four small portraits in a life

on violence, duty and complacency

My brother was driving home late from work last week when he saw a woman on the side of the road being chased by a man.

They were both in their early fifties. She was screaming for help.

It was eight at night on a main road. The sky was darkening but there were enough streetlights to clearly light the pursuit. Her distress could be heard over the sound of traffic. But people, my brother would recount later, were just driving past. Nobody stopped. 

The woman turned desperately onto the local football oval and the man sprinted after her. My brother cut across lanes of traffic to follow them in, lurching his car onto the grass. ‘Oi,’ he shouted as he scrambled to open his door. ‘Get off her!’

The man had a hand on each of the woman’s wrists by the time my brother reached them — he was leaning down, trying to look up into her face.

The woman stared at the ground. She did not struggle. It was like she knew she had been caught. 

But when she saw my brother, she started screaming again. ‘Help me,’ she pleaded, ‘help me, help me, help me.’

The man turned, still gripping her by the arms. ‘We’re married, mate,’ he said reassuringly. ‘It’s fine.’

The woman shook her head. ‘That’s not true. We haven’t been married in twenty years. Please help me.’ She struggled against his hold. ‘He’s harassing me.’

‘Get off her now,’ my brother said again. 

The man let go. The woman ran, disappearing into the darkness. 

There was silence as my brother waited for the man to go in the other direction, back to his own car, then he drove home and called the police station. 

The police thanked my brother for his report. They said they would call him if they needed him.

---

I was interstate for a basketball game a couple of years ago when I stepped into a hotel lift with a few other younger teammates. 

A woman and man were already in it, waiting to go to the bottom floor. The air, as the doors closed behind us and we began to travel down, felt taut and strange immediately. 

The woman’s eyes were fixed on the floor but I could see one of her eyelids was swollen and so blue it was almost black. I searched for her gaze. I wanted to offer a smile. I wanted her to feel acknowledged. I wanted, mostly, to see if she needed help. 

The woman did not look at me. The man did. He in turn searched for my eyes and then smiled steadily, warm and confident, when he found them. I felt bile rise in my throat as I smiled — faintly but instinctively — back. 

‘Good morning,’ he said.

‘Good morning,’ we all echoed.

I leaned against my basketball bag to pretend I was relaxed, but my body was rigid and my hands were trembling. I tried to think of something to do. I tried to think of anything at all to say. I was scouring my mind for a solution to a problem I was not sure even existed.

I did not trust that, even if correct, my young and arrogant instinct for justice — the impulse to intervene as a righteous stranger dipping in and out of lives like a minor character in a short scene — would not make it harder for this woman, not cause more anger and punishment, not put her ultimately in more danger. But saying nothing did not help either.

The lift ride would have lasted only minutes. It felt simultaneously long and too short. I remained as I was: both rigid and trembling, cordial, desperately analysing, and then before I could decide on anything, the doors opened again and we all got out.

He smiled. She did not.

‘She was unfriendly,’ one of my teammates remarked as we lined up for breakfast in the hotel restaurant.

I queried whether she had seen the woman’s bruised eye.

‘You don’t think …’ My teammate trailed off. ‘He seemed so nice.’

I exchanged a glance with another teammate. She laughed a little, but it was a bitter sound.

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘exactly, exactly.’

I looked around for the woman as we sat down to eat. I wanted to find her and slip her a discreet note with my number, or a hotline, or a website, or an address. I wanted to alert the staff. I wanted to ask somebody what to do. I wanted to be told what to do. I wanted to already know. 

I did not find the woman. I searched for her over the next two days but I never saw her again.

---

My brother messaged the family group chat around eleven o’clock after he spoke to the police.

craziest thing just happned, he sent. 

witnessed some lady getting chased down by a man so i drove in and intervened.

that’s scary af, was my sister’s response, but good job for doing that.

My mother sent two red hearts. i’m proud of you, she said. i hope you are okay and got some sleep after that. i hope the woman found a friend and went to the police station. you may have saved her life. 

jeepers, mate, my father said. scary but well done. that must have taken some real courage to do that. who knows what this bloke might have done when you intervened. you okay?

yeah i’m okay, my brother returned, and that was the end of the conversation.

My brother had acted out the role he was born to play. His physicality at twenty-three is virile: tall and broad and strong. It accentuates his tender heart, his gentle nature, his impulse to appease. He has three inches on me in height and shoulder-width; at least ten kilograms more in muscle. His eyes are blue. His skin is white. His blonde hair naturally forms into curls. He fits snugly into the contoured costume of most traditional heroes. 

I slept badly that night after I received my brother’s texts. I was living his moment but I was still me.

It started with shrieking. The sound cracked open the drowsy routine of a drive home. My confusion turned abruptly to horror when I realised a woman was being pursued by a man.

I merged quickly across lanes, the adrenaline hot in my hands, and screeched up onto the oval after them, but I hesitated before I opened the driver’s door because the lights from the road were fainter now. Darkness cloaked the grass.

I was propelled out by the sudden silence. The woman had stopped calling for help.

My shadow was smaller in my car’s headlights as I rushed over and it was here the reenactment split, into two.

In one version, the man tried to reason with me, like he did with my brother. ‘We’re married, love. There’s nothing to see here.’ He gave up when I did not move and returned reluctantly to his car. 

In the other, the man turned to me, heard me bellowing for him to get away from her, looked me up and down, and said, ‘Or what?’

---

I was eighteen, in the city with my family, when I heard shouting erupt from the other side of the road.

It was December and Christmas lights glinted in the trees as we waited at the lights to cross back towards the bus stop. I tilted my head as the shouting came towards us: a man was dodging cars as he pelted desperately away from two other men.

The pedestrian figure changed to green. The man was being caught as the road flooded in both directions with people beginning to cross. He was pressed into the concrete. Everyone looked down in concern but they still moved past. 

‘Walk away,’ my mother warned, monitoring me as she headed out with my father and siblings onto the road.

I walked three steps and then stopped. I had not taken my eyes from the three men. Next to her, my father’s expression changed. He was afraid. ‘Walk away,’ he called again urgently, pointlessly. ‘Come here.’

I was already turning, back to the two shouting men grappling the swearing man into a headlock. I strode over until I was close enough for them to hear me but not for them to touch. My heart felt feral, like it was not my own.

‘What exactly,’ I inquired, ‘are you doing?’