by Mark O'Flynn
‘Well, yer fucked now,’ he said to himself.
There was a small table also attached to the wall, and a plastic chair. There was a window. Edgar examined all these things, his possessions, over and over. Would possessions alone sustain a life?
He had a lot of time, not only on that first day, to stare at the walls. He heard the garbled announcement ordering the return of tennis racquets, and the imminence of muster. He heard the inmates return to the unit. Someone opened his door and gave him a sandwich. Then the sequential thudding of each door as it was slammed home for the night, even though it was still mid-afternoon. A long night began. He could yell, he supposed, he could rant and rave, but would anyone take any notice?
Throughout the evening he heard the occasional shouting of voices.
He dreamed of Meacham, the jagged rum bottle raised to the faceless face. They shared the bottle and Edgar held the broken glass to his lips.
In the morning Edgar was wakened by the sound of keys in the lock and the heavy door being opened. When he emerged he had his first look at the man who had slept on the other side of the wall, within a spit of him, and all the others, and they of him. An officer holding a book called their names. They queued for their breakfast. One inmate with tattoos down to the quicks of his fingers handed out fruit and milk. The pear he handed to Edgar was as hard as a bone.
The wing officer, Mr O’Neil, with his smart epaulettes, told him he had to go outside with the others. Men were already jogging in endless circles. It was not raining, although it felt as though it should be. Someone asked him his name.
Whether it was raining or not, cold or not, hot or not, gradually became the medium by which Edgar began to sense time passing. His name was called three times a day at muster. The doors were locked and unlocked at exactly the same times. Little distinguished the meals. The other inmates complained unceasingly about the awfulness of the food, but Edgar reckoned he had eaten worse and when asked he told them so. The routine had not yet lost its novelty. His two tubs still contained the possibility of multitudes. He had twenty solid pears lined up on his table in varying degrees of readiness, none of them quite ripe enough to eat. They did not rot. Some of the inmates said they had read about Edgar in the paper, the state of his victim. He was notorious. Ed-the-ripper. Towards the end of his first season (it was still warm), the line of pears growing longer on his table (the softer ones confiscated before they might ferment), Mr O’Neil told him he must work.
Birds occasionally flew into the compound—sparrows, currawongs, even a family of plovers. Lone crows pecking through bags of garbage left outside the unit gates at lock-in. Edgar watched them through the finger holes in the grille that covered the bars on his window. Where did they lay their eggs? he wondered. In those months Edgar hung his jacket over the window to thwart the dawn. In the dimness he created he was able to sleep long and hard. He would have slept all day if he could. Sometimes he did, when the screws locked the gaol down. (Screws: Edgar was slowly getting a hang of the new lingo.) Sometimes, if there had been a fight, or a screw got walloped, or a pair of scissors went missing, the entire place would be shut down to punish everyone. It was a strange stasis. There were beatings. There were puerile torments. And now Edgar had been asked to work.
Edgar who had never had a job in his life.
It’s either that or the withdrawal of privileges. Edgar went the next day with the other workers to the textiles factory, which was housed behind a solid brick wall running along one side of the gaol. This was a new experience for him. A new room in his mind had been opened, as in a dream—he’d had no idea there was anything on the other side of this wall. The shop floor hummed with the sound of well-oiled machinery, like the language of bees. Sewing machines. There seemed to be hundreds of them stretching across the concrete floor to the wall, although Edgar’s sense of quantity was no more reliable than his estimate of time.
An officer put him to work at a vacant machine. What was he supposed to do now? The man working next to him came across.
‘Not like this, not like this,’ shaking his little finger with its long, ludicrous nail.
He spoke with a thick accent Edgar could not easily understand, though he recognised the hooked nose, the swarthy complexion of the man he had sat next to in the truck the day they had arrived. Edgar mimed driving. The man nodded. Here was a bond. A moment of recognition that was like finding the dogs again after returning to the shearing shed.
But he couldn’t bring himself to think of the dogs. That thought was an agony. That thought bit. In his mind all the dogs began to turn to stone.
‘Yema,’ the man said, pointing to himself, and they shook hands. The man, Yema, turned to the machine. He showed Edgar how to raise the foot so as to feed the material through; how to lower the foot and load the bobbin, how to adjust the tension wheel. He warned Edgar to keep his fingers away from the needle, and that if he broke one he had to get a new needle from the screws. Slowly Edgar began to get the idea. He laughed out loud when the stitches began to appear in a short sharp burst, like a cicatrice in the cloth or, indeed, like the flawed junction in his own lip. Yema, of course, was much faster. He called out encouragement to Edgar, not to let the material bunch up. He inspected Edgar’s stitches, holding them close to his eyes, and gave him further tips. By lunchtime Edgar was beginning to get the hang of it. He had enjoyed himself, and thanked Yema for helping him.
‘Where yer from?’ Edgar asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘Where do yer come from?’
‘Frum Afghanistan.’
‘Is that near Wagga?’
Yema laughed. Good joke. Was it? Edgar wondered why. By the end of the day he was humming along with his machine. It was like riding a motorbike. Well, almost. If this was retribution then it was not working. Edgar felt happy. Well, almost. The overseer came and inspected their work, the quality and evenness, tallying what they had accomplished against the quota he had fixed under a clipboard. He nodded to himself. Snipped a few loose hanging dags of cotton. The machines were switched off and fell silent one by one. Only as they were packing up to leave did Edgar speak to the screw, who was wearing rubber gloves with which to pat them down. Edgar began to recognise these commonplace routines.
‘What’s this for, chief?’
‘What?’
‘What’re we makin’ here, chief?’
‘Flags.’ The overseer looked at him.
‘Flags?’
‘Flags. Australian flags. If you don’t like it you can go down the other end, I’ve got a vacancy in shrouds.’
‘Eh?’
‘Shrouds. Coffin linings. Funeral shrouds.’
‘I’ll stick ter flags.’
Outside Edgar remembered at once the mother’s coffin lowering into the earth. Had her body been wrapped in a flag? Yema could not understand all the fuss and delay associated with the rituals of Western burial. Where he came from the sooner they buried the dead in the comfort of the grave, plainly wrapped, on their right-hand side, facing Mecca, the better for everyone. How the Angel of Death must laugh at you Westerners, when he came to collect the souls of the dead in all their pretty finery. Edgar wondered at all this talk of death. Perhaps his own right to live was forfeit, after all he had been born with the cord around his neck, he shouldn’t have lived. No no no, Yema sought to explain, the angel in charge of embryos in the womb had been looking after him. God was good. He was meant to live. He had been saved for greater things. Yeah, like sewing flags. Yes, why not? Very patriotic. Yema gleaned a great sense of purpose from futility. It was either that or go mad. Other work came their way, depending on orders. The factory also made clothes; their own clothes; officers’ uniforms too—a bonus of three cents for every collar you sewed above the quota. They also sewed surgical gowns and hospital bedsheets. Edgar listened to the rhythm of Yema’s voice. If the screw had told Edgar he must work, then work he must. And if he refused? Well, said Yema, lowering his voice, he could always go and join
the blacks in the non-workers unit, but he did not recommend that. In fact he shuddered. Life not worth a cigarette paper. So Edgar stayed with flags. He grew to like them, to like his skill in their assembly. He examined the stitching of his own clothes with a new eye.
At its least, work enabled the time to pass from hot to cold, dry to wet.
A sense of balance. He dreamed, or thought he dreamed, of the stone dogs feeding by the river—of him trying to beat them apart with the hatchet—of the mother’s voice beneath the pack: Help me, Eddy, get them off me. He spluttered awake. If anything would drive him mad, it was those damned grassdogs. Gazing at the paint on the walls, Edgar’s thoughts would drift. Occasionally he saw the grass sway and flow with the breeze like the surface of water. And tunnelling beneath it, like a machine or some animal, something burrowing towards him. He watched the rye-grass shudder until whatever it was reached the paint and dispersed and disappeared.
Cold to hot. Wet to dry.
In this context, back when the time was still warm, Yema one day told him that he now had money in his account.
What did he need money for in gaol? Everything was provided. Edgar told his friend that he had money in an account on the outside, but had never seen the need to make much use of it.
‘Shh,’ hissed Yema, ‘never tell people in here that.’
Money could buy all sorts of things, even in gaol. Small luxuries. Yema showed Edgar how to fill in the buy-up form. Tobacco, for example, was worth a week’s wages. Edgar did not want tobacco. He wanted to know if he had enough to buy a Paddle Pop? Why yes, more than enough. How much was a Paddle Pop? A Paddle Pop was eighty-one cents, they debited the amount from your account. They also took out TV rental, if you rented a TV, and a percentage went to pay for victims’ compensation. Edgar wanted to know how could they compensate the victim when his victim was dead? Well, there was the matter of the family. Yema changed the subject. He didn’t want to talk about his victim either.
Yema did not have a TV. Furthermore he admired how Edgar had resisted the mindless soporific of television. The Department sanctioned it. It kept the rabble quiet. It had become a management tool, the way they kept replaying the video movies over and over. Television and methadone. Hang on, Edgar said, I wouldn’t mind watching a bit of telly if I had half a chance. No no no my friend, it dulls the mind and stultifies the senses, it makes you submit to the oppressor. The opiate of the Infidel. Edgar snorted at these funny words. Yema could speak five languages and sometimes, for all Edgar could understand, he was speaking them all at once. Edgar waved the buy-up form, did Yema mean to say that according to this bit of paper he could get two Paddle Pops if he wanted?
Yes, that is what it meant.
So Edgar did, and he gave one to Yema. Their tongues leapt at the sweetness of the chocolate. Edgar had almost forgotten the taste. It was marvellous. He wanted another one right now, but was told he would have to wait until next week. Fill in another form. Wait in the queue. In his eyes there was the dawning of a primitive economics.
More so than Edgar, Yema navigated his way methodically through the structured routine of the gaol day, shuffling and obsequious, keeping as low a profile as was humanly possible. He tried to explain this to Edgar. On the straight path over the pit of Hell he was not passing as fast as lightning, or as recklessly as the wind, or as a bird, or a running man, or even a crawling man, but he was inexorably passing. He was presenting the smallest target for Allah’s wrath. Where it posed no threat to him he tried to look out for Edgar; helped him when an officer or the loudspeaker barked out an order he could not understand. He that does a good deed shall be rewarded ten times the like of it, Yema said.
One day, in the dry months, Yema and Edgar stood in the buy-up line. Edgar had already saved enough to purchase a new kettle, which took pride of place in his tub back in the cell. Clusters of men stood around talking in small groups. Those with purchases moved quickly away from the window. It was dangerous to loiter. An inmate, moving along the line, approached Edgar.
‘Smoketherebro?’
‘Eh?’ Edgar’s hearing was never the best, and he was still learning the argot.
‘I said—smoke there, bro? Are ya deaf?’
‘Don’t smoke.’
‘What about buyin’ us a Paddle Pop then?’
Yema eased himself, ever so gradually, away from Edgar. And he that does evil shall only be rewarded the like of it.
‘Whafor?’
‘You bought one for your Leb friend, why not me?’
‘Who?’
‘Him, your little Leb mate.’
‘Leb?’
‘What he is. Where he’s from.’
‘Is that near Wagga?’
It did not seem unreasonable to Edgar, since he had so much money for Paddle Pops in his account, that he might not lavish his newfound purchasing power upon others. It was the same succour he had received from the supermarkets before they had turned nasty. He gave the young bloke, who was called Indy, a Paddle Pop, and he was most appreciative and the exchange took place in the spirit of brotherhood rather than commerce, although he did not talk to Edgar much during the following days.
Later, when they were alone and were able to find some whispered privacy, Yema said:
‘That very bad, to give in to him. There be trouble for you now.’
‘I thought he just wanted a icy-pole.’
‘Trouble starts with icy-poles. Now he will expect it.’
Edgar was angry he had been tricked. It reminded him of Kate Shoebridge’s duplicity. Why was dealing with people always so complicated? So that when the next buy-up day came around, the young man called Indy asked him again for a Paddle Pop, Edgar said no.
‘What did you say?’
‘Said no. Fuckorf.’
‘You stupid as well as ugly? Puttin’ me on show in fronta these blokes.’
The blokes were all looking the other way.
‘Fuckorf.’
‘You’re a retard. You’re a gronk,’ Indy yelled, ‘You’re a deadset chat.’
‘I ain’t. I’s fit. Judge said I’s fit.’
Indy walked away shaking his head. There was general laughter, which was hard to pinpoint. Someone called out ‘Good on ya,’ but no one wanted to be seen directly siding with Edgar, whose stomach was churning.
The next week, after they had made their purchases, Indy returned with a friend, a man called Otto. Edgar saw that Yema’s prediction had come true. If he continued to buy things for others, then it would never stop. He would be a soft target. Edgar made sure he licked his ice cream all over. Yema quietly vanished. Indy had lost all trace of his former brotherhood.
‘You owe me one Paddle Pop. And Otto too.’
‘Fuckorf,’ snarled Edgar through the aberration of his mouth.
‘That’s not nice, gronk,’ said the friend, Otto, standing beside Indy. ‘Indy likes Paddle Pops.’
‘Not nice comin’ from such an ugly gronk,’ Indy said.
‘Yer fuckin’ monkeys,’ said Edgar, who had no real feeling for the tension that had prickled through the air. There was silence among the nearby inmates who watched in anticipation of some amusement. The only officers were on the far side of the compound, oblivious.
‘Ugly gronks need therapy,’ said Indy.
With no sense of propriety, or the proper order of things, Edgar kicked the taller one, Otto, as hard as he could in the knackers, then, as he sagged forward, thrust the dripping ice cream deep into the stunned mouth and, with a shove on the stick, down the man’s throat. Indy rained blows on Edgar’s head and torso, but Edgar ignored them. They reminded him of a form of human contact, which he had forgotten, that he hadn’t felt since the father had been alive.
Indy gripped Edgar’s arms, but Edgar was strong and threw him off. Otto spluttered, coughing the icy-pole stick and a gobful of Paddle Pop onto the ground. Then it was on and, as according to the laws of mathematics, Edgar landed fewer blows on them than they landed on him. There was
a whirlwind of flailing arms and fists. In their combined efforts Edgar’s nose was flattened. Tears sprang to his eyes. They began to get the upper hand. He found himself thinking it was lucky he had already lost his teeth. Still he didn’t give up. His knuckles were raw but he kept throwing punches at their bony skulls. In time they got him down and were kicking at his head and body. Again, lucky they were only wearing running shoes. They kicked and stamped at him. Edgar curled into a ball.
‘Screws.’
The therapy stopped. Edgar rested on his hands and knees, breathing heavily. By the time he was helped to his feet there were no assailants and no witnesses. Edgar wiped the blood from his nose on the back of his hand.
Who had assaulted him? No idea. How many were there? Dunno. Did he want to press charges? Nup. The screws looked around at the sea of insolent faces.
‘Let ‘em punch on, chief.’
‘Who said that?’
No one owned up. The distraction was over. The buy-up queue moved forward. Yema appeared and helped Edgar back to their unit. He sat on the bed while Edgar cleaned the blood from his face and fists. He looked at the distorted flesh in the distorted mirror, one eye already swelling to close.
‘You did that very well, my friend,’ Yema said.
‘Eh? Why?’
‘You put up a valiant effort. You kept honour, yet you let them win.’
‘They did win.’
‘Now they will leave you alone. You are too much work. If it had been easy they would be back tomorrow. If you had beaten them they would come back with shivs to stab you. But because you did not allow them to win easily, they have kept face.’
