Читать книгу The Contemptuary - David Foster - Страница 10

A who’s who of blue

After a spell at uni in the cold reign of Bob Ellis, and having returned to Grabby where I tried and failed to make the farm a goer, I found myself once more in Sydney, this time way out Matraville way, doing such silly things as entering a disused, teargas-filled tower, there to remove a gas mask and utter my name and rank.

Dudley Leahy cough choke, probationary cough choke officer.

Oh how they laughed.

It was Bill informed me of Mumbles’ impending funeral, old Bill, canon residentiary, retired chalkie much given to quoting from poets like William Cowper in his sermons; that’ll bring the young folk in, Bill, though it makes a pleasant change from C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. Somehow, Bill had learned I was in the gaol when Mumbles was governor. I don’t drink at the Gordon or the Workers Club so don’t keep in touch. Don’t read the Goulburn Penny Post. Bill sings in our miserable excuse for a choir when not required to celebrate, and he only preaches if the sub-dean’s ill or the dean attending a synod. Our choir may well be the world’s worst, but our organ, famously, is one of the best, a splendid Forster and Andrews from 1884, and from a tonal perspective, the Hull-based firm (Hull is other people? Larkin?) was producing its finest instruments between 1870 and 1900. Our building’s architect, Edmund Blacket, had a say in the design of the organ. He was hands on, our Edmund; hand carved, as a piece of scrimshaw, the crucifix that hangs over the pulpit.

The voicing and finishing of our organ ensures we attract the best players, and we recently enjoyed Martin Rein’s rendition of Marcel Dupré’s Variations sur un Noël, with Martin’s wooden dummy work on flute stops between each variation well-nigh Jackie Chan speed. The postlude, or concluding voluntary, is the consolation of the choral Eucharist, as we may expect the likes of Henri Mulet’s Carillon Sortie, or J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Blame it on the organ I’m Anglican, though I do admire sandstone, and St Saviour’s Cathedral Church is white Bundanoon sandstone. In contrast, SS. Peter and Paul down the road, our ex-Catholic Cathedral, is Bungonia greenstone and only has a W. Hill organ. That said, it has the Murphy bell.

Bill needs a hip job for mine; he finds it a struggle to ascend the pulpit. His mic, egged on by a daemon in his trousers pocket, is prone to feed back. He does the service at St Stephan’s Pejar if it’s the fifth Sunday in the month and returns the collection tied in the corner of a two-tone blue handkerchief. As in the manner of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men he came limping down the aisle on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, veering toward the pew it appears he knows I arrogate, without so much as glancing towards me he side-valved ‘See me after the service Dud.’

Always one to avoid me in the greeting of peace, the canon. Never once have I felt the strength of the man’s hand. He just shakes hands with the verger then, from the choir stalls, gives our picayune congregation a generalised wave of benediction.

It would have been the assistant priest alerted Bill to the funeral, but she wasn’t present on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost. Nor did she process in the procession of Stephen Saint and Martyr the following week. Always makes a beeline for me in the greeting of peace though, bless her, and still pulling in that much-needed sixty-seven grand a year paid direct to the diocese. It is she serves as full-time Anglican chaplain at what is at present four gaols, though it has been one and on occasion two. While formerly a place of dark cells and hardwood gags to which the government flogger was still paying visits from Darlinghurst, it today consists in the High Risk Management Correctional Centre, HRMCC, SuperMax; A-wing and the MPU or Multi-Purpose Unit (segro, protection and strict one-out protection); the low-security X-wing and the maximum-security main: four gaols housed within one inexpugnable complex of six wings with twelve yards housing five-hundred-plus malefactors.

Visiting some miscreant for the first time and don’t know which way to turn? Then don’t bother looking for a street sign pointing to ‘Correctional Complex’ because there isn’t one and it can’t be because we’re ashamed of the place when it employs half the district. Reverend Ruth, at present on her annual recycling scrounge for spent Christmas cards, will have done the three-day security awareness course, and the five-day orientation, and the pastoral education course, all run by the CCAC, but I’d be surprised if too many lads feel commoved to consult her. Her main challenge would have been finding someone to explain the computer.

There is one scumbag in for the duration when all he’d wanted was a few smiles, to which as a registered nurse he’d been helping himself. As to the fire he set, which put a few oxygen thieves out of misery, the devil made him do it, or so he told the rozzers. And he’s Anglican.

Isn’t it a shocking thing entirely when the former VC of a university can set fire to a nursing home?

It’s a Messy church, our Anglican Church. One glimpse of the deeply uncharismatic Archbishop of Canterbury tells you that. No Thomas à Becket our Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby. Beckett led an army through Poitiers.

‘Honour Guard’ says your man in the Sam Browne belt, swagger stick a-tuck, ‘Slow March!’ And six screws in navy blue, including a bull dyke and a Filipino, wearing white gloves and black left plastic shoulder bands, march from the car park. They march to the beat of the NSW Department of Corrective Services Band, as represented by a bass drum muffled to produce a lifeless thump, and two snare drums, snares released to create the field drum timbre. A solitary bugler brings up the rear in front of the shiny black Sidney Craig hearse. The bugler is there to sound the Last Post as the coffin retreats behind the curtain. CS bandsmen, despite the uniform, are not as they once were serving prison officers, but rather musos, riff-raff employed at a casual rate of thirty bucks an hour, and will make no attempt to fraternise with such officers as find they cannot fit into the Gothic chapel. Well, it was a chapel once: you can still see the stump of what was a sandstone cross on the ridge over the gable, hasn’t even been angle-ground off square. During the service the drummers seek the shelter of the Cypress pines behind the columbarium. If they’d contemplated a furtive smoke they decide against it. I’d swear as to short-sleeved shirts; as to the kilts, I may have watched too many Bundanoons as Brigadoon, and caution; like Canberra’s Floriade, if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it.

Goulburn was once renowned for music. Our fifteen-piece all-inmate orchestra under the baton of a lifer was a regular feature on radio 2SM during the forties.

Eleven a.m.; the gaol would have been in lockdown had there not been training the previous day, but even so, fifty or sixty two- and three-stripers are present, and many retirees, some in suits, most in leather jackets, though I wore my cream Fair Isle sweater. In a life lagging, twenty-odd years, I made it to Assistant Super, a one-pipper that put me in charge of a wing, but I keep to myself. I never had much to say and I always drink alone, so I made myself unmemorable and that way I survive. Mind you I was forty-two when I became a baggy, 14 July ’86, and the herrenvolk didn’t at first like the cut of my jib, though I’d played tighthead for the Dirty Reds and before that Sydney Uni and my family is well known round Grabby. Took a year before they’d let me hold a set of keys.

Also present in civvies I see many long-term non-custodial staff, most of whom had a soft spot for Mumbles. What would have been, in his day and mine, Welfare and A and OD workers, nowadays designated SAPO’s and Senior SAPO’s and Psyches and MOSPs, and of course today we have a general manager rather than a governor. By the door, receiving commiseration, the family of the deceased and greeting all as they enter, Ron Woodham, only baggy ever made it through to commish. Ron Woodham, forty-six years in the service, retired in 2012 but still serving on the Parole Board. Ron Woodham, who told the Prisons Minister in 2005 ‘My job is to watch your back. My job is to ensure that, as you step down, you will be bruised and not battered.’

That same minister (Hatzistergos) remarked on vacating the portfolio, ‘Anyone could run Corrective Services with Ron Woodham in charge.’

Too true. Say what you will of Ron he took the job seriously. He could recite to you chapter and verse the form of every one of the ten-thousand-odd scumbags housed in the state’s twenty-eight gaols. He was famous for it. He knew Who was Who in the Zoo.

We heard how Mumbles became a baggy three years after Ron, in ‘68. That was the year our A-wing decedent, July ’86, was ordained priest. Though the service was conspicuously secular, a counsellor from the Apostolic Nunciature in Canberra read a message from the Concilium Legionis Mariae, from which we learned Mumbles had been a member of the Dublin-based Legion of Mary, and had done good work for the Legion, though the nature of the work was not specified.

Craig Funerals, who own the hearse and run the Craig’s Hill Crematorium, have a couple of speakers set up outside the now-deconsecrated chapel, but the amp isn’t properly working so we can’t hear all that’s said. We hear enough. We hear the music, selected by Mumbles who died of cancer in the Canberra Hospice; Jailhouse Rock for the note of manly levity, It’s a Wonderful World to bring a tear to the eye, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door from Guns and Roses. I stood apart among the headstones of the Catholic religious who are buried there in their hundreds. I’d never before been to the place, didn’t know it existed. You drive past the gaol towards Tarlo and turn left at the hostelry of Patrick Confoy.

A few one-pippers are glancing my way invitingly but I ignore them. They didn’t have to vote me off the island, friends; I took a powder. Perhaps they imagine I’m a former inmate planning a disturbance. Built like Brad Thorn, Mumbles; six-foot-six, nineteen stone and a bit of a short fuse. Give an Islander Yard gaffer pause, the prospect of a blue with Mumbles. Mumbles began working life, as we heard from Ron, as a mechanic in Barry. No little Australian boy dreams of becoming a screw. Some of us are former jumbo pilots, some master mariners, some butchers, some graziers, all lured by the prospect of steady pay for doing bugger-all with untold overtime. In the early noughties you could pull a six-figure annual wage at Long Bay.

Whereas today, when they lock down X-wing, they leave it unattended overnight.

In his final posting Mumbles departed to become a desk jockey, assistant commish, while I stayed on until the DIC witnessed on my first night overwhelmed me. It took a while.

It may have been suspected I was a dog breeder. In his retirement Mumbles devoted himself to the breeding of dogs, and we heard from Ron how he wouldn’t just sell a dog to anyone: you had to satisfy him that you were a fit and proper person to own a dog. A young female two-striper had a Neapolitan mastiff on a short leash, which in due course entered the ex-chapel to pay its last respects to its breeder.

I got on well with Mumbles. We shared some hard times but we also shared a liking for the phrase ‘these cuffs are too tight’. Back in the late eighties before CCTV, we had twenty-five deaths — murders, suicides, ODs — within the space of two years, and you should see the paperwork for any Death in Custody. It is big.

To cite one instance; a young man, who’d OD’d on ’done and benzos, acquiring his benzos presumably via the hairy handbag, wasn’t on the MMT. So someone who was had regurgitated methadone syrup in payment of a favour and does it taste foul, but off the ’done, out of gaol, back to using, back to gaol: the well-worn path. Mumbles didn’t leave the district when he retired as governors usually do. A former inmate of my acquaintance was astounded to encounter him in a Woolworths’ aisle. ‘Hello Mr Sheehan’ says the ex-inmate. ‘Call me Mumbles,’ mumbles Mumbles.

Son of Man can these ashes arise, can these ashes live again?

Then prophesy upon these ashes and say, O ye dry ashes when

Ye took a turn in the cinerary urn, Hold on says Ezekiel

Thy Word has not been heard since fire pulverized the bone

So when the last trump sounds I fear

Nary a cupboard door may stir