by Trent Dalton
’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
REPORTER STRIKES GOLD
In the end the greatest trick Houdini Halliday ever pulled was surviving Boggo Road Gaol. He eventually escaped the prison by walking out the front gate after serving 24 years for the murder of Athol McCowan, with smiles of congratulations from inmates and prison officers alike.
In April 1981, Brisbane Telegraph reporter Peter Hansen found the long-reclusive Slim Halliday puddling for gold in a creek near Kilcoy where he had paid $5 to the Forestry Department to live lawfully on forestry land as a prospecting hermit.
‘I never confessed,’ he said of his controversial murder conviction. ‘Bischof simply made up the confession he produced in court. Bischof was a ruthless man, you know. It was my case that made him Commissioner of Police.
‘I left Brisbane two days before the murder . . . I was convicted because my name was Arthur Halliday.’
Halliday said he would not fear returning to Boggo Road as an old man. ‘I practically own the place,’ he said. ‘In the end they were using me as a security consultant.’
Two years on, Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. He was last seen living out of the back of his truck in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s north side. But the legend of Slim Halliday lives on inside the red brick walls of Boggo Road Gaol, where Houdini’s cell, number nine in the D wing, remains empty. Simple logistics, prison officials say. Though inmates are convinced they’re yet to find a prisoner worthy enough to fill it.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘It says Irene said she would stand by her man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, she didn’t, did she?’
‘Yes she did, kid.’
Slim hands the article back to me, his long tanned arms reaching across the kitchen table.
‘You don’t always have to be standing by someone to stand by them,’ he says. ‘How’s your letter going?’
‘Almost done.’
Dear Alex,
Do you think Bob Hawke is doing a good job as prime minister? Slim says he has just the right amounts of guile and guts to be a good leader for Australia. Slim says he reminds him of Roughie Regini, the old Jewish German fella who ran the Number 2 Division tote with Slim in the mid-1960s. Roughie Regini was a diplomat and a standover man all in one. He took bets for anything: horseraces, football, boxing matches, fights in the yard, chess games. Once he set up bets for what the boys were going to have for Easter lunch 1965. Slim says it was Roughie Regini who developed the cockroach courier system. Do you guys still use the cockroach courier system? Winnings were paid in White Ox tobacco mostly but cons started kicking up a stink about delays in getting their rightful winnings on night-time lockdown, just when they appreciated a cigarette the most. To separate himself from other potential bookies, Roughie Regini developed the cockroach courier system. He kept a collection of fat and well-fed cockroaches in a pineapple tin beneath his bed. Bloody strong those cockroaches were. Using threads of cotton from his blanket and bedsheet, Roughie learned to tie up to three thin rolled White Ox cigarettes to the back of a cockroach and slip it under his cell door, send it off on its way to his intended punter. But how would he make sure the cockroach went where he wanted it to go? A cockroach has six legs, three on either side. Roughie started doing experiments on his little couriers. He soon realised the cockroaches would go in certain directions according to which of their six legs had been removed. Take a front leg off and a cockroach will start moving in a north-east or north-west direction. Take a middle left leg off, the cockroach will start leaning to his left so hard he’ll start doing circles, anti-clockwise. Take a middle right leg off, he’ll start doing clockwise circles. Put that cockroach against a wall he’ll follow it right along a straight line and be grateful to do so. If Roughie needed to get a package to Ben Banaghan, seven cells down the aisle to his left, he’d remove a cockroach’s left middle leg and send it off on its great adventure, its top cigarette scrawled with the name of its destination cell, ‘Banaghan’. The brave cockroach would slip under every cell along its journey and honour-bound cons would dutifully send it off again on its great odyssey along the wall. I keep thinking about how gentle their hands must have been. All those killers and robbers and crooks. I guess they had time to be gentle. All the time in the world.
I’ve been thinking lately, Alex, that every problem in the world, every crime ever committed, can be traced back to someone’s dad. Robbery, rape, terrorism, Cain putting a job on Abel, Jack the Ripper, it all goes back to dads. Mums maybe too, I guess, but there ain’t no shit mum in this world that wasn’t first the daughter of a shit dad. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d love to hear about your dad, Alex. Was he good? Was he decent? Was he there? Thanks for your thoughts about calling my dad. You make a fair point. Two sides to every story, I guess.
I asked Mum for an update on Days of Our Lives. She said to tell you Marie was showing signs of improvement in hospital. Liz went to ICU to confess but when Marie woke she said it was too dark to identify her assailant so Liz kept her mouth shut and she seems to be able to live with the guilt. The first word Marie said when she woke was ‘Neil’, but despite Neil being her true love, she said she could never be his wife and gave him consent to go be with Liz and their child.
Talk real soon,
Eli
P.S. I’ve enclosed a copy of Omar Khayyám’s poem, The Rubáiyát. Slim says it got him through prison. It’s about the ups and downs of life. The downside is life is short and has to end. The upside is it comes with bread, wine and books.
‘Slim?’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Arthur Dale. That new name you took.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Dale.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That was the name of that screw, Officer Dale.’
‘Yeah,’ Slim says. ‘I needed the name of a gentleman and Officer Dale was about as close as I ever got to a gentleman.’
Officer Dale stretched back to Slim’s first lag in Boggo Road, early 1940s.
‘See, kid, there’s all kinds of bad inside,’ he says. ‘Blokes who start good and turn bad; blokes who seem bad but aren’t bad at all; and then there’s the blokes who are bad in blood and bone because they’re born that way. That about describes half of those screws in Boggo. They took those jobs inside because they were drawn to their own kind, all those rapists and killers and psychopaths they were pretending to help rehabilitate when all they were doing was feeding their own evil beasts that lay dormant inside the cells of their own fucked-up heads.’
‘But not Officer Dale.’
‘Nah, not Officer Dale.’
After his first escape attempt, the Boggo Road screws came down hard on Slim, vigorously strip-searched him several times a day. During these searches it was customary for the officers to bash Slim across the side of the head to instruct him to turn around; kick him in the arse when they wanted him to bend over; elbow him in the nose when they wanted him to step back. One day Slim reacted, exploded in his cell, started throwing chunks of slop from his cell room slop bucket at the officers. They returned with the pressure hose treatment. One officer then came with two buckets of scalding water from the coppers that sat boiling in the prison kitchen. Another officer began shoving a red hot poker through the cell bars at Slim.
‘Them officers were terrorising me like I was some rooster they were priming for a cockfight,’ Slim says. ‘I had a prison-issue knife I’d been sharpening under my pillow and I grabbed it and I stabbed one of those pricks in the hand. I was waving the knife at them, spittin’ and frothin’ like I was a sick dog. All hell broke loose after that, but amid all the madness there was this bloke, Officer Dale, he was standing up for me. He was shouting at these
sick bastards, telling them to leave me be, that I’d had enough. And I remember looking at him like it was all going in slow motion and I was thinking that true character surely is best shown in hell, that true goodness must surely be best displayed in an underworld where the very opposite is the norm, when evil is living and goodness is an indulgence, you know what I’m saying?’
Slim smiles, looks at August. August nods at Slim, one of those knowing August nods, like he thinks he did a lag right alongside Slim, his neighbour in cell D10.
‘You know,’ Slim says, ‘you dive that far down into hell that a wink from the devil starts to feel like a fuckin’ hand job from Doris Day, you catch my drift?’
August nods again.
‘Piss off, Gus, you don’t even know who Doris Day is,’ I say.
August shrugs.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Slim says. ‘Point is, I was in this daydream amid all this chaos, looking at Officer Dale, watching him trying to get these guys to lay off. I was so bloody touched by the gesture I think I got a tear in my eye. Then I got a whole lotta fucking tears in my eyes because a second wave of screws came with masks and threw teargas bombs in my cell. They kicked the shit out of me good and proper and dragged me to Black Peter there and then. My clothes were still wet from the hose. Right in the middle of winter that one was. No blanket. No mat on that one. Everybody goes on about the fourteen days in Black Peter in the heatwave. But I’d take the fourteen days in the heatwave over that one night with Black Pete wet as a beaver in the middle of winter. Spent the whole night shiverin’, just thinking one thing . . .’
‘That everybody has goodness in them?’ I ask.
‘Nah, kid, not everyone, just Officer Dale,’ Slim says. ‘But it got me thinking that if Officer Dale still had some goodness working among those other bastards for so long, then I might still have some goodness left in me when I was done with Black Peter; or when I was done with the joint forever.’
‘New name, new man,’ I say.
‘Seemed like a good idea in the hole,’ Slim says.
I pick up the South-West Star. One of the supporting pictures in the ‘Queensland Remembers’ spread shows Slim in 1952, sitting in the backroom of the Southport Court House. He’s smoking a cigarette in a cream-coloured suit, over a white shirt with a thick collar. He looks like he belongs in Havana, Cuba, not the cell where he was going to live for the next twenty-four years of his life.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask.
‘Do what?’
‘How did you survive for so long without . . .’
‘Swallowing a rubber-band ball filled with razor blades?’
‘Well, I was gonna say “givin’ up”, but . . . yeah, that too.’
‘That article is half right about that Houdini magic crap,’ he says. ‘What I did in that joint was a kind of magic.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I could do things with time in there,’ Slim says. ‘I got so intimate with time that I could manipulate it, speed it up, slow it down. Some days all you wanted was to speed it up, so you had to trick your brain. You get yourself so busy you can convince yourself there’s not enough hours in the day to achieve everything you want to achieve. By “achieve”, I don’t mean learning how to play the violin or getting a degree in economics. I mean realistic midday prison cell goals. I mean collecting enough black balls of cockroach shit in a day that you can spell your name with them. Some days, bitin’ your fingernails down to the quick became a leisure activity to look forward to like an Elvis double bill. So much to do, so little time. Make your bed, read chapter 30 of Moby Dick, think about Irene, whistle “You Are My Sunshine” from start to finish, roll a smoke, have a smoke, play yourself at chess, play yourself at chess again because you’re pissed off you lost the first game, go fishing off Bribie Island in your mind, go fishing off Redcliffe jetty in your mind, scale your fish, gut your fish, cook that fat flathead on some hot coals on Suttons Beach and watch the sun go down. You race that bastard clock so hard you get surprised when the day is over and you’re so tired from your daily schedule of bullshit head games that you yawn when you put your head on the pillow at 7 p.m. and tell yourself you’re mad for staying up so late and burning the candle at both ends. But, then, in those good hours, those sunshine hours in the yard, you could make them slow, you could pull them up like they were well-trained horses and you could turn an hour in the flower garden into half a day, because you were living time in five dimensions and the dimensions were the things you were smelling and the things you could taste and touch and hear and the things you could see, things within things, small universes in the stamen of a flower, layers upon layers, because your vision was so enhanced by the inactivity of all that concrete-wall watching that every single time you walked into that garden yard it was like Dorothy walking into technicolour.’
‘You learned to see all the details,’ I say.
Slim nods. He looks at us both.
‘Never forget, you two, you are free,’ he says. ‘These are your sunshine hours and you can make them last forever if you see all the details.’
I nod loyally.
‘Do your time, hey Slim?’ I say.
He nods proudly.
‘Before it does you,’ he says.
That’s Slim’s favourite nugget of porridge wisdom.
Do your time before it does you.
*
I remember when I first heard him say it. We were standing in the engine room of the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall, the old and glorious brown sandstone building in the heart of the city, towering over King George Square. Slim took us in on the train from Darra. He said there was an old elevator inside the high clock tower that took people right up to the top of the tower and I didn’t believe him. He knew the old lift operator, Clancy Mallett, from his farmhand days and Clancy had said he would let us go up inside the elevator for nothing, but when we arrived the lift was undergoing repairs, out of order, and Slim had to sweet-talk his old friend with a put-your-dog-on-it tip for race 5 at Eagle Farm to convince him to lead us up a secret set of stairs that only the City Hall staff knew about. The dark stairwell up that clock tower went forever and Slim and old Clancy the lift operator wheezed the whole way up, but me and August laughed the whole way up. Then we gasped when Clancy opened a thin door that led into an engine room of spinning steel pulleys and cogs – the city’s clockwork – that powered the four clock faces on the tower. North, south, east and west, each with giant black steel hands tracking the minutes and the hours of each Brisbane day. Slim stared mesmerised at those hands for ten straight minutes and he told us that time is the ancient enemy. He said time was killing us slowly. ‘Time will do you in,’ he said. ‘So do your time before it does you.’
Clancy the lift operator walked us up another set of secret stairs off the engine room that led up to an observation deck where Slim said Brisbane kids used to throw coins over the rail and seventy-five metres down to the roof of City Hall as they made a wish.
‘I wish I had more time,’ I said as I tossed a copper two-cent piece over the rail.
Then time struck.
‘Block your ears,’ Clancy smiled, turning his eyes up to a giant steel blue bell I hadn’t seen above us. And this bell rang loudly eleven times and near burst my eardrums and I changed my wish to one where time had to stop in that moment for the wish to come true.
*
‘You seeing all the details, Eli?’ Slim asks across the table.
‘Huh?’ I say, snapping back to now.
‘You catchin’ all the details?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, puzzled by the testing look in Slim’s eye.
‘You catching all that periphery stuff, kid?’ he asks.
‘Sure. Always, Slim. The details.’
‘But you missed the most interesting thing about that article you have there.’
‘Huh?’
I study the article, scan the words again.
‘The byline,’ he says. ‘Botto
m right-hand corner.’
The byline. The byline. Bottom right-hand corner. Eyes scanning down, down, down across ink words and pictures. There it is. There’s the byline.
‘What the fuck, Gus!’
I will associate this name with the day I learned how to manipulate time.
This name is Caitlyn Spies.
Slim and I look sharply at August. He says nothing.
Boy Kills Bull
Here’s Mum through a half-open bedroom door. She stands in her red going-out dress in front of the mirror hanging on the inside door of her wardrobe, fixing a silver necklace around her neck. How could any sane man not be happy in her presence, not be content, not be grateful for what he’s got to come home to?
Why would my father fuck that up? She’s so fucking wondrous my mum that it fills me with rage. Fuck any and all of those fuckers who stood within a foot of her without first seeking permission from Zeus.
I pad into her bedroom, sit on the bed near her at the mirror.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, matey.’
‘Why did you run from my father?’
‘Eli, I don’t want to talk about this now.’
‘He did bad things to you, didn’t he?’
‘Eli, that’s a conversation—’
‘We’ll have when I’m older,’ I say. The go-to line.
She gives a half-smile into the wardrobe mirror. Half apologetic. Half touched I give a shit.
‘Your father wasn’t well,’ she says.
‘Is my father a good man?’
Mum thinks. Mum nods.
‘Is my father more like me or more like Gus?’
Mum thinks. Mum says nothing.
‘Does Gus ever scare you?’
‘No.’
‘Sometimes he scares the shit out of me.’
‘Watch your language.’
Watch my language? Watch my language? This is what really shits me, when the clandestine heroin operation truth meets the Von Trapp family values mirage we’ve built for ourselves.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘What scares you?’ Mum asks.