Both Sides of the Moon (23 page)

A magistrate saves me from Dan, from myself even though I don’t know it at the time. He tells me it’s all over, my lawful freedom for a while, after I’m in a big fight — if unprovoked attack can be called fight.

Outside a dance hall I’m anyway too young to be attending, the age restriction is eighteen, I’m too inadequate since I am outside hanging around with other outcasts, or budding would-be warriors same of low self-esteem like me. We’re inane utterances and laughable postures in the semi-gloom. We’re talk-grunts covering shy smiles and broken hearts.

And I’m with half an eye out for Dan, I would have to run publicly if he showed up. More inadequate then than even this rabble company of brown boys. Brown boys, unread boys, unloved, don’t know nothing about nothing.

And the other eye out is for the girls: in there, their own unreachable definition. Out here, us our own. We agreed, didn’t we, youth warriors, we didn’t know what to say to them, how to approach them, and who of us would dance even if we could get past the bouncers, which was easy with distraction ploy. Except in there is worse than out here. (The dance floor is like that realisation of having no base. Just endless fall into an empty dark. Don’t look down. Don’t look down, kid.) The faces are of another tribe, another country, not at all your town fellows.

We egged each other on, hoping that if one did it we’d get carried along on his wave. But no one made a move. Just looked at that place and a truth started to dawn.

It was this moment, wasn’t it, boys, of realisation, out there in the spillover red, blues and whites of dancehall light, so many people yet we felt so alone, we had this moment of knowing that we
were never going to know, not woman proper, not in this state, not of our condition. And what was available to us was the handful of sluts, white trash bitches prevailingly, cast out from their own tribe, and who else to go to but their lessers. But who wanted them? Not even us. Those painted face pictures of red gash mouths and built-up hair and added eyelashes circling us like dogs willing to take scraps.

I remember the heads going down, the shoes scuffing and shuffling, the stupid grins, the startled-by-revelation expressions, the shaking of heads, the lovelorn, boy-lost glances thrown there where the light stopped at the entrance to girl and expressive dancing and the higher heaven of
being
yourself, a more or less true self, in the doorway where it changed to a glow, red, less light than it was another defining, to our eyes now it was. And one of us drawled, they shoulda had a sign up there saying us lot aren’t ever gonna get in there. And I said: Even when we are. And someone said, Yeah, man. Even when we’re in there with them we’re not. Just not right, is it?

No, it’s not. (And yet in every face it was. What wasn’t right was, we didn’t get a choice of taking a shot at this, at having a normal turn of talking to a normal girl, having a normal try at dance expression, taking our chances along with everyone else of getting love, getting peer-acclaim glory.)

So someone said, May as well have a scrap then. Another said, Yeah and make it a big one. Fuck them all.

One of our group, pipsqueak to boot, said, I seen this group keeps going down the side of the hall, thinking they’re fuckin’ tough.

And we seized on this. Our cry, our call to war. Thinking
they’re
tough? When truth is, none of them had said a word to us. Not even given a look. We were going to be a war party arrived out of the spillover light dark. To claim their right to innocent existence.

We marched around to the side of the hall and it looked so different here, in just streetlight and a high iron-sheet wall with small windows at the top that glowed the red of our unwelcome, and we thought this bunch must at least know their place, because this was no place to be; they must know where they belonged and were
accepting
of it since we didn’t see too much anger or worse, sullenness amongst them. Sullenness is hatred’s simmering brew.

We heard a voice ask us what the problem was, we’re just having a smoke. Wanna join us?

Of course we didn’t want to join. How could we join, it was why we were here — to inflict upon someone, anyone, for what we realised back there. And we attacked them. And so much pent-up anger spilled out. Lifetimes were expressing here. Fifteen- to eighteen-year-old lifetimes claiming back some of their stolen innocence against the heads of innocents.

But I was no Kapi asking myself for a first time what right has any man got to hurt innocence when he watched that child drowning, what right to take life or dignity — I just hit.

And I hit and I hit and we hit and we hit and we all felt truly uplifted, it registered in our pumping, pride-swollen hearts, it was a trickle in our brains, we understood our warrior past, the power it feels to knock another person over, to be unthinking on an epic scale, to hear the victim’s cries and screams and pleadings.

The magistrate told me I should know better as my father was an educated man and my school reports suggested I had intelligence but a poor, anti-social attitude. Warren was in court, giving me winks, being there for me become the habit of a lifetime. My father, too, and Uncle Henry and Auntie Bubs, the solid citizens as usual. Uncle Henry told me he had a message from Mereana — a voice from the grave! No, something she had always told everyone: If you’re in a situation not of your liking nor asking, then look for the good in it, no matter how much the pain.

But I couldn’t quite take in her passed-on words. Auntie Bubs gave me a long hug and cried for me and touched my face and told me be strong in Maori: kia kaha. Anyone would think I was going to receive the death sentence.

My father was invited to speak on my behalf. He told the court that I was a good boy (oh, Dad, not that good), that I had my problems after growing up in an unhappy home, that sort of thing, because I saw the magistrate’s eyes glaze over and he couldn’t wait for my father to finish, whereupon he informed him thus: Your son was in a group no better than a pack of wild dogs who assaulted an innocent (I agree, sir, now I do) group of youths minding their own business. Several had to be hospitalised, one lost the sight in an eye. Unlike
your son and his worst-offending associates, this court will show a certain mercy. Sentences each of us to nought-to-two years’ borstal training.

We go through Rapanui, the nearest small town to tiny Pinevale. Fuck Pinevale.

I make tough-guy jokes about getting there and the borstal boss telling each of us we’re zeros, our numbers have come up noughts, we can turn around and go home and can the cops please wait just in case. I’m just covering up.

But my two mates don’t laugh, and one says what home is that? I been living on the streets for months. The other asks who the hell was it started the fight anyrate? They both said in unison: Fuck this, man. When at least I had my denial facilities and, then I remembered, Mereana’s words of seeking out the good no matter the pain.

Then one of them told me to shut mouth. So I did. This was hardly a trio of play together die together.

It is a process of induction, the surrender of yourself to lawful custody, after the three of you, under a timed shower and nothing to say to each other not even questions, find you don’t have minds in common. Though at the time I couldn’t see where good could be sought out in this sullen silence of my former friends.

After that and you’re anyway separated by alphabetical order — You there and you over here — and don’t bother even with a
see-you
-later because it might never be.

I am singled out for a visit to the psychiatrist. I am not mad, I tell the induction officer. But he says everyone has to see the shrink, and as he had received my file first I’m the one he’s summoned. Oh really?

So now I feel special, as if my existence is at last confirmed and someone wants to understand it closer. Well, a psychiatrist would, would he not?

I have a hundred things, a hundred brilliant explanations I’ll give this learned man of the mind; the emotions, the convoluted
symbol meaning of mankind and his wretched, lovely condition. I’ll show him what he’s got as an inmate. Even though I don’t know yet what experience of an actual inmate is, as we’re going down this
corridor
, up some nice timber stairs, to offices.

His name he says is Doctor Parker. He asks how I feel. I say confused. He says that’s a good answer. And laughs. Tells me has a stock response of three he almost always gets: Stink. Oh, all right. Dunno. And a separate one for silence. And he says, I see your father is an educated man. So now I know I’m at last acknowledged for being at the very least different. At best not deserving to be here, I can go now. Or make it one night and I can go in the morning. (And yet I know I should be here. I know a process had to be brought to a halt. But that was after. In my fuckin’ cell. My fuckin’ cell not too far from here, but in another country.)

He said: An educated man who one would assume raised you on the right values? I guess he did, sir. And yet you’re here? (Yet I’m here? If he knew, I couldn’t be anywhere else.) I have your file, young Burgess, and it’s rather interestingly different and yet it isn’t. (Oh?) Oh, how’s that? Sir or doctor if you don’t mind. Sir.

He gave a long sigh; what an expressive device is blown air without words to it. His sigh said he hated something about me, not me the person but what I represented. The part he had no intention of understanding. He asked did I believe in God. And he seemed in the act of rising up from behind his desk.

I could have told him it was the most stupid, irrelevant
question
I could ever have expected from a trained man of psychiatric medicine. But I didn’t, though I may as well have. No, Doctor Parker, I don’t.

And he stood up. And his face was incredulous. Do you mean to tell me that you, a mere fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent, have the maturity to answer the most important and profound question in life as adamantly as you have, and not in the affirmative? Do you, boy?

I could have told him the most profound question can be God, but that’s love with a capital G. And when you have love, then it’s enlightenment of the mind from all dogma, all narrow claim. Hell, even this juvenile delinquent understood that much.

But he was power here, I could see that. So I said, sir, who made God? Knowing that I was drawing my own line in the same sand he’d beaten me to. But shit, I was fifteen, for all of it.

If this man had been Maori and in past times, he’d have been on the council of wise elders. If he’d lived in medieval times he’d be an inquisitor. In both instances dishing out injustice. Planned or by consensus. Or he would be the tohunga weaving his manipulative magic and seeing omen wherever it was expedient. But he was white and this was his time, this his place, a borstal training centre for wayward youth. So weak he couldn’t even invoke the hand of God to win his case.

I don’t know what borstal boy wouldn’t remember his first time of actual introduction to his new residence for a period up to two years. It’s the last of a series of steel grilles, each closes with a heavy clang, you’ve seen this on movies, but it was never like this.

The officer is not talking to you, he’s concentrating on his limited job, he’s not here because he’s got scope, even I can see that; he opens and closes each grille behind you, with a manner of
self-importance
(he’s got to guard the public from these wild dogs) but as you go through grille opening after grille opening, deeper into this place, you start to feel your age.

Fifteen. The child you are. I’m fifteen and here. Here at fifteen. And you get a different wonder at what went wrong, as if you know the details but suddenly you’re lost of the bigger picture. You’re reduced, like Kapi was, except not by thought but reality come about of bad thought.

The last steel grille has wooden sliders to go. This could be Uncle Hamu’s abattoir. And I’m sure my eye whites were rolling in my head. The big doors to destiny next slide across, you step in, and you’re here. Your new home.