Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  Tell Slim his garden has never looked better. The azaleas are so pink and fluffy it looks like we’re growing fairy floss for the Royal Show.

  Thanks for the picture of Miss Haverty. She’s even prettier than you described. Nothing sexier than a young schoolteacher in spectacles. You’re right about that face, like a dawn sunrise. I guess you won’t tell her if you know what’s good for you, but the boys from D wing send their regards. Well, gotta go, matey. Grub’s up and I better get my share of bolognese before it goes the way of the dodo. Climb high, kid, tread lightly.

  Alex

  P.S. Have you phoned your dad yet? I’m not the best man to judge father–son relationships but I reckon if you’ve been thinking about him so much, there’s a fair chance he’s been thinking about you.

  *

  Saturday morning letter writing with Slim. Mum and Lyle are out at the movies again, keen film buffs that they are. They’re going to see Octopussy. August and I asked to go. They said no again. Funny that. Fucking amateurs.

  ‘What’s Octopussy about?’ Slim asks, his right hand furiously crafting his letter in a remarkably neat longhand cursive.

  I pause from my letter to respond.

  ‘James Bond fights a sea monster with eight vaginas.’

  We’re at the kitchen table with glasses of Milo and sliced oranges. Slim’s got the Eagle Farm horse races playing through a wireless by the kitchen sink. August has an orange quarter skin stuck across his teeth like Ray Price’s mouth guard. Hot and sticky outside because it’s summer and it’s Queensland. Slim’s got his shirt off and I can see his POW-chic ribcage, like he’s slowly dying in front of me from his diet of cigarettes and sorrow.

  ‘You been eatin’ Slim?’

  ‘Don’t get started,’ he says, a rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘You look like a ghost.’

  ‘A friendly ghost?’ he asks.

  ‘Well, not unfriendly.’

  ‘Well, you’re no bronze statue yourself, ya little runt. How’s your letter going?’

  ‘Almost done.’

  *

  Slim spent a total of thirty-six years in Boggo Road. He wasn’t allowed letters for much of his lag in D9. He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection. Humanity. It means waking up. He’s been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years, using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, a man who knows how to escape their red-brick-wall fortress better than anyone.

  Slim met Lyle in 1976 when they both worked at a Brisbane car repair shed. Slim was sixty-six then. He’d served twenty-three years of his life sentence and was on a ‘release-to-work’ scheme, working in a supervised environment outside by day and returning to Boggo Road by night. Slim and Lyle worked well on engines together, had a shorthand for motor mechanics like they had a shorthand for their misspent youths. Some Friday afternoons Lyle slipped long handwritten letters into Slim’s daypack so he could find them over the weekend and they could carry on their chats via Lyle’s piss-poor handwriting. Slim once told me he’d die for Lyle.

  ‘Then Lyle went and asked for something more troubling than dyin’.’

  ‘What’s that, Slim?’ I asked.

  ‘He asked me to babysit you two rats.’

  Two years ago I found Slim writing letters at the kitchen table.

  ‘Letters to cons who don’t receive letters from family and friends,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t their family and friends write to them?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of these blokes don’t have any.’

  ‘Can I write one?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you write to Alex?’

  I took a pen and paper and sat beside Slim at the table.

  ‘What do I write about?’

  ‘Write about who you are and what you’ve been doing today.’

  Dear Alex,

  My name is Eli Bell. I’m ten years old and I’m in Year 5 at Darra State School. I have an older brother named August. He doesn’t talk. Not because he can’t talk, but because he doesn’t want to talk. My favourite Atari game is Missile Command and my favourite rugby league team is the Parramatta Eels. Today August and I went for a ride to Inala. We found a park that had a sewage tunnel running off it that was big enough for us to crawl into. But we had to come out when some Aboriginal boys said the tunnel was theirs and we should get out if we didn’t want to cop a flogging. The biggest one of the Aboriginal boys had a big scar across his right arm. That was the one that August bashed before they all ran away.

  On our way home we saw a dragonfly on the footpath being eaten alive by green ants. I said to August that we should put the dragonfly out of its misery. August wanted to leave it be. But I stood on the dragonfly and squashed it dead. But when I stood on it I killed thirteen green ants in the process. Do you think I should have just left the dragonfly alone?

  Yours sincerely,

  Eli

  P.S. I’m sorry nobody writes to you. I’ll keep writing to you if you want.

  I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received six letter pages back from Alex, three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex’s childhood when he’d been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked Slim just who it was exactly I had become pen pals with.

  ‘That’s Alexander Bermudez,’ he said.

  Sentenced to nine years in Boggo Road Gaol after Queensland Police found sixty-four illegally imported Soviet AK-74 machine guns in the backyard shed of his home in Eight Mile Plains, which he was about to disperse among members of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang, of which he was once Queensland sergeant-at-arms.

  *

  ‘Don’t forget to be specific,’ Slim always says. ‘Details. Put in all the details. The boys appreciate all that detailed daily life shit they don’t get any more. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ’em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ’em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushy, did you go by foot, did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you ate a good meat pie last week, was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.’

  Slim keeps scribbling across his page. He drags on his smoke and his cheeks compress and I can see the shape of his skull, and his short back and sides with a flat top haircut makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s alive. But for how long, Slim?

  ‘Slim.’

  ‘Yes, Eli.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  Slim stops writing. August stops too. They both stare at me.

  ‘Did you kill that taxi driver?’

  Slim offers a half-smile. His lip trembles and he adjusts his thick black spectacles. I’ve known him long enough to know when he’s been hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, dropping my head, placing my pen’s ballpoint back on the letter page. ‘There’s a feature in today’s paper,’ I say.

  ‘What feature?’ Slim barks. ‘I didn’t see anything on me in The Courier today?’

  ‘Not The Courier-Mail. It was in the local rag, the South-West Star. They had one of those “Queensland Remembers” yarns. Huge piece it was. It was about the Houdini of Boggo Road. They talked about your escapes. They talked about the Southport murder. It said you could have been innocent. It said you might have gone away for twenty-four years for a crime you didn’t—’

  ‘Long time ago,’ Slim says, cutting me off.

  ‘But don’t you want people to know the truth?’

  Slim drags on his cigarette.

  ‘Can I ask you a question, kid?’

  ‘Yes.’
/>   ‘Do you think I killed him?’

  I don’t know. What I know is nothing killed Slim. What I know is he never gave up. The darkness didn’t kill him. The cops didn’t kill him. The screws didn’t kill him. The bars. The hole. Black Peter didn’t kill him. I guess I’ve always figured if he was a murderer then his conscience might have been the thing that killed him during those black days down in the hole. But his conscience never killed him. The loss, the life that might have been, never killed him. Almost half his life spent inside and he can still smile when I ask if he’s a murderer. Houdini was locked in a box for thirty-six years altogether and he came out alive. The long magic. The kind of magic trick that takes thirty-six years for the rabbit to stick his head up out of the hat. The long magic of a human life.

  ‘I think you’re a good man,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you’re capable of killing a man.’

  Slim takes his smoke from his mouth. He leans across the table. His voice is soft and sinister.

  ‘Don’t you ever underestimate what any man is capable of,’ he says.

  He leans back in his chair.

  ‘Now show me this article.’

  QUEENSLAND REMEMBERS: NO CHANCE TOO SLIM FOR THE HOUDINI OF BOGGO ROAD

  He was regarded as the most dangerous prisoner in the British Commonwealth, the master escapologist they called ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol’, but Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday’s greatest trick would be walking out of prison a free man.

  A church orphan who lost both his parents at the age of 12, Slim Halliday began his predestined life of crime when he was imprisoned for four days for jumping trains en route to the shearing job in Queensland that might well have kept him on the straight and narrow. Halliday was a seasoned 30-year-old conman and housebreaker by 28 January 1940, when he made his first escape from Boggo Road Gaol’s notorious Number 2 Division.

  SLIM’S PICKINGS

  Houdini Halliday conjured his first magic escape by scaling a section of the prison wall that became known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’, an observation blind spot invisible to guards in surrounding watchtowers. Despite public criticism over the strength of prison security after the one-man escape, this section of the prison wall remained unchanged.

  It was little surprise to the Brisbane public, then, when it was revealed that in a subsequent escape, on 11 December 1946, Halliday climbed over a corner wall of the prison workshops, a mere 15 yards from the now mythical ‘Halliday’s Leap’. Beyond the prison fence, he stripped off his cell garb to reveal the smuggled civilian clothes he was wearing underneath and caught a taxi to Brisbane’s northern suburbs, giving the driver a tip for his trouble.

  After a frantic and widespread police manhunt, Halliday was recaptured four days later. Asked why he made the bold second escape, he replied: ‘A man’s liberty means everything to him. You can’t blame a man for trying.’

  CYCLE OF A LIFER

  Released in 1949, Halliday moved to Sydney where he worked for the Salvation Army before he began a roof repair business using sheet-metal skills he’d learned in Boggo Road. He changed his name to Arthur Dale and returned to Brisbane in 1950, where he fell in love with the daughter of a Woolloongabba snack bar operator. Halliday married Irene Kathleen Close on 2 January 1951, and the couple moved into a flat in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s northern seaside, in 1952, mere months before Halliday made national headlines again when he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Southport Esplanade murder of taxi driver Athol McCowan, 23.

  The case’s chief investigator, Queensland Police Detective Inspector Frank Bischof, claimed Halliday fled the scene of the McCowan murder and rushed to Sydney, where he was captured by police after shooting himself in the leg when his own .45 calibre handgun went off during a violent wrestle with a valiant Guildford storekeeper he was attempting to rob.

  In a packed court, Bischof testified that Halliday confessed to the McCowan murder while recovering from his bullet wound in a Parramatta Hospital bed. Bischof claimed Halliday’s confession detailed how he slipped into McCowan’s cab in Southport that fateful night of 22 May 1952 and later held up the young taxi driver at a secluded spot at the Currumbin Lookout, further south. When McCowan resisted, Bischof claimed, Halliday battered the driver to death with his .45 calibre handgun. Bischof testified that Halliday recited a poem during his confession: ‘Birds eat, and they’re free. They don’t work, why should we?’

  Slim Halliday, meanwhile, has vehemently maintained Bischof framed him for McCowan’s murder; the detailed confession – from its precise place names to its poetry – was, Halliday claimed, a figment of Bischof’s imagination.

  The Courier-Mail reported on 10 December 1952, Mr Halliday ‘caused a stir in court when Bischof said Halliday had told him, “I killed him.”

  ‘Halliday sprang to his feet,’ the report stated. ‘And, leaning over the dock rail, shouted, “That’s a lie.”’

  Halliday maintained that on the night of McCowan’s murder he was in Glen Innes in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, some 400 kilometres away.

  Frank Bischof would go on to become Queensland Police Commissioner from 1958 to 1969, resigning amid widespread allegations of corruption. He died in 1979. Before being sentenced to life in prison, Halliday declared from the dock: ‘I repeat, I am not guilty of this crime.’

  Outside court, Halliday’s wife, Irene Close, vowed to stand by her man.

  BLACK DAYS IN THE BLACK PETER

  In December 1953, after another failed escape attempt, Halliday was dropped inside Boggo Road’s notorious Black Peter, an underground solitary confinement cell, a relic harking back to Brisbane’s barbaric and bloody penal colony past. Halliday survived 14 days in searing December heat, sparking fierce public debate over modern methods of prisoner rehabilitation.

  ‘So Halliday has been given solitary confinement,’ wrote L.V. Atkinson of Gaythorne to The Courier-Mail on 11 December 1953. ‘The miserable caged wretch, for instinctively seeking his freedom, is to be penalised to the fullest, foulest extent of our medieval prison system? The principle of modern legal punishment cannot allow the infliction of human torture.’

  Halliday emerged from Black Peter an urban legend. The schoolyard kids of 1950s Brisbane didn’t whisper tales of Ned Kelly and Al Capone over their morning tea Anzac biscuits, they told tales of ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road’.

  ‘His knowledge of buildings, rooftops and tools, combined with his viciousness and daring, make him the jail’s most closely watched prisoner,’ wrote the Sunday Mail. ‘Detectives who have known him through his years of housebreaking say he can climb walls like a fly. Probably, Halliday will never stop trying to escape. Police who know him say he will have to be watched every minute of his life sentence, which, if he lives to be an old man, means another 40 years at least of maddening existence behind the red brick walls of Boggo Road.’

  For the next 11 years of his sentence, Halliday was strip-searched three times a day. The only clothing allowed in his cell was his pyjamas and slippers. Two officers escorted him everywhere. His studies were cancelled. Additional locks were fitted to his cell, D9, and additional locks were fitted to D wing. Boggo Road’s Number 5 yard was converted to a maximum security yard where Halliday could move at daytime within the confines of a steel mesh cage. Only on weekends was a single prisoner allowed inside the cage with him to play a game of chess. He was not allowed to speak to other prisoners for fear he would pass on his endless escape strategies.

  On 8 September 1968, Brisbane’s Truth newspaper reported on Halliday nearing the age of 60 with an article headlined: ‘BROKEN KILLER TALKS TO NO ONE’.

  ‘The gleam has gone out of the eyes of Queensland killer and Houdini jailbreaker, Arthur Ernest Halliday,’ the report read. ‘After years under constant double guard and the most elaborate security precautions ever taken with any prisoner in this State, 60-year-old Slim Halliday has become a walking vegetable inside the grim walls of Boggo Road.’

  But Halliday possessed
an ‘indomitable spirit’, the prison’s superintendent told media at the time, ‘which rigorous punishment failed to break, and he was never known to complain about his treatment no matter how harsh or uncomfortable it may have been’.

  As his lengthy sentence diminished, so did Halliday’s obsession with escape. By his late 60s, he was simply too old to scale the red brick walls of Boggo Road. After years of good behaviour he was given the role of prison librarian, which allowed him to share his love of literature and poetry with increasingly interested inmates. They would gather regularly in the yard to hear Houdini Halliday recite the poems of his beloved Persian philosopher-poet Omar Khayyám, whose work he had discovered in a prison library in the 1940s.

  His favourite poem was Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát, which he’d recite over the chessboard and pieces he meticulously crafted out of machine-turned metal in the prison workshop.