Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  He pops the top off the can of paint, opens the plastic bag from the bottle store and sprays the paint inside. Lifting it to his mouth he inhales deeply, coughing a little as the sweet toxic fumes seep into him. His lips feel sticky from the paint, but he hardly notices. All he wants is the numbness.

  So he repeats the ritual until he can no longer hold the bag. He feels the cold stone against his back, sees the great blackness of the night sky, ears buzzing. Soon even that starts to fade.

  And as he slumps backwards, as this lonely, unloved boy slides away from consciousness, uncountable memories fly past.

  Fists…blood…fucking…cold hands…colder faces…emptiness. An emptiness which grows until there is nothing else.

  Later, it begins to rain, but he doesn’t stir. The boy who never was has gone to the only place he feels safe. He has crawled into his can of matt silver spray paint, because that’s the only place where he doesn’t feel.

  And as other children snuggle into warm beds and listen to bedtime stories, the boy who never was lies unconscious in his own special bed. Sleeping in God’s Grace.

  His last day starts just like any other day.

  He wakes amongst the tombstones early, wet with dew, cold. Sitting up he brushes the moisture from his jersey and shivers. His head aches and even though he stinks of paint fumes he hardly notices. Just across from him a girl lies sleeping under a bush. He knows her only as Mouse. He likes Mouse, even though she’s younger than him, because she always has lots of money. She’s a skinny little beanpole of a girl, and because of that she can always get money. Little girls are always in demand.

  ‘Mouse,’ he calls out. She doesn’t move.

  ‘Mouse.’ Nothing.

  ‘Mouse.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ she mutters, still half-asleep.

  He smiles and clambers to his feet, his head spinning. Clambering through the bushes he heads for the toilets closest to the cemetery. He needs a drink of water, and he needs some money for breakfast.

  He doesn’t even look to see if there’s anyone around. He knows there’s always someone. He goes to the last cubicle and sits down on the seat, closing the door. A few moments later he hears the sound of movement and then a gentle knock on the cubicle door.

  ‘Hello?’ a voice whispers. ‘Is anyone in there?’

  He reaches out and swings the door open.

  The middle-aged man smiles at him. ‘Hi.’

  The boy stares up him through bloodshot eyes, the man’s face swimming in and out of focus. ‘Twenty bucks for a blow, OK?’ he croaks, feeling sick from the pounding in his head.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the man says, coming into the stall and closing the door behind him. ‘Very much so.’

  Later he sits in a fast-food restaurant and watches the world pass by on its way to work. They don’t like it when he comes in, he knows that from the looks they give him. Still, fuck ‘em. After his burger he sits in the stall for an hour, slowly drinking his soft drink.

  He watches two boys across from him. The boys are roughly the same age, and they’re laughing, talking shit with each other as they watch girls. For some reason the boy finds himself drawn to them, he can’t look away. They are so clean. Their clothes are expensive and colourful, and their skin is smooth. Watching them it’s hard to believe they’re even real. He wonders where they come from, and where they slept last night.

  As he sits there one of the boys looks over at him, kicks his friend under the table and gestures towards him.

  ‘You want something?’ the second boy asks.

  He doesn’t reply, he keeps staring, confused but unable to grasp why.

  ‘Well?’ the boy asks again.

  He frowns. None of this feels real. How can they see him?

  The two boys look back at each other and laugh. ‘Freak,’ he hears them whisper. And something deep inside him moves, sliding over itself, uncoiling. When they get up to leave he follows them.

  Later, at his trial, the restaurant manager will say he was seen leaving the store at 9.07 a.m. He follows them up the street, trailing them through the stream of pedestrians. None of this makes sense to him, none of it feels real. As he walks, pictures flash through his mind: fists, belts, smiling middle-aged men. Suddenly he hears his mother screaming in his ear: ‘You little fucker…’

  He spins around, but she’s not there. It sounded like her though, so loud his ears ring. A bus flashes by and his eyes are yanked back to the boys. His heart is pounding, and the thing in his belly stretches its wings. Rage uncurls itself, opening its eyes and breathing him in like air.

  The boys walk into a public toilet and he closes the distance without even thinking about it. He can’t feel his legs any more, he can’t feel much of anything over the rushing in his ears. ‘You little fucker…’

  He hates the boys, he knows that now. He hates them more than anything he’s ever seen. He hates their nice clothes and clean smooth skin. He hates their laughter and the way they look at him. Most of all he hates the way they walk through the world as if nothing was a problem, as if nothing could touch them. Fuck them. Fuck every motherfucking one of them.

  As he enters the toilets he sees that one is standing by the hand basin and the other is at the urinal.

  The boy at the handbasin looks up and recognises him. ‘What the…’ he starts to say. But it’s too late for that. The boy who never was is beyond words, beyond questions, beyond all human thought.

  He pulls the screwdriver from his pocket and plunges it into the other boy’s throat, driving him back against the handbasin, eyes bulging wide and white. Then he pulls it out and turns to the other one as the first boy collapses onto the wet floor, gurgling.

  The boy at the urinal stares at him, bug-eyed, pale, terrified. ‘Please…‘ he says, but there will be no pleasing anyone this day. The boy who never was charges him, chasing him into a toilet cubicle. The boy screams, but he doesn’t hear it. He just wants to stab, and stab, and stab.

  ‘Little fucker,’ he gasps with each thrust. At first the boy struggles like a demon, but as the screwdriver goes up and down the struggling diminishes and then finally stops.

  ‘Little fucker. Little fucker. Little fucker…’

  Finally, exhausted, sobbing, he collapses back against the wall, covered in blood, snot and tears. Inside his head the memories of his life batter him as he hears his mother screaming at him over and over in an endless loop. ‘Little fucker! Little fucker!’ Her voice like fingernails scraping along the inside of his skull.

  From the corner of his eye he sees the boy near the handbasin crawling for the door, and he feels himself falling away from the world.

  When the police find him, he is huddled in the corner. Crying like a child.

  Now imagine this: eight months later, after the trial and the sentence, he’s sitting in a room with you. He’s slumped in his chair, saying nothing. He doesn’t appear to even notice you’re there. He doesn’t seem to even notice he’s there for that matter.

  We know some things about how this boy probably works. We know about the likely impact of trauma on his developing nervous system. We know his body very probably functions in a permanent state of panic. We also know he almost certainly has a map wired into his brain that tells him to trust no one. We know he will probably be plagued by almost constant flashbacks of all the terrible things that have happened in his life, and that when these flashbacks come he will feel as if he is reliving the event all over again. We also know that piled on top of all this will be a lifetime of learning he is worthless and useless, and that nobody gives a damn about him.

  And we know one boy has died, and another was seriously injured. Most of all we know that.

  Fix him, society has said to you. We can’t kill him, so you fix him.

  How exactly would you do that? How would you punish him so he gets the message? How exactly would you get tough with him? How would you hurt him so he’ll leave the rest of us alone?

  Because that’s what we’re supposed t
o do. That’s how we stop criminals like the boy who never was, we just get tougher. We just make his life worse and he’ll decide it simply isn’t worth it and become a decent upstanding member of society.

  We just have to kick his arse hard enough.

  Right?

  LAST HAND

  I CAN’T KEEP WRITING this thing forever. The problem is that there’s an endless conveyer belt of stories. I’ve told you a few of the ones I thought were relevant to our purpose, but every day more come along. I could tell you about the 11-year-old boy I saw this morning who’s well on the road to becoming a rapist, or the man I saw yesterday for an assessment who—for some reason yet to be discovered—makes my skin crawl. Truly, I sat with him and my skin quite literally crawled. I have two new referrals sitting on my desk for people I haven’t even seen yet that look as if they could each be chapters in themselves.

  There are no shortage of stories in the Darklands. The stories run on and on forever.

  I suppose the real question is, what next? Where to from here?

  I guess that’s up to you. I hope you’ve got a better idea about what it’s really like down here. I hope you learned some things along the way. Most of all I hope you understand more about how difficult all this stuff is. At the very least, maybe next time some politician is angling for your vote you may not be so quick to swallow the ‘get tough’ sugar pill. You might ask a few more questions before you tick that particular box.

  Feel that way if you want to, it’s only human after all, just don’t believe them when they say it will make us all safer in our beds. The real answers are to be found far deeper than that. The real way to make our own beds safer is to first make it safer for the children of the Darklands.

  When 13-year-old boys are no longer giving strange men blow jobs in toilets for money, we’ll all be safer. When children no longer have to hide under beds listening to their mother scream as she’s beaten, we’ll all be safer. When we take the time to get involved, when we start to give a shit about these invisible kids, then we will all be safer.

  Now’s the time to put up or shut up. Stop blaming all this on social workers not doing their job, or the police, or probation officers. Or people like me.

  If you really want to do something about all this, ring up a social worker and offer some troubled kid a job or work experience. Offer to foster some kids who need a bed to sleep in. If you don’t have time then give some money to organisations that do go out and help people. Get involved.

  You don’t have to, but just remember that we all have a share in this stuff. We can blame everybody else, or we can actually do something to help. It’s not enough to simply sit back and bitch about the fact that everyone else isn’t doing their job.

  Still, people like me have been saying things like this for a very long time. You either will, or you won’t. As for me, well, I can’t save the world; I’m clear about that. That’s never really been my interest, and besides, I don’t think the world wants to be saved.

  Every day I come across situations where I know we could be working smarter, where things could be done more effectively and more efficiently. Day after day I see politics and bureaucracy getting in the way of good work that could so easily have been done. This used to bother me—at times I’ve lost sleep over it—but not any more. I have long come to accept that the system exists for its own self-absorbed reasons. The big decisions are made by the bureaucrats, not the people on the ground. To get to the point where you can influence those decisions you need to become political, and that has never been my thing. I’d rather take the dog for a walk.

  For the last few years I’ve often thought about getting the hell out, of walking away from the game and having a more normal life. I’m tired of the politics, the bureaucracy and all the stupid little boxes. At times I get tired of the stories as well. Some days I feel as if I’ve heard about as much as any one person could ever be expected to hear. I feel like I’ve done my share.

  But then my dad got sick, the worst kind of sick, the big ‘C’. I suppose I thought he’d live forever, that he would always be there just as he always had been there. Life sometimes has other designs for us, though; it sometimes deals us unkind cards.

  He fought a good fight, my dad, and he did it with a quiet strength and dignity that even now humbles me. He was sick over the whole period I was writing this book, and died shortly before it was finished. Whilst his illness had dragged on for some two years, his death was relatively sudden, and very peaceful. Being sick wasn’t his style. He stayed long enough to do the things he had to do, then quietly took his leave.

  At such times you try and find meaning, you try and make sense of it all. When someone you love dies, it shakes the shit out of the whole damn tree. Life is short, I finally concluded, and we all too often get lost in unimportant things. We chase the myth we’ve all come to believe, that happiness can be found in a promotion, in more money, a better car, a better shirt, that big-screen television. We spend our time building careers instead of building our lives. We stay late at work instead of reading stories to our kids.

  Except my father never did that. He was not a rich man—in fact quite the opposite—but he was one of the most successful men I’ve ever known. His wealth could be found in the way he lived his life. My dad never lost sight of who he was and what was important to him. Most of all, he built relationships with people. He helped people, all kinds of people. He loved and was loved. Who could want anything more than that?

  ‘What can you do?’ he said, the last time I saw him. ‘You just gotta play the cards life deals you.’

  At the end of all this, I guess I can’t escape that simple fact. We have to play the hand we’ve been dealt. For whatever reason I’ve been given these strange cards, and all I can do is play them the best I can. Some things we choose, and some things choose us.

  At the moment I’m working with a team of Child, Youth and Family Services social workers out in South Auckland. I go there every Wednesday afternoon and it’s the high point of my week. They mostly deal with kids who’ve gotten into trouble with the law for one reason or another, the throwaway kids, the ones no one wants. There are some real ratbags amongst them, but there are some diamonds too. Most of these kids sparkle underneath all the dirt—all it takes is someone to notice.

  A large part of the reason why I enjoy working out there is the team itself. They are a unique group and every day they work miracles that never make the evening news. Apparently we’d all rather see some pictures of a surfing rabbit.

  Make no mistake about it though, every single day these social workers are making us all a little safer in our beds. How? Because they give a shit. Because they take these broken, mixed-up kids and try to do some good—it’s as simple and as complicated as that.

  Working with them is a gift, and it sustains me. It gives me faith that it’s still possible to do some good. Faith and hope are rare commodities down here, and when you find a supply, you stick with it.

  So it looks like I won’t be leaving for a while yet. I’ll keep doing what I do, and I’ll keep doing it how I do it. I suppose sometimes it isn’t really about doing your share, sometimes it’s about doing what you were put here to do. I am my father’s son, and I’ll play the cards I’ve been dealt.

  We need to think differently about this work. The same old, same old isn’t working. There are too many kids with problems, and many of them are already on the slippery slope to prison. If we’re ever going to make a difference in these kids’ lives we need to think outside the current boxes we work in. We must allow ourselves the freedom to do crazy stupid things. We must hold our breath and jump. We must stop worrying about sounding like professionals and start worrying about how to really reach out to these kids. Above all, we must fart more.

  It seems odd after all these years it should come down to such a simple thing. At the beginning of all this, when I was an ambitious young man, I suppose I would have hoped for something far more profound, something tha
t would make me sound far more of a smarty-pants. Somewhere along the road though, I simply stopped caring about all that stuff. I can’t save the world, I’m clear about that, but if I can make little bits and pieces of it better, that will be enough for me.

  To love and be loved.

  Who could want anything more than that?

  EPILOGUE

  MOST NIGHTS I END up at the supermarket buying one thing or another. Milk, bread, dog food, all the usual crap. We never quite seem to have our shit together when it comes to maintaining basic supplies in the house. Driving there is a pain in the arse, but it’s oddly comforting when you arrive. There’s something about the sanitised fluorescent aisles that seems strangely disjointed from the real world. It’s as if when you step into a supermarket at night you’re in some other dimension where there is no time, no consequences, just an infinite bright suspended animation.

  And, of course, the idiots who push their trolleys slowly down the centre of the aisle. Don’t you just hate those people?

  Anyway, if nothing else it’s a good chance to practise psychological profiling. Just as behaviour reflects personality, so too does supermarket shopping. When I’m standing in the queue I like to study my fellow shoppers and make guesses about their lives. I look at what they’re wearing, how they stand and what they’ve bought. These are all pieces of the puzzle that can be put together to form a picture of a person’s inner life. Who’s lonely? Who’s angry? Who’s happy? Our personalities are echoed in everything we do. What can I say? It’s more interesting than reading the women’s magazines.

  So I’m standing there one night a few weeks ago, in the 12-items-or-less queue, watching people. There’s a professional-looking couple standing three in front of me and I’m intrigued. There’s a coldness between them and I’m trying to figure out if this is just a domestic or part of a more chronic pattern. They’ve each got a basket (that’s a clue) and I’m trying to peer over the shoulder of the old man in front of me so I can see what they’ve bought.