‘I told you. I still care about her. I thought once Master was out of the way
‘Mate, she’s gone. She mentioned kids.’
‘Yeah, one by Robbins and one by Master. She was on the pill when we were together and she still made me use condoms.’
‘So what happened today?’
‘I… I snapped, I guess. I saw her go to your office. Then I followed you back here and-’
‘You saw her? Are you stalking her?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You’re sick.’
‘I know. Look, I’m sorry I burst in like that. Can I help in any way with what you’re doing for Lorrie?’
‘No.’
‘I could charge you with assault.’
‘You were the trespasser, and no one’s going to say that a bit of a shoulder jolt and a punch in the ribs is excessive force.’
I got up and took the empty mug from his hand. I pulled him to his feet by his tie and walked him out of the room and down the passage to the door. He struggled at the very end but I had a firm grip. I opened the door, pushed him through and slammed it.
I watched him through the peephole. He reached to ring the buzzer and thought better of it. He stood there for a minute or so and then squared his shoulders and marched down the path to the gate. He fumbled for the catch and swore before he managed to get the gate open. Was he sober enough to drive? I really didn’t care. I spiked another mug of coffee with a good slug of scotch and went back upstairs to the computer.
Nine o’clock the next morning found me on the road to the Avonlea complex, forty odd kilometres from the CBD. My computer searches the night before had told me that Bryce O’Connor was a member of a city firm specialising in criminal law. He was a partner along with a McPherson and a Williams-all the Celtic bases nicely covered. The website for Lorraine Master’s firm, LP Consultants, told me very little and didn’t allay my scepticism. About investment consultants I tend to take my cue from a Woody Allen line in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy: ‘I’m an investment adviser. I advise people how to invest their money until it’s all gone.’ Maybe it’s just because I’ve never had any to invest. A couple of stray thoughts crossed my mind as I drove. Was the money Lorraine Master spoke about giving me to splash around in New Caledonia actually hers? And could I believe her about Stewart Master and drugs? What about body builders and steroids, and one thing leading to another?
At least I knew what to expect at Avonlea. Or not quite. The website had said that the Avonlea Correctional Centre housed mainly young offenders between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Stewart Master’s age had been variously given as thirty and thirty-one. Hard to see him squeezing in, except for that ‘mainly’.
For an inner-city liver the Western Highway is a dreary stretch that seems to take you further and further away from what Sydney is all about. A narrow view. Prejudiced. I tried to resist it as I made the drive to Parramatta and beyond, reflecting that this was now the demographic heart of Sydney and an area that held almost as much history as Sydney Cove. Almost. Trouble was, the turn-off to Sunnyholt Road towards Blacktown and Avonlea only reinforced the pessimistic impressions. How could so many car salesmen, mechanics and auto electricians make a living? Surely all these secondhand cars couldn’t be sold and, if so, what happened to them in the long run?
It was hard to arrive at Avonlea in an optimistic frame of mind and I wondered how the lawyers, like O’Connor, coped. How did they feel when they saw the acres of housing estates, one dwelling much the same as another, without privacy or individuality, springing up and being occupied in what was essentially a wasteland? Shut the eyes, enjoy the air conditioning and look forward to lunch. The wooden frames were sprouting like mushrooms on the approach to the prison, as if people couldn’t wait to live there. But the completed houses, fenceless, with struggling gardens and not a tree in sight, told another story. You couldn’t get to anywhere else from here unless you had a car. If you didn’t and you were old, you probably stayed put; if you were young, you probably ‘borrowed’ one.
The Avonlea Correctional Centre announced itself in big letters on a brick pillar one side of a security gate. The pillar on the other side said ‘Young Offenders Program’. I looked the place over from the car park before I approached the gate. At this distance the sprawl of buildings behind a series of fences looked like a cross between a cash-strapped provincial university and a Christian holiday camp. The sky was overcast, keeping the temperature down, and there was a mild breeze. In high summer, low lying as it was, it’d bake like an oven, and in winter the winds would cut you to the bone.
I showed some ID and was buzzed through the first gate. Then I went through another gate and was divested of my mobile phone, ‘Hot item in here, mate,’ the guard said. He put the phone in a locker and handed me the key. No charge. Then this friendly type ushered me along a one hundred metre path further into the prison. We went past an exercise yard where a few inmates were walking, talking and smoking. I wouldn’t have called it exercising. The yard was divided into sections and I had a feeling that the dark skins and the lighter skins were being kept apart.
I showed the pass I’d been given and was admitted to another area where my escort left me. Up a set of steps and into a sterile room divided up into glassed-in cubicles. I submitted my pass and the name of the inmate I wished to see and a guard said he’d be paged. I waited, looking back to the exercise yard where nothing physical seemed to be taking place.
‘Cubicle four, sir,’ the guard in charge announced.
I took a seat in cubicle four. I wasn’t the only visitor. At least three of the other cubicles were occupied, including the one next to me. An intense conversation was being carried on between a youngish woman, a lawyer to judge by the papers she was passing across, and an even younger inmate dressed in the bottle green uniform- tracksuit pants, T-shirt.
A buzzer sounded, a door slid open and a man stepped out and headed towards the cubicle. Almost everything about him surprised me. He wore the greens as if they’d been his own choice. He wasn’t tall, 175 centimetres at most, but he looked as if that was all the height he needed. Lorraine Master had told me he was a body builder, but he had none of the misshapen exaggerations that often go with that tag- the excessive muscularity behind the sloping shoulders, the wide arm carry and the crotch-splitting thighs. This man was all of a compact, well-developed piece. I ruled out steroids. And he looked young. Younger than Lorraine. Almost young enough to be here.
‘Stewart Master.’
We shook.
‘Cliff Hardy.’
‘How is she?’
I studied him. Long term prisoners get a certain look in their eyes, as if they can’t quite focus on the here and now. As if the past, the present and the immediate future are too painful to think about. Master had nothing of that. He was intensely aware of the moment, engaged in it as an actor.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know her well enough to say.’
He nodded. ‘You better fucking keep it that way.’
4
When did you last see your wife?’ I asked Master.
‘Six weeks ago.’
‘Speak to her on the phone?’
‘Just as long, or longer.’
‘How come?’
‘That’s how I want it.’
‘Why?’
‘None of your fucking business.’
