at triangular points around the knee-slapping audience, find themselves immersed in the riotous cabaret stylings of the woman playing Mary in stick-on black leggings.
‘All right, let’s go,’ whispers Bernie, making the most of the play’s magnetic and colourful all-eyes-on-stage distraction.
I’m tucked inside a large black wheelie bin and Bernie is pulling me along, the bin’s lid closed above me. My feet squash down paper plates cleared from the prison dining tables at Christmas lunch. I’m up to my ankles in leftovers of canned ham and tinned peas and corn. She wheels me out of the prison kitchen area, past the dining room, crosses an open floor space behind the rec room, scurries past the audience with its head turned to Mary. She turns the bin on a sharp right and my body is mashed against the greasy and foul-smelling inside walls. She scurries thirty or forty paces along and sits the bin upright again, opens the lid, pops her head inside.
‘What’s my name?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘How the fuck did you get inside this place?’
‘I attached myself to the bottom of one of the delivery trucks.’
‘Which truck?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘The white one.’
Bernie nods.
‘Outcha get,’ she whispers.
I stand up out of the bin. We’re in a cell block corridor lit only by the light of a frosted glass floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the corridor, some eight prison cells along. Each cell has a rectangular hard-glass window panel the size of Dad’s letterbox built into the centre of it.
I slip out of the bin, my backpack still over my shoulders. Bernie nods to the cell two doors along the corridor.
‘It’s that one,’ she says. She closes the lid on the bin and scurries away.
‘You’re on your own now, Houdini,’ she whispers. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Thanks Bernie,’ I whisper.
I approach Mum’s cell. The door’s window is too high up for me to see into, even on the tips of my toes. But there’s a recess in the thick door and I can grip my fingers on it and pull myself up, using my knees to help push me up higher. My right hand slips because it only has four fingers to hold on with, but I go again, clutching hard at the window space. And I see her. She wears a white shirt underneath what looks like a light blue painter’s smock. Her prison uniform makes her look so young, smaller and more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. She looks like a little girl who should be milking dairy cows in rolling Swiss hills. On the right wall of the cell is a desk and in the right rear corner are a chrome toilet and wash basin. There are two bunks bolted to the left wall of the cell and she sits on the edge of the lower bunk, her hands cupped together and being squeezed between her kneecaps. Her hair is everywhere, hanging over her face and over her ears. She wears the same blue rubber sandals Bernie was wearing. My arms can’t hold my weight and I slip off the door. I climb again, gripping harder to the recess in the door. A longer look inside this time. I see the truth of it all. The skeletal shinbones of her legs. The elbows like the balls of a hammer, arms like the sticks I’d use to spark the fire that would burn to the ground this long-life-lightbulb jailhouse home for mums on Christmas Day. Her cheekbones have moved higher on her face and her cheek flesh has disappeared, turned to a claypan of thin skin, and her face doesn’t look like it was grown by life but drawn, shaded by a humourless and macabre colourist in pencil that could be rubbed away by a drop of spit and a swiftly moving forefinger. But it’s not the legs or the arms or the cheekbones that trouble me; it’s the eyes, staring ahead at the wall opposite her. Blank staring. So lost in that wall it looks like her brain’s been removed. She looks like Jack Nicholson after the lobotomy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the setting fits. I can’t make out what she’s staring at on that wall but then I can. It’s me. It’s me and August, arm in arm. A photograph stuck to the cell wall. We have our shirts off, playing in the backyard of the Darra house, and August is forcing his belly right out with his right-hand fingers making