Padre Pio

      Author’s Note:

      The novel is a mix of plausible and factual, a piece of fake news.

      The events recounted hereinafter are largely the product of imagination.

      The settings however are actual locations.

      The principal characters are fictitious. Certain of these fictitious characters will share attributes with real-life individuals but identification of these real-life individuals is a challenge to be resisted. We need to reconfigure the real to confect the unreal that is more-than-real. There was no earthquake in Judaea when the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

      Gerda Foster, Loretta Corrigan, Petrus Boekel and Paddy Murray all provided input in one form or another while I too have done time in Wallyworld.

      Take a sip

      They held an open day at the gaol December last that families of staff members might gain a more sympathetic understanding of the working environment their oft-times testy loved ones must endure, of why they so frequently ring in sick whenever there’s a full moon and of why they habitually brace the back door with a foot as they unlock it. Hasn’t been done in decades and I think it a great idea, credit to management as it does entail organization, even a bit of risk. I shouldn’t have done it were I the Senior Assistant Super I was due to become. My youngest daughter Fee, Fiona, who works in the Circle as Screener SAPO, Services and Programs Officer responsible for screening inmates on admission, asked did I want to come along as she was taking Olwyn and Constance, but I said no, not my monkeys, not my circus. Access was via the vehicle gate around four p.m. with one poor girl in the gatehouse, which is electronic, but one door won’t open till a certain interval after another has shut and you need to pass through several doors, incoming and outgoing. A chaplain goes through twelve doors and gates en route to chapel. It would take our Reverend Ruth twenty minutes to get onto the street. There are no little cafes near the Correctional Complex. Quite a show apparently; there was the scumbag armamentarium, our display of confiscated improvised weaponry in the gatehouse, you could see the visitors’ centre where smiles come in in the hairy handbag. Most folk have the idea from watching Foxtel movies that prisoners interact with their visitors through a perspex screen, a box visit. No. While we do have box visits most of our visits are contact and prisoners intermingle with visitors. Dogs can’t sniff out all hairy handbags and strictly speaking we have no authority to strip a woman and make her squat and cough but the threat of a box visit would often bring compliance. That said, female officers baulk at stripping black-clad grannies and fossicking soiled nappies and so we get shrooms and xannies and pink rocks and hash and cell phones in the wings and batteries and chargers. Whilst old lags who would never touch a needle get off their faces on moonshine, brewed from Vegemite, telephone disso, Brasso and aftershave and hidden in laundry detergent bottles, half the population injects using syringes, barrels and picks modified to fit inside the hairy handbag. The salubrious maxim ‘clean fit each hit no shit’ falls by the wayside as inmates share fits with blunt picks. They share tattoo guns fashioned from cassette machine motors and textile shop sewing machine needles using ink made from art class charcoal. Chasers become facultative blasters, given the penalty for a dirty urine; loss of visits, buy-ups, telephone calls, your current classo, is applied irrespective of drug. Boys in blue would prefer all scumbags off their tits on bush buds but the piss-persistent if innocuous cone announces its ignition and so half the prison population has STIs and BBVs, mostly hep C. A few are HIV plus. A good few are in because of dealing and/or clumsy armed robs. The chilly city thus stands in the front-line of Nixon’s War against Drugs.

      There is also a widespread notion we would have a communal mess hall, a commensality where plots are hatched, no: Goulburn inmates chow down in their cells. At open day there were no convicts on display but you could peruse industries, woodwork, the textile shop, though not the distal X-wing demounts, the concrete tennis court, the soothing views of the timbered Cookbundoon range as seen from the oval, the dog squad gave a display by the gym with lots of canine leaps, there was a sausage sizzle, the kids were free to clamber in and out of a meat wagon, but what impressed both Fee and me, was they opened up the wings; not X-wing or the MPU, ‘the Boneyard’ as it houses ‘dogs’, argot for informers, or HRMCC, separate gaols, but Fee said you could walk from office to office the entire bottom landing of the four old wings, built the year they hanged Ned Kelly, that radiate out from the Circle, the roofs of which can be seen over the razor wire and twenty-foot high walls, in the middle distance, across the General Cemetery from Sydney Road, Marys Mount as backdrop. Would you like fries with that? Visitors weren’t free to climb the steps to the upper landings, two in the case of B and C-wing, one in the case of A and D, but look at the ground floor shower block. Forget that cake of soap, an empty cell awaits. Thirteen by seven, nine-foot-six high with a small barred window that only a man nine-foot-three high can see through, in you go now gotcha! Imagine the three-quarter-inch iron door, fitted with what in 1880 was the latest in bolts and keepers, slammed shut and secured with an old brass Jackson lock from Lonnie. Two beds to each slot. Are you sharing your slot with a gronk? That is the fate a recidivist most fears, a gronk being a moron, not to be confused with a ‘chat’, who seldom showers and farts and burps and snores and picks his nose. You couldn’t see or hear them but you knew that they were there as you could read their tags with their names and yards; Leb yard, Koori yard, Aussie Islander, Aussie Asian. Putting a man in a wrong yard is a screw’s worst fear. Each yard accommodates thirty inmates constituting a scumbag platoon. The wing in contrast is company size. Fee says there was lots of shouting initially from upper tiers, enough to impress the girls, and the usual barrage of toilet paper that celebrates any lockdown was finding its way through the bars into the yards. I asked Constance, who’s just turned five, what most impressed her and she said ‘the toilets.’

      Oh they’re good for a smile, the little girls not the toilets. I love the way during baptisms, mostly done two at a time at Sunday’s choral Eucharist, how to celebrate one of the three occasions she’ll see the inside of a church — water on the head, be-wed then dead — a little heathen three-timer will do a twirl in the aisle of the nave as we vastly outnumbered regulars, cranky