First Night at the Proms (Part 1)

Black Maria backs up to the watch house inner gates and sits idling, waiting for its passengers. At a barked command from the ferryman, Nick shuffles forward with the other prisoners and waits to be manacled to his travelling companion, a sullen, middle-aged wraith wearing the look of the gallows on his features and the grave in his eyes.

“You’ve got big wrists son, for someone your size”, the ferryman mutters to Nick as he snaps the cuffs shut on the pair. “I hope your ticker’s as big.”

“So do I”, Nick answers with a catch in his throat.

Maria is an unrelieved black from head to tail, and long. Small slits of triple-glazed glass and fine steel thread are spaced at regular intervals along its length on both sides. The glass is caked in the grime of countless crossings and allows little light to penetrate. A steel mesh partition divides the interior space into two, females on one side, males on the other. Into these spaces, the lines of paired ‘sweethearts’ climb up into the darkness and take their places along the metal bench seats that run its length. Maria’s womb stinks of foetid bodies and stale, nicotine-soaked clothing, and as most of the prisoners are smoking, the air is almost unbreathable, the gap-toothed cackling of the older female lags heightening the mood of despair written large on most of the ticket holders’ faces.

A metallic thump and the grinding whirr of straining metal as the gates swing slowly open and Maria rolls into the secure lock area. The inner gates reverse their motion and clang shut as the outer gates repeat the process. Lurching now up the basement ramp and into the daylight of a free world. Nick is seated at the very rear, looking out the grilled slit at the precious mundanity of the every-day: people going about their lawful business – shoppers, workers, school kids, motorists. As Maria moves through the traffic, drivers regularly pull up behind her. In one vehicle, in a world light years away, a young mother and her two children sit gazing in wonder at Nick’s stricken face, a signifier of a tragedy play being enacted in the airless confines of the black transport.

As Maria picks up speed out of the city precincts, a macabre scene plays out between two of her occupants. One of the male prisoners has pressed himself against the mesh and unzipped his flies, forcing his erection through a hole in the weave. On the other side, one of the ‘ladies’ is down on her knees taking him into her mouth in a frenzied parody of affection, or perhaps, of charity. A sordid little scene but yet, not. As lovers may grapple in the midst of death all around them, maybe this too is a life-affirming act, a pathetic last gasp before such things become a memory, at least where the opposite sex is concerned. Or so Nick muses in a moment of philosophy.

But now Maria is running parallel to what seems like an impossibly long, ochre-hued wall, interspersed with regularly-spaced guard towers. Inside them, visible through bullet-proof glass, silhouettes of spectres on guard duty, mute shadows with the outlines of rifles slung from their shoulders. And then the changing note of the powerful engine as it decelerates and brings hearts up into mouths. Maria makes a left turn onto a long concrete drive, rolls slowly up the shallow incline and halts before the massive slate-grey doors of Long Bay Penitentiary.

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Story By

Phil Kimmons