The Contemptuary. David Foster

Even if he speaks of spiritual matters, he does so under the influence of passions. A wise man notices such a one at the first meeting and a pure man smells his stench

       St Isaac of Nineveh

      Dudley Leahy walked all the way from Uluru to Windsor

      Pushing a trolley from IGA to raise money for cancer

      He sent it to an institute the other side of Canberra

      That spent the money then said to Dudley, we still don’t know the answer

      Bottle of steam and a bit of skirt

      Two might kill you but one won’t hurt

      Trevi Fountain here I come

      Zounds: Elizabethan expletive, abbreviation of ‘by God’s wounds’, in reference to the topical wounds doubted by Doubting Thomas, borne by the Christ as a result of crucifixion on Calvary.

      Zounds! Can’t breathe. But now I’m sitting up in a bed so it was a dream. Methought me under a scrum collapse and couldn’t breathe but now I’m sitting up on a mattress, don’t know where I am. You know the feeling, you wake in a strange bed don’t know where you are. I’m sitting on the side of a bed and it’s not my bed at Willochra. I can hear a couple of plovers making a racket somewhere nearby. They are probably outside the gaol in the old St Saviour’s Cemetery.

      Ah yes. Then it comes to me. I am in a cell. I have been locked into an A-wing slot, fully clothed with no pyjamas on. I am long gone like a turkey through the corn, long gone with my long pyjamas on. No.

      In the absence of fire or riot there’s not a lot to do between lock-in and let-go, but three of us were on that night, my first night in Goulburn Gaol following orientation day, my first night on the job. A roster clerk had seen to it. Those were the days. As a baggy, I was there to do as I was told, but also present doing bugger-all was PO One Macintosh, a waddling echidna who’d had to apply to become a two-striper, whereas I got my second stripe as a matter of course after four years. AS in charge of A-wing that night was Laid-Back Lester, always to be found to be in his office seat, feet on desk, reading a form guide. The two seemed less than pleased to see me, even a little surprised. Indeed Lester sent Tosh to check the roster board in the gatehouse.

      Shortly after lock-in Assistant Superintendent Lester took me to a cell, unlocked it, satisfied himself it was still empty and ordered me in. This will do you the world of good, he’d said as he’d shut the door. Grab some shut-eye. It is a tradition in this gaol that every baggy must spend his first night in a slot, the better to understand what he is dealing with (yeah right, try telling that to a spinner). I later learned that no one ever heard of this ‘tradition’, but as I was a baggy, albeit a baggy of forty-two which is a pretty hairy-arsed baggy, I did as I was told till after twelve months on probation I finally received my first stripe, which came as a relief because when inmates see a baggy they will always try on a con.

      I sat on the bed going over the dream.

      At five a.m. Tosh unlocked the door saying ‘Wakey wakey hands off snakey, I need you to lend an assust.’ There was no panic to his Kiwi voice. I followed him as we went to a slot in the Circle end of the upper landing and as we climbed the stairs I glanced at the office where the case files are kept, and I could see Laid-Back Lester in his seat, feet on desk, reading a form guide.

      An open cell had the door on-the-bolt. There was a strong smell of shit. Sitting in this shit, purple in the face with a noose around his neck, was an ithyphallic man. He was barefoot and stark naked. He had shat himself severely. He had barely a whisk of pubic hair but the hair on his head was silver-white, platinum-blond like Max von Sydow’s. He had shit in his hair.

      ‘Take the weight’ said Tosh ‘while I go get the nine uluven.’ Well no he wouldn’t have said that as we didn’t call them nine elevens before nine eleven, but we still had our nine eleven, which is a small twisted cutting implement that cannot be used to slash or stab but is excellent for sharpening pencils, two of which are kept in each wing for the express purpose of cutting through ligatures generally made from pyjama tops.

      ‘Do we have any gloves?’ I asked.

      No. Help yourself to Hep A. As Tosh strolled off, whistling as he went, to find the nine eleven, I supported the inmate’s torso to take the weight off the ligature. He was slumped forward, sitting in his shit between the toilet and the sink, facing the toilet. The noose was attached to the tap in the sink and went from the inmate’s neck to his wrists, which he’d lashed together at the groin, and on to his genitals, behind the balls, to function as a kind of cock ring. He was covered in wounds.

      Fuck, I thought, how good is this? To make matters worse, nothing was being done in accordance with the DIC check list. In the first place, FRO, First Responding Officer, should have been Laid-Back Lester, because for any cell to be opened between the hours of lock-in and let-go requires, for security purposes, the presence of the OIC. Yet here was I, a green baggy, being left alone in a situation that demanded the prompt attention of Justice Health, or if none of their personnel was on duty, and they probably weren’t at that hour, the Goulburn zambucks.

      While I supported the inmate’s armpits I found myself staring, not so much at his tackle, the way the little girls in their prams in the men’s change rooms always do before they stare you square in the eye, but at his hands and feet, as these were somewhat in my face and had lesions the size of a dilated arsehole, one to each foot about the second metatarsal, and back of each hand about the middle metacarpal. Strange looking wounds: in colour they were reddish-black and, as I have sworn on a Good Book to a table of men in black habits, they weren’t bleeding. They were slightly scabbed, somewhat black, symmetrical and clearly deep, but were they healing? This was the question. Did they appear to be healing? They were certainly disappearing, indeed they disappeared as I watched and were naught but rubicund splotches by the time a wheezing Tosh returned with the nine eleven. Were they free from swelling and suppuration? Were they pleasantly scented? Did there appear to be inflammation about the surrounding tissue? The Congregation Superior-General asked me this over and again at my Passionist interrogation, which took place at Passionist Headquarters, Piazza SS. Giovanni e Paolo, close by the Colosseum, as I was to receive in the mail, much to my surprise and delight, a return business-class airfare to Rome in May of 1990, an invitation extended me, I think we may safely assume, as the result of a confidence I’d shared with the Catholic chaplain at the time, a certain Sister Edmund. I’d mentioned to Sister Edmund I’d seen something in the main street of Katoomba that hit me like a fend from Eddy Pettybourne, but we’ll get back to that, Inshallah. Suffice it to say that neither autopsy nor subsequent coronial inquest made any mention of scarification or wounds to the hands and feet, or so I was assured by the men in black. I couldn’t locate the documentation. I must assume the zambucks noted nothing untoward and as Tosh had returned to the wilds of Aotearoa within a month of the incident, I was sole witness. As to a transverse lesion in the region of the fifth to ninth ribs, I hadn’t looked at the inmate’s ribs. But when I took a closer look at the noose around his neck, I saw

      it was made of toilet paper — toilet paper, rolled lengthwise into half-metre strips then pleached into three strands.

      Where there’s a will there’s a noose.

      Do not hurl that toilet roll into the vast blue yonder

      Wipe your arse or neck yourself the choice is yours to ponder

      But should you choose to neck yourself, to foil the First Responder

      Who’ll earn a commendation should he thwart your anaconda

      Just eat up big distend your bowel

      And offer him a chore from hell

      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