The evening of the day the woman had her throat cut at our local railway station, I got off the train from the city and saw a figure sitting awkwardly on the cold ground. I wouldn’t mind betting that most people getting off at Brunswick were a bit edgy that day, all very aware of what had happened. The lady sitting there so oddly startled me, brooding, as I was, on the violence that had taken place at that very spot just twelve hours before.
I walked along the platform, swiped my myki and looked curiously at her. She looked Italian, maybe in her sixties, and was leaning against the cyclone wire fence behind which old pallets stood in untidy piles. Despite the flowering magnolia just fifty metres away, it’s not the prettiest part of my suburb.
And it really was getting chill. She looked stunned, sitting with her legs straight out in front of her. When I spoke to her, at first she took no notice and then she turned her face towards me but nothing seemed to register in her eyes.
I repeated myself. ‘Are you all right? Can I help you?’
After what felt like a long time she said in heavily accented English, ‘No, it’s okay.’
‘You’ll get cold,’ I persisted. ‘Can I take you somewhere? Is there somebody I can call?’
She looked vaguely at me and blinked a few times. ‘Divorce,’ she said. ‘Very bad. Very bad. But I okay.’
‘The kindness of strangers’ is one of the loveliest phrases in the English language. But there’s another – ‘the bystander effect’ – that comes closer to how I usually react to seeing someone in need in a public place.
The bystander effect is the phenomenon where a crowd of people watching a crime being committed will do nothing to help. Reading about it shocks me until I remember that I might be exactly the same – paralyzed, rendered helpless and heartless by laziness and fear.
I’m not a bad person. Why is the compulsion not to stop for a stranger so powerful that it requires a feat of strength to overcome it and reach out?
Last year I was in casualty by myself for some hours after cutting through a tendon on my thumb. I wasn’t in pain and I was quite happy sitting there with my book. But a thin blonde girl in towering heels was crying quietly to herself. Every time she sat down, she stood quickly up again, as if that were the least painful way to be. She held her forearms protectively around her belly.
I told myself she wanted to be private. That the last thing she wanted was a nosey middle-aged woman striking up a conversation. But I have no way of knowing that. She was so alone. She waited so long to see a doctor. Why didn’t I go to her?
More recently, I was standing near another young woman on a heavily crowded tram. She was agitatedly trying to open the top half of the window, and once she did, she gulped in the fresh air. She fanned her face with a hand; eventually she slid to a crouching position on the floor, whereupon someone gave her a seat.
The girl was pasty and overweight, with unevenly coloured burgundy hair. As she lifted her arm, I saw the marks of shallow cuts up and down her wrist. She got off at the Children’s Hospital, and I relaxed. But didn’t stop thinking about her.
Why couldn’t I just have asked her if she was okay? I could have told her that if she was feeling faint, it would help to put her head between her knees. I could have put a hand on her shoulder, told her I used to be a nurse, that I was a mum, that I could see her off the tram and help her to wherever she had to go. I did none of these things.
The constraint I experience at these times is a physical thing. It feels as though something very strong were pinning my arms to my sides and stopping my mouth with a gag. I know that’s no excuse.
The kindness of strangers. The bystander effect. Like most people, I am capable of both. But I want to become kinder. I want to be less of a bystander.