My parents were police, and I got criminals wrong
He came in through the back gate. Not the house, not the driveway. The back gate, like a bloke turning up to fix a fence.
This was 2020. I was already flat on a cushion inside the bell tent. Someone had put patterns on the furniture, the low table and the edge of a shelf, the sort of shapes that world calls shamanic, and I'd been lying there staring at them long enough to have formed opinions about them.
Then he was in the doorway and the tent got smaller. Loud, quick, certain about everything. He had views on the medicine and on the people administering it badly and on what was wrong with the whole scene in this country. Twenty-odd years he'd been at it. Something like half of that spent working on other people instead of himself. They came to him when the psychologists and the tablets hadn't moved anything, so he was the last stop, and he got up before dawn to do it, and he barely covered his costs.
I'm not going to tell you it works. I'm telling you he thought it did, that he arranged his life around thinking so, and that he wasn't getting rich.
Then he burned four small points into my upper arm, put the medicine on them, and the certainty went out of him. Just went. What came in behind it was quiet and close and endlessly patient. He talked me through the worst of it in a voice I wouldn't have guessed he had. Same man. Twenty minutes later. Sitting on the ground beside a stranger who was in a great deal of trouble, telling him it would pass.
It passed. I remember the voice better than the pain, which tells you which one was the unusual part.
Both my parents were police early on. Not their whole careers, but the years that stuck to them. They went to murders. They went to people in the middle of psychosis who had no idea what year it was or who was in the room. They spent their twenties being called to the worst four hours of other people's lives, over and over, and then driving home and having dinner.
They never sat me down and explained any of it. It arrived as instructions instead. Don't go out late. Don't be walking around at night. Be careful with new people, because you don't know what they are — someone you meet could turn out to be a serial killer.
That last one was said out loud. Not as a joke, and not as the far end of a range of possibilities, but the way you'd mention that a road gets slippery in the rain. They'd worked with the ones nobody picked. They knew what an ordinary-looking bloke could turn out to be, and the whole architecture of it came down to one thing: a clean record means nothing, you just haven't seen the person on their night yet.
They still say it. I'm a grown man and they still say it.
Which is a reasonable thing to conclude from the sample they were handed and a completely wrong thing to conclude about the world. Nobody rings the police about an ordinary Tuesday. They were shown the worst nights in the district for years and mistook them for the district.
So I inherited a sorting rule. Anyone who ended up in front of a court had chosen it. Not been unlucky, not been unwell, not been standing in the wrong spot on the wrong evening. Chosen. And the record was the proof: you could read backwards from the charge to the character.
A few years after that afternoon in the tent, someone else who'd been at the same session sent me a message.
A man had died. Not at mine. A different gathering, later. And the man who had sat on the ground beside me and told me it would pass was going to court over it.
I'm not arguing the case here. It's still before a court, I wasn't there for any of it, and everything I know about that night came to me through a phone. A man died. He had people, and those people have spent years in courtrooms listening to strangers describe his last hours. That's the first fact and it stays the first fact, and anyone who skips past it to get to the interesting part about themselves has told you something about themselves.
What I can tell you is what it did to the sorting rule, which is that it broke it. The rule needed the man in the tent and the man in the charge to be two different people. They weren't. One bloke, one loud voice and one soft one, twenty years on something he believed in, and no way I could see for him to get from where he'd started to where he'd ended up.
Then a second one. Another friend, same world, same long stretch of trying to fix himself and then trying to fix other people. He wasn't well. There was a fight in the street. What came after that isn't mine to publish and I'm not going to. But I watched someone who had done more work on his own head than almost anybody I know finish up with a criminal record, and from where I was standing it did not resemble a choice.
Here's the part I've had to sit with, and it's smaller than you might expect.
I have not turned into someone who thinks nobody's responsible for anything. I still have contempt for people who are reckless with other people's lives, or so far up themselves they can't see anyone else, and who end up in front of a magistrate entirely through their own work. That hasn't shifted an inch. I'm not going to pretend it has just to make this tidier.
What shifted is one thing only: you can't read backwards. The record gives you an outcome. It tells you nothing about the road. Two people can arrive at the same charge from starting positions so far apart that laying them side by side means nothing, and from the outside, standing on a footpath, you cannot tell which is which. I was raised to believe you could. You can't.
I carried that until I was twenty-two. It cost me in a low, constant way I didn't recognise as a cost at the time. I was uneasy in the street. Not frightened of anything in particular, just permanently running assessments on strangers, which is exhausting, and which I assumed was what everyone's head did. I was anxious about the law despite not doing anything. I stayed home. I was careful about things that didn't require care.
If you've got a version of that hum, here's the one thing worth doing, and it takes about ten minutes.
Find out where it came from. Not in a therapeutic way. Literally. Work out which person handed it to you, and then find out what they actually saw. Ask them what a normal shift looked like. Ask how many of the jobs were boring. If they're not around to ask, do it on paper: what slice of the world was that person shown, and was it the whole of it?
Mine were shown the worst nights in a district and mistook them for the district. Once I could say that sentence out loud, the street stopped being a place where I was doing sums on everyone in it.
They still tell me not to be out late. That hasn't changed and I don't expect it to. What changed is that I can hear it now for what it always was, which is a report on what two people saw at work, not a description of the street I'm standing on.
I still don't know how any of it lands in court, and it isn't mine to have a view on. What I've got instead is a small habit. When I hear someone's in trouble now, I notice how little I know about the road, and I don't say the sentence I'd have said automatically a few years ago.
What I wanted, when I was young, was for one adult to say this out loud: some of the people you're frightened of got there on a road you can't see from where you're standing, and some got there through their own stupidity, and you will not be able to tell which from the outside, so stop trying. Nobody said it to me.
Saying it now, to whoever's carrying it.
If someone came to mind while you were reading this — someone still running the sorting rule, or someone who got put on the wrong side of it — send it to them.
If any of this is close to home right now: Lifeline 13 11 14, Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (under 25s), 13YARN 13 92 76. Emergency, 000.