“Go back to your cell,” I said.
“Don’t tell me what to do, you Laos cunt.” He stamped his feet to send his heart charging.
This is it, I thought.
Prisoners were allowed to make calls from the wall phone by the guardhouse at the entrance to the wing. I knew the screws were listening in, but I wasn’t breaking any law. My call diverted from a fixed line on my desk in the office to an Android in my safe to a satellite phone in a Toyota Land Cruiser.
“It’s me,” I said.
“And me,” he said.
I could hear warmth and waves.
“What’s it like in there?” he asked.
“Like school,” I said. “Except worse. What’re you doing?”
“Fishing.”
“Caught anything?”
“Sweetlip, cod, and mullet,” he said.
“Sounds like a law firm.”
“You should hire them.”
“I already did,” I told him.
He laughed. “Give my regards to Sweetlip. Stay strong. Love you, man.”
“Love you,” I said.
Jesse arrived with a shoulder bag full of papers. There were prisoners talking to their lawyers in the rooms on either side of us, murmurs floating through the walls. Jesse looked into my eye, shot red through the iris and bruised blue around the socket. She raised a hand, as if she were about to touch my cheek, then let it fall into her lap. She was wearing a ring I had never seen before.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I couldn’t think of an intelligent reply.
“Last night a remand prisoner got jabbed in the eye with an infected syringe.” She was telling me as a warning to keep safe.
“Who did it?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know. They never know. In prison, people’re always attacked from behind. Even when they’re stabbed in the face.”
I liked it when Jesse acted world-weary and tough.
“The terrible thing was,” she said, “he was only in here because he couldn’t make bail on a possession charge.”
He could have. He didn’t want to. He came in to do me, then he would have miraculously raised the bail and got out.
“He lost the sight in his right eye, Chevy,” she said.
I was sorry. I genuinely was.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” she promised.
I smiled, although it hurt me to listen to her. Jesse was a beautiful woman and a lovely person. She was, however, a shithouse lawyer.
The Lion King was naked, except for a dirty towel draped over his crotch. His cell smelled of liniment.
“Take off your pants,” he told me.
I looked at his cellie, his biceps built on a construction site, his brow bashed down in a boxing ring. I knew I couldn’t fight him, but I might be able to back out of the cell before he could reach me. Then I felt the warmth of a third man behind me. I stepped to the side, to allow him to come past me, but he stayed in position, blocking my retreat.
“Pants,” said the Lion King, and wiggled his ring finger.
The third man walked into me, knocking me off balance, and closed the cell door.
I thought about screaming.
“Are you deaf as well as Asian?” asked the Lion King. “Drop your fucking pants.”
I felt time slow down, saw my own body from above. “No,” I said.
The Lion King laughed.
The third man grabbed me and I threw him over my hip, like a judoka. Something like that only works for you once in a lifetime. His head smashed against the cell floor.
The Lion King laughed again and clapped like a seal. “The slope does tricks!” he cried.
The third man picked himself up, and wiped blood across his forehead. I knew he’d back up on me later, but he’d look weak if it wasn’t one-on-one.
“Look,” the Lion King said to me, “I just want to see if it’s true. Drop your pants for me, and you’ll walk out of here a virgin.”
I unbuttoned my prison trousers and let them fall. I stepped out of them and turned around.
The Lion King reached out and stabbed my thigh with his finger. “And what the fuck is that?” he asked.
Vasari must’ve seen it when we showered.
“It’s an eco-tower,” I said. “It was designed to incorporate elements of Botany Bay’s maritime heritage. The twin Ts are supposed to mirror the shape of intermodal container-lifting cranes.”
“It’s a fucking Tasman Tigers badge,” said the Lion King.
“Everyone who worked on the building got the same tattoo,” I told him, “the night we won the National Architecture Awards.”
“Take it off.”
“It’s a tattoo,” I said.
His cellie pulled a chef’s knife from his pants and offered it to me, blade first. “Cut the tattoo out,” he said.
I had a visit from Jack Roden QC, man of the people. He arrived in Long Bay with his Zegna suit, acquired ockerisms, and activist credentials. He noticed my limp when I walked in.
“You okay?” he asked, and pointed to my leg.
I didn’t know if I was okay. Probably not.
He said he had come to see me as a mate, not a lawyer.
I told him that was good, because I already had a lawyer.
He hugged me when I went to shake his hand. “You’ve got to dump Jesse, mate.”
I did not reply.
“Eh?” said Roden. “Eh? Eh? Mate.” He was a brave man, but I had never liked him. “You stay with her and you’ll be stuck in here forever.” He wanted to refight the Free the Refugees campaign, the best days of his life.
“I’m not a cause, Jack,” I told him. “I don’t need demonstrations.”
Roden leaned forward, as if to confide in me. “Your mates aren’t going to let you fuck up your life for Jesse. Not again.”
That hurt — the again part.
Roden put on his court face. “When was the last time you saw her before this?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “A year ago. Maybe two.”
“Now she comes in twice a week.”
“Sometimes.”
“And she gets paid — it’s her job — to think about you.” Roden did not conclude his argument. He left it to the jury to decide.
Jesse was wearing her grave face — a cute frown, an angry pout. She had interviewed Mrs. Nassoor over baklava and dates. “She said it was you that told her to report Jamie missing. Why didn’t you report him missing?”
“Do I look like his mother?” I said.
That was a thing Jesse used to say to me, when I left beer bottles on the table, or roaches in the cereal bowl. Do I look like your mother? Yes, you do, a little. But you look more like my brother, that beautiful man. Tim? No, my brother from a different father. Show me a picture? I don’t have one. They’re all in my head.
In truth, there were plenty of photographs, but when I looked at the first it made me remember the last.
Jesse wanted to go through everything again, from the beginning. I sighed, because it seemed like we only ever had one conversation.
“When did you last see Jamie?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Tuesday the sixteenth. In the car park at the New South Wales Golf Club in La Perouse.”
“What time?”
“Maybe half eleven,” I said. “We’d been drinking and the club had closed.”
“Why did you go to the car park? You didn’t drive home.”
“No,” I said. “I left the car there. We went to the car park to wait for a cab.”
“What’re you not telling me?”
“You know what I’m not telling you.”
Maybe she blushed, or maybe I imagined it. “Don’t start that again,” she said. She fingered the golden Buddha on the collar around her throat.