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Everything had two meanings, one for here, here being where he was then, cell D9, 2 Division, Boggo Road Gaol,
Slim’s prison fantasies are becoming mine.
I’m only twelve years old
Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday, the greatest prison escapee who ever lived,
Eli Bell, the boy with the old soul and the adult mind,
Bad Old Days refugees like Mum and August and me, exiled here for the past eight years, hiding out far from the rest of the world, marooned survivors of the great ship hauling Australia’s lower-class shitheap, separated from America and Europe and Jane Seymour by oceans and a darn pretty Great Barrier Reef and another 7000 kilometres of Queensland coastline and then an overpass
Darra is a dream, a stench, a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup filled with prawns, domes of plastic crab meat, pig ears and pig knuckles and pig belly. Darra is a girl washed down a drainpipe, a boy with snot slipping from his nose so ripe it glows on Easter night, a teenage girl stretched across a train track waiting for the express to Central and beyond, a South African man smoking Sudanese weed, a Filipino man injecting Afghani dope next door to a girl from Cambodia sipping milk from Queensland’s Darling Downs. Darra is my quiet sigh, my
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Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and I never understood why Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realised Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence.
says.
‘Most things people say don’t need to be said,’ he says.
Nothing in the room but a volcano-shaped pile of books in the thousands.
a story about some god, or some special guy from a religion different from the wooden cross one we knew, not one where Jesus was the hero, but one that was spoken of in the kinds of places Slim said Indiana Jones liked to visit.
‘Who is the man on the red phone?’ ‘Do you really want to know?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I don’t think you’re ready to know,’ he says. ‘I’m ready to know.’ A long pause in the universe. ‘You just wrote it in the air, didn’t you?’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Please tell me, Gus. Who’s the man on the red phone?’ A long pause in the universe. ‘It’s me, Eli.’
‘I respected the man. If he didn’t do that killin’, then I respect him more still and God rest his soul. I never got no chill down my spine around Slim Halliday. And if he did do that killin’, then he was one hell of a tribute to rehabilitation.’
