The screws at Long Bay weren’t at all like the friendly folks in Muswellbrook. The cell measured mere two by three and half meters. I was considered low risk and given the job as sweeper. It wasn’t easy and the nights were long and boring. I swore never to do anything like crime again. Un-expectedly, a  screw called ‘Punchy’  cracked me one below the belt which made me double over, racked with a busted bladder for which they gave me a couple of aspirins. A doctor was only called two days after when I was sick with fever… The fever became so bad I was put in hospital but that screw stayed on smirking as ever. It was a hostile place. The radio was centrally controlled and blaring out loud all day with ads waxing on about Cadbury chocolate bars together with 43 beans in Nescafe… The food was terrible and the mutton routinely wriggled with pale looking maggots that one just learnt to brush off. What have you done Frankie? How did you come to this? Bloody Ernie. He never told me he had a pistol.

Kelly and bra straps

Kelly’s lovely kiss and her bra straps kept me going as much as ‘going’ was possible. Geez, how the time crawled. My only relief was writing letters to mum, dad, and Kelly. My dear mum had tucked the bible and book of psalms inside my little suitcase, no doubt worried sick of whom else I would get mixed up with inside those forbidden brick walls. Her visits were sporadic. It’s not so easy to travel up and down from Muswellbrook. ‘Your dad is too busy with your brother’s health, has to keep massaging him to keep his muscles going”, she said each time. My brother was eleven now and his bones growing bigger but his muscles were not corresponding, keeping up. Tests were being done in Sydney but she had forgotten the complicated name. Something to do with wasting muscles,  dystrophy or something like that, she added crying, her tears soaked up by  her Aunt Bellum’s embroidered hanky on the little table behind the screen that separated us…’”He sometimes has trouble walking up to his bedroom”’. “‘He keeps buckling over”’ and Aunt Bellum reckons that in her family some boys had had the same disease, eventually dying from it. “Women can’t get it, only boys, but we carry it over”, she was sobbing now. I was starting to see the reason why Aunty Bellum never got married and her always worrying about me. I remembered her saying about girls, ’be careful not to get taken’. Was she considering that I could succumb to the same disease that my brother had inherited?

Kelly’s letters became a life-line that kept me from losing the will to keep going. The Long Bay ambience was getting to me. ‘Punchie’ was still creeping around with his fondness for unexpectedly knocking blokes out in the one expert punch, when no-one was looking.  I stayed away as much as possible, with my broom at the ready, just in case! (to be continued)