by Mel Jacob
Heard his story from other inmates. Apparently, Bird tried to sell drugs to some off-duty policemen who’d been at the pub for hours, drinking. They accepted, took him around a corner and then started attacking them. He retaliated first with fists and then with a knife he had on him, killing one and injuring another. Most in here idolize him because of what he did and everyone hates the police in here. V. interesting to see, as Bird won’t tolerate others degrading policemen or praising his crime.
Inmate: Way to go, Bird. One down, about fifteen thousand to go (referring to policeman).
Bird: Don’t let me hear you say that again. All I did was make a widow.
People listen to him. Looks like cross between Superman and The Incredible Hulk. He did a lot of years in A1 Class (Highest). Stabbed three times by other inmates and had to have surgery for one of them. He showed me the scars on his chest and stomach. Now is C2 like me.
Bird has a deep respect for the police. Told me that in his appeal one of the officers couldn’t live with himself and testified that they didn’t disclose to Bird they were policemen. If he didn’t do that Bird would have got life, never to be released.
Said most people rejected him after what he did. The only person who was there for him was his father, who had abused him most of his childhood (dropped wardrobes on his head, woke him in the middle of the night and beat him for drinking remaining milk in fridge etc).
Me: What chance did you have if you had parents who did that?
Bird: I had every chance, there’s no excuse for what I did. Everyone has choices. Everyone.
Refreshing to hear someone take full responsibility for what they have done. Most of the men seem to want to blame everyone else and I have been guilty of falling into that trap. Bird explained how every day he wrestles with the fact that he took someone’s life, which unlike everything else is irreversible. He’s incredibly self-aware. Speaks about himself in the third person and admits that his old self was going nowhere and deserved everything he got.
After I got arrested nearly everyone said to me, ‘It’s not like you murdered someone!’ I see not only the way that others look at him but how hard it is to know you did something that is irreversible. So hard to not let it define you. Most people only see him as his crime. But in my conversations with him I can see that he is more than that. He’s knows all about anatomy and fitness and he knows a lot about plants. Taught me how to propagate a fig tree and he can make anything with origami.
I used to think things were black and white. Right and wrong. Now I can see it’s only shades of grey. Way more than fifty! There’s context and motivation and fear that all come into play.
There’s blokes in here that got such light sentences and there’s others who got worse than me. From the outside it might look like black and white but it’s anything but that. Andrews told me he requested a ruling from the tax office for some creative thing his accountant wanted to do. They approved it and then, despite the ruling, he, his accountant and a whole bunch of clients were all prosecuted. Interestingly, they are all in here together. When the accountant arrived, several blokes offered to bash him for Andrews but he said, ‘NO WAY!’ Most men only speak one language in here—violence.
Another inmate, Gaffey, was charged with manslaughter after a female driver fell asleep at the wheel. She drove onto the wrong side of the road, he swerved to avoid a collision, then she woke and corrected. It was her fault but he was charged because he was on the wrong side of the road. His whole life has been ripped apart. Lost his job, his wife left him so he can’t see his kids. He’s so depressed.
Most inmates don’t believe my charges. Wouldn’t matter except they think that I’m deliberately lying or am an informant. Hard to try and accept things when blokes telling me every day how I got ripped off.
Printed out my charges to shut people up.
Typical conversation.
Inmate: How long did you get?
Me: Two and half on the bottom (when eligible for parole). Four and a half, on top (full sentence).
Inmate: But there must have been a victim.
Me: No, no victims.
Inmate: Didn’t you have a lawyer?
Me: Yeah, I did.
Inmate: Must have been an effing useless one.
Bird suggested he become my personal trainer. I agreed and then in the gym he started punching me in the stomach while I was doing chin ups (said is maxo style and how you become hard). Decided to have a break from the gym for a while.
Heard from one of the other inmates that Jamie (first cellie in Mannus) broke parole and was arrested again. Hard to believe someone would prefer prison to life on the outside. He said his three squares a day on the inside are better than what he ever had on the outside.
Surprised that there is so much humour in here. V. black and sarcastic. For example, after a visit yesterday, Summer (border security) played a practical joke.
Summer: (to the CO) After every visit you search me and you’ve found nothing but it’s (drugs) still getting in here. Have you ever searched Jacobs?
Thanks to Summer, I got strip-searched. On that note—thinking of you!
I love you.
Paddy
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘So, tell me about your father,’ Steph said, crossing her legs and flicking out her ankle, causing the laces on one of her strappy shoes to flutter. I’d thought we’d talk about the dual disappointments of my birthday and wedding anniversary, but Steph wanted to get all Freudian.
‘I think we’ve covered that,’ I said, firmly.
Steph flicked back through the pages of her folder, skimming her notes and diagrams. ‘Your father was nineteen when you were born. Divorced, remarried, has teenage sons?’ She looked up for confirmation and I nodded. But Steph and I both knew that a person’s life encompasses so much more than the scant details you would tick on a form. Marital status. Children. Occupation. These things are categories. They only scratch the surface of our deep, complicated lives.
‘Are you like him?’ Steph asked, pen poised, and I looked down at her shoes again. Does she only wear them once or is she fanatical about cleanliness? I wondered. None of my shoes looked like that.
‘Not really. I get my dark features from him. My mum and sister both have blond hair, and blue eyes,’ I said, noticing a new addition to her wall. The roughly drawn figures floated, weightless, mid-page, with wild curly hair, and smiles that extended beyond their angular faces.
‘Tell me about him,’ Steph prompted.
Why is she doing this? I thought. ‘He’s a dichotomy, I s’pose, like the rest of us.’
‘Tell me about that,’ she said.
‘He’s incredibly social, always telling jokes, a great storyteller. People have often told me how he’s such a nice guy, but when it comes to me . . .’ Steph jotted down notes in her folder and then paused, as if waiting for me to continue. I was waiting for her to speak. It was a conversational stand-off.
‘Nineteen’s young to become a parent,’ Steph said. I’d won.
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘Was it planned?’ she asked, with her perfect posture, perfect everything.
‘No. Mum was only seventeen.’
‘And how did their lives change?’
It’s difficult to think of your parents as people with lives and aspirations of their own. Being a parent myself had given me a speck of insight into how my children only saw me in my one supporting role—their mother. What was my mother like when she was seventeen? I didn’t know.
‘Apparently Mum was very good at school, in all the top classes. She had to drop out because of the pregnancy. I’m not sure about Dad,’ I said. ‘I know he was on his way to becoming a professional footballer and he was a state champion boxer. And suddenly he found himself with a wife and a baby and a job he hated. Then he got sick, I’m not sure what it was, but I know he almost died, had to have an ileostomy bag . . . that put an end to contact sport.’
‘So his life got d
erailed as well,’ Steph commented as I sipped my water. It was the first time I’d ever thought about my father’s life in those terms.
The conversation moved on to depression and Steph mapped out a family history. My maternal grandfather and uncle had both committed suicide; clinical depression snaked through my mother’s side of the family like a mineral vein. There was no denying that it was in my make-up. I’d always been a brooding pessimist.
‘And your father, did he struggle with depression . . . after his illness perhaps?’ Steph enquired.
‘Come to think of it, he did,’ I said, taking another sip of water as the memories seeped in.
‘What comes to mind?’ she asked eventually, holding my gaze for so long I had to look away.
‘I remember him lying on the couch, next to the stereo. Mum was out, so the music was turned up loud. It was The Doors, he loved this song called ‘Peace Frog’, from Morrison Hotel,’ I said, recalling it so specifically and vividly, it felt like it had happened yesterday. ‘I must have been about fourteen. I came in and turned it down, oblivious to his existential crisis. I asked him something and he didn’t respond, it didn’t even register . . .’ I started crying.
‘Take your time,’ Steph counselled.
‘And then . . .’ I said, still crying, ‘he said to me, “I can’t think of a single thing, worth living for . . .”’
Years before, a kid on my street had accidentally shot me in the face with an air rifle. I remember the sting of the pellet penetrating the skin. It was deep and sharp and foreign. My father’s words felt like that. I could feel the hole where they’d gone in, but, unlike the pellet, it was difficult to tell where they had lodged and impossible to extract.
‘And what does that mean to you?’ Steph asked gently, passing me a tissue.
‘In retrospect, I suppose I see it as selfish,’ I said, continuing to cry.
‘But that’s an adult’s perspective—possibly how someone may have described it to you—how did it make you feel back then, as a child?’ Steph was firm, steeling herself for our usual mental tussle.
I cast my mind back to that time, to that place. The brown leather. The speed of the guitar. The pain in my father’s eyes. And I remember I was determined to be better, smarter, so that I could give him at least one reason to live.
‘I can see . . . now . . . that it was a call for help,’ I said, dabbing at my eyes.
‘That is still you as an adult. How did you feel as that little girl?’ Steph asked, and I started to cry even more. After the past weeks, I was surprised I had so many tears left.
‘Hurt . . .’
Steph looked at me, tenacious and tender, imploring me to go on.
‘. . . like I wasn’t enough . . .’
I looked over at the picture of the happy family, the irony not lost on me. And I said what had been buried deep down inside me for so long.
‘Unloved.’
It was there, in Steph’s office, I remembered that my father had tried to kill himself. ‘My family had gone out to my uncle’s farm, bushwalking. Dad didn’t go on the walk, said he wanted to stay back at the house. The others cut the walk short for some reason . . . and they found him in the garage . . . He’d run a piece of hose from the exhaust into the window with the intention of . . . you know . . .’
Steph nodded.
‘I wasn’t there, I was at my part-time job at the video shop, but that didn’t stop me thinking about it. Imagining what it must have been like for him in that car, what was going through his mind? The fumes. I was afraid that if he’d tried suicide once, then he’d do it again. I always felt this worry, this responsibility to look out for him.’ I noticed the clock. We were only halfway through the session but it felt like I’d been in there for hours.
‘For years, it haunted my dreams. I dreamed that I was the one who’d discovered him, and I was coughing and spluttering, trying to pull him out. I always woke exhausted from that dream. I tried so hard to lift and carry him and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save him. In my dreams, it was always smoke, not fumes and the room was filling with smoke . . . I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out.
‘I’d wake from that dream and walk straight down the hall, to check he was still alive. He has this breathing pattern, where he does two or three regular breaths in a row and then there’s a long pause until the next one. And I’d wait, frozen, till I heard the next breath.’
‘What does the dream mean to you now?’ Steph asked and I shrugged, focusing on the shiny tip of her shoe.
‘I don’t know.’
Steph smiled, even though the session was a long, hard slog. And, as the clock indicated, time was passing with a deathly slowness. I wondered if that’s what it felt like for Paddy in prison.
For years I felt like I’d failed my father but now new light had been cast on our history.
‘That he had to save himself, that we all do,’ I finally answered. ‘And he has. He’s remarried and he’s got two great boys. He’s enjoying being a father the second time around—I’m happy for him.’
‘Is he involved in Nick and Lexie’s lives?’ Steph asked.
‘Yes, whenever I go back to the Hunter, the kids ask if they can go to Pop’s lolly shop. He used to have a shop, now he just has a large collection in the cupboard.’
‘When you met Patrick, did you consider him different to your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Consciously or unconsciously?’ Steph asked.
‘Consciously,’ I said, thinking about just how different they are. Chalk and cheese.
There was no doubt in my mind that Patrick loved me. We had bonded over the pain of our fathers’ infidelities and Patrick had promised that he would never ever betray me.
The session had gone over time, so we ended there. Unlike my other sessions with Steph, this one didn’t end with the feeling of neatly folded corners. Everything felt unresolved. Unfinished.
I wasn’t until days later, after mulling things over, that I finally got some perspective. For the first time in my life, I felt enormous compassion for my father. We weren’t so different, he and I. He had taught me to love stories and I will always be grateful for that. I could see now that my father’s life hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned either and it had broken him.
And, as it turned out, Patrick wasn’t that different from my father. Deep down, in that messy, murky core, I was afraid Patrick would abandon me and he had. He hadn’t neglected me or replaced me with another woman, but I could see now with crystal clarity that he had betrayed me. Not in the way I’d feared, but it was betrayal, nonetheless.
TWENTY-NINE
Mannus Correctional Centre
3 September 2013
Beauty,
Awkward weekend visit with Dave Pete and Geoff. Geoff only wanted to talk about World’s Worst Prisons TV show. Highlight for him was hearing about unsuspecting prisoners attacked in their sleep with DIY weapons. Comforting thought! Geoff failed to understand why he couldn’t bring iPhone or iPod to visit (tried to explain to CO, Popovic, of all people, that he likes to listen to music).
CO: Do you have anything to declare? Any prohibited weapons, sharp objects (whole spiel)?
Pete: Only my rapier wit.
Popovic didn’t laugh.
COs wanted to know what time I was finishing my visit as some new inmates had to be processed and they needed me to do the paperwork and computer entry.
Pete: It’s like the Shawshank Redemption.
Me: Funny you should say that because right now my boots are in the warden’s office.
Pete: Why?
Me: Long story. But I’ll have to remember to swap boots when I leave.
Bella the dog is causing problems for me. Tom is up for parole and all the inmates are hassling me to let her go with him.
Inmate: Don’t be a slack bas%&$d, Jacobs, this is Bella’s chance at freedom. Her opportunity to finally get out.
Me: She’s on 47,000 acres. She
chases cattle and sheep and she can roam . . .
Inmate: Why would you want someone to be in prison?
Me: Bella is a dog. She doesn’t have her civil liberties taken away from her.
Inmate: But this is her chance, her one chance, Jacobs, to get out, you selfish effing *rick.
COs pride themselves on knowing what is going on but they don’t have a clue. There’s a Vietnamese inmate, Nguyen (border security), so tiny he looks like he’s about 12 years old. COs are always worried about him because he’s so freaking small. Some of the Asians do Chinese medicine on each other with small stones from paddock.
Nguyen was coming down with something and went crazy rubbing himself all over with a stone, and asked another inmate to do his back so his entire body was covered in bruises.
CO: Tran, Wang, you’re coming with me.
Tran: Why?
CO: We know you’ve been laying into Nguyen. We’ve seen the bruises.
Tran: Sir, you’ve got the wrong idea, it’s not what you think—it’s Chinese medicine.
CO: What sort of idiot do you think I am, Tran? There’s no doubt in my mind he’s been beaten and you’ve had it in for him since he got here.
So Wang and Tran both got tipped because Nguyen had a cold.
Jason Bird was granted parole. Have so much admiration for his self-awareness. One of his parole conditions (20 years) was a ban on alcohol and he requested they make it a lifelong ban.
Me: Really? For the rest of your life? I don’t really drink but what if you want to have a Baileys and milk or something?
Bird: Baileys and milk? Who drinks Baileys and milk?
Me: I do.
Bird: Mate, I wouldn’t go telling anyone that if I was you, especially round here. And if you’d seen me after I’d been drinking, you’d put in a request as well.