Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  He wears a white T-shirt and trousers that creak if he bends and there is a stretcher on which to perch. There is a kind of park just below the filthy louvre windows, each grotty pane of which has wire within it so it can’t be broken no matter what you do with your fist. There are stacks of fresh and ancient seagull shit encrusted over the louvres and he can actually sniff fresh air rolling in, sea air from Hobsons Bay. If only he could get out in it – but he has given up on all that hope sort of thing and has knuckled down to his study of the bible.

  Dorothy posts the letter, or is about to, but absentmindedly catches a few buses instead. She wants to give him his letter personally and is amazed at the sound and sight of hundreds of impassioned full-on Christian choirs belting out holy songs at the tops of their hoarse voices and hatchet-faced trade union officials furiously singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ and hundreds of kids and ordinary working class families screaming and whispering out for justice for her poor first husband whom she wrote off.

  It is the oddest emotion possible for the former wife of a condemned prisoner to turn up to see him just before his terminal date with the rope, but there she is, just staring at all the people holding vigil on the hill, and everywhere she looks she sees them singing songs against the death of him who married her and with whom she had three kids. Dreamily, she thinks of his own three sisters who love him and who know that he is ever so innocent of the charge against him.

  The crowd is jostling, shoving, pushing, screaming. Exasperated people are everywhere and, as trade union bands bang away, children join in with the songs. The cops are either silently ignoring the increasingly bold protestors or charging into the boldest of them, with armoured horses and swirling batons. Apparently one or two protesting Members of Parliament get brained by batons, or charged, or carted away in vans with wailing sirens.

  As she tries to get through the pushing crowd at reception, she sees Governor Grindlay and desperately tries to hand him her envelope. Despite there being such a crush of all kinds of people, he escorts her most hurriedly into his busy office where telephones appear to be strangling each other and all the voices seem to be crisscrossing in a cacophony of craziness. He indicates a spare chair and a recently filled-up glass of tap water and they manage to sit down together for a minute or so, without something else happening at least.

  With all this din it is hard to hear her and make out what she is on about, but it is in the nature of the governor to be patient and civil. She sobs as she hands him the tormented envelope and the governor assures her he shall hand it on as soon as things calm down a bit, and apologises for there being no cup of tea. He reaches over to shake hands and escorts her to the reception area.

  She wanders into a perfect nightmare mixed up with a dream. Past violently screaming irate law students from Monash who have targeted the reception area and are now employing loudspeakers.

  A Labor Party member called Clyde Holding has been vehemently singing out his rage against a government disinterested in social justice. Since he proves incredibly popular amongst the mob, and eloquent as well, the police charge him and grasp him roughly and violently and chuck him into the rear of a police truck and cart him away.

  This sort of carnage – emotional, social and hyper-political – has never occurred before in the snide city of Melbourne, let alone in Coburg, that horrible, hypocritical home for youths who’ve thieved half a god-damned custard tart.

  Thus it is that a man who never got into legal tangles until he was 31 now lies awake in the middle of the night. The two guards looking after him both wish that the Christians and Unionists singing together in protest down there would pack it in and let them sleep on their shift; but of course they are terribly committed and intend to protest passively all the night, into day, in the vaguest but most heroic of hopes that Ronald shall be spared at the eleventh hour. By now, there are thousands of them, all singing and lighting the candles of hope and peace for some sort of better outcome in this enlightened day and age.

  Ronald has shifted from his right side to his left in order to face the wall and close his eyes heavily and solemnly. He too sort of wishes all of the vigil folk out there would shush for a bit so he can sleep for a bit. All the fretting and worry and random regrets are whittling away at his roving innards. To hear nothing is what he now needs at nights – to recall nothing and to need nothing too.

  It’s a hot night – really, really hot: over one hundred degrees in the old Fahrenheit scale, but somehow he gets through it. The next morning, Philip Opas goes down to his local beach at Black Rock, gently swims out a few hundred yards in his swimmers and does his darndest to try and relax. But then at eight o’clock exactly he is spoken to by a fellow floater that the government has just hanged his client.

  Opas stares at him, stupefied. He just can’t take it in. He swims about and floats for a fair time without any of it penetrating, then wanders off home, still vacant and numb. Feeling as though he has walked up the stairs on his knees, rather than those old faithful ex-footballer’s legs, he throws himself down upon the bed and feels drained of all life, as though someone’s just sucked away all his blood. He remains in this state well into the night because there isn’t a single solitary thing anybody can do for him.

  His wife just sees to him as best she can, and gives him every assistance, such as hot beef tea. Poor creature, she is finding it impossible to credit that her husband is behaving so out of character lately: muttering rather than speaking so clearly and confidently in the manner she’s always known. Look at him now, cowering on the bed like a trapped animal, with his mind all mangled and raving.

  Dorothy is on the phone, arguing. Her furious father is threatening her with eviction if the rent isn’t paid and she tells him to go ahead and do it. ‘Evict me, then,’ she says, just to get through to him, but all the furious father can say is what a mongrel she married and that she deserves all the pain she gets out of it. He warned her about bludgers like Ronald.

  She cannot sleep in the circumstances, especially given that it’s such a blisteringly hot night. Her daughters are getting up and down too, making hot tea and sort of sitting there, restless and hopeless, in the cramped kitchen, just about cheek to cheek. They silently stare at the electric clock on the wall, which – faithful and fevered in its approach to time passing – suggests that time is nigh for their dad.

  The daughters must just wait and sit tight through the long and unendurable night until the long and unendurable morning finally dawns. Then, they will sit up rigid and listen to the live broadcast on radio station 3AW. Brian Morley is presenting death live from Coburg Gaol. He’s the only broadcaster doing it live. All the other broadcasters are doing follow-up broadcasts after it’s over. The hanging is set like a radio schedule and nothing on the face of the earth can change it. Nothing.

  Ronald’s old mother can’t find any peace either. She is in the tiny flat someone she can’t possibly recall lent her rent-free. It’s got a not-bad fridge in it that seems to whir in time with her own singular heartbeat and she sits still and reads the label on a tin of marmalade, not so much out of boredom but helplessness. She wants to help her son but there isn’t the means to achieve that and she knows it. So she just reads the half-full tin of ‘Sun Downer’ marmalade with its exhausted-looking but rather hopeful swagman in perspective, carrying his swag towards his eventual eater.

  Ronald’s old mother has her memories too. Of going swimming in rivers and dams, and camping in different parts of the bush. She fidgets and stares at the great big heavy black bakelite telephone plonked on the side table, and thinks about telephoning Father John to see if he can help bring on some Catholic miracle. She has run out of ideas and it’s so hot, she can’t think. Mentally, she apologises to Ronald, wherever he is, for being completely unable to help him.

  After a while, she cries and she prays in an entirely new way that passes all her understanding. She asks Christ Almighty for a break for her son, Ronald, and prays with each molecule of her ma
rrow and less than five stones in weight. She clasps her hands and wrecks her wrists, which is torment but somehow brings joy.

  Whatever his lawyer may think, Ronald isn’t dead yet – though he is at last out like a light. He’s asleep on his left, his favourite side to sleep on. You only get the two sides and tonight, his last night left, it’s his left.

  His dreams are meagre and then brightly rich: flashes of multicoloured cockatoos and parrots. He consistently dreams of bush birds as though he and his three sisters are out in the bush somewhere friendly and there is also summertime swimming and diving into icy dams and lovely cooked chook and delicious vegetables that they have faithfully and honestly grown.

  Chapter 17

  PENTRIDGE BOASTS A great bell out the front which is reverberating in my mind as I remember it all echoing misery and mechanical demands.

  For Ronald, the great bell shall gong at eight in the morning and nothing on earth can stop it. It shall gong repeatedly, eight times for the eighth hour of the hopeful new day, but hopelessly too because of the people at the vigil hoping against hope for one among them in there. They know that, no matter what he did or didn’t do, nobody, absolutely nobody, should be treated like this and have had to endure a year’s bracing for death. Their pain is such they cease to weep, or indeed to do anything except sit, stand or stare.

  At about five in the morning, Ronald is gently roused from his deep slumber by two officers. He washes his visage, briefly sees his eyes in the tiny scrap of bathroom mirror, and rinses his eyes once again. That sure does feel better, the clean water irrigating his hayfevered eyes the way cool water does, and he absentmindedly switches off the tap so as not to waste any.

  The two officers give him three absolutely brand-new pairs of underpants, because a dead man is liable to shit. He puts them on, one over the other, and then they give him a brand-new bright-white T-shirt, which is his favourite kind of shirt, together with his prison-issue pants (freshly ironed) and jet-black runners (polished up). He combs his jet-black hair and wishes it were a little bit longer as he wants to look good for his mum.

  She won’t be there, as she is in the bush or the flat. He remembers how a vague friend of the family gave her that as a lend. That was nice, that was kind, very, and he won’t ever forget that kind of kindness, because it is rare.

  It is a shade past five in the morning and the groaning on the hill is increasing in both sound and musical intensity. Many are weeping or gnawing their clothes. They really do not know how to express their displeasure.

  In outer and inner suburbia the ordinary people wait to hear about it on the wireless. They know that hanging may be deemed harsh, a hard life lesson so to speak, but they also understand that there can be no law without order.

  Ronald is weighed several very strict times to completely satisfy the hangman’s requirements in respect of his study of the ancient and very correct literature related to the victim’s neck and spine. It’s an exact science, breaking a man’s neck, so as to stop his heart and suck the air from his lungs.

  Then Ronald sits himself down at the friendly, offhand invitation of one of the guards. Officer Ken Leonard shows him the fresh-cooked, lean and never-ever-fatty bacon that he’s got sizzling in a little frying pan that rests on one of the gas jets he’s recently lit with a match on a gas cooker–thing. He adds two fresh eggs and they bounce and they bubble into yummy life and he makes Ronald a lovely dish, a lovely last meal you might say. Ken’s never had anything against him and he thinks two officers killed brother officer Hodson anyway. That’s the gossip in the divisions, so it has to be true.

  He offers the meal to Ronald on a sort of plywood serving tray complete with a metal knife and two-pronged fork and a teaspoon with which to add salt and pepper.

  But Ronald softly smiles and, terribly politely, says to Ken, who looks a trifle hurt: ‘No thanks dear Ken it would be wasted on me, I think. Let’s face it, I’m for the lime pit.’

  ‘Why, don’t you enjoy it?’

  A wink.

  Ronald then asks for some Brylcreem to give lustre to his pitch-black hair. The neck of the shirt is annoying him and he wishes he had some nice talcum powder to soothe the itchiness and annoying raw sort of uncomfortable scratchiness. No hair oil is given and it is ten to eight and he is marched rather quicker than he had assumed would be the case.

  Up some scaffolding or ladders he is marched, quickly and unsafely. Someone could very easily slip and hurt themselves.

  It’s been over twenty years since the last one – the hanging of Jean Lee and her accomplices – and now one of the guards says to Ronald in an undertone: ‘We’re going to hang you with the same noose we hung Jean Lee and her boyfriends with!’ And Ronald cannot answer and just looks up overhead at the big wooden beam, with the rope hanging from it that is connected to a new noose just for his neck.

  Down below, the press and the radio people enter the building, clutching impressively printed and gorgeously designed enormous laminated stiff white invitations. There are RSVPs on them and everything. They dutifully hand them in and sign in their names on the register and admire each other’s impeccable grooming. Not one of the men has no tie on and their shoes are so shiny you can see your face in them.

  No other word than ‘nausea’ shall do to describe just how the reporters feel as they sign in and have to stand in rigid strict attention, as if they were in the army or the navy or the air force. The governor served lots of time in the navy and he has always run the gaol along the same sorts of lines.

  They are there to do their duty, which is to write exactly what they see and hear, and type that into a newspaper column for their loyal readers to devour – and for society’s potential wrongdoers to be duly warned. The twelve journalists stand stock-still underneath the great beam, about 25 feet up in the air. They watch Father John Brosnan give Ronald the last rites and extreme unction in Latin and then apply the mystical herb chrism into his nostrils in the sure belief that it will stop his soul slipping downwards to hell.

  The mood becomes less perfunctory. Some are very queasy, having assumed this was going to be a real boy’s own sort of thing, a true adventure to tell the family about. Others are still clutching their embossed invites in their hands by their sides: what a souvenir they shall be in time to come.

  The governor looks impeccable. Rather like a sea captain, he stands there erect in carriage and unsinkable in his duty, which is to carry it through perfectly to the final thread of it, fault cannot be found with him. He is pretty smashed up inside but can’t ever show it and he says to the twelve journalists in a most crisp way: ‘Please no tape recorders, nor cameras or writing instruments. That wouldn’t be cricket.’

  That is the cue for the hangman. He strides eagerly onto the gallows.

  Disguised with welder’s goggles over his eyes and a bizarre cap on top of his head, his great big loping body strides along the beam. The journalists below just gape in awe: they have never seen the like. And that is saying something, where they come from. All of them thought they’d seen everything in Melbourne, but nothing like this sort of pantomime hangman!

  He strides up towards Ronald holding a slender white cord with a thick knot tied on its end. He roughly fits it round Ronald’s neck, tightens it up with a grunt. This throws Ronald quite off balance and he says, ‘For God’s sake, make it quick!’ and luckily, it is very quick indeed. The next instant, Ronald flies down through the open trap. His neck breaks and everyone hears it break, it really is that loud.

  It is done. It is complete. It is over. The government of the day has its way. The hanged human is a human no more, apart from the tidying up. Father told me years on that ‘Ronald was all black down here’, indicating his face, which had had its life leeched from it by the drop.

  As somebody hoses the linoleum floor down, the body is delivered to a hearse manufactured by the father of Dorothy George. The governor glares at the departing members of the press, as if to say, ‘See what occurs if you kill so
meone’, but – as he told me himself much later – he too feels broken inside.

  The journalists drift and dwindle away, mortified. One of the television reporters from Channel 9 has vomited and has to duck into the gents and wash himself down in an improvised sort of way. Brian Morley from radio 3AW who was shocked by the way that Ryan winked right at him just before the hangman pulled the linen hood over his face and he told me that the wink of Ronald has always haunted him and is a thing he just can’t ever forget.

  His daughter Jan hears the radio broadcast on her blue plastic transistor and bangs her young forehead mercilessly again and again into her tin school locker. Her basketball teacher sees it and hears it but there is nothing he can do, except feel shocked and empathetic.

  Dorothy sits up, shocked, in her unruly bedroom and flutters her hands up to her baggy eyes. It’s numbing to realise that there is nothing she can do: there can be no funeral, no service and no hope for her ex-husband, now he has perished a Catholic, which is the last straw, according to her still-put-out father.

  Dorothy still cherishes one photo album of their honeymoon and all those trips they had to the Jenolan Caves. A holiday was welcome after all that honest toil they did when they were on the straight and narrow together; with him in the scrub cutting sleepers for the railways and her having all those babies and often cutting the logs too or getting on her side of the big saw to do the gum trees together. By God they were both so fit back then, and so healthy, were they not!

  The three daughters say nothing after school and there is no tea for them at six o’clock. Dorothy is so depressed and shocked that she can’t function. So the food isn’t prepared. Nothing is prepared. Because no one was prepared for what just happened out at the gaol.