Chapter 36 - An Uncertain End
Anne had read Mark’ diary, she had talked to Amanda’s parents, most usefully she had talked to the Professor, now living on his own in a much diminished status. He had lost his prestigious University post in Newark as a result of his affair with Amanda and lost his wife and family too. He was now living in Canada, as a research scientist on a much reduced income, with only memories to sustain him.
Despite pressure from his wife and police he had refused to testify to extortion. Without that they had no case. So it was only him who wore the consequences of an affair with a student, his dismissal from his post.
She imagined that, if it had happened the way he told it to her, she would have been aggrieved and bitter. But instead he said he was just sad that this beautiful but misguided girl had met an untimely end.
Despite him telling Anne the tale of her seduction and manipulation of him, he refused to speak ill of her, telling of a person that needed to be dealt with using both strength and love. In their conversations he said that Amanda had revealed a joyless childhood, one with little real love and affection. So she had come to a place where she had substituted control as her purpose in life.
The Professor seemed to carry a burden of guilt that his advice had led her to leave America and driven her into the arms of the wrong man and thus her demise. He had hoped that, after the lesson with him about the danger of abusing control, she would have not repeated this mistake, that she would no longer believe that her over inflated sense of power would always get her what she wanted. Perhaps it partly worked; she had become cleverer in hiding her fatal flaw. Mark seemed to have an inkling of this character trait and had tried to warn her off, but ultimately her overconfidence made her reckless.
Everything about Mark made him the wrong man; so, so much the wrong man. He was a man who hated to be bullied. He was kind to a fault when asked for help without coercion. But alongside this was a deep and burning rage, a rage at all the people in his life who had tried to trick, misuse or bully him. So her trying to coerce and control his was a recipe for disaster.
As the years had gone by and Mark had his series of doomed affairs that hole of anger inside him seemed to have got ever darker. His diary in its second half, told about a far different man to the earlier years, this restless brooding spirit, this crocodile spirit which consumed his soul and could break out with less and less provocation, doing awful things with no normal human restraints. At those times Anne felt as if she had peered inside the mind of a hunting predator. But then, even after these events unfolded, some parts of his humanity would come bursting back.
At some point in this relationship with Amanda, out in the opal mining place, something had snapped inside him. His diary did not say that, it told of his caution in first meeting her, that she was really pretty and sexy but she had something eating her up inside a bit like the devil in him. He saw in her a mirror to his crocodile spirit companion, in her soul was her own controlling demon.
His diary told how she had virtually flung herself at him, seeming to be determined to have him as one more conquest. It told how he succumbed despite making his rules clear and trying to warn her off.
His diary then told of a lovely and happy week with lots of affection and wild sex, though more and more as the week passed, the sex seemed to be a substitute for real love.
Then it told of Amanda’s increasing unhappiness in the isolation, of his offer to return her to Longreach from where she could catch a bus back to the coast. It told of her demand that he drive her back, over 1000 kilometres each way to the coast and of his refusal. Then it told how it escalated into threats of pregnancy, then threats of crying rape. But that is where it ended. His diary simply ended her story by saying
“A is really doing my head in. She is so angry and keeps trying to boss me. Today she spat at me when I would not do her bidding. I slapped her face so she came at me with a knife. I hit her, Finito.”
Susan’s story gave a likely ending, that he hit her and killed her, then he threw her body in a mine shaft, her bag in another shaft, and dropped explosives in each shaft to collapse the dirt in on top of her and her things.
But his story did not say that, after the “Finito” she vanished.
What was chilling was the lack of remorse he seemed to feel about what he had done. The next entry was several funny stories about two bush characters he met at Cloncurry pub, seemingly written a couple days later. He seemed to have discarded her from his life and casually moved on without second thoughts, a minor annoyance put aside.
The next entry, another day later, was lots of gruesome crocodile pictures and the caption, “I dreamed of crocodiles last night. They fill my soul and I feed on their hunger. It is a kind of joy.”
She wondered was that a remorse scream coming through a dream or was it only a lost soul going to ever worse places.
Part 7 - Cathy
Lost Girl Diary Page 39