by Trent Dalton
Kids pushing trucks and finger-painting butterflies and pulling their underpants down and playing with their dicks. Older kids reading books and five kids watching Romper Room and hoping gentle Miss Helena inside the television will see them through her magic mirror. A red-haired boy spinning a top made into the shape of a yellow and black tin bumblebee. A girl maybe my age gives me a half-smile the way factory workers might smile at each other across conveyor belts of bumblebee spinning tops. Prints of exotic animals across the walls. And Christopher with the mobile drip. The boy with Ayers Rock inside his melon.
‘You watching this?’ I ask Christopher.
He’s sitting in an armchair in front of the communal television, licking the cream off a split orange-cream biscuit.
‘No,’ he says, indignant. ‘I don’t watch Romper Room. I asked them to put on Diff’rent Strokes but they reckon there’s more young kids than old kids so we have to watch this shit. Fuckin’ bullshit if you ask me. These little pricks can spend the rest of their lives watchin’ Romper Room. I’m gonna be a corpse in three months and all I want to do is watch some Diff’rent Strokes. Nobody gives a shit.’
His tongue licks a slab of orange cream. His light blue hospital gown is as misshapen and crinkled as mine.
‘My name’s Eli,’ I say.
‘Christopher,’ he says.
‘Sorry to hear about your brain,’ I say.
‘I’m not sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to go to school no more. And Mum’s been buying me Golden Gaytimes whenever I feel like one. I just say the word and she stops the car and she runs into a shop and gets me one.’
He spots my bandaged right hand.
‘What happened to your finger?’
I move closer.
‘A drug kingpin’s hitman chopped it off with a Bowie knife,’ I say.
‘Faaark,’ says Christopher. ‘Why’d he do that?’
‘Because my brother wouldn’t tell the drug kingpin what he wanted to know.’
‘What did he want to know?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t your brother tell him?’
‘Because he doesn’t talk.’
‘Why were they asking someone who doesn’t talk to talk?’
‘Because he did end up talking.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
‘Whaaaaat?’ asks Christopher.
‘Forget about it,’ I say, leaning in close to his chair, whispering, ‘Listen, see that builder over there?’
Christopher follows my gaze to the other side of the ward floor where a builder is adding an extra section of storage cupboards beside the administration desk in the centre of the ward. Christopher nods.
‘He’s got a toolbox at his feet and inside that toolbox is a box of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild and a purple cigarette lighter,’ I say.
‘So?’ Christopher says.
‘So I need you to go over there and ask him a question while he’s facing away from the toolbox,’ I say. ‘You’ll create a diversion while I sneak in from behind and steal his cigarette lighter from his toolbox.’
Christopher looks puzzled. ‘What’s a diversion?’
It’s what Slim created in December 1953, after being sentenced to life. In the mattress workshop in Number 2 Division he built up a mountain of mattress fibre and tree cotton and set it alight. The burning mountain of mattress was a diversion for arriving guards who didn’t know whether to attend to the fire or to Boggo Road’s most notorious prisoner, who was already climbing a makeshift ladder towards the workshop’s skylight. Slim’s diversion, however, was his undoing because the fire’s flames rose to the roof where he was bashing out the skylight mesh before severe smoke inhalation saw him plummet five metres to the ground. But the lesson remains: fire makes people panicky as fuck.
‘It’s a distraction,’ I say. ‘See my fist.’
I wave my right fist high and in circles and Christopher’s green eyes follow the fist so dutifully he doesn’t see my left hand reach to his ear and tug his earlobe.
‘Yoink,’ I say.
He smiles, nodding.
‘So what do you need the lighter for?’ Christopher asks.
‘To set fire to that copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting over there by the bookcase.’
‘A diversion?’
‘You learn fast,’ I say. ‘That brain of yours still works fine. A big enough diversion that will make those nurses at the administration desk come over here as I make my triumphant escape out through that entry door they’re always eyeing off.’
‘Where you gonna go?’
‘Places, Christopher,’ I say, nodding. ‘I’m going places.’
Christopher nods.
‘You want to come with me?’ I ask.
Christopher considers the offer for a moment.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘These retards still think they can save me, so I better stick around here for a bit longer.’
He stands, pulls the drip needle out of the top of his hand that’s connecting him to his metal drip trolley.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
He’s already walking towards the television when he turns his head briefly.
‘Diversion,’ he says.
The television is a standard size and if it was tipped on its side it would reach up to Christopher’s waist. He leans over it and grips the rear side of the television with his left hand and places his right hand at the base and, in one mighty and clean jerk, his wire-thin arms haul the television above his shoulders. The kids lying down on a rainbow-coloured mat on their bellies watching Romper Room stare in confusion and disbelief as Miss Helena inside the television is tilted on a sharp diagonal as Christopher raises the television in teeth-gritting fury.
‘I said I wanted to watch Diff’rent Strokes!’ he screams.
I step slowly backwards towards the administration desk as four nurses rush from there to surround Christopher in a panicked semicircle. One younger nurse pulls the youngest children away from Christopher as a senior nurse approaches him the way a police negotiator might approach a man in a dynamite vest.
‘Christopher . . . put . . . the . . . television . . . down . . . now.’
I’m already at the entry door when Christopher staggers backwards with the television above his head, the television’s power cord pulled tight and about to be reefed from the power point. He’s singing something.
‘Christopher!’ the senior nurse screams.
He’s singing the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes. It’s a song about understanding and inclusion and difference; about how some are born with less than others and more than others at the same time. It’s a song about connection.
He steps back three, four, five steps, like Frankenstein’s monster steps, and he turns his hip for a stronger thrust and he throws the television and gentle Miss Helena smiling inside it straight through the glass of his nearest latched white wood-framed window to an unknown destination. The nurses gasp and Christopher turns back with his arms raised not in a ‘D’ for Diversion but in a ‘V’ for Victory. He screams in triumph and as the nurses crash-tackle him as a group, his gaze somehow finds me at the entry door in all the diversionary madness. He gives a sharp wink with his left eye and the best I can give him back is a full-blooded fist pump before I slip through the door to freedom.
*
Timing, planning, luck, belief. Planning. After Slim had laboriously cut through the wire meshing of the boot shop and then the mattress shop and the carpenters’ shop and the loom shop on that daring escape of 28 January 1940, he slipped finally through the wire mesh of the brush shop to find his escape kit.
Slim had patience even in those early days, before his longest stretches in Black Peter. He took his time fixing his escape kit between the watchful patrols of workshop guards because time was all he had plenty of. He relished the planning, he found succour in the sneaky adrenaline-filled creativity of a quest for liberty. The sec
ret making and storing of escape tools brought him joy and focus in an otherwise dreary prison world. Between the watchful stares of workshop guards, Slim had spent months fashioning an escape rope, nine metres in length, made of plaited coir, the stuff they made the mats with in the prison carpet-weaving shop, the stuff they made the mat with that Slim laid upon in the cold, damp and dark Black Peter. Every half a metre or so along this rope he double-knotted it to form footholds. Inside his escape kit was a second rope, three metres in length, and two wooden hammock sticks bound together to form a cross that he tied to the nine-metre rope.
With his escape kit in hand, he climbed to the ceiling of the brush shop and cut his way through the mesh of a fanlight ceiling window and found himself, once more, standing atop the workshop rooftop, this time in a position invisible to tower guards, the prison’s Achilles heel, a perfect blind spot that Slim had deduced through patient hour after hour after hour of walking the prison yard with his head held skyward sketching rough geometry drawings in his mind between variables of the guard towers, the workshop roof and freedom.
He used his shorter rope to slip down off the workshop roof, suffering rope burns to his hands on his way down. Now back on the inner track running around the prison perimeter, he looked up at the daunting rise of Boggo Road’s eight-metre brick penitentiary wall. He pulled his bound hammock cross-sticks from his escape kit. What he held in his hands was a grappling hook tied to a nine-metre rope with footholds. And he steadied himself for a throw.
Timing, planning, luck, belief. For weeks in his solitary prison cell, Slim had studied the science and technique required to lodge a grappling hook against a high wall. Along the top of the Boggo Road prison wall were corners where smaller sections of the wall met higher sections. Slim spent weeks throwing two bound matchsticks fixed into a cross and attached to string over a rough scale model of the Boggo Road penitentiary wall. He threw the hook over the wall and he worked the weighted rope along the wall top until it wedged into the corner of a small step where a smaller section of the wall met a higher section. And he told me how it felt when he pulled that rope taut into that corner and the hook stuck firm. Slim said it felt like one Christmas morning he had in the old Church of England orphanage in Carlingford when the housemaster told all those spindly orphans they were having warm plum pudding and custard for dessert at Christmas lunch. And that’s what liberty tastes like, Slim said: warm plum pudding and custard. He hauled himself up that rope, his hands and feet gripping for life on the double-knotted footholds, until he sat perched high up on the prison wall, unseen in his beautiful blind spot, one side of his view from the top way up there to the blooming gardens set beyond the walls of Number 1 yard, the other side of his view the rambling brick prison that was really the only permanent home – the one and only fixed address – he had ever had in his life. He breathed that air up there deep inside him and he reversed the hook so it lodged this time into the prison side of the wall corner that would become known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’ and he climbed on down to freedom.
*
Four floors to freedom for me. I press the button for ‘Ground’ in the hospital elevator. The first thing Slim did after he scrambled his way through the gardens to surrounding Annerley Road as a fugitive was to slip out of his prison clothes. Around 4.10 p.m., about when the prison wardens were calling his name at the afternoon prison muster, Slim was jumping fences through suburban Brisbane, stealing a new outfit from a series of clotheslines.
Now I’m Houdini and here’s my great blink-and-you’ll-miss-it illusion: slipping off my hospital gown to reveal the civilian, non-fugitive clothes I have on underneath: an old dark blue polo shirt and black jeans over my blue and grey Dunlop KT-26 running shoes. I roll the gown up into a ball of blue material I’m holding in my left hand just as the elevator stops at Level 2 of the hospital.
Two male doctors holding clipboards step into the elevator, deep in conversation.
‘I said to the kid’s dad, maybe if he’s having this many concussions on the field you should consider a more low-impact sport, like tennis or golf,’ says one doctor as I move to the back left corner of the elevator, the ball of my gown hidden behind my back.
‘What did he say to that?’ the other doctor asks.
‘He said he couldn’t take him out of the team because the finals were coming up,’ the first doctor says. ‘I said, “Well, Mr Newcombe, I think it comes down to what’s more important to you, an under-15s premiership trophy for Brothers or your son having enough brain function to say the word ‘premiership’.”’
The doctors shake their heads. The first doctor turns to me. I smile.
‘You lost, buddy?’ he asks.
I’ve planned for this. Rehearsed a number of responses over the lamb roast dinner I didn’t eat last night.
‘No, just visiting my brother in the children’s ward,’ I say.
The elevator stops on the ground floor.
‘Your mum and dad with you?’ the doctor asks.
‘Yeah, they’re just having a smoke outside,’ I say.
The elevator doors open and the doctors exit right and I exit towards the hospital foyer, polished concrete floors buzzing with hospital visitors and ambulance officers pushing gurneys. The first doctor spots the bandage on my right hand and stops on the spot. ‘Hey, wait, kid . . .’
Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Confidence. You are invisible. You believe you are invisible and you are invisible. Just keep walking. Past the water cooler. Past a family surrounding a girl with Coke-bottle glasses in a wheelchair. Past a poster of Norm, the beer-bellied dad at the centre of the ‘Life. Be In It.’ TV ads that make August laugh so hard.
I glance a look back over my right shoulder to see the first doctor walk to the administration desk and start talking to a woman at the desk as he points at me. Walking faster now. Faster now. Faster. You are not invisible, you idiot. You are not magic. You are a thirteen-year-old boy about to be captured by that large Pacific Islander security guard the doctor is now talking to and you are about to be sent to live with a father you do not know.
Run.
*
The Royal Brisbane Hospital is on Bowen Bridge Road. I know this area because the Brisbane Exhibition – the Ekka – is held every August a little up the road in the old showgrounds where Mum and Lyle let August and me eat all the contents of our Milky Way showbags one afternoon while we watched five large men from Tasmania furiously chop logs between their feet with axes to rousing applause. We caught the train back home to Darra from Bowen Hills train station – somewhere around here – and on the moving train I vomited the contents of my Milky Way bag into an Army Combat showbag that consisted of a plastic machine gun, a plastic hand grenade, a sling of ammunition and a jungle camouflaged headband that I’d hoped to wear on several top secret rescue missions through the streets of Darra until the headband was drowned in vomit that was two parts chocolate thickshake and one part Dagwood Dog.
A daylight moon outside the hospital. Cars zipping along Bowen Bridge Road. There’s a large grey electrical box on the footpath running by the hospital. I slip behind this box and watch the Pacific Islander security guard rush out of the sliding entry doors of the hospital. He looks left, right, left again. Searching for leads, finding none. He approaches a woman in a green cardigan and fluffy slippers, having a smoke by a bus stop seat and a council bin with an ashtray.
Run now. Catch up to the crowd of people crossing the busy main road at the traffic lights. Walk into the centre of this crowd. Boy on the lam. Boy outfoxes hospital staff. Boy outsmarts world. Boy suckers universe.
I know this street. This is where we entered the Brisbane Exhibition. Lyle and Mum bought the tickets from a guy in a concrete hole in the wall. We walked through horse stables and cow shit and a hundred goats and a barn full of chickens and chicken shit. Then we walked down a hill and we came to Sideshow Alley and August and I begged Lyle to take us on the Ghost Train and then into the Maze of Mirrors where I
turned and turned and turned through doors but only ever found myself. Keep walking up this street. Find someone, anyone. Like this man.
‘Excuse me,’ I say.
He’s wearing a large army-green coat and a beanie and he’s nursing a large glass bottle of Coke between his crossed legs as he leans against the concrete wall bordering the showgrounds. The Coke bottle is the kind August and I collect and return sometimes to the corner store in Oxley and the old lady who runs the store gives us twenty cents for our efforts and we spend that twenty cents on twenty one-cent caramel buds. There’s a clear liquid in the man’s Coke bottle and I can smell that it’s methylated spirits. He looks up at me, his lips twitching, eyes adjusting to the sun over my shoulders.
‘Could you point me to the train station?’ I ask.
‘Batman,’ the man says, his head wobbling.
‘Sorry?’
‘Batman,’ he barks.
‘Batman?’
He sings the television theme tune. ‘Nananananananana . . . Batman!’ he hollers.
He’s tanned from the sun and he’s sweating in the large green coat.
‘Yeah, Batman,’ I say.
He points to his neck. The side of his neck is covered in blood. ‘Fuckin’ bat bit me,’ he says. His head wobbles from one side to the other like the pirate-ship swings we ride on every autumn at the Brisbane Exhibition. I see now that his left eye is heavily bruised, blood-clotted.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘Do you need some help?’
‘I don’t need help,’ he gargles. ‘I’m Batman.’
Adult men. Fucking adult men. Nutters, all of them. Can’t be trusted. Fucking sickos. Freaks. Killers. What was this man’s road to becoming Batman on a side street of inner-city Brisbane? How much good was in him? How much bad? Who was his father? What did his father do? What did his father not do? In what ways did other adult men fuck his life up?