Nine o’clock the next morning found me on the road to the Avonlea complex, forty odd kilometres from the CBD. My computer searches the night before had told me that Bryce O’Connor was a member of a city firm specialising in criminal law. He was a partner along with a McPherson and a Williams-all the Celtic bases nicely covered. The website for Lorraine Master’s firm, LP Consultants, told me very little and didn’t allay my scepticism. About investment consultants I tend to take my cue from a Woody Allen line in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy: ‘I’m an investment adviser. I advise people how to invest their money until it’s all gone.’ Maybe it’s just because I’ve never had any to invest. A couple of stray thoughts crossed my mind as I drove. Was the money Lorraine Master spoke about giving me to splash around in New Caledonia actually hers? And could I believe her about Stewart Master and drugs? What about body builders and steroids, and one thing leading to another?
At least I knew what to expect at Avonlea. Or not quite. The website had said that the Avonlea Correctional Centre housed mainly young offenders between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Stewart Master’s age had been variously given as thirty and thirty-one. Hard to see him squeezing in, except for that ‘mainly’.
For an inner-city liver the Western Highway is a dreary stretch that seems to take you further and further away from what Sydney is all about. A narrow view. Prejudiced. I tried to resist it as I made the drive to Parramatta and beyond, reflecting that this was now the demographic heart of Sydney and an area that held almost as much history as Sydney Cove. Almost. Trouble was, the turn-off to Sunnyholt Road towards Blacktown and Avonlea only reinforced the pessimistic impressions. How could so many car salesmen, mechanics and auto electricians make a living? Surely all these secondhand cars couldn’t be sold and, if so, what happened to them in the long run?
It was hard to arrive at Avonlea in an optimistic frame of mind and I wondered how the lawyers, like O’Connor, coped. How did they feel when they saw the acres of housing estates, one dwelling much the same as another, without privacy or individuality, springing up and being occupied in what was essentially a wasteland? Shut the eyes, enjoy the air conditioning and look forward to lunch. The wooden frames were sprouting like mushrooms on the approach to the prison, as if people couldn’t wait to live there. But the completed houses, fenceless, with struggling gardens and not a tree in sight, told another story. You couldn’t get to anywhere else from here unless you had a car. If you didn’t and you were old, you probably stayed put; if you were young, you probably ‘borrowed’ one.
The Avonlea Correctional Centre announced itself in big letters on a brick pillar one side of a security gate. The pillar on the other side said ‘Young Offenders Program’. I looked the place over from the car park before I approached the gate. At this distance the sprawl of buildings behind a series of fences looked like a cross between a cash-strapped provincial university and a Christian holiday camp. The sky was overcast, keeping the temperature down, and there was a mild breeze. In high summer, low lying as it was, it’d bake like an oven, and in winter the winds would cut you to the bone.
I showed some ID and was buzzed through the first gate. Then I went through another gate and was divested of my mobile phone, ‘Hot item in here, mate,’ the guard said. He put the phone in a locker and handed me the key. No charge. Then this friendly type ushered me along a one hundred metre path further into the prison. We went past an exercise yard where a few inmates were walking, talking and smoking. I wouldn’t have called it exercising. The yard was divided into sections and I had a feeling that the dark skins and the lighter skins were being kept apart.
I showed the pass I’d been given and was admitted to another area where my escort left me. Up a set of steps and into a sterile room divided up into glassed-in cubicles. I submitted my pass and the name of the inmate I wished to see and a guard said he’d be paged. I waited, looking back to the exercise yard where nothing physical seemed to be taking place.
‘Cubicle four, sir,’ the guard in charge announced.
I took a seat in cubicle four. I wasn’t the only visitor. At least three of the other cubicles were occupied, including the one next to me. An intense conversation was being carried on between a youngish woman, a lawyer to judge by the papers she was passing across, and an even younger inmate dressed in the bottle green uniform-tracksuit pants, T-shirt.
A buzzer sounded, a door slid open and a man stepped out and headed towards the cubicle. Almost everything about him surprised me. He wore the greens as if they’d been his own choice. He wasn’t tall, 175 centimetres at most, but he looked as if that was all the height he needed. Lorraine Master had told me he was a body builder, but he had none of the misshapen exaggerations that often go with that tag- the excessive muscularity behind the sloping shoulders, the wide arm carry and the crotch-splitting thighs. This man was all of a compact, well-developed piece. I ruled out steroids. And he looked young. Younger than Lorraine. Almost young enough to be here.
‘Stewart Master.’
We shook.
‘Cliff Hardy.’
‘How is she?’
I studied him. Long term prisoners get a certain look in their eyes, as if they can’t quite focus on the here and now. As if the past, the present and the immediate future are too painful to think about. Master had nothing of that. He was intensely aware of the moment, engaged in it as an actor.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know her well enough to say.’
He nodded. ‘You better fucking keep it that way.’
4
When did you last see your wife?’ I asked Master.
‘Six weeks ago.’
‘Speak to her on the phone?’
‘Just as long, or longer.’
‘How come?’
‘That’s how I want it.’
‘Why?’
‘None of your fucking business.’
‘She’s making it my business.’
‘She’s wasting her money then.’
‘You mean you’re guilty.’
‘No, I mean the only thing worth spending money on is a lawyer-get the sentence reduced, get parole, get me moved somewhere else. That sort of thing.’
‘You knew your wife sent me. How?’
‘She told O’Connor. He advised her against it but she went ahead. That’s what she’s like. She does what she thinks best. Usually it is.’
‘Like marrying you?’
‘Fuck you.’ He started to get up.
I said: ‘Your mates and your playground-Reg Penny, Gabriel Rosito, Rory McCloud, Jarrod Montefiore, Le Saint Hubert, the Salon de Fun.’
He sat down with a bump. The guard by the door had moved as Master had half risen, now he settled back down. ‘Where did you get all that?’
‘From your wife. Where else? Did one of them set you up?’
He shrugged. ‘One of ‘em. All of ‘em. Who knows?’
‘I’m going there to ask around. Are you going to help me?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you want to get out of here?’
‘I’ll get out.’
‘In ten years.’
‘I told you, we’re working on that.’
‘I can’t fathom you, Master. You don’t look stupid. Don’t tell me you’re thinking of escaping.’
‘Don’t you be stupid. If I was, would I tell you?’
‘Why did you agree to see me?’
‘I just wanted to see what sort of a dickhead you were and to warn you to keep your distance from Lorrie.’
I studied him and thought I saw something behind the tough exterior. It’s a look you see in lonely people, a neediness behind the defensive shell. I pushed my chair back. ‘Well, you’ve done that. You can rot in here for all I care, but I’ll take the job and see if I can give satisfaction.’