Not for you

Scream, my friends don't call me
Friends, they don't scream
My friends don't call, my friends don't-
All that's sacred comes from youth
Dedications, naive and true
With no power, nothing to do
I still remember, why don't you, don't you?
This is not for you
This is not for you
This is not for you
Oh, never was for you...
- Pearl Jam, Not for you.

“Have you tried writing it down? It might help”

“Writing what down?”

“Everything”

“Why don’t I write down everything? While I’m doing that, how about you paint a picture of ‘everything’?”

                “It’s not good, keeping these things inside you.”

“Sure, it’s downright corrosive. People talk about scars – bullshit, I have scars, they don’t hurt. Things change, people grow, scars heal but this thing – it doesn’t. It’s liquid and lifeless, like acid, and it just eats away at new tissue regardless… it doesn’t scar, it burns like it just happened, it hisses and lingers, it corrodes your concentration… dissolves faith ”

…

“Can you tell me about it”

“About what?”

“What you remember”

“Not enough.”

“and…”

“and what? I don’t remember the day, the night. In fact I don’t remember much about the year…or the one before that, or the one after”

“What do you remember”

“Feeling bad - badly… I remember moments. They don’t fit together. I’m not sure they’re all real.”

“Do you remember how you felt then – what do you feel when you think about it now?”

“I feel wrong. I felt desperate”

“Desperate for what?”

“No, desperate… not for a ‘thing’, I wasn’t reaching for some ‘thing’. Just desperate… sliding, falling, scratching, clawing, finger nails in the dirt, tearing on stones, just trying to grasp anything.  Snatching at what you can. It feels like reaching into the world’s jaws… then being thankful even when your fingers find the teeth, clasping great fangs because for a moment, you’re not slipping away…”

“It sounds scary”

“Compared to what?”

“Tell me about the rape”

“...”

“Who was there?”

“Ando… Andy, someone named Mick. I only ever saw him once.”

                “Tell me about Ando”

Ando was a fat cunt… well, eventually he would get fat. Initially, he was just a cunt.

Tall and athletic, with the broad shoulders of an adult. He smelled like a football changing room – sweat, socks and menthol. Girls liked him in spite of that questionable hygiene. Most people did.

At 17, Ando was 6-foot tall and about 90 kilos. He could run faster than me, kick or receive a punt (without fixating on the rhyming opportunity) - he was school captain, he always had a girlfriend, he said he’d had sex, and he had a 100-watt grin permanently plastered on his woolly jaw.

Like I said, cunt.

He had fuck-all reason to be so self-assured, his family was as dysfunctional as mine, maybe more so.

“How did you know him – and his family?”

Ando’s brother, Rus, was at the Police Academy with my brother.

While we were at school, our brothers were two of the youngest police trainees in a generation - part of a bright blue wave of hope, recruited following the Fitzgerald enquiry into police corruption which tore a scab off the festering, pus ridden lesion that was policing in the Sunshine State.

I wonder which fuckwit thought 6 months of uni, 6 months of physical training, and a long hot soak in self-importance would turn a bunch of average-achieving kids, into what was needed to correct a century of abuse of power. Within a few years many of those bright-young-things would quit or be discharged - burnt-out, abused, facing disciplinary hearings, or on serious criminal charges considering - too late – what it was like to stand on the wrong side of the bars. Those who remained, blue-stained, learned the updated rules of the game from those of their mentors who had survived the post-Fitsgerald years: don’t cause a fuss, and don’t get caught.

I might have been 14 or 15, when my brother told me to introduce myself to Ando, the piglets having worked out their little brothers would be at the same school.

“You don’t like police”

“I wanted to be police, back then”

“…and now?”

“Now I don’t like police”

"We can come back to them”

“If we must”

“So, you and Ando met through your brothers?”

Ando didn’t know me from shit before that, despite the fact we’d inhabited the same institution for a couple of years. We went to different primary schools. At high school, he was popular, I was not. One day, I said ‘Hi’, then mentioned the police academy. At the time I still aspired to follow my brother there, so did he. In retrospect, Ando would have made a great cop, for all the wrong reasons.

So, we had a chat. I went back to his place after school one day. Over the next few years, I’d spend a lot of time there. His place is where it happened.

“What do you remember about the house?”

                “It was shithole… and a shelter.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I felt safe there- comparatively. It means they were good to me. It means I wish I’d burned it down.”

“’They were good to you? Who are they?”

“Ando’s family – they felt like mine for a while.”

“Can you tell me about the first time you went to the house?”

“I can’t remember the year, I was at Mercy – fuck – that sounds ridiculous. I mean, I was at Mercy College…”

When we got to Ando’s house that day after school, we dropped our bikes and climbed the front stairs. The front door opened into the living room. Straight ahead, toward the back of the house, in the kitchen, stationed at the formica table was Ando’s mum, Margie.

Margie didn’t move much. I remember her in one cracked vinyl seat that semi orbited the kitchen table, smoking menthols in a stream, and sipping a glass tumbler of Moselle filled from a cask in the fridge. Later - when we got old enough, she’d ask us occasionally to buy more smokes and wine – she paid for it of course. I don’t know how she survived, where money came from, but I reckon she was stretching the same two brass razzoos to house, clothe and feed half a dozen people for about five years. I suppressed the desire to do the dishes or vacuum when I visited – although the house wasn’t filthy, just… lived in. I wish that I had done it more often. It would change nothing of course.

Margie might have been between 50 and 60 when we met – she looked older - but her habits, health and her brood made such longevity unlikely. She’s dead now. By the time she went, I hadn’t talked to any of them for over 20 years.

Margie always made me feel like I was welcome. I think she pitied me. Maybe she couldn’t imagine what would make a kid seek refuge at her place. She was kind to me, praised me about unimportant stuff, like my manners. I think she was happy to have someone visit who could hold a conversation, use a knife and fork, and who didn’t judge her home and family… and I didn’t. I could breathe there, and for a while I hid there. Ultimately, it was like seeking sancturary in a gingerbread house in the forest.

“So that’s Ando’s mum. Who else lived there?”

Ando was her youngest child – his moniker, his surname came from Margie’s second husband, a bloke she’d met and married behind the bar of my footy club. You could see the club from the house. She didn’t talk about him, neither did Ando. I never learned much more about him - he poured me a beer or two.

                “Oh? Where was he, when he poured you a beer?”

“The club? You could see it from the house - less than a block away. I spent about as much time there as I did at Ando’s”

Ando’s footy club was further away – opposite side of the airport. His team was made up of private school kids I now saw daily, mine consisted mostly of a public-school mob I’d been at primary with.

Me and Ando only ended up at the same school because by the time I got to high school, my brother had already fucked up just enough to be shifted from public to private school. As a result of those indiscretions, my education-train got rerouted at age 12; to pass through Mercy College, and on to St Patrick’s– a newly minted pair of co-educational Catholic facilities delivering grades 8-10 and 11-12 respectively. For decades previous, St Pat’s had been a boys school, and Our Lady of Mercy, all girls. Thus, with coeducation, the schools now ground together like pubescent pelvises at a blue-light disco, and I found myself surrounded by the sons and daughters of the business and farm owners of our fair city. I didn’t like the school or the kids or my place in it – but  it’s like they say, if you’re standing in a room full of people and it seems like everyone else is an arsehole -  well, maybe it’s not them.

We knew, even if the adults didn’t, that there was a paper-thin difference between schools anyway. The naughty, grey-uniformed, public-school kids who were frequently and publicly accused of drug use, were usually procuring them from the spoiled little shits at St Pat’s. We learned to look past who got caught, for who didn’t.

“Let’s go back to the house. Who else lived at the house?”

                “Deane and ‘Neen. The others came and went. Andy came later.”

There was a little kid in Ando’s house the first time I went there - Deanie might have been 10 years old. One of the first clues about the household’s - complexities - was Deanie’s surname was different to Ando’s. Even as the youngest, Deanie’s name was the shared by Ando’s older siblings – Janine, Steve, Rosco, Russell and Andy.

“How did Deanie fit in”

“’Fitting-in’ isn’t a term one would bandy about regarding Deanie. Deanie fit-in like a square peg, on a lathe… it seemed unlikely he’d make it through the world whole“

Deanie’s mum was dead. I didn’t know the full story yet.  

He had been born prematurely and with a cleft palette. He underwent what seemed like an endless series of facial surgeries and painful recoveries, interspersed with periods of trying to catch up at school while being tormented by bullies – somehow though, Deanie had inherited his families general sense of intelligence and humour.

Deanie lisped or dribbled sometimes when he spoke, and I couldn’t help spluttering like Sylvester the cat - I figured we weren’t far different.

His grandmother and his uncles and aunts loved him, involved him and protected him as best they could. He was smart, and sensitive - different to us.

Deanie’s Dad, Rosco wasn’t there often – he worked out of town, sandblasting at the mines in the days before ‘fly-in fly-out’ was an option. Sandblasting is also a fair euphemism for Rosco’s recreational activities. I remember him coming home late one night when I was staying over. It was late. Ando and I were watching telly in the living room. It might have been New-Year’s eve, we were drunk, but that wasn’t special. Rosco hurtled his way up the front steps, tumbled in the door and locked it behind him - then sat quivering on the couch staring at the door and telling us not to unlock it. He was being pursued, he said, by a demon. It didn’t take us long to work out he was suffering a severe and apparently LSD induced paranoid hallucination.

Whenever I saw Rosco, he was high, or about to be. Erratic, smiling like a lunatic with a laugh like a hyena, limping, lopsided from an injury before my time - he was fucked-up. I saw him rarely, ‘the Sandblaster’ - I imagine him blasting away his mind with every substance he could lay hands on, the wrinkled surface of his brain eroded by powdered intoxicants, back to a nutshell-smooth surface.

“Dean and ‘Neen, you said were there…”

Janine was home too, that first time. She was 40-something, built like a whippet sculpted from leather. Her grey-blonde hair was cut to a short-back and sides. She kept goal in a soccer team - we went to watch her play once, she was good, at representative level, conceding a few years but no goals to the younger women around her. She was fit, she might have been gay – in retrospect she ticks some stereotypes -  but I was a long way from recognising it. Janine was Margie’s right hand, and another stable, if lonely, cornerstone of the house. I rarely saw her, but she was there – a fixture as much as Margie at the formica table, or the vinyl chairs, or the cigarette-singed carpet.

That first day,  after meeting Margie and Janine, Ando and I wandered back downstairs, opening the front door to a long entry room, with a couch. The room ran straight under the house to a back-door opposite the front one. In my memory, Ando seemed to have the downstairs to himself – I can’t remember if one of his half-siblings shared it.

To the right, there was a dark, dank bedroom, with a TV and double bed – I envisage it now, unmade, rumpled sheets and a too-hot looking doona without a cover. The drawn curtains didn’t move often. The covered windows to the front yard, faced the airport runway just across the road. I stopped hearing the planes sometime around then. I still can’t imagine the sound.

Out the back door, there was pool. When I first saw it, it was kidney shaped, brown paver edged, blue-green vinyl, but clear and inviting. Seasonally, it would change from crystalline, to iridescent green and swamp-like, then back again, as it’s priority waned with the sun, and the money and time for maintenance and chemicals.

Just inside the back door, left was a door to a bathroom. It had a window into the backyard from the shower, allowing air to exchange. When we walked through the bathroom, we found another larger rumpus room – curtains across floor to ceiling ranch-sliding doors again blocked out the street, the airport, the world. It’s a room I still see – I slept there many times… before it happened.

“You seem to remember a lot. How are you feeling”

“Black”

“Black? Like what”

“Like a shadow. Like I’m spinning”

“What shape is the shadow?”

“Black. Spinning. A disc… with teeth.”

“Teeth?”

Have you seen the blades in a sawmill? They’re huge and round, wider than an adult arm span… thick, tempered metal. The teeth are spread far apart, around the edge, they’re only sharpened on the tooth ends, on one side, where it meets the wood. Beneath each tooth, there’s a cut-out, a gap.

The blades have to spin very fast to cut cleanly. The gaps below and between the teeth allow space, for air and debris to move. Circular blades don’t slice like a knife… as they spin, they disintegrate a strip of wood the same width as the blade, just disappear it, dissolve it and blow it away as sawdust.

“So you’re spinning?”

“Slowly, I don’t know, it could be backwards for all I know”

“What happens if a saw blade spins slowly, or backwards - can it still cut?”

“Not really. It just tears at the wood, crushing and splintering it. There’s a huge strain on the blade -  pressure, heat, deformation - it destroys the wood or the blade shatters – both probably.”

“Do you want to stop for a minute?”

                “Spinning?”

“Talking”

                “Not yet”

…

“How do you know it happened?”

“I don’t”

“So why do you think it happened?”

“She came to tell me”

I was at home; I think I was 18. Home by then was a little brick flat, across from a service station and a block from the Supermarket. It was a 15-minute walk to work, but I often drove - I needed that extra time… I don’t know why. I was always tired.

I had moved out of Dad’s house sometime. The flat had been my uncle’s. I think that was where She came to tell me – at least that’s where I remember it. I don’t trust my memory anymore. I think She had visited me there before.

I get confused about timelines and places now – I can’t remember where I lived when. It must have been there – it wasn’t our family home, that was long gone, or the share house, or the flat I rented further out, later.

                “You’d moved out of home by then?”

I moved out not long after I left school. I had come to hate being at the house I’d lived in as a kid. My family wasn’t there anymore, another family was – and I wasn’t a part of it.

I left school, went to uni for a semester, got a job in the first holiday break. As soon as I had a job and a paycheck, I was out. I sabotaged that semester at the pub, often with Andy.

“Andy – not Ando? You said Andy was there when it happened. He was your friend too?”

Andy came home when I was in grade 11, I would have been 16. He was 23, and fresh from a 5-year stint in Maitland Prison - the oldest functioning clink in the nation.

When he went in, Andy was 18 years-old, blonde haired, ten-stone wringing wet, and entering a maximum-security prison reserved for crimes of violence – bad things ensued. Sometime after that, Margie and family must’ve moved to Queensland.

Andy wrote letters to his family, I saw one. It was gently written, to his little brother, with little cartoon drawings – I remember a kangaroo who went ‘hoppity-hop’. It didn’t describe the author’s dark existence, instead it seemed lettered in light for the reader.

At some point, someone felt the need to tell me - I think it was Ando.

Andy had had an argument with Deanie’s mum, and stabbed her. Andy would tell me later that he didn’t mean to kill her. She had been pregnant with Deanie when she died.

Anyway, when he got out Andy came to school – and to stay at Margie’s, with Deanie, who’s mum he’d killed, and Ando and ‘Neen, and occasionally Rosco, Deanie’s dad, would come home off his head on drugs. The cop, Rus, didn’t come around much, and Steve, the second-eldest lived further north, had a family. I met him just a couple of times.

“Sounds complicated.”

“Sounds fucking mental when you say it like that– but it was just life. Complicated – sure, like that Avril Lavigne song? Just five chords - it’s all about the sequence and the strum. Rearrange the chords – fuck it, take two away, and voila, different song. What is it they say - about three chords and the truth?

“The truth? Let’s go back to where we were – where you were.”

I was in a flat. I moved out of home sometime after my Dad remarried. She, had two daughters, maybe 5 and 7 or something like that – maybe younger. I fucking hated her.

“Why?”

“To be fair, I liked her at first. Then I disliked her, then I moved out”

“Why do you think you hated her?”

“I hated her when she left Dad later and took everything – well, what was left, which was five-eighths of fuck-all… but that was later”

“You hated her because she left.”

“Not at all. I was relieved when she left. She would have had her reasons – everyone else seemed to have had good reasons”

“What does hate feel like – to you?”

“Like the prospect of violence - unrealised. Spiny apathy… being forced to care about something that you don’t give a shit about.  Sometimes it’s just an absence… sharpened to a point.”

Dad treated his second family differently to the way he’d treated us. The discipline in the house was too different to my childhood, and yet it was so close – same house, same dad, different rules. It sucked - I left.

He was already single when they met, having abused his first marriage in every significant way until it ended. Jenny had had an affair, and left her husband bringing her young girls.

After mum, before Jenny, Dad and I had lived together for a couple of years. He nursed his alcoholism and depression badly. I stayed because I was convinced he’d die if I didn’t. I think he almost did.

“What was it like, living with him?”

“Like bad Never-land. No Peter, no Wendy - just lost boys, a mad Captain… and a sea-full of ticking crocodiles”

Left largely to my own devices, I started polishing my own sense of martyrdom with dependencies.

At 15 I drank and smoked, cigarettes and pot, and made friends with excellent people possessing low expectations and short life-expectancies. Throughout the last 3 or 4 years of school, I haunted beaches and parks, and school-yards after dark. We went to parties in houses where parents were not. In between, I pretty much lived alone in the house- Dad was out. I didn’t throw parties.

Mum stayed close, in town until I left school. I visited. I misunderstood who was protecting whom and from what - I couldn’t tell you now if I tried. She was like the personification of a safe-box in a movie, a secret cache with a new identity and resources, in-case my secret mission ever went tits up. I can’t imagine what it was like for her to watch me, it was beyond patience. I understand better now how poorly I concealed my delinquency – but she never treated me as though I’d let her down, or hurt her, or made her lonely. I did of course.

“How is your relationship with her now?”

“She’s still my safety net – which I guess means I’m still her circus act…”

I don’t know how old I was when I saw Dad kick my mother - she ducked into punch and sank to the kitchen floor, and he just didn’t stop. My brother was gone, so I must have been older than 13. I ran to get the neighbours for help. The distinguishing feature of the incident was simply that before then, we hadn’t involved the neighbours. Maybe they heard everything and, like us, just wished they didn’t.

A few years later I told Dad to clean his own fucking pool in a fit of hubris. I was punched in the face, and fell into the water – before dragging myself out and throwing a few back. I lost the bout of course, but he didn’t send me to hospital that time, which I took as a positive sign that our combined judgement was improving. I think I fractured my hand – he had a head like a fucking rock.

“Did you hate him?”

“Sometimes. I pitied him. I didn’t understand... I understand better now.“

                “Was he a good father?”

“Compared to what – do you see anyone else in this story with a father?”

Physical violence was not strange in our childhood. I don’t know everything that my brother experienced – he had five years on me. We both learned young that physical discipline was an effective behavioural correction method - later we learned that it was generally frowned upon outside of our home. For a silly decade or two, we nursed the belief it was cultural - violence was unexceptional in the towns of our youth, and throughout our extended family - we might have been wrong, but not statistically so.

My memory is pretty fucked on most fronts – it could be the product of repeated concussions or decades of alcohol abuse -  but I like to think it’s just a sensible coping mechanism. There were good memories too. I think all of those experiences made me a quick learner - considered, but unafraid of making inconsequential mistakes - at least those without immediate physical consequences.

“Is that what the incident was… a learning experience?”

“It was a fucking rape. And no. I said I was unafraid of things that were inconsequential. That night wasn’t a learning experience or a coming of age, it was a fucking assault, and there were consequences.”

“Sorry… I guess I meant, what do you think you learnt from it – what good can you take away from it?”

“Oh. Well- let’s see if I can explain it simply – you may want to take notes in case you need to refer to them later:  You don’t need to stick your kid’s hand on the stove to teach them it’s hot; You don’t need to punch someone in the face to teach them to do their chores; and you most fucking certainly don’t need to experience a rape to develop a detailed understanding of consent. What did I learn from the night my friend was raped, you muppet? I learned that once broken not everything can be fixed, I learned that no-where, I mean fucking no-where is safe, I learned that people are weak and stupid and endlessly disappointing - and I realised that I’m fucking one of them.”

“I’m sorry, you’re angry”

“Wow. Perceptive...”

“You were calm, when we began”

“I appeared calm when we began”

                “What changed?”

                                “Just your perception, Clever Clogs”

…

“How old were you when it happened?”

“It’s hard to say. 17 or 18, I think. Mum and Dad split when I was about 15. My brother went to the academy when I was about 13. I think that’s the timing - I  don’t know, it’s all fucked up.””

“You’re confused about time”

“I’m no Stephen Hawking”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Nothing. Time exists exclusive of him. He just thought about it and felt the need to write something down. He attempted to explain the infinitely indescribable, in twelve chapters”

“Is that what this is?”

…

“Did you go to the police about the rape?”

No. I don’t know why I didn’t – or at least I don’t know what the fuck it would achieve.

If you could ask them, the fucking cops, they would say we were ‘well known to police’ by then. I went to court several times between ages 15 and 18 – family in the dock, villagers in the jury. I had been interviewed by police. I was once interviewed for stealing a bike which had literally been fucking given to me by cops. I had been coached by cops, my Dad’s rugby club was effectively composed of cops, my brother actually was a fucking cop – for a little while at least.

As I grew up some people just changed from being people to being cops, from people I trusted to people I did not. We worked with cops, ate with cops, drank with cops, got fucked-up with cops, got fucked-over by cops,  got arrested by cops… there are smallgoods butcheries that see fewer pigs come and go.

“You don’t trust cops”

“I don’t trust fucking anyone”

“You sound like you hate cops”

“Everyone hates cops. Fucking cops hate cops.

You ever wonder why retired cops show up on those investigative cold case shows recounting what a fuck up the original investigation was? How they savour sifting through the tailings, the grimy details, to justify how much better they are at interpreting acts they profess not to understand, criminal acts they describe with words like ‘evil’, and ‘inhuman’ – despite their overwhelming, career long, day-to-day, in between breakfast-smoko-lunch-and-dinner exposure to how fucking regular and normal and completely fucking human, crimes of inexplicable depravity are…

Put it this way: if you find a person in a police uniform who seems well adjusted and to be coping very well ….despite being neck deep in the shit-fight of degeneracy; despite their coppish inability to ever assess the common societal ignorance and selfishness that nurtures criminality; despite being weaponised, under-resourced, undertrained, and generally despised by the people they are charged with ‘policing’ – if you find a person like that and if that person is not deeply disturbed, not questioning themselves, their beliefs, their society - then that person is a narcissist and a fucking psychopath, and they were absolutely made for the job.”

“You think cops are psychopaths?”

“I think they’re institutionalised – for many, it’s just the wrong institution”

You know what – fuck it – lets draw a time-line in the sand… mum got away when I was 15, around the time of the big court-case, and I moved out about 17, making it the first half of 1995 when bad-shit happened.

It’s not like you can Google this shit. I tried. I put the names of the dead into the search-engine just to stake a peg in time - it just comes back with “It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search”. I agree, there are absolutely no ‘great matches’ for my search, they’re all fucking terrible.

At 18, I was a uni dropout, living in a flat I shared briefly with my Uncle, before he left and I took over the rent.

“What was he like, your uncle?”

                “Predictable”

“In what way?”

“Who cares? Predictable was a pleasant change”

He joined the army straight after school, and left in middle age. After his discharge, he brought his family to Australia, following my Dad’s, perceived success. A few years later, he’d also followed him through a divorce and into independence. Uncle was living alone and able to offer shelter from the storm when I dropped out of uni, and began working.

Even by then, the former drill sergeant was not well adjusted to life out of uniform. Not being able to shout at, swipe at, or shoot people, left him with few options for managing conflict in the civilian world. He was funny, generous and philosophical - but with the conviction of hard experience, black and white with limited concession to shades of grey,  which made him about as dangerous as a faded pedestrian crossing. We spent my paychecks at the pub and called it rent.

I came home once to find he had written a note on the fridge which simply said ‘not good enough’.  I didn’t know what it meant, but I got the message, I cleaned the house from top to bottom, anxious of the consequences. When he arrived home days later, nothing was said.

“We may have strayed a little from the topic.”

“The rape”

“Yes”

“Do you think I’m stalling”

“Are you?”

“Its 2024, and we’re talking about events which occurred in 1995 – whatever the fuck this moment is, stalling is not it”

                “She came to the flat…”

She came to the flat to tell me.

I was getting ready to go to play football, against Ando’s team. It had been a few days since the night we stayed at his place.

I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what. We didn’t have phones then, to text and communicate every 5 minutes - kids today act like validation has nutritional value. She lived at home with her mum. She was still at school. I don’t think we had really talked since the night.

I remember the car ride the morning after the night. Ando had driven us to where we were going – her to school. I don’t remember where I was going. She was sick, I thought it was a hangover. She wasn’t very talkative, I thought she was upset at me for being drunk and for putting my hands on her. I felt like shit.

Ando seemed fine, cheerful even. Cunt.

When she came to see me, it was a Saturday. She said she had been raped, I don’t remember what else.

I didn’t understand. I had been there: We drank all day, we didn’t take drugs. We swam in the pool. People came and went, I can’t remember who. We made out, I was lustful, clumsy. We didn’t have sex, we were virgins. We slept in the same bed.

She said she had screamed my name in the night and I didn’t wake up. She cried for help. I didn’t move. I lay and breathed. She cried, I slept. In the same bed.

I didn’t know a fucking thing. No memory. Zip.

Black. Spinning.

I asked who did it.

She said it was Ando. She said the school captain, the 6-foot, smiling, wooly-jawed football star, had raped her. She was sure.

“What did you do?”

“I went to see him”

                “To talk to him?

                                “To ask him”

“What did you say to her”

“I don’t remember”

“Did you contact anyone else”

“I don’t remember”

“Why don’t you remember, do you think?”

“…”

“Are you ok”

“No”

“Do you want to stop”

“Stop what? I hit ‘pause’ thirty fucking years ago”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to fucking kill somebody”

“You believed her? But you didn’t go to the police?”

“I didn’t know what to believe. So, I went to Ando”

“Where was he?”

“At his girlfriends… fuck, I just remembered that. She and her sister had this house. Ando was there”

Ando said he didn’t do it. I asked him, face to face, on the lawn. Just us.

Then, I spoke to Andy, his brother, my friend. I said what she had told me. Andy who had been in the clink for 5 years for killing his sister-in-law. Andy who had undoubtedly had a closer experience of intimate violence than I had ever had. Andy who had drunk with me, lost fights with me, been fucked up blind with me, and who had threatened me, tenderly, on occasion. Andy who was trying to pull his shit together. Andy who would soon be married, and who would then have a family.

Andy spoke to Ando. They said it didn’t happen.

“What then”

“Clearly, I didn’t know what the fuck then.”

“What now, then?”

“Now I wish I’d done something… more”

“You think that it’s your fault she was raped”

“So do you”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you didn’t ask – ‘why do you think that it’s your fault?’ ”

…

“How did you come to know her?”

“I didn’t, not really. We didn’t know each other, we just wanted to. It never happened.”

“How did you end up there, together, then?”

Her mother had had what people now generalise as ‘mental health’ problems. A doctor would have called it something. Her mind was sometimes beyond her own ability to control.

Her mother and mine were friends. They’d met in hospital, I might have been 11 or 12 years old. I wonder now if they discussed the relationships they survived.

Her mother died while I was out of contact., a few years after that night. I don’t remember where I was or why I wasn’t able to be reached. At the time I lived in a flat where there were syringes on the kitchen table - not mine - but an adequate indicator of my reliability at the time. I wonder if she knew what had happened to her daughter, when she died, if she knew she had been assaulted and that it was my fault.

When I came home, I received Her phone messages. She had tried to reach me, but I missed the funeral. I missed another chance of being… anything useful.

“Her mother’s death seems important to you?”

“Death is important to me”

“Why?”

“In what context is death unimportant to you?”

I think I went to the funerals of four friends in my last year of school – double that body count if you include a couple of years before and after. They linger in those years, in Neverland, like lost-boys.

“How do you think those deaths, of your friends, affected you”

“Less than it affected them.”

“Could it have been traumatic?”

“Life is traumatic, accidents are traumatic, injuries are traumatic, loss is traumatic... but standing still and remembering how someone made you feel, and hoping that feeling remains somewhere, anywhere, is not a trauma to me.”

“Was the rape traumatic”

“Are you fucking mental?”

…

“Let’s try something else. How long were you together, before it happened?”

“Not long. Moments over days.”

We were two years apart, and when our mothers got together we hung out, as kids. She was shy, bright, intelligent and devoted to her mother and younger brother. I felt older, more  mature. I was wrong.

Later I would learn her mother had leaned too heavily on her, undermined and eroded her confidence, was prone to unpredictable mood swings. I hadn’t known. I didn’t know until long after it didn’t matter anymore.

The night it happened, at the house – any relationship we had, just the two of us, died.

I don’t know how long it was before we spoke again, after the day she came to tell me. Somehow, we talked a few times in the year before her mother died. We had both moved to the city by then – grown-ups in our own minds, damaged, but in adult forms. When she spoke to me again, I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to make it better, but I couldn’t overcome the thrill of just speaking. She invited me once or twice for drinks with her friends, whom I liked - but they were not like me, younger, university students, bohemian and confident. I only wanted to see her, I wanted to undo it. She, I think, wanted her childhood friend. I was still incapable of that.

She had a boyfriend, whom I disliked. Later, they had a son.

“When is the last time you saw her?”

“about 1995”

“I thought you said you saw one another later?”

“ I did… we met later, but it’s been a long time since we saw one another.”

…

“I want to understand what you think happened: You went there together, then she said she was raped, but you couldn’t help her.”

“No. You don’t understand. I took Her there, She was raped, I didn’t help her.”

                “You went through a lot”

“THEY went through a lot, you cloth-eared bint.

She went through a lot, her mum went through a lot; my family went through a lot, Margie, her children and grandchild, went through a lot - most of them kept going through a lot.

Every person I knew then went through a lot… I don’t know how to describe how singularly fucking awful, and wrong - and yet ridiculously fucking unexceptional this horrible fucking one thing was - is.

It’s not anchored in that time, that place, those people. I thought it was, but I was wrong… Time doesn’t give a flying fuck, it didn’t even flicker, it just ordered up the next sunrise.

They all went though a lot… I was just there.

I literally fucking slept through the worst of it.”

“You feel responsible for what happened?”

“‘Responsible’ is inadequate – ‘responsible’ is  what a teacher writes on report cards when they mean capable of feeding the class fish. Responsible people don’t exist in the set of circumstances we were in - responsible people have better shit to do than get fucked up and hang around in dark places with part-people, just because being unseen feels safer than the alternative.

Do I feel guilty, complicit, culpable? Fuck yes, I feel like it’s my fault. I helped create that moment, I took her into it, I was there with her, within it, and I have wished ever since that I could unmake it and remake it... but it’s not a fucking bed or a birthday cake.

What you’re dancing around isn’t ‘responsibility’ You want to know who to blame.”

“Who do you blame”

                “For what - life? What would that change? Who would that help?”