A story from a place that is no longer my home

Originally posted 2 September 2017

I want to tell you a story.

This story isn’t a neat and tidy or satisfying one, because it’s true – and that’s not how real stories with real people work. Underdogs seldom win. Those who get knocked down don’t always get back up again.

You won’t feel happy at the story’s end.

The person at the centre of this story is called P. I know only a little about him outside of his real name, which I choose not to share. The point of this story is not to take away his dignity. Plenty of people and institutions have already attempted that.

The story belongs to me and my family, but also to P and his. It belongs to all of us, although we don’t all recognise that.

It’s hard to tell, because it’s about something terrible that happened in my home. But that’s why it matters. It happened in your home too.

Here goes.

* * * * * *

I was trying not to scream, because the kids were there. They were side by side on the couch, wide-eyed and disorientated, because they’d been so sharply woken.

Confused, they’d crept out of bed. I made them sit, told them to stay exactly where they were. They were quiet.

The strange things you remember: I was talking into the landline, an ugly, beige, plastic thing, and the cords were tangled. I’d dragged it in panic to the middle of the lounge floor.

But I would not scream into it. Don’t scare the kids.

I talked, or I tried to, but in a voice that threatened to spiral up into hysteria: I clawed at my dumbstruck brain to answer the questions.

“Try to stay calm. Can you see a weapon? What is your address?”

But I couldn’t stay calm, and my voice came out like someone else’s, ragged and rising:

“You need to come You need to come RIGHT NOW There is someone assaulting my partner YOU NEED TO COME”

* * * * * *

Maybe you’ve done this daft thing too: wondered in that idle and silly way what you’d do if something really bad happened. Would you be the hero, decisive and brave, like you’re in an action movie? Or would you be weepy and scared, even frozen to the spot?

Now I knew. It wasn’t my courage that deserted me. It was my head.

This was five years ago, Labour weekend in 2012. We still lived in our Naenae home.[1] The kids were only eleven and six; my older son was still a daughter.[2] It was the middle of the night, but warm for October, and still. Anyone with any sense was in bed.

I guess it must have been me who heard it first. My body was awake before my comprehension, starting out of bed, following the shouting. It was coming from the kitchen.

On the other side of the door, I couldn’t tell if Andy B was being hit or stabbed.

He was lying there, on the kitchen floor, and he was shouting, but I couldn’t get through.

I could see only centimetres through the crack between the partly open door and the jamb: his back was to me, and he blocked the door with his body. I saw only part of his back, nothing else, but I could see he was moving as he was struck, and I could hear him. I knew he was alive.

I had to get through the door.

I don’t know if I screamed. I just pushed. I had to get through the door. Pushed, failed, pushed.

There was no plan: just a blank mind and adrenalin and desperation and needing to get through the ****ing door. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get through.

I don’t remember the moment I realised I had to dial 111.

I only remember pushing, pushing – it felt like a lifetime, Andy B’s lifetime, the time it takes to end a life – at the kitchen door.

* * * * * *

You see, Andy B had been fighting for my handbag.

A night owl, one who potters about in the quiet left over once the family has gone to bed, he’d meandered from the lounge to the kitchen. There was a bloke, tall and stocky, rifling through the cupboards. They looked at one another.

Things might have turned out differently if the guy hadn’t grabbed my handbag as he pushed past Andy B, trying to get out of the house.

Make no mistake, this was a cool handbag: a whimsical imitation 1960s style in pastel blue. I loved that handbag. I always thought it was to die for, although not literally.[3]

Andy B told me later: as he grabbed the intruder to prevent his escape, he formulated an idea. He would simply hold onto the sweatshirt of this very large and angry bloke until he civilly agreed to put the handbag down, and allowed himself to be handed over to the police.

Like that Scooby Doo episode that never made it past the cutting room floor, this turned out to be a shit idea.

More and more infuriated by the little fella tenaciously grabbing his sweatshirt, the guy began to swing. Andy B fell to the ground, blocking the door with his body, still holding onto the guy’s top.

Only later did I come to understand that as P was punching Andy B in the head, I was hitting him in the arse with the door. I guess it’s the thought that counts.

These were minutes of unalloyed terror that words on a screen do not describe; but they were brief. The guy fled, leaving the handbag and a rattled Andy B, with bruises around the top and side of his head.

I’m reluctant to call someone ‘lucky’ when they’ve been repeatedly bashed in a home invasion, but Andy B may be with us today because P couldn’t land his blows with full force.

Because Andy B was on the floor, holding onto the intruder’s sweatshirt with so much dogged persistence, his forearms helped protect his head against the blows.

Every man reaches a point where he has to stand up and say ‘Enough’.

For Andy B, that moment came in a playfully-styled faux-vintage bag with chunky stitching and wooden hoop handles.

* * * * * *

We waited for the police to arrive.

Andy B started tidying the lounge, because he didn’t want the police to see our shit housekeeping. I offered warm verbal encouragement.

And we started laughing. I guess we were relieved that Andy B had mostly taken blows to the part of his body he uses least.

I tucked the kids into bed, side by side, gave them a kiss, explained that we’d all be fine – we just needed to remember to lock the back door.

They went back to sleep straight away. That’s what kids who know they are safe in their home – who know their parents can and will protect them – are able to do.

As we continued to wait, we ventured out into the dark to check the section, to see what else had been pinched. And there we discovered it.

In the garage, our children’s clothes had been taken off the inside washing line, and folded with care into a pile. These little things – singlets and socks, intimate and mundane – were being stolen with someone in mind.

Something was wrong: I remember saying it, looking at the clothing, feeling the enormity of what had happened settling heavy on my shoulders.

Something was wrong.

This thing, the folded clothes, had been done in an act of love. Distorted, drunken, stupid, but an act of love – for somebody’s child.

That blow landed.

* * * * * *

As a family, we are so earnestly liberal and caring and sharing that it sits somewhere on a spectrum between embarrassing and hilarious. We try really hard. Really hard. We’re like a low budget made-for-TV movie that is narrated by someone like Morgan Freeman, but cheaper than Morgan Freeman.

Of course we were going to do restorative justice.

Daybreak found P in a remand cell.

The police had discovered him that same night, at a bus stop near our house. Like the punchline to a bizarre joke, he was eating a can of tuna from our pantry, and in his pocket was a pair of stolen socks. He’d used the socks as improvised gloves to leave no fingerprints.

The weeks that followed were the piecing together of a puzzle, strange and fragmented and sad. We learned a little about what had happened, and about P himself: snippets from the police and our restorative justice coordinator.

That Labour weekend was not the first time P had found himself in trouble.

He’d had a string of convictions for burglary, racked up over many years. There was a suggestion of domestic violence too, although it did not appear on his criminal record. As a police officer who’d attended the night of the assault had warned us, P was ‘a bad man’.

I know it: I’ve described to you that stereotype, the spectre who haunts your TV set, who we bolt our doors and sharpen our prejudices against. Male, Māori, repeat offender.

And yet he wasn’t only that, because no one is only that.

For five years, P had gone without a conviction. Fatherhood had given him a new perspective: he did some training, found a job, shared his pride in his family and his achievements on Facebook.

It unravelled, all of it, in the space of 36 hours. A relationship bust-up, hurt with no outlet but anger, a binge on booze and pills. Disoriented, wandering, finding himself at a home like his own, but belonging to strangers.

Thinking to himself, **** it – or maybe not thinking at all.

Putting socks on his hands, taking whatever he could find. Moving in and out and around our home in the darkness, as the kids slept; stuffing in a stolen bag things trivial and all but worthless, except to the people from whom they were taken.

Throwing away a life built stone by stone, arduously.

Kneeling, drunkenly, to fold little clothes tenderly in a pile for a child.

P was our neighbour in Naenae, his house separated from us by a few hundred metres; and yet he lived in a different world.

* * * * *

We’d never been to a prison before.

In the weeks that followed the attack, adrenalin and nerves and indignation found me arguing with a stonewalling corrections system, over and over again, sick of the sound of my own voice, as I tried to set up our own restorative justice session.

When we arrived at reception at Rimutaka prison, at the agreed time, it seemed like we’d come to the end of a wearying journey; until the woman at reception looked at us blankly, and with disinterest.

We explained why we had come, what had happened to us, the road we’d travelled to be there – offering up once again our story, the intimacy of our fear and our vulnerability. She shrugged. She had no idea we were arriving, didn’t know anything about us, didn’t care. Nor did her colleagues. They had other things to do.

We were speechless.

We took the seats that no one offered us. We waited for an update, an explanation, an apology for the disrespectfulness of it, that never came.

Confusion, dismay. Benches bolted down, lino, sparseness. We waited.

I felt something I had never felt before, and have never felt since.

I am a Pākehā person with a white collar job. People behind counters usually listen to what I say, rush to help me. My opinion matters, I matter: I am the customer, and the customer is always right.

I live in a world that is fair, more or less; or at least, a world in which unfairness is repackaged, rebranded, or swept away by low-wage workers so I’m not made to feel uncomfortable about it.

That is the order of things; what I suddenly realised I have always expected.

But in the stark prison reception, on a Saturday afternoon, I did not matter. My family did not matter. Our hurt, our humanity, did not matter. Our wanting to make it right, for ourselves and for the person who harmed us, did not matter.

I imagined what the prison reception must have been like on a busy day, kids on the bolted down bench seats, swinging their legs in boredom, waiting with their mothers to visit their dads. Invisible, yet closely watched by quietly hostile uniforms, until orders are barked and they are herded through.

For twenty minutes or so, we sat in the shadow of a grey machine, designed and constructed to remind the families of the incarcerated – to leave no shadow of a doubt – that they are not fully human. I wondered what that knowledge does to a child.

Our harried-looking restorative justice coordinator arrived, apologising quietly for the prison staff.

As we were ushered through the security check – our bags inspected, the contents of our pockets turned out – he explained, with gentleness but frustration, that there had been another mistake. No room had been booked in the visitors’ wing for our restorative justice session.

We would have to walk across the prison grounds, to the wing in which P was housed.

* * * * * *

Wire mesh, cigarette marks on the walls and furniture, the reek of piss.

A man without a shirt yelled something garbled and chaotic that I didn’t understand as we walked across the prison grounds. Although I knew we were protected in the causeway – a caged-in, roofed-over concrete path – I felt no sense of safety.

At the prisoner’s wing, we were steered into a shabby, dark room, and seated on battered plastic furniture. Once again, no one knew we were coming – including P himself. Our long-suffering restorative justice coordinator left us to find him, and coax him ill-prepared and surprised into the meeting.

I could tell P was scared.

He was a big man, broad shoulders and hands. He entered the room in a grey prison issue track suit, with a cocky, hard man flick back of the head – but I could see his fear.

And I was scared. I didn’t know what to expect: defensiveness, unpredictable anger, insincerity, taking the mickey.

We shook hands, sat down together at the table. He talked first, lifting his eyes to meet ours. He had not rehearsed, he was no orator with fancy words, but he did not falter: he knew what he wanted and needed to say.

The apology was given.

It was given with humility, with empathy, without reservation. It was accepted the same way.

And I understood. P was afraid because he was ashamed. He was afraid because he had to confront the knowledge he’d thrown away everything that he’d strived for, his friendships, his family, his self-respect.

He was afraid to face us, to put right what was wrong. He did it anyway.

You wonder how you’d be in that moment you’re called on to do something brave; whether you’ve got the mettle, the character. For a short time, P’s courage made that ugly place beautiful.

It was over in fifteen minutes. All three of us – P, Andy B and I – hugged, awkward and crying, deeply sincere, by the doorway of the dimly lit room.

For me, that afternoon was the difference between going forward or standing still, locked forever in the paralysing moment replaying in my head. I had needed to find some grain of humanity, retrieve some speck of kindness, from this regrettable, shitty thing that none of us would have wished on the other.

Somewhere, Morgan Freeman was looking down on us, smiling.

* * * * * *

How did we get here, what wrong turns did we take, to get to this place I don’t recognise?

I have never stopped asking myself how it came to be that, one night five years ago, my children were not safe in their home; that P’s kids weren’t secure in theirs.

Trauma inscribes itself on the brains of children. For my kids, the fear was brief. But on that same night my kids were snuggled back into bed and reassured, some other kids’ dad disappeared. Simply disappeared, leaving shock, anger, shame behind him.

As our friends rushed to show caring and kindness, another family lost its income.

Perhaps those kids went back to school on Monday, and the other kids whispered about them, about that family. Perhaps the adults were more circumspect, but harsher in their judgements: because we all know how kids like that turn out. Maybe they were the paru kids, the stigmatised ones with the empty lunchboxes. I don’t know. I think about them all the time.

This place that I found myself in 2012, of insecurity and hardship, of fear – the place where I still live today – is not the place I grew up.

Yet this is the New Zealand we made. We once had a home with solid bones. It wasn’t perfect – the welcome mat wasn’t rolled out equally to all – but the foundations were good.

Now the paint no longer conceals the cracks, the roof no longer offers shelter. Not everyone finds a seat at the table; the fire has gone out in the hearth. The four walls still stand, but the heart of our home has deserted the shell.

Some will rush to point out that we all make choices, and we must take responsibility for them. And they are right. But when I was seventeen, the choice that caused me the greatest angst was which university subjects to enrol in. At the same age, P’s choice was whether or not to join a gang.

Some people choose well. They defy the odds, overcome the hurdles, rise above all the shit that life throws at them. Some people are extraordinary.

But most of us are not extraordinary, not even close. We simply play the hand we’re dealt.

* * * * * *

When Andy B and I arrived at the courtroom, there was a kid in the dock. He’d been there before – that much was clear – but no one seemed to know who was supposed to be looking after him. The judge asked after his drug and alcohol problem. He looked crestfallen.

The kid was followed to the dock by P.

I had our victim impact statement in my hand, crumpled a little from my anxious grasping.

I looked at what we had written – and when I say ‘we’, I actually mean ‘I’, as per standard relationship operating procedure. I shrunk.

It was so terribly, terribly earnest, like that shit film from the 90s where Michelle Pfeiffer saves troubled young people from themselves and Coolio raps soothingly in the background.

Nervous wees threatened to sweep over me. Suddenly, I felt like Morgan Freeman was no longer narrating my life, but laughing at me instead.

We had arrived at court with a page of words, good intentions and the most hopeless naivete. I felt certain the people in the court, dour and jaded from seeing endless reappearances of people like P, would smirk at me behind the sleeves of their suits and gowns.

Maybe, I thought, I could back out of the words on the page – make something up on the spot.

I will be forever grateful that I knew I couldn’t improvise fast enough to come up with a Plan B.

I took a breath, and I spoke. I talked about the terror of that night, about what it is to be unsafe and afraid in your home. I talked about what it means to me to live in a community without fear of violence. I talked about our gratitude for restorative justice.

And I talked about the reparation we wanted from the offender standing in front of us: that he reach his potential, in his work, in his studies, as a dad.

My hands shook, and so did my voice – but my words felt enormous as the courtroom turned to watched.

I finished. I waited for the smirking.

When the judge spoke, it was with kindness. He thanked us sincerely for being brave; for being the only people who showed up to support a man who was entirely alone, who had burnt every bridge he had, who had no one left even to kick him when he was down.

As P left the dock, he turned to us with a gesture, hands together, a little bow.

It was something between a thank you and a prayer. Maybe it was a prayer for the whole imperfect lot of us.

* * * * * *

The thing that struck me about P’s letter was the handwriting. The grammar was clunky, the phrases simple and inadvertently funny, like something a little kid might write: but the handwriting was jarringly beautiful, accomplished, telling a story of human potential that got lost somewhere along the way.

The letter was written almost immediately after his arrest, from a remand cell, but given to us much later, at court.

It was written by a man who, at the age of about forty, was starting again from the inside of a cage, learning literacy and numeracy – things that are every child’s birthright, but that he was somehow never given.

It was a long letter, written in the lowest moment: about the relationship he lost, the kids he left behind, about grief, the trail of stupid decision-making that led him to our house that night, his disgust at recognising himself as that guy on the real-life police TV show, his wish that he could only take it back.

It apologised for violating the safety of our family, our home.

I don’t really know what happened to P.

I hope he found peace, and he made peace – with all the people he needed to, including himself.

On his release, he planned to go north, back to his marae. He needed, and he knew he needed, to go home. I think he felt drawn to back to the place he came from, where he would be treated with kindness, with understanding, with dignity. He needed to feel community and belonging, be somewhere people look out for one another. That’s what home means.

I believe he was looking for a sense of home, something important that was lost. So am I.

____________________

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/the-end-is-naenae/as-good-as-it-gets/344919389256535/

[2] https://www.facebook.com/notes/the-end-is-naenae/the-passport/375817702833370/

[3] How does my frivolous passion for handbags fit with my bold, no-nonsense feminist beliefs? Well, DUH – I need a bag to fit all that feminism in.