The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  But then, what of all the others in the cell? I had months of my sentence left to run. I might emerge into freedom at the end of my stint shagged senseless. Or I might find myself converted willy-nilly to homosexuality. That was something I dreaded. If I became homosexual, I would no longer be able to dream about naked women. A centre-fold would mean nothing to me. The breasts! The breasts, in particular! How would I ever cope if I lost my longing to nuzzle into a warm pair of breasts like a kitten settling on a cushion? To satisfy Older Ali, I would have to bid farewell to a richly agonising fantasy life. And I’d have to put up with moustache kisses, like those that Mister Ali had planted on my cheeks and neck back in Kuwait. Also, it had not escaped my notice that men didn’t always smell all that good.

  In the end, I lied. I told Mushtaf to announce that I was forbidden by my religion to engage in sex before marriage, with either men or women. And my church held to a very strict interpretation of sex. Touching, kissing, fondling of any sort were completely out of the question. Before Mushtaf made this announcement, he wanted to know, just out of curiosity, what church I was talking about. Maybe he doubted my sincerity—I didn’t know.

  I tried to think of the most abstemious denomination I’d ever heard of. Methodists were fairly severe, so far as I knew. Baptists—they were against a lot of things. Seventh Day Adventists? I knew they were weird, but maybe they had some odd rule that permitted pre-marital sex, like the Mormons. Anglicans I knew about. Churchy Goward in my home town was an Anglican vicar. He was a very tall man whose stoop gave his body the appearance of being hinged in the middle. He would stiffen into an upright posture with an all-but-audible clang at the first sniff of quite ordinary sin. He had once asked a woman wearing red lipstick to leave the church in the middle of a christening, so it was said. But then there were the Catholics, famous for their taboos, very famous for them. I came down on the side of the Catholics. ‘I’m a Catholic,’ I said. ‘Roman Catholic.’ Of course, at that time I didn’t know that if you actually wanted your trousers plundered, the Anglicans and Catholics were the first people you would turn to.

  It was settled. As I’d learned, the Muslim attitude to the infidel was essentially one of pity for the benighted. They weren’t about to ask me to risk the wrath of God for the sake of a roll in the hay. Older Ali seemed to approve my piety, patting my head and nodding sympathetically. Mushtaf remained sceptical, but kept it to himself. I felt awful, as I ought. To compensate, I worked up an insane enthusiasm for the hobbies of my pals. I helped Peter erect a skyscraper from his carton of dud ball-points. I put in a two-hour shift with Hossein on the lemons. I taught Younger Ali, who had no hobbies, the craft of paper aeroplane construction, decorating the wings with green crescents, little Iranian flags and tiny depictions of the Shah saluting. But never an hour passed without me squirming over my sexual parsimony.

  We saw very little of the prison bosses. Fatty hadn’t shown himself since I arrived. I saw senior guards once in a while, but nobody who looked as if he had any real command. Then one day, without warning, the guards began sprinting all over the prison, rallying the inmates to an open-air address from the chief himself. I tucked in my shirt, put on shoes and socks in place of thongs and lined up with the rich folk, a little to the side of the other inmates in the courtyard. The guards skittled up and down, shouting at the more decrepit prisoners to get to their feet. When every soul in the prison was facing the front, the captain of the guards thudded up the steps to the top platform of a dais that had been set up outside the administration block. His few quiet remarks were amplified by old Beefy, genius of comedy, in a raspy baritone. I didn’t ask Mushtaf for a translation. It seemed likely that Beefy was telling everyone to shut up and stand up straight, and that it would go badly for those who didn’t.

  One of the standard features of the abuse of power seems to be the exacerbation of wretchedness. If those under your régime are miserable, take whatever occasion you can find to remind them that the calibrations on the rack allow for a little more misery yet. We waited, most much more uncomfortably than me, hour after hour, for nothing. Calls to prayer went by unobserved. The guards themselves looked exhausted. Fortunately, it was not hot—a whimsical breeze had covered the sky with clouds—or some would have fainted in the first hour. After a couple of hours had passed I asked Mushtaf, out of the side of my mouth, what the hell was going on. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Don’t talk.’

  The hour of the midday meal went by without anybody getting fed. I could look over the entire prison population—row after row of men and boys dressed in ragged calico. The men were not suffering in any obvious way. They were not grimacing or swaying on their feet. But their eyes were blank, like those of tired beasts. It was a bad day—that was all. Many murmured prayers. I noticed two who maintained a degree of defiance. They held their chins high, kept their arms rigid at their sides. It was ironical that strict obedience should show up as defiance, but it did. The undefiant simply held themselves up as best they could, with no show of reserve energy. When the guards passed up and down the rows, they would stop in front of each of these rebels and hand out some small, spiteful punishment, such as pinching the nose and clapping a hand over the mouth to cut off breathing, or rapping with their knuckles on the forehead. One of the rebels let out a yelp when his toes were stomped.

  The prisoners seemed to me to have developed an intimacy with boredom. They befriended it, I think, but unlovingly; never admiring it, never offering a compliment. Because it wouldn’t go away, they faced it, chatted with it, found a space for it to sit down and grow silent beside them. It was like accepting the company of the village idiot.

  To me, boredom was unendurable. I was unpractised. As the hours went by with no appearance by the big chief, I began to seethe with hatred for whoever he was, fashioning reports to be published in important newspapers telling of the stupidity, the incompetence, the ill-will of Zahedan prison’s top man. Later, I calmed down. I stared at fixed points on the walls, attempted to find rhymes for polysyllabic words (onomatopeia / bring it over here). I held maundering conversations with my father and sister, speculated on the origins of certain superstitions (wishing on an eyelash—where did that come from?). I asked myself whether it was fair to add the length of the Missouri River to that of the Mississippi in order to claim the combined Missouri–Mississippi as one of the longest rivers on earth—considering that we in Australia did not attempt to add the length of the Darling River to that of the Murray so as to sneak into the top five.

  Well into the afternoon, when I could no longer ignore all the aches that gather from standing still, I began to yearn for the arrival of the big chief in quite a new way. I wanted him to exist. I wanted him to become a body with a face on top. I wanted him to become a reality. I almost loved the big chief, and if he had appeared I would have wept for the wonder of his being there. It became extremely important to me that there was a big chief, a supreme prison authority. I could no longer comprehend the person I’d been a few hours earlier—the person who hated the big chief. I wanted to kiss his hand and thank him for being so considerate and kind as to truly be a person at all. ‘Oh big chief,’ I prayed softly, ‘big chief please, please come!’

  Now and again, with a sound like an armful of kindling dropping to the ground, a prisoner collapsed. No attention was paid. They remained motionless where they fell. Mushtaf began to cry, but very quietly. The two defiant prisoners stood out in relief against the surrounding undifferentiated crowd of faces grown dumb with tiredness.

  Finally, with the arrival of evening, the captain of the guard mounted the dais once more. He spoke, and what he said was again bullhorned by Beefy. The prisoners sighed, crooned, and began to move away. The big chief was not coming. Those prisoners who lay on the ground were encouraged by their comrades to rouse themselves. Of the half-dozen or so who’d fainted, all but two were able to make it back onto their feet. Those two were fanned and massaged by their friend
s, but to no avail. I wasn’t able to remain for long enough to find out if they were living or dead.

  I think a man becomes a captive only with the passage of time. At first you are a free man detained by idiots, but not a true captive, not a true prisoner. Your vital life is still a savoury complement to the blood that flows around your body. You belong to the true world, not to a sequestered acre of shadows. Your familiar appetites still prod you, still urge you to head north or south for gratification, east or west for a taste of what you crave. But you whack your head on the wall at each imaginative sortie, and you cannot deny the density of the wall you keep hitting. It stands a little inside the other wall, the one you can see.

  I was never a captive, of course. My sentence was a joke; the conditions of my imprisonment were a marked improvement on the conditions of my more recent liberty. And I wasn’t slated for the gallows. All the same, I could see what would happen in my head if my sentence suddenly became twenty years, or forever. Most of the people around me were likely to die in this miniature world with its double wall that I would leave soon enough. I could see captivity in their eyes and in the way they walked.

  I felt drawn to them. Just the barest welcome into their family had fluffed the hair behind my ears, like a strange, unheralded breeze on a still day. The first smiles that meant anything to me were the smiles offered by these captives. The first kindness that I’d ever appreciated came from these crippled and wearied people offering a share of their bread—or Older Ali gently accepting my refusal to sleep with him. Zahedan prison gave me my first experience of inclusion.

  It wasn’t to last. One fine day, a visitor arrived at the prison in a Land Rover, and paid my fine. I was called to the office of another prison bigshot. His visitor was a skinny guy with a Kelly Gang beard and more teeth on display than you would have thought the human jaw could accommodate. Once the visitor had been introduced to me as ‘also Orzdrea’, he greeted me with great cordiality, saying he’d been stocking up in the bazaar when he heard about an Aussie in the clink. He’d come to check me out; thought I might like to see a friendly face. He found out I owed the sheriff here sixpence or something, and paid it. Steve’s the name, by the way.

  ‘Thank you very much’ I said, miserably, too shocked and disappointed to smile.

  ‘Mister What’s-he here says they’ve been keeping an eye on you, keeping you away from the rough stuff.’

  ‘I’ve been very comfortable,’ I said.

  ‘That right? Reckon you could get a doctor to take a peek at you when you get a chance. Look a bit light-on to me.’

  ‘I have a naturally light build,’ I said, offended.

  ‘Well, yeah. But there’s light and light, isn’t there?’

  The prison officer left us to ourselves, perhaps under the impression that we two fellow countryman might like to embrace and kiss and sing a song. Steve told me all about his business in this neck of the woods. He was an anthropologist from Sydney University, out this way to research a book he was writing on primitive agricultural systems. He went so far as to pick up a piece of paper and a biro from the desk to sketch a shadoof. The warmth of enthusiasm for his subject was like heat from a bar radiator. He was heading up from Pakistan on his way to Tehran, taking the long way round. Hardly anywhere like it in the world, this region, for a proper look-see at the way people used to farm, so he claimed.

  An hour after Steve left in his Land Rover, I was standing outside the prison gates with my suitcase in my hand and the pain of a broken heart bruising my ribcage. I’d cried when I’d said goodbye to the rich folks. The rich folks had cried, too. I’d given Mushtaf half a dozen books, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, so hard to part with. Older Ali had kissed me on the mouth and crushed my head into his chest. Younger Ali had shyly put my two hands together and enclosed them in his. Hossein had tugged my earlobes.

  I am visiting my mother in Brisbane. Years have passed since our reunion. There is nothing in my life and relationships to convince my mother that I can be left in charge of my own affairs and she has therefore decided to give me some advice. I know the advice is coming and I am trying to stall it, maybe postpone it forever. I bounce up from the sofa and fetch an ornament from one of the surfaces in the living room laden with such things and return with it to ask questions. Look at this, extraordinary, where did it come from? Or I comment on the strange drama my mother has created with her interior decoration, the dominance of red and black, the placement on ledges and tables of dragon figurines, dozens of them, some pottery, some iron.

  But my temporising can’t prevail over my mother’s determination to save my life. She succeeds in engineering one of those pauses that people of powerful conviction manage so masterfully. A lifting of the chin, a slight pursing of the lips, a hand raised just a little to signal that the bullshit is over.

  ‘You are … restless,’ she says.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You have a restlessness deep inside you, my little love, deep, deep inside you.’

  ‘Possibly,’ I offer, intensely embarrassed and fearing that a Tarot deck might be produced.

  ‘It will not make you happy.’

  ‘No. No, I suppose not.’

  ‘There is a … a hunger in you. A hunger for love.’

  ‘Well. Maybe.’

  ‘I am telling you things that are difficult for you to accept. But you must.’

  With anyone else, someone whose feelings I did not have to be quite so careful with, I would have said, ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘I have received a letter from—(and here my mother names the mother of my third son). She is very unhappy.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘She loves you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then … why? Why, my love?’

  ‘Restless?’ I offer, meekly. ‘Like you said?’

  ‘Yes, restless. Now listen to me.’

  And my mother goes on to warn me, in terms consistent with the drama of her living room, of all that will befall me if I do not open my arms to love. At times, she comes on like the head of a stern boarding school for boys. At other times, she sounds like a marriage celebrant tendering passages of Kahil Gibram and the Desiderata. And every now and again, she draws her purple and gold shawl close around her shoulders and becomes Madame Sosostra.

  Love, she tells me, is not just sex. Do I understand that?

  Yep, I reply.

  Not too obviously, I hope, I fix my gaze on the framed photographs a little beyond my mother’s shoulder. One of the pictures shows her at a square dance with the man who, decades past, succeeded my father in her affections.

  ‘Be very careful,’ my mother says, ‘with the people who love you. More careful than you’ve been, so far. That’s all.’

  After the lecture, I slouch out into the garden to smoke the first of ten cigarettes. I feel exhausted. I stare at the impeccable garden my mother has planted; at the smart, modern house she lives in. For relief, I think of my father, who never owned a house; who worked as hard as any person in the town, for the barest possible reward. I think of the restlessness that directs his attention away from building, from making. He sees himself as a Gypsy, a free spirit, or sometimes as a man born out of his time. He reads novels set in distant ages of manly trial and ordeal; tales of the Crusades, of Agincourt, of the Teutonic Knights. The women he most desires are of a type that may have flourished for a time in the age of the troubadors: women who minister to him tenderly after battles, bind his wounds, sing him songs, disrobe at a word of suggestion and croon at his touch. The women of the green island are essentially dusky versions of this accomplished, uncomplaining, eternally tender strain.

  He likes to hunt with a bow and arrow. The bow he uses is unfancy: a lemonwood arc, modelled on the English longbow. He is a good shot. He also fishes, and as an angler he has no peer in my home town. While other fishermen struggle and
curse, my father, a few metres downstream from his frustrated comrades, serenely floats a fly over a tiny rippled patch of water he likes the look of and pulls in a rainbow trout. He is also a fine shot with a .22.

  The time comes when his restlessness—a great sustaining force in men and women alike—is no longer there. Broken in spirit by the ugly failure of his marriages, he becomes content to sit and drink shandies under an apple tree in the backyard. The doctor has warned him off full-strength beer. Sighing, bitter, he declines into old age, no longer able to long, to yearn. He sells his bow and arrows, his rifle, and barely bothers with fishing.

  I drive up to Eildon to visit my father one Saturday towards the end of his life. He’s under the apple tree, stretched out on a banana lounge he’d rescued from the dump. Pale, broken, his chin and cheeks stubbled silver, he has roused himself so far as he can to ask questions about my life, my wellbeing.

  ‘Are you happy?’ he asks, turning his grey eyes to me. He seems puzzled by his own question.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m happy.’

  He studies my face for a time, perhaps half a minute.

  ‘Well, good,’ he says. ‘Want you to have better luck than me. But you are happy, aren’t you? You’re getting along?’

  ‘Yes, I say, I’m happy.’

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘I want you to be happy.’

  I see that he is crying. The pallor has left his face and it has become charged with a rush of crimson. His lips tremble. I have never before put my arms around my father at such a moment, and I can’t do it now. I avert my eyes. ‘I’m okay,’ he says. ‘I’m okay. Bloody sook, I am.’