‘But not Officer Dale.’
‘Nah, not Officer Dale.’
After his first escape attempt, the Boggo Road screws came down hard on Slim, vigorously strip-searched him several times a day. During these searches it was customary for the officers to bash Slim across the side of the head to instruct him to turn around; kick him in the arse when they wanted him to bend over; elbow him in the nose when they wanted him to step back. One day Slim reacted, exploded in his cell, started throwing chunks of slop from his cell room slop bucket at the officers. They returned with the pressure hose treatment. One officer then came with two buckets of scalding water from the coppers that sat boiling in the prison kitchen. Another officer began shoving a red hot poker through the cell bars at Slim.
‘Them officers were terrorising me like I was some rooster they were priming for a cockfight,’ Slim says. ‘I had a prison-issue knife I’d been sharpening under my pillow and I grabbed it and I stabbed one of those pricks in the hand. I was waving the knife at them, spittin’ and frothin’ like I was a sick dog. All hell broke loose after that, but amid all the madness there was this bloke, Officer Dale, he was standing up for me. He was shouting at these sick bastards, telling them to leave me be, that I’d had enough. And I remember looking at him like it was all going in slow motion and I was thinking that true character surely is best shown in hell, that true goodness must surely be best displayed in an underworld where the very opposite is the norm, when evil is living and goodness is an indulgence, you know what I’m saying?’
Slim smiles, looks at August. August nods at Slim, one of those knowing August nods, like he thinks he did a lag right alongside Slim, his neighbour in cell D10.
‘You know,’ Slim says, ‘you dive that far down into hell that a wink from the devil starts to feel like a fuckin’ hand job from Doris Day, you catch my drift?’
August nods again.
‘Piss off, Gus, you don’t even know who Doris Day is,’ I say.
August shrugs.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Slim says. ‘Point is, I was in this daydream amid all this chaos, looking at Officer Dale, watching him trying to get these guys to lay off. I was so bloody touched by the gesture I think I got a tear in my eye. Then I got a whole lotta fucking tears in my eyes because a second wave of screws came with masks and threw teargas bombs in my cell. They kicked the shit out of me good and proper and dragged me to Black Peter there and then. My clothes were still wet from the hose. Right in the middle of winter that one was. No blanket. No mat on that one. Everybody goes on about the fourteen days in Black Peter in the heatwave. But I’d take the fourteen days in the heatwave over that one night with Black Pete wet as a beaver in the middle of winter. Spent the whole night shiverin’, just thinking one thing . . .’
‘That everybody has goodness in them?’ I ask.
‘Nah, kid, not everyone, just Officer Dale,’ Slim says. ‘But it got me thinking that if Officer Dale still had some goodness working among those other bastards for so long, then I might still have some goodness left in me when I was done with Black Peter; or when I was done with the joint forever.’
‘New name, new man,’ I say.
‘Seemed like a good idea in the hole,’ Slim says.
I pick up the South-West Star. One of the supporting pictures in the ‘Queensland Remembers’ spread shows Slim in 1952, sitting in the backroom of the Southport Court House. He’s smoking a cigarette in a cream-coloured suit, over a white shirt with a thick collar. He looks like he belongs in Havana, Cuba, not the cell where he was going to live for the next twenty-four years of his life.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask.
‘Do what?’
‘How did you survive for so long without . . .’
‘Swallowing a rubber-band ball filled with razor blades?’
‘Well, I was gonna say “givin’ up”, but . . . yeah, that too.’
‘That article is half right about that Houdini magic crap,’ he says. ‘What I did in that joint was a kind of magic.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I could do things with time in there,’ Slim says. ‘I got so intimate with time that I could manipulate it, speed it up, slow it down. Some days all you wanted was to speed it up, so you had to trick your brain. You get yourself so busy you can convince yourself there’s not enough hours in the day to achieve everything you want to achieve. By “achieve”, I don’t mean learning how to play the violin or getting a degree in economics. I mean realistic midday prison cell goals. I mean collecting enough black balls of cockroach shit in a day that you can spell your name with them. Some days, bitin’ your fingernails down to the quick became a leisure activity to look forward to like an Elvis double bill. So much to do, so little time. Make your bed, read chapter 30 of Moby Dick, think about Irene, whistle “You Are My Sunshine” from start to finish, roll a smoke, have a smoke, play yourself at chess, play yourself at chess again because you’re pissed off you lost the first game, go fishing off Bribie Island in your mind, go fishing off Redcliffe jetty in your mind, scale your fish, gut your fish, cook that fat flathead on some hot coals on Suttons Beach and watch the sun go down. You race that bastard clock so hard you get surprised when the day is over and you’re so tired from your daily schedule of bullshit head games that you yawn when you put your head on the pillow at 7 p.m. and tell yourself you’re mad for staying up so late and burning the candle at both ends. But, then, in those good hours, those sunshine hours in the yard, you could make them slow, you could pull them up like they were well-trained horses and you could turn an hour in the flower garden into half a day, because you were living time in five dimensions and the dimensions were the things you were smelling and the things you could taste and touch and hear and the things you could see, things within things, small universes in the stamen of a flower, layers upon layers, because your vision was so enhanced by the inactivity of all that concrete-wall watching that every single time you walked into that garden yard it was like Dorothy walking into technicolour.’
‘You learned to see all the details,’ I say.
Slim nods. He looks at us both.
‘Never forget, you two, you are free,’ he says. ‘These are your sunshine hours and you can make them last forever if you see all the details.’
I nod loyally.
‘Do your time, hey Slim?’ I say.
He nods proudly.
‘Before it does you,’ he says.
That’s Slim’s favourite nugget of porridge wisdom.
Do your time before it does you.
*
I remember when I first heard him say it. We were standing in the engine room of the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall, the old and glorious brown sandstone building in the heart of the city, towering over King George Square. Slim took us in on the train from Darra. He said there was an old elevator inside the high clock tower that took people right up to the top of the tower and I didn’t believe him. He knew the old lift operator, Clancy Mallett, from his farmhand days and Clancy had said he would let us go up inside the elevator for nothing, but when we arrived the lift was undergoing repairs, out of order, and Slim had to sweet-talk his old friend with a put-your-dog-on-it tip for race 5 at Eagle Farm to convince him to lead us up a secret set of stairs that only the City Hall staff knew about. The dark stairwell up that clock tower went forever and Slim and old Clancy the lift operator wheezed the whole way up, but me and August laughed the whole way up. Then we gasped when Clancy opened a thin door that led into an engine room of spinning steel pulleys and cogs – the city’s clockwork – that powered the four clock faces on the tower. North, south, east and west, each with giant black steel hands tracking