Grassdogs

by Mark O'Flynn

  ‘They did win,’ Edgar said again, his lips thickening.

  ‘Perhaps, but the important thing you have demonstrated is to make them think you are letting them win. It is a subtle language. Now they will understand there is too much trouble standing over you. It is a good result.’

  ‘A good result, he says,’ Edgar mumbled, ‘a big tick. Thanks, teach.’

  Yema was right. Whenever a stranger approached Edgar in the buy-up queue to ask: ‘Smoketherebro?’ Edgar now knew the formulaic response with which to throw them off. No, you can’t have a smoke, bro, because it’s my last one. No, you can’t have my watch because it was left to me by my old man in his will. No offence caused. None taken. It would be unreasonable to take a man’s last smoke, or a father’s watch. To do so would justify retaliation. Therefore the questioner would move on like a wolf down the line to find a softer touch, a new bloke, a youngster. A subtle language.

  Edgar’s bruises subsided. As they turned from purple to brown to yellow he liked to prod their shrinking tenderness. He lifted his face to the air, or to the grille on his window, and sensed the temperature cooling. It felt with the interminable routine of the gaol that each day was the same day repeated over and over. Sometimes he stared at the wire, at the trees on the hill beyond the outer wall, and wondered how long he would have to stay here, how long this single day went on for. Then he remembered. Yema had worked it out for him: until he was fifty-two years old. He didn’t know if it was better or worse to put a figure on it. His lip sometimes curled with longing to climb that hill, to hear twigs snap beneath his feet, imagining the view from the top. He promised he would come straight back down. Then, turning away, he steeled himself, wishing the hill aflame.

  Yema, on the other hand, was preoccupied with every fragment into which time could be divided. Time since his last meal. Time until lock-in. Time until Ramadan. Time until the day of his release. Hope.

  He had lost his watch. He had lost other things as well, including his prized amulet, the system was run by thieves, but it was his watch that he valued most. The standover men hadn’t even had a chance to take it. He was composing a letter to the Ombudsman. The watch had been confiscated from him at the time of his arrest. It had cost a lot of money and he wanted it back, or else be compensated for its true monetary value. There was no use denying that officers of the Department had stolen it. Such a handsome watch as his would clearly be attractive to the underpaid and corrupt servants of the State.

  ‘But yer’ve already got a watch.’

  ‘This is another watch,’ Yema held up his wrist, ‘worth nothing. A frippery. You must help in my composition to the Ombudsman to instigate the inquiry that will restorate my watch to me.’

  ‘Eh? But I can’t write.’

  ‘You know how Australians think. What Australian turn of speech might appeal to the Ombudsman, or is it more better to say Ombudswoman?’

  After scratching his chin Edgar said:

  ‘Shit, I dunno.’

  This letter was an ongoing concern for Yema. It went through many drafts.

  ‘You know,’ he suggested one day to Edgar, ‘you could get the Department to provide you with some improved teeth.’

  ‘New teeth?’

  ‘New improved ones. It is your right. It is only just. It will help you to chew the meat more better.’

  ‘Like a dorg, eh?’

  ‘Like a man.’

  Sometimes Yema prayed with the other Muslims, Lebanese, Iraqis, Aboriginal converts, at special festivals and on holy days, but usually he kept to himself. They were younger, and despite their language he had little in common with them. Time outside his pathway from cell to sewing machine and back, was time he disliked, when he felt vulnerable. He only wished to be left alone to do, as they say, his own gaol.

  One day, when the weather was cooling, with flecks of sleet in the air, Mr O’Neil, the wing officer, summoned Edgar to the officers’ station behind its reinforced perspex. A parcel had arrived for him. A large parcel. A big heavy box containing no less than a television, and a doona.

  ‘Who give me this?’ he asked.

  ‘Fucked if I know, Ed.’

  He carried it back to his cell. Yema read the card, which they found at the bottom of the box and showed the picture of the moon rising over a grass paddock. For the winter, it said. The return address had been torn off the envelope.

  ‘Who send me this?’

  Yema read the card for him.

  ‘From Lynne,’ he said, ‘Who is this?’

  Edgar had to think: ‘My sister.’

  Despite diagnosis and a cycle of treatment and remission my mother remained passionately concerned with Edgar’s situation. She spoke to me of him as I was finishing school and deciding what to do with my prospects. I did not see why she cared about that weirdo loser. Hadn’t he wiped dog slobber on me? There’d been ugly photos of him in the paper.

  ‘There but for the grace of God, Tony,’ she had said. ‘Remember that.’

  She did what she could, but she was not a wealthy woman. She was settling her ghosts. Illness had inflamed her. My father drew a line in the sand as far as contributing financially to the comfort and wellbeing of a convicted criminal, let alone this cockamamie idea of hiring a lawyer. She was only just getting better herself, and now this. He buckled under the strength of her conviction. Her sense of injustice at disease had found a focus in her brother. Since the deaths of her parents, those wizened old prunes, she had felt a weight like no other being lifted from her. She owed Edgar something. It was my mother’s crusade from the start.

  I did not want to listen to them argue any more, so I went out. I had a gram of hash in my pocket, and an uncle called Edgar. No one could tell me what I didn’t know, though what did she mean by the grace of God?

  With his new possessions, including the box, Edgar was almost looking forward to the cold time that lay ahead. He wrapped his doona about him like a king, listening to his jug boil, staring at the walls. He never tired of the walls. Staring at them, his thoughts dried up and his body calmed. Then he remembered that he now had a television. Whacko. Things were on the up. Now he had something else to stare at, and when he worked out how to turn it on there’d be no stopping him.

  Yema’s other great disgruntlement (apart from the theft of his watch, and the injustice of his incarceration—after all, in his country his crime was no crime at all) was the treatment he had received at the hands of the Department in regard to his other item of property. His father’s amulet. He showed Edgar a shoebox full of letters and documents in triplicate dealing with or, according to Yema, covering up the issue of the amulet. It was a whitewash.

  Edgar sat back and, even though he knew he shouldn’t laugh, listened to the funny way Yema told his story.

  Firstly, Yema did not want his mother to know he was in gaol, so he wrote to his cousin, Abdullah was his name. He asked for the amulet, a pendant worn around the neck, to be sent to him. Comfort in a time of tribulation. His family had agreed. Then there had been the problem of postage to a foreign country. Yema hated to think what lies were told to his mother. The amulet was sent, as asked for, to his brother’s house in Enmore. Then there was the problem of sending it into the gaol. If it was posted Yema feared that he would never see it. He knew that mail was often thrown in the bin. Finally the brother came all the way from Enmore to visit and brought it with him. As soon as he passed it across the table the officers pounced. The brother was taken away. The other inmates and their visitors, everyone in the room stared at him. It was his worst nightmare. Back in their station the officers cracked open the amulet. Inside they noticed a brown sticky substance, which, they said, would have to be analysed down at the lab. Yema lost privileges for six months. That had been two years ago, and despite his protestations, all the letters he had written, he still had no idea what had happened to the amulet.

  ‘They think it drug,’ he told Edgar, ‘but would anyone be so silly to bring drug into gaol in this way?
’

  ‘I dunno,’ Edgar said. ‘Plenty of silly people round here. What was it?’

  ‘A lock of my father’s hair. A pinch of soil from his grave.’

  Yema shook the sheaf of papers, all that remained of his quest, before shoving them angrily back in the shoebox, shielding his hot face from Edgar’s gaze. If Allah did not charge a soul beyond its capacity, then how much more would he be expected to bear? Edgar wondered why anyone would want to wear those things around their neck. He kept chuckling to himself over that funny word: tribulation.

  Another parcel arrived from the woman who called herself his sister. The wrapping had already been opened, but inside it was a pillow, with a crimson pillowslip. He was allowed to keep it. There was another card. It bore the picture of some water lilies floating on a lagoon. Yema awkwardly deciphered the shaky handwriting.

  ‘Dear Edgar, I hope you can find someone to help you read this message—That me.’

  ‘Just read.’

  ‘I have spoken to a lawyer who seems to think there may be grounds to appeal on your fitness to plead. This may take some time, but fingers crossed—’ Yema interrupted himself: ‘What means this, this some time? Some time? This nothing time.’

  ‘Read.’

  ‘There nothing else. What means this “fingers crossed”?’

  ‘Where’s it say my sister?’

  ‘Here,’ Yema pointed out the signature, ‘Lynne.’

  ‘Lynne.’

  He squinted at the name.

  ‘You don’t know your own sister?’

  Edgar shook his head, and Yema stopped smiling.

  ‘At least she help you.’

  ‘I don’t want her fuckin’ help. She wanna take me back to that court. That shiny court. I hate it there. They say bad things about me. I won’t go. She can fuckorf.’

  Edgar trembled with a sudden rage. Yema handed back the card, gazing at his friend for some time.

  Years passed, as did the clouds. Edgar became institutionalised. In the cold season someone smashed Yema’s nose for no reason with a tin of condensed milk swung in a long sock. Perhaps they simply didn’t like his nose. Yema was immured in the prison hospital in Sydney. At least he’d be able to see his brother there. His sewing machine, with its stockpile of linen beside it, remained vacant and silent.

  Then another man was hunched over the sewing machine like a gold-miner over his pan. Edgar could have sworn it was Mr Ashcroft. Or at least Edgar thought it was the fat manager from the supermarket. Or was it Dungay? He did not speak to Edgar. He did not speak to anyone. Ate his lunch at his machine. Edgar felt sure it was him, unless it was his brainbox playing tricks on him. Edgar grew scared of going to work; of his old conspiracies. Before a cold month had passed Edgar, wheezing through his open mouth, watched another inmate he did not know approach the seated man—who was it?—from behind and, before Edgar had time to do anything other than blink, hit the newcomer, if it was Mr Ashcroft, over the head as hard as possible with a piece of four-by-two from the timber shop. The seated man fell to the floor, dragging the linen with him, and lay there groaning.

  ‘Kid tamperer,’ said the second man to Edgar, before sidling away with his wood.

  The officers asked Edgar what happened. He didn’t know. He didn’t know the name of either man. The overseer said that this was not the first time Edgar’s proximity to trouble had been noticed. His failure to cooperate. It was in his case notes. Edgar shrugged. ‘Trouble foller me.’

  An ambulance was summoned to cart the man off to hospital. On the stretcher, looking down at him, Edgar saw that it wasn’t Mr Ashcroft at all. Yet it was someone. Edgar had to clean the bloodstain off the floor, which slowed down his quota of flags for the afternoon. He thought he found a piece of brain and flicked it away. The overseer bemoaned the waste of good linen. Again the sewing machine sat idle and silent.

  Later Edgar realised that it probably wasn’t a piece of someone’s brain, but more likely a crumb from the man’s lunch.

  Seeing him so much alone, Indy and Otto and another friend returned to the buy-up queue to try their luck with him again.

  ‘See you’ve bought yourself a new telly,’ Otto said. ‘You must be sewin’ plenty of collars and cuffs to save that much.’

  Edgar did not reply.

  ‘Be real nice if you loaned your set to Indy for tonight’s game.’

  Why should he do that? If he did he would never see it again. If he was going to be given another flogging by these blokes, he sighed, then he had better make it worth his while.

  ‘Youse cunts can fuckorf, yer fuckin’ rockapes.’

  Indy and his pals stared at Edgar’s mouth. He wondered, if he could take the words back would it make any difference? Edgar knew his fate was sealed. Perhaps they recalled their last altercation, for they dawdled on their heels and wandered off, looking for the next distraction, which was the yardstick by which they passed the time. Boredom was a great precursor to mischief. Or as Yema had said, evil not attributable to Allah. That afternoon, for instance, when the call came to return to their units for muster, a large group gathered on the top compound, refusing to go inside. Indy and Otto and their cohorts were in the thick of it. Only when the officers assembled in their helmets and vests, did the recalcitrants back down and return to their cells.

  No one was surprised when, the next morning, no doors were opened.

  Noises in the unit were amplified at night. The rattle of keys on the officers’ lanyards; the slamming of cell doors; the fury, or despair, in human voices. The shouting of inmates echoed through the wing. Threats, imprecations; sound for sound’s sake. If he stood on his chair and peered through the ventilation grille above his door Edgar sometimes saw small items, usually bungers tied to pieces of cotton, scurry like insects out from under one cell door, around the corner of the dividing wall to the next cell. Sometimes a pencil crept out like the pincer of some predatory animal to work the prize in under the crack. Sometimes men called out to intimidate. But, as Edgar had learned, with two solid iron doors between, nothing could get him in here. Words were just noises. By morning their intent to act had usually dissipated. The day began again.

  On nights when there was a big game, every television was tuned to the same channel. There were explosive cheers of elation, or else groans of disgust, when either team scored, or faltered. These cheers and moans, all synchronised so that Edgar sometimes felt they were all together, as one, against a system. Even though he did not understand the rules Edgar enjoyed these games. The combined energy of their roaring at victory, made impotent by the walls, was a sound that gave Edgar a fleeting sense of belonging. The same with their communal silence at defeat. The derision of the victors came later.

  If there was a fragile union in this silence, their temporary alliance was even more evident during violent movies, replayed over and over on the video channel. There was nothing more relaxing than lashings of bullet-ridden blood-soaked violence. Every gunshot on the screen wrought a tremendous cheer. There was no perception of irony in this. The bloodier the better. Edgar preferred the football games, but a good massacre seemed to get him pumped up as well as any of them. When the game or movie was over he felt diminished, shrinking into himself like a tortoise under the nose of a dog. The individual threats and cursing started again, as everyone returned to the confines of his cell; the pack turning in on itself, a fox in a trap gnawing its foot off.

  It was not unusual for inmates to boast of their crimes. This was their college after all. Edgar had learned how to open locked doors and how to hotwire stolen cars. He knew how to secrete drugs about his person. He knew rather than try to force open a till during a robbery, one simply took the whole till. He knew how to rob a bank and reduce the prospect of a heavy sentence simply by not carrying a weapon. Attitude was as good as a weapon. But he was already doing a heavy sentence. What good was this advice to him? It’ll help you when you get out. I’m a old man when I get out. Take it, it’s free advice. Advice that he saw
was laden with bluff and bravado.

  One day the overseer in the textiles shop laid them all off. There was not enough work. Edgar wondered how the demand for flags, for cuffs and collars, for shrouds, could suddenly collapse? He dawdled around the compound catching snippets of conversation here and there, chatting to various colleagues in green. He knew there was nowhere to walk to, other than back again. Nothing was new. For him, as for so many others, a pathway came into being. It was the pacing of caged animals. On the edge of one group he overheard several crooks talking, but one in particular…

  ‘—the Ampol self-serve at Five Dock, so pissed I took a samurai sword to the bitch at the till. Knew I shouldn’t have, but Christ it was fun.’

  Edgar looked at the man. Was it Meacham?

  ‘That’s the risk they run, ain’t it? If they work with cash they’ve gotta expect to be robbed. Firemen expect flames, don’t they?’

  Meacham was staring at Edgar. His mouth was moving. Edgar was not entirely sure if the words came from that mouth.

  ‘So I whacked the slut with the flat of it, fuck did she squeal. A shaving nick and she’s screaming her head off. Had to give her a thumping to make her shut up. Smack smack smack. “Shutthefuckup lady,” I say, “this is a fuckin’ armed robbery, whadda you fuckin’ expect, good manners?” Nice sword too. Threw it in the river…’

  Laughter.

  Edgar circled the group so he could look clearly at the man, but he did not recognise him. Did Meacham know it was him? Edgar could not say.

  How did Edgar know it was Meacham? He just knew. The story. Usually these visions came to him in dreams, but here was Meacham, bold as brass, carrying on like the life of the party when he was supposed to be dead as a dodo. Unless it was all tricks in his head. Or unless Meacham had stolen the story. No one else appeared to find Meacham dead as a dodo. They were listening to his every word. Someone was tinkering with his brainbox. Meacham turned to Edgar, if it was Meacham, and said, or seemed to say, ‘Mum’s the word, eh?’ And winked. Edgar said nothing. He went back early to his unit and lay down on his bed, even though he was not tired.