Into the Darklands (16 page)

IT’S A FUNNY THING, isn’t it, the way the world changes when the sun goes down? Even the most familiar things become strange. Have you ever wandered around the house in the small hours of the night, perhaps on your way to the toilet or to get a glass of water, and felt the hairs on the back of your neck prickle? Ever felt the cold chill that only comes in the dead of night when you know you’re alone but suddenly feel that you’re not? The rules change when the sun goes down—we learn it as children and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend it isn’t so.

I remember when I was eight I had a recurring nightmare that an army of Wile E. Coyotes was coming to get me. In my dream they were just like in the Road Runner cartoons, except in my dream they seemed so much
hungrier.
Now it all sounds pretty stupid, but back then I remember being terrified.

I think we all forget what old Mr W. E. Coyote was intending to do to the Road Runner when he finally caught him. The scene we never got to see was the one where Wile’s sitting by the side of the road ripping off raw chunks off that cute little bird as the blood
dribbles down his chin and the bones crackle. And you can just bet he’d be loving every coppery wet moment. He’d suck the marrow from the Road Runner’s still-warm bones. I knew it then and I still believe it now. Look at his eyes the next time you see the cartoon.

So there I am, eight years old, standing at my bedroom door in the dead of night looking down the dark hallway to where my parents are sleeping. Suddenly the hall seems a mile long. And there are far more doors now than when the lights were on. At eight I didn’t even stop to question the fact that physics and geography changed when the lights go out. Night rearranges things, all kids know that.

I could feel them in the darkness of each doorway, watching me. Studying me. A hundred Wile E. Coyotes with hungry eyes and cruel snouts brimming with teeth. I remember calculating the odds of making it all the way to the end of the hall. Slim to none.

Still, what choice did I have? They’d seen me, of that I was certain. Even though I was back in the shadows I knew their eyes worked better than mine did in the dark. They knew I knew they were there, and so of course they’d have to kill me.

In truth I thought I’d only make it to about the second door before they got me. There’d be a blur from the corner of my eye and then the terrible searing pain of teeth in flesh. I wouldn’t even have time to scream as they pulled me off into the dark and set about the business of fighting over the choicest pieces. In the morning all my family would find would be a bloody red smear.

This all sounds a bit over the top, I know, but can
you
remember what it was like being eight and scared of the dark? Can you remember? There is no top when you’re that age, there’s just the night and the things that live in it.

The longer I stood there, the worse the fear became. It felt as if my whole body was pulled tight as a wire. The skin on my arms and
neck prickled. And that’s when I heard it, coming from the pitch-black of the doorway furthest from me, our supposedly empty laundry. Panting. Dull, hungry panting. Coyote panting.

Now, I know as an adult that this could not be, that probably it was just the sound of one of my brothers snoring, but I believed it then. At that moment I believed in that sound more than I believed in gravity, more than I believed in oxygen. The Wile E. Coyotes had come, hungry in tooth and claw, and if I didn’t move right then and there I would never see the daylight again.

So I did the only thing left to me, I made the only call I could. I ran.

Looking back now I don’t remember running, which is surprising since the rest of the memory is so clear. I suppose my brain may have just edited that bit out, or maybe I ran so fast there wasn’t a lot of thinking involved. Either way, next thing I’m standing in my parents’ room, shaking, staring back across the hall towards the blackness where the sound had come from. Now there was just silence.

A terrible expectant silence, as if everything was delicately poised. All it would take was a shiver to set it off. I couldn’t believe I’d made it. My skin felt electric, crackling the air it touched. I looked across at my parents’ bed and saw the two familiar shapes. Sleeping.

All I had to do now was wake them and I’d be safe. My mum and dad would chase the coyotes away. Not even an army of Wile E. Coyotes could stand against
them.
If I could just wake them before the thing in the shadows in front of me lunged, I’d be saved.

And it was at that precise moment, just as I was reaching out to wake my dad, that a nasty little thought wormed its way into my head. What if the reason the coyotes hadn’t taken me yet was that they already knew there was no rescue at the end of the hall? What
if instead of my parents I found coyotes instead? Such things could happen. I was sure of it with all the terrible certainty small boys have been certain of night-time truths since time began.

I froze. Time seemed to stretch out in the darkness.
‘Dad?’
I whispered, my stomach curdling. What would I do if instead of an answer there were only the low chuckling snarl of a coyote?

‘Dad?’
A little louder this time. Rustling movement. I felt sick all the way through.

‘Dad?’

‘What?’ he muttered, half-asleep. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

It wasn’t a snarl, it was just my dad. And just like that, I was safe.

If only it were that simple for all kids. But of course we all know it isn’t, and I suppose I know that better than anyone. I’ve listened to their stories year after year, and I’ve learned that for some kids the coyotes are real.

Seeing in the dark. That’s what my job is really all about. I have to see the things they see. I have to go with them into their dark places and see the things they saw, hear the things they heard,
feel
the things they felt. The light is poor down here though, and I almost always need to use some magic spells to push back the shadows.

‘Tell me about that,’ I say.

It’s a simple trick, but like all magic it should always be used with care. You say things like that down here and there’s no telling where you might end up. It can take you from the middle of a bright summer afternoon to the bottom of an endless night.

Jerry was my last appointment for the day, which was good because it was hot and humid, and even with the fan on full I was still sweating. One more hour to go.

He looked pretty much how you’d expect a man with his history to look. He was unkempt, with dirty black jeans and T-shirt. It
looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and prison tattoos spread over his skin like some kind of infection. If looking like a criminal was an offence he would have been serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.

Jerry had done the rounds. He’d been in and out of jail since he was 15 on a string of convictions that included burglaries, car thefts, aggravated assaults, resisting arrest and disorderly behaviour. Drug and alcohol abuse had been liberally sprinkled on top of the whole merry pile like icing sugar on a hate cake.

Jerry had probably seen more people like me than I’d had hot dinners. He looked bored before I even opened my mouth. He’d been ordered to come and see me by his probation officer as a condition of parole. In his most recent lot of offending he’d got drunk and attacked someone in a bar. The fight ended with him smashing the other guy’s head into a post and breaking just about everything in the guy’s face without actually killing him.

If ever there was a man that seemed to offer some pretty solid support for the idea of tougher sentencing it was Jerry, because every time he got out of jail he seemed to do some crappy thing to someone or other. Surely the best idea was just to keep him in longer each time?

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s do the bullshit first.’ Then I proceeded to give him the obligatory rave about who I was, what I was doing and what the limits of confidentiality were. ‘Any questions about the bullshit?’ I asked when I was done.

Jerry didn’t speak. He just shrugged and shook his head as if he didn’t give a shit for any of it.

‘OK,’ I continued. ‘Well my style is to be up front from the start. I know you’ve probably spoken to shitloads of shrinks in your time, and most of it’s been a total waste of time, and the reason for that is that counselling is a
total
waste of time. Right?’

He nodded.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘At least we can agree about that at the start. Counselling is a load of
shit.
Someone like you gets sent along to see someone like me and all that happens is my guy goes, “How’s all the criminal stuff going?” and your guy goes, “I dunno.” Then my guy goes, “Well don’t you think you should stop getting pissed and beating the crap out of people?” and your guy goes, “I dunno.” Then my guy goes, “Well how about we look at your thinking errors and develop some more positive coping strategies?” and your guy goes, “Whatever.” Then my guy goes, “Blah blah blah” then he asks if you’re going to get pissed again and your guy goes, “Nuh.” Then my guy goes, “Are you going to commit any more crimes?” and your guy goes, “Nuh.” Then my guy writes some bullshit little report and you go off and have a beer. Right?’

He smiled, just a little, but it was there. ‘Yeah.’

‘Total fucking horseshit. Right?’

That little smile again. ‘Yeah.’

‘OK, then let’s make a deal right from the get go that whatever else we do we’re not going to talk horseshit like that with each other.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Good.’ I de-clicked my pen and chucked it on the desk with my blank sheet of notepaper. ‘You know what gets me the most about all this shit?’

‘What?’ Jerry was thawing, just a little, but there was the tiniest spark.

‘Well, it’s like, what am I supposed to do? I mean, your life is far more complicated than the six pages of bullshit they stick in your file. How am I supposed to understand the first bloody thing about who you are or what your life is?’ I sighed. ‘Besides, they don’t even want that anyway. They don’t want me to find out anything about
who you really are, all they want is for me to fix the bits they don’t like. The system doesn’t give a damn about you but they expect you to turn up for a few sessions with a shrink and change your whole shitty life?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s the system though, mate.’

‘That may be the system but I don’t have to like it.’

‘Who the fuck does?’

‘Not many of the people I see.’

We sat for a moment in silence.

‘So what do you do it for, then?’ he asked.

It was a good question. Better still, it was
his
question. Suddenly I wasn’t the only one who was curious. We were on the road.

‘Good question,’ I said.

When people like Jerry ask you questions like that my advice is, whatever else you do, don’t lie. People like him can smell the bullshit a good mile or so before they see it.

‘I suppose I do it because I don’t believe what people out there say about guys like you,’ I said, waving offhandedly at the outside world.

‘What do they say?’ He knew only too well, but he wanted to see if I had the gazumph to say it. I have gazumph in abundance in such moments.

‘Scum. Losers. Arseholes. Fuck-ups. Throw-away people. I go out to parties and “nice” people ask how come I work with “fuck-ups” like you. Mostly I politely tell them to go screw themselves. My theory is that if you’ve never done anything bad in your life then you have the right to piss on the rest of us who are less than perfect, but I haven’t met anyone who’s shit smells sweet yet.’

‘So you’re saying you
don’t
think I’m scum?’ There was a dare in the question, a hook. We came from different worlds, him and me. I was an educated middle-class professional who probably made more
in an hour than he made in most of the week. He was the bottom of the pile. We were so far from equal it hurt the mind just to think about it.

I shrugged. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Jerry. I think you’ve had your fair share of scumbag moments, and I think if I looked at you the wrong way in a pub you’d break my face without a second thought. But I don’t believe you were always a scumbag, no matter how much of a scumbag you might look now. Kids aren’t born with criminal records, that shit comes later. I’ve never had a baby in here on grievous bodily harm charges. I’ve never had a baby sent to me because he robbed a bank or killed someone.’

‘So what’s your point?’

I smiled. ‘I guess my point is you’re no baby, Jerry.’

He laughed. ‘No, guess not.’

That was about as far as I thought I’d get that day, so we shot the shit a little longer, and then went our separate ways.

The following week started a little warmer than the first, and the week after that a little warmer still. By our fourth session he was actually smiling when I came out into the waiting room to get him, just ever so slightly, but it was there.

Time is always limited in the Darklands. The currents pull people away just as quickly as they bring them in. Something told me that if Jerry and I were ever going to do it, then we had to do it now.

‘Have you ever told anyone?’ I asked him after we’d talked the usual shit for a bit.

‘Told anyone what?’

I looked at him, in that way people do when they lay their cards on the table. ‘Have you ever told anyone why you’re so screwed up?’ I dropped my voice a notch further. This conversation was for him and me alone. ‘Have you ever talked about the old hurts?’ Now,
I didn’t know for sure what Jerry’s history was, but the signs were there, all you had to do was take the trouble to notice. You just had to see.

He became very still, staring at me with eyes that were suddenly cold.

In the middle of moments like that you can almost
feel
the world grinding to a halt. There are some questions you ask, and you know you’re walking into places that even the angels fear, at least the smart ones anyway. Souls are lost and found in moments like this. We were standing at the border of the place inside him where the burning winds blew, a place where the nightmares played over and over against a backdrop of rage and revenge.