Into the Darklands (26 page)

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.

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 informed 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.’

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.