The gaol filled the sky. A place so large in her mind and now in reality that Alice could not fix her gaze upon it. Instead she turned her gaze downwards to the pavement, to the swishing skirts and lace-up boots of two young women walking ahead of her who had got off at the same stop. They came to the entrance of the gaol and the two women walked past and onwards and Alice followed, walked all the way to the corner of Burton Street. Here the two women turned and were soon gone, their lives going in a different direction. Alice kept on walking. She walked the circumference of the prison and found herself lost because it had not four sides but five. A pentagon, of sorts. As though the normal rules of construction had been abandoned here. Or perhaps it was merely an awkwardly shaped piece of land and an unskilled workforce. A watchtower nestled in the curiously angled corner where two sides of the five-sided building merged. Alice felt the gaze of the prison guard perched high up on the platform of the watchtower.

She found her way back to the entrance. Here two vast turrets the height of six men or more abutted the doorway. They had slits cut into them at intervals, behind which, in another century and in another hemisphere, a medieval archer might have crouched. Ornamental, Alice presumed, or perhaps a warning. The walls of the prison were carved from great slabs of sandstone that shone like blocks of gold in the afternoon sunlight. The marks of the convicts’ tools could be seen in many of them, scratches and sometimes initials. I was here, the convicts’ marks said, and do not forget it. The doors, black and solid, were firmly closed. And it was here, not so very long ago, that the people of Darlinghurst and beyond—for it was a great spectacle—had stood to watch murderers hanged. There had been a platform for the hangings over the doorway so the people below could watch. Her mother had come here as a girl to view a famous bushranger hanged. (‘We was not so civilised in them days,’ though she had spoken with wonder of the bushranger’s legs kicking in the air.) The platform was gone now and in its place these turrets built, and above the door a magnificent prancing lion and a unicorn, carved out of the stone right where the platform had once stood, as though such beasts, such craftsmanship, were proof of the civilisation of the people, of the city.

Alice held her tram ticket tightly as one might a rosary or a good luck charm. While she still held it in her hand her journey had not ended. But she was ashamed of her dread; it seemed a poor thing indeed for a visitor who was here for an hour and then gone to be afraid when Milli was inside, a prisoner.