Devil's Choice Read online

  So he had a goal, a boredom cure. Within ten years he was determined to be a doctor or lawyer or something such, at least on paper, and doing it would keep the boredom at bay. So now it was time for books and learning.

  Beginning to Learn

  William had nothing else to do except study, he was solitary by nature and even though he had not injured or threatened someone in months, and had started to moderate his behaviour, he had not been deemed anything but a slightly less extreme version of his previous self, and he knew that deep down the violent and uncompromising part of his nature was still there.

  The one person who had started to talk to him in a more civil way was the librarian, an elderly man who had retired from regular warder duties but was deemed to be of use in this place. The library he minded was not a large building, but it had a mix of donated books and occasional purchases, including a fairly complete set of school books for those prisoners who had decided they wanted to get a qualification starting with their HSC.

  William knew of three other prisoners who were doing the same as him, but only by name and distant sight, he had never spend hours in the library with them, as he was only let in himself for an hour twice a week when no one else but the librarian warden was there. He was also allowed to borrow up to five books at a time, and mostly chose books for his school lessons, but each time would pick out one book about something else.

  He had discovered in himself an almost morbid fascination about medical things and had started to wonder if he might one day do a degree in something related to medicine, perhaps even nursing or psychology, as he had become interested in both the processes of mental illness and how to treat people with it. He also found medical and biology subjects, like the study of cells, how the immune system worked, and how diseases acted, to be of great fascination. So almost always he took out one extra book on a medical subject and each evening after he had finished his dinner he would use the time to study the contents of this book, sometimes looking at the detailed pictures but most often just reading and trying to understand the words of description and explanation. Gradually he found it beginning to make sense to him and this only increased his desire for more knowledge.

  During the day he studied for his Higher School Certificate and he had picked science focused subjects, chemistry, physics and biology, along with the required English and Mathematics. His final elective was Geography to allow him to learn about the places and peoples of the world. He had a particular fascination with the Pacific and with the Melanesian and Polynesian people who lived there. He loved the stories from their history about the way the sailed their canoes across huge expanses and navigated, he read about their customs and the varied speculation about their origins.

  He had a vague recollection of his mother telling him one that his great grandfather’s, a man who had died long before he was born was a “kanaka”, a Pacific Islander from somewhere out there. He had always felt something of affection for the Pacific islanders he had known, partly for their strength, but also because they lived hard and played hard. He had played a bit of football with some of them as a boy, up until his early teenage years. But that got forgotten once he had got tied up with Martin and Dan. Since then he had always enjoyed watching footy matches with islander players who had come to the Sydney Rugby League competition and made good.

  He did not much like blackfellas; there were lots of them from around Newcastle when he was growing up. They often went around in gangs like he had. Sometimes they got into fights with him and his mates. Often when they had the numbers, he had got a couple good hidings and given a couple in return. But he looked at the islanders differently and reckoned they were kind of OK.

  Now, as well as reading lots of things about diseases and medicine, he also actively searched out any books he could find about the Pacific, the early voyages of discovery, the people of New Guinea, the different islands and groups of people spread out across the Pacific. He had no idea if the great grandfather kanaka was a real story or just something he thought he had remembered, but it gave him an interest and a vague desire, if he ever got out of jail, to go off and work or travel somewhere out there. He always looked east when he had that thought, knowing his cell was less than a mile from where the Pacific Ocean began. Occasionally he thought about breaking out, getting a little boat from somewhere and heading out that way. But first he wanted to finish his learning, get his HSC and then, hopefully, get a degree in something which seemed useful to him.

  He decided that he would park all his thoughts of a break out until at least after that. He was just pushing forty now so, with a bit of luck and if he pulled back on the aggression, he would be out of here by the time he was about fifty and still have plenty of time to go off and see these places.

  So now he applied himself fully to his learning. Within six months, as the hot weather at the end of the year came round, he had pretty much mastered his HSC subjects. He found the learning was easy, the hardest thing was making himself stop to eat and exercise, when his mind was in the zone he loved living through it in other places and letting his imagination run, though always coming back to absorbing and understanding one more detail, then yet another detail again.

  He thought of his mind now like an empty warehouse when he began this learning. At first it only had a few remnants of rubbish scattered around on the floor of an empty building shell. Now he had built shelves and the shelves had spaces for storing boxes of objects from across the world and folders of information about these things. The building still had lots of empty spaces but more and of the storage space was being organised and filled. That mass of new organisation gave him a deep satisfaction.

  Then it was time for the exams, sitting in the library under the watchful eye of the librarian with a couple of the other students. He left all his exams feeling good about how it had gone, particularly the Science and Geography ones.

  He decided that next year, if he got OK Marks, he would enrol in a University Degree. In the meantime he would spend his free time reading about his two new interests, the Pacific Islands and the study of medicine. That way if he got into a course about one of these things he would already have a head start.

  One day as he was sitting in his cell he got a call from a warder to go to the library. It was just before Christmas, not that he celebrated Christmas, but he had found in the last week, when a few people had put up some decorations around the prison that it had got him to thinking about his mother and his sister and her children, wondering how they were all getting on, wanting to see the little faces, perhaps no longer little, that had come up to him in another life, holding his hand and sitting on his lap and calling him Uncle Will. He followed the warder down the corridors to the library, feeling a pang for a life lost.

  The librarian greeted him with a huge smile, holding a sheet of paper in his hands. He handed this to him. It was the results from the exams, a list of subject titles and results running down the other side of the page. He could see that they were all good.

  “Well that’s one for the record books,” the librarian said. “You have got the best marks of anyone who has ever studied here. They are saying next year you should easily get into University and have a choice of courses. Even the prison governor sends his congratulations.”

  “You are certainly a dark horse, William; some of the other screws are starting to say the study has made you soft in the head, turning you into one of those soft handed faggots.

  “But me I just say, ‘Well done!’ I know you have put in the hours to learn what you have. Now you don’t want to waste the chance to make a better life for yourself one day. They reckon your science marks were right up there near the top for all of NSW, even above all those students whose rich parents pay them to go to fancy schools.

  “Considering you only had yourself and books to teach you that is pretty amazing. Pity you did not do your learning right the first time when you were at school, maybe you’d be a University Professor by now if you had. “


  William found himself grinning back at this man like he was a kid at school. He could not remember feeling really pleased about something and feeling good with himself for a very long time. He nodded his head and gave the man a gruff, “Thanks.”

  Still he thought, I had better watch my step, can’t have them saying I am soft or something like that, time to nip that idea in the bud.

  He decided that it was time to scare the blokes who had been with Dan and Martin that night years ago, lest the word get around that he had got soft with his study. There were still two of them in jail. The third had got out on good behaviour last year. He needed to think of how to do something suitable to hurt them a good bit and scare them even more. He might be enjoying learning new things but he was not yet ready to let sleeping dogs lie.

  He chewed the ideas over in his mind for a couple days. Then it came to him. With his new found knowledge he knew something that would give them both the most excruciating gut pains and convulsions, but it was treatable and they would not die. He would slip a dose into their food, he would get a chance to do that as there was plenty of coming and going and pushing and shoving in the dining room and their guard was down now that he had left them alone for a bit.

  He just needed to work out the dose carefully to make sure he did not kill them, that way no one would look too hard after the event. Then a few days later he would let them and their friends know who they had to thank. From there the word would soon get around the rest of the place. That would kill off any idea he was soft and keep everyone on their toes. Much better that way as people would be too busy watching him to cause trouble for him.

  He acted three days later, getting into the meal line a few places behind them and bumping into each as they came back past, plates full, to sit down. That allowed him to drop a squirt of his medicine, mixed with some sugar to hide the taste, onto each plate.

  Sure enough later that night they were both screaming in their cells and emptying their guts all over the place. Both spent three days in hospital with a diagnosis of food poisoning. On their return he said to one of their other faggot mates, “You should ask your mates if they enjoyed the medicine I gave them the other night that knotted up their guts. I enjoyed their screams until they carted them off. Plenty more for them or anyone else who gets smart with me. Perhaps one day I will give them big dose and they will leave in a box. It would be good riddance to your bum boy scum mates.”

  Catherine

  Six Years Earlier – Sydney School

  Catherine was sixteen and a half when she first came to Sydney to live. She had lived all the life she could remember between Broome and the desert south of Halls Creek. School was in Broome, but her real life was with her aboriginal friends out in the desert community. This was where her Mum and Dad mostly lived.

  They too spent a lot of time in Broome and Derby where they had a restaurant and food supply business. But, like her, their first love was the desert, the place where their own love for each other had finally come together. Her mother had started the business in Broome when Catherine was a little girl. Now it was well run by those who worked for them and her parents did not need to be around it so much. So for at least two weeks of every month they would leave Broome behind and head south to the end of the road, where it became lost in the sand hills at the northern end of the Great Sandy Desert.

  There they lived in a shack in a place with about a hundred other people, all of whom had black skins to her white. But they were her brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins just as much as her own family were. Even though Catherine was a scrawny kid who was just developing a proper woman’s body she could chase and spear a goanna or a kangaroo, or bring down a bird with a throwing stick just as well as any of the others.

  But, half way through last year, the year when most kids both in Broome left school, what her Mum called her Intermediate Certificate Year, her Mum and Dad had sat her down one day in their house in Broome. It had an ominous feel, her Mum and Dad with serious faces sitting opposite.

  They pulled out a booklet for a school in Sydney, actually two booklets, to give her a choice.

  She had hoped the choice would be whether to go or not but the choice was only between two schools, which one she would choose.

  The first was Presbyterian Ladies College in Croydon where her Mum’s best friend in Sydney, Julie had finished her school. Her Mum had told her before it was a finishing school to help the rich spoilt girls of Sydney learn manners and find husbands. Now she had changed her tune and said it was a really good school. Julie had vouched for it too. She was happy to pull a few strings to get Catherine a place as a boarder. So if she went there she would have lots of other girls her own age for company and Julie was encouraging, telling of the fun she had there.

  The second choice was Balmain High School, where her Mum had gone until her Intermediate Certificate. Her Mum had left then to get a job because the family needed the money. Also her Mum was pregnant very soon after she left school, but that was another story. Her Dad and Julie boasted that her Mum had got the top marks that year, was school dux in her Intermediate exam. But then, as everyone said, her Mum as super brainy, she could do amazing sums in her head and knew words that no one else had ever heard of, so that was no surprise.

  So her parents told her that, while school in Broome was fine up to the end of this year, Cathy was too smart to finish there. Instead her final two years would be in a school with lots of other smart kids who would go on to University, so as to stretch her mind and build up her own ability.

  That sounded like classic parent gobblygook. But she realised that this argument was futile. So she had to decide on the choice she did have, which school to go to. In the end she had decided on Balmain High. It would let her stay with her Grandma, Patsy.

  She loved her Grandma; she had this really cute house in Balmain, the place where her and her Mum’s own childhood friend Sophie had lived, even though Sophie had been dead for yonks before either of them lived there. A part of her felt it was weird-crazy to have a long dead friend. But deep down she knew it was true, Sophie had saved her and her mother’s life that time when they got lost in the desert. The memory was bit faded around the edges now, but at its centre it was just as true and real as ever. So she liked the idea of staying in Sophie and her Mum’s old bedroom and hoped that sometimes Sophie would still visit.

  So the choice was made, Balmain High it was and her Mum wrote a letter to her Grandma, asking if Cathy could stay with her. When the end of January came round the next year she was booked on the plane which took her to Sydney with an overnight stopover in Darwin. She felt very grown up walking around the streets of Darwin on her own. It was now being rebuilt after a cyclone a few years before, much like the ones they got most wet seasons in Broome. Her Grandma met her off the plane in Sydney, an Ansett flight. They went back to her house in a taxi. Now that her Mum’s younger brother David was grown up and gone off working in the mines her Grandma was living alone. So Cathy knew she was as pleased to have her come and stay.

  Cathy found she liked living with her Grandma, she was sort of cool and she was a great cook. She found she could have a lot of deep and meaningful conversation with her Grandma she could never have with her Mum and Dad. There was something very open and understanding about Grandma, hers had been a hard life but she had lived through it and come out the other side. She was incredibly proud of her daughter who had made good on her own, and she loved Cathy’s Dad, Robbie, like a son, even though he was not Cathy’s real father. Cathy felt just the same about Robbie too, even though she could remember a time before he was there the moment he had arrived he had become the Dad she had never known and now he was like a grown up best friend.

  When she thought about him, her Mum and her brother and sister still at home, at times she got really homesick. But, after a month in Sydney, she had new friends at the High School and she decided she really liked this school and living in Balmain even though she could barely wait for
the end of term holidays when she and her Grandma would fly home for two weeks together with her Mum, Dad, brother and sister, a week in Broome, then a week in the desert with her other family.

  The year flew by and then it was time to go home for Christmas holidays. This time it was just her on the plane. Her Gran would come across in a fortnight, just in time for Christmas. She knew this might be her last proper holiday at home and was determined to enjoy it. Everyone was telling her how hard she would have to study next year for her Higher School Certificate, so she could get into University and have her choice of courses. She supposed they were right and she had got good marks in her end of year exams, considering that Broome High School was much easier. But, for now, she would enjoy it, holidays and freedom.

  The six weeks of holidays was over too soon and she was on a plane back to Sydney. The worst thing about the holidays was she could see her friends from before were starting to go their own way, boys meeting girls and getting together, others with jobs so they no longer got holidays when she was there. And many of the things she had done in Sydney did not seem to interest her Broome friends much. So they had less to talk about than before. Still they were her best friends and she would never forget them and did not want to say goodbye.

  But another part of her was also looking forward to seeing her Sydney friends again, hearing what they had done over their holidays, what had they got for Christmas, who had been dating boys and who had been on trips overseas and things like that. So she was half sad and half happy as she caught the plane back to Sydney.

  In the end her final year at school was not such a hard year as everyone told her, she found as she started lessons that she had caught up with the others in her first year in Sydney and so in the second year she only had to keep up not learn twice as much. Julie was great too; she would come around at least once a fortnight and quiz her on what she had learned. She was super smart, just like her Mum, and now a corporate lawyer in a big firm that paid her lots, though she still worked on women’s rights issues in her free time as was always revving Cathy up to get involved.