Twenty eight days in solitary confinement. They called it mutiny. Most of their remission was gone too. They told them that they were lucky that further time wasn’t added to their sentences. Bodgie was sorry for Tommy. He had been only a few days from freedom. They had been really, really stupid and now were paying for it, Bodgie thought as he prowled about his 7 foot by 4 foot cell empty of everything all the daylong except for a bible they gave him to read. He held it as he paced up and down, up and down. He tossed it up and down as he paced up and down. He sat under the window, feeling the hard cold concrete floor under his behind. He got up and paced up and down. He sat down. He got up and paced up and down.
He opened the bible and began to read. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters ...”
Towards evening, the light had weakened a screw came to unlock both the outer and inner doors that sealed Bodgie away from everyone and everything. He got a mattress and blanket from between them. The screw filled his mug with water and he was alone again. Bodgie didn’t even try to tap on the walls. What was the use and what was there to say? The window had been reduced to an air vent by having a metal plate pierced with holes bolted over it through which the light came to form a rectangle of light circles on the floor. Now it was night, dark, complete and utter like before the beginning of the world. Then a little light finally filtered in. The gray of dawn! Keys rattled and doors sprung open. He had to take his mattress and place them between the doors. In return he was given a small loaf of bread and a mug of water. The light strengthened. Keys rattled at the door. It was flung open. Bodgie was taken out to walk up and down in a narrow enclosed yard. He didn’t even see the watching screw. He walked up and down, up and down that narrow passageway with the closed and barred doors. He was absolutely alone in the universe.
“Behold, I cry out of wrong and am not heard; I cry aloud, but there is no judgement. He has hedged up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set darkness on my paths. He has stripped me of my glory, and has taken the crown from my head; he breaketh me down on every side, and I am gone; and my hope has been torn up as a tree …”
Bodgie shut the bible and thought about Samson losing his hair. He couldn’t find that passage. He slumped in the middle of his cell. The tears came. He was utterly and completely forsaken just as Job had been in the bible. The screw arrived. He ordered; Bodgie obeyed; he went away and the boy was alone completely and utterly alone. He slumped in the middle of the cell and let the days happen. The screw came; he ordered; he did, and after awhile the man went away and the boy slumped down again either on a mattress or not. What did it matter? He had been a real mug. Yes and this was what happened to mugs.
“And ye, seek not what you shall eat or what ye shall drink, and be not in anxiety; for all these things do the nations seek after, and your Father knows that you have need of these things; but seek his kingdom and all these things shall be added to you.”
So what, it made no sense to an idiot like him.
Yes, Bodgie decided his life was a mug’s game. He knew he was clever and so he had to change, better himself. For sure, he didn’t want to end up like some of the old convicts out one day and in the next. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless; but how to escape into a better future? How to when he would be out in the streets of Perth again without much money, no job and known to the cops as a crim? Oh God and he drifted down into his Valley of Despond and heard the Bodgie Blues begin with a hard beat that drove him towards the end of his solitary time filled only with the words of the Bible which he had read from Genesis to Revelations. Now he began softly singing all the songs he had ever known and when he couldn’t remember all the words, he made them up. Thus he endured the rest of his days in solitude singing the blues.