‘Yes, Rascal. You have to change.’ Doc’s eyes looked tired from staring so deeply at Charley in his regulation uniform, as if he was worn out just thinking about all the pain that lay below, beneath Charley’s skin, under his muscles, packed into his bones. ‘Learning to read could quite possibly be the first step to really helping yourself.’
Sometimes, the man referred to as ‘Rascal’ thought of the man referred to as ‘Doc’ as the sort of man he might’ve liked for a father. Then he wondered what it would’ve been like growing up with a father. Any father. Even old Charles Cromwell.
Rascal wasn’t his real name. When he was harmless and punching the foreign air with those angry fists in the first seconds of his life, beet-red and already screaming of injustice, he was Charles Cromwell II, named after the no-good father he would never really remember.
The elder Charley spent the first two years of his son’s life in prison for poking a water pistol through the pocket of his jacket and demanding money from a shop clerk, who then died of a heart attack. After he was released from prison (with ‘Born Bad’ tattooed on the inside of his forearm and a halfway-vacant look in his eyes), he gave his son a water pistol. Eight months later he died outside the Star Hotel, a broken pint glass by his head.
The boy had his father’s sense of misadventure sure as he had his rotten luck. It was enough to secure his fate as a Chip off the Old Fucking Block. Of course he’d land himself in jail, but for Charley it had been a time of healing, where he’d learned to find strength, to forgive and be thankful. It was also where he’d learned to read.
If it had been a dark night rather than a Wednesday morning on the first day he began his studies and if he and the teacher had been on an empty street rather than in a prison and if he’d been walking behind her rather than sitting in front of her, Lisa would’ve been bloody scared. Charley knew the effect he had on people. At more than two metres tall and carrying a grand bulk of equal fat and muscle, while sporting a beard that was long and gnarly and matching it with the inverse of a shaved head, Charley understood the power of intimidation. Being bald, though, wasn’t his plan. When he’d started losing his hair at twenty-four – only two years older than his father had been when he was killed at the Star Hotel – he felt there wasn’t any choice but to shave it all off.
Sitting in the room where the other inmates had moments ago either leaned back in disinterest or hunched forwards while honing their penmanship, Charley stared at his teacher, not sure how to ask her to help him. He studied her as she packed up her books and journal into a shoulder bag and placed her pen into a plastic pencil case – a present he would later find out was supposed to be for her two-year-old son. She wore her hair loose. It was thick. He thought about how nice it would be to feel it, to crush it in his fingers and watch it spring back when he let it go.
‘Is there something you want to talk about, Rascal?’
He fumbled in his front shirt pocket for his mum’s letter. ‘I get these,’ he told her. ‘I want to read them.’
Lisa stood tall as she approached her student. ‘You want me to read it to you?’ she asked.
He looked away from her, ashamed of who he was, of his history. Ashamed he’d never learned to read. ‘I want to learn how to read me mum’s letters.’
He’d expected a sigh. Instead her face softened. ‘If you hang in there and have patience with the class, I think you’ll find you’ll be reading the letters on your own quite soon.’
‘No time. Mum’s dying.’
Lisa sat down in the chair next to him. ‘I’m really sorry about your mum, Rascal, but I just don’t know how we can manage to get any one-on-one time.’
Charley looked at her, wondered if she loved her own mum, if she was someone else’s mum, if there’d be a man sleeping next to her at night. ‘We’re getting one-on-one time now.’
Just then a guard came through the door, took away their one-on-one.
Three days later Lisa had asked if he’d happened to bring his mum’s letter. As slow was his usual pace, Charley was still seated, gathering himself while the other prisoners were leaving. He stopped and watched them, unwilling to answer his teacher until everyone had gone, then pulled out his mum’s letter from his front pocket. He’d brought it to class not because he was going to ask Lisa to help him read it again, but because he carried it everywhere, always trying to work out the words. He could make out some – the, and, want, day, hello, love, Mum – and some he could have a go at. Sentences formed. Sentences fell away.
‘You’ve got me for half an hour twice a week.’ Lisa moved into the seat next to him. ‘Let’s see how far we can get today.’
Charley felt a jolt in his chest – relief? excitement? – but he didn’t indulge in it, didn’t want to give too much of himself away. He was quiet when he spoke. ‘I know what the first line is. It’s pretty much the same every time.’
‘Well, when you’re saying it to me make sure you’re really looking at the words. Make sure you’re reading them.’ Lisa nodded her head and tightened her lips, encouraging him.
‘My dear son Charley.’ He looked up at Lisa straightaway. ‘That’s what she writes every time. Sometimes with my name, sometimes without it.’
‘Your name is Charley?’ She said it as if she had just discovered he cared for injured animals.
He shifted in his seat and looked back at the letter. ‘It’s Rascal.’ He felt the back of his neck beginning to itch and went to scratch it, first digging into the scar under his ear.
‘I’d love to call you Charley. Can I call you Charley?’
He stared at his fingernails, expecting to find flakes of skin, dirt, blood. ‘Mum’s the only one who calls me that.’
‘What can I call you?’ Lisa sat with her back straight. She was patient with him. ‘You have to give me a better name than Rascal. I don’t want to call you by your bikie name. I don’t think you’re a bikie anymore.’
Charley raised one eyebrow, crinkling the other.
‘I think you’re a sensitive man who hides behind a particular image.’
He thought about a new name. Thought about how easy it had been to discard ‘Charley’ and accept ‘Rascal’ all those years ago. Thought about how expendable names were. How expendable people were.
‘I’ll come up with something. But call me Rascal for now.’
My dear son Charley,
I hope this letter finds you growing stronger and wiser. I think of you so much and I imagine the loneliness you must feel in that prison. Then I think it can’t be any worse than the loneliness you were feeling before they put you away. I’m sorry for that. I wish I could’ve been a better mum. I wish you’d agree to a visit, although I probably couldn’t handle the travel anyway. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching since I’ve been having more pain. I find it hard to leave my bed before noon on the days I don’t work and more and more I’m taking sickies. Soon I’ll have to leave the bakery for good. Sometimes I feel like it’s all I have so leaving makes me very sad. But then I think about other things I have, like the crochet club and Mavis and June and the wilderness of our own backyard. It used to be your playground. I think of you the most. I’m so sorry your life has turned out the way it has but I will never think that it is over, Charley. I have to believe your life is about to begin.
I love you so much.
Mum
It was true what his mum had said. In prison he was lonely, but that was nothing new. His pain had always been his. No one could touch it. But as he’d come to depend on the letters from his mum, he was working through it. Her letters were like scripture to him which he poured over daily, though struggled, became frustrated, short-tempered and angry.
Lisa had used the term ‘dyslexia’ and came up with exercises for him. Repetitions of vowel sounds like boy and toy and soil and toil. He studied three pages of short words every week and at night he returned
to his mother’s letters. Now vowel combinations were taking shape on the page and manifesting as sounds in his mind and on his tongue. They were bonding together, helping to form words, and words upon words upon words made thoughts. He believed his mother’s letters were going to change the direction of his life.
Twice a week he went to class with a letter in his pocket. Sometimes two. It took them half an hour to get through half a letter and, when their time was up, Charley could see that Lisa’s heart seemed to fall and thud in her gut as he folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.
‘Do you want me to read the rest to you?’ she’d always ask.
‘I need to,’ he’d say, looking hard at the deep creases in his hands. At only forty-two he felt he was getting old. Look at his skin. His bald head. His gut. He couldn’t imagine how old his mum must’ve looked.
Lisa would nod and look at his hands as well. They were big hands, weather-worn. The right one had a cigarette burn on it. Indeed they were hands with stories to tell; Charley would say there were too many stories.
One day Lisa had asked if she could take a letter home with her and make note cards for the difficult words. ‘If you see a word you don’t know, you can just flip the card over, and I can spell the word out like it sounds so you can work out what the word is.’ Once Lisa had discovered Charley’s dyslexia, he could see confidence in her teaching. ‘I’ll bring it to you tomorrow and you can have the letter and the note cards to work on by yourself.’
Charley’s eyebrows were two thick, bushy wrinkles. He stared hard at Lisa, and it was as if a conversation was continuing in their eyes. This small freedom seemed too good to trust, and he so rarely trusted in anything good.
Charley had been surprised to see Lisa the next day in the visitors’ room. He’d thought she’d just leave the letter and the note cards for him. Perhaps Lisa thought he was an OK bloke.
‘I just wanted to give you them in person.’ She took a deep breath, gaining new momentum. ‘Rascal, I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you I think your mother is the most amazing woman.’
Charley nodded, looking hard at the hairs on his fingers. Five long black hairs on each stout finger. He made a fist, stretched his fingers, made a fist again. Scratched the back of his neck.
‘My mother died when I was fifteen,’ she told him, and the space between them fell away. Charley put his hands in his lap. He thought about himself at fifteen, stealing radios from cars, smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day, roaming the dark streets at night and suspicious of his world. He thought about how different Lisa’s life at fifteen must have been. He thought about how soon they’d have the death of a mother in common.
She gave him the letter and note cards. ‘You have a long list of sight words now.’
Charley knew this. He also knew that difficult words like tumour and remember rested on his eyes and settled in his mind easily. It wasn’t that the letters in those words made sense to him, because in fact they were always jumbled, no matter how many times he’d seen them; it was that they’d been written over and over again so many times he just knew what they were without having to look too closely.
‘So between that and sounding-out, there were really only thirteen words I was worried about.’
Charley looked at the cards. Infinite was rewritten as in-fin-it. Acceptance became ex-sept-ans.
‘I have to say I did struggle with the science of what I was doing: taking away the heart of the word to get to the body.’ She rummaged through the cards and held up journey. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, smearing the wetness into her cheeks, ‘but her love for you … her love for you …’ She shook her head and laughed at herself. ‘I don’t even know the words to finish the sentence. How ironic is that?’
Charley had never known this kind of openness with a woman before. Tears went with anger or alcohol or drugs. Maybe he was more than a student. Maybe he was a friend. And it was that thought that gave him the courage he needed. ‘How’d you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘How’d you say goodbye?’
She looked off in the distance, maybe recalling an image of her mother that lasted for only a flash of a moment, maybe recalling a memory of her that went on longer. ‘I never said goodbye while she was alive. I’m not even sure I did after she died.’ Her eyes returned to his, staring. ‘I haven’t.’
‘Were you with her when it happened?’
‘It was the middle of the night. I knew when the phone rang. I knew instantly.’
‘Ain’t no call in the middle of the night’s gonna be a good one, eh? Don’t reckon I’ll get a phone call, middle of the night or afternoon.’
They sat in silence for what seemed like minutes. Charley felt Lisa’s hand in his own, even though they weren’t touching.
His first big book was Of Mice and Men and it took him months to get through it. Sometimes he read the newspaper and, by the time he finished, it was old news. Reading certainly took a lot of time, but time was something Charley had.
My dear son Charley,
I think about you most on these cold nights. Now that it’s winter I’m settling in. Maybe too much. My bones shiver and my muscles don’t want to stretch. I read a lot. I remember when you were a baby. I was so tired from feeding you and loving you that I couldn’t get past three pages of a book. I dreamed that when I was old I would lie in bed for days reading all the books I spent a lifetime saying, ‘One day I will read this.’ Well, I’m doing it now. Sometimes I read all day and night, but I know I’ll never read them all before I die.
When the first week passed without a letter, he thought his mum must be feeling really bad or maybe she’d died and nobody’d told him. He worried. But at night, when he pulled out an old letter, he didn’t feel his mother’s death, as Lisa had her own mum’s. But then the second week without a letter passed and he was sure she was dead and no one had told him. And then he had a dream, one that moved him so much that when he woke up, he didn’t know where he was, had forgotten he was in prison.
‘Did you ever have nightmares bout your mum’s funeral?’ They’d just finished discussing a children’s book, Danny, the Champion of the World, just finished discussing fathers. The thirty minutes were almost up and Charley wanted to talk about mothers.
‘I’m not sure if I did while she was sick. I can’t remember. But I did after she was gone.’
‘I dreamed she was in a coffin. Her face was white.’
‘Did she look like you remember her?’
‘Been so long since I seen me mum I’m not sure if I remember her right, eh.’
‘I always dream about mine being young and healthy. Not at all like she was near the end.’
Charley picked at a callus. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside.
‘Don’t you want to see her, Rascal? Before she dies?’
When she said his name, he shook his head no. Rascal didn’t want to see her. Charley did.
His mum died in hospital. Three of her friends from the crochet club had been with her, crocheting small floppy flowers in all colours. It had been his mother’s request to have them decorating the church at her funeral, then to let people take one with them as they left. She herself had been crocheting them for months, before the pain became too much. Charley got one of hers. A woman named Shirl gave it to him. She’d cried and told him he would’ve been proud of his mother in those final days, that she’d never known a braver woman. The flower was purple and green with a yellow centre. ‘It’s the smallest one we made,’ she said. ‘We weren’t sure how well a bigger one would go over here.’
Charley put it under his pillow, fell asleep at night holding it in his hand. He did so for the rest of his days in lock-up.
He’d meant to show it to Lisa after the next class but class was cancelled. Lisa wasn’t there. The next week someone else began teaching.
Dear Rascal,
Your friend,
Lisa
When Lisa came in for the visit, he told her about his mother’s death, about how the warden had told him there was a phone call. It was the middle of the fucking night. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask for a pass to the funeral. Lisa cried. She held his hand. By then the leaves that had greened and the flowers that had blossomed in the outside world, only to dry up and fall away in the summer’s unforgiving heat, had completely disappeared, winter returning for another long slog. Lisa’s belly was big.
‘It’s Chuck,’ he’d told her. ‘I’ve told the guys in here to call me Chuck.’
‘A derivative of Charley.’
‘I reckon that’s what I am. A derivative of Charley. Me mum wouldn’t have minded it.’
‘Aw, I don’t know. I reckon she’d still call you Charley.’
‘You can,’ he’d told her, picking at what wasn’t peeling from his hands, creating new broken skin.
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