OnDusk : January 2014

An occasional short in three parts.

I. Icecream

I didn’t really have any spare time on my hands but when he asked me if I would help him with his homework I said sure, I am free on Sunday afternoon.

I’d wondered how he divided his time. I knew roughly what he did when I saw him outside of his room, but I wondered what time felt like now that he wasn’t counting down to a release date.

He’d had plenty of those. He’d done the sums out loud for my benefit. Juvenile homes, jail, more jail, longer jail, then a jail sentence on the way to being endless. By my calculations he’d spent about five years on the outside spread jaggedly over a generation.

I could tell you, that with his institutionalized skin and muscles he could have passed for 35. But he surveys the free world through ancient eyes. He would see straight through my weakness.

Even after decades spent reading everyone he came into contact with in his block and on the other side of the cage, he’s never learnt how to hide his watchful eyes. You wouldn’t if you were intent on the destruction of others before they get you. Be someone to fear or be their target, their bitch, their thing of value in a place where everything has a price.

There is a lot that could go wrong in jail. You can be stood over, robbed, stabbed and killed. Or you can be the one to rule and prosper.

Everyone has fear. Everyone is innocent. Everyone is a liar.

The constant manipulations of the truth make the time passing more interesting, more entertaining. Why walk across the room when you could slither around the edges, dodging and zagging with all eyes on you.

Your alternative is to read, study or invest in something to knock you out and sleep away the days, weeks and months when you can’t stand to be outside the womb.

My budding scholar could have foetal alcohol syndrome, he could have brain damage from years of addictions and beatings. He had a horrible upbringing. Stolen, fostered, abused, brutalized. He claimed to be none the worse the wear from the years of heroin he’d shot on the outside and continued on the inside. The two inch scar on the wrist he had savaged with a blade held in his other hand was brushed off as a minor event. There is so much more blood and gore he speaks about in loving detail and other’s that he slides across.

I haven’t asked why he gave up heroin when he was inside. I doubt it had anything to do with rehab, as such a service just wasn’t getting under the skin and into the minds like the regular supply of mule-carted powder. If such a rehab service existed.

It seems irrelevant as these days he is sampling ice. At first once or twice, and now coinciding with when he has money, or when his expanding codependent network has money. The cycles of using then resting, then talking about it, then wanting it again, then using are getting smaller and tighter. Some days he doesn’t look so good. The using days, and the days immediately before them. The days in between he keeps himself busy. Days and nights filled with movement, people and distractions while he marks time. They are his good days.

When it comes to homework, his attention span is five minutes long. Then his eyes start to slide from side to side around me looking for movement, something else to track and process in his calculating mind. He needs more animation. Whenever his eyes made a minor shift to the left or right, I change tack and catch the wind of interest.

I heard the old men say ….

I’ll tell you this story…

He can follow a complex concept providing it has a beginning, a middle and an end.

In between returning regularly to his favourite subject, where he was in charge of his domain, where he felt truly free to spread his wings and his calculating mind, and let fly his imagination. Where people made sense. Where he had learnt the lessons he will fall back on for a lifetime. Jail.

I found that by using jail as a reference, units in a Diploma of Business are easily translated into complex algorithms with variables of prison bartering, trading and profit margins based around buy ups, lock downs and significant events, such as grand finals and the holiest day of what ever prisoners mark their time with, the Melbourne Cup. Tokens are finance, heroin is a commodity, prison life is a fluctuating market, and they’re all players in a bear pit of snakes hooked on White Ox.

Mix it up and I can keep his avid attention for three hours, until it exhausts me and we have ice cream.

I’ve been here before. Different cultures learn in ways relevant to their experiences. Their knowledge systems are unique. Take for example, the remote crocodile enterprise that structured their business plans around six seasons. Everyone knew when the dragon flys came, when the rains returned, when the male buffaloes were especially vigilant about maintaining their territory.

So this ex inmate has simply adapted his passed down bush skills to live as an urban warrior under layers of wire mesh, bars, brick and concrete.

Respect is for those who teach you and nourish you, and keep you alive inside. Even when his family had seen the back of him when he proved to be a bad father, a violent husband, an unreliable son, and only the victims and the survivors could describe the mayhem and life lost by his long fingers and misshapen knuckles.

His eyes remind me of those old photos, of the men dressed in rags with chains around their neck, lined up between the uniformed men who slouched, with rifles held casually across their forearms.

The eyes of the captured, watchful beyond desperate, they are reduced to looking to another being for survival.

I can almost hear the electricity humming inside him when he sits perfectly still, his eyes locked on mine while he pries for weakness. He is always looking for a loose screw, an unlocked door, a lapse in concentration.

But mostly he respects intelligence. So he says. Inside that is something of value. If you know things, have seen things, if you can tell a yarn, then you are entertainment and an education and it can’t be stolen or stood over to gain.

I couldn’t tell you what triggers it, but at times he’ll lapse into complete servitude, waiting on me, deferring to me, cleaning up after me, being on duty against any physical threat that I laugh and say is highly unlikely to come. He will give up his chair, and sit on the floor. I wonder how far he would go, when he is at his subservient best.

I love violence, he said spontaneously, like another might say I love Instagram.

He doesn’t understand what a smart phone is, hadn’t seen a computer up close, uploading and downloading are a magical trick. He has been in a time capsule of men. His needs are simple, his world view is primal.

He is dangerous. I don’t know what holds it in check. He has been conditioned to reach across with ease and take what he wants. He is playful and has some other qualities that makes him far more interesting to me than his inclination towards effortless violence. But it's the violence that gets people's attention.

I wonder who he will hurt. I have imaginery conversations where he leaves with a companion, and returns alone. Where is he? I will ask. And he will give me that look I have seen once before, when I asked another much younger male, where is she? What have you done? It’s an odd look. It’s a detached look. Not the look of purpose. In that one moment there are no lies. Before shock shows, and disbelief clouds their recollection they will tell you everything.

I have no duty of care, no government funded responsibility, no professional code of ethics, no deadline, no phd supervisor. No proof and no evidence. I have witnessed no threats or plans.

I know someone who has been more in that out of jail. I know a child who was abandoned and neglected, and a man who will die warehoused and forgotten. Who doesn’t?

Danger is here now. He is restless. He notices how carefree people are, around the ATMs. How fearless they are, as they walk along the lonely streets at night. How oblivious they are, as they emerge from cars in quiet neighborhoods, laden with bags, wanton purchases, useful things, tradable items.

He says he needs drugs now, because of the way people look at him. He feels their eyes. They would never survive jail. They don’t know to be careful with their eyes, their lives, to notice who is watching them, who is following them, who comes up behind them.

There is no service to support him, no one willing to strap themselves to him twenty four seven as he falls between the cracks. No one could listen to him for long without finding the inconsistencies in his code. He will read that doubt and reject you.

He will go back inside. The signs are clear.

I am certain because I have seen him eat icecream. And cake. To be loved like he loves cake, no one is worthy. He eats it like he may never taste it again. He eats it like oxygen before a deep sea dive, an astronaut preparing for launch, like a man running on adrenalin and fear. He looks like a big kid, filling his lungs, his pores, his cells with sugared joy some may say fondly.

But they haven’t seen his eyes. They haven’t had those split seconds when you see into what has formed underneath the brutality. If they had, they might lock themselves inside and never come out again.

_________________________

II. Chocolate

He slipped up one day and called his room a cell. I had to agree, our pay by the night rooms are small.

But his is spotless. A three day meth binge was followed by chores, while he morosely scrubbed his cell from top to bottom. He found a vacuum cleaner in a locked cupboard – he doesn’t trust the domestic staff – and he used the smallest attachment. His room is cleaner than mine. If he was my bitch I would have the cleanest cell here.

He washed all his clothes, his linen, the curtain. He looked institutionalised, so happy to have found a vacuum cleaner with decent suction.

When I saw him washing his shoes after midnight I had to wonder, was he washing the blood off?

Had droplets splashed across the toes, or the laces he hung carefully from an empty hook he found outside, unused now that the potted plants are all dead. And why was he up so late, and seemingly not under the influence?

His shoes of choice are soft soled sneakers, and they give doubt to him having kicked someone to death. Though, of course it is possible if you have spent time thinking where the blood flows, the muscles will cleave with ease, where the bones snap at their most vulnerable point. He is strong enough. He claims not to be, and will lapse into soft shouldered indolence when he knows he has my undivided attention. Not to trick me, but to entice me.

'I want to be graceful', he said once while in the throes of introspection. He walks with barely a sound.

We keep separate hours, when he binges and when he doesn’t. He is either early to bed, early to rise, or doesn’t sleep at all. He has bonded with another couple of addicts. They all lose weight during their three day fun time, regularly sustained by the even spread of the paydays over a two week period. He tried to draw me into their co-dependent circle.

I told him Other People’s Money is as interesting to me, as Other Peoples Kids are to white people.

Binge, sleep, morose reflections, rewind tight, and binge again. It’s boring for me, but makes him easy to manage.

He tried to top dog me into running on his time.

But the terrible fascination has worn off. We were as thick as thieves in the dining room, or sitting in the sun, or with heads together while I introduced him to the endless fun for all of Youtube in the computer room.

But his addictions make him exhausting to be around and I lost the urgency to run on his time. I have my own life. I can see it through his eyes. I am busy, I am self-contained. I don’t owe anyone, or act like that’s the case. I do what I want, and these days even more so now he is around.

He still runs on contraband and I get constant gifts of chocolate. At first it was because I was patient with him, explaining any questions with no surprise. I passed the greatest test, in tutoring him into good marks at college. He looked two feet taller when he told me, then stuck by me for hours. It seems that his greatest pleasure is to clear away anything that may offend me. It occurs to me that it is the service that he craves, because it is the most demonstrative. A person could get used to that.

He is not overwhelmed by technology at all, and says ‘look in your phone’ whenever I struggle to answer what he wants to know.

But now that he has found his way back to drugs, he also gives me chocolate to mask his binges.As if an aerated family block of peppermint would make me not notice eyes on stalks and raining sweat.

I told him it’s the chemical smell of ice that I abhor. I know how to reach him now. He is fanatical about cleaning his body so now he avoids me when he returns and slips inside until he has showered and rubbed moisturizer all over himself.

He reappears in dove grey leisure wear, scented and aglow with his shiny hair and staring distended blood shot eyeballs and thrusts chocolate at me. Who doesn’t love chocolate?

The binge-induced moroseness that follows takes less than half the time that he spends on using, and includes your common regret over relapsing, again, every week. But there is more to his story that is emerging little by little. I’ve heard three times now that he has no one to bury him when he dies. I wonder who he was to be forgotten.

He looked sad while he hung up his shoes to dry. Made me wonder why. A person is inclined to want to know because he is a rare creature to see in the wild.

He has few inhibitions but he doesn’t lack self awareness. There are two other residents we don’t like. One is simply annoying. She trawls other people’s conversations, and we look like we’d have something very interesting to say. I’ve lived in a free world of sorts, and accustomed to some degree of a live and let live creed. He hisses at her like a cat when she leaves the room.

He told me that at one time or another, all of his teeth have been knocked out from fighting. The prison caps are perfect, and his eyes are slitted. She doesn’t make any expression when he hisses at her.

What would you say when a 6’2” heavily muscled man with jail tattoos hissed at you? Bad kitty?

After the moroseness, and before the next binge, for those few days he is just a person. So that means icecream is the highlight of his day. We got a 4 litre tub, thick chocolate sauce and our new taste sensation, soft smooth peanut butter. He served us up a bowl each, and I put half mine back. I wasn’t pretending to be scared of the stuff, I just can’t eat that much in one go.

Pretending to be anything at all just doesn’t work for our odd coupling. What would I get away with? I see that he watches everything. In jail, they monitor each other’s intake and exhale. In jail, you can’t make any noise after a certain hour. Flushing a toilet or showering indecently will get your head bashed in, and arguably deservedly so. Isn’t it obvious you just don’t do that when noise travels its furthest at night?

So I find we have some things in common. Never wake us.

The only exceptions are if someone has died, or they better have. Otherwise there is no reason to wake a person when they are at their safest. Good rule.

Inmates have nothing better to do than notice what you eat or are robbed of in the prison dining room. The only secrets are what you are snacking on under isolated lock and key, but there is no way of hiding your love handles in prison issue garb. I mentioned I wanted to get fit because cameras are heavy to heave in, out and around. In the blink of a sparkling sober eye over the dining room table, he suggested I try speed, which is well known for its weight reduction effect.

I was detecting a theme.

I’d had a bad chest cold and he’d taken responsibility for measuring my cough syrup, with the 10 ml syringe that didn’t actually fit in the neck of the bottle. I’m well past the age when I take medicine by squirting it down my neck but I was too sick to question it, though I did mention to my temporary nurse that there was really no need to squeeze out the air bubbles, despite how much enjoyment he seemed to get from doing exactly that. I demurred on the illicit-drug induced weight loss, saying if I don’t want it on my ass, I shouldn’t put it in my mouth.

He served himself a litre or so from the brand new tub of icecream and added the toppings. I like mine grouped in their places, loading one mixed spoonful at a time, but he always stirs his altogether. We chatted about the merits of either approach. And then mistress annoyance walked into the dining room.

Without changing volume or tone he said ‘I still see the face of the person I killed’.

It was the first time he’d admitted to what I’d learnt from google. He can do many clever things, like make a tattoo gun out of a Walkman and a guitar string but after over twenty five years inside, he doesn’t understand the easy life of search engines. But it was obvious I could work out that the last and longest sixteen year sentence wasn’t for a very bad incident of shoplifting.

I heard her stop in her tracks behind me, and with no attempt at pretending to have any reason to be there, quickly retreated while he hissed at her. I continued eating my icecream. Then we looked at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed. I laughed off rage, frustration, loneliness and boredom from weeks of other people. He looked happy, and ate a baby sized head of ice cream in one sitting. Then said he was going on a diet. And was going to give up smoking, but made no mention of pulling up on the amphetamines. Baby steps.

There is another resident that we don’t like. No, we do not like him at all.

I have my reasons.

For a short time you see, I’d developed my own drug habit, sitting up at late at night with the night watchman, binging on Breaking Bad via his hard drive on the large screen plasma in the common room, empty after midnight.

I may not like the smell of it leaching from pores, but I happily discussed meth labs, the murders and machinations of the crime syndicates and the state of Walt and Skylar’s implausible relationship for hours every night. Then the bastard came lumbering through our meth party and with no spoiler alert, shot his mouth off. He was already close to the top of my shit list but then he tipped over into the red zone.

Sometime afterwards, I caught him attempting to needle my heavily tattooed fascination.

The spoiler isn’t a great judge of character and obviously doesn’t recognise a crocodile’s smile when he sees one.

I wonder how that works out for him.

_____________

III. Honey

He said the police had stared at him in the street.

I bet.

If you took into account his skin and his hair, even without the whole get up, he could be summed up as 'sinister'. But fashion wise, a Goth would be my closest guess at describing what he looked like.

I happened to know he took a lot of trouble with his appearance, but that wasn’t his most arresting feature.

What about the way I walk? he said, with total concentration.

I could tell his moods best by his silhouette in a dark street. He only had two speeds, alert or evasive.

But it was dinner time, so I gave him lessons in deportment in the dining room. I instructed him to push his sholders back, pull his shoulder blades down. To align his spine, I suggested he try stretching his elbows together behind him. I even used my hands. But his upper body refused to uncoil, after years spent protecting his underbelly, and sitting bent over tenderizing another inmate with a tattoo gun.

He was a photogenic predator.

I could have guessed when I held it up, that he didn’t know phones could take moving pictures. In a loop seven seconds long, he still had the glow of a sleek caged animal, while he asks to camera, 'what’s that?’ before he covers his face with both hands.

Like most would, I’d spent some time thinking about the fact he had killed somebody. He lied most of the time, whether he needed to or not, but on this he hadn’t bothered.

I spent longer wondering whether he regretted it. I’m sure he’d have had lies in waiting, but where I come from, it was indecent to ask.

And just on propriety, he didn’t know how to air kiss. He’d learnt etiquette by rote, not touch and didn’t realize that the object wasn’t to press my face against the vein in the side of his neck.

Cold blooded was the thought that comes to mind. Asexual was another.

I’d have to think about what signals I gave off to make him say, that 'we could move out and get a place together and shop together and eat together and he’d do most of the cooking and he’d like that forever'.

I wondered how many years it had taken for him to come up with that.

But there was no way. I couldn’t stand his friends. I couldn’t stand a few things about him, in fact.

His small group consisted of people you’d expect to die alone in a rent a room. They were penned into rooms without even the hospitality of a complimentary electric kettle, and kept there by their addictions to drugs and failure. They were disposable in his increasingly more elaborate mind games when he wasn’t busy with campaigns of low level terror against people who had hurt his feelings.

He kept on the move, but I usually saw him around dinner time. I preferred to eat mostly alone at the tail end of the service, by which time he’d ignore his entourage, so he could torment them with his presence.

He had a story of escalating horror for any occasion, condiments included. A pot of honey had appeared on the breakfast trolley. He pantomimed how the dousing from a mixture of scalding hot water and honey, and the flesh slides straight off.

He loved supermarkets and opportunity shops. He’d graduated from gifts of chocolate and cake, to scented soaps and offers of the clothes off his back.

And just to show how very close attention he’d been paying, he had a story just for me. It was a fairytale, based on the premise that I was serving a very long sentence in high security. But I am nevertheless very clever.

So the story went, my education,

'and the way you talk'

was very valuable. My education,

'worth a lot of white ox'.

It gave me an enviable edge that couldn’t be stood over for, our shook down in a cell search.

And I would have someone just like him to maximize my potential. All business. I’d have the best cell, location being for status and my pure enjoyment.

I would be working in the most prized job in the prison – in the library. Surrounded by books all day. I would have endless stimulation for my superior intellect and would be paid in stockpiles of tokens and tobacco.

He said I could even have one of those things. A laptop. It wouldn’t be connected to the internet of course.

Well…I write long hand....I guess I could help people with their homework, seven days a week.

I might have looked unconvinced this was the deal of a lifetime, because he reminded me I could have as much contraband as I wanted.

So in jail terms I’d be a librarian with a law degree, living in the luxury of the residential block, helping people try and get out of jail, typing words only the few can see, dining on imported superfoods and good coffee three times a day.

It is softly lit, people whisper, my laundry is done for me, no stabbings, and it’s the highest paid job in jail.

At a certain point in this tale, one might ask, if I was so clever, what did I need him for?

That’d be where his violence comes into play, while I’d of course continue to sit pretty and flattered.

The business model was quite sound. That it came with the challenge of transferring contraband between separate blocks was a bonus. But I was in the final stages of tutoring him. He still had months of course work to complete but he didn’t have months of concentration left in him. Neither did I.

By coincidence his lecturer and I had both come to a decision, at about the same time. A jail contraband system wasn’t the best concept for him to explore in the pursuit of a diploma of business. The Ox Shop had served us both well. I used it as a means of explaining the whole wide world, he flourished while rehashing his empire of incarceration.

One of the few times he looked what I took to mean 'concerned', was the thought of the authorities banning the use of tobacco products in jail.

This’d be a financial crisis for an imprisoned business man. Fatal for some.

It wasn’t just the chaos of deprivation, it was the currency, because the whole economy inside revolved around tobacco. If you happened to not smoke, you were laughing. The stuff was valuable. Huge markup in an unregulated market, if you don’t count the threats of extreme violence around it’s supply and demand.

Heroin seemed distasteful to him, but I might have imagined that.

Could be the same mistake I made as when he told me there were a lot of very sick people in jail. At the time I assumed he meant people other than him.

He didn’t need to explain that the Ox Shops shortfall would be filled with more drugs. That seemed obvious.

There is only so much skin to cover with tattoos, only so much chocolate a person will consume at premium prices. So that just left the only commodity with a ready market and supply network, that could be consumed smoke free.

Heroin, in the perfect environment for the community fed intake of oxycotin seduced prisoners.

In the freeworld, over dinner he announced ‘He will kill her,’ to silence while he showered his plate in three circuits of salt. The other guests already knew which couple he meant.

Girls sang in the shower, the cook played guitar, the phone rang with messages about auditions, drug addicts sat fully clothed, cross legged in their rooms and stared at the door in the dark.

He was resisting becoming one himself, which was a lie. He was just filling time between dosages.

When his college routine collapsed under the weight of the real world, he asked for permission to keep busy on the residential garden beds. They were dead, or what wasn’t, looked like weeds.

It was the kind of place where guests wouldn’t be surprised that he gardened at night. And more than a couple knew the trick of boiling water in a cell, with an element made from the blades of a disposable shaver. The kind of place where you either wished you could afford anywhere else, or you'd just be content knowing you had a place with electricity.

But he'd turned our cells into a pit. Sweetness had no chance of becoming anything new. He was stuck, retarded, twisted and ruined.

I talked to him less, I avoided him more. I didn't have time to ask him why he slept on the floor. I didn't bother to hide I had a complete life beyond his tiny dimensions. And then the inevitable happened. I hurt his feelings.

He was undeniably dangerous. He’d learnt all his ways inside. But I’d lived amongst the ones who stole him, battered him, locked him up and wanted him to die there. I didn’t like my chances in a fair fight, but I had him beat on mind games.

Sweetness continues .... 'Nightwalkers'

OnDusk

Pages

Sunday, 26 January 2014

Australia Day 2014

Wednesday, 1 January 2014

Nightwalkers

" Nightwalkers "

Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 8: Issue 6

Bruce Pascoe & Siv Parker

Sweetness I. II. & III.

II. Chocolate

_____________

III. Honey

ANNOUNCEMENT :: NOVEMBER 2015

Pages

Sunday, 26 January 2014

Australia Day 2014

Wednesday, 1 January 2014

Nightwalkers

" Nightwalkers "

Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 8: Issue 6 Bruce Pascoe & Siv Parker

Sweetness I. II. & III.

II. Chocolate

_____________

III. Honey

ANNOUNCEMENT :: NOVEMBER 2015

Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 8: Issue 6

Bruce Pascoe & Siv Parker