Jake's Long Shadow (16 page)

UNDER STREETLIGHTS THEY’RE in every small town and city suburb, groups of young males getting together, on the outer margins of the marginalised, the worst attracted to their ilk, predator birds of a feather, mindless — since minds aren’t needed when males of this type are together, young (and afflicted) like this.

You simply join up to become a single physical experience and wallow in what happens to you, being together in heartless numbers like this. Oh, and it’s the numbers, the sense of invincibility, the sense that you are not alone in your real darkness, down in the vaults where unexplained anger rules. And it’s the night gives you ownership (of yourself, the true, awful you), the beautiful bad night, better if they’re streetlights, not in the main street where the youths hang out conspicuously easy for the cops to pick, too public, too well lit for you, the lurking monster waiting, aching to express yourself.

It’s the suburban shopping mall, or within eyeshot but not too close, of
a busy pub, since your prospective victims emerge drunk, unknowing, unwitting to you waiting lurkers. You, murderers waiting to fulfil your genetic destiny. Unless it’s of an upbringing so bad you got no choice, and nor then does society.

You hang out and roam around, looking, always looking, for action to happen; if it takes too long in happening, the very worst of you, those who can’t wait for destiny to declare itself in a blaze of violent, unlawful glory, make a decision you’re bank robbers, or specialise in all-night service stations, so you steal guns, steal a car, take your crude plan to a bank you’ve chosen and look, there’s the sweet headline: Bank Teller Shot at Point Blank Range. Such description lifts you into the stratosphere.

Every once in a regular while one or three of your number disappears to do their inevitable life sentence in a max-security jail, testimony to your dangerous status. The ever-replenishing group of you have names of jailed dudes you admire, wanna be like, emulate, mirror their terrible existence. Dudes doing minimum seventeen years (oh man, how big a status is
that!
) for wasting two, three citizens; taking two, three lives. The bunch of you sitting around reading the newspaper court page, laughing, wide-eyed in
admiration
and glee at hearing your buddy’s recorded words in police custody as saying he felt nothing wasting some dude’s life away — laughing. Beside yourselves with pride at this dude you’ve been hanging out with, the élite club he’s joined: Murderer with a capital M, bro.

Or the destiny stumbles your way, like a blind man, unaware, into the oozing reaches of you, the collective beast. Not one thought has come from you, not any, or none that a youth’d own up to for he can’t, he’d be a real outcast, cast out from the outcasts, and that would be the ultimate rejection, would it not? Ain’t what society thinks ’cos you ain’t part of them. It’s your — everyone’s — peers.

Though from time to time you lose those who see they can’t go as far as you, the heartless hardcores, can and will. Gone, often to another town, never to be acknowledged by you again. Spat on if they should ever see you. Beat up if you get the chance. The ultimate in failures in your eyes: young men who refuse to go that whole destined way and do murder.

Under the streetlights and the lights from the hulks of shopping mall, which feel like a ship you kind of belong to, anchored there in the night under the stars, the moon usually in some form up there, cool-az when it’s full, not in terms of beauty or weight of galactical meaning; it just feels like
the meaning of your danger together, bad-intentioned like this. Feels like a good reason, scientifically so it’s said, for you to go mad. Just as soon as the dumb innocent blind drunk man comes lurching your way, or a woman whose face has no connections in this area, to rape, sodomise, beat to death if it’s not her lucky night. Just as soon as that happens.

It’s dangerous and yet laughter and nervous chuckles and outbreaks of bravado disguised as laughing come from you. Of you the tribe member, an individual nothing who is yet desperately, pathologically out to prove himself a necessarily staunch, rugged, dangerous individual.

You who have separated yourselves off from the main flock. Or the main hunting pack. For you hunt a different prey for quite different reason: not to feed hunger, or even a sense of doing something. But to satisfy this clear and specific need in you that says: I must do harm to someone, anyone. Serious harm. The ultimate harm. That’s what it says. That’s what you are.

Most of the girls melt off, or they get dragged off for a quick venting, a quick dip, the ones who stay around are themselves of the same physical, mindless beast. They’re head-kickers and female high-pitch screamers down at the victim, who represents to them what it does to you, the boys, the guys, the fullas, the dudes: your pain becomes
his
effin’ pain. Eff him a thousand times over. Tell yourselves the victim provoked this. He brought it on himself. That anything you do is justified or else it isn’t but doesn’t have to be. Hey? Is that one coming across the park?

Is that one fumbling with his car keys? Hey? He shouldn’t be driving, he’s drunk. Hahahaha! Hey? What’s he doing hanging around in a park? I bet he’s a pervo, a effin’ child molester, a homo (never a homo sapiens entitled to exist in as drunk a state as he chooses. We all have our devils, monkeys riding on our damned backs, burdens that drink helps shoulder, situations at home less than satisfactory, pasts that have to be kept in a state of stupor so they don’t tear us completely apart. We all have that).

Just existing in this circumstance, this proximity to the outcast tribe, is ill-fated and ill-judged enough. Hey, bud! Hey, you! The eff you doin’, man? Oh, hear the pitter patter of feet, shoes running across the street, no sound quite like it. No sight, not under streetlight how every third moment seems snatched away by the night and so it’s all slowed down. Movement. Intent. Who you all are. What you’re gathered here to become. No, not become. You’re already that.

What you’re all here to let out of yourself, the each of you who are the
singular beast about to go for the prey. You were already that. Or else youths your age would be out in their vast numbers everywhere. And they’re not, are they? Just you. Maori youths. Not white youths. They’ve evolved past mindless murder in packs like this. Maori youths. Not all Maori youths —
you
lot.
Your
kind of Maori youth.

On fire, electrically zipzapping all over not with mind signals but
somewhere
beyond, of overwhelming desire to do hurt to someone.

You’re warriors, admit it, boys, from days of old, looking for an excuse to let your limited genes cut loose. You’re not human. You’re from when they didn’t have to be humans. You’re from warrior stock, dumbest
spear-and
-club-fodder stock. Your ancestors never lasted long in the long ago ’cos they had no intelligence. They were mindless. Like they passed down to you, bad-gifted, mongrel-legacy, no minds that can reflect.

You’re not of the true warrior strain. Your ancestors were the scum of their time, the outcasts turned out. Your strain is going to pass on down, unless someone does this back to you on a grander scale. Lies in wait for when you return to being as innocent as you’ll get, in your stinking dirty sheet or no-sheet beds, three, four in the morning, when you’re in the arms of sleep and she’s near throttling you to death, Mrs Dream, ’cos she doesn’t like you, she knows you’re naught but collectively evil, who still shouldn’t be anything to be reckoned with, except Mrs Dream knows you hurt drunken nobodies, and often they’re not nobodies they’re decent hard-working guys who’ve been out on the town and stumbled into the wrong location, they mightn’t be drunk at all, just in the wrong place wrong time, you who destroy innocence and good.

That’s when to get you genetic monsters, when you’re tossing not with guilt but resistance to Mrs Dream trying to put end to you. The good guys, good gene guys should climb through your window and put you quietly to sleep, safe from us, sent into the arms of Mr Death. Mr Justified Death. Before you kill any more of His good innocent subjects.

They should get you before the morning paper comes out telling of another of your foul deeds done to a poor innocent stumbler. They should take you out before you can get to boast and leer at what you fullas did last night, deny you the pleasure of seeing your deed plastered all over the country’s front pages and number one on both news channels.

Vigilantes should get hold of you and firstly whip your bad-arses so bad you won’t be able to take a seat down there in the Devil’s Hell for a month.
Then they should quietly see you off this mortal coil and none should say anything, not breathe a word of your taken existences, just as they wouldn’t any other loathsome, unnecessary creature — squish. You’re ended. Just like that.

Oh, but no one does beat and then crush you, for there is a political process that insanely protects you, grants you rights because they mistake you for humans. In no court of law can the truth be spoken when otherwise untruths are punishable by the same powers the law of the land invests in the court. This is a lie you can tell and no one will do anything about it. You can stand up and say: Your honour, these young men are victims themselves, of upbringing and the far-reaching effects of colonialism. And there’d be no audience to chorus a booing outcry at the lie your highly paid, white
advocates
tell.

It cannot be said who and what you really are, of what bad material you are made. It cannot be uttered, not with the political process of moral correctness protecting you, not with its well-armed squadrons of well-paid enforcers and advocates on your behalf, thank you very much, as they bank money and accumulate status off the backs of you scum.

Look, there’s someone! Look, there’s another! Someone’s gonna suffer this night, like they do every Saturday, it’s hardly ever a Friday, your genes don’t kick in at work weekend, you’re not part of that process, you don’t belong to it, you have no job satisfaction to go and celebrate, no
contribution
you know you’ve made and earned Friday night out as reward. No, Saturday’s your day. Saturday night outcasts waiting for another head to kick in. And worse, sometimes far worse than that.

And I am one of them. I’m what becomes of these, the lost, the born bad. Locked behind bars, I’m no one. I’m nameless.

I DID
NOT
go there with the intention of being anywhere near the creep; not physically, not even a hug, a kiss on the cheek, let alone sexually, for all the evident change in his manner.

I have
not
harboured a single thought, not sexually, of even a fling with him, not once. Not even in a dream.

I went to see him to confirm, but preferably disprove, that Jake had changed. (He couldn’t have. Not that much, not with so much distance between him and my subsequent world.) And in the unlikely event I assessed that he had indeed changed, then I wanted to discuss his will, his estate, as he himself had said; the idea of informing my — our — children that he had made provision for them excited me; kind of partly make up for his failings to them as a father.

What I found was a man who called me unrecognisable and said how he didn’t deserve even half an hour of my company and would understand if I remembered how he was of old and got back in my car and left.

What I found was the man he should have been and, more than that, a man who stood before me, trembling, not with rage but its complete opposite. His feelings were extreme, which he had no choice but to face, those feelings he almost embraced at Grace’s death, to become the truly grief-stricken father, till he took the coward’s option and drowned his
so-called
grief in drink.

Not this Jake.

Jake Heke stood before me, shaking like a leaf and weeping copious, if silent tears. Jake did this. In front of me — to me. Jake-Heke-crying-
with-remorse
? This could not be.

For you, Beth, he said. What he hadn’t given and I had so much deserved, the words from chest-heaving man who looked like a child. When all you wanted was a decent marriage, to raise good children, improve our lives. Sobbing. I’m sorry, Bethy.

Called me Bethy. I had always liked being called that, probably because he had never said it to me and not meant it; it had meant genuine love for me, his way of saying a word he would not let pass his lips. To say I was unprepared for this is the understatement of my life.

He wept for, he said, our two dead children. Which had me torn between falling for this self-indulgent creep saying sorry, all these years later, and forgiving him. I was torn between feeling for him and fury at it taking this long for the man to grow up.

(Stuff you, Jake the Muss Heke. Too damned late — twenty-five years too late, longer than that.) I was about to tell him those very thoughts, but instead found myself weeping as well. Except, unlike him, I couldn’t hold back the sound.

And then he was holding me and it was as far from sexual, or even mildly affectionate, as you can get. Just two estranged people crying in each other’s arms. But it kept changing as we stood there holding each other.

It was a father, a daddy, bawling eyes out for our two lost babies. God, I was crying so myself and for those same reasons: our two children gone. And at our share of the blame — my own, too. I should have known my Grace better. I should have put my motherhood love on the line with Nig, either the gang or me. For he loved me powerfully, did my big boy.

I was crying, finally, for him. At last the man — and still big and strong — holding me in his arms, saying Nig and Grace’s names, over and over.

He cried with sound then, great sobs unlocked from his inner prison, at
long last a true man facing up to himself. It was so moving I felt my own inner being wanting release, the full woman I had always wanted to be; the completed woman, how I am now but with one missing factor: this man.

Grace! Nig! He cried. I did it to you! Jake killed you!

I know he did. Yet he didn’t. Or we are all to blame for everything bad that happens to our children, and there are times when that is just not so. Sometimes they make their own decisions. Though I think Jake was more responsible than not.

I did
not
go to his cottage with any sexual intention, and he most certainly did not even hint that it was what he hoped for. Hell, we were howling together for our children, and he with added apology for what he’d done to me. (You were a mongrel dog, Jake Heke. A violent loser of a husband. A no-account who spent years on the unemployment. A total failure of a father. Therefore not by any measure a man. And yet.)

Yet here we were in this unexpected state, both of us, and I gathered myself before he did as he’d quite gone, letting out not just this decade apart, not just the years he made miserable and tragic for his family, but for his life before that. The life he’d said so little about and yet it had scarred him so, maybe even made him the awful man he once was.

So I’m wiping the tears from his face and making soothing sounds — it was instinctive, humane, womanly, motherly. But he couldn’t stop and I started crying again and next our lips met — I made them meet. Put my mouth to his. The years came back in the instant. Our better times. Still he tried to push me away. He said, No, no, Beth. I don’t deserve you.

It was me, a happily married woman to a
fine
man, who was initiating this.

We ended up doing it and it’s the best loving I’ve had since, well, since him. Jake the Lover, when he left that Muss tag outside the marital bedroom door. The best thing, giving myself utterly to him and he to me. The height I had given up ever reaching again.

Yet I knew it was the biggest mistake of my life — again. With the same man. (Oh, woe is Beth. What have you done? What of your wonderful husband?) And yet why was my heart singing? Oh Lord, what was I to do? What was I to do?