In Sickness, in Health ... and in Jail

by Mel Jacob

  But I could not see the humour anymore. I wasn’t asking for the world. I hadn’t expected to be whisked up the Eiffel Tower or given a two-carat diamond, but I thought that after fifteen years of marriage, I could have done better than a card with a penis drawn on the back, and a vase of paper flowers made by a murderer.

  I was drunk, hung over and alone. All I craved, all I wanted, was for someone to hold me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mannus Correctional Centre

  5 July 2013

  Beauty,

  Sorry I couldn’t call for our anniversary. Jail in lock down for whole day. No phones. Asked Jamie or Uncle Dingo (other Aboriginal artist) if he can make you another card. Sorry. Worse than high school in here.

  Promise to make it up to you. Whiteys were discussing engagement rings and said I am cheap bas%^$d for not buying you diamond. I didn’t have much money then but we could afford to buy one now. Or maybe pearls. Know you love them. Or antique ring with those tiny pearls you love and rubies??? Would be nice to get you something good to have as heirloom for kids. I can’t buy for you until I get out but you could pick something out now and buy.

  Went to parenting course (unfortunately titled Hey Dad). Some good tips. Being consistent. Setting boundaries. Spending time each day. Statistic from course said something like fathers spend less than ten minutes a day with kids. It kills me that I am not with them now but at least I smashed that statistic before I went in. Still believe it’s all about quantity time, not quality time.

  Some interesting conversations about this with other dads.

  Me: Want to come to the Hey Dad course?

  Inmate: Nah, don’t think there’s any room for improvement.

  Me: Good for you. How many kids you got?

  Inmate: Three but haven’t seen them for 18 months.

  Other courses offered here but there is an internal war. Mannus is a working prison and there’s a lot of resistance to educational programs. There is a charity called Kairos (prison ministry). Misread form and told other inmates we got to travel to Wagga so a lot of them signed up.

  Inmate 1: When’s the bus from Wagga arrive?

  Me: I might have misread the form . . . the volunteers are from Wagga.

  Inmate 1: You mean we have to stay here all day listening to bloody God botherers?

  Inmate 2: Lucky for you, Jacobs, the cakes are good.

  I love you so much and thank God every day for you.

  Paddy

  P.S. I know I wasn’t v. consistent with the kids. Promise to work on it when I get back.

  P.P.S. Can you ask the school if I can call the kids during the day? Phones aren’t on when they leave for the bus in the morning and often miss them in the afternoon.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I’d tried to enrol Nick in a music school, for private drum lessons. However, being mid-term, there weren’t any vacancies. I put his name on waiting lists but all the schools said they’d be surprised if anything came up before the end of term.

  ‘Have you tried Hands, Heart and Feet?’ the school receptionist asked, whose kindness in caring for my children has never ceased to amaze me.

  ‘No, but I’ve heard of them.’

  ‘I’m not surprised—they’re pretty special.’

  I learned from the website that Hands, Heart and Feet is a Blue Mountains percussion group run by a husband and wife team—John and Emily. I called to see if I could book Nick into a drumming class. On the phone, Emily explained that the classes were drop-in only. Children were encouraged to attend the adult evening classes with their parents, absorbing the rhythm of the African style music.

  I wasn’t keen on African drumming, or any drumming, for that matter. I wanted to sit outside a classroom, and read a book or drink coffee. But Nick’s tapping was sending Lexie and me to the brink of insanity, so we went.

  The drumming class, like so many other things in life, was not at all what I’d expected. First of all, John and Emily were not African. They are a white Australian couple. When we arrived, Emily was sitting at a small desk on the stage. She was the antithesis of me—calm and glowing with health and vitality.

  John was tall, silver-haired and dressed in garish patterned clothes. He was unstacking blue plastic moulded chairs and placing them in a circle. He’d already put out about twenty, which I thought was pretty ambitious, when he strode over to introduce himself.

  ‘John,’ he said warmly.

  ‘I’m Nick.’ He placed his Balinese drum at John’s feet. ‘I can’t stop drumming. Mum said I’m driving her crazy.’

  ‘Bet I can get you to stop and I’m already crazy,’ John said, pulling a face and instantly endearing himself to Nick and Lexie.

  People started pouring into the primary school hall, many of them also wearing brightly coloured clothing. We sat opposite the entrance, and it felt like being at the airport, watching people arrive and greet each other with such affection. When they hugged, they held onto each other close and tight, like they had really missed them. Like they would never let go. The cynical side of me wondered if there was a catch to all this congeniality. I wondered if, at the end of the class, someone might try to con me with some network marketing scheme.

  When everyone had arrived, thirty-seven in all, John started drumming. He began with a dramatic flourish, which, I found out much later, is known as a call, then settled into a continuous and repetitive rhythm. The majority of people, presumably regulars, knew each other, had their own drums, and followed the beat effortlessly.

  It wasn’t effortless for me. It was frustrating. I could hear the rhythm and I knew what I had to do but I couldn’t do it. It was as though my hands wouldn’t cooperate. The more I tried, the more I thought about it, the more difficult it became.

  ‘If you’re not getting it, don’t worry, your brain hasn’t formed that neural pathway, but it will. Let go. If it’s not getting in here,’ John said, pointing to his temple, ‘let it in here,’ placing his hand on his heart.

  The drummers in the circle played djembes, goblet-shaped drums covered with animal skin and bound together with an elaborate series of tied ropes. At the front of the room, a handful of people played large barrel-sized drums with sticks. As the djembe rhythm increased in difficulty, the standing drummers continued their pattern with the constancy of a heartbeat.

  For those of us who were still struggling, John introduced a phrase: ‘Two hundred pineapples, a rich red tomato, and an apple, and an apple—a really, really big one.’ The word felt more familiar to me, like something I could cling onto. Then, John instructed all of us to get on our feet and together we stamped out the rhythm and the phrase. We moved as a group, swiftly changing from one direction to the next, like a school of fish. I felt silly and self-conscious until I saw Nick, a smile stretched from one side of his face to the other. He had found his tribe.

  After the phrase was introduced, I finally managed to get the opening part of the rhythm. It had an up-and-down feel to it, like riding a horse. The rest was beyond me. But it didn’t matter. The sheer difficulty of the drumming, combined with being in the circle, demanded that I be fully present. I had no time to brood about the past or worry about my future. My drumming ability aside, I had to admit that there was something special, otherworldly, about the way the empty school hall had been transformed into this pulsing hub of energy.

  As John had predicted, about three-quarters of the way into the class, Nick stopped drumming. At seven-thirty, when the lesson ended with a team building ‘Whoosh,’ Nick leaped out of his chair, making a beeline for John’s psychedelic pants.

  ‘You like my pants?’ John asked, amused by his unabashed admiration.

  ‘Yes,’ Nick blushed.

  ‘I sewed them myself. These are my conservative ones,’ he said, and we all chuckled. John thanked us for coming, before chatting with a long queue of others who were waiting to speak with him.

  The djembe drummers restacked the plastic chairs, and the standing drummers moved their b
arrel-shaped drums onto the stage as a large influx of people filled the space for a dance class.

  Nick, Lexie and I went to the drumming class for the next two weeks and, on the third, I arranged a babysitter to take them home so I could stay for the dance class.

  Emily began the class with a rigorous physical warm-up, before slowing to stillness. The quietness enveloped me like a soft, warm blanket.

  ‘Let go of anything that has been on your mind,’ she said, gently. It was difficult to let go. Heaviness weighed me down. It was mostly that same nagging question of why? Why did Patrick break the law? Why did this happen?

  ‘Worries or fears or events of the day. Let it all go,’ Emily repeated.

  It seemed like an impossible task. My worries were wrapped around me like tentacles.

  ‘And connect with the reason you came to class,’ Emily continued.

  I had come to class because I liked dancing. I wasn’t particularly good at it but I wanted, like Steph had suggested, to do something for myself. Something for the pure unadulterated fun of it.

  ‘Now, bring that intention to be present in the class,’ Emily soothed.

  After the warm up, she instructed us to bring our awareness back to the room, as she began to teach the routines. Unlike other dance classes I had been to over the course of my life, this one was welcoming and fluid. Usually, the two front rows of a class are taken up by the most experienced dancers and they cling to their positions like tightly held pieces of real estate. Emily’s class was different. After each sequence she instructed the dancers to move to a different position in the room, in order to experience a new perspective. She moved through the routines in a patient and nurturing way, showing us that the triumph was in trying. And that if we didn’t have it yet, it didn’t matter; it was only a matter of time. Everything about the class was like a spiritual lesson for me. Even though Emily explained the steps in small sequences, thinking about the routines didn’t seem to help. It came from a deeper part of me: that part that feels. In those brief and uninhibited moments as I swayed and gyrated and shimmied, I felt alive and sensuous. Perhaps even a little bit sexy.

  The class ended the way it had begun, in a large circular formation. ‘We thank our bodies,’ Emily said, demonstrating how to massage our own bodies. ‘Even the parts we don’t usually like. Especially the parts we don’t like.’ As I massaged my stomach and my buttocks and my thighs, it occurred to me that I have a relationship with my body outside of the physical relationship I shared with Patrick.

  ‘We thank each other with our eyes,’ Emily said. I joined the rest of the class, who were all looking, deeply and purposefully, across the circle into each other’s eyes. ‘And, finally, we send our thanks to Africa.’ The circle dispersed.

  ‘Nick’s doing well,’ John said, walking up to me.

  ‘He loves it.’

  ‘He’s a natural.’

  ‘I can’t thank you enough. He’s had a tough time . . . this year . . .’

  ‘Everything okay?’ John asked, looking at me with deep concern.

  ‘His dad . . . my husband . . . well . . . he’s in prison.’ I have no idea what John was expecting me to say but it wasn’t that. And of all the facial contortions I had experienced his was, by far, the most dramatic. He looked horrified, involuntarily jerking back as though he’d been burned. And for the briefest moment, I was worried that we might not be welcomed back to class.

  And so in the Springwood school hall, part three of the Trilogy of Crying began. I felt so ashamed. All the sadness and tension and shame that had built up over the past few years was threatening to come pouring out. And in a public place. I turned to face the wall. I had to snap out of it. Pull myself together.

  John moved in front to face me, placing his hands on my shoulders the way a father might. He bent down so that he was the same height as me and he hugged me.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I kept saying. ‘You don’t have to . . . you’re bending right down,’ I managed to say, embarrassed.

  ‘When you hug someone, it should always be heart on heart.’

  At first, my body was hunched over, my hands balled up at my chest. John didn’t attempt to move me or tell me what to do, he just held me. Slowly my hands unclenched and dropped to my side. My face pressed into his chest, relaxing into his embrace, and I bawled. It had been so long since anyone had held me. Really held me. Tears and snot came pouring out of me and onto John’s shirt.

  ‘Sorry, for crying . . . sorry about your shirt,’ I said, when the sobbing had died down to a whimper.

  ‘Crying is good for you, it’s healing . . . it releases chemicals and toxins from the body. My wife cries every day,’ he said, including Emily, who stood a short distance away, in our conversation. The love between them was obvious. The way they called each other ‘my love’, and gently brushed each other’s arm when they were near.

  ‘Sorry about your shirt,’ I said again.

  ‘That’s the beauty of these crazy patterns, there’s all sorts of things on here and you can’t tell.’

  I cried all the way home in the car, as I paid the babysitter and I was still crying when I clambered into bed without removing my make-up or cleaning my teeth. As I lay in bed, fighting so hard to hold back the tears, I could see the situation for what it really was. I felt like a character from a children’s book that had attempted every route except the one she knew she had to take. I had tried to go around it, dig under it, jump and fly over it, and pretend it didn’t exist. I’d tried to numb myself with food and cigarettes and alcohol. But I knew in my heart that there was no way to avoid my suffering: I had to go through it.

  And so I surrendered to the pain I had been so dreadfully afraid of. As the Balinese masseuse had told me, ‘First worse, then better.’ I felt like my chest cavity had been wedged open, and the dull ache I had been feeling for so many months was replaced with a sharp, stabbing pain, as through I’d been cut.

  I cried for Patrick being in prison and for what our relationship had become. I cried for all the things he was missing and for all the things I now had to do on my own. I cried because every night I went to bed alone and because each day was a long, hard slog with no break. And because I hadn’t been able to reconcile the faith I once had, the faith that had brought Patrick and me together, with all the hurt and pain and anger. I cried because the pain wasn’t just emotional or metaphorical, I was in actual physical pain. My eyes stung, my shoulders throbbed, my stomach was knot of tension. Every part of me felt wounded and broken because I had been holding on to everything so very, very tightly.

  I continued to cry on and off for roughly two weeks. Sometime during part three of the Trilogy of Crying, I received a phone call.

  ‘Is that Melissa?’ asked a well-spoken man on the end of the line.

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Zhao . . . Patrick’s friend . . . from Mannus. I’m out now.’

  ‘Hi . . . congratulations,’ I said, recalling he was the actuary charged with insider trading. And then immediately felt guilty. He was so much more than that. He was married with two children. He loved real coffee and couldn’t stand the instant stuff he was forced to drink on the inside.

  ‘How are you? How is Cynthia? How is the baby?’

  Zhao told me that they were all well and he was taking time out to be with the new baby, something the demands of his previous job had not allowed. He asked me if, when he started looking for another position, I might help him with his cover letter. I’d never written a letter disclosing a prison sentence, a federal charge at that. I didn’t know if I’d be of any help but agreed to take a look.

  ‘Do you just keep asking why?’ I said, after we’d exhausted all other topics. ‘I just keep asking, over and over, “Why did this happen? Why did he do it?”’

  Zhao paused, and then after a long exhalation said: ‘It’s good to analyse a situation, so that you understand it, but I’m Chinese, it’s not part of my culture to ask why. Usually, you’re not as
king why, but why me? That doesn’t help you move forward. In my culture, we say, “It just is.”’

  His words felt like the sun, enlightening but out of reach. However I knew that my questions weren’t bringing me any peace. For a brief moment I entertained the possibility that there might not be an answer and something inside me shifted.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mannus Correctional Centre

  2 August 2013

  Beauty,

  Sorry to hear Theo escaped. Do you want to get Lexie another rabbit? I hope this doesn’t upset her but I have a dog. One of the COs helped me apply and I now have a Jack Russell named Bella. If I’m allowed I could bring her home to the kids. She’s v. well behaved. Came from elderly deceased owner in Snowy Mountains. Can’t tell you how comforting it is to have her.

  So weird, the inmates (especially the ones, charged with violent crimes (armed robbery and GBH against humans) are like different people around the dog). Give me a hard time and call me names (mainly a slack ba$%&d) for not letting her sleep in my bed (single) and not taking her to work (in office!) Tried to explain she has 164 inmates fighting over her and slipping her extra food. She has four walks a day minimum. Mannus is dog heaven.

  V. cold. Asked inmate for quilt back and he refused. Others said if I want it back I will have to fight him for it. Can you send money for new quilt? ($60?)

  Sometimes life brings you surprising teachers. Getting to know Jason Bird after asking him to make you the origami vase. His parole is coming up and he started coming to visit me for advice about the outside world. Ironically, he’s the one teaching me. He’s been in prison for sixteen years, since he was eighteen or nineteen. Never used a mobile phone or a DVD or the internet or an iPod. Hard to imagine what it will be like for him getting out, it’s like he’s been frozen in time.