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have done more for Steve. I couldn’t, though. I was just a kid, and every day I just thought about me. I had to.
    When Steve got shipped off, there were only two of us left in the house. A few years after that, there would be none.
    Like I said, although I had stopped going to school on weekdays, I still liked getting down there on the weekend, hanging out with the boys and seeing whatever shit we could get into. In one instance, that shit arrived in the form of a pair of nice, shiny Doc Martens shoes, worn by a kid a little older than me, who was hanging out with some of his buddies.
    This kid was asking for a robbing, but I saw it as at least a three-man job, and I was down at the school with just my mate Troy. I quickly ran around the friendly houses to see if I could enlist any of my usual co-conspirators, but no one was home. As I ran back to the school, I stopped by my house, where I found John.
    John usually looked down on the criminal shit I was into, and I can’t remember what I said to get him to go with me. I probably just told him I needed help. Even though he could get explosively angry with me, John usually tried to help me with whatever if he could.
    I was happy to find the kid with the Doc Martens still at the school and, after beating on him a little, I was soon wearing nice, new, snug-fitting Docs. It was a situation I’d been in countless times, but the difference this time was that the shoeless dude went straight to the cops. It wasn’t hard for them to identify John and me, as it turned out the guys we mugged had been in the same year at school as John. John didn’t remember those kids, but they remembered him.
    My eyes would generally glaze over when I was dragged to court, only coming alive when it was time for me to offer up my lines of contrition, and a promise to mend my childhood ways. This time, though, there was no space for me to speak, just a barking from the bench.
    ‘Nine and a half months,’ the magistrate said.
    ‘Nine and a half months of what?’ I asked.
    ‘You’re going to prison, son.’
    I had a pretty long rap sheet by then, but it was still surprising. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it – I was a fucking menace, no doubt – but if I’d been busted for car theft, or assault, or kidnapping or almost any other crime, they probably wouldn’t have sent me, a sixteen-year-old kid, into a real, adult jail. Stealing shoes, though, that was the end of civilisation as we knew it. That particular crime was selling papers back then, and formed the crest of a moral panic washing over the whole Western world. Something had to be done about it. Something
was
done about it. John copped a custodial sentence, too, but a shorter one because he didn’t have the criminal history that his younger brother did. When they took me from the dock I wasn’t scared, nor was I excited. I wasn’t thinking much, just that I was about to find out what jail was like. I don’t know how John felt about being shipped off to prison, because I never talked to him about it. I can imagine he was pretty pissed off, though. While prison was possibly going to be a useful experience in my future as a fuck-up, it wasn’t going to be a useful experience for John who, at that point, had a chance of further education and possibly even a regular life.
    I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shit I did as a teenager, regretting the decisions I made or feeling bad about the people I hurt. I do think about my decision to pester John that afternoon, though, and I do wonder how things might have turned out for him if I hadn’t.
    We were sent to different prisons: John to Mount Eden Prison, a nineteenth-century monolith of a jail, and me to Waikeria Corrections Facility, then New Zealand’s largest prison. Waikeria was probably the place where my childhood ended. My immaturity would continue for decades, but once you go to an adult prison, it’s hard to stay a kid.
    Although the time I spent in Waikeria was