by Alan Duff
He took off his shoes, socks, placed them by the side of the road and marked the spot with two stones. He walked with immediate pain, yet it was kind of wonderful. Back to nature, to childhood; the birds singing, insects noising, sunlight playing in the foliage, the smells, flower scents. This could be a hunting trip. That is, until the trees crowded in on the road and it got chilly, eerily so, and it looked as if the road would shortly run out.
There, a glimpse of a dwelling, which sent shivers, becoming shock waves, through his being. Is she here? How old would she be? Late seventies? It’s possible. Thinking of her made him shiver the more. Maybe because she wasn’t such a good mother, though then again his memories weren’t setting off alarm bells either. Who knows, maybe she did her best? How old was I when I left this place? Fourteen. Left school before the legal age and hitch-hiked to Two Lakes. No dreams, just wanted to get away. (Wanted to express my anger.)
The trees closed in and there: a rusted sliver of iron roof catching the sun; reddish-brown weatherboards. Must’ve been abandoned years ago. (Years ago, li’l jake.) Jake thought he heard this voice, but it was only in his head, that little boy of so long ago it’s a wonder he even recognised it. Years ago, li’l jakey.
Bare foot, back on home territory. (No it wasn’t home. It was a pigsty. No, not even pigs would’ve lived like we did. Jammed into that tiny cabin stuck out middle of the forest they had planted just before I was born. Now it’s over fifty years old and surely should have been cut down twenty years ago. Maybe it’s Maori land, maybe it always was Maori-owned? How did we get to live here? Was it owned by the forest company?)
Bare foot, the man back in his childhood had to push aside branches at the last, then he stepped into a surprise clearing, like those you come upon when you’re out in the wilds hunting. No reason for their existence is evident, or none you care to seek out; enough to just enjoy, appreciate nature pulling a surprise on you.
Except this told its own explanation. This was someone’s rough lawn, mown by that tethered sheep thick with unshorn wool, munching away. It might be fly-blown. Jake was suddenly nervous, indeed anxious. Make that spooked. I left this shithole as a fourteen year old, went to Two Lakes and never came back, had no desire to. So, why didn’t my old man put up a fight? Least I can say I fought against it, with my fists, even if that turned out so wrong. Least it said Jake Heke ain’t gonna let no one tell him he’s inferior. Eff them. He’ll knock you over if you talk to him like that. In the old days he did. So why didn’t you show some pride, father of mine?
By the time he had thought those thoughts, his bare feet had taken him across the clearing near to the front door. If this dwelling had been made of logs, this would be out of a movie, a little log cabin in a magical kind of forest. With an old Maori lady standing in the doorway —
He stopped dead in his shoeless tracks, and heard himself say: Mum? Thinking: No, it can’t be. Told she was alive but realising now she’d been dead in his mind a long while.
The old woman said, Who’s that? Who you? Who invited you here? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m on a pension. Peering at him, recognition flooding her.
Jake? Is that you, Jake? Can it be you? Are you my long-lost son?
He muttered, Yes, but made no move to embrace her. (We weren’t even near to close.)
Where you been all this time? Why’d you up and leave without telling your mother? Was I that bad? Did I deserve that, all those years of worrying about you, what you were up to — the bad you might be up to? Is it really you, Jake? Is it you, li’l jake?
It’s me. (Yet I know now, in this instant, it’s not me. Was once me, but should never have been me. I didn’t have to spell my name in my head with a small j. It didn’t have to be set in the concrete of my head in lower case. Then I wouldn’t have had to create the counter reaction, the fighting legend, acquire that mindless reputation, take that childish moniker, the Muss. How I made my entire existence stand for being a man with indomitable fighting muscles. I was better than that. Or should have been.)
Now look who’s before me: my old lady. She used to thrash us for the smallest reason, or no reason at all. Least I made sure I never laid a hand on my kids, the other bad stuff aside. And she was hardly beside herself with emotional joy, still that suspicious, volatile Miria Heke of old, ready to lash out with hand or nearest hard object or cutting words. (You idiot! You stupid shit! No wonder they call us the slave line.)
But hell, that was back then. Those years are gone. She can’t have many left. So what does a man do? I can’t find it to hug her. I can’t.
Yet he made himself do exactly that: he hugged her. She felt frail, when she used to be a big woman (with fat, stinging hands and a cruel tongue), this reduced form so vulnerable in his strong arms. Though no emotion came. None. This was duty. Forgiveness. Like Beth had forgiven him. Neither deserved it.
She pulled away from his embrace, ran eyes over him and asked, What’d you bring me? Why didn’t you bring me something nice?
He smiled and said, I never even meant to bring myself. (Mum.) Guess I thought you’d passed on.
Well, I haven’t. Why’d you leave, Jake? I got left to another fifteen years of your father —
He wasn’t my father.
Oh? So what was he — your damn uncle?
I don’t remember him as a father. (Nor you as a mother.)
Well, he wasn’t. Not a husband either. You mean to say you didn’t bring me anything after all these years? Shame on you twice, boy. For leaving me then coming back home with nothing to show for it. You got even a lousy smoke? I ran out. Pension doesn’t go in the bank till next Tuesday, every fortnight. The man comes and picks me up to get the money out, take me to the supermarket. I don’t buy much, smokes are so much these days and they always run out. Always.
(We do a lot of your always, Mum. Always getting drunk, always getting violent, always broke, always never getting it, do we, this life in front of us.
It’s like it’s a big wall we refuse to learn how to climb over. Always.)
I don’t smoke.
She rocked back on her heels in disbelief. Don’t tell me that. Everyone smokes. You’re a Heke. Smokes killed your father. He’d wake himself up middle of the night to have one.
Jake shrugged, couldn’t care less if she believed him or not. You live here by yourself?
Me and the damn possums, every night on the roof. You’d remember them.
(Yes, he remembered, with his siblings scaring themselves that they were the feet of ghosts come to get them.) Yeah, I remember them.
I still do my own cooking. Refused their damn meals on wheels like I’m a cripple. Got my pride. I forget all the time. But not you. Her eyes narrowed, as if with a thirty-six-year late anger. Come in.
She led him inside, the smell returned the boyhood in the instant. Too many smells to specify, nor need to. They just were. Some of it stench. Boiled cabbage and fatty meat. Mutton flaps, the childhood staple within these walls. And drink and violence from both parents. (Always.) This was the house he knew and yet did not love for a moment.
In the tiniest sitting room, weak light came from a single window on the wrong side to the tracking sun; two sofas from another era, one with the springs showing. The shock of seeing the same newspaper wallpapering. The floor, though, was no longer dirt but laid over with wooden planking.
You had the floor done?
Yeah. Too cold for a old woman. This is where you used to sit, front of that fire in the winter — long as your father wasn’t around, drunk more usual, wanting the fire to himself. Why’d you go, Jakey?
He took time in answering. So he wouldn’t word it wrong. Drew in deep breath and said, Because I hated it. I hated being a Heke, descendant of slaves. Those up themselves villagers, as if they could talk. I’ve just driven around, went in the pub, they’re the ones descended from slaves, not us. Hated them saying that. Hated him, the old man, hated being hungry all the time, hated the drinking by you both. I —
(How did she know that?) Guess I did.
The old lady smiled crookedly. No guessing to it. It’s how it is, son. Life keeps repeating itself.
Surprised at her homespun wisdom, he was nonetheless of his own view. Not unless you stop it repeating.
She burst out in an old woman’s cackle, an unpleasant sound; as if an illness was on every expelled breath. Or death was. So how did your life work out?
Not so good. But not so bad now. In fact, now it’s real good. (Specially that I’m seeing Beth again. A chance to redeem myself, to show her another, better man.) His mother’s differently crooked smile said she was not believing him again. Then she said, You sure you don’t smoke? Or you don’t wanna give me one?
He had to grin. I gave it up. Years ago. Bit late for you. I’ll go and buy you a packet — a carton.
You do that. But let’s talk first.
And they did and it wasn’t a revelation to understanding himself, the adult he’d become and fortunately not stayed like. Just listening, mostly, to a familiar old voice — watching a face he knew so well and yet, really, had never known at all, nor would know — saying basically nothing. Just a list of an old person’s complaints and not a little bitterness.
There wasn’t anything to know. She was just a less than ordinary person who hadn’t done even half her best, soon to fade off the planet and leave not even a blank space.
Yet he came away less burdened, if only in the realisation that he should have got over this growing-up baggage ages ago.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
VOICE FROM THE TOP (LANDING)
DOESN’T MATTER WHO I am, not my name, what I look like, how old I am (but I’m no longer young). And what I’m in for is a symptom of a stricken sector, not the murders themselves. Just know that I was the same as most everyone else here, who leaves and comes back again, like homing pigeons driven by compulsion beyond our control. Make that lemmings, marching for the cliff edge to our deaths.
Except they’re drawn-out deaths, of each moment with our tormented selves, a state surely beyond our control or there’d be hundreds of thousands pass through here, our condition would be kind of normal, few would come back, the lesson would be learnt, the assault on your sensibilities would be so shocking as to be life-changing. You’d have to be mad to come back. And sick. More than that. So we’re mad and sick and more.
Or we come back because this is the only place we belong, the only place for society to put us and where we feel valid. We’re most of us dangerous, profound nuisances at best; we’re the spanners jammed in every wheel that ever turned near us, we’ve been busting perfectly good spokes our whole lives, starting at about — oh, I’d say the age of nine.
You’re a symptom, but no one, not even the self-proclaimed experts (who aren’t experts, really), knows of just what. Or they do but the truth’s too unpalatable, it’s too much to handle politically, so it’s never going to get said. We’re the bogey hanging from the nose of society no one’s prepared to point out. A wound that everyone closes eyes to.
So, we’re not only outcasts (grown up and getting grey), we’re cast aside in the too-hard-to-define tray. We’re never going to be fixed, only repeated, of foul deed and cowardly and lowly acts.
We have a need to shed the blood of others, others who know the innocence we have never known. To give us a warped sense of validity, a kind of raw, skin-flailed bleeding meaning.
We’re infected humans, as disorganised as jellyfish floating on the seas, just stinging whoever and whatever comes along. We do everything without thought, or not thought as you know it. Ours is a different process, it must have a different location in our brains. Or maybe we were born with haywired brains.
I’m not just sorry to say, I’m crying inside at saying it, that we’re most of us one race. Without even having to mention what race. Not when everyone knows. (Psst: Maoris.)
In the cell next door he raped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl, buried her alive in a sandy grave on an isolated beach. He reads comics, a dozen a day; he loves fantasy heroes, flights of fancy. It’s how he gets by living with his crime. Superman and The Phantom and Spiderman ain’t no murdering child-rapists. They’re with divine, supernatural powers, can fly and zap their way out of trouble, or from evil deed. Comic book heroes can’t do wrong, and nor, for the duration of reading them, can you. What girl victim was this?
The cell next to Beach Girl is another of his kind. Except he must be of different psychology, even though the same appalling act. He kidnapped a nine-year-old girl he didn’t know, held her captive for three days and raped and sodomised her repeatedly, a crime so bad it shook even us lot up. Though, like to everything, we quickly got numb to what he did. We have to live together. It’s hard to be morally selective, too many dudes here with fooling charm and tongues of snakes and who amongst us is moral?
Kidnap Kevin doesn’t read, like most of the inmates — or they can’t. The only paper Kev gets is toilet paper and the torn-out pages from child porn magazines he and his kind somehow get their worse than grubby hands on. The screws keep confiscating the porn then deal to him, stomach blows, bending the fingers, grabbing a handful of belly flesh and twisting it — he’s only a child abuser, and they charge him with assault, as well as the porn material charge, which adds another meaningless term to his life sentence, along with a meaningless lecture on a subject his brain is not wired to compute. He’s not leaving here except in a box, is Kidnap Kev, the human beast who thinks his nickname is a compliment.
It might be genes, could be genes, must be genes. No one can be nurtured to become that evil. This genetic monster masturbates several times a day, and comes like a little boy moaning in his tortured sleep. It’s only scary that he doesn’t care what his fellow lowlifes think of his unashamed wanking. He asks them if they’re ashamed of what they do or have done. None could answer that, not with a winning retort.
Cell next to Kev is Wally Home Invasion III, for the three homes he invaded his vast, monstrous form with, armed with a baseball bat and a single haka he’d learnt and practised and thought about; set about the respective occupants for no other reason than, he blithely told the court, he felt like it. To us, our thinking, if you feel like something then you do it. Wally smashed in a young boy’s skull as he slept, then did the haka in his poor victim’s bedroom before fleeing. Did home invasions II and III before they got him. He’s the Maori culture class’s most faithful attendee, the selective student who takes out the violent part of Maori history, learns and practises the hakas, but never the lengthy waiata chants that speak of all aspects of Maori history in a most beautiful, poetic form. But still, there’s a truth there for those who don’t feel assailed by it: that it was an endless history of war, its mighty deeds by mighty men, when being a warrior was the only means of validating yourself, fulfilled you as a human being in a time when life was simpler and unknowingly briefer and even more violent than in this maximum-security prison. And they call it: our history, with pride?
Across the landing, two cells to my left facing, is Joe Jurassic Park Jacobs, the serial rapist whose marauding ground was his own residential ghetto in South Auckland. Take a look at him any time of day or what they give us of a night to observe each other, or just happen to notice, his face. His face, how innocent, innocuous it is. They say he’s told one person in confidence — when, hahaha, ain’t no such thing, not here — that he used to go out and observe different people of different occupations and take facial expressions from them.
He started with religious men but Jurassic found they had expressions saying there was too much troubled thought behind the smiling, beatific masks (not that beatific’s a word Jurassic uses, it’s mine, I’ve had time and inclination to learn a more extensive vocabulary). He discovered small-time shopkeepers didn’t have it, didn’t find it in school-teachers either, certainly not cops. He searc
hed every occupation and found it in female nurses.
Happened onto a little café that nurses frequented, would park himself up with a beer and a newspaper and secretly observe them. Then he’d go home and adopt the exact facial expression of whoever he’d chosen for that evening, he’d talk more or less the words he remembered them speaking so to get the feeling from the inside. Then he’d go out and do his dirty deed for the night, gaining trust to a lone woman’s residence by adopting that personality type.
The court convicted him of twenty-seven rapes. Twenty-five years minimum sentence, unprecedented in this liberal, do-somersaults-for-the-criminal justice system. He boasted to what he thought was a single confidant here that the true number was nearer sixty. Whatever, he was never going to be released, one of the few on the never list, since society out there thinks even our types need hope. (When we don’t. It’s saving we need.)
On this top landing are vicious murderers, multiple rapists, men of extreme violence, bigtime heroin dealers. (Outside, our young successors are lined up the length and breadth of this breathlessly beautiful little country kidding itself most is well when it’s not. I tell you, it’s bad seed growing, that ain’t corn waving fecund fat in the breeze. It’s humans made of bad seed, you, someone, everyone, must believe me. This country’s going to reap what it sowed, they’ll (you’ll) see.)
The entire second level is occupied by the Black Hawks, creating force and fear in numbers, strength in their closed gang culture. There’s continuum in the feeding grounds on the outside, festering social sludge pits, feeding the littlies fat on a hard life, a staple diet of lovelessness. It is so I tell you.
On the ground floor are ordinary killers, rapists, men of violence, crazies and a lawyer or three from time to regular time, if they’d been particularly preyful of old-age pensioners’ savings, a doctor who’d murdered his wife, two accountants who defrauded Jurassic’s number, twenty-seven, times a million in dollars from investors nation-wide, in a scheme every prisoner wanted to know so they could go out and do it. No one ever really cares about coming back or they’d not, would they? This lot are the sex toys of the second-floor gang rulers, the heads to bust for that crazy Apeman to play a real wild ape’s old lady, an inquisitor putting a burning cigarette to someone’s skin, like a live coal deciding truth: guilty if you burn, guilty if you don’t.