Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  I turn and run down the corridor as a tall and broad-shouldered prison screw rounds the corner into Mum’s cell wing, following the gaze of the red-haired woman. ‘What the fu—’ he says, stunned by the sight of me. I grip the arm straps of my backpack and sprint up the corridor. The screw has his hand on the top of the baton fixed into his belt. I see Brett Kenny in my mind’s eye – glorious five-eighth for the Parramatta Eels. I see all those backyard afternoons August and I spent practising Kenny’s blinding weave runs, his devastating right step.

  ‘Stop right there,’ the screw demands. But I sprint harder, weaving left and right up the corridor, making the most of a four-metre-wide space, snaking up it like Brett Kenny would snake through a Canterbury Bulldogs defensive line. I fade hard to the right side of the corridor and the lumbering screw with his big lumbering legs and his tractor-tyre belly fades with me into my line of movement. I’m within two metres of his reach when he props on both legs and puts his arms out wide to swallow me up, to net me like a slippery Bramble Bay flathead – a slippery eel – and it’s then that I step hard and quick off my bouncing right foot and zip like a shot bullet to the far left of the corridor, ducking under his ambitious and useless flailing right arm as I go. Brett Kenny finds the gap and the sea of blue and yellow Eels supporters in the western stands of the Sydney Cricket Ground rise to their feet. I turn left into B Block’s open recreation and dining hall area and the space is filled with forty prison women, standing and sitting around dining tables and card tables and chess tables and knitting tables. Another prison screw – a short man, but muscular and fast – spots me from across the hall and gives chase. I run through the dining hall, searching for an exit door, and the women laugh and holler and clap their hands. Another screw joins the chase from the left side of the dining room. ‘Stop!’ the screw barks. But I don’t stop. I sprint through the middle aisle of the hall as Mum’s fellow prisoners bash their hands in delight on their food tables, making afternoon-tea bowls of Christmas pudding, jelly and custard bounce between their fists. I find no exit door and the screws are circling in on me from either side so I turn back around and take a diagonal run across the hall’s steel dining tables. The screw I sidestepped in the corridor now enters the dining hall, angrily pushing through a sea of prisoners who have rushed from their seats before the Nativity-meets-Grease stage spectacular to see the surreal scene of the boy bouncing across Boggo Road tables and chairs like the hero of a Looney Tunes sketch. The screws angrily and clumsily hop onto the tables in chase and rush through aisles to head me off, barking threats I can’t quite hear beneath the roar of the SCG crowd. Kenny! Brett Kenny! Into space. The master, Eli Bell, heading for the try line. Certain to score. Certain to etch his name into rugby league legend.

  I leap between tables like a Russian ballerina, evading the swiping arms of the hapless screws the way Errol Flynn evaded the blades of cinematic pirates, and the prisoners are inside a rock ’n’ roll show now, pumping their fists at the exploits of the dashing Eels five-eighth with the jets in the rubber soles of his Dunlop KT-26s. I leap off one table onto the polished concrete floor at the entrance to the dining hall where the women prisoners stand back – a parting of the sea of female cons – to form a loose guard of honour I can run through. And these women know my name somehow.

  ‘Go, Eli!’ they scream.

  ‘Run, Eli!’ they scream.

  So I run and I run until I can see an exit door beyond the common area joining the kitchen and the cells and the dining hall. It’s a door that opens out to a lawn outside. Freedom. Kenny! Brett Kenny for the try line! Sprinting, sprinting. The screws on my tail and another screw, a fourth screw, coming at me from my right to block my access to the exit door. It’s the fullback for the Canterbury Bulldogs. The fullback screw. Every team’s last line of defence, the best technical defender in the team, agile and strong, always making arcing and streaking cover tackle runs across the field to end the grand final dreams of gods like Brett Kenny. Mum used to run as a girl, was a fine sprinter. Won sprint races at athletics carnivals. She once told me the way to get an extra kick, the extra edge, was to get lower to the ground, picture yourself as a plough and your legs are digging up the earth and you’re digging into the earth for the first fifty of a hundred-metre dash and digging yourself out again for the last fifty, leaning your head back and your chest out across the finish line. So I’m the plough now as the fourth screw arcs across the prison floor but I’m not a strong enough plough and his trajectory is certain to meet up with mine before I can meet up with the back door to the freedom lawn. But then a Christmas miracle, a holy apparition in prison clothes. It’s Bernie, slowly walking her wheelie bin, absent-mindedly but not absent-mindedly at all, crossing into the path of the raging fourth screw. ‘Outta the way, Bernie!’ the screw hollers, weaving around her.

  ‘What?’ Bernie says, turning around blind like a slapstick silent movie star, making a clumsy show of moving the bin backwards now, apparently unwittingly, into the screw’s line of chase. The screw tries to jump the slanted bin but clips a foot on the top of it and crashes spectacularly, belly first, into the polished prison floor.

  I burst out of the rear B Block door and run out to a well-kept grass lawn rolling down to a fenced tennis court. I run and I run. Brett Kenny, man of the match for the third straight week in a row, running well past the dead ball line now, running right into history. Eli Bell. The elusive Eli Bell. Call me Merlin. The Wizard of the Boggo Road women’s prison. The only boy to ever escape that B Block shithole. The only boy to ever escape Boggo Road. I can smell the grass. There is white clover in the grass and bees buzzing in the clover. The kinds of bees that make my ankles swell when they sting me. But get over it, Eli. There are worse things in this world than bees. The lawn slopes down to the tennis court and I look behind me as I run. Four screws in frantic chase, barking things I cannot understand. I slip my right arm out of an arm strap on my backpack as I run. I unzip the backpack and reach an arm in and grip a rope. It’s time, Eli. The moment of truth.

  *

  I started with matches first, like Slim did in his cell. Matches and a line of string. Matches tied by a twisted rubber band in the centre to form a cross-shaped grappling hook. Timing, planning, luck, belief. I believe. I believe, Slim. Hour after hour I spent in my bedroom studying the science and technique of lodging a grappling hook against a high orange-brown brick wall. When I was ready, I fixed my own real-life roped grappling hook out of a fifteen-metre length of thick rope, knotted at fifty-centimetre intervals for grip points, and two roped pieces of cylindrical wood I cut up from an old rake handle Dad had lying under the house. I took the grappling hook down to the Bracken Ridge Scouts Centre on Saturday afternoons where they had a makeshift high wall that they ask young boy scout groups to scale in team-building exercises. Throw after throw after throw, I finessed my grappling hook wall-lodging technique. An uptight scoutmaster caught me carrying out these curious prison break rehearsals one afternoon. ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing, young man?’ the scoutmaster asked.

  ‘Escaping,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the scoutmaster asked.

  ‘I’m pretending to be Batman,’ I said.

  *

  I take a sharp left turn at the tennis court, sprint into a small path leading between the prison’s C Block cells to my left and a sewing workshop shed to my right. Losing breath. Tiring now. Gotta find the wall. Gotta find the wall. I pass the F Block temporary demountable cells. I turn behind me. I can’t see the screws. I rush to the top prison wall. It’s an old brown brick wall, high and imposing. I’m not sure my rope is long enough for the wall I stand before so I rush along the perimeter, searching, searching, searching, for a space in the brown brick fortress where a higher stretch of wall meets a lower stretch. Bingo. I quickly unravel my grappling hook rope and leave a two-metre stretch of rope which will be my throwing segment. I look up at the wall corner where high meets low and I twirl the rope twice like a cowboy with
a lasso, with the weight of the rake handle cut-offs acting as a guiding projectile readying for launch. I’ll only get one shot. Help me, Slim. Help me, Brett Kenny. Help me, God. Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope. Help me, Mum. Help me, Lyle. Help me, August.

  A Hail Mary toss. An act of pure faith and ambition and belief. I believe, Slim. I believe. The hook sails up into the air and over the high wall fence. I step two paces to my right, holding the rope taut, positioned so the hook can do nothing else but lodge into the high–low wall corner when I pull down on it.

  ‘Oi!’ calls a screw. I turn to see him, maybe fifty metres away running beside the fence wall, another screw not far behind him. ‘Stop that, you little prick,’ the screw calls.

  I grip a rope knot and pull myself with both hands up the wall, planting my gripping and reliable and blessed Dunlop KT-26s against the wall face, my back parallel with the grass lawn below me. I am Batman. I’m Adam West in those old Batman TV shows, scaling a Gotham City office tower. This is working. This is actually fucking working.

  The lighter a person is, the easier this is. Slim was Slim when he made his climb up a wall like this one but I’m the boy, the boy who climbed the walls, the boy who fooled the screws, the boy who escaped from Boggo Road. Merlin the Magnificent. The Wizard o’ the Women’s.

  Only sky from this angle. Blue sky and cloud. And flashes of the top wall. Six metres up now. Seven metres. Eight maybe. Nine metres. This must be ten metres all the way up here with my head in the clouds.

  The rope is taut and burning my hands. The middle finger on my right hand aches with the stress of working overtime in the absence of his forefinger co-worker.

  Two screws rush to stand below me, looking up at me. They sound like Lyle when he used to get angry with me.

  ‘Are you fucked in the head, kid?’ one calls. ‘Where do ya think yer gonna go?’

  ‘Come on down from there,’ says the other screw.

  But I keep crawling up the wall. Scaling and scaling. Like one of those SAS soldiers in Britain who rescue all those people from terrorist hostage scenarios.

  ‘Yer gonna kill yourself, you idiot,’ the second screw says. ‘That rope ain’t strong enough to hold you.’

  Of course this rope is strong enough. I’ve tested it seventeen times down at the scouts’ centre. Dad’s old rope I found beneath the house, sitting in his rusted wheelbarrow, caked in dust and dirt. Up and up I go. Oh, the air up here. Was this what it felt like for you, Slim? The thrill of it all? The sight of the top? The thought of what waited beyond these walls? The story of the unknown.

  ‘Come on down now and you won’t get in any more trouble,’ says the first screw. ‘Come on down, mate. Christ Almighty, it’s fuckin’ Christmas Day. Yer mum don’t wanna see you dead on Christmas Day.’

  I’m a metre from the top of the wall when I pause to catch my breath, one last air suck before I make my triumphant crawl over the top, before I achieve the impossible, before Merlin pulls his last stunned rabbit from his hat. I take three deep breaths, my legs stiff against the wall. I pull myself higher, so high I can see the hook segments from Dad’s rake pressing against the wall. Straining against the weight but holding fast. The summit. Everest’s lonely tip. I turn my head briefly and look down for a moment at the screws.

  ‘See you on the flipside, boys,’ I say grandly, a stroke of roguish pluck striking me all this way up here in the thinner air of the wall top. ‘You go tell those fat cats on George Street there ain’t no wall in Australia high enough to hold the Wizard of Boggo Ro—’

  A single segment of Dad’s rake handle snaps and I fall backwards through the air. The blue sky and the white cloud reel away from me. My arms flail and my legs kick at nothing and my whole life flashes before my eyes. The universe. The fish swimming through my dreams. Bubble gum. Frisbees. Elephants. The life and works of Joe Cocker. Macaroni. War. Waterslides. Curried egg sandwiches. All the answers. The answers to the questions. And a word I don’t expect spills from my terrified lips.

  ‘Dad.’

  Boy Steals Ocean

  The memorial plaque reads: Audrey Bogut, 1912–1983, loving wife of Tom, mother of Therese and David. A life like theirs has left a record sweet for memory to dwell upon.

  Seventy-one years for Audrey Bogut to pass.

  The memorial plaque next to that one reads: Shona Todd, 1906–1981, beloved daughter of Martin and Mary Todd, sister to Bernice and Phillip. The cup of life with her lips she prest, a taste so sweet she gulped the rest.

  Seventy-five years for Shona Todd to pass.

  ‘C’mon, it’s about to start,’ I say to August.

  We walk into a small brick chapel in the centre of the Albany Creek Crematorium. Winter, 1987. Nine months into my great time lapse experiment.

  Slim’s right. It’s all just time. Thirty-nine minutes to drive from our house in Bracken Ridge to the Albany Creek Crematorium. Twenty seconds to tighten my shoelace. Three seconds for August to tuck his shirt in. Almost twenty-one months until Mum comes out. I am fast becoming a master manipulator of time. I will make twenty-one months feel like twenty-one weeks. The man in the wood coffin taught me that.

  Seventy-seven years it took for Slim to die. He spent the past six months in and out of hospital, cancer creeping in to too many corners of that tall frame of his. I tried to visit him when I could. Between school. Between homework and afternoon TV. Between my growing up and his getting out. His last great escape.

  ‘CRIME ERA CLOSES’ read the headline in The Telegraph Dad handed me yesterday. ‘A gripping chapter in the Queensland crime annals closed this week with the death in Redcliffe Hospital of Arthur Ernest “Slim” Halliday, 77.’

  Time stops in this chapel. No noise from the few mourners around the coffin, a couple of men in suits, nobody in here that knows anybody else.

  My hand reaches into my pants pocket and I feel for the last words Slim ever wrote to me. It was a message he wrote at the end of the instructions he gave me for meeting mysterious George and his prison smuggler fruit truck.

  Do your time, he wrote, before it does you. Your friend always, Slim.

  Do your time, Eli Bell, before it does you.

  A crematorium official says something about life and time but I miss it all because I’m thinking about life and time. And then Slim’s coffin is taken away.

  It’s over quick. Quick time. Good time.

  An old man in a black suit and tie approaches August and me as we walk back out the chapel doors. He says he’s an old bookmaker friend of Slim’s. He says Slim did some work for him after prison.

  ‘How did you boys know, Slim?’ he asks. His face is warm and friendly, a smile like Mickey Rooney’s.

  ‘He was our babysitter,’ I say.

  The man nods, puzzled.

  ‘How did you know Slim?’ I ask the man in the black suit.

  ‘He lived with me and my family for a time,’ the old man says.

  And I realise in this moment that there were other lives Slim led. There were other vantage points. Other friends. Other family.

  ‘It’s nice of you to come and pay your respects,’ the old man says.

  ‘He was my best friend,’ I say.

  He chuckles.

  ‘Mine, too,’ the old man says.

  ‘Really?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, really,’ the old man says. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispers. ‘A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.’

  We walk along the crematorium lawn, rows of grey gravestones forming grim and uniform lanes in a cemetery beyond the chapel.

  ‘Do you think he killed that cabbie?’ I ask.

  The old man shrugs.

  ‘I never asked him,’ the old man says.

  ‘But you would know, wouldn’t you?’ I ask. ‘I reckon you’d get a feeling on that. Your instinct or somethin’ would tell you if he did it.’

  ‘Whaddya mean, “instinct”?’ the old man asks.

  ‘I was around a guy once w
ho killed many people and my instinct told me he killed many people,’ I say. ‘There was a chill down my spine that told me he killed many people.’

  The old man stops on the spot.

  ‘I never asked him about it, purely out of respect,’ the old man says. ‘I respected the man. If he didn’t do that killin’, then I respect him more still and God rest his soul. I never got no chill down my spine around Slim Halliday. And if he did do that killin’, then he was one hell of a tribute to rehabilitation.’

  That’s a nice way of putting it. Thanks, mysterious old man. I nod.

  The old man puts his hands in his pockets and walks off down a row of the cemetery. I watch him walk down that row of gravestones like he possesses the most carefree soul to ever inhabit a body.

  August is hunched over inspecting another wall of gold plaques dedicated to the departed.

  ‘I need to get a job,’ I say.

  August gives a sharp look over his shoulder. Why?

  ‘We gotta get a place for Mum when she gets out.’

  August looks deeper into a plaque.

  ‘C’mon, Gus!’ I urge, walking away. ‘No time to waste.’

  *

  I landed flush into the arms of the screws that day I fell from the wall of the Boggo Road women’s prison. To their great credit the screws seemed more concerned for my mental health than furious with my misadventures.

  ‘Ya think he’s mental?’ pondered the youngest screw, who had a ginger beard and freckles across his forearms. ‘What’ll we do with him?’ ginger asked his fellow screw.

  ‘Let Muzza make the call,’ the second screw said.

  The two screws walked me in a pressure hold, each man gripping an arm, back up the lawn to the other two screws, the older and more experienced ones with not enough in the tank to chase a teenage boy through a prison yard.

  What took place inside the office of the prison administration building was a strategy meeting between prison screws, which, for me, was akin to being witness to four early Neanderthals working out the rules of Twister.