“It picked you up that night,” she said, “about ten minutes after the car park camera. The film shows you and another man — it could be Tim — carrying what looks like a rolled-up carpet to the edge of the cliff. You swing it once, twice, three times, then toss it over the ledge.”
I scratched my nose.
“What was it that you threw into the ocean, Chevy?”
I told her it was a picnic rug.
“Why would you throw a picnic rug off a cliff, Chevy?”
Why why why.
“You’d believe I’d throw my best mate off a cliff, but not a picnic rug?”
“Christ, you asked my firm to represent you because you thought we could help you. You asked for me — me, specifically — because you said you could be honest with me. You’ve got to tell me the truth, Chevy. The jury’s going to want a motive.”
I laughed. “I don’t need a motive for throwing a picnic rug off a cliff. It isn’t a crime.”
Jesse was becoming impatient, unprofessional. “What was in the rug?” she asked.
“You,” I said.
I was on the lookout for an Asian, but it was two big Lebs who blocked my way to the yard. One of them was known as the Big Leb, like the Big Banana. He looked like a giant ferroconcrete statue of an Arab. He said, “We heard you knocked our brother.”
Jamie’s name was printed in the paper that morning.
“I never knocked no one,” I said, like a real crim.
They told me I was dead, but I was used to hearing that.
The Big Leb sent his forehead crashing into my nose. He broke a bone and brought tears to my eyes. As I raised my hands to curb the bleeding, the Lion King’s chef’s knife fell out of my shirt. The Big Leb picked it up and hurried off.
Then I saw the Viets, mobbed up and moving toward me.
I ran to the Lion King’s cell.
A big cock is a status symbol in prison, and there’s a thing prisoners do where they sew a marble under their foreskin, to make themselves larger. The Lion King had two marbles, and they must’ve been dobbers. He was examining them like a jeweler, his right eye squinting, as if into a loupe.
“Grouse, ey?” he said.
The Viets had paused at the end of the corridor, unsure whether to follow me.
“Let me in,” I said, “and I’ll work for you.”
The Lion King looked to his cock for guidance.
“What do you mean?” asked Jesse. “Me?”
“Don’t you remember that rug?” I asked, although she obviously didn’t. “It’s the one we used for our picnic in Scarborough that time.”
Jesse’s eyebrows drew together. “What picnic?”
“We had a picnic. You made falafel.”
“I don’t know how to make falafel.”
“Maybe you bought it,” I said.
“I don’t think I ever went on a picnic with you.”
This was why Jesse wasn’t a good lawyer. She got stuck on the details, couldn’t see the bigger story.
“Well, you did,” I said. “And we ate falafel and hummus and vine leaves and olives and pita bread. When the food was finished, we fucked on the rug.”
“We did not,” said Jesse, and put her hand over her mouth.
“Yes you did!” shouted the prisoner in the meeting room next door.
“So I took that rug,” I said to Jesse, “and I rolled everything of you inside it — all your pictures and letters, and the James Baldwin books and the Spearhead CDs, and the shirt you bought me in Bali and the shell necklace and the lamp — and I got Tim to carry them with me to the edge of the cliff and throw them the fuck into the ocean, because it’s been ten years now, Jesse, and I can’t haul them around with me anymore. I’ve got to let you go.”
A tear clouded her eye. I never wanted Jesse to cry.
“So it wasn’t Jamie in the rug?” she asked.
“Of course it wasn’t Jamie,” I said.
My duties to the Lion King were pretty much the same as his cellie’s. Basically, I helped him exercise his privileges. I rolled his cigarettes — and the occasional joint — looked after his cell phone in case we got raided, and answered for him and his cellie at the afternoon muster. In the mornings, his cellie answered for me and the Lion King, and I stood like a sentry at his door, because this was his most vulnerable time, when the wing was almost empty. And yeah, I’m ashamed to say it, but I helped him stand over the new prisoners, and ascertain whether they were black, white, or brindle, before he hit them for protection or invited them into his scumbag Nazi gang.
I’d been in Long Bay for three weeks when Jamie rocked up at the Newtown police station, suntanned and smiling and very, very not dead. He did his charm-the-straight-guy thing. He flattered the cops. He’d been fishing, he said, in the Cocos Islands. He’d just got back and heard the news. The sergeant asked him if he’d caught much. Jamie said he’d caught a bonefish as long as your arm. The way he put it could have sounded like a pass if the sergeant had wanted to take it that way.
The cops called in Jesse, she did her thing, and obviously they dropped the blue because you can’t have a murder when the murder victim’s standing in front of you.
Jesse picked me up and drove me from Long Bay to Sydney Airport.
“So where’s Tim?” she asked.
“Turns out he was fishing with Jamie.” Imagine my surprise.
Jesse seemed angry. “What was this all for, Chevy?”
Even then, when I looked at her, I felt happy and safe, as if nothing could truly go wrong as long as I had Jesse by my side.
“You got your criminal-law experience, didn’t you?” I said. “I’m sorry it didn’t go to court.”
“Are you mad?”
And, you know, I think I did go a little bit crazy when she left me, because I lost two of the four people I loved, and one of the others was already dead.
I was chewing doughy croissants in the crappy SkyTeam Lounge, wearing an outfit I’d bought in the terminal. I had no luggage, and I was traveling on my Laotian passport. My body was at the airport, but my mind was still in jail.
I was imagining the morning routine. The Lion King had sent his cellie down for roll call. It would be his cellie who told the screws he was alive and, an hour later — after he’d bullied and nuzzled the punching bag — it would be his cellie who told them he was dead. It would also be his cellie who was the first suspect. After all, he had form. He’d killed the girl at Moorebank.
It would be days before they thought of me, a squarehead, an innocent, an architect.
I remembered the Lion King’s lazy, startled eyes as I walked into his cell with a razor blade on a toothbrush handle. I’d get no marks for originality, but sometimes you can’t improve on a classic. He jumped off his bunk faster than I would’ve thought possible. When he came up, I caught him with the same hook that had floored Jamie on the CCTV film, but this time neither of us was acting.
I striped the fat cunt like a tiger, the way my half-brother Trent used to cut up Lions back on Tasman Street, La Perouse, where I was born.
Part II
Sex and the City
The Transmutation of Sex
by Leigh Redhead
Parramatta
Every great love affair has its origin story. You know, the thing you tell at couples dinner parties, when people ask: “So, how did you two meet?” And ours is a doozy, although probably a little more R-rated than most.
The day I met Josh my life changed, completely, and the funny thing was that in all my twenty-one years I had never believed in the concept of romantic love, let alone love at first sight. I’d never experienced it, and always thought it was a bullshit scam, laid on by corporations to sell greeting cards and Taylor Swift records. I’d always been kind of cynical, I guess. It started at my country high school where I saw all these smart girls fall for the dumbest boys. Everyone’d be drunk at a party and the guys would tell the chicks lovey-dovey shit — anything to get a blowie or a root — and next Monday the sordid details would be online for the whole school to see; the dude wouldn’t even talk to the girl and she’d be so ashamed she’d either OD dramatically on Panadol or enroll in the Christian college on the other side of town. It was pathetic, and it was never gonna happen to me, although that did leave the problem of how to lose my virginity. By the time I was fourteen masturbation just wasn’t cutting it, and I didn’t like that other girls out there knew something I didn’t, so I set about getting that monkey off my back. There was a history teacher I liked at school, Mr. Simms, and as far as I knew none of the other girls had fucked a teacher, so I figured it would be sort of cool, you know?