while he’s facing away from the toolbox,’ I say. ‘You’ll create a diversion while I sneak in from behind and steal his cigarette lighter from his toolbox.’
Christopher looks puzzled. ‘What’s a diversion?’
It’s what Slim created in December 1953, after being sentenced to life. In the mattress workshop in Number 2 Division he built up a mountain of mattress fibre and tree cotton and set it alight. The burning mountain of mattress was a diversion for arriving guards who didn’t know whether to attend to the fire or to Boggo Road’s most notorious prisoner, who was already climbing a makeshift ladder towards the workshop’s skylight. Slim’s diversion, however, was his undoing because the fire’s flames rose to the roof where he was bashing out the skylight mesh before severe smoke inhalation saw him plummet five metres to the ground. But the lesson remains: fire makes people panicky as fuck.
‘It’s a distraction,’ I say. ‘See my fist.’
I wave my right fist high and in circles and Christopher’s green eyes follow the fist so dutifully he doesn’t see my left hand reach to his ear and tug his earlobe.
‘Yoink,’ I say.
He smiles, nodding.
‘So what do you need the lighter for?’ Christopher asks.
‘To set fire to that copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting over there by the bookcase.’
‘A diversion?’
‘You learn fast,’ I say. ‘That brain of yours still works fine. A big enough diversion that will make those nurses at the administration desk come over here as I make my triumphant escape out through that entry door they’re always eyeing off.’
‘Where you gonna go?’
‘Places, Christopher,’ I say, nodding. ‘I’m going places.’
Christopher nods.
‘You want to come with me?’ I ask.
Christopher considers the offer for a moment.
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘These retards still think they can save me, so I better stick around here for a bit longer.’
He stands, pulls the drip needle out of the top of his hand that’s connecting him to his metal drip trolley.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
He’s already walking towards the television when he turns his head briefly.
‘Diversion,’ he says.
The television is a standard size and if it was tipped on its side it would reach up to Christopher’s waist. He leans over it and grips the rear side of the television with his left hand and places his right hand at the base and, in one mighty and clean jerk, his wire-thin arms haul the television above his shoulders. The kids lying down on a rainbow-coloured mat on their bellies watching Romper Room stare in confusion and disbelief as Miss Helena inside the television is tilted on a sharp diagonal as Christopher raises the television in teeth-gritting fury.
‘I said I wanted to watch Diff’rent Strokes!’ he screams.
I step slowly backwards towards the administration desk as four nurses rush from there to surround Christopher in a panicked semicircle. One younger nurse pulls the youngest children away from Christopher as a senior nurse approaches him the way a police negotiator might approach a man in a dynamite vest.
‘Christopher . . . put . . . the . . . television . . . down . . . now.’
I’m already at the entry door when Christopher staggers backwards with the television above his head, the television’s power cord pulled tight and about to be reefed from the power point. He’s singing something.
‘Christopher!’ the senior nurse screams.
He’s singing the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes. It’s a song about understanding and inclusion and difference; about how some are born with less than others and more than others at the same time. It’s a song about connection.
He steps back three, four, five steps, like Frankenstein’s monster steps, and he turns his hip for a stronger thrust and he throws the television and gentle Miss Helena smiling inside it straight through the glass of his nearest latched white wood-framed window to an unknown destination. The nurses gasp and Christopher turns back with his arms raised not in a ‘D’ for Diversion but in a ‘V’ for Victory. He screams in triumph and as the nurses crash-tackle him as a group, his gaze somehow finds me at the entry door in all the diversionary madness. He gives a sharp wink with his left eye and the best I can give him back is a full-blooded fist pump before I slip through the door to freedom.
*
Timing, planning, luck, belief. Planning. After Slim had laboriously cut through the wire meshing of the boot shop and then the mattress shop and the carpenters’ shop and the loom shop on that