front page scoop being pressed in ink. I breathe deep and smell it and I swear I can smell that ink because maybe they’re all on deadline and the presses are already running and I’m gonna be part of that place somehow, some day, I just know it, because why else did Batman with no teeth send me down here, down this very street where The Courier-Mail crime writers return to file their pieces and change the State and change the world? Batman was just a bit player, maybe, but he acted well in the grand production of The Extraordinary and Unexpected Yet Totally Expected Life of Eli Bell. Of course he sent me down here. Of course he did.
A police car passes through the intersection, moving across the road I’m standing on. Two officers. The officer in the passenger seat looks my way. Don’t engage. Don’t engage. But it’s two cops in a police car and I can’t resist engaging. The police officer is eyeballing me now. The police car slows, then continues across the intersection. Run.
*
Slim had been on the run for almost two weeks before he was first reported by a civilian on 9 February 1940. A State-wide manhunt stretched to the New South Wales border and police cars lined roads leading south, where most expected Slim to go. But Slim was heading north when he pulled into a service station in Nundah, in Brisbane’s suburban north, at 3 a.m., to fill up a car he’d stolen from nearby Clayfield. The service station owner, a man named Walter Wildman, was woken by the sound of petrol being pumped from a garage bowser. He promptly and justifiably sprang upon Slim with a loaded double-barrel shotgun.
‘Stand still!’ barked Wildman.
‘You wouldn’t shoot a man, would you?’ Slim reasoned.
‘Yes,’ replied Wildman. ‘I’d blow your brains out.’
This admission naturally prompted Slim to run for the driver’s seat of his stolen car, which in turn prompted Walter Wildman to fire twice at Slim, attempting to blow his brains out but succeeding only in shattering the car’s rear window. Slim sped off towards the Bruce Highway, heading north, as Walter Wildman phoned police to report the car’s numberplate. He got as far as Caboolture, about thirty minutes out of Brisbane, before a police vehicle jumped on his tail, sparking a thrilling car chase through bush side roads and around blind corners and into and out of gullies, which ended with Slim crashing the car through a wire fence. Running into scrub on foot, Slim was quickly surrounded by some thirty detectives from Queensland Police who eventually found him hiding behind a wide tree stump. The police drove Slim back to Boggo Road and threw him back in his cell in Number 2 Division and they slammed the cell door shut and Slim sat back down on his hard prison bed. And he smiled.
‘Why were you smiling?’ I once asked Slim.
‘I established a goal and I achieved it,’ he said. ‘Finally, young Eli, this good-for-nothin’ orphan scumbag you’re lookin’ at had found something he was good at. I realised why the man upstairs made me so fuckin’ tall and lanky. Good for jumpin’ over prison walls.’
*
Train tracks. A train. Bowen Hills train station. The Ipswich line, platform 3. A train pulling in and a set of concrete stairs I sprint down. Maybe fifty concrete steps I’m bounding down, two at a time, one eye on the steps, one eye on the train’s open doors. Then a mistimed step and my right ankle in my right Dunlop KT-26 rolls on the edge of the very last step and I dive face-first onto the rough bitumen of platform 3. My right shoulder cushions most of the impact but my right cheek and ear scrape along the surface like the back tyre of my BMX when I slam the brakes on for a long skid. But those train doors are still open so I lift myself up from the ground and stagger, winded and groggy, towards them as they start closing and I leap for my life and land inside, where three elderly women sharing a four-seat space turn to face me, gasping.
‘Are you all right there?’ asks an old woman holding her handbag with both hands on her lap.
I nod, sucking breath, turning to walk down the train corridor. Small bitumen gravel pebbles are lodged in my face. Air stings the open graze on my cheek. The knuckle that once controlled my missing finger screams for attention.