‘Yes, Eli.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Slim stops writing. August stops too. They both stare at me.
‘Did you kill that taxi driver?’
Slim offers a half-smile. His lip trembles and he adjusts his thick black spectacles. I’ve known him long enough to know when he’s been hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, dropping my head, placing my pen’s ballpoint back on the letter page. ‘There’s a feature in today’s paper,’ I say.
‘What feature?’ Slim barks. ‘I didn’t see anything on me in The Courier today?’
‘Not The Courier-Mail. It was in the local rag, the South-West Star. They had one of those “Queensland Remembers” yarns. Huge piece it was. It was about the Houdini of Boggo Road. They talked about your escapes. They talked about the Southport murder. It said you could have been innocent. It said you might have gone away for twenty-four years for a crime you didn’t—’
‘Long time ago,’ Slim says, cutting me off.
‘But don’t you want people to know the truth?’
Slim drags on his cigarette.
‘Can I ask you a question, kid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I killed him?’
I don’t know. What I know is nothing killed Slim. What I know is he never gave up. The darkness didn’t kill him. The cops didn’t kill him. The screws didn’t kill him. The bars. The hole. Black Peter didn’t kill him. I guess I’ve always figured if he was a murderer then his conscience might have been the thing that killed him during those black days down in the hole. But his conscience never killed him. The loss, the life that might have been, never killed him. Almost half his life spent inside and he can still smile when I ask if he’s a murderer. Houdini was locked in a box for thirty-six years altogether and he came out alive. The long magic. The kind of magic trick that takes thirty-six years for the rabbit to stick his head up out of the hat. The long magic of a human life.
‘I think you’re a good man,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you’re capable of killing a man.’
Slim takes his smoke from his mouth. He leans across the table. His voice is soft and sinister.
‘Don’t you ever underestimate what any man is capable of,’ he says.
He leans back in his chair.
‘Now show me this article.’
QUEENSLAND REMEMBERS: NO CHANCE TOO SLIM FOR THE HOUDINI OF BOGGO ROAD
He was regarded as the most dangerous prisoner in the British Commonwealth, the master escapologist they called ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol’, but Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday’s greatest trick would be walking out of prison a free man.
A church orphan who lost both his parents at the age of 12, Slim Halliday began his predestined life of crime when he was imprisoned for four days for jumping trains en route to the shearing job in Queensland that might well have kept him on the straight and narrow. Halliday was a seasoned 30-year-old conman and housebreaker by 28 January 1940, when he made his first escape from Boggo Road Gaol’s notorious Number 2 Division.
SLIM’S PICKINGS
Houdini Halliday conjured his first magic escape by scaling a section of the prison wall that became known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’, an observation blind spot invisible to guards in surrounding watchtowers. Despite public criticism over the strength of prison security after the one-man escape, this section of the prison wall remained unchanged.
It was little surprise to the Brisbane public, then, when it was revealed that in a subsequent escape, on 11 December 1946, Halliday climbed over a corner wall of the prison workshops, a mere 15 yards from the now mythical ‘Halliday’s Leap’. Beyond the prison fence, he stripped off his cell garb to reveal the smuggled civilian clothes he was wearing underneath and caught a taxi to Brisbane’s northern suburbs, giving the driver a tip for his trouble.
After a frantic and widespread police manhunt, Halliday was recaptured four days later. Asked why he made the bold second escape, he replied: ‘A man’s liberty means everything to him. You can’t blame a man for trying.’
CYCLE OF A LIFER
Released in 1949, Halliday moved to Sydney where he worked for the Salvation Army before he began a roof repair business using sheet-metal skills he’d learned in Boggo Road. He changed his name to Arthur Dale and returned to Brisbane in 1950, where he fell in love with the daughter of a Woolloongabba snack bar operator. Halliday married Irene Kathleen Close on 2 January 1951, and the couple moved into a flat in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s northern seaside, in 1952, mere months before Halliday made national headlines again when he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Southport Esplanade murder of taxi driver Athol McCowan, 23.
The case’s chief investigator, Queensland Police Detective Inspector Frank Bischof, claimed Halliday fled the scene of the McCowan murder and rushed to Sydney, where he was captured by police after shooting himself in the leg when his own .45 calibre handgun went off during a violent wrestle with a valiant Guildford storekeeper he was attempting to rob.
In a packed court, Bischof testified that Halliday confessed to the McCowan murder while recovering from his bullet wound in a Parramatta Hospital bed. Bischof claimed Halliday’s confession detailed how he slipped into McCowan’s cab in Southport that fateful night of 22 May 1952 and later held up the young taxi driver at a secluded spot at the Currumbin Lookout, further south. When McCowan resisted, Bischof claimed, Halliday battered the driver to death with his .45 calibre handgun. Bischof testified that Halliday recited a poem during his confession: ‘Birds eat, and they’re free. They don’t work, why should we?’
Slim Halliday, meanwhile, has vehemently maintained Bischof framed him for McCowan’s murder; the detailed confession – from its precise place names to its poetry – was, Halliday claimed, a figment of Bischof’s imagination.
The Courier-Mail reported on 10 December 1952, Mr Halliday ‘caused a stir in court when Bischof said Halliday had told him, “I killed him.”
‘Halliday sprang to his feet,’ the report stated. ‘And, leaning over the dock rail, shouted, “That’s a lie.”’
Halliday maintained that on the night of McCowan’s murder he was in Glen Innes in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, some 400 kilometres away.
Frank Bischof would go on to become Queensland Police Commissioner from 1958 to 1969, resigning amid widespread allegations of corruption. He died in 1979. Before being sentenced to life in prison, Halliday declared from the dock: ‘I repeat, I am not guilty of this crime.’
Outside court, Halliday’s wife, Irene Close, vowed to stand by her man.
BLACK DAYS IN THE BLACK PETER
In December 1953, after another failed escape attempt, Halliday was dropped inside Boggo Road’s notorious Black Peter, an underground solitary confinement cell, a relic harking back to Brisbane’s barbaric and bloody penal colony past. Halliday survived 14 days in searing December heat, sparking fierce public debate over modern methods of prisoner rehabilitation.
‘So Halliday has been given solitary confinement,’ wrote L.V. Atkinson of Gaythorne to The Courier-Mail on 11 December 1953. ‘The miserable caged wretch, for instinctively seeking his freedom, is to be penalised to the fullest, foulest extent of our medieval prison system? The principle of modern legal punishment cannot allow the infliction of human torture.’
Halliday emerged from Black Peter an urban legend. The schoolyard kids of 1950s Brisbane didn’t whisper tales of Ned Kelly and Al Capone over their morning tea Anzac biscuits, they told tales of ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road’.
‘His knowledge of buildings, rooftops and tools, combined with his viciousness and daring, make him the jail’s most closely watched prisoner,’ wrote the Sunday Mail. ‘Detectives who have known him through his years of housebreaking say he can climb walls like a fly. Probably, Halliday will never stop trying to escape. Police who know him say he will have to be watched every minute of his life sentence, which, if he lives to be an old man, means another 40 years at least of maddening existence behind the red brick walls of Boggo Road.’
For the next 11 years of his sentence, Halliday was strip-searched three times a day. The only clothing allowed in his cell was his pyjamas and slippers. Two officers escorted him everywhere. His studies were cancelled. Additional locks were fitted to his cell, D9, and additional locks were fitted to D wing. Boggo Road’s Number 5 yard was converted to a maximum security yard where Halliday could move at daytime within the confines of a steel mesh cage. Only on weekends was a single prisoner allowed inside the cage with him to play a game of chess. He was not allowed to speak to other prisoners for fear he would pass on his endless escape strategies.
On 8 September 1968, Brisbane’s Truth newspaper reported on Halliday nearing the age of 60 with an article headlined: ‘BROKEN KILLER TALKS TO NO ONE’.
‘The gleam has gone out of the eyes of Queensland killer and Houdini jailbreaker, Arthur Ernest Halliday,’ the report read. ‘After years under constant double guard and the most elaborate security precautions ever taken with any prisoner in this State, 60-year-old Slim Halliday has become a walking vegetable inside the grim walls of Boggo Road.’
But Halliday possessed an ‘indomitable spirit’, the prison’s superintendent told media at the time, ‘which rigorous punishment failed to break, and he was never known to complain about his treatment no matter how harsh or uncomfortable it may have been’.
As his lengthy sentence diminished, so did Halliday’s obsession with escape. By his late 60s, he was simply too old to scale the red brick walls of Boggo Road. After years of good behaviour he was given the role of prison librarian, which allowed him to share his love of literature and poetry with increasingly interested inmates. They would gather regularly in the yard to hear Houdini Halliday recite the poems of his beloved Persian philosopher-poet Omar Khayyám, whose work he had discovered in a prison library in the 1940s.
His favourite poem was Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát, which he’d recite over the chessboard and pieces he meticulously crafted out of machine-turned metal in the prison workshop.
’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
REPORTER STRIKES GOLD
In the end the greatest trick Houdini Halliday ever pulled was surviving Boggo Road Gaol. He eventually escaped the prison by walking out the front gate after serving 24 years for the murder of Athol McCowan, with smiles of congratulations from inmates and prison officers alike.
In April 1981, Brisbane Telegraph reporter Peter Hansen found the long-reclusive Slim Halliday puddling for gold in a creek near Kilcoy where he had paid $5 to the Forestry Department to live lawfully on forestry land as a prospecting hermit.
‘I never confessed,’ he said of his controversial murder conviction. ‘Bischof simply made up the confession he produced in court. Bischof was a ruthless man, you know. It was my case that made him Commissioner of Police.
‘I left Brisbane two days before the murder . . . I was convicted because my name was Arthur Halliday.’
Halliday said he would not fear returning to Boggo Road as an old man. ‘I practically own the place,’ he said. ‘In the end they were using me as a security consultant.’
Two years on, Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. He was last seen living out of the back of his truck in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s north side. But the legend of Slim Halliday lives on inside the red brick walls of Boggo Road Gaol, where Houdini’s cell, number nine in the D wing, remains empty. Simple logistics, prison officials say. Though inmates are convinced they’re yet to find a prisoner worthy enough to fill it.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘It says Irene said she would stand by her man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, she didn’t, did she?’
‘Yes she did, kid.’
Slim hands the article back to me, his long tanned arms reaching across the kitchen table.
‘You don’t always have to be standing by someone to stand by them,’ he says. ‘How’s your letter going?’
‘Almost done.’
Dear Alex,
Do you think Bob Hawke is doing a good job as prime minister? Slim says he has just the right amounts of guile and guts to be a good leader for Australia. Slim says he reminds him of Roughie Regini, the old Jewish German fella who ran the Number 2 Division tote with Slim in the mid-1960s. Roughie Regini was a diplomat and a standover man all in one. He took bets for anything: horseraces, football, boxing matches, fights in the yard, chess games. Once he set up bets for what the boys were going to have for Easter lunch 1965. Slim says it was Roughie Regini who developed the cockroach courier system. Do you guys still use the cockroach courier system? Winnings were paid in White Ox tobacco mostly but cons started kicking up a stink about delays in getting their rightful winnings on night-time lockdown, just when they appreciated a cigarette the most. To separate himself from other potential bookies, Roughie Regini developed the cockroach courier system. He kept a collection of fat and well-fed cockroaches in a pineapple tin beneath his bed. Bloody strong those cockroaches were. Using threads of cotton from his blanket and bedsheet, Roughie learned to tie up to three thin rolled White Ox cigarettes to the back of a cockroach and slip it under his cell door, send it off on its way to his intended punter. But how would he make sure the cockroach went where he wanted it to go? A cockroach has six legs, three on either side. Roughie started doing experiments on his little couriers. He soon realised the cockroaches would go in certain directions according to which of their six legs had been removed. Take a front leg off and a cockroach will start moving in a north-east or north-west direction. Take a middle left leg off, the cockroach will start leaning to his left so hard he’ll start doing circles, anti-clockwise. Take a middle right leg off, he’ll start doing clockwise circles. Put that cockroach against a wall he’ll follow it right along a straight line and be grateful to do so. If Roughie needed to get a package to Ben Banaghan, seven cells down the aisle to his left, he’d remove a cockroach’s left middle leg and send it off on its great adventure, its top cigarette scrawled with the name of its destination cell, ‘Banaghan’. The brave cockroach would slip under every cell along its journey and honour-bound cons would dutifully send it off again on its great odyssey along the wall. I keep thinking about how gentle their hands must have been. All those killers and robbers and crooks. I guess they had time to be gentle. All the time in the world.
I’ve been thinking lately, Alex, that every problem in the world, every crime ever committed, can be traced back to someone’s dad. Robbery, rape, terrorism, Cain putting a job on Abel, Jack the Ripper, it all goes back to dads. Mums maybe too, I guess, but there ain’t no shit mum in this world that wasn’t first the daughter of a shit dad. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to hear about your dad, Alex. Was he good? Was he decent? Was he there? Thanks for your thoughts about calling my dad. You make a fair point. Two sides to every story, I guess.
I asked Mum for an update on Days of Our Lives. She said to tell you Marie was showing signs of improvement in hospital. Liz went to ICU to confess but when Marie woke she said it was too dark to identify her assailant so Liz kept her mouth shut and she seems to be able to live with the guilt. The first word Marie said when she woke was ‘Neil’, but despite Neil being her true love, she said she could never be his wife and gave him consent to go be with Liz and their child.
Talk real soon,
Eli
P.S. I’ve enclosed a copy of Omar Khayyám’s poem, The Rubáiyát. Slim says it got him through prison. It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Arthur Dale. That new name you took.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Dale.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That was the name of that screw, Officer Dale.’
‘Yeah,’ Slim says. ‘I needed the name of a gentleman and Officer Dale was about as close as I ever got to a gentleman.’
Officer Dale stretched back to Slim’s first lag in Boggo Road, early 1940s.
‘See, kid, there’s all kinds of bad inside,’ he says. ‘Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren’t bad at all; and then there’s the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they’re born that way. That about describes half of those screws in Boggo. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those rapists and killers and psychopaths they were pretending to help rehabilitate when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beasts that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.’
‘But not Officer Dale.’
‘Nah, not Officer Dale.’
After his first escape attempt, the Boggo Road screws came down hard on Slim, vigorously strip-searched him several times a day. During these searches it was customary for the officers to bash Slim across the side of the head to instruct him to turn around; kick him in the arse when they wanted him to bend over; elbow him in the nose when they wanted him to step back. One day Slim reacted, exploded in his cell, started throwing chunks of slop from his cell room slop bucket at the officers. They returned with the pressure hose treatment. One officer then came with two buckets of scalding water from the coppers that sat boiling in the prison kitchen. Another officer began shoving a red hot poker through the cell bars at Slim.
‘Them officers were terrorising me like I was some rooster they were priming for a cockfight,’ Slim says. ‘I had a prison-issue knife I’d been sharpening under my pillow and I grabbed it and I stabbed one of those pricks in the hand. I was waving the knife at them, spittin’ and frothin’ like I was a sick dog. All hell broke loose after that, but amid all the madness there was this bloke, Officer Dale, he was standing up for me. He was shouting at these sick bastards, telling them to leave me be, that I’d had enough. And I remember looking at him like it was all going in slow motion and I was thinking that true character surely is best shown in hell, that true goodness must surely be best displayed in an underworld where the very opposite is the norm, when evil is living and goodness is an indulgence, you know what I’m saying?’
Slim smiles, looks at August. August nods at Slim, one of those knowing August nods, like he thinks he did a lag right alongside Slim, his neighbour in cell D10.
‘You know,’ Slim says, ‘you dive that far down into hell that a wink from the devil starts to feel like a fuckin’ hand job from Doris Day, you catch my drift?’
August nods again.
‘Piss off, Gus, you don’t even know who Doris Day is,’ I say.
August shrugs.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Slim says. ‘Point is, I was in this daydream amid all this chaos, looking at Officer Dale, watching him trying to get these guys to lay off. I was so bloody touched by the gesture I think I got a tear in my eye. Then I got a whole lotta fucking tears in my eyes because a second wave of screws came with masks and threw teargas bombs in my cell. They kicked the shit out of me good and proper and dragged me to Black Peter there and then. My clothes were still wet from the hose. Right in the middle of winter that one was. No blanket. No mat on that one. Everybody goes on about the fourteen days in Black Peter in the heatwave. But I’d take the fourteen days in the heatwave over that one night with Black Pete wet as a beaver in the middle of winter. Spent the whole night shiverin’, just thinking one thing . . .’
‘That everybody has goodness in them?’ I ask.
‘Nah, kid, not everyone, just Officer Dale,’ Slim says. ‘But it got me thinking that if Officer Dale still had some goodness working among those other bastards for so long, then I might still have some goodness left in me when I was done with Black Peter; or when I was done with the joint forever.’
‘New name, new man,’ I say.
‘Seemed like a good idea in the hole,’ Slim says.
I pick up the South-West Star. One of the supporting pictures in the ‘Queensland Remembers’ spread shows Slim in 1952, sitting in the backroom of the Southport Court House. He’s smoking a cigarette in a cream-coloured suit, over a white shirt with a thick collar. He looks like he belongs in Havana, Cuba, not the cell where he was going to live for the next twenty-four years of his life.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask.
‘Do what?’
‘How did you survive for so long without . . .’
‘Swallowing a rubber-band ball filled with razor blades?’
‘Well, I was gonna say “givin’ up”, but . . . yeah, that too.’
‘That article is half right about that Houdini magic crap,’ he says. ‘What I did in that joint was a kind of magic.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I could do things with time in there,’ Slim says. ‘I got so intimate with time that I could manipulate it, speed it up, slow it down. Some days all you wanted was to speed it up, so you had to trick your brain. You get yourself so busy you can convince yourself there’s not enough hours in the day to achieve everything you want to achieve. By “achieve”, I don’t mean learning how to play the violin or getting a degree in economics. I mean realistic midday prison cell goals. I mean collecting enough black balls of cockroach shit in a day that you can spell your name with them. Some days, bitin’ your fingernails down to the quick became a leisure activity to look forward to like an Elvis double bill. So much to do, so little time. Make your bed, read chapter 30 of Moby Dick, think about Irene, whistle “You Are My Sunshine” from start to finish, roll a smoke, have a smoke, play yourself at chess, play yourself at chess again because you’re pissed off you lost the first game, go fishing off Bribie Island in your mind, go fishing off Redcliffe jetty in your mind, scale your fish, gut your fish, cook that fat flathead on some hot coals on Suttons Beach and watch the sun go down. You race that bastard clock so hard you get surprised when the day is over and you’re so tired from your daily schedule of bullshit head games that you yawn when you put your head on the pillow at 7 p.m. and tell yourself you’re mad for staying up so late and burning the candle at both ends. But, then, in those good hours, those sunshine hours in the yard, you could make them slow, you could pull them up like they were well-trained horses and you could turn an hour in the flower garden into half a day, because you were living time in five dimensions and the dimensions were the things you were smelling and the things you could taste and touch and hear and the things you could see, things within things, small universes in the stamen of a flower, layers upon layers, because your vision was so enhanced by the inactivity of all that concrete-wall watching that every single time you walked into that garden yard it was like Dorothy walking into technicolour.’
‘You learned to see all the details,’ I say.
Slim nods. He looks at us both.
‘Never forget, you two, you are free,’ he says. ‘These are your sunshine hours and you can make them last forever if you see all the details.’
I nod loyally.
‘Do your time, hey Slim?’ I say.
He nods proudly.
‘Before it does you,’ he says.
That’s Slim’s favourite nugget of porridge wisdom.
Do your time before it does you.
*
I remember when I first heard him say it. We were standing in the engine room of the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall, the old and glorious brown sandstone building in the heart of the city, towering over King George Square. Slim took us in on the train from Darra. He said there was an old elevator inside the high clock tower that took people right up to the top of the tower and I didn’t believe him. He knew the old lift operator, Clancy Mallett, from his farmhand days and Clancy had said he would let us go up inside the elevator for nothing, but when we arrived the lift was undergoing repairs, out of order, and Slim had to sweet-talk his old friend with a put-your-dog-on-it tip for race 5 at Eagle Farm to convince him to lead us up a secret set of stairs that only the City Hall staff knew about. The dark stairwell up that clock tower went forever and Slim and old Clancy the lift operator wheezed the whole way up, but me and August laughed the whole way up. Then we gasped when Clancy opened a thin door that led into an engine room of spinning steel pulleys and cogs – the city’s clockwork – that powered the four clock faces on the tower. North, south, east and west, each with giant black steel hands tracking the minutes and the hours of each Brisbane day. Slim stared mesmerised at those hands for ten straight minutes and he told us that time is the ancient enemy. He said time was killing us slowly. ‘Time will do you in,’ he said. ‘So do your time before it does you.’
Clancy the lift operator walked us up another set of secret stairs off the engine room that led up to an observation deck where Slim said Brisbane kids used to throw coins over the rail and seventy-five metres down to the roof of City Hall as they made a wish.
‘I wish I had more time,’ I said as I tossed a copper two-cent piece over the rail.
Then time struck.
‘Block your ears,’ Clancy smiled, turning his eyes up to a giant steel blue bell I hadn’t seen above us. And this bell rang loudly eleven times and near burst my eardrums and I changed my wish to one where time had to stop in that moment for the wish to come true.
*
‘You seeing all the details, Eli?’ Slim asks across the table.
‘Huh?’ I say, snapping back to now.
‘You catchin’ all the details?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, puzzled by the testing look in Slim’s eye.
‘You catching all that periphery stuff, kid?’ he asks.
‘Sure. Always, Slim. The details.’
‘But you missed the most interesting thing about that article you have there.’
‘Huh?’
I study the article, scan the words again.
‘The byline,’ he says. ‘Bottom right-hand corner.’
The byline. The byline. Bottom right-hand corner. Eyes scanning down, down, down across ink words and pictures. There it is. There’s the byline.
‘What the fuck, Gus!’
I will associate this name with the day I learned how to manipulate time.
This name is Caitlyn Spies.
Slim and I look sharply at August. He says nothing.