Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  The truth is that the story had seemed terribly wrong from the start. The stepfather, who by that stage had been arrested on ‘unrelated’ charges of assault, said he’d dropped Coral off in the morning and she’d walked into school as usual. That meant whoever took her had to somehow get her out of the school grounds in a small rural community at a time when there would have been parents, children and teachers all over the place. Strangers would stand out a mile, and a local would surely be noticed by somebody. Someone should have seen a little girl being led out of a small country school.

  And still the search continued. It was a national agony; watching it on the news each evening and feeling hope slip away with each passing day. I’m a parent myself, and at such times you cannot help but imagine the nightmare her family were enduring, and even though it is a selfish prayer, you thank God it’s not you.

  Finally, 10 days after she was first reported missing, the police made a statement that they had arrested a man and charged him with Coral’s murder. Soon after, her body was recovered from bushes beside a small isolated lake on the southern Wairarapa coast. To no one’s real surprise the arrested man was Stephen Roger Williams, aged 29, Coral’s ‘stepfather’. It later emerged that he had a list of 88 prior convictions for a range of offences, including violence offences. He was on bail at the time he killed her, and blamed the fact that he was smoking ‘P’ or methamphetamines the night before. My take on that one is the same as every other excuse I’ve ever heard: a hell of a lot of people smoke ‘P’ these days, but not all of them beat children to death. In fact, I can only think of one off the top of my head: Stephen Roger Williams.

  Williams told police he’d killed Coral that first morning he originally said he’d dropped her at school. I’m not going to recount the graphic details of what happened to her, that serves no purpose, and to be honest I simply don’t have the heart for it.

  But I will say it again: it’s Mr Nobody who should scare us, Mr Nobody and his never-ending box of horrors.

  As a nation we raged at Coral’s death. The politicians made their respective and inevitable plays, talkback radio burned with outrage and indignation. We all wanted his blood. Some events are so terrible, we can only pray we never find ourselves standing in that dark place.

  Coral’s family released a statement at that time and in it they said: ‘Our plea to all New Zealanders is to treasure your children, and to help keep them safe.’ It was poignant, and desperately sad all in the same breath.

  Some months later, during another interview, a journalist asked me if I thought anything would change as a result of Coral’s death. I said no, I didn’t think anything would change. He reminded me of Coral’s parents’ plea and asked me what I thought of it. I said I thought those of us who loved our kids might hug them a little more, we might read them an extra bedtime story, but the parents who didn’t give a shit still wouldn’t give a shit.

  In the months since, more children have died, and more will die in the future. Undoubtedly between this night as I write, and the point where you’re reading these words, still more names will join the list.

  Mr Nobody hides amongst us all, and his box runneth over.

  But does this mean we should despair? Should we all just give up and retreat to the bunkers? I think not. In fact quite the opposite. The answer, I believe, is to be found in simple things.

  I was quite unprepared for what happened when Into the Darklands was first published. There were a couple of ripples from some in the profession (mostly from people whom I suspect have anal sphincters so tightly puckered that one day they will undoubtedly lose all voluntary bowel control), but in truth nothing like I thought there might be. The ‘nose-out-of-joint brigade’ I was prepared for, and I have to admit, I largely enjoyed. I take a certain pleasure in getting well up the noses of shrinks who take themselves too seriously. Psychology is more a triumph of marketing than science. If you work in this game you forget such truths at your peril.

  What I wasn’t prepared for were the other ripples. I was unprepared for the fact that just as I’d reached out to the world and shared my stuff, the world in its turn would reach back. People wrote to me and told me their own stories. They told me about themselves, about their children, and about their families.

  It is a wonderful and humbling thing as a writer to know your work has impacted on people, to know it has helped people to connect in some way with themselves, and the people in their lives. There is no greater pleasure than knowing something you’ve written has helped someone to understand his or her own experiences a little more.

  I read each letter, every single one. I honestly intended to reply to each one as well, but being utterly hopeless at such things I haven’t made much progress on that front. Correspondence has never been my strong point. Let me say here though, that I read them all, and I thank you all for taking the time to write.

  People actually went out and did things too. It turns out that some people took my ‘put up or shut up’ comment seriously.

  On the first anniversary of my father’s death I was running a seminar in Rotorua, a provincial town in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. I hadn’t thought about the date when I booked the seminar but in the end it seemed appropriate. I’m sure my dad would rather I was out there doing my thing. If anyone understood the phrase ‘the show must go on’, it was him.

  The topic of the seminar was ‘New Alternatives with Hopeless Cases’. Originally I’d wanted to call it ‘Taking the Fuck out of Fuck-up’, but that seemed a little in your face so I went the more conservative route. The seminar was essentially about working with kids and families where everything is hopelessly fucked up and nothing seems to work. This is my great passion, and in truth the more fucked up things are the more I like it. If it looks impossible you don’t look stupid when nothing happens, but you can look bloody clever when it does.

  Before the workshop started people were milling about as they do at such things, drinking coffee and gossiping. I love the whole speaking thing. I have performing in the genes and get withdrawal symptoms if I go more than a couple of weeks without an audience of some description. The opportunity to climb up on the stage and sail as close to the wind as I can without getting into serious trouble is one I can never pass up. How much piss can you take without drowning, that’s a game I can’t resist the urge to play.

  On this particular day a woman came up to me and said that she’d read Into the Darklands and really enjoyed it. The desperately neurotic inner author craves such moments. We writers say we don’t care, but we utterly do.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, trying not to sound pathetically grateful. ‘It’s always nice to hear people in the game saying they liked it.’

  ‘And I took you seriously as well,’ she said.

  This intrigued me. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The bit about doing something rather than just talking about it.’

  ‘Put up or shut up?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes. I’m a Quaker and so my group decided we would raise some money to help families who couldn’t afford to pay their kids’ school fees.’

  Gobsmacked, in a word, utterly gobsmacked. A rush of goose bumps came over me as I stood there holding my coffee in the middle of the crowded room. ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and we did some other things too.’

  As she talked about the things her group had done I felt completely humbled. When you write it’s just you sitting in a wee room tapping out stuff on a screen. You don’t really imagine it having much impact. Yet here was this wonderful person telling me that something I’d written had set a chain of events in motion which ended in some kids’ lives being made a little lighter.

  ‘You never know,’ she said, just before she disappeared into the crowd. ‘You plant a seed and you never know what will grow.’ Then she smiled, and walked away.

  It was a wonderful moment, sublime even. I couldn’t have asked for a more profound way to mark the first anniversary of my
father’s death. It wasn’t just great, it was fucking great.

  Simple things.

  Since the first edition was published I’ve met more amazing people and more utterly frightening ones as well. I interviewed a man in jail a few months ago who kicked another person to death because they were playing their music too loud. This was just the most recent in a long line of violent offences for him. I did the interview locked in a small cell deep in the bowels of Auckland Prison, well out of earshot of any guards, all the time watching the wild light that seemed to dance around in the empty shadows behind his eyes. Evil isn’t the presence of something bad, it’s really the absence of anything good. Times like that you work hard not to piss the guy off. If I’d had a stereo with me, I most certainly would have kept the volume well down. On that same visit I’d been searched at the gates by the police doing a routine screen for contraband.

  ‘Anything in here that shouldn’t be?’ asked the rather large policeman with overalls and a sinister-looking rubber glove on one hand, rummaging through my briefcase.

  ‘Just a Willy Nelson CD,’ I quipped.

  He didn’t laugh.

  I met the little glass girl from an earlier chapter quite by chance just after the book was published. She’s almost grown up now and doing about as well as can be expected. Things did catch up with her dad, just by the by. He ended up doing serious time after she disclosed he’d been sexually abusing her for years. It is a reassuring and frightening thing that the truth waits for us all somewhere up around the bend.

  I’ve heard stories in just the last three months about kids who’ve suffered lives which seemed too horrible to be real. Except just like all the stories down here, they are all real. And inevitably, every time something bad has happened in the intervening months, the same tired old questions do the rounds. Every time some tragedy hits the evening news, we’re still looking for someone to blame.

  Which brings me all the way to this night as I write, to another girl’s tragic, although far less public death, and to a very simple request.

  After Coral was murdered everyone wanted to know what could be done to stop more children from dying, what we could do to stop such a thing from happening again. Politicians did their thing, and talkback radio callers prattled on and on. I didn’t listen to any of it because it just pissed me off. It always does.

  I don’t have all the answers to all the problems, but I do have one suggestion of something you could do if you want to play a real part in stopping kids from dying, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is a very simple thing.

  Today is a Wednesday, and as usual I went out to the Child Youth and Family Services (CYFS) office in Papakura, Auckland, as I do every week. Except today was a little different. Today I learned that a girl I’d seen a couple of times a few months ago, a girl of just 14, had killed herself. Her family was a mess—gangs, violence, neglect, abuse, all the usual suspects. But this girl was different. There was something about her that shone. She wanted to get out of her old life; she had plans to study and wanted to become a doctor. She was bright enough to do it too, and if that was all it took, some dreams, talent and a good heart, she would have been OK. The first time I’d seen her she’d really impressed me, and she seemed to be on track, amazingly so, given the car wreck her life had been up until that point.

  For a while she had stayed on track. Reports back were positive. I truly believed she would make it. I bumped into her a couple of weeks ago at the CYFS office. She’d smiled and said, ‘Hi, Nigel.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, pleased to see her, but in a rush as always. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Good,’ she’d replied, ‘really good,’ and her smile had seemed genuinely full of life. I can see her face now as I write this line, I can still see that smile. Unfortunately, though, life is not always kind, or fair, or sometimes even just a tiny bit decent.

  Everything had been going well for her for months, but then last weekend she went to a ‘party’ organised by someone who knew her, knew her history and should have known better. She had too much to drink, sniffed some solvents with other young people and later that night she quietly slipped away and killed herself. I don’t know what she was thinking in those last few hours, but I suspect the alcohol and drugs simply made it too hard for her to fight the demons when they came.

  Her social worker—a bloody good social worker who genuinely cared for the girl—put it best this afternoon as we’d talked: ‘I think she saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just too far away.’

  I have never heard a life so elegantly and tragically encapsulated in a single sentence.

  We talked about her for a while, about what had happened, and about how utterly fucking pointless her death was. At such times the weight of this work feels almost intolerably heavy. Sitting in that room this afternoon we both felt it.

  This girl who lived and hoped and lost her faith as the rest of us went about our busy lives. This girl whose death went unnoticed by the world. Unlike Coral, her death didn’t make the evening news, but it was no less horrific, no less unjust.

  Then, after we’d both vented a bit, we had to get on with the rest of the day, with all the other kids and families, all the stories and tragedies that are the bread and butter of CYFS social workers. It was much harder than usual to get myself going. Things like that tend to kick the legs out from under you. One feels a little drained.

  I’m writing this tonight while it’s still fresh because I’m angry, and I want some of that to filter through. I’m angry because we make simple things so fucking complicated, and because it’s so fucking easy to make a difference. It’s easy for all of us to start to change things, it’s just most of us don’t bother.

  So how do we stop kids like Coral from dying, kids like my Wednesday-afternoon girl?

  When I wrote this book I didn’t think anyone would listen, let alone do anything, but people did. They listened and they did stuff. So this time I’m going to ask the world for something, and we’ll see where it goes. Sometimes even an old cynic like me starts to believe there might still be cause for hope.

  Recently I was invited along to the planning day for the CYFS Youth Services team I work with at Papakura, my Wednesday-afternoon crew. These are people who are actually doing stuff, not just talking about it. These are the social workers who did everything they possibly could to save that girl, and then had to move on to the next one when nothing worked.

  More sensible hearts would break.

  My guys had no budget to go anywhere nice for their planning day so we met in a local ‘sports’ club, which is a fancy name for a corrugated-iron shed where guys meet every weekend to drink themselves blind, fight and break stuff. It was depressing to say the least. The seats were ripped and broken, the place stunk of cigarette smoke, and the floor was sticky with old beer. It looked like no one had tidied up after the brawl the night before. I couldn’t believe these people, who were spending the day planning how to help our most desperately needy kids, were having to meet in such a place. They had to get out of the office so they would have some peace and quiet, but the only place they could afford to go was pretty bloody grim.

  And yet they just got on with the job of stretching resources and time, and all good common sense, to try to work the impossible. They got on with the business of trying to save kids like my Wednesday-afternoon girl. Shame on us though, that they should have to do it in such a depressing and soulless place. Shame on us all.

  So here’s the bit where I ask the world for something. You see, saving kids isn’t about policies, or politicians, or experts, or any of that tired old bullshit. Saving kids is about you and me. Saving kids is about just one person standing up and doing something. Saving kids is about giving a shit.

  It would be nice, don’t you think, if my Wednesday-afternoon guys had somewhere nice to go to plan how to achieve the impossible? I think it would. I think it would be just grand. And all it would take is for some good person out there, who has somewhere ni
ce for people to meet and plan, to ring up the CYFS Papakura office and ask to speak to the Youth Services Supervisor.

  Not much to ask, really, is it? Such a simple thing.

  And if you don’t live in Auckland, or if you don’t even live in New Zealand, I’m sure the people who work in your local social-work office might like somewhere nice to meet as well. This book has now wound its way across the ditch, and even round the other side of the world. It doesn’t matter where you are, or what language you speak, the problems, and the solutions, are the same.

  For my part, I’m off to practice what I preach. By the time this second edition hits the bookstores I will have started a new life. There comes a point, after you spend enough time telling other people to do the things that make them happy, when you really need to walk the talk yourself. As I write this my family is in the final stages of closing down our life in Auckland and moving back to Dunedin, back to Otago, back to the place where my bones are buried. This will mean leaving behind a number of people who have become very special to me, but if I’ve learned anything in the last couple of years, it is that loss is simply part of the ride. We all leave sooner or later.

  I crave simple things. I crave southerly changes, wild coastlines, and watching storms roll in over the Pacific. The sea has always been my church. That’s the place I go to reconnect with the bigger picture, to reconnect with the things that feel real to me. That’s where I go for perspective and peace.

  I want to lead a simpler life, to spend more time writing books, and more time reading them. Writing has always been my great passion. That’s the box I tick when asked what my real job is. Most of all though I want to spend more time with my family, to enjoy my kids before they get too old for having adventures with their dad. I am determined to do what I tell others to do, to follow my passions, and spend more time with the people I love.

  I’m still going to get about the place doing my thing. In truth I don’t think I could stop that even if I wanted to. I have some ideas about playing on a bigger stage as well. Politics is not my thing, and never has been, but the media, now there’s a bed of thorns worth jumping into. If I’ve learned nothing else from the journey that this book has become, it’s that it just may be possible for one person to make some kind of difference, even though you might not always know just exactly what or how when you set out.