White Knuckle Ride

by Alan Carter

  You’re going to be asked to throw your phone in the bin now (the big grey one over there, the one with the grubby lid). I’ll ask nicely, but I will only ask once. Throw away your books and magazines while you’re there. You might get them back later, I don’t know, it isn’t up to me, but you can keep your iPod, for the moment, if you’re good.

  Now we’re getting somewhere. With the imagining, that is, not with the waiting. Time is still ticking slowly by. In this next step, you will need to imagine that the departure lounge is being cordoned off. Any good strong rope will do, or crime scene tape, as long as it encloses everyone there: the girls clipping about in high heels with their walkie-talkies (to remind you that you are an infant there is baby-talk), the men bustling in busy-person, day-glo jackets, the passengers waiting on the chairs, the passengers who are standing because they are stoic or because they cannot abide being wedged between the bodies of strangers in rows of seats when so much wedging and rowing is still ahead of them.

  Everyone is together, and now you must take out the men — just lift the rope and they can slip under it. The children will have to go next, the ones who are old enough to walk, or waddle. Even in imagination it’s no simple thing, this moment of taking the children away. For some children there will be men waiting outside the cordon, others will be passed amongst strangers, but the rest must wander off into the world alone.

  We’ll have to wait for a while now, for the women to settle.

  Some will need to find a wall to turn their faces to, but those afraid of what else might be taken from them will choose to remain in their seats. It’s only the women with the walkie-talkies who swing into action: clipping around in their new uniforms designed by those big names Hip & Shit, communicating with the static coming through from the outside world, sniffing the fear and liking it.

  Imagine the thoughts of the women against the walls or sitting together, caught in this mysterious loop of time, in a place between leaving and arriving. Imagine their clothes turning burgundy and bottle green, their feet swelling, growing heavy, massing with roots, binding them to this place.

  Remember the rope, the crime scene tape? Pull it tight now. Electrify it, so that no one gets out alive. And there you have it at last: prison, as close as I can get.

  There are just two more things you’ll need to do to complete the picture, make it real. You will have to imagine that the airline is a budget one, because nearly every woman there is on the bones of her arse. And a third of the women — even though you might never have seen such a thing in your life — you must colour a third of the women black.

  Gloriana Women’s Prison had been built in the 1950s. It had low, red brick buildings with concrete verandahs, demountables, and kidney-shaped flowerbeds stuffed with yellow roses. Apart from the ten-foot fence looped with razor wire, there are probably some primary schools still like it today.

  They did a study at Gloriana once, about self-harm. People asked us questions and there were forms to fill out. I’ve never been any good with forms — I look at boxes and start to panic. I can’t afford to panic, and I wasn’t a cutter myself anymore, so I just wrote in big letters TAKE DOWN THE RAZOR WIRE. If the people who had power over us didn’t have the imagination to consider our imaginations, why bother?

  Muster on an average day at Gloriana was around one hundred. You’re probably surprised by that number. You thought there were more bad women than that? You thought wrong, and it’s not that there are more women out in the world who haven’t been caught. It’s just that women are no good at getting away with crime. And I’m sorry to break the news to you, but it’s not that women are better people than men either; we just know this about ourselves, carry the knowledge stamped inside us: we’re odds on to get caught, or even turn ourselves in, and knowing that, except in cases of madness or desperation — which is most of the cases here — why would you try?

  If you’re waiting for me to tell you about my crime, then you should know that I won’t — it’s an arrangement I have with the person I harmed. I was quick to admit my guilt, but it was a long time before everything my victim had lost became as real to me as my own losses.

  The world expects remorse, and it’s right to because without it there’s too much terror. But the world wants remorse served fast, like food and sex, while really remorse is slow. People like to talk about punishment and penance, God and being good. Confession and apology taste sweet to them, but remorse, heeding none of this, continues its slow work. Remorse destroys part of you and replaces it with part of your victim. Remorse gnaws tiny holes in you and vomits up an essence of your victim to fill them, and it does this until you no longer know where you begin and your victim ends. That’s really where you started from in the first place, when you committed your crime, only now what you feel for your victim has changed. Now you and your victim are together, forever, for the purpose of some sense on this earth.

  But I’m afraid you’ll become bored if I don’t tell you about my crime. You’ll be disappointed in me and you’ll wander away before I’ve told you my story. So let me say this: on a scale from good to bad, one to ten, I’m about a six point five. Some would say seven. I have perhaps more than the average amount of violence in me, but given slightly different circumstances in my life, I might have had none.

  I was leaving Gloriana, after years. I’d been medicated, educated. I had been evened-out and adjusted. I was being moved from maximum to minimum security, a prison called Dryandra, where I would be prepared for release. If anyone knew exactly how long that preparation would take, they weren’t telling me. ‘It’s up to you,’ they said.

  I can’t remember when Do As You’re Told was replaced by It’s Up To You. Maybe it was set down in my file as the day my shame should end and rehabilitation begin, but the change took place without warning or explanation, like when fruit and yoghurt replaced rice pudding at dinner — having to get used to something new because it was supposed to be good for you. Anyway, it didn’t take long to work out that it was really only a slight modification in treatment, and now the rule was It’s Up To You To Do As You’re Told.

  I didn’t like Corrections Officer Mulholland. On April 26 2008, the day I had waited for — my last at Gloriana — it was CO Mulholland who first spoke of Elizabeth Fritzl.

  ‘Did you hear about that guy who locked up his daughter and all those kids she had?’ she said, drawing a ChapStick across her mouth.

  There were five of us at the table, bent over breakfast bran and Sudoku.

  ‘Where?’ asked Ursula. Ursula had been undone by crystal meth.

  ‘Not sure, Switzerland maybe?’ said Mulholland. ‘I can’t remember, somewhere near there — he kept her in a dungeon for twenty-four years.’

  ‘It was Austria,’ I said, not looking at anyone. I’d seen the story on the late news — I had media privileges some of the others didn’t — and I had fallen asleep with his face in my head.

  The moment the story began you knew it was going to be bad, but when Joseph Fritzl’s photo appeared on the screen the doors of hell flew open. Although his face sagged, it wasn’t just the drapery of age, but of flesh that’d had too much of everything it ever wanted. He had vicious, hooked eyebrows over pale, pitiless eyes and a lolly-pink mouth decorated with a small moustache. It was a face icy with vanity, the face of an aged porn star, and it was just as well his guilt seemed beyond doubt because it would be difficult to convince any human being with nerve endings that it wasn’t.

  I didn’t want to give my feelings away to Mulholland as she stood over us, but at the same time I knew the danger in this story and I didn’t want her to take control of it. Slowly, without elaboration, I told the others what I knew. I told of rape in the dungeon: seven children born, one dead, three taken above ground to be raised on lies, the others who grew hunched and stuttering. I told of no sun, no air, mother and children digging soil with their hands to make bigger their own prison. The more I told, the more it began to sound like a fairytale, and lik
e a fairytale, it sliced deep.

  I had learned how to read the smallest of signs in that place, the hardening of the pupils in another woman’s eyes — black oil to black coal — and the trouble it meant for her, or us. As I told the story I studied my listener’s eyes.

  ‘What about the girl’s mother?’ asked Ursula.

  ‘She says she never knew a thing,’ said Mulholland, having her moment at last.

  Time was up and we all stood. As we filed out to our places of work and study, I watched Mulholland join another group of women and begin the story again, better informed now. I saw her later, when my shift in the bakery began, and she was telling it there too. All day she moved through the prison, keeping her lips moist, the story juicy. She was like a person strolling through the rooms of a house, pouring petrol, striking matches — by lockdown the place was on fire.

  I saw it in the faces of the other women. I heard it in their voices, and in the clash of cutlery in the cafeteria. The story of Elizabeth Fritzl was moving through everyone: the sadists, the unlucky, the kicked, used, broken and overwhelmed, the unsound and the terribly sad.

  It was in the air like gas. It smelled hot, blue. The weakest part of everyone was exposed, belly-up. By then we all knew what Elizabeth Fritzl had looked like, twenty-four years ago, when she was first entombed. Fresh, pretty, lit. She showed no signs of trouble, but trouble there must have been. No one believed her Daddy had been a nice one until the day she helped him install the door to her own cell and he held the ether-soaked rag to her face. She hadn’t been imprisoned with earlier happy-Daddy memories to ease her horror, twenty-four years was not the sum of it.

  All day I watched the shadows of the Fritzl family moving over the prison walls. When I was finally locked in my cell that night I didn’t want to read or watch television. The prison was never silent or dark, but I could think at last.

  Had the day really happened the way I thought? Maybe the story was just another piece of news, a bit grislier than most, and the other women had only batted it lightly back and forth, gossiped. What if it was just my mind again, the mind that had committed my crime?

  Had the story thrown open the cellar door in every woman there, or had I imagined it? And if I had imagined it, did that mean I was not ready for Dryandra yet — and when would I ever be?

  It had been such a long time since I’d hurt myself, since the song of cutting had sung to me. I lay down on my narrow bed and closed my eyes against the fear of myself. Cutting would end the confusion in my head, not knowing if my mind and the way it understood the world was real. I ached to go deep, to know at least this about myself, that I was flesh and blood.

  In the morning there would be forms to fill out, panic boxes. There’d be a final visit to the nurse for a health check, and to make sure I wasn’t smuggling contraband in my ears or my arse. I could think of nowhere to cut myself that wouldn’t show — knowing that once I started I’d have to see bone. Any mark the nurse found on me would mean that I wasn’t going to Dryandra.

  Not that day, not in the near future.

  So what did I want more — cutting or leaving? This was life as I hadn’t known it in a long time, balanced on a slender thread belonging only to me. I opened my eyes and saw the Fritzl shadows playing over the walls, stalking on stilts across the ceiling. I counted the shadows: father, daughter, children alive and dead. But where was she? Where was Elizabeth’s mother?

  Did she see nothing, hear nothing — did she have no other sense with which to ask? Was she busy baking apfelstrudel, feeding her man? Or did she doubt her own mind, like I did, and in doubting had she handed it to her husband for safe keeping?

  I was hauled to my feet. There wasn’t enough room to pace, to stride my anger out, so I turned tight circles, my arms wrapped around me. It hurt, this sudden fury. I tried to breathe into the centre of it, but my breathing was sharp, ragged, there was too much fuel in me, the fire just burned on.

  I had promised myself that I would never think of it again — the knife with which I’d committed my crime. The finest blade in the set, wet with potato juice, waiting on the kitchen bench. There were daydreams and there were nightmares, but I knew daymares too, so I stretched out on the bed and allowed my mind to pick up that knife.

  I was in a kitchen again, but this time it was the kitchen of Mrs Fritzl. She was vivid and three-dimensional when I’d finished making her, although fashioned crudely: I gave her a floral, flour-smudged apron, currant eyes in doughy flesh, a tight-stitched mouth. I built her huge, a shelf of bosom and triangle legs balanced on tiny feet. I put the tiny feet into girly shoes — Mary Janes — and then I came up from behind and stabbed her.

  I stabbed close to her heart. I ran the knife like a sewing machine needle up and down her back. My neck hurt so I stabbed her there too, and when she toppled I leapt on her chest. I didn’t imagine blood because I didn’t care about that. It was only the yielding material of her I cared about, the in and the out. She didn’t have to die, I only wanted to give her something to think about, and when all my anger was gone, I stopped.

  I undressed in the dark, pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. There was no confusion in me now, only the same small guilt and sadness and peace I felt after I masturbated. I felt no need for that, and it was my last night in Gloriana.

  The next morning everything took longer than it should have because Elizabeth Fritzl was still moving through the prison. The nurse was late to see me because there were women with more urgent needs, and the COs were busy hosing down brushfires. I was put in my cell with my two small plastic bags of possessions, and I waited.

  Everyone was always saying that Gloriana was going to be knocked down, so after a while no one made a fuss when we wrote on the walls. Life has to be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards. I’d written that, or at least Soren Kierkegaard had. And I’d written lists of things that I hoped lay ahead of me, at Dryandra and beyond. Indian Ocean sunset. Trust myself.

  I thought about the woman who would live in this cell after me, and what these words would mean. I wondered if she was already committing her crime, fitting it into her day along with the shopping, or if, like me, she was soon to wake to the hours that would change her forever.

  It was after lunch when someone at last came to get me.

  ‘You’re going to have to change out of that trackie,’ said the CO, looking me up and down.

  ‘Colour doesn’t suit me?’

  ‘Ha-ha,’ she said.

  I hated it when people said that. Either you thought something was funny or you didn’t, but you didn’t have to be mean about it. ‘And what am I supposed to wear now?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the CO. ‘They’ve got something waiting for you, I think.’

  What they had waiting for me were the clothes I’d been wearing the day I arrived at Gloriana, the ones I’d worn to court. I was led into the area where all those years ago I had been stripped and searched. I got out of my hoodie and T-shirt okay, but by the time I reached my track pants I was shaking so much I couldn’t stand.

  ‘It might be easier if you took off your shoes first?’ said the CO, all sarcastic.

  I sat on the bench with my pants around my knees and unlaced my runners. Maybe if I’d let myself imagine this day I wouldn’t be having so much trouble. But I’d been strict with myself, tried never to think of time.

  ‘Am I taking my shoes?’ I asked the CO, who was politely looking elsewhere, fiddling with her keys.

  ‘I dunno, I guess so.’

  ‘Could you find out?’ I stood in front of her in my bra and knickers, challenging her to look, taking this small measure of power over her, that I wasn’t fat.

  I heard her discussing it outside in the corridor as I pulled on the skirt and blouse. They were much too big for me now. I had dressed to my lawyer’s instructions. She’d presented me to the justice system looking like any young, clean, unfashionable office worker who had just destroyed her own and somebody else’s
life.

  ‘You keep the shoes,’ the CO said when she returned to the room, and then she looked at me and stopped. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, what?’ I asked, my feet cold on the concrete floor.

  ‘Oh, you look like such a baby in that.’

  I looked down at the little yellow flowers on the blouse and the crushed pleats of the skirt and my eyes filled with tears. I felt sorry for trying to make her feel bad about her weight.

  ‘It’s freezing outside,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you got tights or something?’

  ‘It was summer when I came in.’

  ‘Okay, hurry up, then, let’s get you on the road.’

  There were two police officers waiting when we got back to the office. Constable Rogers was maybe a bit younger than me. Perky, sporty, jokey — I knew the type. As far as I’m concerned, there are two types of Australian female: those who have played netball, and those who would never even consider it. And those two types can’t ever get along, because their values prevent it.

  But Constable McDermott was tall with a smooth, wistful face. He had broad, expressive hips, so that his gun in its holster looked no more threatening than a taffeta bow. It took no imagination at all to see how good he’d look in a long satin dress. I’d forgotten this, that on the outside there were men who looked like women — I’d forgotten about surprises with no fear in them, perhaps even a smile.

  ‘Mind your head,’ said Constable McDermott, as he helped me into the back of the car. Both of them sat in the front — that was my next surprise — like I was just a regular passenger, even a client.

  All the time I’d been in Gloriana I hadn’t really known where the prison was located. I’d fitted myself into a corner of the van that delivered me from court, and not looked. I’d been told that the prison was out of town — where they prefer prisons to be — and a visitor had said it was a two CD drive to get there. Not understanding where I was in relation to the city where I’d been born and raised just made things lonelier, as if we all existed on a prison planet in an outer galaxy, far away from Mother Earth.