The Punga House Wanker

‘The Punga House Wanker’ was awarded a Highly Commended placing in the Samesame But Different 2025 Peter Wells Fiction Contest. The judges’ comments, from authors Pip Adam and Jeffrey Buchanan, are below:

“A powerfully chilling story concerning sexual abuse, religious hypocrisy, the fight for justice, and the  power dynamics involved within that intensity. It requires the reader to enter the gravity of the situation. The writing, intense, draws you in, gasping, the messages ringing long after. “

Please note there are references to sexual abuse, religious hypocrisy and church cover-ups that may be triggering for readers.

The Punga House Wanker

Twice in my life I have sat in a room with professional bigots and been asked, “Is there anything more you’d like to say?”

They are pakeha men in positions of trust with established duty of care, even if just in their titles. I’m twenty-three going on eight, a naive twelve at best. So the power I have to trigger their fear to protect everyone but me is staggering. They are nervous of me the moment I walk in, even the air stands to attention. It won't be the first time this morning they find bits of fluff to investigate on their tightly-knotted ties. Their attempt to present as neutral falls short, and I take my seat, front and centre.

They are not kind and they do not hide their annoyance. They are not interested in truth or justice and are here to protect their ‘brother in the Lord’. I am nothing more than an inconvenience to their cogs of bigotry, but I am too naive and trusting to understand religious gaslighting, or know that they are narcissistic deceitful psychotic fuckwits.

If you are born into this world with no ground and no right to question its absence, thinking is hijacked. There are unspoken rules of engagement that you understand before you can speak. They are woven into the fabric of your bones. Although, if you do not fit their ‘Adam and Eve’ gender and sexuality allocated options, there is an exit stage left, but it may take much of your life to find it.

A conveyor belt programmed to an algorithm of bigotry is not Christianity. I have known Christians. Two immediately come to mind: a writer, minister, film-maker, activist; and a musician, nun, advocate – my friends. Their strength was in their affirmation of humanity. They held no pious need for performative reverence. They loved me for who I am, not despite it. Their commitment to diversity was galaxies beyond the deficit “we love you even though you are you” doublespeak. We are all here one day and gone the next, but some leave craters in our hearts. 

At twenty-three, I am still trying to escape the deceit that these men parade as honesty. It is the petri dish of their violence, and unbeknown to me, I am their target. I am filled with young blind fundamentalist trust. A benefit of membership to this world with no ground, where I am still thirty years from feeling the grass between my toes and lifting my eyes to the sky without overwhelm. On this day though, seated front and centre, I reside outside of the body that is always falling. So I am oblivious to the screaming coming from the burning just below my diaphragm: 

Listen very carefully… They are not here to help you… Get up, walk out of this room, and run!

I breathe down into this nausea.

“I do have something to say,” I reply, directing my question to the sex offender, who sits with his mask of innocence far too high on his chair, with a defiance suggesting there is nowhere for his shame to sit. He is arrogant and has every right to be, with a number of religious leaders in his back pocket. One, with delusions of being above the law, penned, in a letter to me, the term ‘relationship’ - widely used to dismiss sexual violation as some kind of mutual disagreement between an adult and child. In a clever vile swipe, the child is now a perpetrator in their own abuse:

“…Theo brought this matter to our attention to deal with as a Christian. He is aware of other aspects of the relationship in addition to those you have referred to, but he recognises your relationship together had become dishonouring to God…Theo has been addressing these matters in counselling. He has also made himself accountable to others in ways that suggest you do not need to feel responsible for his future actions.”

So Theo’s confidence is unremarkable, he is simply at home in the coddling embrace of the unconditional support and protection of fundamentalist patriarchy, where it is possible to discuss the very things he will now conveniently deny. In the blink of a secret handshake the past evaporates.

This same letter-writer then employed Theo’s counsellor, supposedly to consider the evidence on both sides of the case, which would only be appropriate for a court judge to do. It is a guise for an information gathering exercise to discredit me as ‘a disturbed child’ and ‘revengeful ex-girlfriend’. This is all facilitated within a pretence of reconciliation, that I did not ask for or want, for obvious reasons. I am invisible, had I been imprisoned or sectioned under the Mental Health Act, I would have had more human rights than I have in this room. The counsellor is one of the men here today.

His mission is to weave the ‘rug’. So that these men can, at the very most, and really only if it is essential to the sustainability of their ‘calling to do God’s work’, stand at its corners, holding it with just a fingertip and, on the count of three and an “Amen”, discard it along with me and every single word I have spoken and the breath in between. This counsellor, and I use the term weakly (as he has failed to grasp even a basic understanding of trauma) has made no effort to hide how bothersome I am to his needle and thread. He crosses his legs as if he is lounging at a bar listening to jazz. In his hands he holds a clipboard and pen, and takes notes as if employed by the Crown and not Theo’s church. The benevolent misogyny in the room has one role, to make me shut the fuck up.

Theo is a psychopathic con-artist. He looks like he has been filled with embalming fluid, his skin grey and clammy. The largest organ in his body is protesting with revolt. His personality is frail with disappointment. Today he holds up his innocence with a practised air of disbelief. No one believes him but the men applaud for the distance it creates from the truth. I have watched them shield him, perplexed by their efforts to hold a man of bland rote-learning in such regard. Perhaps it is their fear that on exiting his pantomime their own closets will begin to jingle-jangle.

The counsellor’s foot taps up and down. His face is also clammy, like a dumpling, and if anyone were to touch it, it would reshape like plasticine, leaving him sitting there with his smirk a little more off centre. His hair is tidy and has been coloured recently, perhaps permed. He cares about his appearance, just not human rights. I suspect what I am about to ask Theo will be a takeaway for him to return to and hold later, alone in the darkness of his room with the curtains pulled and the doors locked.

The men look at me with the combined strength of one weak sickly man in a hospice. I am assigned female at birth, and I have not transitioned; I am too dissociated by trauma to even know that I am trans. But I am still the strongest man in the room and I continue as such.

”Firstly,” I say, “you have a year to enter a programme for sex offenders, if that does not happen I will go to the police...”

With all the pressure to keep quiet, I think I am being rather generous. The blood from my heart is pulsating too quickly to my head and I force myself to breathe before continuing.

“I’d like you to answer a question I asked you a decade ago. I had begged you for time-out the day before, and twenty-four hours later you told me that I’d had my time out and to meet you in front of the punga house.”

The punga house was a small fernery garden with large punga walls located behind the church.

“Anyway,” I continue, “you were especially prolific on Sunday nights after the church service inside, with everyone distracted and less likely to notice the trampoline transformed into a bed.”

His eyes register where I am headed as I settle into the groove of the words memorised.

“After you were done with me, and as you were moving into the punga house, you sent me back inside…”

I’d turned towards him with the burn of the newly-received rash on my face from his evening stubble that no adults saw for my invisibility.

“ “Why can’t you come inside now?’ I asked you.

And you’d replied with no hesitation but an urgency suggesting something needed your immediate attention, 

‘I’ll tell you when you’re older’.”

I pause for effect,

“You’ll tell me when I’m older?….hmmm.”

I’m briefly mesmerized by Theo’s face as it begins to quake. I wait a moment, long enough to feel the men’s heads domino into downcast. I wait again until his fidgety aggressive eyes dart in my direction, and then say with the pause of a breath in the middle, and more maturity and wisdom than I possess,

“Theo … I am twenty-three years old 

... tell me now.”

My father often told me to ‘sit like a lady’ as he walked past, angry at my inability to over-activate my hip and thigh adductors when seated. So I tuck my feet back behind the chair-legs to prevent my knees from splaying too much for the bigotry in the room. The more invisible they make me, the more determined I become. I sit back in the chair and fold my arms like I’ve seen my father do. Oh and I can see why he does that, it really is the posture of ‘the ball’s in your court, dickwad’ and ‘full-stop’.

Flushed shame begets beetroot anger, which begets white rage. Theo is a statue of indignation. I can feel the wrath of his thoughts: 

Who the FUCK do you think you are!”

The room is frozen. I am the only one breathing and yet I still naively wait for them to find a voice, to say, 

Theo…please answer the question, your silence is offensive.

I wait to see if any of these men have bigger balls than I.

They do not, and what I see is the shame that hides their eyes, the weight of undeniable guilt that lowers their heads, and the fact that all of the men now know that Theo is The Punga House Wanker.

And all of the men do nothing.

The undeniable is denied.

The invisible remains invisible.

The meeting is closed.

And so my yearning for congruence grows lest I die from their attempts to manufacture my reality as lies.

Try as they did to reduce the crimes, on the anniversary of this meeting he is convicted. And so lives up to his name, Theo – a nod to the years of theology studied, the graduation gowns hired, and the criminal conviction and name suppression sewn into the fabric of his degree. Providing him the credentials to join a global wall of decorated pedophiles. 

A deal is cut. I remain uninformed. Unlawful Sexual Connection is reduced to Indecent Assault without the respect of twink to disguise the altered dates on court documents making me fifteen years or older. Four years of charges are left in a file for me to return to one day if I wish,… or am provoked to. But next time with a legal-minded genius and a lens also for the greatest barrier to healing - the enabling complicit bigoted professional bystanders. 

When these men meet their maker as they presume they will, on crawling into God’s presence on their cowardly yellow bellies, may God look them up and down before leaning back with folded arms and the facial expression of ‘the ball is now in God’s court, dickwad,’ and ‘full-stop’, and say,

“Kia ora, my pronouns are….”

(c) Sam RB 2025