Joe Victim

Chapter Twenty-Six

Twelve months ago I couldn’t even remember it had happened to me. Twelve months ago there were more important things on my mind, wonderful distractions-the kind of distractions that had an entire police force hunting me down. Since being locked away I’ve had time to think about things-in fact time is the only thing I have had. My past is a blend of memories so distant they feel like they belong to somebody else, or perhaps they’re TV moments I’ve seen and somehow claimed as my own.

I was sixteen years old and I had never done a single illegal thing except for breaking into a few homes, shoplifting, and once burning down a barn that had goats inside that I didn’t know were there. I used to sneak out of my room at night and walk around the streets, not looking for anything, but just walking, being one with my neighborhood and thinking of those that were in it. I could always hear the ocean only a few blocks away. Sometimes I’d walk down the beach and stare out at the water as the moon hung over it. On calm nights when the moon was full it’d reflect off the wet ripples in the sand that were formed by the leaving tide. I’d think about swimming, but then I’d think about how cold that water would be, about the things out there swimming beneath the surface. Hungry things.

I shift on my seat and look at Ali, at her soft skin, at her face. She’s taking notes even though the recorder is capturing everything. I tell her all about it, my remaining testicle throbbing as the memory stirs up more than just some emotions.

I used to break into people’s homes. It wasn’t about money. I couldn’t buy things without my parents noticing. I couldn’t steal a TV and bring that home because back then TVs were almost as heavy as dishwashers. I broke in for a different reason. I used to pick out girls at school I liked, and during summer holidays when I knew their families were away I’d sneak into their bedrooms. When the house was empty like that, you could spend all day long in those rooms, lying on the bed and really getting to know somebody. You could really make yourself at home. The fridge and pantry would provide sustenance, the bed somewhere to relax, the underwear I’d find in the girl’s drawers would provide texture to the fantasy. When school was back the girls would never know what I’d touched while they were away, and that gave me a feeling of superiority. They’d be walking around wearing panties that I’d spent time with. That’s the truth, and it’s a truth that I can’t tell the woman opposite me.

When I broke into my auntie’s house, it was purely about money. I wasn’t breaking in to spend time eating her food and cuddling her underwear. I was being beaten at school by a pair of brothers-twins, actually, who told me the solution to making those beatings go away was for me to pay them. So in a way all of this started from those two. Simple, really. Two bullies who were older than me created a serial killer. I had no money. But I knew I had to get some. Up until my auntie’s house I’d only broken into homes where I knew the people were away on holiday. Nobody holidayed during the school term.

“I needed the money,” I tell my psychiatrist, and I tell her why. She doesn’t look saddened by the tale, she doesn’t frown and go Poor Joe, you were even a victim back then, but she does perhaps jot it down since her pen doesn’t stop moving. I wouldn’t put it past her to be doodling a picture of her and me naked. “The only place I could think to get it was my auntie’s house. Auntie Celeste. She was my mom’s sister.”

“Was?”

“She died about five years ago.”

“How?” she asks, and her tone is suspicious.

“Cancer, I think,” I say, but it could have been anything. A tumor. A heart condition. Whatever it is people tend to start getting when they’re over sixty. It certainly wasn’t me.

“So you broke into her house?”

The house was a single-story dwelling that was a little nicer than my parents’, but not nice enough for me to break in and stay a while. It was a town house built on the edge of South Brighton heading toward New Brighton, not that there’s really anything that new in either suburb. It was a ten-minute bike ride between the two houses. Auntie Celeste’s house had a concrete tile roof and wooden siding, it had aluminum joinery and windows that my auntie cleaned the salt spray from every day. It had a pretty good lock on the back door that was stronger than the hinges on the door, so if you gave it a good kick the screws would rip away from the frame and the door would cave in. Or, you could take the alternative option-I used my mom’s key. My mother and her sister had swapped keys after Celeste’s husband had died from an unexpected heart attack. They felt safer knowing they could get into each other’s house in an emergency.

This was an emergency.

I snuck out of my bedroom a little after midnight. It was pretty easy to do, it was just a matter of opening the window and having the athletic ability to drop a few feet. I rode my bike to within a block of my auntie’s house where there was a park. You had to be careful with parks at night in Christchurch. I knew it back then and I’ve certainly had bad experiences in them since. I didn’t see anybody about, so I hid my bike in a bunch of bushes. I didn’t lock it. I walked the rest of the way. The street was pretty dead. People were in bed for work, or for school. It was a Sunday night. People are pretty much less alert on a Sunday night than any other night of the week. There were a few lights on, but not many, and certainly none inside my aunt’s house. I could hear the ocean, the tide bringing in the waves. They crashed against the shore only a few hundred yards away, each one covering any sound I made.

It was dark around the back of the house. There were no gates or fences blocking access from the front to the back. There were fences on each side between properties, and one running along the back. All the fences in this part of the neighborhood were run-down, the sun and salt air having warped the planks enough to make archery bows out of them. The backyard was mostly brown patches of burned-off grass. There was an old vegetable garden that was overgrown with weeds and old potatoes-my uncle’s pride and joy, but not my auntie’s. She was letting nature take its course the same way it took its course with my uncle.

I reached the back door and used the key and made my way inside. I was as nervous as hell. So nervous I’d even thrown up back at the park where I parked my bike. I knew the layout of the house. My parents had dragged me here a thousand times over the years. The bedrooms were at the back, and only one of them was a bedroom, the other one was a sewing room that my auntie never really used for sewing, but my uncle used for drinking. The back door took me into the lounge and dining area. I didn’t turn on any lights. I had a small flashlight and no knife because I didn’t need a weapon. I was sixteen years old and had never had the desire to kill anybody-not for real, other than those who were bullying me at school, and maybe some of the neighbors, and the fantasies I had about the girls at school whose underwear and bedrooms I spent time with may have involved some nasty thoughts, but me stabbing them wasn’t one of them. Not back then.

My auntie had a wad of cash inside a tea-bag container in the pantry. She’d always go to it if she was giving money to my mom if mom was going to the store, and could mom pick up a packet of cigarettes or some sugar or whatever else Auntie Celeste was short of. I opened the lid and pulled out the money, but didn’t take the time to count it. There was no point. I wanted to get out of there. I was nervous, and the kitchen stank of cigarette smoke just how it always did, and I wanted to be gone. I closed the pantry and had halved the distance to the back door when the lights came on. My auntie was standing in the dining room. She was wearing a pink robe and her hair was in curlers and she had a crossbow in her hands. It was my auntie-but I didn’t recognize her. She had a hard look on her face.

“A crossbow?” the psychiatrist asks when I get to this part of the story. “Your auntie had a crossbow?”

“I never knew she had one,” I tell her. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have gone there.”

“But a crossbow? Really?”

I understand her surprise. Aunties aren’t the kind of people to own crossbows. Except for the ones who do. And my auntie was one of those. “I’m not lying,” I tell her.

“No, I didn’t think you were. Why do you think she had one? Did your uncle go hunting?”

“Not that I know of. I don’t know why she had one, and I never asked her. I remember seeing it five years ago when she died. We had to go around to her house and go through her stuff. It still looked the same. I don’t know if she ever fired it.”

“Was your mum surprised to see it?”

“If she was, she didn’t say.”

“That night in her house, what did you do?”

“She told me to stand still, and that’s exactly what I did. I thought I was going to throw up again. I was sure if I moved, even if I blinked, she was going to shoot me. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly how it was going to happen. She’d pull the trigger then there’d be a whistling sound that lasted half a second, then I’d clutch my stomach with my fingers around the end of an arrow. I even held my breath in case that was enough of an incentive for her to shoot me.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not right away. Neither of us said anything for about ten seconds or so, and then she said my name. I think it took her that long not to figure out it was me, but to figure out that it really could be me. I think she recognized me immediately, discarded it, went through a whole bunch of other possibilities looking for a better fit before coming back to me. When she got there she didn’t lower the crossbow.

“She said she was going to call the police. I asked her not to. She said it would be for my own good. I begged her not to. She said she was disappointed in me. Extremely disappointed. I’d heard that before, but didn’t tell her. She said it was going to crush my parents. I told her I was desperate for the money. Then I told her why, about the bullies and their threats and how paying them off was the only way I was going to be able to walk around school without having my pants pulled down around my ankles in front of everybody, or not getting pushed into walls and dog shit smudged into my hair. She nodded and seemed to understand, but kept the crossbow trained on me. She said everything I told her was awful, that school sounded tough, but no matter how tough it was that gave me no excuse for breaking into her house. I still had her money in my hand. It felt warm in there, it was crushed into a ball and my hand was sweating. Both hands were shaking a little, but hers were rock solid. It was like I was the fourth or fifth person she had caught that night.”

I was nervous about being shot, but given the choice, I was starting to think I’d prefer getting shot than having my parents find out. There was no way my aunt wouldn’t tell them. My mind was racing for ideas, for something I could bargain with. All I could think of was somehow getting my hands on that crossbow. My parents would know of my burglary attempt by morning. I didn’t know what would happen then, but it wouldn’t be good. I would be grounded, but that was no big deal. They would be disappointed in me, but that didn’t mean much either. They might call the police. That’s what I was afraid of. I’d rather have been shot than accept what the police would do to me. At sixteen years old, that’s the way my mind worked. So I was thinking about how I could get hold of the crossbow and how I could leave the house and my dead auntie and have nobody figure out it had been me.

“You felt guilty,” Ali-Ellen says.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I felt bad, really bad.”

“Hmm,” she says, and notes something down, then looks back up at me. “Tell me, Joe, was it the fact you were stealing from your auntie that made you feel bad, or the fact you had been caught?”

It’s a good question. I had been breaking into people’s homes for the best part of a year and I thought I was above being caught. And caught by a woman more than three times my age. That meant even if I could get hold of the crossbow, I would probably get caught afterward.

“At both,” I say.

“Uh huh. Okay, what happened next?”

“My aunt asked me what my parents would say if she told them,” I say, and as the words come out I travel back in time again, back to that moment leading up to what I would later think of as the Big Bang. My aunt’s exact words were What would your parents say if I told them? She didn’t say when I tell them, but if I tell them.

They’ll hate me for it, I told my aunt. And maybe they’ll want to kick me out. I didn’t think they would, but I wanted my aunt to feel sorry for me.

They probably would, she said, and yet she still didn’t lower the crossbow. Are you armed, Joe? she asked.

No.

Have you ever been with a woman, Joe?

What?

A woman. Have you ever made love to a woman?

I’m only sixteen, I told her.

That doesn’t mean anything, she told me. Every TV show on these days has teenagers screwing. It’s what soap operas are becoming about. They’ve gone from adult story lines to children story lines, giving the children adult lives. Forty years ago they were about differences between people, struggling to run pubs and businesses; these days it’s all about fucking. Do you know how long your Uncle Neville has been dead?

Have you forgotten? I asked.

No. No, of course I haven’t forgotten. He’s been gone six years now.

Then why did you ask me?

It doesn’t matter, she said. All that matters is I miss him. I miss having a man around the house. Things tend to be let go. She lowered the crossbow. I wondered how far through the floor it’d go if she pulled the trigger. It was more relaxing than wondering how far it would have gone through me. How much money have you got there, Joe?

I don’t know.

Count it.

I counted the money. I had to count it twice because I was nervous and messed up the first attempt. I had grabbed all the notes, but left all the coins. I had three hundred and ten dollars. It was a good amount. I figured I could get through most of the school year with that amount.

That means you owe me three hundred and ten dollars’ worth of work. There’s plenty of things around here that need taking care of. The house hasn’t seen fresh paint in ten years. The vegetable garden out back is a jungle. You’ll come here when I need you and you won’t ever say no to me. Ever. Do you understand me, Joe? You help me, and I help you by not telling your parents I caught you here. Deal?

I have to work off three hundred and ten dollars, I said. That’s what? A few weeks’ worth of work?

No, Joe, it’s worked off when I say it’s worked off. I have to figure out an hourly rate. It might be five dollars an hour. It might be one dollar an hour. I’ll let you know when everything is done that I want done. Of course it’s up to you. We can run with the alternative and I can phone the police right now and see where that leads.

I couldn’t see any other option. Mowing lawns and painting walls were going to make up my immediate future-and they did. So would the Big Bang-only I didn’t know it then. At least she didn’t emasculate me by having a poodle I would need to walk and clean up after.

I suppose so, I answered.

You suppose so? You need to sound a little more enthusiastic than that.

It’s a deal. I said, trying to put some heart into it.

Good. Lock the door behind you on your way out, Joe, and I’ll call you on the weekend.

I didn’t move. I understood everything she had said, but I still felt unsure about it. I can go?

You can go.

Umm. . thank you, I said, unsure what else I could have said.

“And then I left,” I tell my psychiatrist, having just relived the whole scene with my auntie for her.

Ali has a puzzled look on her face. “That’s it?” she asks. “That’s the traumatic experience you had when you were sixteen? Almost getting shot by your auntie?”

“That was only the start of it,” I tell her.

“Then what?”

Before I can answer, there’s a knock on the door, and a moment later a prison guard, one I haven’t seen before, comes in.

“You’ve got a visitor,” he says.

“I know,” I answer, shaking my head at his stupidity. “She’s sitting opposite me.”

“No, not her, another visitor.” Then he looks at Ali. “I’m sorry ma’am, but you’re welcome to wait here-should only be fifteen minutes.”

“That’s fine,” she says.

The guard uncuffs me from the chair and I behave just like any model citizen would behave. He escorts me down the hall. I’ve already figured out who I must be going to see, so when I’m put into another room and sit down opposite the former detective, I already know what it is I’m going to say.