Rick the Prick...the end.

Bert’s BBQ – A Cautionary Tale

You’d think we’d learn. That when a man starts speaking in slow, chilling tones about how the world has wronged him (and what he’d really like to do about it) we’d take him seriously. But prison makes you numb to crazy talk. Desensitised. Until one day, the talking stops, and people end up dead.

Rick reminded Harley of someone. Another man who claimed to be undeserving of punishment, with polish in his voice and poison in his heart.

A man who walked out of prison quietly…and made sure his ex never walked again.

This is that story.

“Yeah, nah,” Harley said, shaking his head. A couple of days had passed since Rick’s latest tirade, and Harley had heard enough. “I wanna lag him into the screws.”

He didn’t have to explain why. I already knew.

Harley carries the weight of what happens when warning signs get ignored. A couple of years ago, on a previous stint inside, he crossed paths with a bloke named Bert—a softly spoken old music teacher with diabetes, a BMW, and kids in their twenties. The kind of guy no one would’ve picked for what came next.

He’d been sent to our ward after breaching an IVO, but it was the diabetes that kept him there. Harley, by then fully confined to his wheelchair, took pity on him. “It was his first time inside,” Harley said. “So I helped him out best I could. Even got my brother to pick up his Beemer and drive it home for him.”

Bert had told him he was divorced, but had a new girlfriend of a couple of years. Coming up to Christmas, she’d wanted to spend time with her own kids and suggested he do the same. But somewhere in the mix, they’d had a fight—over the phone.

“She said, ‘See, you’re a loser. Even your own kids don’t want to spend Christmas with you.’”

Harley reckons that insult broke him. Called into question the image he had of himself—this refined, cultured man with a big house in Brighton. After the call, Bert got drunk and drove to her house. She called the cops. They searched the car and found knives, enough to lock him up.

Like Rick, Bert thought he was above it all. The other prisoners. The guards. He spoke with a plum in his mouth and would constantly request officers to watch their profanity and be more professional. “Don’t forget,” he once said, “you work for me, not the other way round.”

Unsurprisingly, his popularity ranked somewhere between head lice and a cavity search.

After his six-week stay, the screws cleared out his cell and found scraps of paper—meticulously written out plans of how he was going to kill his girlfriend. Harley watched as they read them aloud, laughing, calling him a “fuckin’ fruit loop” before scrunching them up and tossing them in the bin.

But Harley saw something else. Something dark behind Bert’s eyes. A coldness. A flicker of intent.

“He was hurt, man. Properly hurt,” Harley told me. “Being called a loser cut deep. The way he saw himself was so far above that. It was a brutal insult.”

Harley even confronted him. “You wanna kill her, don’t you?”

Bert didn’t say much. But not long after, he tried to hang himself from the shower rail.

It was clear his mental health was slipping. Whether he was on meds or getting any real help inside was anyone’s guess. But a couple of days after his release, Harley’s worst fear made the six o’clock news.

A man had been revived after pouring petrol on himself and his girlfriend before setting her alight. She died. He barely survived, but severe burns eventually took his life. His name was confirmed in the press the next day. It was Bert.

There was no fallout for the prison. No inquiry. No reckoning. Harley still wonders what might’ve happened if those notes had been handed to someone—anyone—who could’ve done something. He likes to believe it might’ve saved them both. But he also knows he did nothing. And that haunts him.

That’s why Rick sets him off. Why every unhinged rant from Rick sounds like an echo. Harley sees the same danger. Hears the same bells. And maybe, just maybe, lagging Rick in (again) might stop something worse from happening.

The Long Goodbye

The days blurred into a week, and Rick became a very sick puppy indeed. So sick the medical staff sent him again to the big hospital in the city. True to form, he fought them on it, but they finally convinced him to go. He returned a ghost, with a grim diagnosis delivered by the specialists: two to three months of life left, max. All because he steadfastly refused the dialysis that could filter the poison from his blood.

His health spiralled even further. A fall in the shower. A panicked trip to the hospital for chest pains. Then a shingles diagnosis that put him back in isolation. He was a man coming apart at the seams.

One day, they sent him back to St. Vee’s Hospital in the city, and this time, he never returned to us. A month later, the head nurse gave me the final update. “He accepted treatment,” she said, a hint of surprise in her tone. “He’s on the mend.”

On the mend. He finished his sentence while still in their care, a prisoner of his own failing body. Technically, he was a free man.

I’m glad, I think, that he didn’t die on my watch. But there’s a cold dread that slithers back in, unwelcome. In that sterile hospital room, with the beep of machines his only company, he found a reason to cling to life. I just pray to God, or whatever’s listening, that his reason wasn’t revenge. Because if it was, then the system didn’t just fail to fix a broken man.

It reloaded his life… and pointed him back at the world.