Crimwife (16 page)

I was also called into my supervisor’s office. “What is taking place between you and that inmate?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t want a part of this. I don’t like lies or deception.

“You seem to be spending too much time with him. There have been reports coming in from all over the jail.” My plan to be ordinary had failed spectacularly.

“Well, I don’t know why that is. They can’t be saying anything, because there’s nothing to say.”

“Well, I’m telling you now not to have anything to do with him.”

“OK, no problem.” I left her office struggling to appear baffled about why the meeting had taken place.

Jimmy and I had one unsupervised encounter in Parramatta jail. We arranged to meet in the chapel, then sat in the pews and talked. I was petrified and he was, as always, too cool for school. We shared about fifteen minutes, the only time alone we would have for years. Nothing happened of note. I was talking with him to find out, as best I could, what the hell I’d got myself into.

The letters continued. Louis was our courier, and he was clued in to what was going on. As sophisticated as his national operation was, Louis was an easygoing and non-violent man. He asked in return that I contact his wife, tell her that he loved her and send her a red rose. It was the least I could do.

I wrote some letters back, but they were vaguely worded, and I tried to disguise my handwriting. If I’d typed them on my computer, I would run the risk of the computer becoming evidence, if this went wrong.

About a week after we had been warned to stay away from each other, I arrived as usual at the jail and went through the doors leading into the first zone before the Coach House. The sweeper, who was there each morning mopping the entrance, followed me through.

“Your mate’s in there,” he muttered in my direction and went back to his work. Until that instant, I hadn’t known he knew anything, and I still don’t know why he tipped me off, since his words sounded full of contempt. I looked over at the holding cells, which I’d never paid much attention to before. One of them was holding Jimmy.

“I’ve pissed someone off,” he said. I went over to speak to him, standing a demonstrable distance from the front of the cell. He was smiling and moving from foot to foot like a fighter warming up.

“What does this mean?” I asked him.

“I’m getting tipped. I’m out of here. You can’t smoke in here. They didn’t tell me that part.”

“Well, you’d better let us know if you need your file sent through.” I turned to leave.

A reception officer came out. “The dep’s sent down papers that you’re not to have contact with that inmate,” he said.

What had they been told? “That’s fine,” I said and kept walking to the gate, behind which lay the relative safety of my office – or so I thought.

A few days later, an inmate on my caseload, Jasper, struck up another unexpected conversation. We had been working on his rehab application, which was one of his bail conditions, and he had made frequent brief visits to my office to drop off more documentation as he got it. Out of the blue, he announced that there were other wars being waged.

“Tanya, I don’t want you to worry about what’s going on,” he started. I mustered up some faux curiosity.

“We know what they’re up to and it’s OK. We’ve got you covered. I’ve got five blokes ready to punch on for you, if need be.”

“OK,” I said. The plot was thickening like quicksand. These were battles that I hadn’t started.

“We think the library sweeper is a spy, but that’s OK.”

“Really? But he’s so well-mannered.”

Jasper rolled his eyes. “Yeah, he’s perfect. But don’t worry, if he tries anything, we’ll smash him.”

“But I don’t want him smashed.”

“Well, if he’s a dog he’s gonna get smashed,” said Jasper. “We’ll check it out later on.”

The charade was only getting more serious and it was tiring. Jimmy had been sent to the remand centre at Silverwater and had asked anyone he could to get their girl to ring his girl. So at home I began to receive long drawled messages from strangers – Methadonians in the afternoon, mostly – asking me to visit Jimmy. His thinking worried me. He knew I couldn’t go near him while I was still working for the department, but he said there was no harm in trying. Was he naïve? Delusional? Bored?

Jasper coached me over the next few weeks. “You mustn’t say or do anything in here,” he instructed. “There could be any kind of bugs or cameras. You don’t know what they might be capable of. You need to be smart. We can only cover your back on the ground, if you know what I mean.”

I knew what he meant and I was grateful to him. To this day I have no idea why he appointed himself my bodyguard, or whether what he reported from the yard was true. Years later, Jimmy called me up and told me that he had started training with a top bloke called Jasper. When I confirmed that it was the same Jasper, I burst into tears. In the weeks until I resigned, after Jimmy was moved to Silverwater, Jasper was the only guide I had as to whether or not everything was going to come crashing down.

But it didn’t. My supervisor informed me that my twelve months’ probation was due to be reviewed. There were going to be questions about inappropriate contact with an inmate, and I would more likely have to show cause why I shouldn’t be terminated. I told her I understood, persevering with the nothing-to-hide attitude.

Head hung low, I met with the union. They organised a meeting with the assistant commissioner to discuss the allegations and the evidence, or lack thereof, to support them.

On a cold, dark, wet winter afternoon, just over a year after the first cold winter morning at Mulawa, the union official and I met with the assistant commissioner to discuss my continued employment. I asked what was on my personnel file. He said that it was clear, as nothing had been proven. He told me I was free to apply for other roles in Corrective Services in the future, but that perhaps the Drugs and Alcohol role should not be my first choice. We agreed that I could go quietly, and I tendered my resignation.

Leaving the big building that administrates the parallel universe, I felt a surprising level of relief. Damage control had been my main motivation of late, but as we walked up the rainy city streets, the weight of Corrective Services, with its plethora of unwinnable games, melted off me and ran down the gutters into the drains, flowing away with the rainwater. It was so good to be free of the enormous responsibilities and I told the union rep so. The jail paid well, but not well enough to be able to get in trouble as quickly as I had.

“That’s good,” she said, “and now you’re also free to visit Jimmy.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to me; I had been so focused on avoiding prosecution. Clearly, I was now out of the frying pan, and she found it credible to jump into the fire. I figured she was right, and I might as well, since I’d gone through all of this.

The next day I booked three visits at the Silverwater remand centre.

Emma was a good kid. She’d entered high school feeling the same as her friends: feisty and full of purpose. Emma was going to be a nurse. She’d decided she would study after school was finished and then travel the world. She hadn’t planned where, exactly, but she was looking forward to the adventure.

Emma’s friends were important to her. Her home life was happy enough, but boring. Her father had left her mother when her mum was pregnant, and had always denied her existence. The man she called Dad was the father of her brother Joe. Joe was three years younger than Emma and boring, too, as well as spoilt. They didn’t fight, but they didn’t hang out together either.

So Emma loved going to school. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, Emma went to see her friends and scheme teenage schemes. Her school marks were average, but good enough to keep her teachers and parents happy, which ensured more time for her social life.

At home, Emma says, she was ever the dutiful daughter, helping with housework and doing her homework. Both her parents worked and Emma cooked dinner for the family and looked after Joe, making sure he did his homework too. Emma insists that she’s always felt safer living a regular suburban life. Before she met Shorty, she didn’t even like going to bed after midnight. As an adolescent wising up to the world, she learned that her good-girl reputation served to cover up a multitude of sins.

Until much later in life, Emma’s mother sincerely believed that it was her daughter’s friends who had led Emma astray. She had no evidence to the contrary. Emma was never in trouble at school or at home; she had never wanted to stand out.

During Year 9, when Emma was fourteen, she and her friends grew more confident talking to boys. Instead of heading directly home after school, Emma started going to friends’ houses and getting home late; it was easy to bribe Joe with chocolate.

The girls also started going to parties. At the end of Year 9, Emma was introduced to Shorty, who, at seventeen, had already left school and was doing odd jobs. Emma thought Shorty was gorgeous. He was a man of independent means. He left the half-grown, squeaky-voiced boys at school for dead. The attraction was instant and mutual, says Emma, “But I wonder what he saw in me at first, apart from the obvious.” Emma had developed physically earlier than most of her friends and was often mistaken for being a few years older. This time she didn’t mind.

She knew that Shorty had been to Children’s Court for a few things, mainly shoplifting and assault. Emma thinks that growing up, the way she did, in the working-class west of Sydney, in a suburb with a lot of public housing, is a big factor in why girls are attracted to criminals. In these suburbs, some teenage girls won’t consider a man who hasn’t been to jail. By contrast, Emma says, “The girls who go to private schools and have money wouldn’t give these idiots the time of day. Maybe they’re attracted to bad boys, but it wouldn’t be this kind of bad.”

Shorty’s best friend was dating Emma’s friend Caitlin. Before long, Emma was spending all her free time with Shorty. She would meet him after school at Caitlin’s house or at the shops. Caitlin’s mother worked afternoons, so Emma would stay with Shorty for as long as she could. Over time, she started getting home later and later, and her parents began to insist she spend more time at home, rather than with Caitlin.

Nothing much appeared to have changed in Emma’s life. She maintained her school attendance and her marks, and kept her room clean. Her parents were exhausted on weekends, and saw no reason to stop Emma sleeping at Caitlin’s house every Saturday night.

Shorty was not as exciting, nor as exotic, as Emma had first thought. She wanted to go out to parties and the movies, but Shorty was happy to sit around at his house with her, watching TV.

Yet Emma’s devotion to Shorty grew. She had taken up smoking and drank beer at parties. Shorty drank much more, and he smoked pot every day, starting when he first woke up. He spent most of his time playing video games, drinking, smoking and trying to get more money for beer. As his faithful companion, Emma joined him, happy to go along for the ride. She had lost her virginity the first night she’d been drunk, so it was exciting for her to have a full-time boyfriend and a full-time sex life. She was living a grown-up life. Shorty promised he’d take her out more when he had some money, and Emma was mostly content to be by his side. She went on the pill after a scary first month of unprotected sex with Shorty. That way, she figured, she had all her bases covered.

Things went smoothly for a few months. Shorty, however, was getting angrier. Even then, Emma says that his control over her was complete. She was at his beck and call, and he had a power over her that she still can’t explain.

Emma, some fifteen years later, is still tough on herself, even though she was in school when she met Shorty. She is disappointed at the choices she made, even though she didn’t always choose what took place. Their fights were explosive. Shorty had no problem screaming at her in public. He lost his temper more often, and more quickly. At first Emma fought back, but the price she would pay for this grew too high.

“I was sixteen years old and we were at a crossing on a main street by the Westfield,” she says. “We were arguing at the traffic lights and Shorty lost it. In the middle of the day he grabbed my top and ripped it so that all the buttons flew off and I was standing there half-naked. You can’t imagine the humiliation. But in those days I always took him back.”

Eventually, Shorty’s outbursts became more violent. One Saturday night, when Emma was halfway through Year 10, Shorty got into a fight at a party. Emma heard him say, “You looking at my girl?” and by the time she turned around, Shorty was belting her supposed admirer on the ground. The cops were next on the scene and Shorty was arrested on charges of grievous bodily harm, resisting arrest, being drunk and disorderly, and using foul language. His relationship with the local police had never been good, and he was well known to them. Shorty had said they were waiting for him to trip up. Plenty of blokes flogged other blokes at parties. To Shorty, it always seemed as if the filth had it in for him.

In the beginning, Emma says, she genuinely felt sorry for him. She was a teenager in love, she admits, but Shorty’s life had been hard. His mother was dead, and he’d been raised by a stepfather who didn’t want him and beat him regularly when he was drunk. Shorty’s older brother had left home two years earlier, and Shorty had been drifting since then. “He had so much pain and anger,” says Emma. “I felt so sorry for him and I wanted to help. It wasn’t his fault where he had come from. I believed it was so, so hard for him. Nowadays? … Very different.”

The courts, however, were unforgiving, and Shorty got a six-month sentence in a minimum security adult jail. Emma followed, and so began her new routine. Her mother had no idea that she was on the train to visit Shorty in jail, rather than with Caitlin. One night, before Shorty’s arrest, Emma’s mum had picked her up from a party and seen Shorty as well as the smitten look on her daughter’s face. She freaked out. After that night, Emma never mentioned his name at home again, and instructed her friends to do the same, so her mother gradually eased up.

For months, each Saturday morning, Emma supposedly left for Caitlin’s, returning home on Sunday afternoon. Leaving earlier to get to jail was hardly noticed. Visits with Shorty started at 9 am and Emma was punctual. She got up at 6 am and left the house dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. During the hour-and-a-half train ride, Emma could change into something girlier if she wanted. From the station, she walked twenty minutes to the jail; she almost never missed a visit.

There’s some outrage in her voice when she says that she was let in too easily. “The guards knew I was underage. I handed them my ID. They could see I was sixteen, but they still let me in. Even twenty years ago you had to be eighteen.”

Emma was stopped only once from going into a visit by a guard who noticed her age. She remembers sobbing all the way back to the train station, overcome with worry about Shorty.

Technology and supervision have changed dramatically since then. There were no cameras patrolling the visit areas alongside the guards. Security was relaxed. The visits area was used for picnics. Visitors could bring in food and stay until 3 pm. There was a play area for kids. It was more like a park, with trees for shade and benches and tables to sit around, than a jail. It was almost romantic. Couples were allowed a lot more physical affection back then, too.

“Beware of the razors,” Emma tells me, with a mock-serious voice. “Once the razors come out, you know there’s no going back.” Not long into Shorty’s sentence, Emma learned that he could sew. He had stitched a single razor blade into his clothing and made it through to visits without detection. Out of nowhere, one visit, Shorty produced the blade and began slicing the crotch of Emma’s jeans.

“What are you doing?” Emma jumped, but Shorty was quick and certain with his slicing.

“Look at them there,” he said, pointing to a couple in a very close embrace. “They’re doing it, and so are they.” He pointed to a corner of the area, which was almost out of view. Shorty finished cutting Emma’s pants and told her to sit on his lap.

“I’d gone off the pill when he got locked up,” says Emma. “It was making me fat and I assumed I didn’t need it for a while.” When Emma got off Shorty’s lap, he took out a needle already threaded and stitched the razor back in. “I suggest you sew those up before you go home,” he said, smiling at her. “Or next time just wear a skirt.”

Still in shock from what had just happened, Emma looked around to check no one was watching. They had just done something that had never crossed her mind as being possible. Shorty had planned it, and he’d surprised Emma yet again.

“See?” said Shorty. “No drama at all.”

She watched him go in at the end of the visit and wondered how he got away with so much. What made him invincible?

Emma didn’t want to have sex during jail visits, but she did want to see Shorty. She went to visits every weekend, and every weekend she dreaded the sight of the razor. Half the time he wasn’t able to get a razor out, and so Emma wore shorter skirts to appease him. She worried the whole time that they would get caught, but they didn’t. They never saw any other couples get in trouble, or maybe the guards turned a blind eye, like Shorty said, because it kept the boys calmer.

Three months after Shorty went to jail, Emma found out she was pregnant. Family was something Shorty had longed for, and he beamed when she told him. He was happier than she’d ever seen him. Emma thought their little family would help Shorty settle and give him the love he’d been deprived of for so long.

But how to tell her mother? How do you explain that you’re sixteen, pregnant and that your secret boyfriend is in jail?

“I got her when she was drunk,” Emma says matter-of-factly. “Every Friday night, Mum would have a few to drink, to unwind from the week. I didn’t tell her till I was four months. I didn’t know how. When I did tell her, she broke down. She was devastated. She didn’t want that for me.”

Her mother had fallen pregnant unexpectedly herself the year before. Emma’s little sister, Charlotte, would be eighteen months older than her niece. Emma’s mum was to be a grandmother at thirty-eight.

“Being around Charlotte, I knew what to expect with a baby,” says Emma. “And Shorty was stoked.” Emma finished school for the year and simply never returned. When Shorty got out of jail, they moved into a flat together and Emma got ready for the baby. Shorty had picked up habits in jail after only six months. He had started using speed and was more aggressive than ever.

Their daughter, Julia, was born a month after Emma’s seventeenth birthday. Shorty was at the birth and played the proud father. “I thought we could be happy for a while,” Emma says. But three weeks after Julia was born, Shorty attacked Emma. He wanted to use her money for drugs and she refused. He slapped her and pushed her to the floor. Then he took her wallet and went out.

Emma hoped things would get better. Shorty spent his nights doing crime and his days sleeping. Emma was convinced that he was using needles, but he denied it, blaming her for causing him stress. Despite bragging about his criminal expertise, Shorty never once gave Emma money. His money went on himself, his friends and his drugs.

When Julia was six months old, Emma found needles in Shorty’s bag. He was furious with her for snooping and shoved her to the ground. “You’ll never find anyone else better than me,” he would tell her. “If you ever think of leaving, I will find you, and when I do, I’ll wreck your face so bad no one will ever look at you again.” Shorty had made threats every time Emma mentioned leaving or even having some time apart. In the beginning, he would threaten suicide. When that didn’t work, he started threatening Emma instead.

The third time that Shorty beat Emma, she waited till he went out again, grabbed Julia and left. She went to her mother’s and called the police. She pressed charges against Shorty, and he was sent to jail for six months. She took out a restraining order and was able to get peace for her and Julia for a short time. While Shorty wrote to her and called, Emma didn’t respond or visit him.