by Peter Kocan
“Move him into the sun.
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, dreaming of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.”
While you’re saying the words, the beauty of them strikes you all over again, so that you speak them very clearly and feelingly and you even start to make a little gesture with your hand, like an actor or something. Then you see that Marian is smiling a lovely smile at you, and Arthur is looking at you closely and smiling a little too. You suddenly feel embarrassed. It’s incredible. You’ve been spouting poetry right here in the office, in front of people.
“That’s beautiful,” Marian says.
“Oh, it’s not bad,” you say, wondering if she thinks you’re a fool.
“Well, about the books,” she says, suddenly getting businesslike. “Each week you’ll go around to all the men here and take a list of what sort of books each man wants, then your Charge will send the list over to me and I’ll send a boxful of selected titles back over on the food truck, and you’ll distribute them to the men and gather them up again the following week to be exchanged for a new lot. All right?”
“Fine.”
“Of course, I can’t guarantee that each borrower will get exactly what he asks for, but I’ll make the selection as close to each one’s preference as I can. I’m afraid, in your own case, I don’t have much in the way of poetry.”
“Never mind,” you say, “anything will do.” You don’t really want to read any other poetry books, it would be like betraying your own lovely green book with the gold coloured lettering.
“It’s settled then,” Marian says. She gives you another big smile. You realise the talk is over, so you stand up to go and Marian puts out her hand and you shake with her. Her hand feels nice in yours, soft and firm. As you go out of the office you hear Marian say to Arthur: “He seems a nice boy.”
You don’t hear Arthur’s reply.
The other men all want to hear about Marian and what it was like being so close to her.
“Did you get a feel of her?” Bill Greene wants to know.
“Of course not. We were talking about literature.”
“Literature be fucked!” says Ray Hoad.
“We heard you was rootin’ her on the floor,” says Bill.
“Chock-a-block up her,” says Ray.
“With Arthur ticklin’ ya balls with a feather,” says Bill.
You just grin and let them talk.
“I’d like to get into her.”
“I’d fuck her arse off!”
“She’d love it!”
“Course she would.”
“Did yer see the miniskirt?”
“Yeah, she’s a fuckin’ prickteaser!”
“Flashin’ her fanny!”
“She likes Len.”
“Because he’s got a cock like a horse.”
“They were talkin’ about literature.”
“On the floor.”
“She was talkin’ and Len was fuckin’.”
Tuesday is the day for you to go around to all the men and make a list of books they want. Most of them aren’t very interested. You approach Hartley, the famous murderer.
“How many books can I order?” he asks.
“Four or five,” you say.
“I want five books about murder,” he says.
“What for? Homework?” says Ray Hoad, who’s nearby.
So you write it down. “Hartley. Five books on murder.”
“Er, don’t you think it might look a bit odd?” you ask him.
“Why?” he asks.
“Well, just saying ‘about murder’ like that. If the screws see the list, they might think you’re dwelling on the subject.”
“I am,” he says quietly.
“Oh,” you say and quickly move on to the next man. Later you change the “about murder” to “about crime”.
Hartley will never get out. He doesn’t care. At least, he says he doesn’t. He says he’ll die happy, knowing that he’s killed several people. When his first batch of books comes he’s very pleased because one of them is about famous Australian murderers and he has a whole chapter in it, with photographs of himself handcuffed between policemen and pictures of the victims’ bodies and the places where the killings happened. Ray Hoad says the book is Hartley’s family album.
Hartley is very musical. He used to be allowed to play an old dusty piano locked away in one of the storerooms. He played very well, Mozart and stuff like that, but the screws stopped him playing after a few months because of security. They always talk about “security” whenever they want to stop anyone doing anything. Then Hartley got a violin sent to him and was allowed to play it for a couple of weeks until someone realised he might use the strings to strangle people, so they took the violin away. You think maybe they were right about the violin, but the piano seemed harmless.
“Who ever heard of anyone being strangled with a piano?” Bill Greene says.
“He murdered Mozart with it, didn’t he?” suggests Ray Hoad.
Dick Steele is making everyone edgy. His feuds with other men have got very savage and there’s an undercurrent of violence. Mario has already attacked Dick with a billiard cue, really trying to smash Dick’s head. Dick got away unhurt, but he’s still goading Mario. It’s bad in the television room, when you’re locked up with him for three and a half hours and he sits up at the back and weaves a web of hatred over the room. If one of his enemies is there he’ll niggle and goad all night in lots of little ways. He always brings his bottle of wine out and makes everyone share it, and you dare not refuse. He keeps pressing you as though he’s just being very friendly, but if you keep refusing he makes you one of his enemies. Even Ray Hoad doesn’t want to get on the bad side of him. You know Dick is mad, in an even worse way than Hartley, but he doesn’t show it, especially when screws are about. Dick is close to several of the screws and you have a feeling there’s some sort of arrangement between them, maybe for getting the wine. Dick has a kind of power which you feel, but can’t quite explain. You never talk ill of Dick with anyone, because he might overhear, or because you’re afraid the person you talk to might report your comments to Dick. He makes you feel he has ears everywhere, like the secret police or something.
It’s making you very tense. You’re sure something bad will happen in the ward sooner or later. Maybe a stabbing.
You’re in the billiard room. Dick is lolling in a chair. He wants a cushion from across the room.
“Get me a cushion, Len,” he says.
You know this is a tricky moment, a sort of test for you. If you go and get the cushion you’ll be showing that you’re weak and afraid of him, like Dave Lamming, and he’ll have you fetching and carrying for him all the time. If you refuse, he’ll start marking you down on his enemy list.
You look over at him, as though you hadn’t heard properly.
“Pardon?” you say, making your voice flat.
“Get me that cushion, will you?”
You look across at the cushion and then back at Dick as though you don’t quite understand. Dick knows that you do understand.
“You want a cushion?”
“Yeah.”
You sit quite still. Dick knows that you’re going to be difficult.
“I’ve got a crook back, mate,” he says. “I need the cushion for support.”
He said that so you can obey him without seeming to lose face. As though you’re just helping a bloke with a crook back. He also said it so he’ll have a bigger grievance if you defy him, a bigger reason to make you an enemy. You are such a mongrel you wouldn’t even do a sick man a tiny favour.
You’re at the moment of truth now, and must either obey or defy him. Either way, your life is going to be made miserable from this moment on. You’ll be his stooge or his enemy. His face is very grim. You may a
lready have hesitated too long. Just then Bill Greene, who is on the other side of the room, picks up the cushion and throws it as though playfully at Dick’s head. The crisis is over. You’re not sure whether Bill Greene understood what was happening and deliberately helped you, but you feel grateful anyway.
Sometimes, when Arthur comes down to the vegetable garden and you’re talking to him a little away from the other men and screws, you almost tell him of the pressure building up in the ward because of Dick. It’s the only time you’d dare, down in the open with just the two of you and no other ears to hear. It would be a very serious thing to do. It would make you a nark, a phizzgig, the lowest form of life. Also, if it got back to Dick that you’d ratted on him, he’d never rest till he’d paid you off. You try to imagine what it feels like to have a knife in your stomach. So you don’t say anything to Arthur.
The climax comes in a strange way. One morning Dick comes into the dining room with the others and he’s got a long gash down his face. It’s raw and bleeding. Arthur wants to know what happened. Dick won’t say.
“They got me, that’s all,” he mutters.
“Who got you?” Arthur wants to know.
“I’m not sayin’.”
So Dick is taken into the office. A senior supervisor is called from the other part of the hospital. The supervisor takes a dim view of it, examining Dick’s wound and then coming into the dining room to stare at all of us, as if trying to pick the vicious assailant. We see screws moving around the ward. They’re searching for the weapon that wounded Dick. The atmosphere is very tight and bad, the screws all with hard faces that they get when there’s trouble like this. There’s a rumour going among the men that Dick inflicted the wound on himself.
“You know that big nail in the wall on the verandah? He shoved his own face onto it.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s fuckin’ mad!”
“He’s trying to frame someone.”
“He hates himself!”
“He’ll have ter join the queue!”
We don’t see Dick any more. We learn he’s been locked up in a far cell. Then we hear he’s making confessions. About the wine, for instance. Screws open the ceiling of the shower room and find a cache of wine there. Then screws are sent to search behind one of the toilet cisterns and find a long knife, Dick’s own. Then it’s said that Dick has confessed to having buried a revolver somewhere in the vegetable gardens. By the afternoon two dozen screws have come from outside with long sharp iron rods and are moving methodically across the vegetable gardens, poking the rods down every few inches, hoping to strike the metal of the buried gun. For two days they poke the earth. The gardening work is stopped and all the men kept locked on the verandah under close watch. The screws can’t find any gun.
“A bloke feels like a faaarkin idiot,” Eddie complains. “Pokin’ the faaarkin ground all day.”
Once they thought they’d found something. The screws all hurried to the spot and dug a huge hole to unearth something solid that a rod had struck, but it was only a rock. Then a man from the army comes with a mine detector and goes slowly over the whole surface again, but can’t find any buried metal. The screws decide there isn’t any gun.
After a couple more days, Dick is sent away to the gaol. We all breathe easier, as though we’ve been freed from a tyrant. For a long time there are jokes about growing guns in the garden.
It’s winter. There are a lot of wet days and we don’t go to work in the garden when it’s raining. When we can’t go down to work we have billiard and snooker tournaments, with all the men and some screws gathered all day long in the billiard room. It’s snug in there. It has a big old wood-burning heater and some of the men sit around it like Alaskans, yarning and joking, while others are playing or watching the billiards. You can see the rain on the windows and hear the wind and rain whooshing along the verandah or making a low moaning sound in the barbed wire. Sometimes if you want to go out on to the verandah you can hardly push the door open because the wind is blowing so strongly against it, and when you step out you get soaked in a few seconds. But it’s good to stand out in the cold and wet for a while on the deserted verandah, looking out across the wall at the mist covering the lake. The best thing about it is that it’s so good for thinking about poetry out there, with nobody near, and your mind alert from the cold. The sound of the barbed wire and the wildness of rain makes you think of Flanders, and you can recite some of Wilfred Owen’s or Siegfried Sassoon’s poems to yourself and they seem even more real and true than ever, as though the trenches were just the other side of the mist. You can feel the sorrow and tragedy running down inside your mind like the rain down the window, then a kind of sombre, piercing happiness at the way the poetry turns all that suffering against itself and rises above it. But you don’t stay out there too long or the screws might think you’re acting oddly. They wouldn’t understand why anyone would enjoy being out in the rain and cold. You’re careful not to let your lips move too much either, when you’re reciting to yourself. You’ve already had trouble about them seeing your lips move.
You were in the garden, digging, and during your breathers you were reciting some verses softly to yourself. A screw reported you to Arthur and you were called to the office.
“How d’you feel within yourself, Len?” he wanted to know.
“Good,” you said, suddenly feeling very nervous. You know that when a screw asks you how you’re feeling within yourself it means they suspect you’re disturbed.
“No worries?”
“None in particular. Why?”
“Oh, we just wondered.”
They’re always like that. They don’t come straight out and ask “Why were you talking to yourself?” They just beat around it and make you very nervous, so that unless you’re careful, the nervousness will make you say something silly that will confirm their idea that you’re disturbed. Anyway, they figure that if you’re mentally ill you won’t know you’re mentally ill and so there’s no point asking you about it straight out.
So you just waited while Arthur looked at you thoughtfully and hoped he’d say something to give you a clue.
“We noticed how you seemed a bit agitated this morning, while you were digging.”
“Oh,” you said, suddenly understanding. “I was just reciting some verse to myself.”
“I see,” said Arthur. He was still looking closely at you. You could tell he was a little reassured. You didn’t deny talking to yourself.
“It’s hard to recite verse to yourself without moving your lips,” you explained.
“Mmmm, I can see it would be,” he agreed. He was probably wondering whether reciting verse to yourself is abnormal or not. “Well then,” he said, “we’ll say no more about it, eh?”
You went out of the office, still very uneasy, but feeling you’d probably satisfied Arthur.
“What did Arthur want you for?” asked Zurka.
“To ask ‘The Question’.”
“Did you tell him?” Zurka grinned.
“Sort of,” you grinned back.
Everyone knows “The Question”: “How do you feel within yourself?”. and the answer: “Through the most convenient orifice.”
Since then you’ve trained yourself to recite with a minimum of lip movement, like a ventriloquist.
We’re playing soccer at weekends, if the weather isn’t too bad. This is a strong soccer district and many of the screws are good players and take part in our games. This is a golden opportunity for Ray Hoad to push and shove screws around. Sometimes, though, it backfires and the screws push and shove us.
Ray has just been deprived of a free kick by the screw referee. Ray thinks it’s unfair. He recaptures the ball and is fouled and takes another free kick. The screw referee is standing two yards from the ball as Ray runs up to boot it. The ball seems to fly sideways from his toe and there’s a whacking thud and the screw referee collapses gasping and cursing.
“Ohhhh, you cunt!” the screw croaks.
“That was bloody deliberate!”
“It was an accident!” protests Ray with a huge grin.
The other screws gather around their winded mate. They discuss whether Ray should be punished. It’s up to the fallen screw. He decides to let it pass. For the rest of the game Ray is followed by a thundering trio of screw players, kicking him, shouldering him, hemming him against the wall, tripping him. Ray doesn’t care—he’s had his satisfaction. Once you get into a melee and are kicked in the calf of the leg by a screw who meant the kick for Ray. You limp to the sideline and nurse your agony.
There aren’t enough young and active men to make up two proper teams. The play is really between the four or five enthusiastic men of each side, with the other men set around the field as stationary obstacles. Some screws who belong to the local soccer club decide we need encouragement and arrange for the local under-sixteens to come and play us. This is a great event for us. For weeks we plan tactics, and train and formulate our team.
On a fine Sunday the under-sixteens arrive in a bus and are let in through the gate. They have some mothers and friends with them. The mothers and friends set themselves at the sideline in folding chairs and with thermos flasks of tea and picnic baskets. The under-sixteens strip down to their playing gear and start limbering up. They look very fit and fast. Then our side trots out. We’re in new red shirts and white shorts and proper boots that Arthur requisitioned for us. Arthur has given us a little talk about how important this game will be for establishing a precedent. If it goes well, it could lead to regular sporting contacts with outside teams. He says he had to do a lot of string pulling to get this match agreed to by the Administration. He also says some things about this being wonderful for our resocialisation and rehabilitation, but we don’t listen to that part much.
While both sides are limbering up, you and Ray Hoad and Bill Greene are talking with a few of the under-sixteens. They’re clean-cut boys and have been told about us.
“Is it true you’re all murderers?” one asks.