I didn’t get bail. A wave of fear crested and crashed on top of me and I began to say goodbye to my life and my children. If the poor little things could see their mummy now they wouldn’t know what to make of it; they’d only cry for me to go home with them. I couldn’t bear to think of it – but it was all I could think about. In a room full of busy, officious people, I had never felt so alone. And the day was only just beginning to go downhill.
‘The thing in the back is gonna love it at Moorabbin,’ the police officer remarked to his partner as we sped down a highway in a divisional or ‘divvy’ van, with me sliding around in the locked steel box at the rear.
‘Who the fuck cares?’ his mate scoffed.
The prison at Deer Park was full to capacity so I was to be kept on remand at the Moorabbin Police Holding Cells until a place became available. Apparently this was good news for me because, I’d been told by an officer at the Ringwood cells, there was an exercise yard at Moorabbin. The divvy van slowed sharply and stopped, sending me thudding into the front of the cage. ‘The Thing’ had arrived. I was pulled out and marched inside – the last time I’d see daylight for nearly a month.
Straight away I could hear women shrieking and swearing as if a brawl was in full swing. I dared not turn around. ‘Dear God, please don’t put me in with them,’ I prayed. This only brought two female officers wearing the dreaded blue gloves. ‘Oh, please no,’ I begged them. I still had my period and desperately needed to change my pad. They couldn’t care less – the strip show must go on.
I re-dressed and was ordered to get the standard three cushions and two blankets from a stack. As I gathered my ‘bedding’ I spied four or five women pressed against a Perspex window trying to get a look at their new cellmate – me. A pounding heartbeat or two later I was standing in their midst. As the heavy steel door banged shut behind me I turned to look at it. ‘Exercise Yard A’ was painted in large yellow letters above it. ‘Oh you fool,’ I thought. There would be no trees, grass or blue sky – just steel, cement and a salivating wolf-pack of lady criminals. They were onto me within seconds.
‘Got any smokes?’
(Not, ‘Hello, what’s your name? What are you in for?’ Or, ‘Are you OK?’)
‘Yes, I do actually.’ I was trying to sound amenable and cool. ‘A full packet, too.’
The women nearly knocked me over in the rush to be my new best friend. The rapid-fire questions about smokes gave way to heartfelt inquiries about my name, how I was doing and whether they could help me feel more comfortable. I seemed to have transitioned quite well into their ciggie-obsessed world – until they asked exactly when I was going to produce these smokes of mine and when they might get one.
‘Oh, I gave them to the officers,’ I said, jerking a thumb at the door. ‘You can ask them for one.’ I presumed that’s what the women had done until their cigarettes had run out. How was I to know they’d already been locked up in there – utterly smokeless – for a week or two? When I walked in with talk of a full packet they presumed I’d ‘banked’ it in the female vault, the same way Shannon had hidden her marijuana. I was promptly labelled a ‘fucking green-skin’ and abandoned by my new buddies in less than a minute.
Still, one of them was civil enough to direct me to the far cell to put my bedding in. I went back out into the exercise yard and tried to absorb my new, compressed concrete universe. The yard was a rectangular box about fifteen metres by five metres. At one end three concrete stools and a concrete table were cemented into the floor while a concrete bench sat just inside the main door. A security camera was bolted to the roof alongside a fully enclosed television screen.
There was a slot for meals and communication built into the main door. Above the slot was a Perspex window covered by a Venetian blind, so officers could see the prisoners before opening up. The door itself was built into a steel wall with reinforced tinted Perspex at the top so the prisoners could at least see who was arriving at the reception area. It’s how the she-wolves had first ogled me.
A door to the left led to a shower that was operated by pushing a button in the wall. Each jab dispensed thirty seconds of water before you had to press it again, with no control over the pressure or temperature. Next to the shower was another steel door leading into a concrete ‘visitor’s box’ – much like the cell I’d just come from at Ringwood.
To the right of the main yard there were three cells about four metres wide by five metres long. This was where prisoners slept, or at least tried to. Each cell had a lidless stainless steel toilet and wash basin with a wall-mounted, stainless steel ‘mirror’ that only reflected a blurred rendering of any poor soul who dared to look at themselves. There were also two benches; one running the full length of the cell (six cushions) while on the opposite wall there was a standard three-cushion bench. Each cell could accommodate three women on the benches and one, possibly two, on the floor if need be. Cameras in each cell monitored everything. There was a similar cell configuration on the opposite side of the main yard, including a ‘drunk tank’ for the alcohol-blitzed overnight arrestees, which doubled as a holding cell for everyone else when the officers conducted daily cell and strip-searches. I badly wanted to go home.
When the crushing disappointment about my nonexistent cigarettes had abated, the women in the yard grew curious about the fucking green-skin. They lit a conversation, albeit a closely guarded one. At first I was intimidated by their prison banter. I could swear like a sailor but there was a bleak harshness to their profane language. Even so, I soon found them very easy to speak to. It took them thirty seconds to deduce I was a first-timer and drug free – a ‘fucking squarehead’ in the vernacular.
Kristy and Brooke were both twenty-three-ish and could have passed for sisters. They were athletically built and had long, bottle-blonde hair. Both were also heroin addicts and had young children in the care of family members, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Leah was around twenty-five, thin and quiet with a welcoming, friendly smile. Leah was an addict, too, but she seemed to exert control over Kristy and Brooke when they played up. It was obvious they all knew each other on the outside.
Debbie was around my age, approaching forty. She was very quiet and extremely sensitive to just about everything. She, too, was gripped by an addiction to heroin as well as any pills she could get her hands on. Finally, there was Tracey: the most boisterous of the lot. She was in her mid-thirties and clearly an ‘old-timer’. Another heroin addict, Tracey was also a good friend of the infamous stand-over-man-cum-self-mutilating maniac Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. She adored her mum, too; it said so on the tattoo on her arm. And she clearly liked the look of me.
‘G’day, goooorgeous!’ Tracey cooed as she eyed me up and down. I had never been hit on in quite the same manner in all my years. I couldn’t speak. ‘What’d they pinch you for, sweetheart?’ Tracey continued. My pulse raced and my mouth went dry. For a split second I contemplated telling her I’d committed a horrible murder, but out of nowhere a tiny, nervous voice squeaked the truth.
‘Fraud,’ the little creature peeped. A couple of seconds later I realised it was me.
‘Guessed as much, beautiful,’ Tracey breathed. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll look after you.’
That was exactly what I was afraid of.
Once the initial shock of being in Moorabbin morphed into more of a generalised apprehension, I felt strangely drawn to my fellow inmates and soon realised they meant me no harm. Not even Tracey. We were all in the same boat and thus innately shared an intense sense of sisterhood. They were wretched creatures; abused, broken and rough around the edges, but they were unflinchingly honest about who they were. It can’t be easy to say, ‘G’day! I’m a heroin addict. I will lie, cheat, steal and do just about anything for drugs. That’s why I’m in here.’ Compared to my crimes – which were committed in comfort, far from danger and neatly covered over by a latticework of lies – these women wore their harrowing stories on their faces, and their hearts on their sleeves. I admired them and felt oddly mesmerised. I suddenly wanted to know everything there was to know about heroin addiction. Maybe if I understood it I could somehow help them?
‘Tell me about yourself,’ I found myself saying. ‘Tell me everything.’ So they did. We had a lot of time to kill.
The women revealed some of the biggest hearts and the most soul-destroying histories I had ever heard. They’d all had horrendous childhoods and had staggered along a well-worn path from abuse to the heroin that numbed them just enough to exist. They certainly put my own difficult past into perspective. Where the average woman would likely identify child abuse as the single most damaging event in their lives, to these girls it was a given; their entree to misery. And it only got worse from there. Much, much worse.
I marvelled that these extraordinary people were still capable of any emotion, let alone the empathy they shared and the unconditional support and friendship they quickly offered to me. Maybe it was because I was someone who seemed interested and wasn’t going to hurt them, or maybe it was because I was subject to the exact same scorn and disrespect from the police officers who were guarding us. As far as the police were concerned, we were all the scum of the earth.
I was surprised to discover the female officers were the worst. Except for me, all of the prisoners required medication as they were in various stages of withdrawal from opiates. Depending on the officers on duty, medicine was dispensed at whim and not at the same time each day in order to limit the impact of the women ‘hanging out’ – the painful, searing craving for heroin. Once their bodies started screaming for the drugs they’d become dependent on, the women became agitated, anxious, restless and – with very little provocation – extremely aggressive. It only took me one day in lock-up to realise the officers were playing games with them – just because they could. Welcome to prison.