Letters from the Inside (9 page)

August 31

Dear Tracey,

Sheez, instead of not knowing what to say, this time I don’t know where to start.

Congratulations about your essay. That’s great. I’m not surprised though, ’cos you do write well. Am I allowed to see it?

But why do you keep saying you don’t know what to write about? Write about yourself. Write about Garrett. You think I’m not burning up to know more about you? Just what is true in what you told me before? Like I said, I think I can tell what’s fake and what isn’t, but in some parts it’s not easy. What’s true about your family for instance?

As for my telling people, well, I told Cheryl that you didn’t go to Prescott High, and I couldn’t get you to answer my letters. That’s when she said you might be some psycho. But I haven’t told her you’re in Garrett. I was too freaked-out by it all. She keeps asking me, but I tell her I haven’t heard. I’ll have to say something eventually but at the moment I don’t seem to want to, I don’t know why.

I haven’t told anyone else. I’m still hanging around with Cheryl, but not so much with Rebecca or Maria. I’m good mates with a girl called Naomi Barker, plus a new girl called Mai Huynh, from Vietnam. As you may have guessed, this is a bit of a multi-cultural school — 28 different languages or something, including heaps of Vietnamese, but Mai’s the only Vietnamese I’ve got to know well. She’s sweet, but she can be a bit of a suck.

I suppose my family is sort of normal. I’d never thought of us that way. Except for Steve, but every family has to have one creep. There’s no zoo without a gorilla.

Am I allowed to ask what you did to get put in Garrett?

You know, a lot of things are making sense to me now. Why you wouldn’t send me a photo — guess you don’t have any. Why you didn’t ring me up, or send me your phone number. Are you allowed phone calls? Why you have a post-office box. Maybe even why you don’t believe in God.

How come they don’t censor your letters?

I can’t believe the way my innocent letter to you, back in February I think it was, has developed into this. Oh well, maybe it was meant to be. Anyway, it’d be good to get a long letter back this time.

Love,

 
Mandy

Sep 4

Dear Mandy,

The one thing I did think when I got sent here was that I wouldn’t have to do schoolwork. And it’s true you don’t have to go to the classes. But there’s nothing else to do, so you go. And when you do, you get more work than at real school. (Not Prescott High, either. Jefferis High was the last, but there’ve been a few.) I don’t normally give a, so I don’t do much, but lately I’ve been trying a bit, for some stupid reason, and it’s too hard. I mean tonight I spent an hour and a half on one problem in Maths and got nowhere. Trouble is, there’s no-one to ask. And then tomorrow the stupid bat’ll tell me I should make an effort. ‘You’ve got brains, Tracey you should use them.’

Well, suppose I better answer the questions in your letter. But the lights go out in half an hour, so don’t expect any ten-pager.

You’re right about the photos — I don’t have any of me. This place is pretty strict. You know how you see on TV all these modern Qs with carpets and colour TV and pinnies? There may be some like that somewhere, but I’ve never seen one. Maybe I’m in the wrong state — this girl from Jennings reckons they’re OK there. When you get here you’re given a list of the rules, and what you can keep in your slot. Here it is, if you’re interested:

H.M. DETENTION CENTRE
GARRETT

NOTICE

Do not deface your cell or other Garrett property.

No gambling will be permitted.

You have been received into this centre either on remand or to serve a term of imprisonment.

If you consider you have grounds for appeal you may ask to see a legal adviser.

Articles and books required for educational purposes:

A cell card listing such articles, and initialled by the Education Officer, must be kept in your cell. An exception is made for items issued by classroom tutors and containing an authorisation slip.

F.R. Batchelor

(Director of Prisons)

Pretty exciting, hey?

But they let you have some stuff that’s not on the list. Time’s running out. But before the lights go off, I want to say one thing: Don’t ask why I got put in here. Don’t try to find out. If you do, that’ll be the end of any friendship, for a good reason — you won’t want to have anything to do with me.

You see? It’s never going to be much of a friendship, is it? Because I can’t be honest. If I don’t pretend and act and cover up you’ll realize how off I am. So either we have a friendship that’s half-fake, or I’m honest and we lose it. All that crap you see on posters, like ‘True friends are truthful friends’, it doesn’t work when you give it the acid test.

Lights out — see ya

    
Tracey

September 10

Dear Trace,

Why do your letters take so long to get to me? Last time I asked, you gave me some fake excuse. Is it because they do censor them?

I’m still spinning round and out. God, Trace, I don’t know what you did. I can’t imagine. It scares me, to tell you the truth. But I’ve got to stick tight to a few things — one of them being that I think you’re OK. All these months of letters, I know a lot of what you said wasn’t true, but you can’t hide yourself completely, and I think, reading between the lines, that you’re an OK person.

Maybe you did do something really bad. I guess you must have. But I bet you wouldn’t do anything like that now. And there are all kinds of reasons why people do stuff. Maybe you were hanging round with the ‘wrong crowd’, as my mother calls them. (She means anyone with a tat or rad hair). The good old peer group pressure that we get warned about at assembly every second day. Maybe you were off your face, or worse. Doing drugs. I don’t know. This is foreign country to me.

The counsellor at school told Steve he’d end up in Ruxton if he didn’t watch out.

Sheez, this term’s been a long one. I suppose winter term always is. Netball’s been good — we won a few games. Finished second last, but still. It seemed like every weekend was raining — wet and cold and windy. I’ve been trying to teach Mai Huynh to play netball but fair dinkum, you’ve never seen anything like it. She’d rather let the ball bounce off her head than catch it. I don’t think girls play much sport in Vietnam. But she’s teaching me table tennis and she’s a star at that. So don’t ask me to explain it.

That was true about your basketball team, wasn’t it? All that stuff you wrote?

Went to the movies with Naomi (Barker) and Cheryl yesterday. Nay and I both wanted to see
Waiting for You
, but Cheryl talked us into going to
David’s Diary.
She sure likes to get her own way. But
David’s Diary
was good. It’s about this guy who’s rapt in this girl named Alex, and she’s got an identical twin named Sarah. And the two girls keep swapping on him, ’cos Alex doesn’t like him much anyway. And after a while Sarah decides she’s got the hots for him. Then Alex decides there must be more to him than she realized, so she gets interested too. But now he’s switched to Sarah. . . and so it goes on. It’s sort of a comedy, but a romance too.

Do you get videos where you are? How much TV can you watch?

Well, hear from you soon I hope.

Love,

Mandy

Sep 12

Dear Mandy,

OK, big-nose, you want answers, let’s get them out of the way. I swear, you ought to be a welfare officer.

1. They say they do ‘random censoring’ (spot checks) of letters in and out. We have to hand them in unsealed, and the ones we get have been opened. But the hacks (they’re the guards), the ones we talk to, say they don’t bother much, except to look for drugs. Round about Christmas they started reading everything, and there was a full-on riot. So they’re a bit nervous of doing it now.

2. Of course all the basketball stuff was true. That’s our big thrill here — if you suck up enough bums you get to play sport once a week (it’s really more like once a fortnight — if you’re lucky) with outside teams. No away games unfortunately, or they’d come back with an empty bus. There’s a gym here and teams from outside come in to play. They’re only adults — no kids our age allowed. Most of them are hacks and their friends and rellies, or Christians, people like that. But basketball’s the best, because that’s the only sport where we’re in a regular comp., with finals and everything. And they always play the finals in here, whether we’re in them or not, ’cos they say we’ve got the best gym. But maybe it’s ’cos they’re sorry for us.

Trouble is, we might get kicked out of the comp. soon — they reckon we play too rough. But if they want to see rough they ought to come into the yard for five minutes. That’s rough. They expect us to be real thugs, so the moment we brush them with a fingernail they drop to the ground and cry. I gotta go to the next question. This is getting me mad, thinking about it.

3. I haven’t got that essay about my Nanna at the moment. The teacher’s still got it. But when I get it back — oh I don’t know. I’d be embarrassed to have you read it.

4. I guess the reason my letters take so long is that they’re slack here about sending them. We take them to breakfast and put them in a box. I don’t know what happens to them then.

5. One of the slags (that’s us) told me the reason they use a post-office box is so people won’t get embarrassed. Like, if your grey-haired grannie goes into her country post office with a letter addressed to her dear granddaughter in Garrett, or if she gets a letter with Garrett written on the back of the envelope, then everyone’ll know. So it all goes through a box number.

6. We can watch TV for an hour in the afternoon, after school lessons; an hour after tea; and an hour during the day at weekends. But it’s only black and white. No video, although they keep promising. (It doesn’t take long in here to get jacked-off with promises.) And there are the worst fights over what to watch. Some shows everyone agrees on, but not many. Half the time the hack tells you what it’s going to be, just to stop the fights.

Well, this is about my longest letter ever. Oh yeah, one last thing: tell your brother to stay out of Ruxton if he knows what’s good for him. That’s Vaseline City in there, believe me. KY Country. On the other hand, maybe you’d think he deserved it.