by Tony Birch
A chocolate cake, topped with whipped cream, sat on a chipped plate in the middle of the kitchen table. We sat at the table while Jon cut a piece for each of us. Rachel stuck her hands under her chin, rested it on the table and stared at her slice of cake. Jon pointed the knife at it.
‘You gonna eat it or what?’
Rachel wiped her hand across her mouth, catching some dribble. ‘I don’t wanna spoil it.’
‘Spoil it all you like, sweetheart. There’s plenty more to come.’
Before he’d gone to gaol, Jon told us he could cook only two meals other than toast and a boiled egg: the ‘Ned Kelly’, which was a main course, and a dessert he’d invented and christened the ‘Can-Tam’.
‘With the Ned Kelly you take a tin of crushed tomatoes, a tin of tomato soup and a tin of baked beans. Then you add a tin of water. Two if you want the feed to last a couple of meals. And it doesn’t hurt to add some salt and pepper. Same rule as the dagwood. Plenty of salt and pepper.’
‘Why’s it called the Ned Kelly?’ I asked. ‘Because murderers eat it?’
‘You’re not saying I’m a murderer are you, Jesse?’
He smiled when he said it, so I guessed he wasn’t angry with me.
‘It’s got nothing to do with being a murderer. It’s all the tin cans in the recipe. You know, like the Kelly Gang and their tin hats.’
He shook his head and laughed.
‘Jesus, he might have been brave. But what a fucken dumb idea.’
We never got to try the Ned Kelly, but we had the Can-Tam, lots of times. It had only two ingredients, sliced cantaloupe and chocolate Tim Tam biscuits, broken into pieces. Jon would put the biscuits into a tea towel and beat them with the heel of his shoe and sprinkle the mix over the top of the sliced cantaloupe. The colours, brown and orange-yellow, didn’t look all that good on the plate, but when you bit into it, the Can-Tam tasted sweet and juicy and crunchy all at the same time.
We usually ate it in front of the telly after we’d finished tea and cleaned up. Jon loved his dose of TV as much as Rachel and me. He said it was ‘sacrilegious’ to switch it off.
‘Once you’ve got a hold of freedom, a taste of the good life, never let go of it,’ he called out from the kitchen bench one night, where he was peeling potatoes, while Rachel and me were at the table trying to answer the questions on a quiz show.
‘When I first went inside they doled out TV time along with cigarettes and chocolate milk. The set was bolted to the ceiling in the day room, where we all sat of a night.’
Rachel put her hand up to ask a question, like she was in class at school.
‘You said it was the day room, Jon. How come you went in there at night-time?’
I thought it was a dumb question. I rolled my eyes and told her to stop interrupting. Jon was more patient with her. He leaned across the bench and patted her on the head.
‘See, Jesse. She’s sharp. She understands they were trying to fuck with us. They put us in the day room of a night. Good one, girl. Treated us like kids. One word out of line, one misdemeanour, and you could miss The Bill for a month. By the time you’d begged your privileges back you’d lost track of what was going on. Since I’ve been out, I’ve watched all the TV I can get. Flatline on it.’
He loved cop shows. I was surprised that he didn’t seem to mind the police. He even barracked for them to catch the crooks. It was the lawyers in their suits and ties that got to him.
‘A lawyer’s like a sly old fox crossed with a snake,’ he said from the couch one night.
He was smoking the fattest joint I’d ever seen and watching a repeat of Law & Order.
‘I come across lots of fellas in the can who were done over worse by their lawyer than the Jacks.’
All Jon missed about prison, he said, was cable television. I thought he was making it up.
‘You had cable TV in gaol? For free?’
‘Yep. And computers.’
‘Did they ration it? Like you said before, with the telly in the day room, if someone played up?’
‘Yep. But when cable came in, they could shut them down, cell by cell. So, if the bloke in the next cell did the wrong thing, he paid the price, not the whole division. A fairer system, the old cable.’
‘What did you like best on the telly?’ Rachel asked.
‘Well, I loved my sport. Specially the wrestling. All the boys went for the wrestling. Cooking shows were popular, of course. Although it could be torture, looking at all that top-shelf grub and not being able to get a mouthful.’
‘Did you watch cartoons?’
‘Too right. Watched a lot of cartoons, mostly old-school stuff, like Top Cat, The Flintstones and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. We all love cartoons, don’t we?’
‘Not Jesse,’ Rachel said, laughing. ‘Not when he was littler than me.’ She held her hand over her mouth. ‘Tell him that story, Jess.’
The story was embarrassing and I wouldn’t have repeated it except that Jon wouldn’t stop at me.
‘Come on, Jesse. I really want to hear it. Give us the story.’
I don’t know why but I stood up to tell it.
‘Well, before Rachel was born Gwen and me were living in a bungalow in the backyard of this Greek fella, where we had this little TV, a portable one. It was mostly made of plastic. Orange plastic. After I turned it on I complained that we had a cheap telly. Well, Gwen said, “What do you mean a cheap TV? The picture looks okay to me.” I told her the picture was fine but I couldn’t understand why the people inside our TV were drawn with pencils and crayons. I wanted real people instead of drawn ones, I told her.’
Jon liked the story and couldn’t stop laughing. Rachel laughed too, even though she’d heard it before.
‘And what’d Gwen say?’
‘She said if I didn’t want to watch it she’d be more than happy to chuck it out the window for me.’
Rachel and me usually watched our favourite cartoon, The Simpsons, while we were having tea. Jon tried to get into it but didn’t like it.
‘This is a sitcom pretending to be a cartoon,’ he complained. ‘If that’s what they’re trying to do, then they should use actors in the first place. It’s sort of like your portable telly story, Jesse. They should use real actors for this stuff.’
If we helped him with the dishes and cleaning up of a night, he’d tell us a prison story. They were crazy, wild stories. Some were so scary I hoped they weren’t real. If I thought about them after I’d got into bed I couldn’t get to sleep.
Jon said prison was a place of rules, and new inmates had to learn real quick that while some rules were written down, most of them you had to work out for yourself as you went along. If you didn’t learn fast, he said, you could get hurt, even killed.
Rachel was fascinated by what he’d said. ‘How would they kill you?’
‘Don’t you worry yourself about that, sweetheart,’ he winked. ‘There’s some things you don’t need to know.’
The first unwritten rule of prison was that you never asked another inmate what he’d done to end up in the lockup.
‘That’s your basic starting point, which every new boy should know. If a cellmate gives up his story, that’s fair enough. Otherwise, you don’t mention it.’
He said if you had ‘half a brain’ you tried your best to stay out of trouble.
‘You look the other way. Say nothing. But once another inmate had made his mind up to get you, you can’t take a backward step. Don’t matter how frightened you are inside, you have to step up.’
Jon looked at me and repeated what he’d said, nodding his head up and down as he spoke, like it was important that I understood.
When he wasn’t cooking or telling us stories he did jobs around the house. The roof was full of leaks and the floorboards were rotten. He’d fixe
d most of those within a couple of weeks. He built a set of shelves from planks of wood he’d dragged home from the highway. They’d fallen from passing trucks. When he’d finished the shelves he looked around the house to see what he could put in them. All he could find were a few cups, some old magazines and a book or two.
He also built a funny-looking toy for us to play with. It was a cross between a skateboard and a billy-cart and was made from more scrap timber and the wheels off an old pram he found in the shed out back. On warm nights he’d sit on the veranda steps, smoking a joint and listening to the radio, while I pushed Rachel up and down the road in the cart.
Jon started to worry that he’d ‘gone to blubber’ since getting out of prison so he also made himself a set of barbells from a metal star picket and two empty paint tins that he filled with cement. He poured cement into one of the tins and stuck the end of the picket in the tin. When it was hard, he filled the second tin with muddy cement and stuck it in the other end of the picket.
After breakfast he’d go out to the yard, wearing just a pair of jeans, and throw the barbell round like it weighed nothing. The muscles in his arms turned to knots of rope each time he lifted the bar, and I could see the blood pumping through his veins.
As he exercised I read the tattoos on his arms and on his back and chest. They were mostly the one colour, dark blue, and looked nothing like tattoos I’d seen before. Names ran up and down both arms. Some had dates with R.I.P. written under them. He had a pair of hands gripping a set of prison bars on his stomach and a large picture of a winged demon on his back.
It was a bit like the demon in Gwen’s deck of tarot. It was a card she never liked dealing herself. Whenever I looked at his bare back I got a little scared that maybe I’d been wrong about Jon and he’d turn out to be no good and bring us more bad luck. We were watching him exercise one morning when Rachel pointed to one of the tattoos.
‘What does R.I.P. mean, Jon?’
He lifted the barbell a few more times and put it on the ground before answering.
‘R.I.P., Rest In Peace, love. They’re dead. All these people listed here.’
Rachel ran her eyes up and down one arm. ‘There sure is a lot of them.’
‘Yep. There is. Two of them died inside but the others were citizens when they passed.’
He laid a hand on a name on his shoulder – Rodney.
‘This bloke I’d known all the way back from the homes. Little kid, he was, when I met him. In for stealing cars. When the cops pulled him over, the night he was caught, he was sitting on the spare wheel from the boot so he could see over the steering wheel. Died a few years back, in a fight out the back of a country pub. A blue over a five-dollar bet on a game of pool.’
He pointed to the name below it – Shannyn Lee.
‘She was a beautiful girl, Shannyn. Knew her before I went in last up. You know, some of your so-called friends drop off soon as you’re away. You’re as good as dead to most of them. Not Shannyn. Visited me whenever she could. Her old man wasn’t happy about it, so she’d come out on the train when she could sneak away. We was never together or nothing. She was someone who cared about you. No matter what you’d done.’
‘How’d she die?’
He looked across at Rachel. ‘Just lost her way, mate. Lost her way.’
He picked up the barbell, looked at it like he wasn’t sure what he had in his hands and dropped it back in the dirt.
‘Any fella inside for the time I did, they carry their history with them. Your body is a map. Or a book.’
He stuck his fists under his chin, pushed his elbows forward and showed us the cobweb tattoos wrapped around both elbows.
‘In the old days you’d count the number of rows in the web. That’s how you worked out the years a man had done. A row for each year.’
I counted the rows on Jon’s left elbow under my breath, five – six – seven.
‘These days every man and his dog has ink. Have you see the old girl who works behind the jump at the post office down the road? She has a tatt. Got it for her sixtieth birthday, I heard her telling one of the customers. Ink means nothing these days. Movie stars have got it. Teachers. Even coppers. A mate of mine told me that when Princess Diana got killed in that car crash with the Arab bloke, they stripped her down on the slab at the morgue and saw that she had a pussy cat tattooed on one cheek of her arse, and a big dog on the other, with his tongue hanging out.’
He chuckled to himself. ‘Jesus, wonder what the prince would have thought of that when he found out?’
The only tattoo he had with colour in it was a red heart and a scroll across his chest. The scroll, with R.I.P. under it, was blank.
‘Who’s that one for?’ I asked.
‘Me.’
‘For you? But you’re not dead.’
‘Not yet. But one day, when I am, and they find me, people will see this. Then I’ll be remembered.’
He covered the heart and scroll with his hand. ‘I haven’t seen any family for years now. And don’t expect to. No one’s gonna say any words for me when I’m gone. Except what I put here.’
He slapped his breast. ‘Jon Daniel Dempsey – Rest In Peace. That’s what I’m gonna have put there. I’m a little too superstitious to have it filled out yet. I’ve still got a bit of life in me. I don’t want to be stirring the demons just yet by telegraphing my end. Tatts can do that. Fuck you up if you’re not careful. Knew a bloke in gaol, went by the name of Pistol. Had a smoking snub-nose inked into one of his thighs. Surprised no one when he took a bullet in the back of the head.’
He pointed at his cheek, just below his eye. ‘You come across a fella with a teardrop here, you give him a wide berth. Can only be bad news. He’s probably killed. Most likely in gaol. Another inmate. A screw, maybe.’
He tapped his cheek a couple of times more to be sure we were paying attention. ‘You two with me?’
‘Yeah, we’re with you,’ I said, although I didn’t reckon Rachel got much of it. She was looking bored and wandered off and picked up her bike. I thought that maybe I understood what Jon was getting at.
‘It’s like Gwen with the tarot cards,’ I said. ‘You look at some of them pictures and you know they mean trouble. There’s one card with a dead body lying on the ground. A soldier, face down in the dirt, and he’s got ten swords in his back. Been stabbed ten times. That has to be a bad sign, doesn’t it, Jon?’
He raised his eyebrows and whistled. ‘Stabbed in the back ten times? Yeah, I’d reckon that’d be about as bad a sign as a man could get. If I drew that card I’d be laying low for a while.’
Things were going along real well at the farmhouse until it went sour between Jon and Gwen. She turned on him, just like she had on other boyfriends. Trouble came out of the blue, on her night off from the pub. They usually sat on the couch, her with a drink, and him with a smoke, watching a DVD.
After we’d finished tea, she went into the bedroom and slammed the door.
‘What’s up her arse?’ Jon asked, as I handed him the plates from the table.
‘Dunno.’
When we’d finished cleaning the kitchen Jon asked Rachel to go tell Gwen he was about to start the movie. He picked up the remote and fired it at the telly. We could hear Gwen yelling at her over the volume.
‘She says she won’t be watching,’ Rachel said, standing in the doorway.
‘Suit herself then. Come on. Sit down with us.’ Jon smiled and made some room for Rachel on the couch.
Gwen came out of her room a while later wearing a skin-tight black dress and lots of make-up. She stood in front of the telly and told Jon she wanted them to go out for the night.
‘Sorry, babe. You know how it is. I’m on the wagon. Too much temptation down the road for me.’
‘On the wagon? Bullshit. You’re not on the wagon from th
e choof. You’re never off it. You smoke more dope than fucken Bob Marley. Seeing as you don’t mind taking money off me for your smoke, you can take me out for a drink.’
‘Can’t, love. It’s not the same. It keeps me calm and off the grog. And the other stuff.’
She walked into the kitchen and sat at the table with a bottle of vodka for company. She poured herself a drink, then a second, and a third. She stood up, choked the neck of the bottle, walked back into the lounge and sat on the arm of the couch. Jon didn’t take his eyes off the telly and wouldn’t look at her when she called his name. She started poking fun of him, saying he was a ‘fucken old bore’, who never left the house.
‘I dunno if you’re just a big kid, the way you hang around with these two all day, or if you’re turning into an old woman, with all your mopping and dusting. Dusting? For fuck’s sake. Jesus, they sure fucked you up in gaol. Turned you into a robot.’
She teased him over his cooking, which wasn’t fair, seeing as she always finished off the food he left out for her when she got home from work.
‘And all those cakes and biscuits? What’s that about? You’ve gone from being a gunnie to Jamie Oliver.’
Rachel was now on the floor with her colouring pencils. She loved the Jamie Oliver cooking show and started laughing.
When the bottle was empty Gwen went back to the kitchen. She banged around in the cupboards and the fridge, hunting for another drink. All she could find was a stubby of beer. She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge.
‘You start showing me some attention or you can pack your bags. I want a night out. Tonight. You pick up your game, or you can fuck off now,’ she screamed.
Rachel scooped up her pencils and ran out of the room. Jon didn’t say a word. He looked from the telly to Gwen and back again, like she wasn’t there. When she couldn’t get his attention she stormed out of the lounge, slammed the front door and marched up and down the veranda.
When the movie was over Jon asked me to help him in the backyard, moving some scrap timber into the shed.