mean I could do things with time in there,’ Slim says. ‘I got so intimate with time that I could manipulate it, speed it up, slow it down. Some days all you wanted was to speed it up, so you had to trick your brain. You get yourself so busy you can convince yourself there’s not enough hours in the day to achieve everything you want to achieve. By “achieve”, I don’t mean learning how to play the violin or getting a degree in economics. I mean realistic midday prison cell goals. I mean collecting enough black balls of cockroach shit in a day that you can spell your name with them. Some days, bitin’ your fingernails down to the quick became a leisure activity to look forward to like an Elvis double bill. So much to do, so little time. Make your bed, read chapter 30 of Moby Dick, think about Irene, whistle “You Are My Sunshine” from start to finish, roll a smoke, have a smoke, play yourself at chess, play yourself at chess again because you’re pissed off you lost the first game, go fishing off Bribie Island in your mind, go fishing off Redcliffe jetty in your mind, scale your fish, gut your fish, cook that fat flathead on some hot coals on Suttons Beach and watch the sun go down. You race that bastard clock so hard you get surprised when the day is over and you’re so tired from your daily schedule of bullshit head games that you yawn when you put your head on the pillow at 7 p.m. and tell yourself you’re mad for staying up so late and burning the candle at both ends. But, then, in those good hours, those sunshine hours in the yard, you could make them slow, you could pull them up like they were well-trained horses and you could turn an hour in the flower garden into half a day, because you were living time in five dimensions and the dimensions were the things you were smelling and the things you could taste and touch and hear and the things you could see, things within things, small universes in the stamen of a flower, layers upon layers, because your vision was so enhanced by the inactivity of all that concrete-wall watching that every single time you walked into that garden yard it was like Dorothy walking into technicolour.’
‘You learned to see all the details,’ I say.
Slim nods. He looks at us both.
‘Never forget, you two, you are free,’ he says. ‘These are your sunshine hours and you can make them last forever if you see all the details.’
I nod loyally.
‘Do your time, hey Slim?’ I say.
He nods proudly.
‘Before it does you,’ he says.
That’s Slim’s favourite nugget of porridge wisdom.
Do your time before it does you.
I remember when I first heard him say it. We were standing in the engine room of the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall, the old and glorious brown sandstone building in the heart of the city, towering over King George Square. Slim took us in on the train from Darra. He said there was an old elevator inside the high clock tower that took people right up to the top of the tower and I didn’t believe him. He knew the old lift operator, Clancy Mallett, from his farmhand days and Clancy had said he would let us go up inside the elevator for nothing, but when we arrived the lift was undergoing repairs, out of order, and Slim had to sweet-talk his old friend with a put-your-dog-on-it tip for race 5 at Eagle Farm to convince him to lead us up a secret set of stairs that only the City Hall staff knew about. The dark stairwell up that clock tower went forever and Slim and old Clancy the lift operator wheezed the whole way up, but me and August laughed the whole way up. Then we gasped when Clancy opened a thin door that led into an engine room of spinning steel pulleys and cogs – the city’s clockwork – that powered the four clock faces on the tower. North, south, east and west, each with giant black steel hands tracking the minutes and the hours of each Brisbane day. Slim stared mesmerised at those hands for ten straight minutes and he told us that time is the ancient enemy. He said time was killing us slowly. ‘Time will do you in,’ he said. ‘So do your time before it does you.’
Clancy the lift operator walked us up another set of secret stairs off the engine room that led up to an observation deck where Slim said Brisbane kids used to throw coins over the rail and seventy-five metres down to the roof of City Hall as they made a wish.
‘I wish I had more time,’ I said as I tossed a copper two-cent piece over the rail.
Then time struck.
‘Block your ears,’ Clancy smiled, turning his eyes up to a giant steel blue bell I hadn’t seen above us. And this bell rang loudly eleven times and near burst my eardrums and I changed my wish to one where time had to stop in that moment for the wish to come true.
‘You seeing all the details, Eli?’ Slim asks across the table.
‘Huh?’ I say, snapping back to now.
‘You catchin’ all the details?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, puzzled by the testing look in Slim’s eye.
‘You catching all that periphery stuff, kid?’ he asks.
‘Sure. Always, Slim. The details.’
‘But you missed the most interesting thing about that article you have there.’
‘Huh?’
I study the article, scan the words again.
‘The byline,’ he says. ‘Bottom right-hand corner.’
The byline. The byline. Bottom right-hand corner. Eyes scanning down, down, down across ink words and pictures. There it is. There’s the byline.
‘What the fuck, Gus!’
I will associate this name with the day I learned how to manipulate time.
This name is Caitlyn Spies.
Slim and I look sharply at August. He says nothing.
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