I sit up and wrap my arms around her and I squeeze her so tight I worry I’m going to break one of the weak bones in her ribcage. I drop my head onto her shoulder and I didn’t know I missed that smell, that smell of Mum’s hair, that feeling of her.
‘Everything’s gonna be all right, Mum,’ I say. ‘Everything’s gonna be all right.’
‘I know, baby,’ she says. ‘I know.’
‘It gets good, Mum,’ I say.
She hugs me tighter.
‘It all gets good after this,’ I say. ‘August told me, Mum. August told me. He says you just have to get through this little bit, just this little bit.’
Mum weeps into my shoulder. ‘Ssssssshhhhhh,’ she says, patting my back. ‘Ssssssssshhhhhhhh.’
‘Just get through this bit and it all goes up from here. August knows it, Mum. This is the hardest bit, right here. It doesn’t get any worse.’
Mum weeps harder. ‘Sssssssshhhhhh,’ Mum says. ‘Just hold me, sweetie. Just hold me.’
‘Do you believe me, Mum?’ I ask. ‘If you believe me then you’ll believe it will get better and if you believe it then it will.’
Mum nods.
‘I’m gonna make it better, Mum, I promise,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna get us a place where you can go when you come out and it will be good and it will be safe and we can be happy and you can be free there, Mum. This is just time. And you can do what you want with time, Mum.’
Mum nods.
‘Do you believe me, Mum?’
Mum nods.
‘Say it.’
‘I believe you, Eli,’ she says.
Then a female voice echoes down the corridor.
‘What thaaaaa faaaaarrrrk is this shit?’ barks a red-haired woman with a large belly and a backward lean, standing in her prison clothes, holding a plastic dessert bowl filled with wobbly red jelly, staring at Mum and me in the doorway of cell 24. She turns her head to the recreation area, hollering, ‘What sort of crèche you screws runnin’ here?’
She slams her dessert on the ground, furious. ‘How the fuck does Princess Frankie deserve a contact today?’ she barks.
Mum holds me tighter.
‘I gotta go, Mum,’ I say, pulling out of the embrace. ‘I gotta go, Mum.’
She clings to me hard and I have to pull myself away from her. She drops her head, crying, as I stand up. ‘We’ll get through this little bit, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s only time. You’re stronger than time, Mum. You’re stronger than it.’
I turn and run down the corridor as a tall and broad-shouldered prison screw rounds the corner into Mum’s cell wing, following the gaze of the red-haired woman. ‘What the fu—’ he says, stunned by the sight of me. I grip the arm straps of my backpack and sprint up the corridor. The screw has his hand on the top of the baton fixed into his belt. I see Brett Kenny in my mind’s eye – glorious five-eighth for the Parramatta Eels. I see all those backyard afternoons August and I spent practising Kenny’s blinding weave runs, his devastating right step.
‘Stop right there,’ the screw demands. But I sprint harder, weaving left and right up the corridor, making the most of a four-metre-wide space, snaking up it like Brett Kenny would snake through a Canterbury Bulldogs defensive line. I fade hard to the right side of the corridor and the lumbering screw with his big lumbering legs and his tractor-tyre belly fades with me into my line of movement. I’m within two metres of his reach when he props on both legs and puts his arms out wide to swallow me up, to net me like a slippery Bramble Bay flathead – a slippery eel – and it’s then that I step hard and quick off my bouncing right foot and zip like a shot bullet to the far left of the corridor, ducking under his ambitious and useless flailing right arm as I go. Brett Kenny finds the gap and the sea of blue and yellow Eels supporters in the western stands of the Sydney Cricket Ground rise to their feet. I turn left into B Block’s open recreation and dining hall area and the space is filled with forty prison women, standing and sitting around dining tables and card tables and chess tables and knitting tables. Another prison screw – a short man, but muscular and fast – spots me from across the hall and gives chase. I run through the dining hall, searching for an exit door, and the women laugh and holler