Remember Ronald Ryan by Barry Dickins

Author:Barry Dickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press

THE END

CHARACTER

RONALD RYAN

SETTING

The condemned cell, Coburg Prison.

The set is the condemned cell at Coburg Prison on 2nd February 1967.

It is filth itself with rusty barbed wire surrounding the dusty louvres of its solitary window.

RYAN, sometimes but not for very long, gets up on his stretcher bed and peers through it.

He is garbed in disillusioning harsh pants and horrid top with printed black arrows.

He looks positively ghoulish.

His hair is his only vanity and this he oils and brooms with a busted plastic blue comb.

He is preparing to either be hanged or liberated at eight the next morning.

On a grotesque desk he keeps a dusty copy of the Catholic Bible.

And a few prison-issue envelopes for his correspondence.

He has a razor with which to shave.

He has a stick of broken shaving cream.

He has 100 minutes to live.

He is feverishly pacing and then feverishly still as a stone.

Lights up as RYAN fronts the audience.

He is precisely like a river current which has stopped.

One lace on his exhausted gymnasium shoes is untied.

He is very close to the audience, on edge as well as nonchalant.

Hundred minutes left so don’t walk out on me my darlings

You are the beloved ones remember

You turned up to see me hang or walk relatively free

There is no harm but the harm

The hours one of those just stepped in to see me

An hour it was who liberated me and listened to me with such care

The hour sat down and leant his chin on his other arm

Like an obedient child

Like an obedient bird

Like an old longing in my home

Which is D Division

Last night the earth stopped and I began to breathe simultaneously

Thank you David Copperfield

What am I saying?

The first Coburg tram has just rumbled over Sydney Road

The first baby just got born not far from Jordan my home

I want to travel to Jordan and do time with my redeemer Christ Almighty

Who shall forgive me for murder as He knew more than I about how that felt

They hanged the thing they couldn’t understand

They pinned him up personally on the bloodstained board

The one person who could’ve helped

Not just me but all of the bickering butcher-heads of the world

The ones who run the program and ruin the result

The ones who tip scorn far in

Tip it right in the writers and thinkers who make Stalin look left-wing and alternative

We are ruled by reactionaries who failed kindergarten

Illiterate Premiers

Poisonous parsons

Evil architects such as the parasites who designed this jail in windy Coburg

Where the wind goes to die and all the fairies commit suicide in their filmy fashion

I’m a fairy telling you

Besides I heard what I’m saying already whispered by children in Bell Street

So it must be true

Last night they shifted every single criminal out of D Division just to let me have it

Just to stick it up me

That I’d have no fellow murderer to speak to or joke with

I was all alone in D Division

With merely the ghost of myself to talk to

And bot a smoke from

And thieve his last match therefore and inhale a last gasp of throat

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