twelve years. The guards know George and the guards also know the things George carries inside in the false floors beneath his watermelon and rockmelon crates. But of course they’re paid handsomely not to know about these things. Now, like any retail business on the outside, the Christmas season is a nice earning period for traders who care to make a few extra bucks from retail on the inside. George can usually bring in all kinds of gifts at Christmas time. He can smuggle in sex toys and Christmas cakes and jewellery and drugs and lingerie and little Rudolph lights that turn red with a tickle of his nose. He has never, however, through twelve years of successful clink trade, smuggled in a thirteen-year-old boy with a childish lust for adventure and an unshakeable hankering to see his mum on Christmas Day.’
I nod. ‘I guess not,’ I say.
‘When you get caught, Eli – and you will get caught – you do not know George and you do not know anything about George’s fruit truck. You are mute, you understand. You will take a leaf from your brother’s book and shut the fuck up. There will be a total of five trucks making deliveries on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, all with their individual illegal bonus cargo. You can guarantee the screws will try to smuggle you out as quickly and as quietly as you came in. They’re the last ones who want the world knowing a thirteen-year-old boy was found running around the grounds of the Boggo Road women’s prison. If they take it further up the food chain then they’re more fucked than you. Press comes in, then the prison standards crowd comes in, the clink trade collapses and the wife of one of those screws don’t get that special Mixmaster she’s been dreaming about and that screw don’t get his Sunday-morning pancakes and everything else that comes with ’em, you know what I mean?’
‘Do you mean sexual intercourse?’ I ask.
‘Yes, Eli, I mean sexual intercourse.’
He jiggles the rod twice, studies the top of the line like he doesn’t trust it.
‘Another nibble?’ I ask.
He nods, reeling his fishing line in a little more.
He lights a smoke with his head tucked into his chest, cups the smoke from the rain.
‘So, where do I meet him?’ I ask. ‘How will George know who I am?’
Slim blows a drag into the rain. He slips his left hand into the top pocket of a flannelette shirt inside his raincoat. He holds a slip of paper, folded in two.
‘He’ll know you,’ he says.
He holds the slip of paper in his hands, dwells on it.
‘You asked me that day in the hospital about the good and the bad, Eli,’ he says. ‘I been thinkin’ about that. I been thinkin’ about that a good deal. I should have told you then that it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.’
‘But you didn’t always have a choice,’ I say. ‘When you were a kid. You had no choice then. You had to do what you had to do and then you got on a road that gave you no choice.’
‘I always had a choice,’ he says. ‘And you got a choice today, kid. You can take this slip of paper. Or you can breathe. You can step back and breathe, ride on home and tell your old man you’re looking forward to spending time with him on Christmas Day and you ain’t gonna worry any more because you know you can’t do your mum’s time for her, and that’s what you’re doin’, boy, you’re living inside that prison with her and you’re gonna be there for the next two and a half years if you don’t step back for a second and breathe.’
‘I can’t, Slim.’
He nods, reaches his hand out with the slip of paper.
‘Your choice, Eli,’ he says.
The slip of paper peppered by rain. Just a slip of paper. Take the slip of paper. Take it.
‘Are you gonna be angry at me if I take it?’
He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says flatly.
I take the slip of paper. I tuck it in my shorts pocket without even reading what’s written on it. I stare out to sea. Slim stares at me.
‘You can’t see me no more, Eli,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘You can’t keep spending time with an ol’ crook like me, kid,’ he says.