“You’ve stopped learning,” I said. No one responded, so I braved the silence and sliced right through it. “You’ve peaked. You know how to fight. You know how to steal. You keep doing the same thing day in and day out. You’re no longer stimulated. What you need is a mentor. You need someone in the crime scene to tell you how to get to the next level.”

Everyone absorbed my advice. I returned to my book, but I was only pretending to read. I was too excited! There was a warm river trickling through my veins. What was this feeling all about? It was brand-new.

Bruno threw a stone so it hit the tree inches above my head.

“Look around, dickhead. This isn’t the city. Where the fuck do we find someone like that?”

Without looking up from my book, and concealing my inner fire, I pointed up to my father’s proudest achievement- the prison on the hill.

Creation

“So how are we supposed to know who to ask to mentor us?” Dave asked.

“I already know,” I said.

My father’s shed was furnished with every conceivable detail about the prison and prison life, including, thanks to his whipping the warden at pool, files on the prisoners themselves. After coming up with my idea, I had studied every file on the whole menagerie of scum up there and had stolen the file of the clear winner.

“First I ruled out white-collar criminals, domestic abusers, and anyone who’d committed a single act of passion,” I said.

“And?”

“And I also excluded rapists.”

“Why?”

“Because there really isn’t any money in it.”

“Have you bloody picked one or not?” Bruno shouted.

I put down my book and reached into my bag for the file. My heart was beating so wildly I could feel it against my chest. I slid the file across a grassy patch of ground to Bruno and with my mouth dry as a new towel said, “This is your man.”

Bruno took a look. The others crowded around. The inmate’s name was Harry West; he was doing life. If there was a crime, he’d committed it: shoplifting, assault and battery, breaking and entering, possession of an illegal firearm, malicious wounding, grievous bodily harm, drug possession, drug dealing, drug making, attempting to bribe an officer of the court, successfully bribing an officer of the court, tax evasion, receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods, arson, larceny, manslaughter, murder- the whole shebang. He’d set fire to brothels. He shot a man on the dance floor of a bar for doing a fox-trot during a waltz. He stabbed a horse at the racetrack. He’d broken arms, legs, feet, toes, broken ligaments, fragments, particles, matter; his charge sheet stretched back fifty years.

“Why him?”

I sprang to my feet. “The criminal underworld runs the industries of gambling and prostitution. Brothels, strip clubs, bars- these are the venues where the action takes place. You need to find someone who has links to all these things. And someone who’s a career criminal. You don’t want some fly-by-nighter.”

You had to hand it to me, I knew what I was talking about. The boys were impressed. They took another look at the life and times of Harry West. It looked like he’d spent more than half his life in a cell. That’s a life without a lot of running.

I went on: “It’s impossible to know how high up he is in the criminal underworld, but even if he was just answering phones, he’s been in it for long enough to know how the whole system operates. I’m telling you, this is the guy!”

I was electrified. No one had ever seen me like that. Their eyes scrutinized me. A little voice in my head tut-tutted me for encouraging them, but I had spent nearly my entire waking life hatching quirky ideas, and no one other than Caroline had ever heard a single one, until now.

“Let’s do it,” Bruno said, and immediately my stomach tightened. Why? A strange physical reaction was going on inside me. As soon as my idea was embraced, I no longer liked it. It now seemed to be a stupid idea, really awful. I liked it much better when it was in my head all alone. Now that it was going out in the world, I would be responsible for something I no longer had any control over.

This was my first of a lifetime of battles with ideas: the battle of which ones to air and which ones to bury, burn, destroy.

It was decided that because Bruno and Dave had juvenile records, it would be safer if Terry went to meet Harry West and report his findings back to the gang. One early morning in the middle of winter, before school, I accompanied Terry up to the prison. I was keen to go, not only because it was my idea, but because I had never been to the Palace (as it was often referred to in our home) that my father built.

You couldn’t see it from the town that day. A heavy layer of gray fog swallowed half the hill, including the jail, and snaked down to meet us as we fought our way up toward it. When we reached the halfway mark, we could see the shifting wall of fog in front of us. It curled into knots. We walked right into it, right into the soup. For a good twenty minutes we couldn’t get a fix on anything. To make the ascent harder, it had been raining and the winding dirt road that led up to the peak was a river of mud. I was cursing my own head the whole way up. What a big mouth!

When we saw the heavy gates of the prison emerge out of the fog, a long shiver swept over my body. Terry smiled optimistically. Why wasn’t he worried? How can the same situation make one person garrote himself with nerves and another person bright and cheery?

On the other side of the gate, a solitary guard was standing erect. He peered curiously at us as we leaned up against the bars.

“We’d like to see Harry West,” I said.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Martin and Terry Dean.”

The guard eyed us suspiciously. “Are you family?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want to see him for?”

“School project,” Terry said, giving me a surreptitious wink. Behind the gate a gust of wind blew the fog around, and for the first time we saw up close the prison that made a weekend magazine call our town “ Least Desirable Place to Live in New South Wales.” It didn’t look as much like a fortified castle as it did from the town. In fact, it was not one but four large red brick buildings of the same dimensions, as innocuous and ugly as our own school, and without the wire fence in the foreground, it appeared as ordinary as a government office block.

The guard leaned forward, pressing his head against the cold gate. “School project, eh? What subject?”

“Geography,” Terry said.

The guard scratched his head listlessly. I supposed the friction on his scalp started his brain like an outboard motor.

“All right, then.”

He unlocked the gate and it made a shuddering sound as it opened. I made a shuddering sound too as Terry and I walked into the prison compound.

“Follow the path until you reach the next station,” the guard said behind us.

We moved slowly. Two high wire fences ornamented with barbed wire lined the pathway on either side. Behind the fence to the right was a concrete yard where prisoners moved around, swiping at the fog lethargically. Their denim uniforms made them look like blue ghosts floating in a netherworld.

We reached the second guard station. “We’re here to see Harry West.”

The bearded guard had a sad, weary expression that told us he was underpaid, unappreciated, and hadn’t had a hug in over a decade. He plunged his hands into my pockets and rummaged around without so much as a how-do-you-do. His hands went into Terry’s pockets too. Terry giggled.

When the guard finished, he said, “All right, Jim, take them in.”

A man stepped out of the fog. Jim. We followed him inside the prison. The fog came inside too. It was everywhere, floating through the barred windows and crawling in thin trails along the narrow corridors. We were led through an open doorway into the visiting room.