Into the Darklands Read Online Free

programme was 10 weeks long and, ever the pragmatist, I’d leapt at it. The idea of being in and out in two and a half months appealed greatly. I’ve never had too many pretensions about contributing to the great onwards march of knowledge. In truth I didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff, I just wanted to get my ticket and get out as fast as I could.
    ‘Hi, I’m Nigel,’ I said, sitting down across from the programme manager.
    ‘Hi, Nigel…’ he began, and then the phone rang. I sat there politely for a few minutes while he spoke to a client.
    ‘Are you the student?’
    I turned round and nodded at the man at the other desk.
    ‘I hear you’re going to evaluate their programme?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Why don’t you evaluate ours instead?’
    I laughed. ‘What’s your one?’
    ‘The SAFE programme.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘It’s a sex-offender treatment programme.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yeah. Why do you want to evaluate a boring old stopping-violence programme? Sex offenders are far more interesting.’
    ‘Umm…it’s just I did kind of tell these other guys I was interested in theirs.’
    ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said, waving a hand dismissively. ‘They’ll get over it.’
    ‘What kinds of things have your guys done?’
    ‘Sexually abused kids, some flashers, peepers, obscene phone callers.’
    ‘How long is the programme?’
    ‘Six months to a year.’
    Bugger, I thought, that’s a long time. ‘That’s a long time,’ I said.
    ‘These guys really need it,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly difficult work. Far more interesting than a stopping-violence programme. We see them in groups each week then we take them away for a weekend and do victim-empathy work.’
    ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
    ‘Understanding the pain they’ve caused their victims.’
    ‘Oh.’ Then I had the thought that always precedes both the best and the worst decisions I ever make: That sounds pretty cool.
    By the time the other guy finished his telephone call it was a done deal.
    ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, putting the phone down. ‘Now, where were we?’
    I turned back to him. ‘Well, actually, the plan’s changed a little…’
    And that’s how the second part of my life began.
    Just like that.
    That research project was the point at which everything changed. Within a month I would have observed my first victim-empathy weekend, and after that there was no going back.

WATERSHED
watershed (waw’-) n. 1. Line of separation between waters flowing to different rivers or basins or seas. 2. (fig.) turning-point e.g. in history.
    Concise Oxford Dictionary, seventh edition
    I BELIEVE SOME moments resonate long after others have faded. Some moments hum all the way through to the end.
    Imagine if you will a little flat in Mt Eden, and a young man sitting on the edge of a bed. There’s a bag lying at his feet, half unpacked, and he looks exhausted, unshaven.
    In many ways that young man seems a stranger to me now. He’s very young, and very naive. He thought he knew a lot about the world—as young men invariably do—but he’s just discovered the world is deeper and darker than he’d ever imagined.
    He’s too tired and ragged to know it as he sits on that bed, but the physics of his world have been altered forever.
    It didn’t sound like that big a deal: observing the sex offenders’victim-empathy weekend. In fact it sounded kind of cool. This was the real deal, working with bad guys just like on telly. The group started on Friday night and went through till Sunday afternoon. There’d be two facilitators and all I’d have to do was watch. How hard could that be?
    I was nervous on the Friday night. In fact, truth be told, I was scared. I’d never been in a group of sex offenders before, and the idea of what I was about to embark on had put the jitters up me. I also hadn’t met the group facilitators before, so I had no idea who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
    ‘Hi,’ I said,