DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER C

CHAPTER C

A warm afternoon breeze lashed greasy food wrappers, swirling them around my ankles, as I approached the puke yellow door frame.

I paused when I reached it, as I held my backpack in my hand and gazed into the workshop through an open doorway.

As I stood on the cracked concrete path, I wrinkled my nose at a stench. The acidic pong of exhaust fumes from vehicles as they hustled their way along the road beside the path.

While I looked into the shop, I scrutinised the men at the back of the building.

None of them looked my way.

Therefore, feeling comfortable, I stepped over a brick lying against the open glass door and entered the workshop to collect my car.

I wended my way, past ladders and coils of electrical wiring, towards the back of the building, my journey accompanied by the harsh sounds of whirring drills.

I didn't see the pasty faced slimeball. Instead, a woman greeted me as I drew close to the back wall.

'Hi!' She said from behind the counter.

Leaning forward, she lowered her voice.

'I'm sorry about the calendars.'

She moved her head toward the wall behind her.

'That's my husband, Alf's thing. I've told him our girls must keep out of the workshop until he takes them down.'

I too, was unhappy with the calendars and their salacious depictions of women.

However, I reckon, for a man to take down those calendars, he needed an epiphany. A revelation as intense as the beam of light from a lighthouse, to pierce and enlighten his mind.

The woman continued, her voice rising as it competed against the shrill sound of a whirring drill.

'And please excuse the mess. Rodents damaged wiring in the ceiling, causing a fire. Electricians have set Friday as the day for the lights to be fixed. I'm looking forward to having more light at this end of the shop. Now, you're here because...'

'I'd like to pick up the car that needed four new tyres.'

Lying on the countertop in front of the women was a sheaf of documents. The documents rustled as the women straightened up and rifled through them.

'Ah! Here we are.'

She pulled out a document as a set of keys attached to the document jangled. She handed the document, a receipt, with the keys to me. I gazed at the receipt and then slipped the keys into my jeans pocket.

'Everything in order?' She smiled as I pushed the receipt in beside the keys.

I nodded as I took a credit card from my shirt pocket and handed it to her.

She looked at the screen of the computer now on the desk and tapped on a keyboard.

With the transaction completed, she returned the credit card.

I said, 'Cheers! Thank you,' turned away from the counter and left the workshop.

I strode to my car and climbed in.

With the backpack placed on the seat beside me, I started the engine, released the handbrake, and headed out.

Into the clamorous, fume-laden throng of traffic on a road that led to places of comfort.

When I reached a Macca's restaurant, I turned into the carpark and parked the vehicle.

I followed the good-times aroma of frying food as I stepped out of the car and strolled into Macca's to order a meal.

When my order of coffee, burgers, and fries was called, I went to the counter and picked up the tray with my meal stacked on it. I ambled out to the outdoor seating area with the soothing aromas of fried food and coffee wafting around my face.

I sat down and congratulated myself on achieving the goal of replacing the car's tyres. I sighed with relief as I had no other scheduled meetings with men, but, rather than relaxing, a shadow sliding over the table I sat at unsettled me.

A man passed as I looked up. His face was familiar, but his name, or where I had met him, eluded me.

I watched him swagger across the carpark.

I shielded my face with my hand and glanced down at my tray as he looked in my direction.

When I looked up again, he was climbing into a dark blue sedan. I did not recognise the make of the vehicle, yet I had seen similar ones in movie scenes depicting Britain in the fifties and sixties.

I watched the sedan leave the car park, accompanied by three other vehicles of a similar vintage. A sight reminiscent of scenes from those movies.

Scenes which involved bobbies in vehicles with blues and twos activated.

Sirens and flashing lights, similar to the ones which had interrupted my journey to Macca's after I had collected my car from the tyre workshop.

Therefore, I stopped by the side of the road a couple of miles from Macca’s as first responders and two fire trucks hurtled past.

A familiar sight, because of fires I had lit or helped to ignite.

Blazes as a response to the malignant behaviour of men towards women and girls.

Like the one I ignited in my father's shed.

An inferno about five years before my visit to the tyre workshop with the puke yellow door frame.

My father was a right bastard in his dealings with pre-teen girls. I enjoyed, therefore, watching the fire spread through my dad's wooden shed.

Whooping with joy, I cheered the fire on as the flames leapt up high while they consumed the shed and its debauched contents.

I sang hymns of praise as the flames spread along the petrol I had poured over the grass around the shed and outwards to his house.

The flames sprinted along that trail of fuel, across the backyard and licked the back steps of the house.

I stopped singing, though, as blues and twos charged into my dad's backyard and stopped the fire from going beyond the back steps.

Another conflagration I enjoyed taking part in occurred about ten years before I torched my father's shed.

A blaze late one night, while grey clouds slithered through the pale light of a sallow moon as two woman friends and I took out a building.

We hurled Molotov cocktails at the building, the clubhouse of a rugby team, as a mournful breeze whispered ghost-like tales.

A club whose male members carried out sordid, degenerate fantasies on the bodies of my two woman friends.

Those blokes were never called to account for their depraved behaviour. They deserved to lose something of spiritual and physical value to them.

The fire was an unalloyed delight as my friends and I watched the flare from the Molotov cocktails as they slammed into the clubhouse. We pumped the air with our fists as the fire roared and surged through the two-storey building.

We grinned and coughed as the stench of burning paint flirted with clouds of acrid smoke as the fire spurted through the building's roof.

We high-fived each other as hungry, reddish-yellow flames licked the painted timber of the adjoining grandstand. And left the scene before blues and twos were within cooee of the site.

A third blaze, decades before the other two, a friend, Anne, and I started in a derelict building.

Though the fire took a ferocious hold, the outcome was like the proverbial curate's egg. Some parts were good, like Anne's escape from the flames, but others were not so good.

In the cool, grey smoke-laced misty dawn following that fire, a body groaned. It lay underneath a once green, upturned enamel bath tub radiating heat from the previous night's fire.

While the fluting call of a Pied Butcher Bird drifted over the pungent smelling ruins, police officers moved from patrolling the site. Instead, they focused on locating the source of the moaning.

As they searched through piles of blackened bricks and other rubble, the body gave a hacking cough and expired.

However, Anne and I planned for more than one body to lie amongst those smouldering ruins. As that part of the plan had failed, the curate's egg revealed its not so good parts.

The ruins had once been a sizeable two-storey brick, timber, and tiled building on the grounds of an asylum.

Before the fire, white ants had ravaged the upper storey, making it uninhabitable. The Asylum Administration therefore condemned the building.

The forty-five male inmates of the now condemned building had to be moved out. Squeezed into one or other of the crowded male wards found in the fifty or so buildings scattered across the two hundred acres of the asylum.

Once the inmates were out, the windows and doors of the abandoned building had plywood sheets nailed over them by the asylum's Outdoor Staff.

However, male nurses re-purposed several ground-floor rooms of the condemned ward in a way that had little to do with nursing and more to do with the rapacious sexual appetites of heterosexual men.

A purpose which included removing plywood sheeting from several ground-floor windows and doors.

Appetites which furnished the room that once housed the ward office with a garish vinyl Burnt Orange sofa filched from the asylum’s furniture store. The four Lime Green vinyl lounge chairs in the room came from the same source. As did the varnished round plywood table in the centre of the room, its edges marred by black cigarette burns.

Reeking cigarette butts overflowed the four ashtrays on that table. Each ashtray had a New South Wales Government Public Service logo fixed to the side of these clear glass receptacles.

The nurses had pilfered the funds for a radio from donations made to the Asylum Patients' Comfort Fund.

Allocations from this fund lay within the gift of the asylum's nursing staff. Hence, a Ruby-Red transistor radio now sat in the middle of the plywood table amidst a variety of scrunched-up lolly and chocolate wrappers.

The male nurses also furnished two of the condemned ward's ground floor cells.

In each, they placed a wide metal framed spring bed. A once white grotty sheet, greasy grey cotton blanket, and a malodorous dark stained pillow lay on each bed's lumpy kapok mattress.

The faint stench of kerosene drifted from a lamp perched on the vinyl top of a small square grey metal cabinet beside each bed.

A butt-chocked round ashtray added to the sordid vibe of these rooms. A pongy dark red bakelite receptacle that lay on the seat of the Sapphire Blue straight-backed vinyl chair that stood a couple of feet away from each grey cabinet.

The cells in the other wards of the asylum had different furnishings than the ones the male nurses used to decorate their love nest. Each ward had a minimum of four such cells, called 'Single Rooms' by the nursing staff.

The furniture in these cells comprised a narrow, metal framed spring bed and a foam rubber mattress with linen, blanket, and pillow. A battered stainless steel bedpan rested on the floor with a roll of toilet paper beside the pan.

External bars adorning the one fixed window restricted light from entering the room and cast dismal shadows across the bilious green paint of the cold, bare concrete floors.

Whiffs of urine and sweat drifted out from the sickly yellow walls, while unsavoury aromas floated around the uncovered drain hole that lurked in one back corner of the floor.

Let into the solid, chipped, pale green doors were three narrow strips of glass, stretching from the top of the door to half-way along its length.

The doors had external locks and, once put into a cell with the lock engaged, an inmate had no means of opening the door. Or of communicating with the outside world. Except by bashing the door.

The light switch for the barred single bulb set high into the off-white ceiling near the small, mesh-covered ventilation hole was also outside the room.

Nurses determined who was to be imprisoned in the cells and why they were to be detained.     

Individual asylum nurses in each ward who had neither a professional nor legal obligation to record the date and time they confined a person in a cell. Nor the date and time of the person's release or the reasons for their imprisonment.

Two male nurses raped Anne in one of these cells.

On the day of the assault, Anne worked a twelve-hour day shift in a Male Rehabilitation Ward, Ward 24. She worked that shift a couple of months before I set fire to the condemned ward.

On the grey, cold, rainy winter's afternoon before that twelve-hour shift, an inmate of Ward 24 behaved in a way that Ward 24's Charge Nurse found unacceptable.

Frogmarched into one of the ward's six ground floor cells, the man spent several hours in solitary confinement before being released the next morning.

Anne's twelve-hour shift started on the morning of that release.

Her duties for the shift included re-making the cell's bed and cleaning the cell.

While she was doing those tasks alone in the cell, two men entered the ward.

They wore shiny black leather lace-up shoes and grey trousers.

The red cloth of a Male Nurse’s tie bulged over the pocket of one open-necked grey shirt. The blue tie of a Male Charge Nurse bulged over the pocket of the other open-necked grey shirt.

The two men strode through the ward towards the long, chilly corridor that led past the Single Rooms.

They entered that corridor and went straight to the Single Room where Anne was making the bed. They waited until she turned her back toward the doorway.

They then stormed in and grabbed her.

To the sounds of keys jangling in their trouser pockets, they wrestled her onto the bed and held her down.

They had pulled the cell door closed behind them, without engaging the lock, so no one heard Anne's cries, yells, and screams as those two male nurses slapped and raped her.

After the assault and about six weeks before the fire, a colleague found Anne, sitting on the edge of a bath in the bathroom of the asylum nurses' home. Blood was flowing from both wrists.

Triple zero was called, and an ambulance took Anne to Balmain Hospital.

From there, an ambulance took her to the asylum, where a doctor admitted her as an,

' … unmarried, hysterical female prone to acts of self-harm …' according to a conversation Anne overheard between the doctor and a male nurse.

Early one afternoon, about four weeks after being admitted, as wattle blooms gifted their aroma to the condemned building, Anne and I crept into the ground floor brothel.

The pale grime-filtered light from windows without plywood sheeting guided our way through the male nurses' sex parlour.

I heard about the brothel via the asylum’s grapevine. The brothel’s existence repulsed and terrified me.

Now, four days before the fire, as I checked out the layout, I had those feelings confirmed.

'Fucking hell! Anne,' I said, as we sat down on the Lime Green lounge chairs in the last room visited on our tour of the bordello.

'What an awful bloody place. It reeks of exploitation and the pits of human depravity. As you said, it is not only the furniture that is stolen. So are the lives of women who are forced here either through inducements, valium filched from pharmacy stocks or coercion, the threat of ECT....' my voice trailed off.

I looked at the suppurating scabs on Anne's temples.

'My memory is appalling. And my body has had enough. ECT, for me, had to stop. It scared the shit out of me when the suicidal thoughts returned,' Anne whispered, as tears welled in her eyes.

'We gotta get these bastards and trash their bloody cesspit.'

A sad, subdued silence descended between us as dust motes frolicked in the light that seeped through a dusty cracked window smeared with grey spider webs.

The room's damp air reeked of stale cigarette smoke, kerosene, and cheap pomade.

I glared with disgust at the creatures crawling on the pie crusts scattered across the table.

A trail of black ants snaked across the table, from its edge, past the crusts, to a cracked tea cup and up the side of the receptacle to its lip.

The cup was one of six on the table, spread around an empty clear glass whisky bottle and a brown sherry bottle. Both with their stoppers missing.

I shifted my gaze and looked at the light sparkling on the blue kerosene in the glass bowl of a lamp on the table. One of two alongside a torch beside the Ruby-Red transistor radio and two open packets of Diazepam tablets.

With the power cut off, the lamps and the dim light gave the room a perverse, sensual vibe.

My stomach churned as, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a rat scurry across the scabby, patterned vinyl floor. It ran up the side of the Burnt Orange sofa and disappeared into a hole in the seat of that item of furniture.

'Let's get the fuck out of here before I vomit,' I said.

I got out of my chair as Ann said, 'Yep! Time to split. No questions about the diagram I gave you of a car's engine and the position of the carburetor?’

'No,' I replied. 'And they park their cars in the shed adjoining the wall near the former entrance? The one with the window opening into that shed?'

'That's right,' Anne said as she wiped her eyes and stood up.

We left the room and navigated our way through the building.

We exited via the once covered rear entrance to the building. An entrance near a ground floor bathroom furnished with green enamel basins and green enamel bathtubs.

We gave each other a hug after we stepped outside.

We then separated and went to our wards. We did not meet again until the night of the fire.

On that night, the insipid light from a crescent moon cast creepy shadows across the cold iron corrugations of the shed's roof.

Moon light that lit my way as I walked beside my bike with Anne's diagram in the top pocket of my coat. I pushed my bike rather than riding it, to keep a low profile, as I snuck through the crisp night air.

I heard a soft repeated 'mopoke, mopoke,' the call of the Southern Boobook Owl and the hoarse bark of a fox as I drew close to the condemned ward.

I stopped underneath the branches of a Moreton Bay Fig Tree a distance from the building. A position that gave me a view of the shed as I parked the bike beside the tree's massive spreading root system.

Above me, twigs creaked as an eerie breeze rustled the dead leaves lying in the watchful shadows of the tree as I eyed the open shed.

I took a torch out from the pocket of my coat, and with stealthy tread, approached the building.

I turned the torch on when I reached the shed.

The torches' dim light, shining through the piece of cloth I had wrapped around the torch, lit my way into the musty depths of the shed.

The two cars in the shed, a two-toned HR Holden Special Sedan and a dark blue Riley Pathfinder, were like vehicles my cousins owned.

While in the building that afternoon, Anne unlocked the window that opened into the shed.

She was now in the former ward office entertaining the two male nurses who had raped her. The two men who also ran the brothel, now drinking alcohol Anne had laced with chloral hydrate.

I gave Anne a small brown bottle of that liquid the previous evening. I had removed the bottle from the uncounted medications inside a ward's medicine cabinet.

While the entertainment progressed, I walked between the cars and the wall of the building until I reached the window.

I heard laughter and a DJ talking on the radio before the sounds of a pop song drifted into the shed.

With cautious movements, I pushed the bottom half of the double-hung window up.

I then walked beside the cars, parked nose to tail, until I reached the vehicle nearest to the shed's entrance.

The front passenger's side window of this vehicle, the Holden Special, was open. I therefore opened the Holden's bonnet without difficulty.

With the dim light of the torch guiding me, I leaned over the warm, smelly, greasy engine. By using Anne's diagram, I located the carburetor. I turned the petrol inlet screw until petrol started dripping.

Leaving the bonnet open, I walked towards the back of the vehicle.

I paused outside the shed, a short way from the Holden’s tail lights. I turned towards the vehicle and lit a cigarette as petrol dripped onto the concrete floor of the shed.

Petrol fumes drifted around the dark depths of the corrugated iron shed's interior and through the open window into the building as I stared into those dark depths. Depths with several meanings I meditated on as I watched the smoke rings I created drifting in the moonlight.  

I turned my gaze towards the shed floor and saw, in the torch's light, petrol flowing towards the wall.

When the petrol reached the wall and flowed towards the window, I switched off the torch and put it into my coat pocket.

I watched the cigarette make a beautiful glowing arc when I flicked the cig towards the spreading stream of fuel.

I turned towards the bike and ran like hell away from the shed, so I missed seeing the cigarette land.

My knees were knocking together as I stood beside my bike, underneath the shadowy, whispering branches of the Moreton Bay Fig. I watched the fire flare and lick the flapping curtains on either side of the open window.

The Holden went first, followed by the Riley in a booming ball of flames.

With a ferocious roar, amidst the clashing sounds of cascading corrugated iron, the fire finished with the shed and tore into the building as I heard the window breaking. 

While roof tiles exploded in the heat and the stench of burning rubber, vinyl, and wood choked the night air, Anne bolted out from the flaming building.

I raced towards her and threw my arms around her. She held me tight as we burst into tears.

As the sobs subsided, I took a hanky from my jeans pocket as Anne took a handkerchief from the sleeve of her nightie. After we dried our eyes and blew our noses, we walked in silence to the bicycle.

In the light of the flickering flames of the fire, I took a set of clothes draped over a brown leather suitcase.

A thick leather strap secured the suitcase to the bike’s rear carrier. I had untied the string attaching the clothes to the suitcase before I walked to the shed.

I handed the clothes to Anne.

While she changed out of her asylum garb, I unstrapped the suitcase from the bicycle carrier.

Anne’s belongings from the asylum nurses' home filled the suitcase. After Anne’s admission to the asylum, a colleague packed the items into the case and gave it to me for safekeeping.

When Anne finished changing, I handed her a bottle of perfume I took from my inside coat pocket. She gave her hair a soaking with the spray from the bottle to mask the stench of smoke and returned the bottle.

Though her bank book was in the bag, the banks were closed until 10 the next morning. Therefore, after I put the perfume bottle in my coat pocket, I took out from a pocket of my jeans, a purse containing cash.

As I handed the purse and bag to Anne, I muttered, 'Fucking hell!' as I shook my head and smiled.

'It was a bloody near thing!' Anne grinned and chuckled as she took the items.

Holding them in one hand, she squeezed my hand with the other, kissed me on the cheek, whispered 'thank you,' turned and strode towards the asylum's main entrance. She left an aroma of sweet smelling perfume trailing in her wake as I secured the leather strap to the bicycle carrier.

Once out of the asylum, Anne caught a bus on Victoria Road to Wynyard Park. From there, she made her way to the underground station and caught a train to Central Railway Station. On reaching the station, she transferred to a train travelling to the North Coast of New South Wales.

As Anne disappeared into the night, I picked up from the ground the clothes she had discarded: an inmate’s standard issue floral cotton nightie and a tatty green cardigan.

I strode towards the fiery building and tossed the clothes into the flames, as sirens screamed across the sinister, still asylum grounds.

As blues and twos drew closer to the fire, I returned to my bike, hopped on, and rode to a call box.

I phoned my friends who I shared a farm house with on an abandoned North Coast dairy farm.

I said my friend Anne was coming to spend a week or two with us. She was travelling on the overnight mail train from Sydney. They agreed to meet her, in the sleepy early morning hours of the next day, at the station close to the farm.  

I went on leave a couple of days after lighting the fire.

When I returned to work, asylum gossip filled me in with details of the fire and a funeral.

Dental records identified the body dragged out from underneath the up-turned green enamel bath tub. The body was that of one of the male nurses who ran the brothel.

The other male nurse failed to report to work after the fire, leaving his whereabouts a mystery.

Asylum gossip mentioned Anne as an escaped inmate. When the day shift for her ward came on duty the morning after the fire, they noted her absence.

They conducted a head count because no one had conducted one for several days. Five inmates were missing, including Anne.

According to the asylum grapevine, following her escape, and given Annes's alleged suicide attempt, she had drowned herself in the Parramatta River.

Soon, according to that grapevine, a phone call from the police will request a senior asylum staff member attend Sydney Morgue. A woman's body, dragged out from the Parramatta River, needed to be identified.

I ignored these rumours, and, two weeks after returning from leave, I left the asylum.

I left during my breakfast break, as I had no reason to return to the ward.

The day before I left, I collected, from the Pay Office, my salary envelope containing a fortnight’s pay. I had used up my recreational leave entitlements with the week's leave I took after the fire.

My manner of leaving I had heard mentioned on the asylum grapevine as, 'gone to Victoria.'

It alluded to Victoria Road, the busy main road that ran past the main entrance to the asylum and into the city.

A reference also, according to that grapevine, to the dozens of nurses over the century and a half of the asylum's existence who had walked out of the place. Walked out during a meal break and did not return to their wards to finish a shift.

After I signed out for my breakfast break, I rode my bicycle out of the asylum to the house in Gladesville I shared with a married couple.

I entered the house, and, after taking off my blue nurse's uniform and the white leather lace-up shoes, I had a shower, and put on a shirt, slacks, and sandshoes.

I wrapped my blue nurse's uniform around the garbage from the bin in the kitchen and pushed the greasy, rancid bundle into the incinerator in the backyard. After I shoved the shoes in beside the bundle, I set the bundle alight. I grinned with happiness as flames gobbled up the shoes and the uniform.

Returning to the house, I entered the kitchen.

I wrote a note with a biro I took from my shirt pocket to the married couple on a sheet of paper I tore from my notebook. They worked long hours at the fish and chip shop they owned in Drummoyne.

I informed them I was leaving; the bicycle became theirs.

After I returned the pen to my pocket, I placed the note on the kitchen table. I put the rent money, and the house keys on top of the note.

With the battered leather suitcase from my bedroom, which I had packed the previous night, I left the house.

I caught a bus on Victoria Road to the city. 

From there, I made my way to Central Railway Station.

I bought a single first-class ticket from the Booking Office.

As well, I bought a caramel malted milk-shake and two pies with sauce from a milk bar at the station.

When I finished the milk-shake, I took the two meat pies with me and ate them on a train to the North Coast of New South Wales.

I had phoned Anne a couple of nights before leaving the asylum. I told her my travel plans, and when she saw me get off the train, rushed to greet me.

We held each other tight and, after separating, amidst laughter and war-whoops, hand in hand, we strolled out to the Buggy. A Volkswagen Country Buggy I and my three house mates had found in a shed on the dairy farm about a year before I lit the fire at the asylum.

Anne climbed onto the driver's seat and switched on the engine. We sat in the Buggy with the engine idling. I looked at Anne, puzzled.

'Why aren't we moving?'

Anne gripped the steering wheel and stared through the windscreen.

'I must inform you of something. I keep the engine running to mask what I am about to say.'

Alarmed, I asked, 'Anne...'

'No! It's not that. I am not about to respond to voices I hear in my head. Not that I have any. But normal conversations between people carry in this still, quiet country air.'

She paused, and, with a rush, blurted out, 'Clare knows one of the guys!'

'What...?' I stared at Anne's pale, drawn face.

With my heart pounding, I exclaimed, 'Fuckin' Hell! Holy Mary! Mother of God! What are we to do?'