life shit they don’t get any more. If you’ve got a teacher you’re hot for, tell ’em what her hair looks like, what her legs look like, what she eats for lunch. If she’s teaching you geometry, tell ’em how she draws a bloody triangle on the blackboard. If you went down the shop for a bag of sweets yesterday, did you ride your pushy, did you go by foot, did you see a rainbow along the way? Did you buy gobstoppers or clinkers or caramels? If you ate a good meat pie last week, was it steak and peas or curry or mushroom beef? You catchin’ my drift? Details.’
Slim keeps scribbling across his page. He drags on his smoke and his cheeks compress and I can see the shape of his skull, and his short back and sides with a flat top haircut makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s alive. But for how long, Slim?
‘Slim.’
‘Yes, Eli.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Slim stops writing. August stops too. They both stare at me.
‘Did you kill that taxi driver?’
Slim offers a half-smile. His lip trembles and he adjusts his thick black spectacles. I’ve known him long enough to know when he’s been hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, dropping my head, placing my pen’s ballpoint back on the letter page. ‘There’s a feature in today’s paper,’ I say.
‘What feature?’ Slim barks. ‘I didn’t see anything on me in The Courier today?’
‘Not The Courier-Mail. It was in the local rag, the South-West Star. They had one of those “Queensland Remembers” yarns. Huge piece it was. It was about the Houdini of Boggo Road. They talked about your escapes. They talked about the Southport murder. It said you could have been innocent. It said you might have gone away for twenty-four years for a crime you didn’t—’
‘Long time ago,’ Slim says, cutting me off.
‘But don’t you want people to know the truth?’
Slim drags on his cigarette.
‘Can I ask you a question, kid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I killed him?’
I don’t know. What I know is nothing killed Slim. What I know is he never gave up. The darkness didn’t kill him. The cops didn’t kill him. The screws didn’t kill him. The bars. The hole. Black Peter didn’t kill him. I guess I’ve always figured if he was a murderer then his conscience might have been the thing that killed him during those black days down in the hole. But his conscience never killed him. The loss, the life that might have been, never killed him. Almost half his life spent inside and he can still smile when I ask if he’s a murderer. Houdini was locked in a box for thirty-six years altogether and he came out alive. The long magic. The kind of magic trick that takes thirty-six years for the rabbit to stick his head up out of the hat. The long magic of a human life.
‘I think you’re a good man,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you’re capable of killing a man.’
Slim takes his smoke from his mouth. He leans across the table. His voice is soft and sinister.
‘Don’t you ever underestimate what any man is capable of,’ he says.
He leans back in his chair.
‘Now show me this article.’
QUEENSLAND REMEMBERS: NO CHANCE TOO SLIM FOR THE HOUDINI OF BOGGO ROAD
He was regarded as the most dangerous prisoner in the British Commonwealth, the master escapologist they called ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol’, but Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday’s greatest trick would be walking out of prison a free man.
A church orphan who lost both his parents at the age of 12, Slim Halliday began his predestined life of crime when he was imprisoned for four days for jumping trains en route to the shearing job in Queensland that might well have kept him on the straight and narrow. Halliday was a seasoned 30-year-old conman and housebreaker by 28 January 1940, when he made his first escape from Boggo Road Gaol’s notorious Number 2 Division.
SLIM’S PICKINGS
Houdini Halliday conjured his first magic escape by scaling a section of the prison wall that became known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’, an observation blind spot invisible to guards in surrounding watchtowers. Despite public criticism over the strength of prison security after the one-man escape, this section of the prison wall remained unchanged.
It was little surprise to the Brisbane public, then, when it was revealed that in a subsequent escape, on 11 December 1946, Halliday climbed over a corner wall of the prison workshops, a mere 15 yards from the now mythical