gonna wanna hold you.’
I scan the room we’re standing in, stretching, clicking my aching neck back into a functioning place. We’re in a kitchen, part practical cooking space with sweeping metal benches and sinks and drying racks, industrial ovens and stovetops. The entry door to the kitchen is closed and steel roller doors have been pulled down over a service bain-marie with twelve compartments. We’re standing in a kind of storage room space flowing off the kitchen; there’s a roller door on the rear wall of the kitchen which I must have come through.
‘This is your kitchen?’ I ask.
‘No, it’s not my kitchen,’ Bernie says, feigning offence. ‘This is my restaurant, Eli. I call it “Jailbirds”. Well, sometimes I call it “Cell Block Ate”, that’s A-T-E, and sometimes I call it “Bernie’s Bars and Grill”, but mostly I call it “Jailbirds”. Best beef burgundy you’ll find south of the Brisbane River. Shit location for a restaurant, of course, but the staff are friendly and we get a steady stream of about a hundred and fifteen loyal guests every breakfast, lunch and dinner.’
I chuckle at this. She laughs, raising a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh, you gotta stay quiet as a mouse, you hear me?’
I nod.
‘Do you know where my mum is?’
She nods.
‘How is she?’
Bernie stares at me. There’s a tattooed star formation on her left temple.
‘Oh, sweet Eli,’ she says, her hands cupping my chin. ‘Your mum has told us about you. She told us how special you and your brother are. And we all heard how you wuz tryin’ to get here to see your mum but your old man wasn’t havin’ it.’
I shake my head. My eyes catch a box of red apples on the kitchen bench.
‘You hungry?’ Bernie asks.
I nod.
She steps to the apple box, wipes one on her prison pants the way Dennis Lillee shines a cricket ball, throws me the apple.
‘You want me to fix you a sandwich or somethin’?’ she asks.
I shake my head.
‘We got Corn Flakes in here. I think Tanya Foley down in D Block has a box of Froot Loops she had smuggled in. I could rustle up a bowl of Froot Loops for ya.’
I bite into the apple, juicy and crisp. ‘The apple’s great, thanks,’ I say. ‘Can I go see her?’
She sighs, pulls herself up onto the steel kitchen workbench, neatens out her prison shirt.
‘No, Eli, you can’t just go see her,’ she says. ‘You can’t just go see her because, and I don’t know if you’ve worked this out just yet, this is a fuckin’ women’s prison, matey, and it’s not some fuckin’ summer holiday resort where you can just wander on across to B Block and ask the concierge to page your fuckin’ mum. Now, get this straight, you’ve only come this far because Slim begged me to let you come this far and you better start telling me why I should let this crackpot adventure of yours go any further.’
The sound of a choir echoes outside the kitchen.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
A beautiful choir. Angel voices. A Christmas song.
‘That’s the Salvos,’ Bernie says. ‘They’re singin’ up a storm next door in the rec room.’
‘They come every Christmas?’
‘If we’ve been good little elves,’ she says.
The song gets louder, three-part harmonies squeezing through the crack beneath the door to Bernie’s Jailbirds restaurant.
‘What’s that song they’re singing?’
‘You can’t hear it?’
Bernie starts to sing. ‘Sleigh bells ring, are you listening, In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight. Walking in a winter wonderland.’ That song. That fucking song. She slides off the bench, moves closer to me, a dumb look on her face. She sways to me, smiling. Something about her smile is unsettling. There’s madness in Bernie. She’s looking at me but she’s looking through me too. ‘Gone away is the blue bird,’ she sings. ‘Here to stay is the new bird . . .’
There’s a knock on the closed kitchen door.
‘Come in,’ Bernie calls.
A woman in her twenties enters the kitchen. She has blonde tufts of hair at the front of her scalp and blonde tufts of hair at the base of her scalp and the rest of the hair in between has been shaved in a crewcut. Her arms and legs are bone with no meat and her beaming smile to me when she enters the kitchen is the greatest gift I’ve received so far this increasingly unusual Christmas Day. Then her smile fades when she turns to Bernie.
‘She’s not coming out,’ the