by Mark O'Flynn
Mr O’Neil told Edgar that Otto would not die.
‘Pity,’ said Edgar.
Otto was in Long Bay Hospital after some surgery to repair a perforated bowel. There were no witnesses to the incident, so there was nothing to charge Edgar with—everyone knew that the life of a dog wasn’t worth diddly. Otto had slipped on the toothbrush. What it did mean, however, was that Edgar would be unable to return to the Main. Indy and all his friends would be out to even the score.
Edgar, as they say, still had more gaol in him.
‘I ain’t signing on Protection.’
‘You’ve got no choice, Ed. We’re not letting you back out there with them.’
‘I can protect meself.’
‘That’s the trouble, Ed. Indy and his mates might need protecting from you.’
The Protection Unit was full to overcrowding. It was another type of pressure cooker. Everyone wanted to be protected from something. Young lads had to be protected from predators. The lifers had to be protected from their own notoriety. Society had to be protected from the likes of them. Edgar was asked if he was likely to slash-up? If he was, they would place him in an observation cell where the light bulb burned all night.
No, he said again, he would rather knock someone else than kill himself.
‘Sounds like you don’t need any counselling then.’
Edgar was placed in a two-out cell that he was to share with a grey-haired, silver-bearded older man, although Edgar, with his own scrappy bits of beard, did not know how old he himself might look.
‘Here you go, Fletch,’ said the officer, opening the door and introducing them, ‘you can convert the heathen dogman.’
The cell was identical to all the others Edgar had seen, except that it contained two bunks. The man was already ensconced on the bottom one, tucked under a floral doona. He was not happy.
‘Chief,’ he called, getting awkwardly to his feet, ‘chief, you’ve got to find me a one-out.’
‘They’re all taken.’
‘I can’t share with anyone else.’
‘Bad luck.’
The door was closed. Click.
There was a little mauve curtain hanging over the window. Pictures on the walls, not of naked girls, but of rivers, trees, country landscapes. There were books. Edgar counted ten, which was the maximum allowable limit. And—Edgar’s spirits soared—Fletcher had a television. He looked at the man he was now to spend eighteen hours a day with for the foreseeable future. His ears sprouted tufts of white fur. Did Edgar know him? He could not say. At least he did not look like Meacham. Edgar threw his tub into the corner, then he held out his hand.
‘G’day ter yer too, fellah.’
The old man, resigned to his entrapment, responded:
‘Yes. I suppose. Hail, young fellow.’
And they shook.
It was harder for Fletcher than it was for Edgar. Edgar farted. A lot. He chose odd, if rare, times to shower. He picked his toenails and flicked the parings about the floor. He urinated loudly in the toilet. He picked his nose with every finger. He masturbated on the top bunk—as they say in the slot, every night he had a kill. His favourite television shows were cartoons.
(‘Have you no consideration for anyone?’ Fletcher cried out, once they had got to know one another. Fletcher must have put up with a lot.
‘Eh? What’s that big word?—Consider-what? Do you ever have that for me?’)
They were quickly getting along like an old married couple.
One day a week, they had access to the Education block and Fletcher insisted that Edgar go there, that he should try to learn to read and write.
‘I can write me name,’ said Edgar defensively. ‘I got a certificate.’
But when Fletcher put him to the test he found that Edgar mixed up his b’s and p’s and d’s and q’s. He signed his name Ebgr Ham with a tail of ink meandering to the end of the page.
‘Just like a doctor,’ said Fletcher.
Edgar looked forward to Wednesdays, and Fletcher, who did not attend Education, looked forward to a brief respite from Edgar’s company. Both were extremely cranky if Education was thwarted for any reason. In time Edgar wrote a letter to his friend Yema and told him about the weather, but he did not know where Yema was any more. Fletcher worked on the ground maintenance gang, which cut the grass around the sterile zone. He complained constantly that the plovers swooped him when he pushed his mower too close to the camera poles, but Edgar envied him, at least he was outdoors.
Each evening Fletcher kneeled at his bunk and covered his face with his hands, mouthing soft words to himself. Once Edgar had the curiosity to ask him:
‘What yer doin’?’
‘I’m praying.’
Edgar laughed. They each thought the other was mad. Fletcher did not ask Edgar what he was in for. Nor did Edgar ask what was Fletcher’s crime, although Fletcher delighted in telling Edgar which other inmates were in for chopping up people and stuffing them in suitcases (of whom there was no apparent shortage). It was enough to know the length of the sentence. That gave a hint. Fletcher was doing ten on the bottom with sixteen on the top. He’d done nearly eight already so he was looking forward to his release on parole in two years’ time. He’d been a good boy, a model prisoner. It was the screws who let slip to Edgar, in tones of tedious revulsion, that his cellmate was in for taking photographs of things he shouldn’t have been photographing. Sick photos. Of children whom he had drugged. A sex pest. Struggling with his understanding of this, Edgar had no choice but to live with it. One night he woke up with a start. Fletcher was standing no more than a foot away, staring at him.
‘Do I know you?’ Fletcher asked.
Edgar growled and rolled over. One thing gaol had taught him was that nausea was relative. He wondered if he should kill Fletcher in the night. He did not think a kiddie tamperer would present as much of a problem as the German shepherd. In the end he decided not to, as they would probably find someone just as bad to stick in with him, one of the lifers with nothing to lose; someone without a television. Besides, Fletcher had begun to read to him from his ten books, which he would change every now and then at the gaol library. There were many writers, Fletcher said, many modern masters who had tried to describe the prison experience. Many, many, going back to the less modern. Even that slippery penologist Foucault had had some interesting insights. Of course they had romanticised it terribly. Crime and punishment, sin and redemption, these were perennial themes of human experience. If one thought about it, one could think oneself out of this place. The life of the unshackled spirit rose above confinement. Sometimes, he said, he felt like Raskolnikov, but none of them, none of these brilliant minds, knew what he knew. None of them had the finely illuminated perception that he possessed in the light of all this knowledge.
‘Huh?’ Edgar often said.
Fletcher had been a Catholic priest.
‘You talk too much.’
He liked listening to the stories, but there were too many tricks in words. He liked the sound of Fletcher’s voice, but if truth be known he preferred the cartoons.
This did not stop Fletcher, who also liked the sound of his own voice, and gave running commentary on the books he read from. He pontificated on an endless range of subjects. Sometimes Edgar would wake in the night and Fletcher would be standing at the window whispering to himself. He theorised, pacing in front of Edgar, who gazed dully at the Roadrunner, or Rugrats, or Angela Anaconda. Fletcher went on about his fellow inmates whom he considered, unlike him, to be the dregs of humanity.
‘I thought you was the dregs of that,’ said Edgar.
It was a commercial break. Fletcher looked taken aback that Edgar had spoken.
‘What? Because I’m here in Protection?’
‘Because yer a spider. You wouldn’t stand a snowflake’s out there.’
‘And what are you?’
‘I like dregs.’
Fletcher was silent, and then the cartoons started again, the coyo
te falling to his death beneath an anvil, only to bounce back again. When this claimed Edgar’s attention, Fletcher laughed out loud.
One night, after Edgar had noisily finished his ablutions, Fletcher, lying with his face to the wall, said:
‘This is Hell. I’m in Hell.’ It was like a realisation. ‘It’s Camus.’
‘It sure ain’t no picnic,’ said Edgar, flushing the boghole.
Suddenly, climbing up to his bunk, he was a boy again. He heard his voice utter the father’s phrase. The same lilt and intonation to the words. They felt like stones in his mouth. His mind was suddenly filled with the father. Never marry a woman, my lad, unless yer can stand ter watch ‘er chokin’ with a bit of pepper on ‘er tonsil. He lay staring at the ceiling, thinking of Alf. He could hear the faint whistle over the top of his father’s teeth as he worked, smell the boots he kicked into the corner of the kitchen. Fetch my tea. Pass the salt. He could smell his father’s breath, see the hairs on the back of his hands. He knew the space between the freckles on his arms. Edgar was aware that Alf was not present in the cell, but he knew every shape the hand made.
Slowly he realised that Fletcher was still talking.
‘Didn’t you hear a word I said?’
‘What word?’
‘You weren’t listening?’
‘You talk too much.’
Fletcher laughed.
‘Ed, you’re the perfect confessor. You listen, but you don’t hear. And you don’t judge.’
‘I ain’t no judge. It were a judge put me here.’
‘Me too, Ed, me too.’
Fletcher resumed his pacing.
So while Edgar thought of the father, heard, smelt, felt the bristles of his jowls—and in time thought of his mother, and in time, the silky—Fletcher, meanwhile, revelled in the confession of his crimes, made to the waxy cavity of Edgar’s deafness. What he had taken his photographs of, the types of camera he had used, what he was doing while he took them. He elaborated what had tempted him in the first place: a child’s eyes, a pout, her plaits, the gullibility of the mother. He was a lover of children, not some clichéd abuser. Edgar did not listen. He drifted in and out of sleep. He heard the vocal drone, but he was standing in the grass with the father. There were dogs. He wondered where were the grassdogs now? Not here, but out in the long grass—in the paddocks which swayed in the paint on the walls.
Fletcher wanted to know what was Edgar thinking about? Was he listening? But Edgar, as according to Meacham, guarded his dreams. Fletcher was sordid. Or was it Edgar’s dreams that were bestial? Something in Fletcher’s tone filtered through to Edgar. It was the grandstander absorbed with his own voice, rather than—another big mouthful that Fletcher spat derisively—the penitence of the sinner.
Edgar remained, according to the precedent, mute by the visitation of God.
And deaf. He barely listened. He drifted to the paddocks with the father, traipsing through crops of wheat or lupins, a dog swimming in the grass, the great wide sky overhead. He did not hear Fletcher’s mantra: ‘If only they knew, if only they knew.’ He did not register Fletcher’s allusion to the fuss made over this child or that child or one girl missing in particular. Edgar saw his own hand pushing open the door of the shearing shed. They always made such a fuss when a girl went missing. What sort of slutty mothers were they, to go off and leave their daughters in his charge? Dusty sunlight falling from the nailholes in the roof. They were just exploiting him for free babysitting. One of them had actually said to him: ‘After you’ve finished with her you can come and do it to me.’ Sometimes Edgar snored. He breathed the smell of lanolin.
He did not understand why Fletcher quizzed him at the end of each evening’s instalment, asking how much Edgar had understood of his sorry purgation.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Eh? Nothin’.’
‘Didn’t you understand a word I said?’
‘You yabber too much.’
‘You’re incredible.’
‘It don’t matter if I listen or not, you’d still be yabberin’.’
According to Fletcher, God was listening to him through the holy ears of the idiot savant.
Edgar did not listen to the dreamy admission to the accidental overdose of Rohypnol. Nor the sudden young body that had to be disposed of after Fletcher had finished his business. His photography.
‘I mean, Ed, what would you do?’
No reply. Edgar’s reverie resumed. The peppercorn tree bowing over the shed. Fletcher’s words drifted against the ceiling. He went on about the fuss that infected the entire district where he was once parish priest after being transferred from Queensland. Edgar did not understand the options that had paraded themselves through Fletcher’s panicky mind. None of them had ever died before. They had all liked him. He had tortured himself over whether to make a full confession to police. Perhaps plea-bargain for manslaughter. It would have eased his conscience. But conscience was a social construct; it was a tool of oppression, and he had risen above dogma. Besides, he had his good works to perform. Edgar dreamed of dogma. Of scrawling in the dust with a stick. Instead, when Fletcher was caught, he only admitted to the photographs they could identify, which, even the jury admitted, could have been of anyone—while they carried on the search for someone else miles away. Edgar could smell pepper. They dragged the river twice. Hope dried up. Just another unsolved case. A local suicide deflated the passion for the search. Handy red herring, that. Most of Fletcher’s victims were in Queensland so the scent was now well and truly cold. They would never find her. While he was here, right under their noses serving time for something altogether different. Almost innocuous. Justice was not the province of the Church, as salvation was not the domain of the courts. A shame really, such a pretty face.
Edgar drifted through the grass. Heard the different voices of the dogs. He did not comprehend the big words Fletcher used in his boasting, and did not try to. The sound of his voice was lulling, as it went on, night after night, hypnotically. Edgar slept. The scarecrow of the mother came and cooked scones in the corner of the cell. He dreamed of her searching in the grass for the flour. So he did not understand what Fletcher muttered. Some caves in a range of hills. They had no name. They weren’t even on the official maps. No one knew they were there. Even the blacks had forgotten they had performed initiation rituals there. They were just hills without names and were known only by the small town at their base. Edgar looked up, the horizon swayed with grass—a small nowhere town—at the blue silhouette—called ‘the Rock’. The search never even got close—
Here, lying as he always did on the top bunk, Edgar’s ears twitched. He fell suddenly back into his body. Listening. Suddenly he knew where he had seen Fletcher before. Without a beard. Not in a dream with Meacham.
It was at the Rock that Fletcher disposed of the remains, buried in an anonymous cave, miles from the site of the search. They’d never find her. Poor little Sophie. Such a pretty face. If only they knew. Was Ed awake? Huh? Did he understand a word that Fletcher was saying to him? Nuh. Did he remember the girl’s name for instance?
‘Shut up, I’m tryin’ ter sleep.’
Edgar grumbled and rolled over, wide-awake, for when he thought about it he did remember the girl’s name. Sophie T. And other details besides. Rohypnol. The colour of her underwear. Details that Fletcher had happily revealed.
Edgar kept these details to himself.
He asked if Fletcher remembered a TV show called Huckleberry Hound?
I don’t believe Edgar knew he had a cause, which I guess is pretty much the point, while for my mother time was running out. Trucks came and went, in and out of the big gates. Inmates arrived and disappeared overnight. The prison population was in constant transit. Only Edgar seemed stuck fast.
The following summer, after Christmas, Edgar was informed he was to have a visitor. But the gaol was locked down, so the visitor was told to return the following week. Edgar did not know who to expect, but when he enter
ed the visiting section, locked in a pair of white overalls that were zipped up the back and secured at his neck, there, perched on a chair bolted to the floor, was the mother. Quickly he realised it could not be her. The mother was dead as a dodo. It must be the sister. He faintly recalled her sitting in the courtroom during his trial. And at the mother’s funeral. Yes. He definitely recognised her. But did that recognition go deeper? She was much older. Today she wore an orange cardigan. He could smell perfume.
‘Hello, Edgar,’ she said, standing up. Her hand was small and cool.
‘Lynne?’ he tried the name, a stone in his mouth.
I rose beside her and shook my uncle’s hand. I was almost his height. His hand was cold and strong. I introduced myself but he did not remember me. I tried not to look at his lip.
They exchanged some pleasantries—the drive out to the gaol, the accommodation she had found in town. The unfortunate delay. He thanked her for her Christmas cards. He kept them in his tub. And for the doona. And the rice cooker. I did not know she had been sending him Christmas cards. He explained, in brief, about the television. I stole glances at the way his tongue worked in his mouth. How had she talked me into this? How could she say but for the grace of God? The only resemblance I could see was the colour of our eyes.
This was no time for small talk. Why had she not come sooner? he asked, and that was something I also wanted to know.
Because she had been sick. She had been sick and for a long time she had believed her husband who thought that Edgar was guilty.
I wanted to interrupt, to get the business underway, but my uncle had other ideas. He wanted some answers to questions he could barely conceive of: When? Who? Why? She told him she had run away from home, the first time when she was thirteen. Edgar was a baby. She hated the farm. The desolate tedium and the emptiness. The sky’s oppression, and the poverty of the dust. She did not want to be reminded of her father and his despair, the constant bickering and broken crockery. Their father, from whom she had stolen money and fled.
