Cracked Lenses

by L J McIntyre

  “But why would they do that?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out and what scares the shit out of me. If they were a crazy religious group then I would get it. They’d trap us, do some weird stuff to us and then kill us or whatever. But why would they try to ruin my online reputation? Ruin my career? It doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s a revenge thing, but revenge for what?”

  “It could be something worse than that.” She puts her legs up on the bed and leans against the headboard.

  “Like what?”

  “The curse that Tamati mentioned. Or some sort of voodoo stuff. I mean, isn’t there a type of voodoo which believes you have to drain the energy and will from a person, make them ready to die before killing them? I’m sure I’ve read it somewhere. It’s like the voodoo witch, or whatever they’re called, can feed off the person’s soul if you destroy every aspect of them before you kill them.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? A curse, voodoo?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “I didn’t say I believed it. But you’ve got to admit, in a place like this you can understand why people start believing in stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, but I’m worried it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “My uncle was a prison guard in Belmarsh prison. One of the prisoners in special confinement, an eighteen year old lad, had killed two pensioners with a hammer. He didn’t steel anything from them, didn’t do anything else. Just killed them. One day my uncle asked him why he did it. The murderer looked him right in the eye and asked, ‘Who said I needed a reason?’ That story still terrifies me to this day. That’s what worries me. That there’s no real reason. Just pure evil.”

  “But a whole town?”

  “You never heard of Jonestown?”

  “That was a cult.”

  “We don’t know that this isn’t a cult. You heard Tamati, they love that triangle symbol for some reason. Sounds culty to me."

  “But that doesn’t explain why they’re attacking you online.” She presses her cheeks into the palms of her hands and sighs. “What are you going to do about the article on that website?”

  “There is something that might save the scraps of my career and give us some security while we’re here.”

  Chapter Twenty One: Three Years Earlier

  Jack Coulson: Session Four

  “I notice you brought the camera with you today. Have you used it yet?” Paul asked. He was wearing a white shirt and black trousers.

  I leaned over and handed him the camera. He turned it on, clicked a button and brought the screen at the back of the camera closer to his face. “These are good,” he said from behind the screen. “Really good.” He leaned in further. “Wow, four hundred photos. You’ve been busy in the last couple of days.” He turned the camera off and handed it back to me. “You’ve got an eye for composition, Jack.”

  I managed a slight smile and rotated the camera in my hands. “I…I liked it.” I shook my head. “Don’t know why. Had no idea what I was doing.”

  “You know,” he took his glasses off and polished them on his sleeve before placing them back on again. “The wonderful thing about creativity is that it allows us to be more present for a while. When we’re working on a half-written page or colourful canvas, and those creative juices are flowing freely, we’re focusing only on the creative task. Our minds are no longer concentrating on our own plight and daily challenges. We’re not looking back at the past, not worrying about the future, we’re here and now.

  “Edward De Bono, a very famous psychologist once said that creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. And with photography, in those moments when we’re looking through a camera lens and not through our own cracked lenses, we’re learning to step outside of ourselves, to view the world as an observer, and then something amazing happens, we find that we can also step outside of our problems, our stresses and fears. ”

  I nodded.

  “Did you experience that at all?”

  “After a while of clicking away, I lost myself a little bit.”

  “Did the fingernails stop?”

  “At times.”

  He nodded and smiled.

  “And as a writer.” He eyed me. “You get all of those benefits and the added bonus of stepping in the shoes of someone else, trying on their perspective for a while, seeing the world from their eyes. That’s how great characters are written.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Would you be willing to give writing a go?” he ventured.

  I shook my head slowly.

  “Was that something your dad took away from you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did your mother encourage writing?”

  I smiled. “Whatever made me happy, my mother encouraged me to do more of.”

  “But your dad didn’t like it?”

  “He didn’t like me. That was his issue.”

  “So whatever made you happy—”

  “He destroyed.”

  “Can you give me an example of when he did this to you.”

  I sunk my back into the cushion, raised my eyes to the ceiling. “When I was about ten I started writing a book. Nothing amazing, just a book about a little boy who was stranded on an island and tried everything he could to leave. I spent weeks on that book. Every evening and every night when I was supposed to be asleep. My mum would read each completed chapter, tell me it was wonderful. That’s how she was.”

  I sat upright, wiped a tear off my cheek.

  “On the good nights we’d see my dad through the curtains before he got in from the pub. His silhouette would skulk outside the window. Then we’d hear the key in the door. If he slammed the handle down hard, my mum would tell me to run upstairs. She’d take the brunt of his drunken fury. His face used to get so red when he was angry.”

  “The red-faced monster.”

  “Yeah. Childish description, I know. One night he came home and we didn’t hear him at the door. We didn’t hear him slam the handle down. He found me sitting at the dining room table writing in my little book. He snatched it away, started reading my story out loud and laughing. He told me it was worthless shit. I watched him tear pages out in chunks.

  “My mother was so angry. She rushed upon him and slapped him across the face. She’d never shown even a little bit of violence in all those years, but that was too much for her. It was the first and only time she stood up to him. She was in the hospital for three days. She’d fallen down the stairs, as far as everyone else was concerned.”

  “Jack, I’m so sorry.”

  “That wasn’t the end of it. For years he made fun of me, used the writing as a way to hurt me. He’d say things like, “Ooh, Jack the big writer wants a bike for Christmas.” Or tell me I didn’t have a creative bone in my body. The more I ignored it, the more he kept going. One night he threw every book I had in the bin.”

  But despite that my mother urged me to write in secret, and read as much as I could. Probably a pipe dream now but back then I was certain I’d be a writer. Over the years he took that away from me.”

  “He stripped your confidence from you.”

  I nodded.

  “And your mum, did she stay with him?”

  “No, she left when I turned eighteen and moved into the university campus.”

  “What did you study?”

  I held his gaze. “English Literature.”

  His lips curled up in a subtle smile. “Why did you choose that subject?”

  “Because fuck him.”

  “I’m assuming something happened since then for you to not write anymore.”

  “One of my short stories got rejected from a magazine.”

  “Rejection is just a natural part of writing.”

  “I know, but all I could hear was my dad taunting me and it gave me a panic attack. Felt like I was dying. I gave the writing up after that.”

  “That’s a real shame, Jack.”
>
  “Some battles you can’t win.”

  “And your mother, what happened to her?”

  “She died a year ago of cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Those last years she was genuinely happy.”

  “And your dad?”

  “Died of liver failure.”

  Paul crossed his legs, pulled the bottom of his shirt down to straighten it out and said, “Your dad sounded like a real arsehole.”

  “He was.”

  “But you’re not, Jack. You know that, don’t you?”

  I looked at him.

  “The red-faced monster. That wasn’t you. It was him.”

  “I’m his son. And sometimes I get angry.”

  “We all get angry sometimes. Have you ever checked out before like you did with the van driver?”

  “Never. But I’ve lost my temper before.”

  “And how do you feel when you lose your temper?”

  “My heart feels like it’s about to explode.”

  “Anxiety?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you see in your mind when you’re angry?”

  “I see me as my dad. I see people looking at me the way we looked at my dad.”

  “Even if the anger you feel is probably the same anger we all would feel?”

  “I don’t know how other people feel. Listen, I’m my dad’s son. I have to deal with that.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Humans are complicated creatures. We are not our DNA. We are not our parents. We have a choice.”

  “My choice is not to take the risk.”

  “What risk?” He leaned closer.

  “The risk that I’ll hurt someone like I did the van driver.”

  “Is that the real reason you push people away, Jack? You’re scared you’ll hurt them like your dad hurt you and your mum?”

  I rubbed my face with my hands. “I am who I am. It’s hardwired into me.”

  “No, you are your own person—”

  “But I did hurt someone. I hurt him so badly he’ll be eating out of a straw forever. That was my fault, Paul.”

  Chapter Twenty Two

  “I have a close friend,” I explain to her. “He works as a journalist for the Liberty newspaper back in the UK. He might be able to get something published from me, a piece about us being trapped here and what’s been happening online.”

  “But why don’t you just write the same thing on Facebook?”

  “I thought about that, but I’ll get more credibility if what I write is published in a national press. And maybe the locals here are less likely to hurt us—or whatever their plan is—if all of this, including our location, is made public.”

  I pick up my laptop and send an email to Ethan, briefly explaining the situation and asking if it’s possible to get an article in either the printed paper or the website. I close my laptop, stand up and start to the door.

  “Where you going?” she asks.

  “I’ve had an idea. We need to go to the police station. They’ll have CCTV which will prove I wasn’t at the station at 6.15am.”

  “Really? Is that necessary?” Annie asks. Her face is scrunched up as if she’s just chewed a bee.

  “What?”

  She comes to the door and grabs the handle. “If you’d been in New Zealand long enough…” She opens the door and steps out. “You’d know the police force is the biggest gang in the country.”

  “Meaning?” I ask as I step outside.

  “We’re screwed.”

  The late afternoon sun is lying low, warming the top of the factory behind the town. In the station, Sergeant Davidson is playing on her phone.

  She lifts her eyes. “Christ almighty, you again?” She tosses her phone on the desk and clasps her hands together. “What this time?”

  “I’d like to request a copy of this morning’s CCTV, from 6:00 am to 7:00 am, please.”

  She leans back in her seat and cranes her neck, looks over to Nigel. “Hear that Nigel? He requests a copy.” They both start laughing.

  “A copy, nice one,” Nigel says.

  I point to the camera on the wall above her, the one aimed at the door. “That’s right. The feed from that camera.”

  “That camera’s broken.”

  “Well, the red light is flashing on it.”

  “Nah, it isn’t.” She crosses her arms.

  “I can see it.”

  She cranes her neck again. “Is he disturbing the peace, Nigel?”

  “Seems like it to me. My peace has been disturbed.”

  “Mine too.” She takes the handcuffs off her belt and puts them on the desk.

  “Okay, forget it,” Annie says. She looks at me. “Let’s get out of here.”

  When we leave the station, a massive mess of sound and colour trundles past us. It’s a multicoloured van, like an old-school Volkswagen, with speakers sticking through the metalwork in the doors, Bob Marley’s ‘I shot the sheriff’ blasting from them. The van pulls up outside the convenience store, the music dies, and a young guy gets out the passenger side and walks to the driver’s window.

  “What the fuck is this place, man?” asks the young guy.

  “Who cares?” The driver says. “Just grab some beers from the shop so we can get out of here.”

  “Bloody hell,” I grab Annie’s hand. “These aren’t local. They can give us a ride out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty Three

  I sprint up to the van. The smell of weed wafts along the path and gets stronger the closer I get to the open driver’s window.

  “Excuse me,” I say quietly between deep breaths. “Is there any chance you can give us a ride out of here? We’ll go anywhere, just as long as it’s not here.”

  The driver, his red eyes in narrow slits, nods his braided head, “Yeah man, the more the merrier. Hop in the back door.”

  Sergeant Davidson’s voice rises above the blasting music. “Kill the engine and get out,” she says as she runs up to the van, nears the driver side window and stands next to me. Her hand is resting on the metal baton hung off her belt.

  The driver’s eyes double in size, his cheeks flush red. He kills the engine and looks at me.

  “Don’t look at him,” Davidson shouts. “I’m god right now and you’ll take my word as gospel. Get out the car.” She looks terrifying, larger than before, wider, jaw clenching in and out.

  The guy climbs out, follows Davidson around to the front of the van. She spins him around, shoves him against the pink and yellow bonnet.

  “What’s happening?” I ask Davidson.

  Nigel’s voice comes from behind me. “Interfering with police business?” he asks me while chewing gum.

  I shake my head and take a step back.

  Davidson is searching the braided guy. She looks up at Nigel when she finishes. “Check the van.”

  Nigel opens the door, leans in and grabs something. He holds his discovery aloft, a half-smoked joint, for Davidson to see. “Narcotics,” he says.

  Davidson spins the man around, slips the baton out of her holster in one slick movement, and holds it against his chin. He leans back against the van, tries to bend his neck backwards away from the baton, ends up with his head titled up toward the sky, his eyes huge.

  “I’m so sorry,” he manages.

  His friend walks out the convenience store with a bag of munchies and beer. It takes his baked mind a few seconds to get a handle on what’s happening. Then he drops the bag, his legs tense up, and his entire body twitches as if to start running.

  Nigel, now holding his baton, says to the other guy, “Run and you’re dead”. He bats the palm of his empty hand with the heavy metal pole.

  Annie was right. The police look more like a gang of thugs than any law enforcement agency.

  Davidson says, “Bringing drugs into our town, you little fucking swamp rat.”

  “I’m so, so sorry.” His voice is beginning to crack.

  “Swamp rats,” Nigel repe
ats while eyeing the other guy who is frozen like a statue.

  “We should go,” Annie whispers to me.

  I ignore her.

  The frozen guy says, “It’s just one joint.”

  “Hear that, Nigel? Just one joint.”

  Nigel shakes his head.

  The man against the bonnet says, “We’re really, really sorry.”

  Davidson smiles at the man, takes the baton from his chin and pushes it into his chest.

  “Please,” he pleads. “We were just passing through.”

  Davidson slides the baton into her holster. The man relaxes a little bit, straightens himself up. Tears are rolling down his cheeks.

  Davidson nods to the van. “Go on. Get back in the van.”

  The man looks at her suspiciously, suspecting a trap. He looks at me.

  “I told you not to look at him.”

  “No, sorry,” he says.

  “Get in the van now,” she orders, and he obeys.

  He cautiously walks back to the driver’s door, while the other guy moves quickly to the passenger side. Just as they both climb in, Davidson approaches the window and says, “It’s a good job we’re in a good mood today or you’d be going to prison.”

  “Yes, thank you.” The guy leans forward, starts the engine.

  “Now, don’t ever come back to Nesgrove, you hear?” she asks.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The van slowly rolls away and Davidson turns to me. “What were you talking to him about?”

  “Just chit chat.”

  “Chit chat?” she asks. “You weren’t looking for a ride, were you?”

  “Course not, no. You told me to stay in town.”

  She nods and eyes me for a few seconds before heading back to the station with Nigel. We go back up to the room and both fall on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Half an hour of silence ticks by before I say, “I think it’s safe to say the whole town is in on this.”

  “Yup.” Annie lies on her side and watches me. “Now what?”

  “Blow that petrol station up.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”