Bloke, page 10
The fact that I had been charged with things just to keep me and my evidence locked up in the legal system for sufficient time to protect Baras and his business friends was no consolation. Worse things had been done to the innocent. Or nearly innocent.
Finally I was told another lawyer was coming to see me. He was already seated at the table when I was ushered into the room. I sat on the other side but was wary of him. There was something about the way he laid out his papers, something about his sharp scrutiny of me that was unlike any defence lawyer I’d seen. They usually tried to convince you that they were an absolute gem and your case was a soda and they believed every word you said. Well, they had to, or they’d have to swap sides.
This bloke was cool and had an air of self-satisfaction and subterfuge, which he had convinced himself was made invisible by his awesome guile. Which might have been so, had he not been using a Department of Fisheries biro. Well, people do like to pick up other people’s pens, it might have just been the bowerbird thing, but it made me wary.
And so when his line of questioning led in a perfect curve from diving at Nullakarn to the police raid of the Arafura Star I realised that the first ten questions were irrelevant, a smokescreen. He wasn’t asking me to prove my innocence, a lever to get me charged with something as simple as False Tendering of a Maritime Document, he was actually after what I remembered of the incident. Could I describe the police involved, could I describe my crew, did I know his name?
I decided it was better if I didn’t, better to pretend I had only a dim recollection of the times of events and the people involved. At one point he referred to the date and time the police boarded the Arafura Star, which was a few days out on the calendar and seven to eight hours out on the clock, but I said nothing. Several questions later, he asked me something that required me to give him the date and time of the incident, and falteringly I fed him back his own information. Sweat dribbled down the length of my spine. I turned to hide the back of my shirt. Something was up. I was being parcelled.
‘And the fishmeal you imported wasn’t cleared by Customs?’
‘I didn’t import fishmeal.’
‘Two tonnes, the manifest says.’
‘It wasn’t my boat and they wouldn’t let me go below.’
‘But you were the skipper.’
Finally he clicked his pen and pushed a document toward me. ‘Sign this as a record of our interview.’
‘You’re my lawyer,’ I said. ‘I don’t sign anything for my own lawyer, do I?’ I made my voice sound hesitant, quizzical.
He looked at me for a moment, re-evaluating my mental state. ‘No, no, it’s not necessary, but it could be helpful to your case. Support your side of the story. These are serious charges. Perhaps there are people who might be able to help.’ He clicked the pen and placed it on the pad before me.
‘Well, I’ll sign it when it’s typed up then. Type it up and it’ll be easier for me to read. I find handwriting a bit hard.’
He looked at me closely before reaching out to recover the pad. He clicked his pen with barely concealed annoyance.
‘Oh, and as your lawyer I must ask about your previous sentence – murder, wasn’t it?’
‘Manslaughter.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He feigned a review of his notes. ‘Manslaughter. That will of course be withheld from the trial, but as your lawyer,’ (I wished he’d stop saying that) ‘it would be useful for me to know the circumstances.’
‘You’ve got the charge there in your notes.’ I pushed one leaf back to reveal the Department of Corrections letterhead. ‘You’ll read it all there.’
It wasn’t wise to push this smartarse, but I wanted him to know I wasn’t without powers of observation myself. I needed to tread a fine line between pretending to have fallen for his false dating of the police raid but still being smart enough to read upside down. I needed time, and it certainly wasn’t time to sign a confession – or whatever it was he wanted me to agree to.
I was allowed one visitor once a month. She took time off work to drive to Barwon. We were separated by a perspex screen punctured with three holes the size of ten-cent coins. I sat down and touched the screen. She mirrored the gesture.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘La Paz, the holiday, I ruined it.’
‘It’s just a city.’
‘But it was your dream … to travel and …’
‘Jim, I enjoyed the holiday. That’s why I’m here.’
I breathed out and my shoulders slumped in relief. She hadn’t decided I was too much trouble. Just a man. Trouble. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ve been worried you’d —’
‘Don’t worry. Jim, if we can get you out of here we’ll work it out. And …’ her eyes swept the confines of the space, ‘and I think we can make some headway here.’ She looked to the corners of the room and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t need to explain. They’d record everything we said.
‘There’s a requirement in the act which means they have to lay a formal charge or release you,’ she said for the benefit of the recording. ‘It’ll work out, Jim. They won’t get away with it this time.’
‘Your husband, Baras …’
‘What about him?’
‘I’ve been trying to work out why you didn’t tell me how he set up your father.’
‘I didn’t think it mattered. There was more important stuff to worry about.’
‘Did he have something against your dad?’
‘No, they got on all right. No one mattered much to Bruno. Everything was like a game of bluff to him. Other people were like cards.’
‘Well, how come … ?’
‘How come? I was nineteen. Bruno’s no mug. He’d been everywhere, knew everyone, could even talk about art.’ She scanned the room slowly, vaguely, immersed in memory. I watched her closely, searching for a clue to her response to those memories.
‘He knew enough to make good guesses about what would quadruple its price in a year. He didn’t think, he schemed. I thought he was cultured and knew how to live – that’s what I thought – knew how to get out of Nullakarn. Don’t think I’m not embarrassed by it. After all my dreams, to chuck it away like that, just to escape boredom.’
She turned her gaze to her hands, and I stared at the crown of her head, at the point where the hair determines how it will part, that point a mother gazes at when she feeds her child. I should know, I could never take my eyes off women with their children. How they held them. The look that came over their faces.
But even as I stared I was trying to work out her relationship with Baras. Why she hadn’t thought to tell me, why she thought it had no bearing on my circumstances.
‘Baras fixed your father up.’
‘Jim, I told you. I’m embarrassed, about all that, I can hardly …’
‘But I have to know because —’
‘It doesn’t matter, we’ll work out some other way.’
‘But if he’s mixed up in this latest scheme then —’
‘Forget it, Jim, he’s too dangerous to get involved with.’
‘So we pretend he’s not there?’
‘Just let it go, it’s —’
‘But I’m trying to get out of here.’
‘And you think I’m not trying to help you?’
‘It’s not that …’ But the guard judged that our time had elapsed and took her by the elbow.
‘I love you, Giovanna,’ I whispered, but she was already being turned toward the door. I caught her glance, but couldn’t judge whether it was a flash of exasperation aimed at me or the situation.
I couldn’t stop wondering about her and Baras. Her inability to talk about him. Why the marriage had ended.
That insidious thought lingered in my head, like a scorpion under bark. Perhaps I was part of a revenge plan. It was an awful thought and I tried to shake it out. I knew how destructive negative thoughts could be. Not just to us, but to my focus on getting out. The thought of too much time in the gym was bringing me to the edge of panic, and the last thing I could afford in here was panic. But scorpions can hide under bark for weeks.
nine
While I could handle the gym, I had to be careful not to show I believed I was destined for a better fate. Some of the boys were scary. There were a few who’d hold hands and snuggle up, but some of them did it just to suck you in, a prolonged joke to draw comment. And the comment was a trigger they had set as fine as a single strand of hair. Some of the education tutors picked up the tension of these man-taps and went to pieces, nervous wrecks.
This was one of those days. Our latest saviour had failed to show, so we were turned out into the kitchen garden. A pack of cards entertained most of the blokes at a picnic table under the verandah. I looked for a sunny wall out of the wind, and of course Soloman was already there, head tipped back like a black Easter Island statue, eyes closed.
‘Welcome, brother,’ he murmured. As he hardly ever spoke, this was a true welcome.
‘Just getting out of that wind, Soloman. A bit brisk.’
‘Sucks out the sun, bruz.’
We sat like sponges drawing the sun into us, imagining other suns, different walls, women’s thighs. The heat buzzed around my eyes, my breath burred in my nose. Giovanna.
‘That’s a funny name yev got, bruz. Bloke.’
‘That’s what they called me.’
‘Your old man?’
‘Na, I was an orphan. Didn’t know my mum and dad. Hostel said I was Bloke.’
‘Ahh.’ Soloman sat up and looked over at the card players, caught a man’s eye. The man placed his cards face down on the table. The game stopped. Soloman tilted his chin a fraction of an inch and the man came over to us. Shortish, solid fella. Dark.
‘Brother Nugget, this is Bloke. Come from hostel. No parents, na.’
Nugget shook my hand briefly, soft and fluid like the Koories. He went back to his cards, we leant back against the wall.
‘He’s a good fella that Nugget. Clever too. Thought you blokes should know each other … brother.’
The sun fuzzed against our eyes, Soloman’s words buzzed at my ear.
It would have been useful to follow events on the internet, something to keep me occupied, hopeful, but the administration had been receiving unsavoury reports about Ayres. He was slobbering on the screen. We were denied access to the computers while the legality of salivary deposition was considered.
All I was allowed were a dozen books a week – selected by the librarian. Fortunately some things remain true. The trusties can’t be trusted. Library assistants are always privileged inmates but codes of honour are still obeyed.
My first allocation of books were all Westerns written in the fifties and sixties. It was an old custom to pass notes in the pocket at the back of the book and so I slipped in a note to indicate my preference. Next week I got Jack London, Graham Greene and Ion Idriess. Made the tedium bearable.
One day in the rec yard I mentioned my lack of computer access to Soloman. He wasn’t big on technology but he asked me twice about the Act under which I’d been charged and the following week he offered me a cigarette, even though he knew I didn’t smoke. Neither did he. A corner of paper peeped from the top of the pack. I chose a cigarette and lifted the paper with it. All proceeding well except we didn’t have a lighter. I made a show of sticking the cigarette behind my ear. For Ron. We went to great lengths to hide certain transactions from the warders, but most of the time they couldn’t have cared less about the pathetic artifice of our clandestine communications. We did it for our own sakes, to prove we still had some control over our lives.
Nugget pulled up a chair and drew it into the shade of the canvas awning. He rotated a handshake in and around Soloman’s hand, like otters rolling in the sea, and then shook mine, an abbreviated, more formal version. I knew the etiquette. Blackfellas are always in gaol and I’d met plenty.
Soloman pushed the packet of cigarettes toward Nugget and he took one, lit it, offered me the lighter for the smoke I’d forgotten behind my ear. I accepted the lighter and returned it with the cigarette, which he slipped back into the packet.
None of us looked toward the guard and pretended not to be pleased by the seamless cueing of our subterfuge. The little things chew up time, preserve the self.
Nugget smoked with pleasure. We sat in a silence made content by his contentment.
‘Your name, bruz,’ Nugget said as he stubbed the butt, ‘unusual name, na?’ I nodded. ‘My uncle up on Murray, live at Echuca, there.’ He pronounced it Etch-oo-ca, blackfella way. They liked to maintain the difference. ‘Mob up there called Buloke, na. Bit like your name, eh.’ Nugget glanced briefly at my face, meeting my eyes for the first time in the ten weeks I’d known him. ‘Look like you too, bruz.’
I stared at him, but he’d cast his eyes down and was mucking about with the cigarette packet. Soloman said nothing. What? I was thinking. What did he say? He’d looked right at me when he said it. I knew it meant something. But what did he say? I felt dazed, forgetful, confused.
Yard time concluded with a clash of gates and squealing alarms as the security combinations were armed, followed by the boom of a dozen doors opening simultaneously.
My cell was flanked on either side by unoccupied cells, but my nearest neighbours always cranked up the volume on their CD players or TV so I could at least hear something. But mostly it was just noise as I turned the pages of my books.
I avoided novels with the merest hint of romance or erotica. It wasn’t healthy. I was into a bit of Cuban politics and ocean trench exploration. I wanted to know about the orange roughy and the Patagonian toothfish before we destroyed them with purpose-built nets and remorseless GPS, which allowed a net to be dropped fifteen fathoms to within a metre of the last shot nine months previous. I read to stop myself thinking about Giovanna’s body, and her reluctance to discuss Baras, and the past … and whatever it was that Nugget had said.
After an hour I’d calmed myself, placated myself with knowledge, but that night I woke from a dream in which Giovanna was astride me, her nipples just brushing my chest, her hair draped about our faces, and the merest whisper of her pubic hair against my cock. It was intolerable. Quick, where were the technical dimensions of seine nets?
And what was it she’d said to me in the dream? I love you, Jim Buloke. Fuckin Nugget, what was he playing at? ‘Look like you too, bruz.’
I splashed water onto my face at the tiny sink, took off my jocks and poured a cupful on my balls. Worked like a treat – try it some time. I did thirty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, forty bench-presses against the wall, jogged silently on the spot with my hands behind my head for ten minutes. Fuckin Nugget, who does he think he is, destroying a good dream like that? What dream, idiot? Blackfellas have always asked who you were. Wondered about you. Where you were from.
I kept exercising until my muscles started to spasm from lactic acid, and even then my breath came in syllables: bu-loke, bul-oke, bul-oke, bloke, bloke, bl-oke. Of course I’d wondered why people had always made a point of seeking me out, but I’d never let myself think about it; at the age of fourteen I needed another problem like I needed to stay in this room one more day. I had always run away from it like … shit, I’d forgotten the piece of paper Soloman had given me, as if the intrigue of acquiring it was sufficient in itself.
I spread it out on the bed and focused the reading lamp. There were two pages of text reduced to eight-point type and printed on the thin, almost transparent stuff they use to protect colour plates in expensive books.
The Trade Act. I read the entire thing, even though I could see that someone had highlighted a section on the second page. The Act was worded by lawyers for lawyers and was full of ifs and whens and shoulds and excepts, but the highlighted section was right to the point: ‘and within 45 days of arrest the detainee must be charged within the terms, conditions and procedures of Requirement 428: illegal importation of prohibited goods, or if charged with a crime not within the terms of Requirement 428 the 45 days or part thereof shall be considered part of any sentence. Should a charge within the Requirement or of any other nature not be made within the prescribed 45 days the prisoner must be released. If …’ But I’d stopped reading. Forty-five days. I’d been here seventy … seventy-one days.
A man not used to the system might beat his chest and gnash his teeth and rail against an administration which could so easily fly in the face of its own laws and the United Nations Treaty of Hu— But forget it, like pissing into the wind.
I knew that if I could get decent legal representation I was out. Well, not out, but a chance of being out – unless they’d charged me with something else without telling me. But Giovanna knew about the Act, she’d be onto it. So, I was right – unless they passed new laws to thwart unlicensed captains or such like. It was like that in the gym, hopes up and down like a dunny seat. You learnt not to rely on anything outside yourself. The gymnast’s tenacious self-preservation proved its efficacy once again. Uneventful days passed reading and pretending to be fascinated by education programs.
Then I was called into the governor’s office, a procedure so mind-numbingly pretentious it made the teeth ache. At least thirty steel doors to open and close with thirty intercom messages back and forth, plastic cards swiped, fingerprints scanned, numbers registered, and all with ridiculous pomposity. It was supposed to impress the gymnast with the impossibility of escape. And they were right – the tedium would be unbearable.
The abruptness of the Governor’s interview was like … a cup of cold water on the genitals. Television and films always make a big play of oak panelling, the shelves of heavy books upholding the tenets of the law, the kindly demeanour of the governor who would help if he could – which when translated into reality becomes a cynical little shit who treats lives as a traffic cop treats registration stickers. One more number to take down, one more pink slip to stick.
