Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton
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,