On an Alien Shore. John Tully

      Cover: Gittus Graphics – www.gggraphics.com.au

       For Dorothy

      I’m helpless here – an alien shore

      Knows not my voice nor cares for me;

      I seek in vain, like many more,

      For work, for help, for sympathy.

      – James Horsley

       1

      THERE IS A STINK ABOUT a prison that comes only partly from tangible things. Beyond the stench of shit and piss, boiled cabbage, floor polish and disinfectant, cold iron and sweat, is the stink of fear and cruelty and despair. It is the smell of rotting souls.

      Father Minahan doubted he would ever get used to it. They hang people here, he shuddered; snap their necks at the end of a rope and bury them hurriedly in quicklime. He was standing before the iron-studded wooden gates, stamping his feet and blowing on his fingers against the cold, fighting down the urge to cross himself as he waited for the warders to admit him. A thin drizzle was leaking from a sky full of rooks that threatened snow. Above him, the gatehouse towered into the fog, its blackened brickwork enhanced with ornamental white stonework – embrasures, sills and crenellations, all dirtied by smog and time. Time, the priest mused, was one thing those behind the walls were rich in. There were old lags inside who had been buried here for as long as he had lived, and yet still had not served out their sentences.

      The dog-faced turnkey at the gate – Belcher by name – gave him a surly nod and beckoned him inside. Minahan scurried through the small door built into the gates, hoping for warmth, but if anything, it was colder inside than out. There was nothing warm or human about this place, with its green and brown paint and iron bars. Sour smells wafted like halitosis. Faint cries and shouted orders echoed along the corridors. Although Belcher must have been close to retirement, Minahan had difficulty keeping up as he swung – Left Right! Left Right! – always the old soldier – down the corridor. A toothless old con was on his knees, sloshing soapy water with a scrubbing brush: one of the trusties who performed the menial tasks to save on Queen Victoria’s wages bills. The man’s face was blank.

      Belcher halted at an iron gate and rapped on the bars with an immense bunch of keys. “Father Minnow, Mister!” he barked. “Visitin’ the prisoner on appeal!”

      Minahan had given up correcting the warder’s mangling of his name and he half-suspected the man did it on purpose.

      Another screw loomed up, his shadow enormous on the walls in the flickering gaslight. This one had a slight Belfast accent under a heavy Geordie overlay and boasted the name JAMES PATRICK MULGREW sewn on the breast of his blue serge uniform. Mulgrew was a scrawny little fellow with a pumpkin head, a pot belly and no arse to speak of; but a brave man by the look of the fruit salad of campaign medals on his breast. He grinned a lop-sided, snaggle-toothed grin and all but touched his forelock to the priest.

      “Thank you, Mister!” Mulgrew snapped, slamming the gate shut behind the priest and fumbling with his keys.

      Then, respectfully, his voice many decibels lower, he informed Minahan, “The prisoner will be here shortly, Father. If you like, I can fetch you a nice cup of tea.” With that, he ushered the priest into the visiting room, a coldly impersonal space that contained a scratched old table and a pair of plain wooden chairs. Minahan thanked the screw and sat down heavily after dusting off the chair with his handkerchief. His myopic gaze took in the brickwork, bare apart from a tiny barred window with a hint of snowy sky beyond it. A pair of heavy ringbolts was set into the flagstones: one could never forget that the purpose of the establishment was punishment by incarceration.

      Father Minahan had been looking forward to visiting the prisoner, if not the prison. A shy and lonely man, he preferred books and solitude to the company of his fellow men. He worried, too, that he had little in common with many of his priestly colleagues, and in truth he was neither fish nor fowl. He was not quite English, though he had never set foot in Ireland. Educated out of his class, he flopped awkwardly in the rigid British social hierarchy like a fish out of water. When he spoke, it was in the English of an educated man, but there was a touch of Scouse about it – the hybrid dialect which combined Lancashire with Ireland.

      Minahan was the eldest son of a Liverpool stevedore whose parents had left Skibbereen in West Cork during the famine years. Although still a young man, he had developed a pronounced stoop and often wandered the winding streets of Durham City with his hands clasped behind his back, lost in thought, his black garments a tempting target for Protestant urchins armed with stones and mud pies. His curly black hair framed a thin face and long nose, on which perched a pair of thick spectacles which magnified his sad brown eyes.

      Time passed. Mulgrew reappeared with a mug of scalding tea, apologising for the delay and generally fussing, but Minahan politely made light of it. “You’re very kind, Mr Mulgrew.”

      “God’s blessing on you, Father.”

      At last, with a great clatter of keys, the door swung back again and Mulgrew stood aside to let the prisoner enter. After shackling the man’s ankles to the ringbolts in the floor, Mulgrew left, informing Minahan that he would be just outside the door if he needed him.

      Minahan had come to know the prisoner rather well and to value his company. A young man of medium height and of slight but strong build, the prisoner observed the priest with cornflower-blue eyes from under a fringe of dark brown hair. His expression was serious, but he smiled readily and his grip was firm when he shook hands. He had the typical prison pallor, but it overlaid a complexion that had been toughened by exposure to the elements. When he spoke, it was with the accent of Donegal – Ireland’s northernmost county – but so fluent was his English that Minahan sometimes forgot that it was the young man’s second language.

      “It’s good to see you Father,” the prisoner said. “Thank you for coming.”

      “And you too, Michael,” Minahan replied. “I apologise for the chains, but it is the regulations and thus beyond my control.”

      Michael shrugged. He knew by now that the prison worked according to clockwork schedules and anally inflexible rules. Once they had hold of you, your body was theirs; all human autonomy was gone. Even the simplest transactions and tasks were regulated. You could never open a door for yourself. Nor could you sit down, eat, sleep, wash or read except when and if it was permitted. Sadly, he realised that he’d come to regard it as almost normal.

      The hands that Michael folded on the table hinted that he had earned his living by hard manual labour, but there was something almost scholarly about him, Minahan considered. The black rings under Michael’s eyes indicated that he had been sleeping badly, which, as Minahan realised, was hardly surprising.

      Michael, though, was philosophical. “As the Irish proverb goes, ‘There’s nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse’!” he said, smiling wryly.

      “Yes, and nothing that God’s love cannot overcome,”