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“Now Eliza, I need to talk to you about your cognitive skills.”
“My what?”
“Your cognitive skills.”
“My George reckoned I was pretty good in the cot, that what you mean?”
“No Eliza. I’m talking about your ability to recall things, your capacity to analyse situations and draw logical conclusions.”
“But if I could do all that crap they would not have put me in here in the first place.”
“Eliza, sometimes there are temporary oversights which are caused by conclusions that are based on evidence to which proper guidelines have not been applied.”
“You mean a fuck up?”
“In a word, yes. Eliza, explain the word, ‘friend’ to me.”
“Well, a friend is a special person, they can be a woman, and they can be a bloke.”
“Go on.”
“Well, they can be someone you meet for the first time down the street, or sitting on a tram. I met a bloke once; I was sitting in the park. He did not seem to want anything from me, money, or anything else, if you get what I mean. He just wanted to sit there with me. Sometimes he would sit there for nearly half an hour, just saying nothing. And then we would both start to talk about all sorts of things, kids climbing trees, footy, the war, the new copper George put in for me once. And I used to tell him about all my silly invention ideas that come into my head.”
“Did you like him?”
“Yes, he was a real friend.”
“You stopped seeing him?”
“I was put in here, in case you had not noticed.”
“But he was a real friend?”
“Yes, he was, not like some other blokes I have known.”
“How often did you meet?”
