by Mudrooroo
I get home late. Mum asks where I’ve been. I tell her just mucking about with some of the kids from school, but she knows I’m telling a lie.
“You want to stay with me, son?” she asks.
I nod and look at the floor.
“They’ll take you away like the rest of them,” she says.
“No!”...
My voice ripped out in a scream that hurled back the familiar bareness of the cell. A key mercifully grated in the lock. The door opened. The fourteen days were done.
When the warder took me back to the Juvenile Section I found I had become a hero to my mates. Even the screw became a bit human and gave me a cigarette. I was a little colder and a little older, more a part of the prison and its atmosphere, part of the grey cloud that dismally envelops it. This atmosphere got me down when I first came in but now it had become part of me. I became an emptiness gas-filled with the grey cloud.
After solitary the prison accepted me as I had never been accepted outside. I belonged.
two
I pick up the towel and rub myself dry but there still remains the peculiar smell of the yellow prison soap. You get used to it, but it emanates from us all, strong as vomit stink.
I follow the other soon-to-be-ex-cons into the cell-like room where our clothes await us. It is here that we were initiated into jail life and for the first time donned the grey uniform of belonging. It has the last touch of outside when we come in, the first touch when we leave. It is a sort of despair and expectation depot.
Our citizen-of-the-world clothes cringe in shadow one against the other as though anticipating the jeers in store for them. They have been tailored on a prison wage, modelled in the latest style of years gone by and made of the choicest cloth available. Blue serge that has the habit, much like its wearers, of picking up bits of fluff around the streets.
I choose a suit that looks more or less my size and put it on. The mirror reflects a person I take to be myself gazing back blank-eyed. Critically I examine the image: the figure tall and slim, the face, neither handsome nor ugly, and the skin, due to lack of sun, now no darker than olive shade. The suit is not as bad as I expected and appears to be a good fit. Either a convict is finding joy in his work or I, after eighteen months, have lost my clothes sense. Anyway, it will do until I can acquire something more suited to my taste. The people I know outside go in for clothes. They call themselves Progressive Dressers — and I have influence enough to borrow at least a shirt and a pair of jeans.
I comb my hair as best I can. It is in a crew-cut ordered by the chief warder. He must have read that bodgies wear their hair long and decided to do his bit in the fight against juvenile delinquency. Or maybe he remembered the Samson story.
I am dressed and ready to go, but we still have to wait until the screw condescends to open the door. Waiting gives me time to think about the future and toss up whether I will swing on with the gang again. I can take them or leave them now. It’s amusing in a way, after being born at the bottom of the world to find I have worked myself up such a long way. I frequent the best bodgie hangouts now and sleep with white girls if I want them — great kicks. . . .
Clunkity-clunkity-bang. Clunkity-clunkity-bang. . . . Blank-faced teenagers sway to the delinquent beat, gyrate and shuffle, losing their souls to it.
Black, black cat where are you going to go?
Black cat, so black cat when are you going to go?
Been sitting here all night,
It really ain’t right,
You gotta go to be in the know.
A roll of drums, and the band rests. Lights swell and show up the youth’s face. False insolent face with the bleak eyes of ain’t-got-nowhere-to-go.
He sweats in the stuffy hall, half suffocated by the hot reek of powdered bodies and heavily oiled hair. The mob swirls aimlessly about. One or two stop to speak to him and he answers shortly.
The band begins again. Four tight-trousered youths with gleaming electric guitars sway in anticipation of the drums and lay down a steady beat. The bass guitar clunks, the others twang and they’re off.
The youth puffs on a cigarette, carefully protecting his new clothes from the ash. Smoke spirals float up and fade into the ceiling haze. The lights dim and a girl appears in front of him. Dark eyes hollow in a pale face, short ash-blonde hair. Her smeared mouth twists.
“What a drag this place is.”
His eyes drop to her blouse. Small breasts. Real neat.
“What place isn’t?”
She sits next to him and they watch the dancers.
“It’s helluva hot, and those cats still dance.”
“Mad! I saw a black cat once, it ran round and round until it dropped dead. Real crazy.”
“Crazy.”
She is restless and he sees that her forehead is damp.
“Want to get some air?”
“My date’s pissed off somewhere. I guess it’s all right.”
They circle the floor and escape to the river bank.
She takes his hand as they stumble across the grass. Overhead the dark sky is filled with stars and a cool wind moves in the trees. They sit and he feels her body against his.
It’s too much of a drag to do it now and not worth it. Sex is such a bore sometimes. All the same he feels her breast and she does not protest. It’s too peaceful for anything except talk.
“Got some money yesterday and bought some new threads.”
“They’re terrif. I saw them in the hall. Must have cost a bit?”
“They did, but I’m a Christian and God provided me with the cash. It was a sort of debt.”
“How do you mean debt?” she says.
“Church bored me crazy when I was a kid.”
She seems impressed. “Hey! you didn’t rob a church?”
He nods. “Donation box. It was a pushover.”
He tells her how he came into the Cathedral the night before. A few people praying but no one noticing him. He slipped through a small door up the stairs. A grill barred his way to the choir gallery, so he sat down and waited until someone came to lock up the church. He went down then — pretty spooky it was. Only the sacristy lamp flickering a tiny light and shadows moving everywhere. But he had a small torch.
“I nearly knocked over St Anthony, but I begged his pardon and asked his help. He gave me the wink where I would find the box. It was there right enough and dead easy to crack. The jemmy made a bit of a noise wrenching off the lock, but nobody heard — except God, and He wasn’t interested. It was a regular lucky dip — quite a few greenbacks and a pocket full of coin.”
“How did you get out if it was locked up?”
“Easy. There was a door bolted from inside. I found that out to start with, see. It was a dark night and nobody could have seen me leave.”
“You’re game,” she says. “You must have needed the money pretty bad to dare God.”
Ain’t no God no more, no more.
There ain’t no God no more. Yeah!
His fingers unfasten her blouse and dip inside her bra. She laughs. Her hand moves. . . .
It isn’t worth it. Got a willing chick here and can’t be bothered doing anything. Not tonight.
They end on the ground kissing for a time, then he sits up and talks again.
“Listen. You know what? I want to go over to the East and become something. I’m washed up here — done. Done everything I can do. If I go fruit-picking or work on a farm I can save enough money to go across.”
“Why don’t you? I wish I could go, but my mother takes most of my money off me.”
Silence. For something to do he snaps the strap of her bra. This brings a giggle. He watches the reflections of the city lights broken by the ripples. The river smells like blood. Swellings and hollows. He moves his hands away in disgust.
“Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
“What about my date?”
“Oh forget about him. He can find his own way home.”
“Yeah. I’m thirsty. W
hen I go out with him he never buys me a drink or anything.”
“O.K., O.K.”
They tidy their clothes.
Expresso bar softly lighted. They take a corner table and drink black coffee. He yawns, she yawns. They wander back to the hall where her date takes her off his hands. The dance is about over and he drifts off.
Black, black cat where are you going to go? . . .
I should be happy I’m getting out, but I’m not. At this moment going out is meaningless. What exactly am I going out for? God knows. In here I can achieve a certain evenness of mind, but out there it will go like my prison suit.
I glance at the bleak greyness of the walls. Even in the quivering sunlight they retain their clamminess, recalling the nightmares that chilled my prison sleep and vaguely haunted my daylight hours.
The walls are rough sandstone blocks with shrunken lime between. High and thick they loom around, and on top at vantage points sit the flimsy glass and corrugated iron guard boxes. I look up and see the guard, death stick at the ready, peering down at us. Grey for walls, yellow for boxes, blue for guards, static and distinct.
Outside they may think these screws are ordinary men doing a job for the community, but to us they are a pack of wage slaves with a taste for brutality. Who makes a job for them anyway? Without us cons they would be nothing.
We move across to the superintendent’s office to collect our miserable prison pay. I throw my chest out and march, really step out to show my acquaintances that I am on my way. Yesterday I had to listen to their stale jokes, like “See you in a week”, and so on. Not really funny because it might so easily be true.
We stand in front of the grey main building, a line of clowns with haphazard smiles revealing our uncertainty. Should we feel happy? Sad? Or in between? We are the I-don’t-care-a-damn-mob. We fake it when we can’t make it.
This chap Jeff in front of me turns and talks out of the side of his mouth.
“I know this doll with the big tits. And man, can she turn it on!”
Jeff and I once shared the misery of a boys’ home when we were kids and we swung together for a while in jail. Not really friends, only acquaintances for time-killing talks on Sunday afternoons. God and eternity, being and non-being etc. We couldn’t agree on any answers, but it gave me a chance to air my highbrow reading. It wasn’t altogether a waste of time because he really knows a lot. He is a sincere Catholic — one of those cons who get intensely religious in jail, and he tried to bring me back to the One True Faith. Once he softened me up enough to go to Mass with him, but it only brought me back to the awful boredom of the orphanage.
In my mind’s eye the school chapel looms up, cream-walled with stained glass windows, the tower pointing at a star, the boys filing in for prayers. Inside, all subdued brown — highly polished floors, rafters, pews, pulpit and altar rails, and around the dome of the sanctuary a fresco of the hung Christ. The principal mounting the pulpit, his face intense and old, his lips pursed to speak:
“How can there be secrets unknown to the living God? He is everywhere and He sees into the hearts of each and every one of you. He sees into the deepest and blackest cave. He is awake to all your lies and all your tricks. I tell you God is not mocked. No! And those boys who stole oranges from the orchard last Saturday. Yes, you were seen. You refused to step forward and confess — but God is not blind. He can blast you down at this very moment and send your souls straight to the everlasting fires of Hell. Boys, boys look into your hearts. Let each and every one of you dredge up the hidden slime and cast the devil away from you. Make a deep examination of your consciences and a sincere act of contrition, resolving to sin no more. . . .”
Jeff went to Mass as regularly in jail as he did in school and prayed for salvation. He wasn’t faking then. But what a change now that he’s coming out!
“You’ll have something worth confessing if you go with that hot-stuff doll again.”
He grins and looks embarrassed.
It is time to move. The screw orders us to file into the Administration Section. This department is a sort of brain, an invisible place from which orders flash along telephone wires. We never go there except on our day of release. The trusties do not look like convicts at all. They are clerk-like and efficient in well- made prison drab, a contrast to the rest of us, always sloppy and soiled. It is obvious that they take pains to groom themselves, like white-collar suckers who want to catch the boss’s eye. Here they keep tidy to keep their cushy jobs.
For myself I don’t care a damn how I dress in jail. The only time I became enthusiastic was when a shipment of ex-army trousers came in. Man, they were really bodgie pants. We each got a pair and an oversized coat, and strutted about being all jazz-like and calling each other “man” or “Dad”. Real delinquents, just like the movies. The day the chief warder noticed us we had drifted way out from the norm and were going round with the bottoms rolled half way up our calves. Joke over! Back to the old drabs.
The superintendent walks out of his office holding our money in little envelopes. Our earnings are small enough, but we have not worked too hard for them, and what we did helped to fill in the long, drifting weeks and days.
The superintendent is getting on in years and so is his brown suit. He looks the personification of the prison and radiates the same dreariness. He is one of us even though he considers himself free. Perhaps once this man felt he could reform convicts, lead them on to the straight and narrow, but I see now that in his way he is as lost as the rest of us. Maybe even more. He had more to lose.
He hands us the money and wearily begins his farewell and don’t-do-it-again speech, which means, “See you tomorrow mate.” His voice grinds out the dirge that mocks us, mocks him and mocks the world.
It’s over and we’re on our way. We file out together and I alone look back. I want to pound on the locked gates and demand to be let in again. . . . I turn away. So long jail for now — or for ever?
II
FREEDOM
three
Outside at last and what to do? Got to get a move on or be picked up for loitering with intent. Lucky others, vanished into the streets below to somewhere or someone. But how would you come back from jail to a wife and family? Try to be cheerful? “Hullo I’m back. How’re you all going?” Words running out into a silence. . . . Wife tongue-tied. There can be no questions about jail. Tears have dried up long ago — if there were any. Probably there is a boy-friend now and nothing to be said except Hullo — Good-bye. Then off somewhere to get drunk. Big deal.
I am still in front of the gates, staring down the hill and over the port. It is summer and the sun is white-hot metal in the sky. The rippling sea glints back and cheers me. Good rocking tonight.
The people in their light summer clothes make moving patterns against the drab stone buildings. I drag myself slowly downhill into the problem-filled future, and already I begin to feel homesick for the easy drifting of boob. I guess the fact is I’m afraid of life, haven’t got the guts to be a real criminal.
The sea is near and I walk to it, remembering nights in jail when its singing blackness was distant and unattainable. My cell was on the top landing and in winter when the sea-wind came crying in I stood on the bed, face pressed to the bars, gulping the salt sea tang until I became part of its crashing surf and soundless depths. Brain-washed, body-washed, drifting in a trance. . . . On clear nights I could see the water alight under the space-travelling moon and I would feel detached from life, melancholy but content.
“Hey you! Get down from that window.” The harsh frog voice of the warder would fling me back into my cell. It was against regulations to forget my punishment among the stars. Convicts standing at windows could be contemplating escape — although the ground was floodlit and forty feet below.
The hill ends, and the shops flaunting their wares solicit me like harlots. I walk into a store and stand gaping idiotically at the brightly stacked shelves. Mouth waters at the rows of tins, jars and boxes of luxury food
s, but habit checks my greed. I was raised in poverty; it has disciplined by appetite, and anything that fills my belly is good enough.
“Yes?”
The old lady behind the counter is a picture of church-going respectability. I feel her pious horror as she glances at my unmistakable prison suit. I pretend not to notice her, but from the corner of one eye observe an agitated blue-veined hand. What is she frightened of? The old duck’s past raping age and her shop is too near the jail to be raided by a con.
“Packet of cigarettes, please. Any sort will do.”
She takes a packet from the shelf.
“No, not those. The blue ones over there.”
“That’ll be three and three.”
She watches my every movement as I pull out my pay packet, open it and hand her a ten bob note. She rings it into the till, puts my change on the counter and watches nervously. I act my crim role again, pick up the change coin by coin and slowly take out and light a cigarette, giving her time to imagine all sorts of possibilities before I step out into the street.
Cars zoom past. Laden trucks lumber and clatter to and from the wharf. Fremantle is a busy port buzzing with movement, everyone but me with somewhere to go. While I was inside some zealous prison worker asked me if I knew where I was going. I said a ticket was put into my hand when I was born, but if it gave a destination, well, time had smudged the ink and so far no collector had come to clear the matter up.
No one spares a glance for the half-breed delinquent, and this is how I want it. I steer away from the ships and turn towards the beach. A few people splash in the mild surf or lie about exposing pink limbs to the burning sun. Funny how they oil themselves over and bake to achieve the despised colour I was born with. Some kids are building a castle in the white wet sand, flat-topped with bucket-shaped turrets and a moat. It is the same sort they all build, so maybe it is the kind of place white people dream of living in- pretentious, dominating and secure.
