by Robert Drewe
In prison, however, he was unable to set down a single word about the surf. The merest thought of sea, sun and wind made his head throb and his body ache with a homesickness that reached down to the bone. What could be more removed from those vital elements than this place? It was less upsetting, even calming, to concentrate on his old bedroom view high on the ridge. In his attic room he’d had a bold image of himself at that age, defying lightning strikes, sniffing distant bushfires and looking down on birds in flight.
Birds flew beneath him, raucous birds crisscrossing below. Most people only saw birds flying overhead; they rarely saw their wing-engineering in action like he did, the muscles and tendons working to keep them airborne as they streaked by. Obviously he was intrigued by flight and balance, what his one year of university architecture would later teach about the symbiosis of function and aesthetics. Cockatoos, magpies, currawongs, butcher birds, kookaburras: they were leisurely enough for him to see what made them tick. But the parrots’ flight apparatus was harder to glimpse. Quicker than his reactive sight, they flashed past so fast they left their colours and screeches streaming in their wake. Radiant reds, greens and blues still striping the air.
Ms Shehabe was right. It was amazing what flooded back once you started writing it down. But memories came in fits and starts. Concentration was a problem. Night was the hardest twelve hours of the twenty-four. Lockdown. But she’d said it was still the best time to write. ‘Write what you know. Describe what you remember. Think of one image and the rest will follow.’ That was the purpose of the first exercise, Angeline Shehabe said. She provided Home Office writing pads and HB pencils. ‘To a writer, a pencil’s as good as a computer.’
Write what he knew? Well, he knew tonight’s order of events, every night’s events, for that matter, even before they happened. First, the banging doors coming closer, footsteps coming closer, the sound of keys. Every cell’s music suddenly turned on full clashing volume, everyone’s territory of sound trying to deaden every other competing noise. Bash it into submission. And he was maybe trying to read a magazine through this din, write a letter, attempt a crossword.
Despite all this racket, ever since the first class he’d been thinking: what do I know? Apart from the many shapes of the ocean and women. The trouble was, the things he didn’t want to know drowned out what he knew. The night noise swelling louder. Jangling keys again. Thumping. A Cockney voice shouting down the corridor, ‘Hey Frankie, Frank!’ ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ ‘Goodnight Frank, ha ha ha.’ Swearing, bad jokes, hilarity. The slap of flesh. Sounds of sobbing. Keys rattling again. Yells. Another ‘accident’? A fight? Grunts. Moans. Abruptly, a rare ten, fifteen, twenty seconds of silence. Then mad Mick O’Hare suddenly jabbering furiously again about a stolen bicycle and a fat whore in Leeds in 1994. Down in G-wing a long lone howl, like a wolf on a snowy mountain. Quiet. Then the howl again, straight out of Alaska. Silence. A trombone blast of a fart nearby. An answering one. Laughter. Mad Mick yelling that the hooker swapped the bike for bad smack. Laughter. A Raleigh mountain bike, ten gears, in mint condition. A yell: ‘So, Mick! How did you get to choir practice without your bike?’
What he knew. Well, he knew that most of them in here had something in common beyond being crims. They were young and aimless, with short attention spans. They didn’t look at the big picture but took the first pleasant option. Easy gratification won out every time. Easygoing, they called aimlessness back home. When and where he grew up, easygoing was regarded as a male virtue, one he had in spades. Dropping out after first-year architecture to go surfing year-round had been no big deal in a place where an easygoing nature and good hand-eye coordination made you a decent bloke. Relaxed Athleticism = Proper Australian Man. Change the accents, give them a tan, put them in T-shirts, and these prisoners could be guys he knew back home. Not the gangs, of course, or the shit-throwing maniac-killers in F- or G-wings, or the zoo animals and rock spiders in isolation, but you could transport B-wing holus-bolus to the Ocean View Hotel at midnight any Friday night. Or vice versa. Maybe easygoing was something to think about. One of these days.
Should he bother writing all those thoughts for next Thursday’s class? He was sunk right in the middle of that, he knew that. Six months on remand in a nineteenth-century bluestone prison left over from the days of Dickens and foggy cobblestones and Jack the Ripper, he knew it by now. But it wasn’t what he knew.
This was crazy, but what the prisoners thought he knew – because he was Australian he must know – was the low-down, the goods, on Home and Away and Neighbours. How could an Australian not be an expert on the prison’s two all-time favourite shows? It gave him a strange kudos. Amazingly, the prison hubbub came to a halt when the Australian soaps were on TV. All these English murderers and rapists, bank robbers and arsonists and drug dealers, were serious fans.
That was a surprise, their uncritical enthusiasm; urban British crims yearning for the pragmatic tanned girls, suburban ethics and earnest kitchen-table confabs of Australian TV. What’s more, they assumed because the soaps were Australian that this Aussie prisoner, this former world champion surfer (so the rumour mill alleged, and he didn’t deny it), not only followed them as avidly as they did, but was many episodes ahead of them in knowledge. Hardly differentiating between fantasy and reality, they associated him with coastal TV characters of the same laconic stamp. Either way, he must know what would happen next: who was divorcing, pregnant, having affairs, abruptly leaving town under a cloud, being killed off – the usual soapie stuff. And they cared about those shows. No one took the piss.
Coming on top of the soapie connection and the surfing, his nationality didn’t hurt him, either (like all Australians, to them he was from approved convict stock). There was no class barrier to fret about. That he’d already served six months on remand lent the cachet of a serious felony. It all added up to the fact that Pablo Dyson was OK. To be left alone.
Of course he was enigmatic about his supposed plot knowledge, making only cryptic comments like ‘that girl’s not what she seems’ or ‘that bloke’s luck’s going to run out soon’. When in doubt there was always his stand-by: ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you, mate.’ He didn’t admit that back home he’d only ever seen one or two episodes, by accident; that back home only kids and old ladies watched the soaps. Depending on the season and the daylight, he was still out in the surf, on the road, with a woman, or in the pub. The longer he was away from home, however, the further he was away from Home and Away. If his trial didn’t happen soon (he had to be acquitted!), maybe they’d realise Pablo Dyson’s soapie knowledge was running out.
Writing down his memories of parrots sent Dyson into a reverie about colour. The fluorescently red and green king parrots, the elegant pink and grey galahs, the yellow crests of the cockatoos. The luxury of colour. When everything outside was ashen or metallic – asphalt, steel, observation towers, razor-wire, and let’s not forget the sky – and everything inside was chipped, heavy-duty institution-cream, any colour seemed over the top. Those voluptuous pink angophoras with their moist dimpled flesh; he’d never thought of trees as womanly before, all heaving breasts and undulating Polynesian hips. Which brought back other memories.
At night he’d endeavour to attract sleep by trying to remember in chronological order the women he’d slept with. His version of counting sheep. When he didn’t recall, or had never known, their names – which applied to about half of them – he’d think ‘the Maui chick’ or ‘that short blonde at Whale Beach’ or ‘those two Swedish backpackers at Broken Head’ or ‘Hendo’s ex-wife’ or ‘the first ever Brazilian’ or ‘the mad redhead at Rusty’s party’. It was an unwieldy list, and his memory was forever jumping out of sequence with images and places, many of them outdoors or unusual. He was sure he’d forgotten a lot, but by the time he’d counted about 150 he was usually asleep anyway.
Thinking of hips – the shy way she kept tugging at her sweater – Angeline Shehabe seemed self-conscious about hers. Like all the f
emale education-unit staff, she deliberately dressed down. Professionally dowdy was advisable in here, all the skinny young women fattened and flattened under layers of floppy shirts, baggy jumpers and loose jeans. Sexually negated. No make-up on any of them, nothing masking their cold sores and dry lips, the bitten fingernails and weary eyes. Only Angeline Shehabe, the one black teacher, suffered none of these Caucasian blemishes, hopelessly failing to conceal the natural beauty of her cheekbones, the definition of her lips and curves. Neither the enforced drabness nor the depressing environment could hide her spark and beauty. From his seat in the writing class, pencil working busily, Pablo Dyson secretly tried to inhale the odour of her.
Did she write about what she knew? She’d let slip only a little personal information: she was a poet and she played the piano. (No rings, though, on those poet’s and pianist’s slim fingers.) And she was from Sierra Leone originally, wasn’t she? Or somewhere just as bloodthirsty. Dyson thought of coups and machetes and massacres and child soldiers with AK-47s. God knows what terrible stuff she knew. Did she also know that all the straight prisoners in the education cell fancied her? That at least one of them was falling in love with her?
The idea of putting this down on paper was strangely thrilling. He ached to write of his feelings about her. He jotted down some carefully obscure and unidentifiable descriptive words: skin – smooth, lower lip – pink, laughter – nervous, general manner – flustered kindness, appearance – elegant and striking. Nothing sexual that would count as an offence. If she reported him, they’d throw him out of the class, and worse. Instead, he safely elaborated on his memories of parrots and gum trees and the dawn view of oyster beds in another hemisphere when he was twelve.
In his mind he saw every tree and rock back on their block. Two vertical acres of Hawkesbury sandstone and high eucalypts. The rocks all sixty million years old in their present formations; before that, sixty million years of weathering down to sand. And before that, another sixty million in the making from sand to rock. So the shire council’s geotechnical engineer explained when he tested the ridge’s ability to bear a house. The only block with a water view his parents could afford. ‘It’s two acres of air going cheap on the Central Coast,’ his father told the family. ‘Above a narrow tidal inlet of Broken Bay. Fingers crossed.’ The geotech guy poked rods in the ground, chipped and hammered and took measurements, and finally frowned and said all those rocks visible above ground were floaters and unstable. The devastated look on his father’s face. ‘But the bedrock will support you all right,’ said the engineer. ‘That bedrock isn’t going anywhere for another sixty million.’ This fact cheered them up when the house swayed on its pole foundations in every gale. It was a steep climb, too, 107 stairs, but from three sides you could see the sun and moon glistening on the water.
If his reminiscences bored Angeline – they had the rest of the class bewildered and fidgeting – she listened with the same polite encouragement she gave the others’ defiant catalogues of family mayhem and early felonies. Of course she maintained a distance. Everyone knew the rules: no prisoner-teacher contact; the merest brush of a hand against her elbow, the touch of fingers during the passing of a book, was forbidden. There was an emergency button on the wall by her seat, and warders – all mutton-faced, slope-shouldered weight-lifters – patrolled the corridor outside. Anyway, in case of trouble (although this would have been news to her) everyone knew that Oswald was her protector. A twenty-stone Christian who’d decapitated his son-in-law with an axe for infidelity, Oswald had informed them all that he looked on Angeline as a daughter.
Oswald always sat himself next to her, giant African hands resting placidly on the table, his pad and pencils arranged at right angles. As soon as Angeline introduced the lesson, Oswald took up his pencil and began his customary creative endeavour. No matter what she was trying to get across – characterisation, plot, dialogue – he wrote the same first-person sentence in gorgeous copperplate, with each repetition a growing smile of assurance and pride registering on his cheeks: My name is Oswald Eugene Mosilyo, secretary-treasurer of the Lesotho Western Engineering Company Limited’s Ladies’ Netball Team (Undefeated Middle Regional B-Grade Champions 1993–1996, Runners-up 1997–1999). It was easy to imagine the neatness of the team ledgers back in Lesotho, and that all the balls, whistles and uniforms were accounted for.
But even Oswald couldn’t control the intrusive general prison chaos that made her task difficult, that regularly made her frown and grimace and hold her stomach as if in chronic pain. Her class was held in the frenzied two hours between two p.m. and four p.m. known as ‘free time’, when B-wing prisoners were allowed out of their cells to watch videos on a communal television, line up to use the phone, buy soap and toothpaste and Mars bars, and attend education classes. So Angeline’s class competed with violent movie car chases and explosions, a table-tennis competition and a beginners’ drum class next door. Without apology, warders constantly poked their heads in to snatch out some prisoner or other. Youths changed their minds and came and went into the education cell with no idea what ‘creative writing’ was, or even ‘English’. One boy peered in to ask the same question every week: ‘Miss, will you braid my hair creative like yours?’
‘Sorry, Winston,’ she said. ‘I’m not a hairdresser. But I’ll give you a book to read.’
‘Oh, man. You’re the creative teacher. I need a creative style. Maybe next week.’
‘Don’t come back, son,’ growled Oswald.
Pablo Dyson was one student who listened intently to Angeline’s quiet instructions and obeyed them as best he could, even if it meant taking his eyes off her for minutes at a time. Already he lived for those two hours on Thursday afternoons. Just to surreptitiously inhale her, and hear her lilting voice – so roundly formed and sweet and earthy – and fantasise about the texture of her lips, and more. He could have eaten her sweet, decent words as they ventured out into the air.
He attempted every writing exercise she suggested. Point-of-view. Plot. Description. Tense. Characters. He was perfectly happy to oblige, to write in the first person or in the present tense if she wanted him to. He’d gladly try her tricky stream-of-consciousness paragraphs, like writing without using adjectives or the letter E. To please her was his aim; to claim the smallest smile or encouraging spark from Angeline Shehabe was the main event of his week. Along the way, he didn’t mind setting down certain parts of his life. It helped fill in the time; there couldn’t be much longer to wait until he was out of here. If it helped him understand what had gone wrong and how he could have come to this, he guessed that was a bonus.
At night the prison reminded Dyson of an aquarium, the old one at the harbour wharf with the tin shark on the roof. The same subterranean atmosphere, public-toilet marine smell, damp walls, humid air and over-bright artificial light. A dank place where the smaller, more pallid inhabitants flicked aside as the sharks cruised through. And he felt like a foolish child, a dozy kid visiting on a school excursion who’d been inadvertently locked in after closing time.
Foolish? He’d been heading for Sennen Cove in Cornwall and Freshwater West in Wales and a highly rated right-hand reef break at Thurso East in Scotland, bare expenses and a low-budget, extra-long-haul Garuda flight provided by a weekend travel supplement that liked his novel idea of a European surf-spot appraisal. He’d already surveyed Portugal and France. Variable waves, wild girls. At Heathrow, Customs found four ecstasy tablets in one of his board bags. Four old sandy, linty, waxy tabs jammed in the side pocket with the spare leg-rope and board wax.
He had no memory of them. Presumably he’d been given them while still heavily jet-lagged. There was a dim recollection of a lively beach club in Guéthary on the Basque coast, and a tall giggly girl with spiky red hair. While the Home Office considered whether he was guilty of drug smuggling, with its severe custodial sentence, or merely illegal possession – a far more lenient penalty – he was charged with both offences and remanded without bail. A passport st
amped with visas for Indonesia, Peru, Thailand and Brazil didn’t help his case. Vigorous protestations that he was a professional surfer, not a drug smuggler – that trying to smuggle four ecstasy tablets into Britain made no sense; coals to Newcastle, like taking a bloody teaspoonful of coal to Newcastle! – cut no ice with the authorities.
‘Why would I bother, why take the risk, when I can buy them in any club in London?’ he told the investigators. ‘Can you now, mate?’ they said, as their searching Stanley knives enthusiastically carved into his two surfboards, sliced into the board bags, his luggage, wetsuits, the soles of his sneakers, the lining of his windbreaker, even The Da Vinci Code paperback and toothpaste tube. ‘We’ll make a note of that.’ And after six months inside without bail, his case still hadn’t come to court. He was an unconvicted prisoner, in his mind guilty only of stupidity and, at the advanced age of thirty-three, of still being a footloose surf bum. On everything else he was pleading not guilty.
Point-of-view was an interesting exercise. Of course everything depended on your personal standpoint. One side or the other. Guilty or not guilty. Black or white. Right or wrong. His lawyer was optimistic that the smuggling charge would be thrown out as nitpicking. Not enough drugs involved. On the possession count, well, he’d already done six months. When the case finally came up, that would be taken into account. Might be only a week or two left to serve. When the case came up. There was a long queue of defended cases ahead of him.