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