by Alan Duff
Life.
How long you done of it?
Seven.
Halfway then. Give or take a year or three. Chuckling, how tough guys do. With always another meaning. Asking, Who do you know down here, anyone? Meaning anyone important, of mutual advantage, or warning given and taken, and for a pecking order to start right here.
Just wanna do my time, Rog. Owe too many good years to the effin’ system.
Yeah, know what you mean. Whyn’t you pay me a social call soon, I got some good smoke. If you do it, that is.
Nah. I don’t, man. Used to. Just wanna get out. But I’ll pay the call, Rog. Soon.
Abe Heke’s heart was beating double. Well, I’ll be. If it ain’t Apeman. Thinking he looked older, grey showing everywhere, and not nearly as formidable as he first looked all them years ago when Abe had (stupidly) joined his gang. Wankers. Childish wankers. Like I used to be (and still am, aren’t you prison inmate number C279130?). Though he was fearing the day very soon when Apeman was going to know he was here, residing in the same hellhole. (And then what?)
Abe Heke was more afraid that he wasn’t just fearful at the thought.
The first thing Apeman did was seek out some likely followers, some obsequious crawler types who’d do his every command. That meant the ones in for petty crime, who thought they were on the way up to a fabulous criminal career, who saw it comic-book hero style in their heads, a Frankie Goes to Hollywood notion. And a dude like Apeman at the very pinnacle, lights all around his name and his graphic, dramatically tattooed face. (Oh, boy.)
He ordered his first recruit to get hold of a metal blade, which turned out to be a piece of industrial hacksaw made of specially strengthened high-tensile steel and sharpened into a single-edged knife, with string wrapped round the top to form a handle. The minion could keep it in his cell in case of a security clean-out.
He found out the layout of the prison complex and where the fights usually took place, the staged ones, ’cos he was gonna stage this but make it look as if Abe had started it. Which is why he got another crawler to get hold of another bladed weapon that he, cunning Ape, would make sure ended up with Abe’s fingerprints on it and only his.
Apeman had no intention of setting deliberate eyes on his quarry, in case he lost it. In case he surrendered an already-surrendered self too incautiously to revenge. One thing, Abe Heke would know he was here and Ape loved the irony of Abe being unable to do anything about it. That he was stuck here as much as Apeman was. (Now you know what you’ve done, Heke shit, son of shit.)
Look at this cunning, evil monster, Apeman Black. How quickly he has installed himself and selected men of weak character, low intelligence. See how he gets inexorably nearer and nearer to that handsome man whose face says he shouldn’t be here, who doesn’t know who I am and will never know. I’m just Nameless, out to make up for my long life of blindness. I’m one of those the good Lord Jesus called out to his Father and said: Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.
Except now I know what I’m doing. I’m doing good, Lord. But not in Your name, You’d not have me up there with You. This is in the name of a process I’m going to go through before my time ends on this ole earth (that didn’t bless me with much, and nor did I give any back to it). Ape’s going to fail in his mission if it kills me stopping him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
RESPONSIBILITY’S WAKE-UP CALL
ALISTAIR, BACK INTO his self-pitying mode but for a very good reason: Kayla had walked out two weeks ago. Made like this new self had never existed, like this man who thought he was stronger, who took on the responsibility of being the father to Sharns’s baby, like it never happened. She walked out on a man on his way up.
He’d turned to his bed for solace — if he could find sleep; which when he did was of longer stupendous stretches than before. Yet if the baby cried unduly, he could come out of the slumber, if not Rip Van Winkle style of a giant awakening (just me, a little more responsible Alistair Trambert), and go see if Sharns was absent or not. See if she might be in danger of killing (my) little Rachel. Feed Raych, comfort, walk her for often hours in a mostly vain endeavour to stop her colic-induced crying, which was more a bellowing, in an infant’s higher pitch of shrieking.
It got right inside you and made as if a dozen burglar alarms were going off at the same time. It took over your brain, made it reverberate as if you’d been put in a tumble-drier, or a concrete mixer. And, yes, quite frankly it did make you feel like ending it’s cacophony, kill the little shit. It seemed as if Rachel were doing this deliberately, as if she were being naughty for its own sake and the worse that you, it’s adoptive father effectively (and emotionally), did not deserve this. Sure, you understood why Sharneeta would want to hurl it against the wall, dash it to death on the concrete footpath outside as she’d once threatened to do, warning the baby herself that this is what she’d do. Luckily for baby, Alistair heard the commotion and took Raych from Sharns and told the mother to go for a long walk somewhere. (I did my bath thing again and when it didn’t work went close to my old self, of walking out and leaving the child as she wasn’t my responsibility, she was lucky to have me around.)
But then he got an idea, maybe it was something he’d read somewhere, that if he massaged-cum-manipulated Rachel’s spine maybe it would help. He took her and laid her down on two layers of towels and placed her — screaming — on her front, and began his rubbings and manipulations of her tiny spine and back area. It worked. (It worked!)
Not every time, not even most of the time, but enough to give himself relief, same time it clearly did something for baby. Well, that was effectively in the past. Didn’t mean anything, nothing good to take from it, to lift his self-esteem, a sense that he was at last worth something. Not now Kayla had walked out of his life. (Sharns was right: I’m a baby, no different to little Rachel, dependent on Kayla.)
He felt Kayla became jealous of the attention — and success he had with Rachel — he gave baby. Especially that she loved babies and yet the child never took to her. He also suspected she’d met another man, for she started getting up earlier and coming home as late as midnight with none but mumbled explanation that she ran into someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. That kind of lame excuse (lie). The love-making had cut dramatically, when previously it was near on tap. (Providing my drinking, not hers.)
He knew that relationships amongst welfare beneficiaries had a high turnover rate. Must be the itinerant lifestyle, the life in general, that couldn’t possibly have any other outcome, but instability. Too little money, too many daily struggles to contend with, nothing positive and never any energy. More, it was probably that welfare-club members had less maturity, were less inclined to take personal responsibility, so break-ups were far more inevitable.
Rachel’s crying became Sharneeta’s screaming, became an intrusion into Alistair’s mid-afternoon dreaming that he was watching Kayla being made love to by a very handsome, very self-confident young man with a huge penis. Became Alistair, in underpants, rushing into the living room to find Sharns huddled in a ball in a corner, and the baby on its back.
One side of Rachel’s face was a red welt. Obviously Sharns had lost it, the plot she never got in the first place, of being mother. More than that, mother to a child born with colic. He wondered, though, if Sharneeta Hurrey’s pain was worse than her assaulted child’s.
He picked up baby first and put her into her cot. Then he went over to Sharns, on his knees, and held her. Cradled and rocked his wretched flatmate; it just came naturally. Sharns was pouring forth in semi-whisper how everything was closing in on her and what could she do? Over and over she said this.
The three of them went out in Sharns’s car at Alistair’s insistence with him driving; baby in a Plunket-supplied baby seat in the back, the moribund mother in the front. Saying nothing. Just sobs heaving up every now and then.
He drove them by his house, well, really a wall of old brick, a slate roof visible, big iron gates
at the front (the old oak tree where that Maori girl hung herself) and Alistair telling Sharns this was where he’d been raised.
She asked, out of her gloom, why he wouldn’t want to go and say hi to his mother after all the nice things he’d said about her. But he said no, he wasn’t ready yet. (As for you, Dad, I wonder if I’ll ever be ready to face you as a loving son, or just man to man, after what you’ve done to my head.) Sharns just shrugged, no more to say.
He put thirty bucks of petrol in the tank and again Sharns came part way out of her gloom to say she should be paying and she’d pay him back, just as soon as she …
He switched off. It had become a rant. Who paid didn’t matter anyhow. (We’re in the same misery-ridden club together. And I know it’s ourselves who got us here. Now I know.) Certainly the baby was enjoying the drive, maybe the motion, the engine thrum, and Sharns had a station on of, surprise, classical music, which Alistair had grown up with.
They got back after dark, with a bottle-feed stop along the way, Alistair gently coaxing Sharns to do it herself, so she’d get to hold the baby as a baby should be held: with food-nourishing, nurturing love. Not that she exactly took to it, the loving mummy role. More dutiful, if that. And they were hardly back at the flat when Sharns said she couldn’t stand it, the flat was making her claustrophobic, did Alistair mind if she went out walking for a few hours? Baby should sleep most of the night now, she said. Sure, why not. He was tired himself, or drained maybe, from what Sharns and her child sucked out of him.
He fell asleep before the television, but was woken by Rachel’s crying. The colic crying, which especially attacked your ears and mind when it had taken you violently from sleep. His first instinct he acted on: Shuddup! Again: Shuddup, I said! Of course it didn’t work. Sharns gone again.
He went to the cupboard to get some baby-milk mix. The tin was empty. Now what? He could take the baby with him and walk to a late-night dairy, but it was chilly outside and she’d make a terrible racket down a Pine Block street, and maybe some drunk would think he’d kidnapped the kid. An actual baby kidnap having been all the headlines of late.
No. He’d be better to get the milk powder alone. Maybe Sharns would turn up in the meantime. He hadn’t got over his guilt at being found trespassing in her room so was reluctant to check to see if she just wasn’t asleep, or awake and not responding. I’d better see if she’s here because this is home alone stuff, I’m — no, damn it, not my responsibility, I’m doing this out of plain decency and kindness. Sharns was guilty of leaving her child at home alone if he didn’t find her in her bedroom.
She was guilty. And of allowing her bedroom to completely transform into absolute chaos. God, had Alistair really lived like this?
Back in the living room and baby had it near shaking with her shrieking. Poor baby, Uncle Al won’t be long. Got to go and get you some milk powder. Broke a house rule, that no one touched the power-bill money under the hot-water cylinder in the closet. No choice.
Alistair hurried out into the night. There were no stars up there to signal a way, or give a symbolic gesture, or twinkle a bad omen, just a blanket of black like Sharns must carry above her every waking existence, poor Sharns, poor mother who can’t be one. Well, don’t worry, Uncle Alistair’s here, being responsible, even strong, for the second time in his (my) otherwise gutless life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE DEVIL’S RANK AIR
THE DRYING ROOM stank of damp bedding and clothing constantly drying, in big industrial tumblers. A misnomer for a large, high-ceilinged room that hardly ever knew dryness. The stench assailed any nostrils not used to the rank smell prison inmates left on their clothing and bedding. If smells could have emotional quality, then this was what broken hearts gave off chemically. Bad hearts added another smell.
Sheets in different states were stacked on smooth wooden benches as far as the eye could see, some yet to be washed. Others washed and waiting to go into the dryers, yet others dried and yet to be folded. Lastly, another pile was folded and ready to go back for another week of soiling, of sperm staining, bleeding from a fight wound, from sores that refused to heal, sweat that broke out from tortured dreaming.
Inmates could get lost in here amongst the laundry. They got to know every sightline for the screw who walked in cruise-and-lazily-watch mode, on a set circuit; being screws who weren’t imaginative, and clever, and manipulative like cons. Or so the self-deluding cons believed. When really the screw’s were more intelligent, not rocket scientists, no, but you didn’t need much to have more brains than a loser con, or so the prison officers spoke and laughed of between themselves. Like, who gets to go home at night?
Behind all those piles of single story-telling sheets, a man could do some heinous things to another inmate before the victim’s noise brought the attention of the guards. This is where real good scraps took place, encounters between men who wanted nothing more than to beat another. Not fists. Anything. As long as you won. What an irony, losers prepared to die if necessary to be a winner.
One of Apeman’s lackey suck-ups, a skinny white guy who sewed padding into his prison shirts and jackets to make his shoulders look broader than pathetic, came in with Abe Heke, carrying a big plastic bin of dirty sheets between them. The lackey had waited till Abe went by and asked him if he could help out or he, the lackey — call him Pitiful — was in trouble.
Abe, though wary, could see no reason not to believe the guy, and anyway he told himself to be ready to drop his handle and fight if he saw anything that looked like Apeman coming his way.
Pitiful joked to Abe, a sex joke, then complimented that he didn’t look like the normal inmate, how come he was in here? Was it a traffic offence, you kill someone driving drunk or something? We get a few of those. Poor bastards, in here they get eaten alive. Though a bloke like you, I doubt many’d eat you alive, eh, mate?
Abe could see Pitiful was a nobody, but then again what he said touched a spot in Abe, the part about him not looking like he fitted here.
He said to the guy, I don’t belong here either. Not my scene. I lost it when these guys, four to our two, wanted to beat us up. Lost my pal the second they appeared, he didn’t wanna know. I’m waiting for my appeal to be heard.
Pitiful said, Is that right? You might be not long from being released. Now that’d be cool.
More than cool, pal. I don’t think I can do my two years here.
Two years? That’s not so long. I’m doing a five. First lag was a three. Had a eighteen month for driving whilst disqualified, then this five. For three burgs. Burglary, Pitiful enlightened when Abe frowned. Five years ain’t nothing, once you adjust to it.
I couldn’t. Not five years.
You think you’ve got a chance to win the appeal?
My lawyer says ninety per cent chance we’ll win.
We? Since when is a lawyer doing the time with you? Ninety per cent? That’s effin’ good odds, mate. I’d say it’s more or less a guarantee. Here, turn left thissa way.
Thissa way, down this machine-polished linoleum floor, between thick concrete walls there’s a strip of light from a high run of windows casting horizontal stripes of gold on the wall opposite. Sunshine, eh mate? Makes you want to smile, don’t it? Smiling as he said this and kicked for the drying room door to be opened. Thissa way — what’s your name any rate?
Abe Heke. Yours?
Pitiful grinned self-consciously, and in his weak manner. Well, he said, I’m known as Pitiful.
Pitiful? Man, I can’t call you that.
Everyone else does. I don’t mind. I’ll get mine one day, don’t you worry about that.
And they went thataway into the bowels of hell. Where the devil awaited, going by the name of Apeman.
They didn’t notice the door open again, to let in a tall and powerfully built Maori guy. Though others saw him and knew he was one of the new intake from Auckland. But look at him twice and you saw he had that softened look, of a man who’d experienced a conversion to God, or
Jesus, whichever, Father or His Son. Happens quite often, more than you’d think, hardened dudes converting to Christianity. More often than not it’s the hardest ones, the scrappers not the evil bastards. So not as if you can suddenly lord — hahaha, like Lord — it over them. Indeed, you treat a convert born-again quite differently to other inmates, because you know he can be trusted and he’s not a potential physical danger to you like virtually all others.
So he moved past eyes that tried not to miss a thing, and they missed him. At least, they didn’t see him for what he was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IS THAT YOU, AL?
A VOICE IN Sharns’s tortured head told her she should go home now. Get out of the bar she was standing in, laughter all around her at this hour, past midnight, of the same families of criminal hard-arses whose numbers were too many for the law to have locked up all at once. People even she knew society would be a better place without. For they never changed, they never contributed, only sucked blood and more blood. The voice asked then: So why do you keep this company, Sharns? You’re better than that.
The voice sounded like Alistair’s, but a grown, more mature Alistair. It told Sharns, Even if you’re struggling to cope with life yourself it is not your child’s problem. Even as you stumble and lurch in your sorry, sad state, don’t let the child suffer, too. Don’t, Sharneeta, don’t do that to your own child or what hope is there?
But she fought the voice, even gave it the name of Alistair in her tormented head and told him to go away, leave her be. If this is how she was going to live her life, in denial, rejection of her own child, then so be it. She lost herself deeper in the (dark) forest of music and human sounds all around her.