Nightwalkers 2013
An 11-year-old girl wrote a poem about loneliness in a school yearbook. Decades later, her brother found it.
Loneliness
Siv Parker aged 11 years.
He ambled slowly across the dim lit room to the door,
His old and tattered shoes padded heavily on the floor.
The light streamed in, as the door opened, creaking and
crying as if in pain.
He looked out hopefully, but it had just been a bush against
the window pane.
He turned and walked, his eyes downcast, as he remembered the things that had happened in the past.
...
Nightwalkers
Siv Parker
They were all sorts united, under his pall. Left alone, their addictions might have faltered. But that became unlikely from the day he walked through the door.
The Haven sat about halfway along a long narrow street of renovated terrace houses. It hunkered down on a site deeper than it was wide, like a broken tooth in a glassy-eyed boxer’s grin.
The elderly couple next door knew its history as a slaughterhouse and a home for unwed mothers, at different times, before being boarded up and fenced off.
A benevolent society had then picked it up for a song, riddled as it was with asbestos, much to the disapproval on both counts, from the convergence of the upwardly mobile who’d sandblasted and renovated their way into the heritage listed homes all around it.
The two storey building had been transformed in off-white stucco with a final flourish of a grey fibreglass awning that looked old from the day they’d jammed its protective cloak along one side.
The humble structure was relaunched as a temporary home for the poor, providing single rooms, wholesome meals and a common room in which a tall man would best be bent over to avoid a head injury from a ceiling lowered for the remodelled central staircase.
The Haven’s oversized door sat at the top of three wide shallow steps, obscured from the street by two large industrial bins. Visitors would have avoided the skips and circled the building to find the front door, if not for the large sign hung high that invited they ‘Enter’.
In the month since his release, he’d gotten to know the lay of the land and the streets that laced the small hill overlooking the city centre. Ten thousand paces, and he was close to circling the inner-city suburb, though he much preferred the lesser travelled streets that fell within its boundary roads.
His shorts were too short for a man of his age. His dress sense confirmed he’d stopped the clock over two decades ago. He was hairless as far as the eye could see, with a cast to his skin only prison provides.
The symbols and vows he’d needled into his skin with a cell-made tattoo gun were largely indecipherable and no longer applied. He had perfect teeth, all capped after having had them knocked out at one time or another. He claimed to have loved the taste of his own blood, which I didn’t doubt. A good bloodletting for some is as calming and life-affirming as meditation is for others.
He moved with no claims to being either male or female. By any measure that was interesting, and it got my attention. He was clearly a man, who’d had partners and children. He said they refused to know him and no one would mourn him. Unexpected acts of kindness he’d shake off with a flinch, like he’d been punched front and centre, full in the face. He’d willingly move into a passive embrace, but his arms would jerk back as if spring loaded at the merest pressure to cease. His touch was a strange one. He once patted me on the shoulder twice as if he was delicately cracking an egg.
He had a story a day, a daily reminder of what a man could do with a blade, a cord and his bare hands. And one hero, who was sitting waiting for me across the dining room table most nights.
According to him, his life behind bars had brought out his best side, where he was clever, thoughtful, indulged, and desired. He fancied himself as a grand master of people. Jail was broken up by stabbings, smashed bodies, and worn-down resistance. Each story he’d embossed by slowly tracing the scars that ribboned his body and his closely clipped skull.
Abused and neglected, and then downhill from there to be fostered and housed, that was as much as he would say of his early life. The specifics of how he had got there were as relevant to me as the GPS coordinates of our temporary home were to him.
He would have been a tall boy, a long-limbed child. A good boy. Until he was sucked into that wicked stream that meandered in the only direction it runs, straight into a prison of fully grown men. Most residents were, be it remotely, related to at least one exactly like him. But not so many of us knew a lost child who’d then gone on to kill.
If he had an interest in you, he preferred the intimacy of sitting face to face. The whole time I knew him in that place, he was a brief encounter at the beginning and a little longer at the end of each day. He saw a future in it and said as much, but where I was going was never going to include him.
His minions were a collection of mild to middling drug addicts who would never interrupt him. They were an unlikely assortment that he’d groomed to creep near and sit close.
‘Our way is to share,’ he’d say, as he drew people in with offers of cake and ice-cream, and then kept the biggest share to himself while he probed them for weak spots. I knew how that went. I’d felt the pressure so subtly applied that before you knew it the snake was around your neck.
He sanctified scoops of Neapolitan ice-cream by evoking memories of the ‘originals’. These were the men who’d stayed staunch while they became grandfathers trapped in a series of prisons. A dangerous life, in a place humming with malice. How long could you stand it? A year, a week, an hour before you’d want your escape? A second becomes too long to wait. The only thing faster than that is the electricity that ricochets around the prisoner’s brain. So that’s where he lived. He had no interest in anyone else’s shell.
The free world ran on a much slower time and he attempted to juggle us all.
The only place he would not follow me was into the TV room. He could uncoil his arms to a surprising length. I’d only know he was there, slightly bent in the doorway, when I felt finger tips brush the back of my ear.
His industry was a sight to behold. As well as slinking around The Haven he’d enrolled in a training course, so his probation officer could tick that box, and more often than not he disappeared on his night missions, out onto the streets returning at about the time the birds started up each morning in the branches outside his window.
Within weeks his loose gang of drug addicts, once idle and disorientated, now had a purposeful life. They treated The Haven like a waiting room, and their excitement would build as they kept themselves within earshot for his signal to leave as soon as the night took hold.
They got around with the hushed tones and stealth of a secret life, but the only surprise would have been if they hadn’t been disappearing on a nightly drug quest.
We all knew the shelter the night brings to the day, and we’re free from the eyes that claw at us in the light. We’d all walked the streets of our childhood, seen our shadows dance against the enclosures we would never be welcome inside.
We could all guess how long before their shadows, standing tall at the windows, and snaking up the pass to the door of each street-lit cottage, would transform into flesh and blood.
By virtue of the lay of the land and the way the wind blows, once a day, and twice on Sundays, a person finding themselves out front of The Haven could hear church bells that came from somewhere distant over the hill.
And from time to time you’d hear the ugly sound of the nightwalkers floating across the valley. Angrily broadcasting their position while they stumbled around. They whistled and clapped and yelled after cars, and slammed into each other with their own special kind of friendship.
The meth addicts hadn’t liked each other to begin with, and now they watched each other; checked up on each other; couldn’t let each other alone. Jealousy had a solid hold of them. A survival code corrupted to its most foul extent. None of them would prosper while they stayed together chained up by the neck.
The last time I saw him, he had sat across from me, bright-eyed and satisfied with the chaos around us. He’d been speaking softly only to keep his shadowy companions on edge. I could see the inky black dye job was fading. A sign his addiction was sucking up every available dollar. I wondered what he thought when he saw his mirrored reflection had slapped on twenty years of hard time.
In only a few weeks The Haven had lost the rowdy, good-natured scenes at meals, to a grotesque flexing of his corruption. The rest of us watched as he set his small group against each other, tweaking the disputes over pay days and debts. He’d turned our haven into a pit of decay. His constant talk of violence was a malignant shroud, designed to subdue us. It was indecent.
‘I don’t trust anyone,’ I’d finally said to get the smile off his face. It worked. And it rocked him. Without the ice igniting his brain, he might have paused and pulled back, but instead I became every hurt he’d ever had, sitting within his reach, looking at him, dead in the eye.
In one unsheathed look, he told me he’d been wronged over and over again and had a capacity to survive in ways far beyond what I would deign to descend to. And then he slid one hand out of sight and emerged with a one-inch square of duct tape that he lay on the table, razor blade side up.
That’s a conversation stopper if ever I’ve seen one. Silence. They smelled blood in the air. He had called me out with a weapon, so I raised him with a yarn.
‘The last time I saw one of those I was getting shrapnel out of my grandfather’s back. That old man now, he lived in the camp down by the river. For as long as I can remember.
‘Long, long time ago now, they took him from the mission when he was a little boy. Mission mob lived off all these rabbits that had taken over all over the district. But the farmers didn’t like them at all. Eating all their crops and breeding like you know how. So they set my grandfather to work blowing them up. Because he was closer to the ground, I suppose. They used to put a stick of dynamite in a tin can and “fire in the hole!”
‘Well, old mate farmer he must of underestimated one of those charges and it blew up not long after it was lit. Blew two of my grandfather’s fingers clean off.’
I held up my right hand, thumb and index finger bent inwards towards my palm, while I slowly, unhurriedly pulled my shoulders back into a standing position.
‘And all those little bits of metal from that tin can sprayed him from neck to knees. My grandfather said it looked like he’d been peppered for real.
‘The thing about that shrapnel, it will go straight through you. It might take years and years but one day you’re going to feel it starting to come through your back. My grandpop now, he said it itched more than he could stand sometimes. Those tiny bits would catch and drag on his shirt, get so bad he’d rub his back against a tree to work them free.
‘I must have been around nine or ten when he said I think you got some steady hands now. And he sit on a stump next to his fire, and said just flick them out with the tip of this blade.
‘I was scared of those little teeth in the middle more than anything. I’ll never forget what his back looked like, covered in all these scars. Could see the shiny bits of metal and feel the bumps just below his skin.
‘He reckon when he got blown back from the burrow the old farmer picked him up by the scruff of the neck and carried him back to the house over his shoulder like a fresh side of mutton.
‘But the blade did the trick. One little nick and the shrapnel would come out easy. My granddad now, he had a big thick belt on and I can still see that blood running down and soaking into his waistband. But he never felt a thing, or so he reckon. Bless my old pop, that was the last time I saw him.’
That yarn got me up and out of my chair, and halfway to the door. Silence got me the rest of the way to safety.
And that was the last I saw of any of them. I never returned to tell them that my grandfather’s hands were the same as mine, fine-fingered and all intact.
And that’s where it ended. Some don’t like to be around drunks, others will avoid the blasphemer, but none would willingly live with an ice addict. There was so little time from when they’d first taken a bite of his sweet offerings, before they all ended up on the streets.
He had a face you’d see in your dreams, finger tips hooked, prying and trying to get to you, eyes with deadly intent. Until he returns to jail, his shadow is free to fall anywhere.
Anywhere. He could slide up behind you and press his lips to your ear without a sound.
First published in Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 8, Issue 6 (2013).
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