On stepping up to help
Running just now (yes, I was on deadline and, no, I wasn’t procrastinating, the dog needed exercising) I saw a clump of people across the road staring intently into the water. Some of them held out their phones in front of them. Was someone in trouble? It did not appear from the set of their shoulders that anyone was unduly concerned, and I didn’t want to be a rubbernecker. Still, if something was amiss, I didn’t want to pass idly by either. Wrong happens when people do nothing.
This morning I read former Otago Daily Times’ sub-editor Gordon Brown’s wonderful, harrowing account of being seriously injured in a bike accident in Bangkok and how three Western tourists had done nothing to help him. How even among the ongoing trauma of the calamitous event it is this act of callousness that has marked him the most. Then, before I set off on my run, I listened to the last 11 minutes and 37 seconds of the 14th and final episode of the excellent podcast series The
Teacher’s Pet (yes, I was on deadline and, no, I wasn’t procrastinating, the living room needed dusting) and was dumbstruck by the travesty, the miscarriage, the ongoing ripples of sadness and love and anger, 36 years after a young Sydney mother disappeared without a trace. All the evidence for Lyn Dawson’s suspected murder points to her husband, Chris Dawson, a star rugby league player and high school PE teacher, who moved 16-year-old student Joanne Curtis into his bed two days after his wife supposedly vanished. Through journalist Hedley Thomas’ remarkable efforts, witnesses to Dawson’s tendency to be violent toward his wife have recently come forward. It would appear too many people said too little at the time.
I happened upon a news story the other day online. A man had been sentenced to five months’ home detention for indecently assaulting a young woman in a cinema. His third strike. On a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon, 32 long years ago, my parents dropped me, aged 12, my 8-year-old brother and his best friend at the movies. We were there to see the latest James Bond. I was in charge. The theatre was pretty full, but even so I can remember thinking it was odd when a man came and sat down right beside me as the film started. When I first felt his hand on my leg I assumed it was a mistake. Inch by insistent inch, however, his hand skulked toward my inner thigh. Too terrified to move, too mortified to scream, I froze. At intermission I bought three choc tops and told my brother and his friend we were changing seats. Afterwards, when my other mother picked us up, I told her what had happened and she ran around in a furious, ultimately fruitless, frenzy, enlisting the help of the cinema staff in trying to find “the little creep”. The movie is a blur to me but I clearly remember what he looked like, that he was about 18 or 20 and quite good-looking and that somewhere small and insecure deep inside myself, I wondered whether I should be flattered he had picked me.
Weirdly, I’d read another news story several years ago about the very same man, charged for the very same thing. I’d speculated whether it could be him. This time, though, there was a photo. He was the right age. The right ethnicity. It was him, I’m sure. All these years later and still lurking around movie theatres preying on little girls. If my family had done more, if we had gone to the police at the time, could we have changed things? Might we have stopped him?
I did cross the road this morning; succumbing to curiosity, to my conscience. I looked into the water and saw nothing. The tide of our local beach, one of the most polluted in the city, was fully in and there was nothing to see. Just the usual flotsam and jetsam. The sea lapping at the wall. Why were all these people staring at a few ripples? A man caught my eye. It was just here, he said joyfully. A sea lion. A big sea lion, right here in front of us!
There was no trouble, nothing requiring doing, but, still, I was glad I had checked.
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If my family had done more, if we had gone to the police at the time, could we have changed things? Might we have stopped him?