Tom de Souza: Not all walls that imprison vanish when you leave jail

I stand in Perth Magistrates Court, looking at my little brother standing on the other side of the dock. He is 23 years old, not so little anymore. Built like a heavyweight boxer, hair slicked back, tattoo sleeves running up both forearms. He has on his best blue, collared shirt, two damp patches spreading from the armpit to his breast as he waits to learn of the sentence he will receive on two counts of armed robbery. I feel a sense of responsibility for my brother. Don’t get me wrong. I do not blame myself for his actions. I do not feel guilty. Kids feel guilty, adults are responsible, and I acknowledge that he looked up to me and I set a bad example. The responsibility I feel now is not a burden. I am responsible for being there for my brother because now, finally, I can. A few weeks earlier, in late September 2020, when I was still with Dorje, I could not have told you this. I could not have told you this for the more than three years we were together, ever since that first magic trip through the Kimberley when we fell in love. I could not be there for my brother, my now ex-girlfriend, or even myself because there was a wall around my heart that nobody could penetrate. Ironically, the moment Dorje left me was when that wall came down. It was a real physical sensation. Behind that wall was a flood of tears I had hidden from myself for almost 10 years and from Dorje for our entire relationship. Tears I had swallowed pushed down into a place deep inside of me. I felt safe from them there, but really they just hardened into anger, the default emotion of all young men. Now, when I look at my brother up there in the dock, I cry. The tears feel beautiful and soft as they roll down my cheek. I let them fall freely. The magistrate tells Chris to stand and reads out his verdict. Two-and-a-half years in prison. Two guards lead him out of the dock and down to the holding cells beneath the courtroom. Chris and I climb out of my four-wheel drive. We walk down the sandy track to an empty Margaret River surf beach. Sitting down, he picks up a handful of sand and watches the grains fall through his fingers. He wonders aloud if there was a point in time he could somehow return to and undo all this mess. Maybe when he was 11, I gave him his first bucket bong at Mum and Dad’s house. Perhaps the first time he smoked ice, aged 15, from the bag he found at Dad’s house, where I was living full-time. Chris wonders, but he knows too that this is the hand life has dealt him, and he must take the hard lessons he has learnt in prison and keep moving forward. He can see now how all this happened. He can pinpoint it right back to that fateful moment in early January 2016, when he was 17 years and, hopped in his little green Daewoo Lanos and started driving down the Bussell Highway to Yallingup to see his family, off his head on liquid Xanax. “I was out of control. I had no idea what I was doing. I’m driving down there, somewhere between Bunbury and Busselton. It was raining. I must have looked at my phone or something, looked up, and was off the road. I swerved back, went straight over to the other side, and rolled into a ditch at 90km/h. It happened so quickly,” he says. “I remember sitting there in the seat, glass all over me for 10 minutes. I thought I was dead. It took me a while to realise I wasn’t. Eventually, I exited the car and fell to the ground. I was like, s..t, I’m in trouble.” Chris looked back at his car. It was a complete wreck. He wasn’t sure how he was still alive. He crawled to the boot and wrestled his bodyboard bag out with everything in it, dragging it with himself out onto the road. He managed to flag down a passerby, who called an ambulance. At 1am, Chris limped out of the Bunbury hospital with his broken ankle in a cast, afraid of the drama that might ensue if the police arrived. He stood outside the hospital and tried to hitch a ride. A black Holden ClubSport pulled up. The driver told him to get in. “He asked me if I had any money. We go to this house, and he buys a half weight, half a gram of ice. I thought we would just be smoking it, but he pulled out two syringes. I was a bit hesitant, you know, cos I’d never done it before, and I’d seen what had happened with you. But what else was I gonna do? He mixed them up and did me up,” my brother says. “That feeling, you can’t explain it; it blows your f…ing head off. A knife in the back of your throat. Gasping for air. The most intense thing I’ve ever felt. It’s so intense that it’s just sinister. But weirdly, it made me feel normal. It made me feel alive. I just felt that everything was all right. Everything was going to be fine.” Once you inject a drug, you cross a physical threshold from which you can never really return. After Chris’ first shot, the doors were open. His descent into total destruction was rapid and unstoppable. When I was at my worst on ice, Mum always had this intuition that I would be OK, but with Chris, she feared for his life. She knew she had to get him away. Two months later, in March 2016, she put him on a plane to live with Granny in Queensland. If there was anyone who could help, it was Granny. Good old Granny, 80 years old and tough as iron, soft as silk, a woman who would give everything for the people she loves. For the first six months at Granny’s house, Chris was suicidal. He felt abandoned, terrified, and alone. When he thought about his future, everything was blank. Without drugs, his life felt empty. When you stop banging your head against the wall, how is it going to feel? There was nothing, no one except Granny. Our champion. Our hero. “That was the toughest period of my life. It was tougher than prison. Way tougher. In jail, you just accept the fact that you’re there, there are four walls around you, and you can’t get out. “In Queensland, it was like a prison with no walls. If it wasn’t for Granny, f..k man. Granny saved my life. 100 per cent.” Granny did everything to try and get Chris back on track. She was there to pick up the pieces when Chris deliberately drove his car into a brick wall at 60km/h. She helped him get a new one, find a job as a furniture removalist, and later an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker. She helped to teach him basic living skills and the merits of cleanliness. She also introduced him to the local boxing gym, where he found genuine friends like his mate AB. Boxing helped Chris feel less alone and relieved him of his feelings. That and Granny were the only two things he felt he had to live for. He put everything into his training and soon competed in State and national title fights. It gave him purpose and helped him fill the void that ice had left, but still, he was tormented by the things inside of him he did not understand. “I put everything into these fights. Then afterwards, there was just this hole still. I was going through relapses and off the rails, then trying to get myself back on track again. It was just a cycle. I was stuck in it. I didn’t understand any of it. I was just reacting. I didn’t have the skills to be able to deal with the shit that was going on inside of me. I didn’t even know what was going on inside of me.” Chris didn’t understand what he was doing when he got back with his ex-girlfriend either. He knew it wasn’t right, and when he looked back, he could see he was seeking a solution in somebody, something else. Still, it was a better alternative than drugs, he reasoned. If he couldn’t help himself, maybe she could help him. With nine months left in his apprenticeship, in early 2020, he moved back to Perth to be with her. “It takes courage to walk away from someone you love, knowing that it is not right for you. Most people can’t do it. I couldn’t. The only way I felt I could get away was just to go off the rails. Completely sabotage me.” A cold, windy night in May 2020. Chris was awake for an entire week, putting any drug he could find into his body. Ice, coke, GHB, clonazepam. Out of control, storming around the streets of Perth in a psychotic rage. Get out of my f..king way. At the Melville Plaza, he walked up to the first car he saw. He tapped on the window. The two men inside wound it down. He pulled out a knife and demanded they get money out from the ATM. “I had no idea what I was doing. I’d lost it. I was in my Ugg boots, and there were people around, calling the cops. I heard the sirens and just remember legging it, jumping fences. I ended up hiding behind this big letterbox. I called an Uber. I called a f…ng Uber, bro. How stupid is that? I got in the car, and the cops picked me up like 30m down the road.” As the sun drops below the horizon, Chris wraps the towel around himself and huddles in from the cold. He is frightened of the road ahead but knows he is on the right path. He found that path in jail through Solid Steps, a residential rehabilitation program at Casuarina Prison. It is the only program of its kind in Western Australia. It helped Chris to deal with the real issues underlying the drugs and to discover the self-awareness he needed to create change. “In the beginning, I was just there because I was trying to get parole. But it turned into something bigger. I started learning and saw the people around me learning, too. Even the bad ones: the standover men, career crooks, lifelong junkies. I watched them changing, too, only I was lucky enough to have the support they never did. “Solid Steps taught me things I needed to know about myself. I learnt to understand my behaviour and how that was causing this pattern of drug-taking. Like the self-sabotage and all that. I learnt more there in nine months than I did in the 25 years before. I found yoga, too, and saw the need to nurture the spiritual side of myself that I had neglected through years of drugs.” Chris is continuing this work now through kinesiology, counselling, yoga, and meditation. These things form a safety net beneath the precipice of addiction that he, I, and every other ex-addict will forever be teetering on. Slowly, by being kind to himself, he is learning to understand and love who he is. But in the sad, strange irony of prison, it helped him move forward but also held him back. He feels tainted by it. Jail, a filthy black mark against his name, confined him within his past’s four walls. A reason for some of his old friends, the good, positive ones, to dissociate themselves from him. But perhaps the greatest damage prison has done, Chris says, is to force him to deny the tender parts of himself from himself. He has had to build an impenetrable wall inside of him to survive there. Now, on the outside, he doesn’t know how to bring that wall back down. I tell Chris about the day I watched him sentenced to prison and how it came in the same week that Dorje left. About how it was the toughest day of my life. How it was the closest I’ve ever come in the seven years, I’ve been clean to sticking a shot of ice straight up my arm. Instead, it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me because breaking in half opened me up. I tell him about how I cried for him and for Dorje and for myself, too. I tell him about my efforts in the months afterwards to try and remove that wall completely. How I’m still frightened by the things I continue to discover behind it, and how I’m learning to talk about these things with people whose opinions I respect and care about. Vulnerability, that tender little flower in me, once closed to all the darkness and the cold, now blooming into the light and the nutrients it needs to survive and grow. “You know, by uncovering those things and allowing them out into the open, as words, as feelings, just as they are, I’m starting to understand them. And now I understand. They don’t seem so frightening anymore. Just remember, bro, that I’m here for you whatever happens. I love you,” I say. Now I mean it, truly. “I love you, bro.” “I love you.”