It had taken just two harrowing hours to realise the girls were completely settled with their father, whereas I was about as stable as the Fairstar in a cyclone. I had to get my act together. First I needed a place to live, which was easier said than done. When an inmate leaves prison you are required to provide Corrections with the address of where you will be living. My house in Healesville had been confiscated and sold off long ago so I simply didn’t have a home to go to. Nothing. Fortunately the Prison Housing Service was there to help – they directed me to a putrid little one-bedroom unit on the ground floor of an apartment block that was swarming with addicts and dangerous ex-criminals.
When I arrived at the address in Ascot Vale I was dismayed not only to discover it was a ‘prison release block’ but that I was the only female tenant. The rest were men who had just been let out of Barwon Prison – home to people like Carl Williams. The fear that gripped me as I walked up the path only intensified when I pulled the flimsy apartment door closed behind me. The place was a dive. It was old, it stank and it was ‘furnished’ with dilapidated items you’d find on the footpath during a council rubbish collection. There was no TV, the kitchen tap didn’t work, the pongy mattress was covered in stains and – worst of all – the lock on the door was about as secure as a plastic latch on a child’s jewellery box.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night thanks to my neighbours knocking on the door and the window. They weren’t hoping to borrow a cup of sugar, though – they wanted to know if I needed to score, whether I had any money or if I could help them get drugs. I missed the C Unit like a baby bird who’d fallen out of its nest. In prison I had been 100 per cent safe from every threat in the world and I had slept like a log almost every night for the past four-and-a-half years. I couldn’t believe the Prison Housing Service would turn me out with nowhere to go and then put me in a dangerous and stinky cesspit crawling with desperate men. As soon as the sun came up I phoned my lovely friend Carolyn and organised to meet her at Swinburne University.
‘Oh my goodness! How are you feeling, Kerry?’ she asked as a taxi dropped me at the main gate of Swinburne’s Lilydale campus. I must have looked totally wrung-out and dishevelled. ‘I’m feeling much better now,’ I said, ‘because I know I’m never, ever going back to that shithole of a unit. They can put me in prison again first.’
Carolyn had arranged for me to move into the university’s student accommodation. This not only provided me with an escape from Casa del Crim in Ascot Vale, it put me close to where Shannyn and Sarah attended school in Lilydale. The accommodation itself was lovely – a bright and tidy one-bedroom unit with a comfy bed – but the best feature was the security swipe card, which no one could get into the building without – the next best thing to being locked up. The campus itself was spread across carpets of lush green grass and it even had its own lake. I was in the best of both worlds; I felt secure in my little ‘cell’ plus I had a sliding door that opened onto a step where I could sit and watch ducks paddle across the water.
Without Carolyn’s help, and of course Cheryl’s, I would have struggled to find my feet in society. She had lobbied hard to secure a job for me at Swinburne University three days a week, and the cost of the accommodation was deducted from my salary. I had also accepted a receptionist’s job at my old day-release placement at the law firm in Werribee where I would be working on the other two days. My first role at Swinburne was administration in the writing department where I’d done my Master of Arts. With the degree under my belt I was also invited to do a PhD in writing. I was extremely grateful but I quickly realised I was also the university’s golden girl and something of a research project to the professors. They had never had a PhD student who had come to them from inside a maximum-security prison before, so my job and study there had a feeling of quid pro quo about it.
I’d spent enough time in prison to know that day three of an inmate’s freedom is the hardest. Carolyn seemed to twig to this, too. At the end of my third day she turned up at my room with a bottle of Fifth Leg sauvignon-blanc as she’d promised she’d do years earlier in prison. As we sat together on my little step and looked out towards the lake, I began to debrief with her: my family had all returned to Mildura (at least the ones I actually recognised); I’d had a nightmarish afternoon with Shannyn and Sarah, and realised I’d had better understanding and control over them while I was in prison; I’d had a run-in with a snooty woman I didn’t even know, and I’d narrowly escaped from the scary slums of Ascot Vale without being robbed or worse.
‘Do you know what, Carolyn?’ I said as we watched a pair of ducks glide over the lake’s glassy skin, ‘if you weren’t here I would call my dealer.’
‘Kerry! You don’t even take drugs!’ she said with a snort. ‘What are you talking about?’
It was a good question and it made me realise how ingrained in the DPFC drug culture I had become, and how I fundamentally understood what the women meant when they said day three is too hard. At that moment I felt the word ‘institutionalised’ was probably a good fit for me. ‘I miss prison, Carolyn,’ I said. ‘I guess what I’m saying is if I had a dealer I would definitely have called them by now. I totally get what the girls mean when they say that. All this other stuff: life? It’s just so fucking hard.’
One of the pre-release programs I completed in prison was run by a group called the Self Help Addiction Resource Centre, or SHARC. Of course, I wasn’t addicted to anything – not if you don’t count my addiction to prison itself – but I really liked their concept. The SHARC program was concerned with re-establishing relationships ahead of a prisoner’s release. It made me think about my relationships in more detail and how some of the structures in prison made it impossible to have real relationships until I had actually been released. Now that I was out I was finding out just what a big deal this particular aspect of ‘freedom’ could be. So, I was surprised when, just eleven days after I was released, SHARC invited me to give a speech at a workshop being held in an old church in St Kilda.
A lot of the people in the audience were struggling with depression, addictions, mental illness or all three. But knowing I was a clean-skin, the SHARC people asked me instead to talk about how prison can have a positive impact on a person. That was easy, because I truly believed it could, providing women were properly supported inside. I had seen it happen to others and I was living proof of the edict myself. I stood at the front of the old church and talked about resilience, the strength of the human will and the value of never giving up on yourself or others. I spoke about the programs that are available in prisons to help people deal with their problems and improve themselves. I told stories, cracked some jokes and gave examples of what life in prison could be like and how you could always find positives in every situation. I was told afterwards that it was a great talk.
That was pretty much the first such speech I had ever given. I had learned that the fear of public speaking is so common it has its own word: glossophobia. In the years ahead I was to discover I was the opposite of a glossophobe. I love public speaking and it is one of the few things I know I am really good at. I’m in my comfort zone behind a microphone and in front of a group. I can read an audience and know when to shift gears to keep their attention, or, if they’re confronted by the subject matter, when to tell a joke or make an aside to release the tension. I didn’t know it then but the SHARC talk was the first of hundreds of public appearances that would eventually lead to an audience with the Governor-General. If only it was so easy talking to my own daughters.
It quickly became obvious that years in prison had largely dismantled our relationship. All those long afternoons in the Visitor Centre, all the cards I sent them, all the phone calls I made … none of it could alter the fact I had left them. Now that I was finally ‘back’, the reality of the damage that had been done hit home hard. I felt more like a step-mother to the girls than anything else. Or an aunt – Aunty Mum. I could be wooden, unsure and stand-offish with them. I didn’t know their friends, I had never been to netball practice – in fact, I hadn’t seen them outside of prison walls since they were little girls. None of this was their fault; they were innocent victims of my terrible behaviour and the tragedy was they continued to be – for a very long time.
It took a full five years for us to rebuild our relationship. It wasn’t the same as before, and we had to put ourselves back together using emotions and character traits that had been buckled and bent by the experience. I had spent my entire sentence trying to prove that I wasn’t going to harm them, break their trust or disappear again inside a green jumpsuit in a prison Visitor Centre. I never counted on feeling like I would get out and sometimes decline to see them in favour of a night on the town.
Another relationship that had been intrinsically altered by prison was the one between me and men. Where I’d once tended to be subservient to men, I emerged from prison as a single-minded, almost ruthless piece of work. I wasn’t exactly a man-eater, but I would date guys and as soon as I was bored or had something better to do, I’d drop them like a hot potato. Sometimes men would ring or send me an SMS the next day. I’d write back with all the charm of a robot: ‘What are you texting me for?’
‘Oh, I just really like you.’
‘So?’
That attitude had been cast in the emotional furnace of prison. Make no mistake, women who are locked up for years will have lascivious thoughts about some of the male officers, but you dare not say it or show it – not unless you want to risk getting killed on the compound. In a women’s prison, lustful thoughts must be locked up between an inmate’s ears. You clamp down on your sexual impulses – hard. Suppress, suppress, suppress. By the time you get out, all of that pressure crushing down has forged your sexuality into a blunt but effective tool. You are so used to stomping on the feelings that might have given you butter-flies in your previous life, caused you to blush or made you want to give yourself to someone completely. What’s left is animal instinct – a wanton, self-serving sexuality. Well, that’s how it was for me anyway.
Not that I didn’t have a good time with some guys. There were a few I got close to. There was one man I had a bit of a thing with for a while. He was a senior figure at one of the banks and we’d seen each other a few times. We met up after work quite late one night and ended up back at his place, a lovely apartment in St Kilda. About midnight we were standing on the balcony having a glass of wine. ‘Hey, did you know that’s a corner where ladies of the night hang out?’ I asked my date, and pointed to a stretch of the footpath across the road that glowed in a puddle of street light. Before he could answer, a slender figure stepped out of the shadows and leaned into the window of a car that had just glided up like a scene from Pretty Woman. I did a double take.
‘Rachel?’ I called out, causing the figure to look up at the balcony.
‘Kerry? Is that you?’ a voice replied.
‘Heeeyyy, Rachel! You’re out? Great to see you,’ I said and gave her a thumbs up.
By now Rachel had moved her potential customer on with a firm but dismissive wave of her hand, like a cop directing traffic. ‘Come down here!’ she squealed. ‘Bess is around here somewhere and Jude’s just up the road. They’d love to see you.’
I had to turn her down. After all, I already had a date, who was now shaking his head in amused disbelief. Up until then he’d only known me as Kerry the fiery brunette who worked at the uni. ‘Come inside and sit down,’ I said to him. ‘Perhaps I should tell you a little bit about myself.’
He sent me a text message a couple of days later: ‘Hey, I really like you!’
I never got back to him.