IN A fairer country than this you could sue the Coburg council for most of what happened. I have to say, you’d do ’em for a poultice if there was justice in here. Because any fool could see that if you build a block of high-rise flats opposite a prison, you can expect strife with the neighbours. You’ve built a line of sight that’s a natural route for trouble.
I wasn’t here when it started. I got nailed holding the tax man’s bucks after it had been going for about a year. Not an offence I’d send a bloke to jail for, but the magistrate works for the same boss as the tax man, so he takes it personal. And when he finally pierces the armour of my figures to the rotten flesh of my ledger he slots me inside.
So when I get to Pentridge, and they put me in C Block with all sorts of hard, bent boys covered with drunken tattoos, it’s practically a ritual. Every third Monday, and you can almost hear the breathing get heavier between these Mondays, the hard, bent boys in C Block take up a collection. We all have to give if we want to watch. It’s strictly user pays.
Every time the collection plate comes around Bernie tries to get out of paying. An accountant, skinny beyond famine physically, and skinny beyond fraud morally, he nervously sweeps ginger temple-fluff across his bald scalp as he pleads.
‘Come on, boys. Let me watch free this once. You know I’m trying to build a nest-egg for when I get out. I need a nest-egg. I’m ruined in my line of work. It’s all right for you blokes, you can go back to yours.’
Furnace Dwyer throws a totem-pole of arm round him and hugs a threat through his bird-boned shoulders and reminds him that quadriplegics don’t need nest-eggs because the public health system looks after them. Bernie’s shit-scared of Furnace Dwyer and public health so he pays up.
We all pay up. Because the bitch won’t come out unless we shoot her a good, solid wad of the folding. And in winter it’s got to be even solider, because as the weather falls her rates rise. But we don’t begrudge her that. The Antarctic wind shunting off the bay has a way of moulding mammary tissue that we appreciate, and it’s worth paying more for.
So we assemble in exercise yard C. It’s the one place in the prison you can see her balcony from. The hard, bent boys roll the collected notes into a wad and jam them into a condom and tie a knot in the end. Then Gary the Alias gets out his shanghai — a coathanger bent Y framed with condoms tied end on end for propulsion — and he fires the wad of money over the wall, across the road, up onto her balcony. He never misses. It hits the glass of her door and shivers it, as the roar, made up of wishes and would-bes from us about how, if circumstances were looser, we’d deliver that wad of notes by hand, dies down.
She’s like a spider sensing a vibration from the outer reaches of its web. She’s out on the balcony before the last quiver has oozed out of the glass. Every time she has new gear to unwrap her stunning body out of. That’s a compliment to us. And she takes it off to a bump and to a grind she’s seen in a black and white movie. It’s weird at first because you can’t hear any music, but you get to imagining it. She’s far from being a natural at this, but we don’t care. In fact her clumsiness seems to make it better … a bit of amateur purity. Half the men in here are in here for being excited by and acting against innocence.
In exercise yard C it used to be that we mouthed filthy boasts and promises while the show was going on. Not any more. We came to hear ourselves high as lap-dogs yapping on leashes, knowing if we were let off we’d get quiet fast. These days we’re a silent herd of flaring nostrils. A still copse of stiff dick. At most all you hear now when the strip show is on are a few half-starved groans and a lot of breathing shallow and asthmatic with sex. All, that is, except for Furnace Dwyer, who is a badly affected man.
As soon as the woman on the balcony begins to peel the clobber he starts to go cold-turkey. His facial scars start to pulse. And his suffering is so mind-over-body acute that it is a source of sorrow to us all.
‘Bitch dies screaming,’ he whispers as she unhooks her bra. And as she progresses to the climax of her act he has to space his threats and curses through chopped-up breaths that never reach enough lung to feed his brain properly.
‘Bloody exploitation … this is. Cuts me up. But my turn’ll … turn’ll come. Cut for cut. I’ll hang her … hang her scalp from that … that balcony.’
No one ever replies to any of this. Because, firstly, no one wants a honed-down serving spoon punched between their eighth and ninth vertebrae, and secondly, we know he’s never getting out of here, and thirdly, on occasion we can see his point of view. Yes, sometimes we think she deserves Furnace. It is, after all, dog-dirty work pushing this stuff at caged addicts. Because when she’s finished, it’s there, it’s in the air, and it has to be got rid of. And it’s got rid of in many sad, tissue-ripping ways that make this joint a much harder place to be than it would be without the sight of her.
Despite this, I’m unhappy when I hear the unbelievable news. I’ve spent so many nights with her in my cell — my version of her anyway — that I was starting to believe she was mine. I’ve been to Europe with her, checked in to some of the grand hotels, winked at the porter as he ogled her arse and struggled across the lobby with our luggage … kilos and kilos of transparent underwear. I’ve watched her undress to soundless music in the Presidential suite. I’ve spent a lot of exotic, aristocratic time with her after lock-up and lights-out. Not just the obvious things, but deep, soulful eyeball to eyeball time. My imagination has become a thing of great power since I was locked up. So I certainly feel a pang of loss when I hear the unbelievable news that some moron who has made a career and a fiasco of studying the mind of man has decided to give Furnace parole. I might even love the poor, doomed bitch, because I feel like crying.
Furnace comes limp-skipping down the corridor from Admin, twisting ears, slapping backs and kicking arses and singing that old Lynard Skynyrd song … ‘Cause I’m as freehee as a birr … hirrd now.’
And we know if a man ever had the energy and the evil to live up to all his promises this one has. The council flats are to become a flawless wall of drawn blinds once again. We’ve seen our last strip show. For the first time I wonder what sort of life she has behind that glass door that opens onto the balcony. What sort of pressures force her out that door to us?
Furnace goes over to Bernie to mess up his cranial thatching one last time. He gets him in a bear-hug and shakes him until his hair flops down off his scalp onto his collar. And he tells him it’s a full-on, brain-popping shame that fraudsters are locked up solid while murderers are free to walk the streets and guzzle slabs of VB of a night. And anyway, where does Bernie’s family live? He’s not above social calls. And he laughs a C-Block-wide reverberation of laugh.
As Furnace lets Bernie go he leans back and takes a deep breath to replace all the air he’s laughed out at him and Bernie pops him in the chest with an ice-pick. It sounds like a fish landing on a pier of my youth. My guess is it goes straight through Furnace’s favourite tattoo, the smiling, smudged blue face of Eva Braun, between his ribs, deep into his heart. Bernie tries to yank it out for another go, fights it and pulls at it from different angles with his face set in kamikaze grimace. But the serration is bitten in between those ribs and he’s dragged down hanging on to the dead Furnace by this slippery handle.
No one moves for longer than normal after a killing. No one can believe how this gentle man got locked to the dead standover ace on the floor. He’s still holding tight to the ice-pick in the twitching Furnace when the warders, with their stop-and-smell-the-roses-stroll, reach him. They’re smiling. One of them says something about Goliath and they’re laughing. And though it is, of course, a good thing when such a man dies premature, none of us are laughing, on account of poor Bernie. Lying there mumbling, with his hands frozen to an ice-pick. Scale-grey. Mumbling about how his life is forever more devoid of any emotion that isn’t fear. Mumbling about how his vision is forevermore blind, he calls it, to anything that isn’t horror undiluted. His mumbles are full of sense. He now has a lot of hard time before him and a lot of hard men after him. We start to sidle for our cells while the warders stand around to dangle their toes in the spreading pool of Furnace’s blood. It’s a refreshment they’ve looked forward to for a long time and they can’t deny themselves now.
The boys in here who are made of the bad things in life, made of slugs and snails and puppy-dog’s tails — and incest and bones broken step-paternally and rides taken in tumble dryers and chainings to fridges and cigarette burnings and untold orphanage barbarity; these hard, bent boys who run the prison have taught me never to speak truth to authority. So when I get in front of the panel inquiring into Furnace Dwyer’s death I lie. I tell them I think Furnace must have been into Bernie for a lot of smokes, and Bernie wasn’t going to let him walk out without collecting. They don’t chide me, the authorities. They don’t even laugh. They just look at me blank. And I can see it registering with them that, uh oh, we’ve lost one tax cheat to the puppy-dog’s tails, to the bones broken step-paternally, to the hard, bent boys who run the joint. And I see my parole step back into the shadows alongside other mythical dates like Armaggedon and judgment day. Choosing sides has its price.
The panel knows, like I know, that something has gone high, wide and awry inside Bernie’s head to make him go after Furnace with an ice-pick. It’s the sort of job everyone wished someone else had the balls to do. And little Bernie has a mind full of fraud and fear, so some valve inside it must have blown to swell his genitalia for the job.
The popular view is that Bernie had finally had enough of Furnace’s bastardisation. But I know better than this. I know he’s got a chronic case of my own problem. Like me, Bernie dreams about the woman who strips for us on her balcony across the street every third Monday. But his dreams would have all the extra power a victim’s dreams usually do. His late night thoughts would be a fairy-tale, I reckon. She’d be the damsel in distress. He’d be the knight in the armour. And guess who the dragon would be, Eva Braun on its scaly chest. In his melodramatic, late-night mind’s eye, Bernie rescues her from Furnace Dwyer. Of course he also makes her orgasm with the scream of a jump-jet. But the rescue would be the important part to Bernie. The standing up from his table in a cafe or the standing up from his stool in a bar or the standing up from his seat in a train, when no one else would stand up, and the saying, loud enough to reach above cafe hum or above bar hubbub or above track-rattle, ‘Take your hands off the lady, pal,’ and the watching of the swallows tattooed either side of Furnace’s oesophagus as they deepen blue in his skin leaching pale with cowardice.
And he’s dreamed this dream so long and hard he’s dreamed himself into a contract he can’t get out of. And when he finds Furnace is about to walk he has to honour the contract. That’s the way I see it. Nothing else explains the foolhardiness of his act.
But if I was to tell the panel of inquiry about the woman Bernie had dreamed himself into protecting they’d cancel our Monday strip shows quick smart. And as hard on us as they are, these strip shows, we’re addicted to them. So the hard, bent boys are right to make me tell lies.
The visiting room in C Block is cream coloured above head height, but from there down it’s skin-oil yellowed. A long thin room partitioned down its length. We sit at a bench, sealed from the unconvicted by steel plate below and by steel mesh and glass above. The glass has wire running through it that dices our loved-ones like carrots. The diced loved-ones are partitioned from each other for privacy. But on our side of the glass the bench runs away uninterrupted. I rub my elbows against ink-webbed elbows. So when I whisper the sweet nothings through the mesh they are the sort of wishy-washy-ready-for-public-airing sweet nothings. Never anything with enough tang to be repeated in the exercise yard or the shower block … or to someone else’s loved-one next week. It frustrates the wife, but she’s not brushing the spider-webbed elbows of the hard, bent boys while she tries to talk up her end of our own, unique something special.
Today I’m only half listening to the diced wife. Something about our son Angus dropping applied mathematics at school. He’s apparently lost faith in maths since the figures failed me.
‘Got a real thing for the humanities out of your trouble,’ she says. Her frock is puckering below her collar bones and I crane my neck for some diced cleavage.
Next to me Andy Howson, who’s taking a break from armed robbery, is rabbiting-on to the de-facto about how the prison chaplain is making more sense than he did last year. He wonders if the chaplain has lifted his game or if his guard is dropping with age. He wonders which one of them has found religion. He keeps wondering, but can’t muster much enthusiasm for the de-facto today.
Somewhere further down the line disbelief is raising someone’s voice. ‘Brian Wallace? Brian Wallace? That toe-rag Brian Wallace? How could you get that horny?’ But even this promising brouhaha doesn’t interest us much today.
The truth about today is, we are distracted by the domestic tragedy Bernie has lined up for us. The prison authorities take no stock of privacy, and Bernie, sitting right there next to Andy Howson half way down the line of fifteen, is going to have to explain to his wife, in front of us all, the extra years he’s earnt himself by whacking the standover ace. And we revel in this sort of domestic cut-up. We know how it’ll go. All the explanation and the emotion and the gesture will get sliced through the mesh and diced through the glass and will be reassembled in a ham-handed way on the far side, until after about five minutes of this both parties are so confused they don’t know what part of the conversation belongs to them and what part belongs to the party on the far side of the glass mesh. And suddenly hate is the only communicable emotion, because it’s brief and it can get through the wire barrier clear and uncut. Many marriages are diced up through this glass. It’s the most vicious theatre in town.
Bernie knows this. He’s waiting. His hands won’t keep still, nervously thatching his temple fluff over his waxy dome. It glows strong ginger against his bloodless skin. His body is shaking in waves. I’ve never seen him so afraid of anything, and he’s been virtuosic with fear since they first threw him in here. But now he looks as if his bowels might get the better of him.
We’ve never seen Bernie’s wife. She doesn’t visit, so we know she’s not rabid keen on him. But we recognise his symptoms and know she must be a real hell of a thing. Big warder of a woman, the like of which might make prison enjoyable by comparison. The undisputed keeper of the family jewels.
As I watch him shake I start to lose my appetite for the humiliation of Bernie. Then again, a woman as hard as she must be you don’t need. So I’m glad it’s just about over for them.
My wife and I swap about five minutes of chat. She talks about things I can no longer see. I talk about things she doesn’t ever want to see. It’s all we have for subject matter.
Then, as she’s showing me, hand to hand, how long our Angus’s hair has grown, a no-holds-barred beautiful woman steps up to the glass. And I see what Bernie is afraid of Us.
This is a woman we’ve all looked up to. A woman we’ve been sleeping with for too long. Finally come down from her balcony. And she’s come down from her balcony wearing Bernie’s wedding ring. And that would make her Bernie’s wife. And all the hard-grafted, condom-shrunk wads of cash we’ve been firing up onto her balcony for so long would have been landing smack bang in Bernie’s pocket.
All conversations, even the promising one about the toe-rag Brian Wallace, have died. Bernie looks up and down the line of cheated faces that stretch away either side of him on the convicted side of the glass.
‘A nest-egg, boys. Me and the little woman, we were just building a nest-egg is all.’ And he’s crying like a fool. And the boys, tax-cheats included, go cuckoo.