Who had copped it or sucked the big one I wondered as I chewed on my bottom lip. I caught a breath of my own and picked up the receiver. "Hello?" - "Bro, we got a bit of a problem. Can you come up to the hospital? Ayden got a hiding earlier tonight and he's in ED" - "Yep, I'm on my way"
As a former emergency responder, I've seen more than my fair share of broken bodies. Whether lying on stainless steel, hospital beds or still crumpled in situ, it's hard for a victim to maintain any sort of dignity in those circumstances. When it's one of your own, it begins to play out as a living nightmare.
You purse your lips and fight back the tears. Worse still is the rage that wells up from deep inside you. From dark places you normally try to avoid.
You stick your chin out, sniff and get on with your job. In my particular case, that includes administering a religious blessing, assuring the family and offering plausible commentary into what is likely to happen next. As an added bonus I also crack jokes to try and keep spirits up.
"Oh", I said to his mum with a hopeful smile, "So that's what you look like without makeup?" In spite of my best efforts, her eyes would soon become just as puffy as the bloody and bruised ones of her son.
I doubt makeup would have helped.
"Uncle, I don't understand why anyone would want to do that to someone else". The birds had only just started to stir outside.
My niece sat across from me in the quiet room. We were waiting for scans to be reviewed by specialists in Australia. I'd been asked that question before and it wasn't entirely unexpected. I've long forgotten who first asked me that, but it didn't really matter. I was lost for an answer way back then, and I still didn't have one. It's above my pay grade I cowardly tell myself.
The truth is that real meaningful consideration would only likely generate bitterness and hate within me that I like to think I'm above.
It reminded me off an incident some years ago when another nephew came home on leave after a deployment to Afghanistan with the New Zealand Defence Force.
Young, fit and trained to kill he was also knocked over by a mess of young punks walking home through Flaxmere Park late at night.
I wasn't there but thinking back, it must have been hilarious watching his aunties and grandmother jump on his back so as to restrain him from returning to the park with a spade he grabbed from the potting shed.
What do you do when parents are rubbish and allow or are indifferent to where and what their children are doing in the middle of the night? There will come a time when my nephew will have to account for putting himself in such a high risk situation, but it's fair to say he was never there as a predator. For now, we allow the physical injuries to heal while we contemplate how to dress and sooth the emotional lacerations that are not so obvious to the naked eye.
How are we supposed to teach ethics and civility past the innocence of primary school? What do we do when aforementioned rubbish parents abdicate or worse still, abandon child nurturing responsibilities all together? How about we create a Ministry of Human Decency? It couldn't be any worse than other governments departments we already have catering for the dross of our society. Offensive tactics are better than defensive ones I've been told.
Better than picking up the spade I reckon. I suppose.
Who turned out the light?
Joe Kairau is an Intelligence Operator, a former police detective and political candidate for NZ First. This is his first column which will appear every Monday. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
