There was the time I helped the two old ladies and their shopping carts up into the tram, while a bunch of schoolkids and other assorted lazy fucks pushed past us. The old dears were so surprised by my assistance that I think they thought I was about to rob them.

A few days later I was doing the market shopping, and I found forty bucks under the tomatoes and that was cool and kind of well-deserved, I think.

Then there was the time at a shopping centre when a shitman was screaming at his seven year old daughter to get her fuckin arse in the car cause they were running late for the nightly Smack Mum Around Show, and one thing led to another and I ended up breaking his nose and the cops and DHS came and took his kids away when they saw Mum was waiting in the car, still recovering from the matinee performance earlier in the day and in dire need of a hospital bed followed by a Women’s Refuge. That was way cool, too.They were times when I looked at myself and could say with confidence that I’m one of the Good Guys.

Being a Good Guy can be deceptive, though. You know the Bad Guys are out there, and you’re ready for them, and you’re prepared to protect women and kids from them, and then you remember that, Good Guy or not, you’re still a man. And you look like any other man.

A little girl was standing near a bench at Southland, weeping uncontrollably. No one nearby, a teddy bear clutched, white-knuckled, to her chest. The very picture of a lost kid, the kind of image that makes any parent’s heart jump out of their chest and throw itself on the floor, the kind of image that makes a Good Guy, particularly one who’s also a father, leap into action.

I squatted down and put my hand on her shoulder, and said all the comforting things, and asked her name, and wiped the tears away with the napkin from my just-finished ice cream, and told her we’d wait there for her Mum to show up, because her Mum was worried about her and would be back soon. She put her arms around me, and I picked her up and sat her down on the bench. She relinquished enough of the grip on her teddy bear to cling to me, and she held my arm around her shoulder, her little tear-stained face buried in my Rage Against The Machine T-shirt.

I held on to her, patting her head, trying to soothe her sobbing, all the while thinking of my own daughter and the couple of times we’d been separated for a few minutes at the zoo or the shops. All the while keeping an eye out for a frantic mother, looking forward to the moment when I could hand back the little girl, share a parents’ moment, and get back to looking for the latest James Ellroy novel.

But I’m a man, and this was a six year old girl, and this is the twenty first century. Mother appeared from around a corner, and saw us sitting together. Her instant reaction was a primal mother kind of “my child, my child, my child is alive, I’ve found her”. In an instant, that changed, as she saw the Man. You know what comes next. I can’t say for sure that the words Predator, Creep, Paedophile, Child Molester, Rock Spider were actually said, but I sure as shit felt them.

Nobody who saw this was prepared to stand up and say anything – when they looked at me, all they saw was all the things she was accusing me of being. Nothing I could say would fix it, because I’m a Man, with his arms around a crying little girl in a shopping centre. So I skulked back to my car like a good little sex offender, all the fear and hatred still ringing in my ears, and I drove to my ex-wife’s house and picked up my daughter. We went home, and watched Finding Nemo and ate spaghetti, and I read Dr Seuss to her.

I put her to bed, and I held her tight, and I kissed her goodnight, and I knew that, no matter how good a father I am, she’s going to get lost at the shops once or twice, and I prayed that when it happened another Good Guy would see her and not be too afraid to sit with her on a bench and dry her tears and wait for me.

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