Time stops in this chapel. No noise from the few mourners around the coffin, a couple of men in suits, nobody in here that knows anybody else.
My hand reaches into my pants pocket and I feel for the last words Slim ever wrote to me. It was a message he wrote at the end of the instructions he gave me for meeting mysterious George and his prison smuggler fruit truck.
Do your time, he wrote, before it does you. Your friend always, Slim.
Do your time, Eli Bell, before it does you.
A crematorium official says something about life and time but I miss it all because I’m thinking about life and time. And then Slim’s coffin is taken away.
It’s over quick. Quick time. Good time.
An old man in a black suit and tie approaches August and me as we walk back out the chapel doors. He says he’s an old bookmaker friend of Slim’s. He says Slim did some work for him after prison.
‘How did you boys know, Slim?’ he asks. His face is warm and friendly, a smile like Mickey Rooney’s.
‘He was our babysitter,’ I say.
The man nods, puzzled.
‘How did you know Slim?’ I ask the man in the black suit.
‘He lived with me and my family for a time,’ the old man says.
And I realise in this moment that there were other lives Slim led. There were other vantage points. Other friends. Other family.
‘It’s nice of you to come and pay your respects,’ the old man says.
‘He was my best friend,’ I say.
He chuckles.
‘Mine, too,’ the old man says.
‘Really?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, really,’ the old man says. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispers. ‘A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.’
We walk along the crematorium lawn, rows of grey gravestones forming grim and uniform lanes in a cemetery beyond the chapel.
‘Do you think he killed that cabbie?’ I ask.
The old man shrugs.
‘I never asked him,’ the old man says.
‘But you would know, wouldn’t you?’ I ask. ‘I reckon you’d get a feeling on that. Your instinct or somethin’ would tell you if he did it.’
‘Whaddya mean, “instinct”?’ the old man asks.
‘I was around a guy once who killed many people and my instinct told me he killed many people,’ I say. ‘There was a chill down my spine that told me he killed many people.’
The old man stops on the spot.
‘I never asked him about it, purely out of respect,’ the old man says. ‘I respected the man. If he didn’t do that killin’, then I respect him more still and God rest his soul. I never got no chill down my spine around Slim Halliday. And if he did do that killin’, then he was one hell of a tribute to rehabilitation.’
That’s a nice way of putting it. Thanks, mysterious old man. I nod.
The old man puts his hands in his pockets and walks off down a row of the cemetery. I watch him walk down that row of gravestones like he possesses the most carefree soul to ever inhabit a body.
August is hunched over inspecting another wall of gold plaques dedicated to the departed.
‘I need to get a job,’ I say.
August gives a sharp look over his shoulder. Why?
‘We gotta get a place for Mum when she gets out.’
August looks deeper into a plaque.
‘C’mon, Gus!’ I urge, walking away. ‘No time to waste.’
*
I landed flush into the arms of the screws that day I fell from the wall of the Boggo Road women’s prison. To their great credit the screws seemed more concerned for my mental health than furious with my misadventures.
‘Ya think he’s mental?’ pondered the youngest screw, who had a ginger beard and freckles across his forearms. ‘What’ll we do with him?’ ginger asked his fellow screw.
‘Let Muzza make the call,’ the second screw said.
The two screws walked me in a pressure hold, each man gripping an arm, back up the lawn to the other two screws, the older and more experienced ones with not enough in the tank to chase a teenage boy through a prison yard.
What took place inside the office of the prison administration building was a strategy meeting between prison screws, which, for me, was akin to being witness to four early Neanderthals working out the rules of Twister.
‘He could fuck up a lot for us, Muz,’ said the largest screw.
‘We gotta call the warden?’ asked ginger.
‘We’re not calling the warden,’ said the man they called Muzza, Muz and, the least preferred,