T'wouldn't be the
first time Donkey's been in the shit for cracking wise about serious and
sensitive matters.
Once, as an insecure
school boy trying to generate some social currency, I loudly remarked to my
sniggering peers how much of a shame it had been that the doctors had sliced
off Sister Kathleen's huge knockers because now there was nothing good to look
at during Geography. This appalling
remark had been delivered whilst the Mother-Superior smouldered silently,
menacingly, behind me. When I'd finally
noticed that the cackles of my peers had exceeded even my comedic abilities, I
spun around and flinched at Sister Sophia's detesting face protruding from
forbidding, mission-brown from eyebrows to 'obnails.
The hectic confusion
of the school corridor suddenly plunged into silent slow-motion. I cowered pathetically as her piercing stare
damned me to the eternal inferno with a hatred one wouldn't have thought
possible from a woman of the cloth, and after a deliberate, seemingly endless breath,
things sped-up very suddenly with her launching into a violent rage of verbal
abuse which actually damned me to the eternal inferno.
More recently, it has
been my recent, blasé spray about escaped convicts in Vanuatu which has sent me diving for the
self-flagellation stick. Despite my
treatment of the subject as just a big, harmless old joke, things have taken a
nasty turn around these parts recently with the severe beating of a long-term,
well-known and respected expatriate by intruders in his home, followed the next
night with the brutal murder of an elderly expatriate couple in their beds.
It was immediately,
generally understood that the perpetrators of both incidents were none other
than six of the twelve escapees which, everyone soon discovered, were still on
the run, some two months later.
Confirmation of this
fact from the sheepish Correctional Authorities a couple of days later saw egg
on both their and my ugly mugs, but the latter was soon sizzling away fit to
explode when it was confirmed by the police that the escapees really were the
prime suspects in both incidents.
The town went into
lock-down as the rumour mill, known locally as the 'coconut wireless' went
haywire. Everyone's brother's friend's
dog had seen the escapees hiding-out in the bush behind their homes, and every
other punter's house had been burgled in the space of a week as bored young
people took advantage of the e-scape goats at large to break into the homes of every
expatriate in their neighbourhood to make off with those enormous TVs they'd
been eyeing off for the past year and a half.
Amidst this genuine
fear and panic, the additional, extraordinary rumour went out that someone's
husband/brother/aunt works in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the
Minister had just issued an edict that the Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF) – the poorly-trained,
trigger-happy paramilitary arm of the Vanuatu Police Force – had permission to
take up arms after dark and to shoot anyone on suspicion.
You can just imagine
what that led to; better six nut-bags with knives moving through the night than
70 with officially sanctioned automatic weapons!
Crikey! I'll know never to take the piss out of a
serious situation again. I never could
have believed that this tuen of events could have become this dangerous. I've definitely learned my lesson; there's
nothing ... absolutely nothing funny about living in fear for your life every
night. No more making light of such
issues ... ever ... again!
Oh by the way, on
those first couple of nights during which the VMF were on the loose, only a few
gun shots were heard, but they appear to have been well wide of the mark, 'cause
a few days later the Government issued a warning to the (now seven) escapees
– "Turn yourselves in by midday on Saturday, or else...".
Or else what? They've been on the run for two months! ...
and judging by the location of these two crimes, they've not been very far away
from the cops that whole time. "Turn
yourselves in by midday on Saturday, or else ... we're really going to start
looking for you"? Hmmph!
