by Mel Jacob
I got two iceblocks out of the freezer, cut the corner off Lexie’s and passed the scissors to Nick. Still neither of them said anything. I wondered if, like me, they felt numb, or if they felt like it wasn’t real and were expecting Patrick to walk in any moment, peel off his shirt, and say, ‘Who’s coming in the pool?’
I wondered if they would be haunted by distilled memories. Would they remember my black suit, the coffee percolating on the stove or the heat of the afternoon, the way I recalled each time I bit into a Granny Smith apple my mother telling me that she was not taking my father back. I had been eighteen at the time, and after years of him leaving and coming back she decided she’d had enough.
‘Dad made a mistake,’ I said, ‘but it’s nothing we should feel ashamed about . . . it’s going to be hard, at first . . . but we will get through this.’ Still neither of them said anything. I didn’t know if it had even registered. If they had even heard me.
‘Where’s Grandma?’ Lexie asked, panicked.
‘Outside, getting the washing off the line,’ I said, much to Lexie’s relief. ‘This is a big thing, a hard thing,’ I continued, ‘and I want you to know that it’s okay for you to do or say anything.’
‘Can I yell?’ Lexie asked.
‘As loud as you like.’ And they both yelled at the top of their voices.
‘Can I scream?’ I nodded and they screamed.
‘Can I hit Nick?’ Lexie asked, delighted by the sudden behaviour amnesty.
‘Do you think it’s going to make you feel better?’
‘Yes!’
‘I don’t think it’ll make Nick feel better.’ The conversation wasn’t really panning out the way I’d imagined. I’d envisaged tears and tantrums, and holding them in my arms.
‘Do we have to wait two and a half years to see him?’ Nick asked, as the coffee hissed on the stove.
‘No.’ It had never occurred to me to explain that we could visit Patrick. It made sense that Nick wouldn’t have understood this; he had no point of reference point from books or films or TV shows.
‘Can we go now?’ he asked.
‘Another day. We have to make a booking.’
‘Some people never see their dads,’ Lexie said. ‘Like Grace from preschool. Her dad lives in a kingdom far, far away.’
‘He lives in the United Kingdom, in England,’ I said.
‘What’s a moron?’ Lexie asked.
‘Another word for an idiot.’
‘Grace said her mum calls her dad a moron. Sometimes she shouts into the phone like this: “You bloody moron!”’
‘Dad’s not a moron,’ Nick said.
‘No, he’s not,’ I agreed, although at that juncture, it was debatable.
Nick smiled in the wry, shy way he does. ‘Can I make that pterodactyl noise?’
‘Do you think it’ll help?’ I asked.
‘Nah, I just like doing it.’
‘Well, I’d prefer you didn’t. It hurts my ears.’
‘So we can’t really do anything, can we?’ Lexie observed. And then, as though I’d been talking about the most trivial thing in the world, she said, ‘Now can I have a biscuit?’
The phone didn’t stop ringing. So many people stopped by to offer their support, or to drop off meals and flowers. And I hadn’t expected that at all. Patrick hadn’t fallen ill or been hit by a car, and I felt uncomfortable and undeserving about the enormous outpouring of generosity. ‘He’s gone to prison,’ I said to my friend Bec, after the fifth lasagne had been dropped off at the house, ‘for breaking the law. It’s not like he has cancer.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said, ‘they’re your friends, they want to help. When people ask you what you need, tell them.’
At first when everything was so raw and so new, I didn’t know what I needed. But Mum knew. She fielded all the calls, and took the kids to the park, bathed them and cooked dinner, as I stumbled through the day in a somnambulant daze. And on that first night, as tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. The court images played on a loop in my mind. Patrick’s anguished face, his sister collapsing, the gavel hitting the desk, and him disappearing.
Sometime around five on Saturday morning I finally drifted off to sleep, and when I woke several hours later, I saw filtered light shimmering through the window, and, for that brief moment, I felt fine. Until I remembered what had happened and the pain returned, as salient and barbed as a needle.
I could hear the kids on the front lawn with Mum. I didn’t feel like joining them; I wanted to stay in bed, where I could still smell Paddy. I held the green T-shirt he slept in and breathed in his scent. It was a mixture of sweat, and citrus from the deodorant he wore. I didn’t know when would be the next time I would see him or even talk to him. I called the inmate information line religiously for any updates.
‘You’re just going to have to wait until he calls you,’ the operator said, with an indifference I found cutting.
Late on Sunday afternoon, it was time for Mum to return to her home in the Hunter Valley. I felt panicked about her leaving. She was the only one aside from Patrick and me who the kids felt completely comfortable with. She’d already been at our place for a week and she’d given us all that she could. She worked full time, and she’d just bought a house and hadn’t even moved in. ‘You can do this,’ she said as we said our goodbyes at her car. ‘I know you can. You’re a strong person.’ I didn’t feel strong. I felt fragile like blown glass.
Later on Sunday afternoon, Lexie began to cry. Finally, I thought, it’s hit home. She understands. I imagined her erupting in grief.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m just really sad,’ she said, wrapping her arms around me.
‘I’m sad about Dad too.’
She looked at me, puzzled. ‘I’m sad about Grandma. Why does she have to go?’
Monday was tediously slow and fast at the same time. When I thought about Patrick, and wondered how I could survive without him for two and a half years, time seemed to pass at an excruciatingly sluggish pace. I can do this. I can do this, I told myself, repeating what Mum had said, but I didn’t believe it for a second.
Only two days had passed since the sentencing. Two and a half years seemed like forever. And yet, dropping the kids to school, tidying the house, signing the power of attorney forms with Amar, buying groceries and walking to the bus stop to collect the kids, moved more swiftly than almost anything else I’d ever experienced.
When the school bus arrived, Nick was the first to step off, throwing his bag onto the ground with such force it slid along the gravel and into a nearby tree.
‘You okay?’ I asked, wishing I could see what was inside him, that I could read his thoughts like a diary.
‘No,’ he said and started walking home.
‘Anything you want to talk about?’ I asked, when we sat down to afternoon tea.
‘Why don’t you ask Lexie? She likes to talk . . . to people on the bus . . . about Dad!’
‘Is that true?’ I asked her gently.
‘You said it was nothing to be ashamed of!’ she screamed at me and ran out to the backyard. I was glad Lexie didn’t feel shame but I was concerned her openness might invite teasing.
For some reason I couldn’t figure out, the answering machine had stopped working, so I answered each and every call in the hope that it was Patrick. That afternoon the phone rang, and I steeled myself for another draining conversation about what had happened and how we were coping, but then a recorded message with an American accent played: ‘You are about to receive a phone call from an inmate at MRRC Correctional Centre. If you do not wish to receive this phone call, please hang up now. Go ahead, please.’
‘Paddy!’
‘Beauty.’ It had been a lifetime since he had called me that. Years before, when we first started dating and I would fall asleep on the long drives home from his place to mine, he began—somewhat ironically, I think—to call me Sleeping Beauty.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
&
nbsp; ‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s so good to hear your voice.’
‘And yours . . . are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes, yes. Can I speak to the kids?’
I called the kids, put the phone on speaker, and had a jumbled and overlapping conversation. We spoke for roughly five minutes before a series of beeps sounded. None of us knew then that this was a warning that the call was about to be terminated. It was the strangest thing, hearing the dial tone and not being able to call him back. In our pre-prison life, we had called each other countless times during the day, and often if I was in the middle of something I would call him back, but I couldn’t do that anymore.
‘You didn’t do anything wrong by telling people on the bus,’ I said to Lexie, as she helped chop vegetables for dinner. In many ways, she was the polar opposite of Nick. While he internalised and fretted over things, she was so expressive, she seemed transparent.
‘So why can’t we tell people?’
‘We can tell some people but . . . but at this stage we’re only telling our close friends and family.’
She chopped the zucchini with determined force. ‘Can I tell Alice?’ This was Lexie’s best friend.
‘You can, but she already knows, her mum wanted to explain it to her.’
‘I wanted to tell her!’ she said indignantly. ‘Who else can I tell?’
‘It’s complicated, Lex. You’ve only just started at the school. It’s going to take some time until you know who your close friends are.’
When I called the kids for dinner, Nick said, ‘Mum, you set four places . . .’
None of us said anything. We didn’t need to. We felt Patrick’s absence so keenly; it felt as though a chasm had opened up around us. I’d always enjoyed dinners with the kids. There was a lot of laughter, and our stories flowed easily. Sometimes we had to stop the stories until more food was consumed. Our first dinner at home as a threesome was stilted and awkward.
I bathed the kids, we read books and prayed, and I tucked them into bed. And I went to the kitchen, to start washing up.
‘Can you come up with us?’ Lexie yelled.
Our house wasn’t big, but it was long and the bedrooms were at the far end. ‘Stop yelling!’ I yelled back.
Soon afterwards, Nick materialised. ‘Can you stay up with us? Lexie’s scared.’ But I could tell from his tone that it wasn’t just Lexie who was scared.
The kids went to bed easily but were used to having one of us at that end of the house. So, I got into bed and picked up Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, the book I’d started a month before. In the weeks leading up to the sentencing I had been so tired I’d only managed to read a couple of chapters, sometimes reading the same page over and over before falling asleep.
Reading it that night, I was riveted. As much as I loved my children and wanted to help them navigate this difficult time, another part of me longed to get as far away from the situation as I possibly could. I wished that, like Davidson, or other women I’d read about, I could embark on a solo journey across the Australian desert, or ascend a rocky mountain crop or meander along cobbled European streets. I wanted a journey of solitude and escape, one that could be plotted out on a map. Sure it would have its challenges, but they would be a welcome distraction from my messy inner life. Maybe I’d have an enlightening encounter with an enigmatic shaman. And there would be a recurring motif, like repeatedly spying an eagle or a striking red cardinal.
I just wished I could do pretty much anything other than what I was being called to do. I felt hemmed in. Trapped. Patrick was locked in the big house and I was stuck in a small one.
NINE
Maximum security. Maximum security. Maximum security.
Patrick was in the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre (MRRC), one of three prisons located in the Silverwater Correctional Complex, twenty-one kilometres from the centre of Sydney. MRRC is the maximum-security section of the complex, housing 900 inmates, most of whom are on remand (waiting to be sentenced), recently incarcerated or in transit between prisons. I read the description over and over again, trying to imagine Paddy in a maximum-security prison. Every possible scenario that sprang to mind was like oil and water.
For our first visit to MRRC, Patrick’s brother James drove Rosemary, my mother-in-law, and me in my old beat-up Honda SUV. Patrick had been insistent that we not drive there in James’s new car, and that I not wear fancy clothes, or make-up or jewellery. As I sat in the back seat, I kept thinking that I should have been feeling stunned or upset, but I still felt nothing. Even as James drove down Holker Street and coiled razor wire came into view, I was numb.
‘We’re here to see Patrick Jacob,’ I said to the receptionist.
‘MIN number?’ she asked. Each inmate is given a master index number for identification.
‘520764,’ I read from my hand.
‘ID?’ she asked. There were signs everywhere warning visitors to remove jewellery and place personal items in the lockers provided. In our eagerness to comply, James, Rosemary and I had completely forgotten about identification and had to return to the lockers to retrieve it.
Next came the fingerprints. Then the biometric retina scans, which involved standing on a line and staring at a red dot in a machine similar to the one that was used at the optometrist. Rosemary, who’d recently had retinal surgery, was unable to provide a successful reading. At first, the staff insisted that she couldn’t enter, but after numerous unsuccessful attempts, they gave her an exemption.
‘Locker,’ said the guard when we moved to the next security checkpoint, at the far end of the room. James and I stared at each other blankly. We had already been to the lockers numerous times. The guard eventually pointed at the twenty-dollar note in James’s hand.
‘The receptionist said we can take twenty dollars in. Is that correct?’ I asked.
‘Coins!’ he barked and, like wide-eyed tourists, we returned to the lockers again.
After two more retina scans, a walk through a rectangular 3D metal detector, and having a hand-held wand waved over us, we exited the main building and walked across a small courtyard to another building. It opened into a long corridor filled with vending machines. I spent the full twenty dollars on things I knew Patrick liked.
At the end of the corridor, past all the vending machines, was another reception desk. The officer verified our details and we stood waiting, peering across through glass doors into the visitation room. From a door adjacent to the desk, I saw Paddy emerge in a skin-tight white visitation suit.
‘Go!’ an officer said. We just kept standing there. ‘Go!’ he repeated. James and I looked at each other, wondering if he was talking to us. The guard pointed to the double door.
When James pushed open the doors and we stepped in, all eyes turned to us. I felt a strange mix of repulsion and fascination. The visitation room was starkly lit, with neon lights. The inmates wore white jumpsuits fastened at the back, with ‘VISITS’ printed in large bold black letters on their backs. Some of the men looked like caricatures from prison movies, the most freakish collection of people I’d seen outside a Diane Arbus book. Some were monstrous, dwarfing the people sitting around them. There were shaved heads, rat’s tails, tattooed and scarred faces. Others weren’t especially large or scary, or otherwise unusual. They just looked like men you’d see anywhere.
All of the tables inside and outside, bar one at the very back of the room, directly in front of a guard, were taken. It felt like a decade passed as we made our way across to the back of the room. The table was small and circular and bolted to the floor, along with all the stools that surrounded it. We sat and waited.
I wonder what he did, I recall wondering about the inmate sitting at the table closest to ours. He had jagged scars down one side of his face, a short mohawk strip (which I later found out was called a brohawk), and tattoos creeping up from the neckline of his suit. I deliberately averted my gaze to the floor, worried that my curiosity might upset someone, the same way it sometimes did on str
eets and supermarkets on the outside.
‘Black,’ the guard said, standing next to Patrick at the table. We all looked up at him blankly; the remaining stool was white. An impromptu game of musical stools followed, and it was only when we were all standing that we realised one of the five stools was black, and was intended for Patrick—the black sheep of the family, as it were.
‘Behave yourself,’ the guard said, before moving to stand against the wall directly behind us.
I gave Patrick a peck on the cheek. ‘You look . . .’ I started and changed tack. He looked terrible. He had sunken, bloodshot eyes and an unruly mess of facial hair. ‘What are you wearing?’ I was referring to his skin-tight onesie, which looked remarkably like an ice-skating costume.
‘I know. Lucky we don’t want to have any more kids.’ I was relieved to hear that he still had a sense of humour. ‘CO’s idea of a joke.’
‘CO?’
‘Correctional officer. They give out the wrong-sized suits and shoes, just to mess with you,’ Patrick said, and then he talked and talked and talked. I recalled how during a playwriting course I’d taken, the teacher had said, ‘In real life, people don’t talk in monologues.’ I’d disagreed because my paternal grandmother spoke in monologues that chronicled her entire TV-centred week, moving swiftly from one topic to another, without any variation in tone or pace.
Now Paddy was so desperate to talk to someone he could trust that the words poured out of him in a deluge. I found it hard to concentrate. I kept thinking that coming face to face with my husband in his white jumpsuit at a prison visitation should have been devastating. It should have made the situation agonisingly real. But it didn’t. I didn’t cry. I didn’t speak mournfully about the kids. I didn’t do anything, except observe numbly, because it still seemed like some kind of elaborate practical joke.
James and Rosemary listened intently, and they also had pertinent and comforting things to say. James talked about the business, and Rosemary spoke about the prison chaplain and about faith. I was stumped, though. I was so shocked, my mind had gone blank. And the more I tried to think of a question, the more one eluded me. About two thirds of the way through the hour-long visit, I finally thought of a question: ‘Have you been keeping a low profile?’