My oldest friend in the world was a boy called Brett Goldin.
I met him at primary school, when we were both hideously awkward and navigating impossible minefields of social rejection. We were in Little Shop of Horrors together when we were 12 – I was Audrey, he was the voice of the plant, and we were both in love with the dentist. In high school we jointly morphed from goths to ravers. We lived together at university in a flat plastered with bad movie posters. We were going to get old together, sitting on a porch somewhere complaining about running out of hair products.
In 2006 Brett and another friend of ours, a fashion designer named Richard Bloom, were murdered in Cape Town, in what was framed as a hijacking gone wrong. They died just days before Brett was due to arrive in the UK, visa in hand, finally ready to take over the world of Damon Albarn and the RSC.
I flew home for the funeral, which was and remains the most surreal experience of my life. Brett was a well-known actor, so I emerged from OR Tambo Airport in Joburg to see newspaper hoardings emblazoned with ‘Crazy Monkey star slain’. There were television cameras outside the cemetery. People I hadn’t seen in over a decade, who’d tormented us when we were kids, came weeping up to me. I stood with Brett’s sister, who I’ve known since I was small, and tried to hold her up as her knees buckled, along with my sense of reality.
Grief is an odd beast. For years I couldn’t hear a Pulp song without dissolving, and I convinced myself that Brett was managing my MP3 player’s shuffle function from the beyond, sending me coded messages of love through the Twin Peaks soundtrack.
Brett and Richard never made it to 30. They never saw their old friends having children, growing up. I still find it hard to believe that Brett never got to watch District 9, which he would have loved, never got to hear Lily Allen, never knew that I wrote my PhD thesis on our fucked up adolescence.
If you’ve read any of the previous posts in this blog then you’ll know what my politics are. I’m very aware of the way that social justice works, and I know that the kids – and they were kids – who killed Brett and Richard had a hell of a lot less chance in life than we did. They grew up in an area known for gangs and crime and street drugs and casual violence, caught between the legislated psychoses of apartheid and the astonishing inequities of the ANC’s 21st century South Africa, a million miles away from the bohemian bars of central Cape Town where we spent our university years. I know this, and I also know that the penal system, mostly, doesn’t work. It pushes people further into criminality, it pathologises them, it makes them mad so that they can survive. I’ve read the statistics. I know that non-whites are more likely than whites to end up in prison, and I know too that that’s not because of some endemic, cellular tendency to violence.
I know all this, and yet. Recently Nurshad Davids, one of the boys who was involved in their deaths, applied for parole. He was convicted of hijacking, kidnapping and armed robbery rather than murder, and sentenced to 15 years in 2006. He has served five years and five months of his sentence. And although I know that the criminal justice behemoth is fundamentally flawed, and although I know that the violence he is capable of is likely caused at least in part if not entirely by his upbringing, his circumstances, the people he had around him, the political system that affects his world, the gang culture he was born into, I do not want him let out of prison. Not yet.
This isn’t necessarily an urge for revenge on my part (at least I don’t think it is). I don’t want him dead. I don’t even want him punished as such. He is a cypher to me; part of my mode of coping has been to erase the personhood of those responsible, to have them be nothing, faceless, forces of nature. But something in me rebels furiously at the idea that he could walk away from this after only five years. I think of what I’ve lost, of what we all lost, and I cannot countenance the fact that one of those responsible should be able to go back to his life so easily (even though I know it won’t be easy; South African prisons are no picnic). I suppose, in a way, I feel that the effect his and his friends’ actions have had on the many people who loved Brett and Richard has been so seismic, so enormous, that there needs to be symmetry; that you cannot disrupt the lives of so many in such a huge and destructive way and then go back to your own, that your life too needs to be marked, permanently, by consequences.
Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe it does. Maybe my nice leftie liberal perspective is only a veneer. I don’t want Brett’s killers strung up, I don’t want them stoned, but I do want them to know. I want them to feel, for the rest of their lives, the effects of what they’ve done. Because I know I will.
Brett’s family has started a petition against the parole application. If you’re interested you can sign it here.