by Miller, Alex
The guilt of all this haunted me so much during my teenage years I always had this deep hidden place of worry going on that I could never admit to anyone. I find it difficult to write this to you even now, as it sounds as if I am complaining, while you have spent all these years without your freedom and you have far more reason than I do to complain of how unfair life has been to you. I will not go on and on about all that. It is too difficult and too painful and too complicated and too frightful to ever sort it all out or for me to ever feel completely free of it.
So why have I written to you now, you must be asking me? After I left school I did a shorthand and typing course and began working in the typing pool of a biscuit-making factory in Brisbane. I liked the work and the other girls and I met one of the junior accountants there and we got married. I was nineteen and he was twenty-three. We had a little girl. Allen changed towards me soon after we had Cynthia—that was not my choice of a name but was his mother’s name and he insisted on it. He started staying out with his mates after work and drinking and my life became ugly and unpleasant. I don’t wish to go into the details of all that but I left him just before Christmas last year and returned to Townsville with Cynth. My mother still lives in Townsville but we do not get on and except for Christmas and birthdays we don’t see much of each other. I am working as a typist for a legal firm in Townsville and they are very nice people. I feel appreciated and respected at work and enjoy my time there.
Ever since I came back to Townsville I have thought every day of you being just up the road at Stuart. You are the only other person in the world who knows the real story of that day at Coal Creek and how it came about. I know I must speak with you if I am ever to get free of my guilt and the pressure of thinking of that day. Please forgive me for intruding into your life once again, Bobby, but I hope you will understand that I would love to somehow make amends for everything if I could possibly find a way.
If you do not hate the memory of me I should like to come and visit you. If I don’t hear from you I will understand. Once again, please forgive me for pushing my way into your life again. You must wish you had never met me. There is only one thing I would like to ask of you. It is this: if you do hate me and do not wish to see me, I tell you now you must write the true story of Coal Creek or it will be lost forever and you and Ben will be thought of as nothing but cold-blooded killers, which you are not. I taught you to read and write all those years ago and if you do nothing else with that gift but write the true account of Coal Creek it will have been more than worthwhile. To see you redeem yourself would lift a load off my conscience that I cannot lift on my own. Forgive me for asking this of you. I have no claim over you.
She signed herself simply Irie.
I sat there at my desk in the quiet of the library, the sounds of the prison like the distant roar of water going down a chute, and I thought about that girl. I tried to see her in my mind but her likeness was gone and I had only my feeling of how much I had prized her friendship over the years and how it had helped me keep myself afloat in that place. There was hard things happened in Stuart but it is not my aim to speak of them here. I hated to think that Irie was burdened by feelings of guilt all these years for what happened and I wanted to call her up on the telephone right there and tell her it was none of it her fault. It took me a while to settle myself down enough to begin a letter back to her. When I was writing my letters to her all them years knowing she was never to read my words I wrote with ease and the words come to me without too much thinking about them. But now I could not think how to start and when I started I could not think how to go on. I started several times and screwed up each try and I got up and walked about the library and I looked out into the corridor and seen men coming and going, then I went back and I sat down again and I wrote to her that I would like to see her if she wished to pay me a visit.
I do not have the letter I sent her, but I remember telling her that I did not see how she was to blame for nothing that happened that morning out at Coal Creek, but that it was something like a sudden accident that no one seen coming and we was all taken by surprise. I said I had not expected her to ever wish to speak to me again and was very glad she had written to me. I do not know if I told her the whole truth of how I felt about her getting back in touch because I did not want to scare her away. Seeing her handwriting and reading her words of sorrow and suffering I was filled with a powerful emotion for her, which I knew must have scared her if I had told her of it.
The morning she come to the prison I was very nervous to see her. You will not believe me, but it is true all the same that I was more nervous of seeing Irie than I had been of facing the hangman. Life plays such tricks on us.
She was sitting waiting for me when I come into the visitors’ square. I recognised her at once. She was no longer the girl of twelve I had known but was grown into a smart young woman in her middle twenties. There was no mistaking her. She stood up when she seen me coming and we faced each other across the desk. The guard told us to sit down and we sat down. We said stupid things like, How are you? about ten times and give replies like, I’m real good. Then suddenly we both laughed and that was it, we was ourselves again with each other. She started to cry and I felt like crying myself and I was not allowed to reach across and touch her and that was the hardest thing for me. She apologised for crying and we laughed some more. She got her hankie out of her handbag and wiped her eyes and said she must look a mess. I had never seen no woman more beautiful but I did not have the courage to say so.
I decided then that I would give her all them letters I had written to her. I asked her if she had ever been back to Mount Hay. She had not been back and did not know what had happened to Deeds and Ben’s child. Irie was working as a typist in a lawyer’s office and she said she would make some enquiries and find out. We talked a while about Deeds and of her and Ben’s baby, which was a way of not talking about ourselves. She said them two was the hidden victims of Coal Creek. I asked Irie where her own kid was and she said she was at kinder. She was four years of age and was very bright, Irie said. She was proud of her, I could see that. You will meet her, she said. I’ll bring her with me next time I come in to see you. We did not talk about the things in her letter or her guilt or my own feelings. That was all too big and we was pressed for time. We was both emotional, I believe, at finding we was still Irie and Bobby together. It was the greatest feeling I ever had in my life and it made me wonder if I had ever understood anything at all or was just skimming over the top of life.
We did not say nothing about it, but when we laughed together was when we knew we was close and always had been. There was no covering that. When our time was up she said, I will come next week. I said I would wait for her. That was when I seen the tears in her eyes again, just as she was turning away. I watched till she was gone and seen her look back from out beyond where the guard stood.
. . .
Irie come to see me every week for two years until I got my parole and I told her I had started writing this account and that pleased her. The authorities would not allow me to pass over to her my bundle of letters, in which she would have seen the strength she had been for me. They wanted to read them all first and I would not permit that to happen. So them letters stayed with me till I got out. Irie only missed coming to see me once, and that was when her daughter was sick with a bad cold.
I wanted to help her come to the knowledge that there was no blame for her to take, and that we was all part of what happened, and it was just a real bad mistake. She told me she only had her mother’s account of things to go on and needed to talk to me about the details. You are the only other person in the world who knows the truth of it. She said when she woke at the sound of the shotgun and come out the side door of Ben’s place, Deeds holding her back, she seen her mother on her knees and thought she had been shot. Everyone seemed to be shooting at each other, she said. All I could think of was to get to my mother’s side. She did not get on well with her mother, she said. Mu
m and me always had a bit of a problem. Miriam was Mum’s shining star of hope and when she lost Miriam she lost her joy in living and never recovered it. Irie told me, Mum is bitter and is closed off from her despair. She blames me and she blames you and she blames herself for encouraging you with your reading. Irie said, I have tried to remind her that encouraging you the way she did when you first came into our home was a good and generous thing for her to do and was not the cause of the tragedy but only part of our lives as they was then. But Mum can’t talk about it without getting upset. I go to see her whenever I can bear it, but neither of us enjoys my visits.
Irie found out my mare Mother died of snake bite in the paddock behind the pub where Chiller had kept her. When she told me this news I just said I had expected to hear something of that kind. The saddest things Irie found out through her enquiries was that the government men come out to Mount Hay and took Deeds and Ben’s child away from her and that Deeds did not know where the kid was taken to and the government men would not tell her. Irie was going on with her enquiries to try and find the boy. Deeds had lived with Rosie for some years until Rosie passed away. I never said nothing to Irie about it, but in my heart I knew Rosie had put one of them Old Murri curses on Ben for beating her boy Orlando and that curse had stayed on him and bitten into his life and had brought on the conditions for his destruction. I never even told myself this in so many words, but I knew it. I knew it the way my mother knew such things. It was there, like a buried death you cannot speak of.
. . .
My parole come through after I had been inside for fourteen years. Governor Dawes asked me to come and see him. This time he stood up and come around his desk and shook my hand and he looked into my eyes and smiled and he wished me luck. You did well, Bobby, he said. He told me he was leaving Stuart himself and a new reforming governor from Ireland was coming to take on the job. When he told me the government was talking seriously now of doing away with the death penalty we looked on each other as equals, two men. And that was it. I shook Dawes’ hand and wished him luck with his new job. He was always glad to know a prisoner who did not end up hating him, like most of them did.
Me and Irie was never allowed to touch each other during them two years of her visits to the prison. We never said the word love but it was there between us from that first day when we laughed and cried together at the same time. We knew then we had always been meant for each other, but we did not dare say so. We both dreamed of being able to reach out and touch each other. But we kept it as a dream. It was too powerful a feeling to ever talk about so long as I was not free. If we had let it out into the open it would have destroyed us with the ache of it. So we never said nothing about it. But it was in our hearts and in our eyes every time we seen each other. Them last two years took longer to pass for me than the first twelve years. I was afraid I would die or be killed before I had the chance to get paroled and to see Irie on the outside in the real world where we could have our freedom. I daydreamed all the time about this and my fear of not ever having it was so big it made me ill.
. . .
They give me my clothes back and the morning I stepped out of Stuart I was wearing my old hat again and knew myself a free man. I seen Irie waiting for me in the road with her little girl beside her. She come up to me and I do not think we could speak. She reached and took my hand and held it in her own hand and we walked down that road away from the prison hand in hand. It was like she had claimed me. By then we both knew we was going back to Mount Hay, where we belonged. We was going to try our luck out there together. Later I give her my bundle of old letters and this account. Together they was my understanding of the events that was locked in both our souls for the rest of our lives. Just like we was locked to each other. The grip of Irie’s fingers in mine as we walked down the open road that morning was more than I can speak of.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my publisher, Annette Barlow, to my UK publisher Clare Drysdale, to Siobhán Cantrill, to Wenona Byrne and to Ali Lavau and the team at Allen & Unwin. My thanks are due also to the poet Ross Donlon, who first dragged this story out of me.