Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

Boy Swallows Universe - Trent Dalton


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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?’

      ‘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.

      ‘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?’

      ‘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.

      *


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