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