Lost
Late on Monday evening a young fella hailed me outside Central railway station. Opening the door he asked, “Can you take me to the nearest police station ?” “No worries, jump in.” “There’s only one problem,” he explained, “I’ve got no money.”
He seemed okay but there was also a group of girls waiting up ahead. “Is this an emergency?” I asked. “Yeah,” he replied. “Why?” “I been kidnapped, but I escaped.” I waved him in.
He was a seventeen year old schoolboy from a small central western New South Wales town, over 300kms away. “Look, here’s my school jacket,” he said, unrolling a bundle he was clutching to prove he wasn’t lying. The jacket bore the high school insignia.
At lunchtime that day he’d been returning to school from the shops when a vehicle stopped and four men jumped out. They placed a bag over his head and bundled him into the car, at which point he became unconscious.
“How,” I asked, “did they bash you?” “Nah.” “Drug you?” “Nah, but I must have been unconscious because next thing I woke up about an hour ago, on the floor of a cellar.” Okay, I thought, noting he’d related this tale coherently and without emotion.
The kid then climbed a staircase to locked doors when a bloke came in carrying a tray of food. So he pushed him down the stairs, found his jacket and phone and escaped. “Where did you come out?” I asked. “In a laneway behind some office building around here,” he claimed. Phew.
The phone rang, his mother. Naturally she was frantic with worry and gave him a relative’s address in Sydney’s northwest suburbs. “Can you take me there ?” he asked. I talked to the mother and confirmed that payment would be made at the destination.
After further queries I learnt that this was not the first time the kid had been abducted. “What do you think will happen now?” I asked. He paused. “I dunno,” he said quietly. “Hope they don’t send me to W......House.” “What’s that?” “A mental home.”
When I inquired about previous visits to the home he said he’d ‘rather not go into that’, and fell silent. It seemed that mention of the home had brought him back to reality, shattering the kidnapping delusion.
His phone rang again. Once more a concerned female, ‘just a friend’, could be heard jabbering from his earpiece. “I’m not running away,” he patiently explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”
Upon arrival we were met by a young fella around twenty years old who greeted the kid with a certain bemusement, or resignation. It was plain that this was a repeat episode for the kid, a sick puppy of sorts.
The relative paid me and tipped another twenty. “Thanks mate,” he said, “You’re a real lifesaver.” Closing the door the kid sparked up, informing his relative, “Gees, I’ve really got the munchies!” They both started laughing and wandered off into a unit block.
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