to ever escape Boggo Road. I can smell the grass. There is white clover in the grass and bees buzzing in the clover. The kinds of bees that make my ankles swell when they sting me. But get over it, Eli. There are worse things in this world than bees. The lawn slopes down to the tennis court and I look behind me as I run. Four screws in frantic chase, barking things I cannot understand. I slip my right arm out of an arm strap on my backpack as I run. I unzip the backpack and reach an arm in and grip a rope. It’s time, Eli. The moment of truth.
*
I started with matches first, like Slim did in his cell. Matches and a line of string. Matches tied by a twisted rubber band in the centre to form a cross-shaped grappling hook. Timing, planning, luck, belief. I believe. I believe, Slim. Hour after hour I spent in my bedroom studying the science and technique of lodging a grappling hook against a high orange-brown brick wall. When I was ready, I fixed my own real-life roped grappling hook out of a fifteen-metre length of thick rope, knotted at fifty-centimetre intervals for grip points, and two roped pieces of cylindrical wood I cut up from an old rake handle Dad had lying under the house. I took the grappling hook down to the Bracken Ridge Scouts Centre on Saturday afternoons where they had a makeshift high wall that they ask young boy scout groups to scale in team-building exercises. Throw after throw after throw, I finessed my grappling hook wall-lodging technique. An uptight scoutmaster caught me carrying out these curious prison break rehearsals one afternoon. ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing, young man?’ the scoutmaster asked.
‘Escaping,’ I said.
‘Excuse me,’ the scoutmaster asked.
‘I’m pretending to be Batman,’ I said.
*
I take a sharp left turn at the tennis court, sprint into a small path leading between the prison’s C Block cells to my left and a sewing workshop shed to my right. Losing breath. Tiring now. Gotta find the wall. Gotta find the wall. I pass the F Block temporary demountable cells. I turn behind me. I can’t see the screws. I rush to the top prison wall. It’s an old brown brick wall, high and imposing. I’m not sure my rope is long enough for the wall I stand before so I rush along the perimeter, searching, searching, searching, for a space in the brown brick fortress where a higher stretch of wall meets a lower stretch. Bingo. I quickly unravel my grappling hook rope and leave a two-metre stretch of rope which will be my throwing segment. I look up at the wall corner where high meets low and I twirl the rope twice like a cowboy with a lasso, with the weight of the rake handle cut-offs acting as a guiding projectile readying for launch. I’ll only get one shot. Help me, Slim. Help me, Brett Kenny. Help me, God. Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope. Help me, Mum. Help me, Lyle. Help me, August.
A Hail Mary toss. An act of pure faith and ambition and belief. I believe, Slim. I believe. The hook sails up into the air and over the high wall fence. I step two paces to my right, holding the rope taut, positioned so the hook can do nothing else but lodge into the high–low wall corner when I pull down on it.
‘Oi!’ calls a screw. I turn to see him, maybe fifty metres away running beside the fence wall, another screw not far behind him. ‘Stop that, you little prick,’ the screw calls.
I grip a rope knot and pull myself with both hands up the wall, planting my gripping and reliable and blessed Dunlop KT-26s against the wall face, my back parallel with the grass lawn below me. I am Batman. I’m Adam West in those old Batman TV shows, scaling a Gotham City office tower. This is working. This is actually fucking working.
The lighter a person is, the easier this is. Slim was Slim when he made his climb up a wall like this one but I’m the boy, the boy who climbed the walls, the boy who fooled the screws, the boy who escaped from Boggo Road. Merlin the Magnificent. The Wizard o’ the Women’s.
Only sky from this angle. Blue sky and cloud. And flashes of the top wall. Six metres up now. Seven metres. Eight maybe. Nine metres. This