Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  ‘Hey, Nigel.’

  The voice from behind makes me jump a little, and I turn round trying not to look guilty.

  And there he is. James the dog killer and would-be psycho. The same James who sat in a room three years before and told me how he wanted to kill kids because they were ‘too fucking noisy’.

  ‘James,’ I said, surprised. ‘How the hell are you?’

  I hadn’t seen him since his probation period ended and he’d disappeared into the mists as most of my guys do.

  In truth I was feeling a little off-balance. It’s always strange when you bump into your guys in the real world.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said, and he did look pretty good. He was still wearing black jeans but his jersey was red. His hair had grown back and even his teeth looked in better shape. ‘I’m working as a chef now.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, meaning it. ‘You enjoying it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  There’s a slight awkwardness to our conversation, though, a hesitancy. ‘So you doing OK?’ I ask, and he knows what I’m really asking.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I got a lady now.’

  I smile. ‘You treat her nice?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She have kids?’ I ask, giving him the look.

  He smiles, not taking offence, because he knows me well enough to know I have to ask these things. ‘Nah. Seriously,’ he says, ‘I’m good.’

  I nod. ‘You live around here?’ I ask.

  ‘Nah, I work in town and this is on the way home.’

  ‘OK.’

  We stand there for a second, the conversation faltering a little.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he says, ‘I better get going. I just saw you and wanted to say hi.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ I say, holding out my hand.

  He takes it and his grip is warm. ‘And…well I just wanted to say…you know…thanks.’

  Something passes between us then, and my chest knots up a little, but this time in a good way. ‘You’re very welcome, James.’

  He shrugs. ‘Well, I’ll see ya.’

  I smile. ‘OK, I’ll see ya.’

  Later, as I’m driving home, the conversation plays over in my mind. I have no way of knowing if what James said was true, but it felt true. And that makes all the other horseshit worthwhile. That’s why I do what I do.

  It’s only as I’m pulling into my drive that I realise I forgot to get the milk. Still, it doesn’t really matter.

  This is about as close to a happy ending as I ever get.

  BAD COFFEE, SEX OFFENDERS AND MOUNTAIN GORILLAS

  WHEN THE FIRST EDITION came out I couldn’t believe I’d left out this whole chapter of my professional life. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t talked about bad coffee and mountain gorillas. When I’m an old man, holed up in some shrink retirement home with all the other demented old ex-shrinks, memories of these times and the people I worked with will be the things that make me cackle till my false teeth fall out.

  ‘What are you laughing at, you crazy old man?’ the drug-addled hospital orderly will snarl. I’m sure his name will be Zac or Sam or some other three-lettered thing.

  I’ll mumble something through the toothless cackles and he’ll rock back a bit, scowling, ‘What?’

  I’ll reach over, grab my dentures from down the side of the wheelchair with fingers bent and twisted with age, cram them back in and wheeze at him: ‘Mountain gorillas, you fuck-knuckle.’ (Yes, I’m sure my potty-mouth will worsen with age.) Then I’ll dissolve into inane, crazy-old-man cackling again.

  And Zac, or Sam, or whatever-his-name-is will be won’t understand.

  How could he? You had to be there.

  Some people might find it hard to pinpoint the worst cup of coffee in their entire life. For me it’s easy. It was just after dawn in April 1993, sitting on a rock in the middle of a freezing cold stream deep in the heart of the Kaimai—Mamaku Ranges. I had a splitting headache, a heavy pack and was surrounded by grumpy adolescent sex offenders.

  To call it a cup of coffee is a bit of a stretch. Actually it was a sachet of instant cappuccino powder sprinkled on top of a stainless-steel mug of Nutragrain with a liberal slosh of stream water. I’d bought the sachets as my emergency caffeine supply. The milk and sugar were in the powder so all it needed was water.

  The powder congealed into little doughy lumps that bobbed about amidst the bits and pieces in the stream water. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d taken freshwater ecology as part of a zoology undergraduate degree I could have pretended those bits and pieces were just very small twigs and the like. Unfortunately I’d spent time looking at those swirling bits and pieces under a microscope in my earlier life and so I knew they undoubtedly had wee legs, antennae and Latin names.

  That morning I sat on my rock in the middle of the stream chewing my ‘coffee’ and trying not to think too hard about the day ahead. I kept my feet in the water—which was so cold my legs ached—in the hope that this would distract me from the pounding headache which had kept me awake all night. ‘Miserable’ does not quite cover the moment.

  Believe it or not, I actually look back on that moment with genuine fondness. Most days I even wish I could be back there again. It was the second day of a 10-day wilderness-therapy programme for adolescent male sex offenders. We’d take groups of about 10 kids aged between 13 and 17 out into the wilds for days on end. We climbed mountains (literally climbed mountains), tramped for endless hours, rafted rivers, slept in puddles from time to time, squeezed through caves and ate more chocolate than the human body could ever be expected to digest. In amongst all that we also did some of the most intense therapeutic stuff I’ve ever been involved in with kids. Those trips were intense, hilarious, miraculous, horrific and every other thing you could think of all rolled up into one.

  Without doubt the most amazing thing about those trips were the people I worked with, my colleagues. A little while ago the original team had a get-together. Towards the end of the evening I sat at the table, looking around at this amazing and utterly demented group of people, and thought about how fortunate I had been. These were the people who showed me the way when I was new to the game, these were my real teachers. I also realised that nothing like those trips would ever happen again in my life, that it would now forever be just anecdotes told at dinners like this as the years went on. It was a bittersweet moment.

  So yes, I’d go back in a second.

  Even to that pounding headache on that godforsaken rock in the middle of an icy stream with one of the most appalling cups of coffee in recorded history.

  The rest of that particular day was a horror story as well. We tramped for hours. Our valiant leader was a good friend of mine who loves tramping for miles, especially if it’s up something very steep and involves both getting lost and then finding his own creative and incredibly difficult way to the hut. Something happens to him in the wilderness which doesn’t happen to me. This is the man who once told me with genuine pride that he’d walked for so long up a mountain in Yosemite Park in the US that his feet bled. The night of that long walk he’d slept in the car to save money on a motel. It was so cold it hurt, and he couldn’t get out to take a pee because rattlesnakes came down to sleep on the road for warmth. He thinks an 11-hour tramp is character-building. I think it’s fucking horrible. I love this guy, but there have been times—as I’ve followed him for hour after exhausting hour up mountains—when I could have shot him in the back of the legs and taken some real pleasure from it.

  That particular trip we were blessed with a whiney young man we’ll call Harry. He moaned and moaned and moaned. He was slow, constantly wanted to stop and complained incessantly. After a few hours of this it would be fair to say I was harbouring unkind thoughts towards him, and it would also be fair to say I was not alone.

  So we walked and walked and walked. Towards the end of the day, after some nine hours, our valiant leader decided it would be quicker to ‘cut along the top of the ridge’. Insid
e I cringed, because I’d cut over a ridge or two with him before and it generally meant hours of pushing through bush so dense it stripped the skin from your legs, but outside I kept a brave face.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ I said, trying for stoic but only getting about halfway. ‘It’s not far now.’

  ‘That’s what you said last time,’ one of the boys astutely and somewhat bitterly observed.

  ‘Ahh, but then I was lying,’ I said, lying again. ‘Come on, we’re nearly there. It’s just up that wee ridge.’

  The boys looked up through the trees. The ridge was a kind of mini-Kilimanjaro thing. The top of it literally disappeared into the mist. There were collective groans and unkind words.

  For myself I prayed briefly that God should take me then and there, the will to live slipping quickly away, but God obviously thought it would be far more amusing to watch me walk myself to death up this bloody mountain.

  And so, given that divine intervention seemed unlikely, off we merrily set. The merrily bit lasted about a hundred metres or so, then it just became a bloody slog. I stayed at the back with Harry, who true to form moaned and bitched every step of the way. After an hour or so the rest of the group were ahead of us, out of earshot.

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ I said, trying not to lose my bottle. ‘If you just keep going it’ll be easier. The reason you find it hard is because you keep stopping.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ he whined for the hundredth time. ‘Can’t we just sit down?’ As he said this he was rolling a cigarette.

  ‘The smoking doesn’t help either,’ I said.

  Harry saw it differently. He said he was ‘smoking for energy’.

  Uh huh.

  So we’re plodding along, and the afternoon is getting later and later. At that moment our intrepid leader came back to find us.

  ‘What’s the story?’ he asked. I could tell from his tone that his patience was wearing thin.

  ‘Harry’s a bit slow,’ I replied, rolling my eyes.

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ he barked. ‘It’s not far now.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Harry muttered in that charming way surly young people do.

  We were both getting a bit concerned about the time it was taking. The gradient wasn’t that steep, and even though I was tired as well, Harry’s pace was more about laziness then it was about the terrain. We knew from experience the temperature drops away at night time, and the weather can roll in quickly and unexpectedly. Even though we were well stocked with gear, neither of us wanted to be snuggled up with Harry that night in a small tent while the rest of the group enjoyed a nice warm hut with mattresses and a fire only an hour or so’s walk away.

  So on we struggled for another half hour, me at the back, our leader off in the distance bellowing back at Harry to keep going, and the boy himself caught in between. Finally Harry simply sat down on the track and refused to get up.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can’t just sit down. Get up.’

  He said nothing as he took out his tobacco and started rolling another cigarette.

  ‘What? You’re going to spend the rest of your life here?’

  Nothing.

  I sighed, fed up with the performance.

  ‘What’s the hold-up?’ our leader bellowed from about a hundred metres up the ridge above us, hidden by the dense bush.

  ‘He won’t get up,’ I called out, sick of the whole thing.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘What?’ the boy bellowed back.

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘NO!’

  And here’s the thing, there was a brief pause, and then a mighty bellow that seemed to shake the clouds: ‘RIGHT!’

  Then it started.

  There is a scene from the film Gorillas in the Mist where Dian Fossey (played by Sigourney kick-alien-arse Weaver) is charged by a large silverback mountain gorilla. In the film we don’t see the animal at first, we just hear the sound of its bellowing, and see the forest crashing aside as it charges down through the trees. We don’t see the big silverback right till the end, but we sure as hell know it’s coming.

  That’s exactly what this was like. I watched the bush crashing aside as our very own enraged silverback hurtled down the ridge towards us. Trees splintered as the canopy was smashed aside, and just like the film, we couldn’t see it, but we knew it was coming.

  Harry leapt to his feet and grabbed a tree, hugging it tight.

  I froze as the only line I could remember from the whole film flashed through my head: If the silverback charges, whatever you do, don’t run.

  And so I watched the rapidly approaching wave of destruction, looking exactly as it had on the big screen, convinced we were both about to be torn asunder by an angry silverback mountain gorilla.

  It was a strange anticlimax when the bush parted and out charged my mate.

  After the adrenaline had ebbed away, I laughed my arse off. Needless to say Harry found a bit more gas in the tank and we made it safely to the hut about 40 minutes later.

  I’ll remember that scene—the awesome spectacle of the charging silverback—even when I’m a crazy old man trying to find my teeth.

  Of course, it wasn’t all about primates. The next morning as we were walking out to the vans down a particularly beautiful river valley I found myself beside a kid called Patrick. He was 14, angry, and about as defensive as a kid of that age could ever be. No one had ever given a shit about this boy in his life, and now the rest of us were paying the price. He’d sexually abused several younger boys, all of it angry horrible stuff. As I walked I noticed he was writing in a small notebook.

  ‘What’re you doing, Patrick?’ I asked, half-expecting a ‘fuck you’, which was his stock-standard reply.

  ‘Poetry,’ he mumbled.

  I did a double take. ‘You write?’

  He nodded. ‘Yup.’

  ‘Cool. What kind of stuff?’

  He shrugged, and we walked a bit more in silence.

  ‘I write too,’ I said.

  He looked up. ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Poetry?’

  ‘Nope, novels and stuff.’

  ‘I tried that, but I couldn’t finish one.’

  I smiled. ‘No, well you’re a poet, that’s why.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘How long have you been writing?’ I asked.

  ‘Forever.’ It was the way he said the word that struck me. Forever.

  And just like that, walking down that utterly beautiful river valley, I found him. Just walking along like a normal kid.

  ‘They don’t understand,’ I said as we walked.

  He looked up. ‘Who?’

  ‘Them,’ I said, pointing to the group some distance in front. ‘People who don’t write don’t understand what it means to be a writer. They think you have a choice, but really you don’t. We write because if we didn’t we’d go fucking crazy, right?’

  He smiled, and it was a clumsy self-conscious thing, but there was more warmth in that one smile than I’d seen in him in the whole six months I’d known him. ‘Yeah.’

  So this angry young man and I walked a while together, and we talked about writing, and words, and how to find beauty in a world that is often cold and unkind. We talked about how to paint pictures that could stir things in people. Things like compassion, and kindness, and connection. We talked about how you write words that make people give a shit.

  And that one conversation was worth a hundred shitty cups of coffee.

  SIMPLE THINGS

  October 2004—one year on

  ON THE DAY I did the first media interview for the release of the first edition of Into the Darklands a story was just beginning to break that would dominate the nation’s thoughts for many months to come. Late the previous afternoon a mother from a small rural community in the middle of the North Island had contacted the police. She’d gone to meet the school bus as usual, except this day her six-year-old daughter, Coral, didn’t get off. When she called the school she was inf
ormed her daughter hadn’t been in class that day. The girl’s stepfather told police he’d dropped Coral at the school that morning as usual. Somewhere between his car and her class, the little girl seemed to have vanished, almost as if the ground had opened up and swallowed her whole.

  I remember the reporter I was talking to the first morning after Coral was reported missing saying that Into the Darklands had been released with almost eerie timing. It felt that way to me too. It’s the one time something I’d written myself gave me a genuine chill: Forget what the media tells you, it’s the mundane horrors that should really scare you. Forget the headline-grabbing celebrity killers, it’s Mr Nobody you should worry about, because he lives in every town.

  Almost at the same time I was talking to that reporter, hundreds of kilometres away searchers found Coral’s schoolbag floating in a stream some distance from her school. It was further than she could have walked, and there was no way the current could have carried it there. Her lunch was untouched.

  Mundane horrors are sometimes found in the smallest of details, like a child’s uneaten lunch.

  Over the next 10 days the nation followed the search with a collective baited breath. I spent the whole time refusing to comment to the reporters who interviewed me about the book, even though it was all they wanted to talk about. The last thing I wanted was some half-arsed comment from me somehow jeopardising either Coral’s safety or the police hunt for her. The only thing I did say over that period was that anyone who knew anything, no matter how unimportant it might seem, should contact the police.

  ‘Do you think she’s dead?’ one reporter asked me four days after Coral first disappeared.

  Inside my head I heard a small steady voice: Yes, she’s dead, but all I said was that I’d rather not speculate.

  ‘Do you think the stepfather did it?’

  Yes.

  ‘I’d rather not speculate.’