LINES

“Go fuck yourself’ – but as she said it, she knew there would be a trade-off.” muse: nigel simmonds With a stoic sigh of resignation, she descended into the suffocating claustrophobia of the subway, just another molecule in the vast and undulating mass of pinstriped, tailored, monochromatically-clad human flesh migrating from the innermost hub of the sprawling city. The loneliness and anonymity found in this engulfing throng of corporate humanity always astounded her, that she could have her personal space invaded so significantly, that she could feel skin on foreign skin, stray and unassuming limbs brushing sacred curves given only to lovers without her slightest consternation. The snow that peppered her hair and shoulders slowly returned to its liquid form, seeping to her scalp and shoulders, a spontaneous chill before warming against her skin. The blizzard that still raged through the darkened avenues of concrete far above her head had a disquieting air of Armageddon to it. She had left the austere, grey offices of Lyman, Hutz and Pitt law firm with her heartbeat pulsing in her upper chest and throat, its rhythmic throbbing swallowing the sounds of the world as if, with their news, the partners had placed tightly-rolled wads of cotton wool deep into her ears. She had expected it, each word reaching her as if recited from script, but the aftermath had been no less of an affront. How could they, after all the days and months and years she had poured unpaid hours into their gains? How dare they. •  •  •  •  • The train doors opened with a despondent, hydraulic hiss and another twenty passengers tried to wedge themselves into the remaining gaps between the bodies already crammed onto the train. The pointed tip of an elbow dug into her back and she pressed herself further into the mushy folds of the businessman next to her, an involuntary convulsion quivering her nose and upper lip at the familiar wretched stench of stale cigars and too much cognac. Celebratory or commiserative she wondered, and the perplexity of human nature struck her once more. How was it that the very same acts could have such polar purposes? But wasn’t that the nature of addictions, to fill every void they possibly could in life, regardless of reason, their insipid fingers creeping into your soul like pickpockets in the night, finding your weaknesses, silencing your rationale to weave their infectious magic and steal your will? The carriage jerked across a junction-point, passengers swaying with the train, but there could be no concern of losing one’s balance in this tight-knit morass of limbs and bodies. She clicked the remote dangling from her headphones up another few notches, willing the sound to drown out her other senses too, begging the music to stifle the smell, whisk her away from this place and quell the torments of her emotions. •  •  •  •  • “Miss Eve, we can’t help you anymore than we already have. I’m afraid you’ll just have to accept this as the best possible outcome.” Lyman-or-Hutz-or-Pitt’s jowls shook as he dispensed his pathetic excuse, and she knew that, despite his obsequious smile, he just didn’t give a shit. As the lights on the train flickered and the next station appeared in a blur of colour from the subway tunnel’s darkness, she pictured that smug and arrogant face, the skin slowly seeping south like the wax of a melting candle. She had wanted to smack him as hard as she possibly could, reach across that long, wide desk, empty but for the three of them staring back at her from the far side, and belt him with all her might. She imagined the sensation, the sagging skin moulding to the shape of her hand, giving under the impact of her blow, liqueous and devoid of its former elasticity. The train plunged into darkness once more and the hundreds of eyes around her searched for anywhere to look but into each other. She recalled coming into the city as a child, filled with excitement and wonder, smiling into the vacant faces around her. Back then, they would always smile back, succumbing to the innocence of youth, unfettered by the weighty burdens that seem to mount ever more with each passing year. She would cling so tightly to her mother’s hand, terrified that she might be lost to the surging torrent of bodies all around her, and they would emerge in gasping relief, regurgitated by the claustrophobic vaults beneath the city into the bustling street above. She would gaze up at the towering buildings, so contrasting to the one- and two-storey timber houses of her country neighbourhood. Sometimes they would go to galleries, sometimes to the cinema, once even to see a ballet, after which three months of avid dance lessons had slowly petered out in disillusionment. But her favourite places were the toy shops, expansive, exciting, filled with the dreams of a million children just like her. Rarely did she emerge with anything, rarely would she care – it was enough just to see it all. •  •  •  •  • She squeezed her way to the door, stepped from the train and wondered where to go next. She knew that her path lay at the top of the escalator, through the automatic gates, out into the cold once more and to her car and the thirty-minute drive home. That this was her designated route, but it all seemed so empty to her, purposeless. There would be on alarm clock tomorrow morning, there wouldn’t be the shower and breakfast and donning the same staid and conforming outfit devoid of personality. She came to find a hatred for those shining glass doors, the clink of her ring upon the steel handle an ominous sentence, committing her to the déjà vu reality that had become her life. She had longed for her freedom, dreamed of the day she would exit those same shining doors for the very last time, a wide grin of elation upon her face and endless opportunity at her feet. She had craved cathartic release, but not like this. Sitting in her office, she had surreptitiously browsed the internet for yoga retreats, adventure holidays, horse trekking tours in the Andes. She had even Googled images of the nearest public park, anything to give her imagination respite from the four enclosing walls that stole her waking hours six days a week. It was good money, very good, and it was enough for blind eyes to be turned and excuses to be made. His sweaty hand creeping from knee to thigh, his prolonged gaze 30 centimetres below her eyes, the not-so-subtle double entendres laughed off as playful banter. The first time she had been pressed against the back of her office door as it snapped shut behind her and the cigarette-stained fingertips of the senior partner had traced her waistline, the bulging gut concealing the swelling of excitement, she had excused it as misjudged flirtation. When he had rested his hand on her shoulder, nonchalantly sliding it across her collarbone, and inching slowly downward as he pointed out figures on the spreadsheet in the screen in front of them, she had frozen, convincing herself it was an innocent mistake. The groping had become worse, suggestions more frequent, acceptance more prevalent, but the lifestyle had also come with them – the company car, the expensive dinners, the pay rise, the bigger house, mortgage, holidays, wardrobe. Until that day. That day, it had all changed. That day she understood that these were not rewards for a job well done or benefits of her employment, they were payments for his crude desires and she, she was his prostitute. •  •  •  •  • It was still snowing when she emerged into the night, but the wind had dropped almost completely. The world was silent, any noise instantly muffled and muted in the swirling whiteness. She walked to her car, materialising from darkness into the glowing pools cast by the street lights like a stone skipping across a pond in a chain of concentric circles. She knew she wasn’t the only one. She had seen the tear-stained cheeks, witnessed the hurried packing of personal belongings of colleagues soon to be preceded by the word ‘former’, but this hadn’t stopped the loneliness or the isolation. She turned the key in the door of her Mercedes that was soon to be collected by the leasing company, sunk onto the driver’s seat and from nowhere, she found a promise, a vehement affirmation as if she were reciting vows. She probably hadn’t been the first, she certainly wasn’t unique, but she would be the last, and his payments and actions would be returned in kind. •  •  •  •  • He had broken his leg skiing in Aspen at the start of winter, shortly after the first heavy fall when the air is still too warm, thawing the surface, the night’s cold turning snow to ice. She had relished the pain and suffering he must have endured, quietly delighted that it had happened on only the second day of his vacation, wasting countless thousands of dollars. Spiteful glee had turned to gratitude in the hope that, at least for the next four weeks in a cast, his nauseating advances might abate. He had become more demanding in his disability, with a sycophantic mockery that turned her stomach. First it was getting him a coffee, then bringing him books from the shelf at the other side of his office, then a laundry list of stationary that he ticked off one at a time. She began to wonder how long it would be before she was called to the men’s toilets to help him wipe his sagging, pasty ass for him and she gagged at the prospect. For the sixteenth time that day, and she noted it was still before midday, her phone vibrated on her desk with a text. “Come. Need help” was all it said. She sighed, rose from her desk and walked the twenty-one paces to his office. “Ah good,” he said as she appeared in the doorway. “Close the door, I need a little hand with something.” His white leg cast stuck out from behind the desk, causing him to slouch even more and causing him to appear more toadlike than ever. “Come, come,” he ushered, pointing to the floor. She followed his finger to the mottled beige carpet, turning back to him with the expressional equivalent of a shrug. “The paper clip. I dropped it and I can’t get to it.” In the angle of wall and floor next to his desk lay a single blue paperclip looking tragically solitary on the pale brown short-pile carpet. Its numerous siblings lay in a jar upon his desk and yet this single orphan was the only one desired. Squeezing into the constrictive space behind his desk and with no space left in which to manoeuvre, she had no option but to turn her back to him, projecting her posterior towards him to retrieve the coiled piece of metal. She tried to expel the vision of him leering at her toned buttocks behind him, closing her eyes in disdain. And then, drawn up from her deepest dreads, her worst imaginings manifested, she felt the creeping caress of an unknown object brushing her the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. It was as if the room was instantly plunged into a supernatural Arctic chill, a shiver wracking her body, and she froze, like a naked, vulnerable rabbit caught in the apathetic gaze of headlights. The grey rubber tip of his crutch appeared between her legs, its smooth shaft skulking upwards, drawing her conservative, knee-length skirt with it. An eternal moment of nauseating terror gripped her as the cold, brushed aluminium found its objective between her thighs, gently rubbing back and forth as his heavy breath echoed in her ears. Once, twice, three times it stroked her in motions only given in…

“There was a knock at her door; it was Nick Cave.” muse: kirra pendergast Maggie was sick and tired of people taking the piss; specifically, people with flaccid appendages dangling between their legs; more specifically the preened-bearded, wax-haired, fake-spectacled, kitsch-shirted six-foot-one flaccid appendage talking at her from the other side of the reclaimed pallet table at which she sat. “Yah, yah, so I was sitting on this beach in Goa right, and this topless Reiki chick had just totally dialled into me. I mean, right, she was massaging my aura right there on the beach. We were one, right there in that moment, where that guy wrote that Leo movie about a beach and stuff – I forget the name. “So she ohmed, but like properly ohmed yah – like bringing in the sound of the universe right into my soul – and pop: my third eye was wide mahn. And in that moment, I saw it. I mean I could actually feel it in my mouth, I could taste it on my tongue and – get this – I even got brain freeze at the reality of this manifestation that was coming through to me. So yah, here it is: hemp-yah-ice cream. I started my crowdfunder last month and, yah…five figures already.” He snuffed through his nostrils in arrogant self-appreciation and blew some of the beer foam clinging to his moustache across the table. Oh God. Was this really happening? Had literally the entire population of Bondi turned into self-infatuated space cadets? Maggie glanced skeptically at the glass of water in her hand, trying to discern whether the cause of this atrocious experience was in fact a Timothy Leary creation lurking in the local network of pipelines spouting hallucinatory molecules into the digestive tracts of every 30-something silver spooner in the district. “Sounds like frozen compost to me. And by the way, Alex Garland wrote ­The Beach­ on Haad Tien bay, Koh Phangan – that’s Thailand, not fucking India. If you’re going to bullshit, at least get the key facts right, Richard.” Maggie thrust the milk crate-upcycled chair backwards with her black denim-clad calves, nearly fracturing the shins of the guy behind her, causing him to stumble into his friend, caught up in the hysterically baggy gusset of his über-trendy harem pants, that fell below his knees. She swept her jacket from her chair and caught Bullshitter’s freshly-purchase glass of craft beer, spilling the overpriced amber fluid all over his blue plaid pants. ‘Small mercies’, she thought, ‘there goes 27 dollars of liquid pretentiousness’. “Ah, oh – shit,” he stuttered, “like, double-yew tee eff chicky. And yah, like, my name’s Seth, not Richard…” “Yeah? Sorry, you must just look like a Dick to me…” and she paced out into the cold Sydney night, gulping in the chill air as if taking breath for the first time in the last three quarters of an hour. •  •  •  •  • Why Maggie still bothered, she had no idea, she pondered as the coldness of the sand seeped through her jeans, grasping at her buttocks hard enough to make them ache. But she didn’t move. She was enjoying her longneck of disgracefully unfashionable Tooheys beer wrapped in brown paper as she watched the fairy lights of refraction twinkle across the undulating ocean. Their sources, whether street lights or passing cars or shop signs or living room lights of $1,800-a-week apartments, were so mundanely unromantic, yet stolen by the sea and played with by the gentle waves, they became magical, ethereal. She wished she could fall into that ink-black brine, drift like the lights from the mediocre to become extraordinary. She didn’t want to be rich and famous, she just wanted to be…worthwhile – to stop this treading water existence and actually make an impression on the world. She took her iPhone from her pocket and moved down to the water’s edge, clicking on the camera app that allowed low light exposures, and turned her phone upside down, bringing the tiny lens as close to the lapping waves as she dared. The wave clutched at the low hem of her coat, dragging it shorewards before retreating with it, a cold, wet thief wishing to peel it from her back. As the mirror-like sand reflected the striations of multi-coloured lights, she clicked. The wave released its grasp, crept through the canvas of her shoes and curled its cold tendrils around her toes. •  •  •  •  • Hashtag-nocturnalreflections, she typed as she sipped her long black. “Sure, I’d like to have a bit of love in my life, but I’m not going to put up with a fuckwit to get it,” she said, staring at her rippling reflection in the depths of the steaming mug. “I know that Mags, I just think you should drop your standards a bit,” replied the white-blonde-haired barista with barely a square millimetre of natural skin colour remaining on her slender arms. “Yeah, not into the gutter though, hey Rachel!” They laughed again at the thought of last night’s disappointment in male form skulking home in his atrocious beer-soaked pants, the light cotton clinging to him in all the most embarrassing ways and emitting the distinct aromas of a teenage party gone awry. She got down from the bar stool, grabbed her cup, and with a broad smile and beverage salute, she headed into the morning, hoisting her heavy backpack onto one shoulder and skipping across the road to make it to her bus into the city. Taking the two cups of the earphones that hung around her neck, she drew them up to her ears, cocooning herself from the world in sounds only of her own choosing. She loved the solitude it brought her when riding the bus or walking through the streets of the frenetic city. It was as if she was not there at all, viewing her surroundings through a closed circuit monitor, her body a surrogate automaton, oblivious to the jostling bodies that cascaded towards her like an avalanche of flesh and fashion. She used to wear the standard, free-with-the-phone buds, discretely pressing the little white beetles into her ears and re-inserting them every two blocks once they had worked themselves free of their precarious nook and dangled lifelessly from their identical twin, who held on for dear life to save them both. It would scream its tiny voice into the void until Maggie nestled it once more back into its little cave, whispering sensuously into her ear in tones of Robert Smith; ‘whenever I’m alone with you, you make me feel like I am home again.’ These repetitive suicides at the gallows of her diminutive troubadours wasn’t the reason for her relegating them to the bottom drawer of her bedside table. Maggie found that, despite their less than subtle nooses dangling from her ears, unobscured by the long mousey hair she usually tied in a scruffy bundle at the back of her head, people would still invade her sanctuary of sound, asking her for the time, a coffee or her phone number. After one continually persistent wannabe Allen Ginsberg had insisted on invading her private space again and again on one particularly long and arduous ten-minute bus ride, she had alighted early, stepped through the door of the JB Hi-Fi store across the road from the bus stop and asked the first staff member she could distract from their Facebook account for the most glaringly obvious headphones available. “How many decibels are you looking for?” “Enough to hear the music I’m playing – I really don’t care. No, not the lightweight ones – and those in-ear things will be in another small, dark cavity if you don’t listen to me. Headphones – big – shiny.” A raise of one eyebrow, a reaching right hand and not a single other word brought Maggie’s beautiful, chrome intruder-eradicators into her possession and, from that day onwards, she was in overpopulated, suffocatingly crowded, even Boxing Day Sales-bonkers bliss. No one could penetrate her chromium audio shields – fuck the lot of them •  •  •  •  • She was early for the shoot, and it gave her time to check the angles, lighting and most beneficial backdrops through the viewfinder of her Hasselblad 500. She still worked medium format and, though she had bought a digital back for her 30-year-old camera and only occasionally indulged in the inordinate expense of running real film through it, she couldn’t part from the bulky, yet satisfyingly tangible piece of photographic history. She cradled the camera in her left hand, the bulky cube of its body weighing pleasingly heavy in her palm as she adjusted focus and aperture with her right.  The couple arrived, all glee giggles and touchy-feely. Maggie greeted them and discussed the shoot; what they wanted, what she suggested, but mostly that she wanted them to simply be themselves. This was her modus operandi, not to manufacture some beyond natural fabrication of her subjects, but to reflect them only as themselves, and it was this that afforded her a loyal, if select clientele. This, however, was little more than a bill-paying exercise, and Maggie found herself fulfilling formulaic needs in a tragically uninspiring shoot. It epitomised all the glamour, creativity and excitement that people assumed a life as a professional photographer wasn’t. They sat at the Has-Bean café, Maggie’s fifth soy latte of the day slowly cooling and congealing in front of her as she flicked through the images on her MacBook Air, flipping it around for the adoring couple to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and gush over as the cynicism of Maggie’s inner monologue mocked their romance. She wondered how long it would be before he cheated, in heart or mind or body, on his new bride. She’d seen his frequent furtive glances at the overly exposed cleavage of the 20-something waitress, his eyes unsubtly clambering their way up her perfectly toned and unfathomably long legs, his smile at his wife’s most recent remark of infatuation faltering in distraction upon his lips. He was careful to hide these departures of adoration from his betrothed and the victim of his carnal instincts, but to the other thirty pairs of eyes in the café they were a cavalcade of declaration, a full pageant – streamers, marching band, Mardi Gras float, all screaming of his desirous scrutiny. Maggie pictured the ‘late nights at work’, mascara smearing steadily down a rosy cheek toward the phone cradled in a shaking hand as the bride of such a brief time timidly accepted her husband’s feeble excuse. She had found the texts, she had seen the receipts, the truth was abundantly clear and she wondered how many of their friends and his colleagues were privy to his dirty little secret, but she wouldn’t, she couldn’t confront him or admit it. The ensuing divorce would be nasty, her in floods of tears, the bump in her tummy rhythmically nudging her from the inside, begging him for some mercy. He hailing showers of guilt and blame upon her, how it was her fault that he had strayed. And she would be left, five months knocked up, jobless, ejected from the Vaucluse apartment his parents had bought them as a wedding gift, the laughing stock of their social circle and a future unfolding as a welfare mother, struggling to raise a child alone, family in a far-off land and she becoming everything she had always feared – utterly hopeless. Maggie shook herself back to reality, laughing to herself at her subconscious prediction of destruction of this innocent love that had only just begun. •  •  •  •  • “Nick Cave.” Maggie took another sip of her beer. She had succumbed to wearing a dress, but she was damned if she was going to stoop to the level of espresso martinis and margaritas in her ladylike mannerisms. “Hmmm?” she looked up at the man-bunned schmuck who had cornered her in the kitchen. At least, she assumed he was a…

“I reached around and realised immediately that this wasn’t the type of prison I was accustomed to.” muse: matthew leitch I couldn’t understand how it had come to this. In fact, as I stood on the threadbare carpet, my toes feeling the burnt nylon crusts from ancient cigarettes in unknown fingers, and the inexorable weight of hindsight stooping my shoulders and deflating my lungs, I could not believe that, of the myriad possibilities that had been cast at my feet in my first nine days of freedom in half a decade, that this was the one and only unquestionable solution that could be drawn. On the 27th of June, 1998, at 3:14 pm on the kind of day that makes you wish for an excuse and another warm body to curl up with under vibrant, Aztec blankets with something warm and milky, I had felt a sound. That may confuse you, it might even hasten you to irrational conclusions of my oratory abilities, but this sound had been very distinctly felt, not heard. It was of the sort that brings involuntary curses to your lips in realisation of the repercussions yet to be physically witnessed. It was that uniquely distinct crunch of a crashing car, that eerily beautiful tinkle of a shattered pane of glass, a sound so loaded with ominous foreboding that your ears are no longer its most prevalent witnesses and your face scrunches into grimace at its cause. The gavel had sounded off the anvil in resonant finality, but the small disk of wood bolted to the judge’s roost was not what that small wooden hammer had struck. His hand had raised, the blow delivered, my solar plexus the victim, and even now I could feel the bruise it had left. That mallet of fate had shattered everything secure, everything known, everything loved and free in my life, the shards falling to dust, leaving an endless, darkened abyss where once my heart had beat and my soul had sung. I felt my chest implode into nothingness, like the stoved in, painted visage of a fragile china doll, leaving nothing but the boundless emptiness of hollow dreams that would never transpire. That sound that I had felt, the one that was yet to reach my ears or my conscious rationality, would remain with me, echoing onwards through the 1,825 days in which I was absent from the world. She had gone free, stuck to the story, regurgitated it verbatim again and again, to cop, lawyer, judge and jury; she had been drifting off to sleep in the passenger seat, she had woken to the impact and had stayed with the girl with the broken leg until the ambulance arrived, while I remained in the car – in the driver’s seat of the car – in shock. I had told her she shouldn’t have been driving, but she’s headstrong that way, never wishing to be told what to do, condescended to to be told she had drunk too much. She hadn’t been wasted, but our three years together had made her inebriated tells glaringly obvious to me; the slight sneer when she disagreed with something, her increased and passionate gesticulations. To others, these would just appear to be her caught up in the moment and socially excited, but I knew she was a drink away from the onset of sways and slurs, two at best from the arguments, the ire and the tears. I, on the other hand, was deep into one of my occasional protracted abstinences, stone-cold sobriety causing her towering persona to cast me into the inky recesses of her shadow. They were her friends, I was there for moral support, little more than a corsage ready to pick up the pieces at the end of the night. When departure had come, I instinctively opened the passenger door for her, but a defiantly raised eyebrow told a different story, her limelight-bathed ego denying my chivalry. She had hit the girl on a pedestrian crossing at a mercifully slow roll, creeping through the silent streets of our hometown. It was her fault – clean-cut, plain and simple. There was simply no denying it by her, me or even the most robust and factually deviant lawyer, but I will always defend her, as I did then, despite the ramifications that I held in my hand today after that event so many years ago. It was carelessness at worst, a dark street, some overgrown shrubs and a lone pedestrian in the middle of the night. It was not the alcohol, but no breath test, blood test or walking of a chalk line would testify to objective circumstance, only the fumes of red wine that coursed through her body. My last act of heroism, those gestures she detested and felt so belittled by, would be the one she would gratefully receive: I would take the fall. I’d seen enough Hollywood movies and law-based TV shows to know the drill on autopilot. “I was driving,” I said, and wrestled to unfasten my seat belt. “You were half asleep,” as I undid hers. “You woke on the impact. Now repeat it back to me.” “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…” “LILY! We haven’t got time to fuck around. Climb over me and sit in the passenger seat. Now repeat what I say. I was driving…” “I was driving,” “lily – fuck – no, I was driving, not you,” “You were driving,” “Good, and you were half asleep,” “I was half asleep.” She reached her leg into the passenger foot well and I began sliding beneath her. “You woke on the impact,” as I slid my arse into the driver’s seat. “I woke on the impact,” and she thudded against the passenger door as her weight shifted into the seat. “Now go help the girl.” “Now go help…” “No Lily – go and help the girl. Get out of the car and go and help her. She has to see you get out of the passenger’s side so she knows I was driving. She’ll be fine – cuts and bruises. We didn’t hit her hard.” “Jesus Christ, I killed her…” her voice trailed off, timid, meek, in absolute, terrified shock of what she had done. “Lily, no.” I reached across and cupped her face in my hands, my eyes boring into hers, mentally driving our newly fabricated truth into her mind. “I was driving, it was an accident, we didn’t hit her hard. You have to go check on her. You have to be the one who cares for her, the one who shows her kindness and mercy. She has to like you. Tell her I am in shock. Tell her I am sorry, but tell her I was driving.” And to her credit, for pretty much the first time in our entire relationship, she did exactly what I told her. ____________ It is a surreal experience, going to prison. One minute, every cell in your being is hoping and praying, your solicitor is whispering in your ear words that you can’t quite comprehend, the judge is raining down his justice, the whispers of the gallery surround you like breaking waves on a sandy beach, and then – crack. You feel that sound, and everything goes silent, numb. The one mercy of my conviction is that, by the time I was transported, processed and interred in that vast, cement oubliette, the other inmates were behind bars for the night, locked into their pens like rodeo bulls, just waiting for dawn to spring forth in all their fury. As Dumas’ Count and millions more before me must also have experienced, it was the fierce clang of bars on bars, the ramming home of where I was, that brought reality flooding back, an acute awareness of the shit my life had become. I looked down at my dozing cellmate, snorting, and rolling onto his other side to face away from me and the guard’s searching beam. I hope I don’t get raped – I hope I don’t get raped – I hope I don’t get raped. I’ve always got on with people. I’ve also always considered myself socially inept, but I have managed to procure or fabricate a façade, making people like me and forget me in exactly the same moment. I don’t ruffle feathers, I don’t speak loudly, I don’t hold steadfast opinions, and this became my shield, a cloak of invisibility under which I could pass the achingly long minutes of hours of days, of weeks and months and years until I had served her time for her. The things we do for fucking love. Because of my genially beige personality, I got off lightly; a fractured cheekbone in my first week for eating my lunch, which I had apparently agreed to give to Chaz, a 63-year-old with a long, white tobacco-stained goatee who would later become my mate, and three broken metatarsals the first time I refused to suck cock, but that was all. Not that I became the go-to for the inmates’ source of a good time and a quick blow. I held my ground enough for everyone to know that I wouldn’t fall over, but I wasn’t a threat. The six times a blade was held to my throat and I was told to open wide I obliged, and I defy anyone to be in my position to not take what they’re given, but I wasn’t going to do it again. I’m not a big guy and I’m a pussy when it comes to confrontation. Hell, that’s how I’d come to find myself in this position. She would only have to say a few words and I’d back down, let her have her way and avoid the hassle of a conflict. Psychology would be my weapon, and on these dough-brained petty criminals who had been spawned in the sticky, crusty scum layer clinging to the rim of the gene pool, it was all I needed. Four out of the six penises I’d allowed into my mouth belonged to the same guy. Not that he had four of them you understand. If he had, I’m sure is ensuing illustrious career in the porn industry would have prevented him landing himself in this gargantuan shitbox for ripping off businessmen’s Mercedes and BMWs from an underground car park in Queen Street. He was the third, and from that moment, at least for four knee-buckling rendezvous, I was his bitch. As I gulped down the plastic cup of water, the back of my throat still burning, the corners of my lips stinging from over-extension and involuntary tears from gagging still trickling from my eyes, I knew this had to stop. “Frank,” (why are they always called Frank or Bob or one of those names you could never picture parents looking down at their newborn child and saying ‘I know, let’s call him…’) “Ooh, tough girl wants some more action,” Frank retorted to the jeers of his posse. “Ha ha! Frank, we both know you’d kick my arse! Nah man, look, I was just thinking…” Frank’s already wrinkled forehead furrowed further, “eh?” “…well, I feel like we’ve got to know each other pretty well. You know, we’ve got just about as intimate as two straight guys can get. I got you those cigarettes, you got me that whisky for my sore throat. You know, I feel like we’re kind of mates, yeah?” I could see synaptic sparks behind his eyes like the wheel of a gasless lighter yearning for flame. “Eh?” “Well Frank, mates don’t suck their mates’ cocks do they?” And with that Freudian flash of psychological ingenuity I was not only a free man, but more importantly, I was a protected man. The first six months of my incarceration were the hardest, that’s for sure. Looking back at it now, that one tenth of my Sing-Sing sojourn felt like three quarters of my time inside. After those months, I began to…