After the Blues

by Kathy Lette

  Bruce the Tooth beckoned him over to join a group of girls with Sportsgirl cotton tops, nipples turned on to high beam. ‘I can hack the Women’s Movement,’ he said expansively. ‘Women are underdogs. Like prisoners. See.’

  ‘Is one of those women your girlfriend?’

  ‘A mate of ours owns a massage parlour. He sends us in the odd freebie.’

  ‘Really?! Where? How …? What about the prison officers?’

  ‘Do you know why fuckin’ dog screws hang around in the threes? One likes readin’, one likes writin’ and the other likes hanging round with intellectuals.’ His eyes lit up with sly gaiety.

  ‘They’re calling you.’

  He wrapped his fingers around my upper arm. ‘Rather talk to you, Julia.’ There was a deceptive languidness to all his movements. ‘It’s the difference between scratching your arse and tearing it.’ I looked at him, perplexed. ‘Rough dunny paper’s a dime a dozen. You,’ he sized me up, ‘are softest Sorbent.’

  Maybe that’s why I fell for him. He was such a smooth-talking bastard.

  It began with secretive calls on the Al Capone (he was teaching me rhyming slang), then smuggled, uncensored letters called ‘stiffs’. He wrote to me about the brutal boys’ homes, the police bashings with baseball bats on the balls of the feet, where you couldn’t see the bruising, the razor blades planted in soap so blokes would slash themselves in the shower. He’d even eaten nails because hospital was some respite from prison floggings. Attraction is mysterious, but I know now that it had something to do with the fact that Billy’s upbringing, unlike my own, had been a harsh apprenticeship of hatred. I wanted to take his pain away. That’s how I saw myself, a human tube of Savlon.

  After the letters, we graduated to private meetings. I had joined the Prisoners Action Group and now started organising poetry sessions. These contact visits were conducted in a row of glass cubicles. Billy and I sat on opposite sides of the table as the prison officers peered in at us through the glass. It was like being stuck inside an aquarium.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you …’ I began.

  Years of regular meals, early nights, exercise and no alcohol had had a Peter Pan effect. He did not look his thirty-one years. ‘Oh well … You’re only human.’ He smiled irresistibly. ‘What did you think of me at first squiz?’

  ‘I’d never met a prisoner before. I expected you to be, well, hairier.’ He rocked back in his chair; the complicated tattoos on his folded forearms rippled like coloured markings on some exotic animal. ‘I thought beneath all that bluff and bravado you’d be a bit of a … yobbo. I didn’t expect you to be, well, it sounds patronising, but … intelligent and sensitive.’

  ‘I do impressions.’ I heard his shoe thud to the floor.

  ‘After encountering Bruce the Tooth, I’m afraid I judged you all too harshly.’

  He stretched his leg out under the table. ‘I dunno …’ Screws patrolled the corridor, peering into each aquarium. ‘… I reckon you’d make a good judge. Like them, you know how to dispense with justice!’ he muttered as he slid his toe underneath the elastic of my underpants.

  It was like being back at school behind the toilet block, or lying underneath your boyfriend on the lounge-room floor in an agony of orgasmic guilt, one eye out for the sweep of your parents’ homecoming headlights. As the guard disappeared down the corridor, Billy rocked forward on his chair and replaced his foot with his fingers. We remained like that, our faces frozen, as I spoke like a push-button tape recorder, droning on about Sappho, Craig Raine, Emily Dickinson, Donne.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m shakin’. I’m like a dog shittin’ razor blades.’

  At the end of the ‘poetry session’, he leaned back in his chair once more and, with devout delight, slowly licked each finger. That was the day I learned that objectivity in journalism was a myth.

  ‘A crim!’ Kerrie stopped trowelling Vegemite onto her toast. ‘Have you got kangaroos in the top paddock?’ She tapped her temple with the butterknife. ‘Crims,’ Kerrie concluded through a mouthful of toast, ‘make a habit of finding things before people lose them, remember!’

  Kerrie didn’t understand that the politicians and television executives, and now the current affairs TV host she’d dated, had exactly the same predatory instincts as Billy – the only difference being that Billy didn’t have sufficient capital to set up a corporation.

  ‘You’ll like Billy,’ I reassured her, spooning Earl Grey tea leaves into the pot. ‘He’s witty, intelligent …’

  She raised her plucked eyebrows sarcastically. ‘The reason he’s spent most of his life behind bars remains a mystery …’

  The terrace we lived in was a ramshackle affaire, complete with harbour view. Well, more of a glimpse, and then only if you stood on the loo and held a mirror out of the window. The walls were papered with political posters: ‘Eve was framed’, ‘Nicaragua is Spanish for Vietnam’, ‘War is men’s menstruation envy’. An Australian flag was draped over the window as a curtain.

  ‘It’ll take time, I know that.’ I positioned my teacup on the kangaroo-fur coaster. ‘Prisoners come out in a worse state than when they went in.’

  ‘The only reason you’re interested in Billy is that it’s another first for you.’ Kerrie angrily slathered another slice. ‘I mean, you’ve done everything else.’ She paused to scrape the butter residue off her knife onto the lip of the Vegemite jar. ‘Except bondage. Firsts are getting rarer and rarer these days …’

  ‘You are so wrong, Kerrie.’

  ‘What?’ Kerrie gasped, intrigued. ‘You’ve done bondage?’

  I watched her squirm into perilous stilettos as she fished up beneath her leather skirt to retrieve a shirt tail before heading off to work. Kerrie was wrong about our generation. We had led very protected lives. Not from dope and men and kinky positions, but we had been protected from intimacy. Intimacy’s the one thing we’ve never had. ‘He needs me,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’ She lacquered her teased hair in gel, using the glass oven door as a mirror. ‘You’re his lifeline.’

  ‘I’m going to teach him about music and literature,’ I explained, separating the garbage into piles of biodegradable and plastics. ‘And about food and theatre and …’

  ‘Sounds like you’re allowing for everything …’ She rolled her Burnt Burgundy–lidded eyes. ‘… except what will happen.’ Late for work as usual, she tottered towards the door. ‘Step out of line and he’ll be massaging your collarbone with a crowbar.’ She clenched her fist fiercely. ‘Or giving you AIDS, ugh. Even the straights “turn” inside.’

  Squeezing the wettex into a ball, I followed Kerrie’s trail of crumbs around the kitchen. ‘If you don’t have anything to be passionate about you may as well be dead.’

  ‘You might be,’ she growled and slammed the front door.

  The bonus for working in the prison laundry was a contact visit. I waited on the prison lawn next to the mothers with lips like string and their squawking babies. Billy’s name and number were called. I stood up. But it was Bruce the Tooth who appeared, swaggering across the ragged grass. He hurled himself in a neat dive onto the patch of bindi-eyes at my feet.

  ‘Where’s Billy?’

  ‘Did his block in the weights yard.’ His gold tooth seemed to be flashing Morse signals at me. ‘Got three days in the pound. Siddown,’ he ordered. ‘Ya know he’s done his nuts over you.’

  His eyes slid over my body. I drew my legs demurely beneath me.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve really got him gallopin’ the lizard. Been wankin’ himself to death, poor bastard.’ He leaned up close to my face. ‘He’s doin’ it hard. If he bolts, it’s gonna be your fault, missy. Look, why don’tcha just let him slap ya with his love slug now. Once he’s filled you up with billy dunk, it’ll all be over. I seen it before.’ His breath was like the stale water in a vase. ‘It’s not the cunt, it’s the hunt. See?’ He was musclebound and missing one front tooth while the other glistened gold. ‘Next debatin’ day why don
’tcha just slip backstage to the dunnies. We’ll create a distraction for the fuckin’ dog screws an’ you can whack up for him. No skin off of your nose. Look,’ he said reasonably, ‘three years without a woman … He’ll do his lolly before he even gets it in. The sparrows will fly out of his arse. Then you can piss off and let him do his time in peace …’ Affronted, I stood up to go. ‘Oh, don’t try your coy routine with me.’ He seized my arm. ‘Youse snobby chicks have seen more ceilings than Michelangelo.’

  ‘Women don’t count ceiling cracks anymore.’ I was full of venom by now. ‘We’ve had something called the Women’s Movement while you’ve been inside. You know,’ I said sarcastically, ‘feminism!’ I was striding towards the exit.

  ‘You middle-class chicks. You make a man eat a mile of your shit just to kiss your arse,’ he called out after me, tooth flashing. All niggling doubts dissolved that day. I was now determined to transform Billy into a born-again human being.

  During the six months I waited for him, mysterious deliveries appeared on our doorstep. A carton of biscuits. A container filled with cans of Spam. Pre-loved televisions and car radios. We got used to the anonymous gifts. Every evening after work, I would round the corner of our street in Darlo with Christmas-morning anticipation. I was dazzled by Billy’s daring.

  ‘I’m not having all this contraband in the house,’ Kerrie said, threading herself into a pair of coloured, factory-seconds pantyhose.

  ‘How do you know it’s all hot?’ I retorted. ‘Just ’cause he’s in jail doesn’t mean he’s a real criminal. A conviction doesn’t always mean a crime, Kerrie.’

  ‘Oh right. Of course. He’s just a victim of circumstance with a circumstance of victims.’

  ‘Billy said his friend on the outside would look after us.’

  ‘That’s another thing. I don’t like the underworld having our address.’

  ‘Faulty pantyhose is hardly underworld. Anyway, you’d better get used to it. He’s going to need a place to stay,’ I hazarded, ‘when he gets out next year.’ Kerrie shot me a look of pure malice.

  ‘He’s not living in this house. And that’s that.’

  ‘Why?’

  Kerrie rolled the pantyhose up her legs. The ventilated crotch was skew-whiff and the waistband reached up under her armpits. ‘Because a bloke moving in will ruin our fucking rapport!’

  Later that night we received our final unscheduled delivery. I was dozing in bed when a hand went over my mouth. How I had fantasied about this moment. The curve of each caress. How he would separate me from my clothing with philatelic precision. His voracious rapture for each basketball scar and birthmark. How his face would distort with passion during lovemaking. How he would call out my name …

  ‘You’re bewdiful,’ he said, kissing me hard on the mouth. ‘But babe, to be honest, the most bewdiful thing in the world to me right now would be a steak.’

  After a contact visit, Billy had just walked out of jail. He had simply taken the place of one of his younger brothers. They’d exchanged clothes, heads had been counted, and Billy, surrounded by a cluster of visitors, had walked out free. When discovered, his imposter would get six months for public mischief. And now Billy owed his brother one. That was how it worked in their world. Over scampi and chips and a big juicy steak at the local cafe, Billy told me that his plan was to ‘stay snookered’ at my place until we could organise a car and some Bugs Bunny … ‘Money?’ I guessed. Then we would do a Harold Holt – ‘Bolt,’ he decoded for me – up to Joh country.

  I was a journalist. I knew the penalties for aiding a fugitive from justice. But causes were my cause. To me, it was the jails that were immoral, and incarceration the crime.

  We washed down the meal with Germaine Greers then went home and Donald Ducked on the Rory O’Moore.

  By morning, Billy had fixed everything. The fridge door now closed without the aid of an ockie strap. The table no longer listed. The ironing board, rusted into a state of rigor mortis, was now oiled and put away.

  ‘I knew he’d change everyth– ugh,’ Kerrie gagged. Flustered by the presence of our house guest, she’d accidentally put coffee in the teapot. ‘Why can’t he be inept like other men?’ Kerrie got the ironing board back out of the cupboard and snapped it to attention. ‘First he rearranges our furniture, next it’ll be our facial features.’ She looked across at Billy, who was doing chin lifts on the kitchen doorframe. ‘You can’t stay here.’ She sullenly sidled past him to have another go at making a cup of tea.

  ‘Are you wearing that dress for a bet or what?’ Billy held himself aloft with only one hand and tweaked the hem of Kerrie’s vinyl miniskirt as she passed.

  On the counter were the remnants of a dope deal, some hash and a half-eaten Mars Bar. Kerrie dumped them unceremoniously in the garbage bin. ‘It’s flirting with fate to have contraband in the house,’ she admonished.

  ‘I like flirting.’

  In jail you trade on your repartee. It’s a currency. And Billy was loaded.

  ‘Dope causes cancer,’ Kerrie said, wiping coffee off her skirt with a wettex. ‘I steer clear of Mars Bars, monosodium glutamate, alcohol, peanut butter, bongs, salt and too much sex.’

  Billy thudded softly back to earth. ‘Why live?’ He retrieved the Mars Bar from the bin and ate it in one gluttonous mouthful. He sniffed under his arms. ‘God, a bit whiffy under the old Warwicks.’

  Kerrie looked at me for translation. ‘Warwick Farm, arm,’ I deciphered.

  She watched, appalled, as he swigged a gulp of milk from the carton. ‘Ugh … got any flavouring? Can’t drink it raw. The nipple’s still in it.’

  Kerrie seized the carton from his hands. ‘Oh, I’m sorry we’re not satisfying our guest from Her Majesty’s Parramatta Hilton.’ She thrust the carton back into the fridge and strode past him with exaggerated indifference.

  ‘Youse middle-class babes have a few misconceptions about our legal system.’ He wrapped his fingers tightly around her wrists, right where a pair of handcuffs go. ‘Basically everything depends on a group of twelve people of average ignorance, chosen to decide who has the best lawyer. Kerrie’s Kangaroo Court,’ he said affably, ‘can I appeal against me conviction, Your Honour?’

  Kerrie went red in the face. It was a hormonal meltdown. Good-looking crims have this effect on women. The Prisoners Action Group was made up of females: teachers, journos, socialites, social workers, writers, film stars, even a famous senator attended on one occasion. I attribute it now to the Ned Kelly complex – the knight in rusty armour. But I didn’t know that then.

  ‘Maybe …’ Kerrie bantered back, not fighting his grip. ‘I’ll try anyone once.’

  ‘And I’m used to penal servitude.’ Billy lifted the lids on his acid-blue eyes. Kerrie stood still, as if caught in the beam of a searchlight.

  That was when I told Kerrie I agreed with her. It was time Billy and I headed north. Having a man round the house was ruining our fucking rapport.

  Being on the run was like being in a B-grade gangster movie. What’s more, the car Billy had chosen was a huge, shiny Chevy, complete with tailfins and whitewall tyres. It was large enough for us to swim laps in the back seat. He drove fast, leaving a pedestrian puree up and down the median strip. By the time we crossed the Queensland border, the vinyl seats were slippery with our sweat.

  We southerners call Queensland the Deep North. All of Australia seems to retire to the Gold Coast, to identical apartment blocks called ‘Xanadu Towers’ and ‘Shangrila Chevron’. Calculatedly thin bodies clad in lurid, frivolous teenage fashions swivel to reveal antediluvian heads. Queensland boasts the highest divorce rate, the highest alcohol consumption, the highest number of repossessions and the highest consumption of tranquillisers than any other state. Crocodiles have a habit of dining on humans. Wives cut off the appendages of unfaithful husbands. Politicians own racehorses. Aboriginal people hang themselves in jail cells with tragic and mysterious regularity. Street marches are banned, abortions are illegal and homosexuals are
imprisoned.

  Apart from that, it’s Paradise.

  We dumped the car with an ex-con at the border and waited for Leon. ‘A lawyer mate,’ Billy said. ‘Cool. Leon does a good job for the Prisoners Action Group. He likes the boys and a bit of rough trade.’ His, I was told, was a ‘safe house’.

  Leon arrived in a decapitated V-Dub. ‘Go topless. Rent a convertible’ was scrawled in candy pink down the side of the duco. Leon was weedy, bow-legged, sported the residue of teenage acne and looked like he would have trouble getting people to remember to put his name on their Christmas card list. He was clearly displeased to discover that Billy had some emotional baggage in his luggage. Leon begrudgingly stowed me in the back with the bags, where he obviously felt I belonged. His voice was distorted in the wind so I only caught every second word about his current cases, and the battle he and the Queensland Prisoners Action Group were waging against the infamous Boggo Road jail.

  We ate lunch at ‘Froggie’s and Woggie’s BYO French restaurant’. Halfway through the entrée, Leon informed me that I was a wanker. ‘The things you’re working for just split the movement’s solidarity.’ His tone was one of thinly disguised contempt.

  ‘Come on! The extension of superficial amenities to prisoners has not given the prison population …’ I grimaced as Billy belted the bottom of the tomato sauce bottle and wiped the red globules over his garlic prawns. ‘… less compelling reasons to fight. Don’t eat off your knife, my darling.’

  ‘Our lovemaking has ruined me,’ Billy beamed. ‘Billy Bridges, the man Katingal, Grafton, Boggo Road couldn’t break. Undone by a mere woman!’ He planted a prawny and proprietorial kiss on my mouth. ‘Once, me and Bruce the Tooth, we intimidated this screw, see …’

  ‘Bruce and I,’ I corrected automatically, impatient to continue my debate with Leon.

  ‘… got this bar heater off of him, pinched an aluminium pie dish from the officers’ mess and two pieces of T-bone from their kitchen. Took about two bloody hours to grill it, but babe, what a bloat-out, but.’