Look out! He's got a knife!

Tales from the crypt

Random thought that occurred to me. Skip it if you want.

When I was a kid, there was a boy at my school who was labeled the troublemaker. His name was Chris. There was trouble at his home, which his parents and the teachers didn’t tell us about but which we picked up anyway, mostly from Chris himself. Maybe the teachers didn’t know about it, at least at first. Later they couldn’t help but know about it, but at the time they treated Chris like he was just born bad.

At our school, they used the fire alarm as the bell. Do they still do that? It always seemed a little weird to me. Anyway, one time at Little Lunch I thought it would be funny to bring everyone back in early. My friends Finnbar and Mario thought it would be funny too, which encouraged me. The alarm switch in the hall was covered with glass, so I broke it and flicked the alarm on and off for about the length of the bell and all the kids started running back. Pretty funny, huh?

But right then, one of the teachers – I think I remember which one but I’m not sure so I won’t name her – came out and caught me red handed. “What did you do that for?” she said to Chris, who just happened to be nearby. She asked Finnbar and Mario if he had done it, and they said yeah it was Chris. She scolded him at some length about how irresponsible it was to trigger a false fire alarm, and kept him in late after school.

I was sorry that Chris got in trouble, not just because I felt guilty but because I used to walk home from school with him most days and I had to work home by myself that day. But I didn’t have the guts to put my hand up, and Chris never once said that he didn’t do it.

Another time, Chris and I were fighting, and I pushed him off a log in the playground. He went down and landed on his head and didn’t get up right away. He just sorta lay there. I felt terrible – once again – and ran inside to get a teacher – I think it was a different one to before but hey, teachers are all kinda alike when they’re on the warpath. She came out and berated Chris and told him to get up. He just lay there. The bell went and she went back inside. We all followed her. Chris just lay there. About ten minutes later he came back in looking kinda miserable.

He was told off for staying outside so long, and kept in after school. I'm pretty sure he was only faking it. Not 100% certain, but pretty sure.

One time, a girl in another class almost cut her finger off on a razor blade someone had put in her pencil case. Apparently she just shoved her hand in there, and suddenly there was blood everywhere. (I always wondered what happened to this girl, partly because of this but mostly because at the time – we were both still in single digits – I thought she was a cutie. I bet she’s grown up to be a great looking young woman. Where are you now, Bernadette?)

Naturally Chris was blamed, until it was pointed out that he’d hadn’t left our class all morning. I always wondered who really stashed that razor blade. No it wasn’t me, sheesh!

A while later, there was a story in the paper about Chris’s family, and how they had been tormented for years by a race hate group in Naenae. They’d had bullets fired into their house, been threatened with machetes, and even been firebombed. Chris’s parents didn’t speak much English – they were Samoan immigrants – and hadn’t known what to do about it.

These days, Chris is in jail for murder. He’s been there for a couple of years now. There’s no doubt that was involved in the murder, but he wasn’t physically in the location where it happened, and he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. But he’s in jail for murder nonetheless.

I think about Chris quite often. I think about writing to him in prison, although I have no idea what I would say. I haven't seen him since we were ten. When we were little we were friends and he took heat for me, and now he’s in jail on an unconscionable offence and I don’t know what I think about it all, except that there’s nothing simple in life, and people tend to carry on in the patterns they start in.

Posted by pearce at November 28, 2003 8:38 AM