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gaol again and this time rotting seaweed too. This time, in irons, he’s in a road gang in the May Day Hills, then Pentridge, then a prison hulk, the
Sacramento
, anchored in Hobson’s Bay off Point Gellibrand. There goes his youth into the official particulars:
Height 5 feet 10 inches, weight 11 stone 4 pounds, sallow complexion, hazel eyes, dark brown hair, broad visage, low forehead, eyebrows meeting, first growth of a beard, age 15 years 9 months
.
    Nine scars listed on his face, running north to south.
    Sallow complexion! Low forehead! Eyebrows meeting! Strong evidence of his criminal nature, if not membership of the apes!
    Those old fishy prison lags not put off by scars and fierce eyebrows give the boy a try. He can state that none of them succeeds. (Every prisoner claims that, but convicts can pick the truth. Something missing in the eyes thereafter gives it away, they say; the spark goes out.) Most of them he just glares at and says nothing. Those toadfish that keep trying, or gang up on him, he warns he’ll kill.
    ‘All day,’ he says, ‘I’m handling picks and bars and sledgehammers, and handy with them.’ He’s in a work party of trustees quarrying bluestone and building piers around the bay. ‘You won’t always be together,’ he says. ‘You’ll need to sleep sometime, and without dreaming of a crowbar through the skull.’
    These gaol dregs are so dense you’ve got to get it across that you’re quite prepared to die yourself before they take the message in, before they understand the fact of that calm and tight-closed fury and give up.
    But one afternoon behind the Newport breakwater, one lag’s so crazed he won’t. He pulls out two ugly things, one a gaol-made knife, grins another sickly grin and makes another stab. The boy just shrugs and quickly moves. In fact, he doesn’t need a pick or hammer with all the man’s got on his mind. He takes one cut on the elbow, whips a spiky branch of kelp across the straining face and the lag trips on his own dropped pants and without fuss has his jewels stamped in the sand.
    When he comes off the hulk he’s just eighteen, six foot, with a beard. Double the scars. A quieter man who hates the smell and sight and motion of the sea. At least now he can imagine hell: a greasy winter shore bisected by a loamy rivermouth, a city’s slimy bay, froth-stained with tar and sawdust, phlegmy flotsam, puffy things with pecked-out eyes. And on the high-tide line, strings of smelly sea-grapes pretending to be rosaries.
    Well, why not? He’s seen the sea as gaoler, molester, killer – and graveyard, too, for countless bloated cats and dogs, several cows, two drunkenly shotgunned sea lions, one pig and three people, one a street-girl still in her stays but minus her head. He’s jumped aside as four spooked Clydesdales bolted a dray of pitch and bluestone foundations off the end of the Gellibrand pier like it was a cartload of feathers. And seen them every day for a fortnight after, in frozen frenzied gallop down below, still in harness, crabs and toadfish politely diminishing them from the lips and nostrils backwards. Until a pack of tiger sharks with a taste for everything but the stone and iron wheel-trims cancelled the tableau in twenty minutes.
    He’d face the gallows before doing it again.

S he’s got a shock for me, she says, as I walk in the door. She’s marrying George.
    George?
    The baker. The American.
    Well, she’s right. I’m shocked. Coyly asks me to be a witness. Everything’s so wrong, I squirm. I’ve just got out of gaol. Can’t I sit down first, have a drink, take my boots off? She’s a flickery version of herself, she’s lost her grip. She mixes frowns and giggles and holds up bolts of cloth for me to nod at. A wedding gown! She skids around the house, not finishing jobs, ignoring children, dabbing at her hair like she’s eighteen, not a widow.
    George can get the cake for free!
    He doesn’t much fancy the Pope, the groom announces, if