and clap their hands. Another screw joins the chase from the left side of the dining room. ‘Stop!’ the screw barks. But I don’t stop. I sprint through the middle aisle of the hall as Mum’s fellow prisoners bash their hands in delight on their food tables, making afternoon-tea bowls of Christmas pudding, jelly and custard bounce between their fists. I find no exit door and the screws are circling in on me from either side so I turn back around and take a diagonal run across the hall’s steel dining tables. The screw I sidestepped in the corridor now enters the dining hall, angrily pushing through a sea of prisoners who have rushed from their seats before the Nativity-meets-Grease stage spectacular to see the surreal scene of the boy bouncing across Boggo Road tables and chairs like the hero of a Looney Tunes sketch. The screws angrily and clumsily hop onto the tables in chase and rush through aisles to head me off, barking threats I can’t quite hear beneath the roar of the SCG crowd. Kenny! Brett Kenny! Into space. The master, Eli Bell, heading for the try line. Certain to score. Certain to etch his name into rugby league legend.
I leap between tables like a Russian ballerina, evading the swiping arms of the hapless screws the way Errol Flynn evaded the blades of cinematic pirates, and the prisoners are inside a rock ’n’ roll show now, pumping their fists at the exploits of the dashing Eels five-eighth with the jets in the rubber soles of his Dunlop KT-26s. I leap off one table onto the polished concrete floor at the entrance to the dining hall where the women prisoners stand back – a parting of the sea of female cons – to form a loose guard of honour I can run through. And these women know my name somehow.
‘Go, Eli!’ they scream.
‘Run, Eli!’ they scream.
So I run and I run until I can see an exit door beyond the common area joining the kitchen and the cells and the dining hall. It’s a door that opens out to a lawn outside. Freedom. Kenny! Brett Kenny for the try line! Sprinting, sprinting. The screws on my tail and another screw, a fourth screw, coming at me from my right to block my access to the exit door. It’s the fullback for the Canterbury Bulldogs. The fullback screw. Every team’s last line of defence, the best technical defender in the team, agile and strong, always making arcing and streaking cover tackle runs across the field to end the grand final dreams of gods like Brett Kenny. Mum used to run as a girl, was a fine sprinter. Won sprint races at athletics carnivals. She once told me the way to get an extra kick, the extra edge, was to get lower to the ground, picture yourself as a plough and your legs are digging up the earth and you’re digging into the earth for the first fifty of a hundred-metre dash and digging yourself out again for the last fifty, leaning your head back and your chest out across the finish line. So I’m the plough now as the fourth screw arcs across the prison floor but I’m not a strong enough plough and his trajectory is certain to meet up with mine before I can meet up with the back door to the freedom lawn. But then a Christmas miracle, a holy apparition in prison clothes. It’s Bernie, slowly walking her wheelie bin, absent-mindedly but not absent-mindedly at all, crossing into the path of the raging fourth screw. ‘Outta the way, Bernie!’ the screw hollers, weaving around her.
‘What?’ Bernie says, turning around blind like a slapstick silent movie star, making a clumsy show of moving the bin backwards now, apparently unwittingly, into the screw’s line of chase. The screw tries to jump the slanted bin but clips a foot on the top of it and crashes spectacularly, belly first, into the polished prison floor.
I burst out of the rear B Block door and run out to a well-kept grass lawn rolling down to a fenced tennis court. I run and I run. Brett Kenny, man of the match for the third straight week in a row, running well past the dead ball line now, running right into history. Eli Bell. The elusive Eli Bell. Call me Merlin. The Wizard of the Boggo Road women’s prison. The only boy to ever escape that B Block shithole. The only boy