Bobby Linyette tore my canvas backpack from my shoulders and set it alight. I watched that backpack burning and the fire in my eyes told me, deep down inside, that Bobby Linyette had just upset my plan, largely because inside that backpack were my plans. A whole blue-lined school exercise book filled with all my ideas and carefully crafted strategies written in ink. I had schedules in that pad and diagrams and sketches of grappling hooks and ropes and measurements of walls. The masterpiece of these plans was sketched in pencil across the pad’s central two-page opening, the product of valuable prison intel passed directly to me by the Houdini of Boggo Road. A perfect bird’s-eye-view 2B-pencil blueprint of the grounds and building layout of the Boggo Road Women’s Prison.
‘How could you do something so . . . so . . . violent?’ Poppy Birkbeck asks across her desk.
She dresses like one of the 1960s singers Mum loves. She dresses like Melanie Safka. Her arms are folded across her desk and from her elbows hang the fire-coloured sleeves of a loose dress, part American Indian smoking ceremony leader, part Sunshine Coast hinterland seller of sculptures carved from tree trunks.
‘I mean, this is not the kind of behaviour one displays in the schoolyard,’ she says.
‘I know, Mrs Birkbeck,’ I say sincerely, putting the plan back on track. ‘It’s not schoolyard behaviour. It’s more like something you’d find in a prison yard.’
‘It really is, Eli,’ she says.
And it really was. Straight out of Boggo Road’s Number 1 yard. A simple slice of porridge thuggery. All one needs is a pillowcase, something unbreakable and a breakable kneecap.
I had stolen a pillowcase from the Year 8 Home Economics class at 10 a.m. that morning. We were learning to sew. Most of us boys sewed handkerchiefs. But the real Home Economics stars like Wendy Docker sewed pillowcases adorned with stitched images of Australian fauna. I filled Wendy Docker’s kookaburra pillowcase with two five-kilo weight plates I stole from the sports equipment room during our 11 a.m. Health and Physical Education class.
Shortly after the 12.15 p.m. lunch bell I found Bobby Linyette standing in line at the central quad handball courts scoffing a Chiko roll among his hyena buddies.
I approached Bobby the way my pen pal Alex Bermudez, former Rebels motorcycle gang Queensland sergeant-at-arms, said one should approach the unaware victim in a shiv attack. I knew the words of Alex’s letters like I knew the words to ‘Candles in the Rain’ by Melanie Safka.
You want to be coming at the victim from behind, shove the shiv in as close as you can to the kidneys. They’ll drop like a bag of spuds. The key is to shove the shiv in hard enough to get your point across, but soft enough to avoid a murder charge. A fine balance indeed.
I shuffled quick and hard at Bobby, the pillowcase twisted taut so the five-kilo weights became the head of a cotton kookaburra-embroidered mace, and I swung with force at his right kidney, just above his grey school shorts. His Chiko roll dropped to the ground as he keeled over to his right, collapsing like a crushed can of Pasito with the pain and shock of impact. He had time enough to register my face and time enough for rage blood to fill his own but not time enough to anticipate my follow-up full arm swing blow to his right kneecap. Hard enough to get my point across. Soft enough to avoid expulsion. Bobby hopped on his left foot for two steps, clutching desperately at his busted right kneecap, then he crashed down on his back on the rough skin-grazing bitumen of the handball court’s King square. I stood above him with the pillowcase weights raised above his head and I knew the fury inside me was the only gift my father had given me in a decade.
‘Cuuuuuunnnt!’ I screamed down into his face. Spit was coming from my mouth. The holler was so loud and primal and frightening and mad that Bobby’s friends stood back from us like they were stepping back from a bonfire with a burning can of petrol at its core.
‘Stop it,’ I said.
Bobby was crying now. Bobby was pale and his face was red and reeling so hard away from the pillow weights I thought his head might sink through the handball court.
‘Please stop it,’ I said.
*
Mrs Birkbeck’s office is decorated with painted aluminium animals, a green frog clinging above a filing cabinet