There’s a reason they call it serving time. After you’ve been stripped of everything else, time is all that society can take off you as punishment. When you keep handing your time over day after day and year after year, however, it creates a black hole into which other things disappear: your relationships, your dreams, the person you once were. And when every day is a replica of the last – the same walls, same people, same clothes, same routine – the passage of time becomes harder to measure. That’s until the calendar throws up cruel reminders that make you sit and contemplate the time you have lost. You’d think Christmas Day would be the worst. It’s not.
Christmas was all about getting in touch with children and family. Since the thirty-odd women in the C Units all wanted to use the phone at once on Christmas Day I started a ballot system where the officers would draw our names out of a hat. It was always rigged in my favour but no one seemed to mind. I’d have six minutes on the phone with each of my girls to find out what Santa had brought them and what they were doing for the day. ‘I-love-you-Merry-Christmas-darlings-and-Mummy-will-speak-to-you-soon-bye!’ And then Christmas parenting was over for another year. When everyone’s phone calls were done with, we were locked in while the skeleton staff of officers had their own lunch.
We’d sit around in the cottage and have our ‘family’ lunch. We were given Christmas ham and Sue would have ordered a chicken to cook. Later, when the officers had finished lunch, the girls from other units would come and visit and sometimes exchange gifts from the canteen. Tania even fashioned a Santa outfit one year. Each passing Christmas got a little easier. The first one I was distraught and would have done anything to stop thinking too much about what was happening on the outside: excited children burrowing under the plastic tree at dawn, the squeals of delight as presents tumbled from coloured paper, the bustle of getting ready for Christmas lunch, the drunken afternoon rituals of dancing, napping or fighting, and the tears of children who, when the excitement had dimmed, realised how much they missed their mum. After a while, though, it just became another day to get through.
Boxing Day could be a bit of a drag and New Year’s Eve wasn’t too bad because at least the women could watch the fireworks on TV, not that I ever did – I made a promise to myself that I’d only let myself enjoy spectacles like that when I was welcome to do so live. Then New Year’s Day would lumber in like an elephant and crush you up against your cell wall. To most people 1 January is a time of new beginnings, new goals, fresh challenges and the end of bad habits. Even to some inmates it spells the beginning of the end of their sentence. But to the long-termers it was just the start of another gruelling year in the black hole. It is the worst day ever.
I’d walk out of my cell on New Year’s Day and picture a giant ladder suspended in the air with 365 rungs that reached up through the clouds. I couldn’t even see where it ended, but I knew I had to fight, struggle, claw and squirm to pull myself up every single rung one at a time. At the end of the year, if I made it to the top, I’d get to slam my flag into the summit on 31 December like a solo mountaineer and say, ‘I fucking survived!’ The next day I’d have to squeeze past the elephant to get out of my cell where a new ladder would be waiting for me. I’d hate to think what it was like for some of the really long-termers.
Women who were serving heavy sentences – ten years or more – were afforded a special kind of respect from the other inmates. It wasn’t ‘respect’ for their crimes (which were often heinous), nor was it because they were seen as hard-arses or women to be feared – it was simply an acknowledgement of the enormous price they were paying. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty rungs. Seven thousand, three hundred rungs. Ten thousand, nine hundred and fifty rungs. Mary was one such woman with a long climb ahead of her.
An Egyptian woman, Mary had been forced into an arranged marriage and had two young children at the time she started having an affair with her husband’s brother. When her husband was found burned to death in his car in St Albans, a suburb north-west of Melbourne, police thought it was suspicious that he was still wearing his seatbelt. That and the fact toxicology showed he’d also been drugged. They quickly had Mary and her lover in their sights.
Another breakthrough came when Mary took herself to the Western Suburbs Hospital to have an abortion. The police quickly got a warrant to take a DNA sample from the aborted foetus, which conclusively proved the victim’s brother was the father. This provided prosecutors with a motive. A jury found them both guilty of murder and they were each sentenced to twenty-one years. It was the lead item on the 6pm news so everyone in the prison knew of Mary’s fate. It was about 8pm when she was brought into A5.
Normally, at that time of night, A5 was a noisy and rowdy place with women yelling abuse and threats at each other from their cells, demanding cigarettes or just being stupid. But when Mary came in, the place was deathly silent. You could have heard a pin drop. My cell gave me a window seat to the mournful procession. No one said a word – not the officers, not the inmates. All we could hear were footsteps as Mary was marched to a cell and the door was closed behind her. Then for the next three or four hours the only sound we heard was Mary sobbing to herself at the very bottom of seven thousand, six hundred and sixty-five rungs.
Like the rest of us, though, the people left behind in Mary’s life were also sentenced to suffer. I took time to get to know her and discovered her children – a boy and a girl – were about the same ages as Shannyn and Sarah. They had essentially been orphaned by Mary’s murderous acts, given that their dad was dead and their mum would be in prison into their adult years. They wound up in the care of their paternal grandparents who asked the courts to prevent Mary from seeing the children at all. They also planned on taking her kids to Egypt, where they wanted to have them included in an old-world ritual that Mary objected to.
‘What can I do for you, Mary?’ I asked as she sobbed in her cell one day. ‘You’re going to be here for twenty-one years and I need to be able to help you adjust to that.’
‘Can you just enable me to see my kids for a little bit longer?’ she pleaded. ‘That’s all I ask.’
Putting my experience in the Family Court into practice, I got the officers to download an ex-parte agreement that we were able to file and stop the grandparents taking the children out of Australia. I got to know Mary’s side of the story. She had undergone that same ritual herself when she was eight years old and was forced to marry someone she didn’t love. Don’t get me wrong, murder is murder and it is wicked and evil, but when you live in a place where every second person is a murderer you don’t differentiate between who is a good murderer and who is a bad murderer. As a peer support worker it was important to see the woman and not the crime.
On 1 January 2007, I walked out of my cell and looked up at the ladder in front of me. It was different: a bit shorter and it didn’t disappear into the clouds. I realised it was the last New Year’s Day I would spend inside DPFC. I pulled myself onto the bottom rung and started climbing.