Pythian Games

I have chronic fatigue.  Earlier this week I had to a Govt. Agency and get assessed for disability payments.  For over an hour I was grilled by a severe looking woman in a navy blue uniform.  She asked me all kinds of inquisitory and seemingly irrelevant questions. ‘Have you ever been to prison?’ she demanded at one point.  ‘No’, I answered in surprise wondering what prison had to do with chronic fatigue.

Days later I realised I should have answered yes, I have been to prison.  I went there one sunny Sunday with a girl who liked to save souls.  It was decades ago.  We went there to see a young guy she knew who was in Remand awaiting trial.

We rattled out to the prison on a Melbourne tram.  It was only a couple of suburbs on from our inner city share house.  As we travelled the girl filled me in.  Hamish, the guy we were going to see, had been hitchhiking through the countryside with some girl.  After a few days on the road they were hungry and dirty.  They came across a farmhouse where there was no one home.  After breaking in they ate what they could find, showered and sat down to watch TV.  The farmer and his family came home, found them and rang the police.  Hamish and the girl were arrested.  The girl was sent off to face her own fate somewhere outside of this story and Hamish was sent to the Remand Centre at Pentridge Prison in Melbourne.Apart from the fact that Hamish sounded like the most unlikely name for a prisoner I had ever heard I had trouble dealing with his crime.  It sounded incredible.  Unbelievable.

Once we got the prison we joined the queue outside. Women who looked like gangsters molls from B Grade movies smoked cigarettes.  Whole families of overweight people clustered round each other talking loudly.  The children ate potato chips and chocolate bars.  Above us towered the bluestone walls of the prison.  At intervals watch towers topped the walls.  Motionless men carrying rifles stared down into the prison.  At the base of the wall red flowered geraniums grew.

After an age of waiting a vast wooden door swung open and we filed in.  The girl who liked to save souls talked to a guard and we were directed to the Remand Centre.  After crossing a courtyard surrounded by windowless walls we entered a sun filled room where the families sat on shabby couches, their voices subdued.  Again we waited.

Eventually our names were called.  We were given a number then ushered into a chill, sunless, cavernous place.  We walked past a row of booths until we found the one that tallied with our number.  Hamish was led in by a warden and stood facing us on the other side of a glass panel.  He was really young and really small.  He shook from head to foot.  He and the girl liked to save souls talked to each other through Bakelite mouth pieces that looked like they had been recycled from antique telephones.  They discussed Hamish’s options.

It turned out Hamish’s father was a hotshot lawyer in Sydney.  ‘You must write to him,’ said the girl.  Hamish replied that he had and his father had written back  saying that he deserved to be punished.  For the remainder of our visiting time the girl tried to convince Hamish to write to his father again.  I smiled in what I hoped was an encouraging way whenever Hamish looked at me.  Although I could see his father’s point of view I felt for the quivering mess in front of me.  He was so young and so small and the prison was so huge and so cold.  When the warden returned to take him back to his cell, Hamish gave us both a forlorn, flickering attempt at a smile.

Weeks later Hamish turned up on the doorstep of our share house.  He had contacted his father again who relented and got him legal assistance which got him off the hook.  Hamish slept on our lounge room floor for a few nights then disappeared back to Sydney.  Shortly afterwards the girl who liked to save souls joined a cult.  I never saw her or Hamish again.  I never went to prison again either.