Sarah said they came in angry and armed. They had pushed past her mother at the door
and they now stood looming over her in the living room. The smallest long nosed man held a revolver
and the tall red-faced lad had a rifle.
She knew their names, they were all from our village. The nervous red haired one was called Stan, the long
nosed one was nicknamed Pokey and the third Dave had been our class at primary
school. Stan held his rifle
embarrassingly as if not comfortable in the tidy living room with it. Sarah’s mother was terrified and wept at the
doorway crying “what’s happening?”.
Pokey began,
“You’ve been going out with the other side”, he told Sarah,
“that’s not allowed”. He continued with venom, “If your father was alive he’d
have sorted this but he isn’t so we are here to do the job”.
Pokey stood, his lower lip puckered and he was nipping it
repeatedly between his finger and thumb in a nervous gesture. The revolver in his other hand swung from
side to side with the same nervousness.
Sarah thought she was going to die in her small tidy living room aged
seventeen never having lived at all.
Pokey continued, “You’re going to stop seeing him right”, he looked at
her mother, “and we mean business, if we have to come back…” He let the silence hang and all the time
Pokey squeezed and released his lower lip so hard it stood out white and
proud. Sarah thought her heart would
explode with fear.
Even the next day when she told me of the event at school she cried
with the memory of it all. Her mother hadn't slept the whole night and Sarah had reassured her that everything was
settled. It was all okay. The three men had taken her word that she
would end the relationship and she had.
Since her father died, Sarah felt it her duty to support her mother and
even now facing this trauma she felt shame that she had brought such terror to
her widowed mother. I listened burning
with rage that three such idiots could inflict such damage on innocent people. Personally, I felt that if her father had
been alive they would not have dared knock on the door. But a young widow and teenager was obviously
fair game for the local thugs.
That’s the thing about when society breaks down, it is not
the local doctor or friendly street cleaner that suddenly turn toxic. When the police and the army withdrew from
our village it was the vicious and malignant that came into their own.
Intimidating at will and feeling themselves the village heroes by targeting the
vulnerable. The very worst of society
suddenly feel empowered to do what they want.
I met Pokey shortly after and told him exactly what I thought of him and
his friends. We had a heated
conversation and I informed him that I would be going out of my way to date
every single person from the opposing community on sheer principle. This seemed very noble and righteous at the
time. I was on a crusade and informed
Pokey I would much rather be dead than be dictated to by a little shit like
him. It was weird how empowered you can
be but also very foolish at the same time.
After all, it is one thing to announce you are going to date across the
cultural barrier and quite another thing doing it. I had never had a boyfriend of any sort so was not equipped for
the task I had set myself. In fact,
four years passed without my having any romance whatsoever and gradually my
heart went out of the whole affair.
With each year that passed I felt my failure anew as only teenagers
can. Total humiliation was reached at
the five-year mark. Sarah met and
married Dave, our classmate and villain! I began to suspect that the whole thing had
not worked out well for me at all. It
could have been my imagination but I felt that Stan, Dave and Pokey and probably both sides of the community were sneering at my failure.
