It was a steamy Sydney harbour-side evening, a smell of bushfire in the night, the final ferry churning by the point, when the police grabbed me dangling from a balcony.

A peripheral incident, fruit of a minor fallout from romance on the top floor, it proved nonetheless foreplay to resolution of another charge, one that had languished in a computer and now stole into the world, enthused by mention of my name.

The expression of satisfaction, of suspicion reflected on the face of the constable as the page spilt details of indictable marginalia and cash owed nicely deflected my own grimace: a brief, elected stint in the hole forecast...

Relevant data transacted, I was at length dispatched with a soft shove into a large cell, the low whine of metal loping to a punctured clang as, with an impinging taste for the exquisite, I hustled up a phrase of Milan Kundera: in love with his fate he found pomp and beauty in the march to ruin!

COMPANY! boomed the cop, the word walloping unhunched the figure of a man at the back of the cell.

Like a bird’s head whipped from beneath a wing an Aboriginal face materialized, blinked moistly, then exploded in a smile so extravagant I stopped in amazement of it as at my back the door pranged shut with the crack of a bolt shoved in.

His root-dark face beamed. ‘Howya been, brother!’

Perched on a tiered elevation of plastic mattresses, he was slouched against the back of the cell, arms crossed.

‘Newtown, bro, under-ground’s us!’ he gushed with juicy brio, peering like a cranky child who’s had a lucky break. ‘Choicest bugger of a slammer in Sydney... But they let us smoke, someink! Got some baccy?’

‘Sure.’ Easing a pack of Drum from my pocket, I lobbed it to him.

He snatched it from the air with a lightning flick of his wrist, grinning broadly. He then bustled to his feet, from his glut of them assembling a few of the mattresses of which I now stood manifestly in need. Conspicuous in their dead skin of grey plastic, the dimension of a coffin, thickness of a hand in depth, their purpose is to elevate one a few inches from the concrete.

These he embellished with a blanket, indicating the corner adjacent to his.

With the Aboriginal - now poised cross-legged with relish manufacturing cigarettes - ’s indigenous air as incentive, I took my place, reclined in a sitting position against the back wall of the cell. Arranged thus, adorning the grunge, I quietly perused the perimeters of the gravity-well in which I now found myself.

Imagine yourself in a buried, patrolled cube.

Three metres by three, as many up.

Slumped against a cold wall you will note in the opposite corner a concrete object in which is set a metal tray, auditioning as the toilet.

Vanity will dodge it as long as metabolically feasible.

This is to the right of an iron door.

To the left, sunk waist-level into the very wall, is a mysterious aluminium tureen, a bevelled puncture in its lower right side. Impending thirst will presently divulge an apparatus which spurts a toiling, silvery cusp of water upon coercing a tightly-sprung tap, also buried flush in the wall.

Two compact, sickly fluros suffuse the cell with a spurned, liverish light that seems more to laminate than illumine. It is that dead light in which even the most beautiful face is advised to avoid a mirror.

The walls confronting its reach, a carious surface set on concrete, are a chaotic mosaic of dates and names interlaced with dumb, specious puns, tattooed and smeared.

The ceiling, set high to outwit suicide, is strewn with nuggets of masticated newspaper, strips of tabloid gnawed by bored felons then hurled furiously upward where they adhere and set like concrete.

Edging this crusty constellation, the dubious frame of a bitter conceit, a rust-coloured tracery of unguessed substance marked its rims like a stale spray of junkie’s blood.

Fine, a fine; final, confined, coffin...


It was the slender side of a minute before this inspection was interrupted from the Aboriginal’s corner with a nuggety, boomeranged question:

‘What for!?’

Leaning forward with a prying look, he now faced directly toward me, speculating the pedigree of my desperation.

‘Yep: what?’ he repeated.

I was inclined to take my time responding to a question destined to provide little of dramatic interest.

‘Fines...’ I said, adding: ‘Three days.’

‘Fines?’ His eyes squinted in the effort to appreciate so pathetic a word. ‘What’s them for - parkin cars?’ He laughed glutinously. ‘Ordja chucka screamin uie fronnatha copshop like brother Percy someink?’ He seemed to enjoy imagining that to be the case while I recalled the night months previous when the Bondi police breathalized me after a reverse stint down a one-way backstreet in the Dodge.

‘Not quite,’ I answered him. ‘The heist was grog over the limit.’

He wagged his head gravely, and grimaced. ‘Pricks never give a bloke a break for a minute!’ He waved his arms angrily, peering at the floor. Then he seemed, with an electric jolt, to knot himself together, as though at the instant before a crazed leap, and added with fierce heat: ‘Well me, I’m in it up to here!,’ his left fist flying to his jaw in a perilous gesture of pride. ‘Real trouble brother!’ He gloated grimly with a look of bitter, hardwon satisfaction.

As though impressed by a miracle this expression now sped to one that seemed to be its precise opposite: unabridged, radiant joy.

‘But luck’s mine taday! Shoulda gotta few years but for this woman Judge who gave me a break!’ His head ducked forward on its thick neck as his fist came down like a pestle on his knee and his eyes flashed wide as he gaped, as if even he suddenly doubted the truth of so fabulous a fact.

Probably he had been locked in here some deranging span of time. Sitting less than two metres from me, on an acute forward lean, he appeared for a moment insanely tense. That too transpired as I recognised an expression of anticipation, an appetite for collusion awaiting the reaction aroused, presumably, by his confession.

Studying that avid, hungry swirl of a face, I was in brief contemplation of a plausible response when, as though reacting to some high-voltage atmospheric signal perceived by him alone, he sprang to his feet with fierce gestures claiming he had smashed the jaw of a cop:

‘The prick!’ he cried, left fist cleaving the air miraged with the mug of a cop.

Homicide alone beats it for the heat.

Borne forward in the brunt of this ejaculation, traversing an invisible groove through the centre of the cell, his hands whirled and head flashed in the reverberations.

I got the wild data: he lived in Redfern, fatigued autoclave of demoralized Aborigines with momentous women who don’t cringe from sweetening the fray with their own fists:

‘We get trackless in the pub, and there’s fights, beauties! And the cops, there’s one who goes for me each time, the prick! He jabbed me one with his truncheon and I fissioned the bastard!’

His expression was one of fury requited at any price.

I sat silently, revolving my tongue in my mouth. ‘How did they relate to that?’ I finally asked.

‘Crucifixion, brother!’

This time his right fist sizzled the air in an integrity-bolstering, cathartic trajectory toward the bull’s eye of prison.

Closing my eyes, I pressed the lids together tight, as if in an effort to fuse them. A bitter instant of relief ended as they sprang hotly apart, a film of molecules combusting along the rims. The walls gleamed dully like frozen effluence.

Merged once more with my vision, the Aborigine was standing at the door of the cell, which he kicked. This door, set mid-way in a wall half a metre thick, had a grille of three bars across which was slid from the outside a small curtain of iron.

Doubtless, he’ll soon have more to confide, I reflected, and proceeded to roll a cigarette. DEATH IS BEST was printed in what looked like crap on the wall to my left. Beneath it, a cockroach, glued there by its guts.

‘I was a junkie long time bro!’ His words shot fast and sharp into the cell. ‘That’s why I... ended up in so much shit!’

Lighting the cigarette, I glanced up in time to see him evacuate a small incandescent gob of spit which hit the floor with a faint, audible smack. ‘Ya gotta be a thief to be a junkie,’ he elaborated, now with a swift glance in my direction. The silence that followed was poised ingeniously upon its own implication.

Suddenly he hurled his fist at his throat With enough force to slam back his head. Not content with that, he proceeded to throttle himself.
I pressed back against the wall and took a breath.

Ripping the hand away he gaped at me with big eyes:

‘My wife thought I had another woman - she was right! Two grand a week straight up my arm.’

I gazed at him in utter disbelief. Perhaps heroin, I wondered, is mysteriously obliged to materialize in sympathetic collusion with the longing it aroused? For the idea of a Redfern based Aborigine, though he be a thief of fabulous competence, trashing $300 dollars a day on drugs seemed to me categorically inconceivable.

He flung me a brief, black look, calculated to liquidate any potential for doubt I might have possessed.

‘Never rolled grannies for the bread like some bastards!’ he hissed. ‘Stole it good and proper.’

He’d had a real break. One night, God knows where, slinking round the cock-eyed labyrinth, driven by the need to score some smack, he had jemmied his way into a hapless little flat.

His voice veered to a whisper I could scarcely hear...

‘Listen to this - it was a real dive.’ His eyes widened with the import of this detail. ‘Nothing there, just a crusty fridge and clapped-out t.v. with pliers for switching stations. A shoddy little outfit, dirty socks and dishes, filthy buggers! No score so I was on my way out when I saw a stick of buddha thick as my wrist!’ He clenched his fist and flourished a haughty wrist in the air, glistening eyes peering at me to see if I had guessed. I! Few audiences attended with less relish. My features reflected his voracious look with the expression of one harangued by unrelated dreams.

This satisfied him; he would truly amaze me with his remarkable fortunes now! His voice glowed with flagrant, defiant delight.

‘So I shoved it in me pocket - suddenly, I could smell the stuff everywhere!’ he whispered, his expression an unfocused bouquet, hinting at several discrete frequencies of rapture, oily stamens blurred by unmentionable bees.

‘So I slipped into the bedroom - a Gomorrah. What sort of people’s these? Phew! Man, some people!

‘First place I checked was the cupboard; mate, near gagged on the pong! All these clothes were piled on something big: three huge buckets. Grabbed a lid...’

Gauging by the fresh ferment that multi-dimensionalized his face, I gathered I was now the audience of an echo from the single supreme moment of his life. The chronic tale amounted to this: he had blundered on a goldmine, a dark pungent prelude to buckets of cash. Twenty thousand dollars worth of marijuana...

If a junkie ever boasted signals suggesting his leanings were sanctioned, this man was not feeling omitted. He had starred in the conversion of a desperate event into one for which to have been born was a triumph of good fortune, exuding the promise of unimagined paradigms and a sure, sustained, peerless surge on the glorious soft white wings of heroin. His face proclaimed and relived the memory of that epoch-vindicating event...

The fact that he was in jail telling me this apparently had significance only insofar as he had exhausted that particular boon to arrive elsewhere:

‘Things happen!’ he concluded. ‘Life’s the opportunity to exist. Name’s Morris.’

The silence loping in the wake of these confidences once more seemed to inquire significantly of myself. The effluvia of several insignificant miscalculations, barren of desire to remark on my condition, I dodged his hope.

‘You look fit! - for an addict,’ I offered, hoping to flatter him with a flexible but credible conceit. He looked not merely fit but with the vigour of something wild.

‘Fit?’ he said. ‘The stuffs a preservative! Anyways, I’m off now, That woman gave me a break all right, this mornin. Expected a furious fallopian tube. Could of got a few years this time on account o’ em gettin sicka me face. But she’s packin me off to the country to get clean. It’s up to me, she said: could take six months, could take three years. Me, I’ll do it in six...’

He eyed me for a moment.

‘Then, ya know what? I’ll work with them assistin Abbos like me,’ he blurted, the dark gleam of his face focused on mine, coming to a sudden halt in his striding, standing on a slight lean like a spear recently terminated in the earth, still quivering from flight.

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