Waiting for Danica by Ana Dean

Author:Ana Dean [Dean, Ana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Street Gangs - Melbourne, Police Corruption
ISBN: 9780994256478
Publisher: JoJo Publishing
Published: 2015-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

1982

Danica spent New Year’s Eve drinking in town with Joan, Simon and the rest of her city friends. When she arrived home at seven-fifteen in the morning, she was drunk and bandaged. Her celebrations the night before had included some sloshing around in the fountains of the newly built City Square, where many of the revellers had disposed of their empty bottles. She spent the second half of the evening in the back of an ambulance, after having stepped on broken glass while doing so.

Better an ambulance than the Watchouse was what I thought.

By the time Ben rang our house from prison again, I had changed. I had stopped despising Danica’s friends. I’m not sure when it happened exactly, perhaps I’d seen a different side to things when I spent time with them that night, maybe the anger had become tiresome, or perhaps I was just growing up. I stopped blaming her friends and started to pity them instead and then my pity turned to compassion and then I took my compassion to extremes. The ‘Ana mission of mercy’ had its start in early 1982 and would last for another five years. I began writing to every one of Danica’s friends who was incarcerated. I started to write to Ben, because he had no one besides his mum. I even wrote to some of the ones I barely knew. It was always for the same reason; I couldn’t bear the thought that they were in there feeling lonely, or abandoned. Someone had to remind them that they were people and they mattered and who else was going to do that if I didn’t? Their mates on the streets, who promised they would write, never did.

Simon didn’t write because he couldn’t, but the others had no excuse for breaking their promises. Danica found out Simon was illiterate in the worst possible way. They were walking through the city together at the time and Simon was scanning the newspaper he was carrying. Danica, being the smart-arse that she was and trying to be funny, taunted, “Are you trying to pretend you can read? We all know you can’t.” She did not expect his reply, “I can’t.” Danica felt awful. She would never have exposed him like that if she thought for a second that it was true. She’d had no idea.

Not surprisingly, Mum and Dad were not so keen on the idea of me being every prisoner’s pen pal. They still blamed the influence of friends for Danica’s lifestyle. It wasn’t that they weren’t sympathetic people, they just saw these other kids as someone else’s problem and they were drained; they had no capacity left to care for anyone outside of their immediate family. I, on the other hand, felt compelled. If writing a letter made someone feel a bit better, how could I not do it? Danica was too focussed on herself to bother with putting time into correspondence and the same went for every one of her other friends. It

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