shape. He crossed the track into the workshops area that was usually patrolled by guards but wasn’t during Sunday prayer service. Sweating, hot, quiet, stealthy, he ran to the back of the workshops and, invisible to the guards, climbed onto an outhouse that allowed him to climb further and up to the roof of the workshops.
Here, potentially visible to the guards in the prison watchtowers, he produced a pair of stolen and smuggled pliers and rapidly cut through the wire netting covering the workshop ventilation windows. Timing, planning, luck, belief. And a slim build. The Houdini of Boggo Road squeezed his thin frame through the ventilation windows and dropped down into the boot-making section of the workshops.
Each workshop section was separated by wire meshing. Slim cut and slipped his way through the wire from the boot shop to the mattress shop, from the mattress shop to the carpenter’s shop, from the carpenters’ shop to the loom shop, from the loom shop to paradise – the brush shop in which he had been working in recent weeks and in which he had hidden his escape kit.
Timing is right for my escape. It’s 3 p.m. in the children’s ward play area, a polished wood floor communal space shaped like half an octagon. The area is bordered by white wood-framed latch windows like the windows in my school. Same time in the afternoon Slim made his escape. A time in the ward when most of these kids – about eighteen kids, aged four to fourteen, battling everything from appendicitis to broken arms to concussions to knife wounds to fingers chopped off by artificial limb specialists – are on a Tang and green cordial high from afternoon tea, their tongues still buzzing with the sweet elixir of the cream inside a Monte Carlo biscuit.
Kids pushing trucks and finger-painting butterflies and pulling their underpants down and playing with their dicks. Older kids reading books and five kids watching Romper Room and hoping gentle Miss Helena inside the television will see them through her magic mirror. A red-haired boy spinning a top made into the shape of a yellow and black tin bumblebee. A girl maybe my age gives me a half-smile the way factory workers might smile at each other across conveyor belts of bumblebee spinning tops. Prints of exotic animals across the walls. And Christopher with the mobile drip. The boy with Ayers Rock inside his melon.
‘You watching this?’ I ask Christopher.
He’s sitting in an armchair in front of the communal television, licking the cream off a split orange-cream biscuit.
‘No,’ he says, indignant. ‘I don’t watch Romper Room. I asked them to put on Diff’rent Strokes but they reckon there’s more young kids than old kids so we have to watch this shit. Fuckin’ bullshit if you ask me. These little pricks can spend the rest of their lives watchin’ Romper Room. I’m gonna be a corpse in three months and all I want to do is watch some Diff’rent Strokes. Nobody gives a shit.’
His tongue licks a slab of orange cream. His light blue hospital gown is as misshapen and crinkled as mine.
‘My name’s Eli,’ I say.
‘Christopher,’ he says.
‘Sorry to hear about your brain,’ I say.
‘I’m not sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to go to school no more. And Mum’s been buying me Golden Gaytimes whenever I feel like one. I just say the word and she stops the car and she runs into a shop and gets me one.’
He spots my bandaged right hand.
‘What happened to your finger?’
I move closer.
‘A drug kingpin’s hitman chopped it off with a Bowie knife,’ I say.
‘Faaark,’ says Christopher. ‘Why’d he do that?’
‘Because my brother wouldn’t tell the drug kingpin what he wanted to know.’
‘What did he want to know?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t your brother tell him?’
‘Because he doesn’t talk.’
‘Why were they asking someone who doesn’t talk to talk?’
‘Because he did end up talking.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
‘Whaaaaat?’ asks Christopher.
‘Forget about it,’ I say, leaning in close to his chair, whispering, ‘Listen, see that builder over there?’
Christopher follows my gaze to the other side of the ward floor where a builder is adding an extra section of storage cupboards beside the administration desk in the centre of the ward. Christopher nods.
‘He’s got a toolbox at his feet and inside that toolbox is a box of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild and a purple cigarette lighter,’ I say.
‘So?’ Christopher says.
‘So I need you to go over there and ask him a question