used to teach at a very, very fancy private school. The kind of school where it cost the parents a house deposit to send their kids there each year. One Friday morning, I received a phone call from one of my student’s grandmothers, Violet. She liked to call me to talk through the homework I’d set for my class so she could help her grandson, Josh when he went to stay with her on the weekend. They were going to go out for lunch and then to see a movie that Saturday, after they did some school work in the morning. I said it sounded like an excellent weekend plan and Josh was a very lucky boy to have such a cool grandmother.
After I hung up the phone with Violet, I suddenly felt really angry, which is obviously an unsual reaction to a lovely conversation but just hear me out.
You see just a few weeks before I started teaching at this fancy school, I did a relief teaching day at a jail school. On this particular day, I taught a girl who had been on a steady cocktail of drugs since she was ten years old. Her name was Heaven. She turned fifteen the year I taught her. The pupils of her eyes were permanently blown out and milky like she was wearing scary contact lenses. She was tiny, because she never grew properly and she wore baggy tracksuit pants low on her bony hips and her face was covered with an unfathomable amount of make up. She was heartbreakingly affectionate. I had only met her for the first time that day but she immediately asked me to straighten her hair and made me five friendship bracelets because I was her best friend.
This girl’s mother sold her to a pimp for a slab of beer and a rock of heroin when she was eight years old. Fast forward seven years and that little girl has now been jailed for armed robbery. When she’s released, she’ll re-offend because she has no choice. She’s an addict, with no education, no skills and no choice. She never had any choices. She’s a victim of circumstance. It makes me want to smash stuff against walls when I think about what she could have been if Violet was her grandmother. What if she had Josh’s parents? What if she went to a fancy private school with a uniform and had a bedroom of her own? She wouldn’t be this crumpled little broken bird, with those horrific eyes. Permanent scars of her unfortunate birthright. She’d be healthy and she’d do gymnastics and travel overseas on her school holidays. Instead she’s in jail at the age of fifteen when she should be at home watching The Bachelor while doing her homework. She’ll grow up to be one of those people who come up to you in the street and ask you for money and tell you to get fucked when you say you don’t have any to spare.
I have a mate who’s homeless. His mother was a prostitute and he was raised in foster homes. His name is Bobby and he spends most of his days hanging around outside my local Woolies. One day I was waiting outside the supermarket for Mr Smaggle. Bobby took a seat next to me and started chatting away about his day. He was drinking from a brown paper bag and yelling quite enthusiastically but he was having fun and we were both laughing.
While I was sitting there at least three people walked past with these looks of panic on their faces. Their eyes seared into mine silently asking ‘Are you okay? Is he bothering you?‘ and hovering around to see if they’d have to intervene.
I understand where their concern comes from. I think it’s really wonderful that people are looking out for each other and I especially appreciate it being a woman and a statistical target for random street attacks. However, if I’m chatting to someone in broad daylight, outside a busy supermarket with hundreds of people walking past and I’m laughing and smiling, I’m fine. These people weren’t looking at me to see if I looked uncomfortable. They looked at Bobby with his bare dirty feet, his yellow nicotine stained fingers clutching a brown paper bag in one hand and a filthy rollie in the other. They took one look at him and automatically assumed I was in trouble. I wasn’t. I was just chatting to my mate.
You see Bobby is one of my kids, all grown up. I never taught him and he’s older than me, but he’s one of my kids. One of my Heavens who tied woven bracelets around my wrist and begged me for another Milky Way bar from the treat box. Drug addicts can be unpredictable and more often than not they’re completely untrustworthy. I know that, but once upon time, they were just little kids that randomly popped up in this world in really horrible lives that they can’t ever, ever escape.
I hate the assumption that Bobby is going to hurt me. I’ve been hit on in bars by much scarier and much more threatening men, wearing expensive suits and drinking $40 glasses of whisky. No one ever tried to save me from them.
Just because someone isn’t wearing shoes doesn’t mean they’re dangerous. It usually means that they simply didn’t have lovely grandmothers to take them out for lunch on the weekends when they were kids. I didn’t choose my parents and Bobby didn’t choose his. Heaven certainly didn’t choose hers.
I won this random lottery of ancestry and I’m feeling more and more uncomfortable about it.