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.