If the sun were out you might have veered off to Maroubra beach and forgotten all about visiting Gav Cooke, justifying your existence and the whole gaol catastrophe, but it is raining. You drive on.
*
A custodial officer in blue appears and the gaol gate opens and just as promptly shuts, excluding you and the other visitors clustered under umbrellas. Someone inside the sandstone walls must be watching a monitor. It’s already ten a.m. and you’re anxious to prove your work has been worthwhile, that at least one prisoner is continuing to study and isn’t using. Hard to believe that until a few months ago you’d been in charge of the education of these prisoners.
Your hand itches to push the buzzer until a man lifts a small girl who relieves you of all responsibility by pressing it. You’re paranoid, imagining the surveillance camera swivels. Following you because you worked here? Possibly. One visitor is yelling and waving her bare arms in a jerky backstroke. You’re the only one wearing a raincoat. You like to have as much of your body covered as possible.
A car skids and stops. Doors open and young Asians, one with blond streaks, race to the gate. Rain spots their white shirts. Rain drips off the brim of a Koori father’s Akubra, drips on the bare shoulders of a redhead who’s rolling up the waistband of her skirt. Her legs must ache from standing in those boots.
The gate swings open and the officer orders a man to take the child down from his shoulders. He orders the redhead to pick up her baby and collapse her stroller, ready for searching.
You stand at the sign-in desk holding your ID. The later you arrive, the less time you’ll get to stay. The stooped man ahead laboriously prints numbers on a card. A bald officer passes the stooped man’s licence to a hirsute colleague. The officers pass the licence back and forth, marvelling at how one way the writing is the right way up and the other way the photo is. They wave the man through, then run their fingers down creased computer printouts, down the food-spotted computer screen itself, before agreeing that Cooke, #899472, the inmate you have come to visit, has been sent to Goulburn. Bugger, bugger, bugger.
‘When?’
‘Dunno. I saw a crim looked like him going out to run laps,’ says the hairy officer.
You look at your watch. The bald one rechecks Gav’s number and phones the wing.
‘He’s there, hanging around,’ they chortle, handing you a see-through satchel for your belongings.
Muttering families crowd the entryway behind you. The bald officer upends a stroller and shakes it until a baby bottle filled with orange cordial bounces on the cobblestones. You follow the arrows pointing to the visitors’ waiting room, turning around in time to see the redhead pick up the bottle, wipe the nipple on her hip and thrust it at the baby.
One of the officers must say something you don’t hear because the redhead screams, ‘Search a baby? Piss orf, you sick old pervert. You got somethin’ about baby bums or what?’
‘Officers found contraband in his nappy at Parramatta … ’
‘The filth planted that! I’ll tell my guy, youse are all perverts!’
To the right of the corridor a toilet door is ajar. The overhead cistern drips and rust oozes through the pipes. You imagine a sign, Last place to shoot up before visiting.
In the waiting room you join gaunt tattooed westies jiggling and scratching in front of a wall-mounted telly. Kids whining for soft drinks fling themselves over and under chairs. To distract them the adults fold fliers about the Children of Prisoners Support Group into paper darts.
Eventually an officer shouts, ‘Visitor for Cooke.’
You take a few steps forward. The officer steps close and whispers, ‘First time, luv?’
You jump. He must be new. You turn away. The less he knows the better.
‘Youse wanna go fer a beer after, luv?’
You cross your arms and shake your head. It’s like visiting a foreign country.
‘Be at the gate at four?’
You aren’t that lonely.
‘A bit long in the tooth for young Cooke, aren’t youse, but?’
He’s right about your preferring Gav. Who wouldn’t? You’d confided in each other every day like old friends. He’d had his first shot when he was twelve. He’d fetched beers for men who arrived when his mum still had someone with her. The day he gets out he’s going to get a job in a gym. You trust him. Sort of.
‘Visitor for Cooke, pro-ceed, please.’
A video camera is mounted at each turn in the corridor. A blue uniform opens the door and you scan the visiting area, willing Gav to be there, waiting. Visitors and prisoners sit hunched over tables like primary-school parents at parent–teacher night. Not that you’ve ever been to one, or are likely to go for that matter. A woman officer hands over the number nineteen and you wander among the tables looking for Gav.
‘I don’t care who the fuck he is, you didn’t fuckin’ hafta let him spend the night, did ya?’
A male voice. Nothing to do with you. Gav is wearing a white plastic bag with no opening in the front. A body bag.
‘Table which?’ you lip-read him say to the female custodial officer. ‘Nineteen? OK!’
He can’t find the table with the nineteen on it because you’re still clutching the number. You hope he isn’t expecting someone more exciting. Finally he sees you.
‘Hey, Chalkie. There’s a table in the corner.’
What doesn’t he want the officers to overhear? He wouldn’t ask you to do anything illegal. He unwinds your fingers from their grip on the number. You want him to keep touching them.
‘Took a long while to get here, eh?’
‘I’ve been here ages.’
‘Me too.’
You smile and tell him about the police planting drugs on the baby.
‘Tell me about having an addicted mum, eh? Talk quicker. We’ll be lucky to get fifty minutes.’
He looks like he’s been working out, but not using is the important thing.
‘See Big Max’s lady?’ He points.
The whole room throbs. You turn in time to see Max’s hand move under his lady’s skirt. Probably she isn’t wearing knickers. Gav says she tapes a sawn-off fit loaded with heroin to her thigh, a takeaway for Max. Are drugs more a commodity than sex? You can never figure it out. That’s Berko coughing, the one whose missus claims she got pregnant in this room. You cross your legs and check out what a toddler conceived during a gaol visit looks like. Brown eyes, sticking-out ears and sticking-up brown hair – just like Berko. The air, thick with volatilised juices, wraps around you like a bodysuit of sperm, sweat and sour breast milk. Thank goodness for cotton knickers.
You sit side by side at the low table next to layers of chipped mustard paint, craving a hit of passion, some touching, love – the things everyone else here seems to have in abundance. You’re desperate to hear him say something personal – like his release date has been brought forward, and he hasn’t had a shot in months, and he’s enrolled in a certificate in sports training, and he attributes all this to your excellent work. Just I miss talking to you would do.
‘Instant coffee with fake milk and sugar?’
The legs of his chair scrape on the cement. Screams and swearing bounce off the high-gloss walls. People intertwine like pretzels – hands down neckbands, hands under shirts, hands up skirts, hands down pants. Berko’s clone, snot dripping from his nose, careens into the legs of your chair.
‘This awful brew.’ Gav places the coffee on the table.
You drain the last bitter drop and dig your right thumbnail into the bottom edge of the polystyrene until crescent-shaped dents ring the bottom, like the moon has orbited for the entirety of someone’s lagging, one crescent for each month. He jiggles his legs.
Names are called out as new visitors replace those whose time is up. The crim at the next table leans over to tell Gav that, bad luck, a trannie with a stroller has been barred entry.
Was that redhead a trannie? Bringing in drugs?
‘Gav, how’s your course going?’
‘It’s impossible to study when you’re two-out. You know that.’
‘But you’re still submitting a unit every fortnight?’
‘You try studying while you’re locked up with some arsehole eighteen hours a day.’
‘How many units have you sent in?’
‘The guy I’m two-out with watches telly until three in the morning.’
Like you’re responsible for the overcrowding. ‘I suppose you’ve gone on request for earplugs?’
‘No luck.’
He must have done something major to get the super offside.
‘You bring some in. Give it a go, Chalk. Earplugs and packets of Drum. Not for me. For yourself. Prove to yourself you’re no longer a puppet of the system.’
One earplug inside each cheek? Or in your ears and wear your hair down? ‘I could end up in Mulawa.’
‘Aw, don’t be so middle-class. You can count on me. I’d visit you.’
The hell he would! Suddenly it’s quiet. The paint on the cement floor is worn so thin you see the grey underneath.
‘Visitor for Cooke, one minute.’
He’s looking straight ahead. You keep your chin level with the table, look into his dark smoky eyes. Pinned. Just like the rest of them. He won’t even ring when he gets out.
‘Doesn’t matter, Chalk. I’m being sent to Goulburn tomorrow.’
‘Goulburn. Why?’
‘Visitor for Cooke, thirty seconds.’
You stand.
‘If I’d been able to get enough tobacco I’d have come down easier, but you weren’t here.’
‘It’s not my fault you’re using.’
He stands up. ‘Shh. Not my fault they urine-tested me when I least expected it.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Visit me in Goulburn, eh?’
‘Time’s up, visitor for Cooke.’
‘Please, Chalk?’
You touch cheeks.
*
Outside the gate the rain has stopped. Bright straw hats, striped bags and T-shirts replace sandstone, brick and concrete. You join the queue at the ice-cream vendor’s cart. No sense feeling hungry at the beach.
Permission to Lie