by Helen Garner
‘After I’d been working here for a while,’ says Rod, ‘I found I’d lost my fear of death. I don’t know what the soul is—that spark—and no one knows what happens to it at death. But it’s certainly gone before people reach here.’
‘You have to realise,’ says Jodie, ‘that what we deal with here isn’t really death. We see what’s left behind after death has happened—after death has been and gone.’
For days after my visits to the mortuary my mind was full of dark images. At first I kept thinking I could smell blood, on and off, all day. Once I tore open a paper bag of pizza slices which had got squashed on the way home, and the dark red and black of their mashed surfaces reminded me of wounds. My bike helmet knocked lightly against the handlebar as I took it off, and the sound it made was the hollow tock of a skull being fitted back together after the brain has been removed. In the tram my eyes would settle on the wrinkled neck of an old woman: she’ll soon be gone.
There is nothing so utterly dead as a dead body. The spirit that once made it a person has fled. But until I went to the mortuary I never had even the faintest inkling of what a living body is—what vitality hovers in its breath, what a precious, mysterious and awesome spark it carries, and how insecurely lodged that spirit is within the body’s fragile structures.
1992
Sunday at the Gun Show
ON A SUNDAY morning, hours after a man was arrested for the knife-murders of three young women near the bayside suburb of Frankston, I went with my husband to the twenty-sixth Melbourne Gun Show. Australian Shooters Journal promised ‘250 tables of antique and modern firearms, Edged Weapons and Militaria’; its editor depicts this extravaganza as ‘often the favourite of many due to the intimate atmosphere of the venue’.
Entry cost nine dollars fifty each. Just inside the door, a Salvo lady, middle-aged, smiling hard, was rattling her tin. As I dropped in my coin I remarked, ‘You’re a bit out of your element here, aren’t you?’ She made no comment, but intensified her glassy smile and murmured, ‘God bless you!’
The organisers in the vestibule had safety-pinned official Gun Show ribbons onto their chests, just over their hearts. As they walked briskly about or paused near the open door, the blue and white ribbons would flutter merrily. These spasms of bright movement made a striking contrast with the carefully controlled male faces above them. One might speak, another might briefly smile, but, on the whole, expression was at a premium.
My husband plunged through the main doors and I followed him into the big auditorium. Intimate atmosphere? Maybe, compared to a wind-swept parade ground, a waist-deep swamp at dawn. For intimate, read crammed, muffled, dimly lit. The palace of weapons was packed with men. Blokes of all ages were shuffling, hands in pockets, along rows and rows of trestle tables, on which flat glass cases held displays of medals, daggers, drill manuals, stained desert maps, ancient bullets, firing pins, mysterious screws and springs, and other treasures. Bizarre assortments of second-hand books were sprinkled about; unread hardbacks with titles like Dentist on a Camel lay alongside well- thumbed paperback copies, at three dollars, of reputable Australian novels such as 1915 and My Brother Jack.
In here, facial expression was outlawed. The social tone was blank and affectless. Moustaches were plentiful, in a narrow range of styles: barbered grey, Civil War, semi-reformed bikie. The universal response to ‘Thanks’ was ‘No sweat’.
My husband, who is as interested in guns and warfare as the next fifty-two-year-old erstwhile air cadet, moved smoothly past the sentimental memorabilia and into the area where the handguns began and the vibe darkened further. He seemed to be able to read the weapons, to get a distinct meaning out of each piece—though, like all the other men in the room, he was keeping strict guard over his facial features.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a double-barrelled shotgun in a battered case. ‘A Hollis. That’s what Hemingway shot himself with. Or was it a Purdy?’
To me the displays were just a lot of lumps of metal. I concentrated hard. Yes, that one was pocket-size, and this one, by an effort of the imagination, I could call ‘pearl-handled’. Caught in the slow-flowing river of men, I kept shuffling sideways. Two buffs behind a table were talking. One of them, who had a big gut and drooping whiskers, was saying, ‘I don’t have friends. I get emotional when friends let me down.’ The other nodded, stone-faced.
I came to a display of knives, very slender, gleaming, about eight inches long. They looked as if they were designed to slide neatly between some poor bastard’s ribs. I picked one up. It was terrifically sharp. The fat blond in the dark blue tracksuit who was selling them kept his eyes on me. To make conversation I said, ‘I wonder what you’d use these for?’ Holding my eye, he drew in a huge sigh, let it out slowly, took two beats, and said in a voice that was at once toneless and heavy with irony, ‘Opening letters?’ I put it down hastily and shuffled on.
In the next part of the hall a sort of bottleneck had developed. Men were lingering over a particular glass case as if spellbound. I squeezed through, but it was only another spread of handguns. Were they better, cheaper, made by someone more famous? It was as baffling to me as if these men had been contemplating relics of some god whose name I didn’t even know. I accidentally caught the eye of the man in charge of these guns. Like the blond knife-seller, he maintained eye-contact in such a way as to lock me into his level, hard, challenging stare. He, too, let fall a significant pause, then said in a low voice, without the slightest intonation, ‘G’day. How you going?’
‘Good, thanks!’ I piped. I actually blushed.
I caught up with my husband at a table where bundles of bumper stickers were on sale. He was reading them with grunts and clicks of incredulity. ‘Annita has one—Paul is one. Look at this, will you? Take my gun? The contents come first! It’s paranoid. It’s bloody moronic. It’s pathetic.’ The sticker-seller, a callow youth, glanced up. My husband stepped towards him, then changed his mind and walked away in disgust.
A girl knelt beside her boyfriend, who was sitting on a folding stool behind his display. She was watching him open a little present she had brought him. ‘It’s Chinese,’ she said. He glanced at whatever it was, quickly rewrapped it, and sat unmoved while she threw her arms around his neck and passionately kissed him on the cheek. She let go, and knelt there, gazing up at him, exuding speechless adoration. He glanced nervously behind him. No one seemed to have noticed. He eked out a narrow smile.
We passed a video of a burly backwoodsman in a landscape of snow. He was casually dismembering the corpse of a large furry beast. Paying close attention to the screen was a young Vietnamese man in full camouflage gear. His eyes in his blank face were unnaturally bright, almost blazing. Beside the video screen a thick strip of leather hung in a wooden frame. One was invited to slash it to shreds with a sample of the same knife the backwoodsman was using to skin his prey. We both had a go. Ooh yes, it was very sharp indeed, and cleverly shaped into a vicious, chunky little curve.
Round the next corner, in the Ultimate Arms stand, hovered two young women dressed in blacktie, and caked with make-up, blusher and vivid lipstick. Their sparkling smiles, as they referred inquiries about the importing of weapons to their less attractive male colleague (also in evening dress) came as a shock in this cavern of grimness. Closer in, we saw that under their swallowtail jackets the girls were wearing black leotards and towering heels. The counter was exactly low enough to reveal them from the crutch up. Around this stand ran a hectic little frisson—but only in the movements of eyes. Faces remained frigid.
Shuffle, shuffle.
A silver-haired old man ear-bashed his fellow gun-fancier about security: how not to look like a tourist, where to carry your money, how to react when mugged, how to park your car so you never have to walk to it alone at night. ‘I tell my kids,’ he said, ‘and I think as they get older they’re starting to listen. I say, “Listen to your old dad and you’ll live longer.” ’
Is that what this is about—fear of d
eath? ‘They’re all brooding on death and destruction,’ said my husband. But there was another quality in the silent, tense concentration of the shuffling blokes. They were as scrupulously expressionless as men you see in adult bookshops, contemplating sex aids and pornography. The air was thick with suppressed anxiety, a sort of dull belligerence.
I went out to the vestibule and waited there for my husband. Near me, also waiting, stood a young woman with frizzed blonde hair holding a small girl by the hand. The three of us shifted from foot to foot, glancing occasionally back into the slow, milling stream of men. Several times the young mother caught my eye. Once she tilted up her chin and opened her mouth, as if she had something she wanted to say to me: but no words came, only nervous glances and smiles.
To get out of the hall we had to submit to a metal-detector, and a man inspected my bag without meeting my eye. We drove home in silence. As we rounded the corner near the Aberdeen Hotel, my husband gave a sigh and said gloomily, ‘But there was some craft. Some people were better than that mob—like those two blokes who made the beautiful stocks, out of good timber.’
While the dinner was cooking, I sat at the kitchen table and flipped through Australian Shooters Journal. A chap from Queensland called Mr C had written in with an idea. ‘Frisking passengers by means of an electronic gizmo at the departure lounge is not the way to go. On the contrary, no passenger should be permitted on board who is not armed or at least willing to defend himself. Picture our terrorist who has boarded at an intermediate stage and doesn’t know the rules. In mid-flight, the maniac stands up and says he is taking over in the name of the Mongolian Mother Molesters’ Movement. Next thing there is the sound of three hundred hammers being cocked, and the following day the Japanese tender for the mineral rights to the last hijacker!’
‘This bloke’ commented the Journal’s columnist, ‘has a delightful turn of wit. Why this little yarn made me chuckle all afternoon is hard to say…Was it because, like you perhaps, I am well and truly fed up of [sic] being kicked around by scum?’
I called my husband to eat, but he had turned on the TV and got interested in a documentary about the World War II campaigns of the great Russian general Zhukov. I carried the meal into the living room and sat down beside him. He took his plate and thanked me. I said, ‘No sweat,’ but he didn’t laugh. His eyes remained fixed on the screen, where the camera was roaming disconsolately through the gashed and gaping ruins of Berlin.
1993
The Violet Jacket
IN HOBART, ON my way to a more remote spot for some walking, I went to a bushgear shop to buy myself a waterproof jacket. A young man in his early twenties served me, friendly and knowledgeable. He showed me a jacket of a pretty violet colour. ‘It’s specially designed for women,’ he said. ‘The sleeves are not too long, but they come right down over your wrists, to keep you warm. And the whole thing isn’t too…voluminous.’
I put it on.
‘See how it’s made?’ he said. ‘They’ve sewn it so that even when your rucksack strap comes across here, in front on your shoulder, you can still get things out of your top pockets.’
‘How clever—isn’t it clever!’ I was zipping and unzipping and ripping the strips of velcro. I got it all done up and swanned about in it, in front of the long mirror. The young man laughed. Together we admired the ingenuity of the jacket, its simple practicality, the outcome of somebody’s careful thought. The price tag made me wince, but I said, ‘I’ll take it.’
As I slipped it off, I noticed among the wall display of heavy hiking boots a strange shoe, which was dangling toe down, hooked to a peg by a little loop of leather stitched to its heel. Its upper was of stiff cloth firmly laced, and its sole was made of black rubber, moulded so closely to the curves of a human instep that it looked as light and tight as a ballet slipper, but tougher: springy, graceful and peculiar. ‘What sort of shoe is that?’
‘It’s for rock-climbing.’
‘You’d think it was made for a dancer,’ I said. ‘It’s strong, but it’s almost dainty.’
‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ he said, taking it down and passing it to me. ‘You have to buy them tight. Your foot has to be right up against the end, so that when you get the top of the shoe over a hold, your toes are over it as well. You have to be able to get a grip.’ He made clawing movements with his bent fingers, laughing, and glanced back over his shoulder as if into a yawning chasm. My hair stood on end. I put the shoe back on its hook and followed him to the counter.
‘Are you going walking?’ he said.
‘Yes—do you think the weather will be good?’
He flashed me a joyful look. ‘Last weekend I was down at Freycinet,’ he said, ‘and I could see snow on the Hazards! Maybe you’ll be lucky!’
At the cash register a woman customer was telling the other shop assistant, also a woman, that she had just that morning got out of doing jury duty.
‘Didn’t you want to do it?’ I asked.
‘I would have—but I was challenged.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. The woman assistant and I ran our eyes up and down her. She was in her forties, with a lot of flustered wiry blonde hair and a big smiling mouth full of uneven teeth. She wore a rain jacket, a money belt, heavy boots.
‘Maybe you looked a bit…alternative?’ I suggested.
‘Or were they getting rid of the women?’ said the assistant. ‘Was it a rape case, maybe?’ She shuddered. ‘I’d hate to have to do a rape case. I’d be so outraged—I don’t think I’d be able to be objective. Or imagine if you were on the jury of that bloke who killed his wife and cut up her body into pieces.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He put bits of her down the drain. Some of her he put into a blender.’
We three women looked at each other without speaking, our eyebrows raised and our lips stretched back off our clenched teeth, through which we sharply sucked in air.
‘A friend of a friend of mine,’ continued the woman shop assistant, who was wearing spectacles with unusual, sophisticated frames, ‘knows someone who knew the social worker that the wife went to. Apparently the social worker warned her. The wife came to her and said, “I’m leaving him.” And the social worker said, “Well, get help—because you could be in real danger.” But the wife said, “Don’t worry. I can handle it.” ’
‘She told people he was violent,’ cut in the rejected juror passionately. ‘She told people, but no one would do anything about it.’
During this exchange, the young man was right in the middle of us, shoulder to shoulder with his colleague, working modestly and efficiently, keeping his eyes down and filling out the credit card docket, folding my new coat and sliding it neatly into a big paper bag with string handles. He waited till there was a pause, then handed me the pen, to sign.
Our eyes met. The sparkle had gone out of his open, cheerful face; it was closed and sombre now. He was carrying in silence the load of the horrible story. I signed quickly, thanked him, took my parcel, said goodbye, and hurried out on to the street.
There are two men in this story. Two. Out of all the many sorts of men that exist in the world. And so I’m determined that I will acknowledge and value and remember the young man who laughed with me and showed me the clever jacket and the beautiful shoe, for at least as long as I’ll remember the other one, the murderer and dismemberer.
1993
Killing Daniel
WHAT SORT OF a man would beat a two-year-old boy to death? Paul Aiton, thirty-two, who stood trial in Melbourne in 1993 for the murder of Daniel Valerio, is a very big man, a tradesman who wears colourful shirts, thin ties and boots decorated with chains; but at first glance, in the dock, he looked oddly like a child himself. On his heavily muscled body, with its overhanging belly and meaty hands, sat the round, hot-cheeked face of a boy who’d been sprung, who was in serious trouble, but who glared back at the world with eyes that sometimes threatened to pop out of his head with indignation and defiance.
Often his head, with its
moustache, its reading glasses, its hair cropped short in front and curling over the collar behind, would be invisible behind the dock, where he appeared to be doodling or taking notes. Outside the court, especially during the retrial, when a spirited performance by the defence QC led many to believe that the verdict might be the lesser one of manslaughter, Aiton would occasionally make mocking gestures, leering and waving, towards the dead boy’s father, Michael Valerio, a huge, simmering but powerfully restrained man who attended court each day with his wife. Something about Aiton persistently called to mind the word infantile.
At least there was a certain intensity in his demeanour. When Cheryl Butcher, the dead boy’s mother, was called to the witness stand, she displayed the dull eyes and defeated posture of a woman whose path through life is joyless and without drive. She had her first child at seventeen. Her relationships with men have been chaotic and soon broken. Now she has lost one child through violence and had two others (Candice and Benjamin, then seven and four) taken from her and given into the custody of her previous de facto, Michael Valerio.
Cheryl Butcher has not been charged with any crime. But she intrigued people who followed this case through two trials. How could she not have known what was being done to Daniel? What deal did she make with herself to allow her child to suffer the brutality of her boyfriend Aiton in exchange for his company, his pay-packet—for the simple fact of not being manless? And how could she, the night after her little boy died, agree to marry the man who had killed him?
Butcher was out of the house when Daniel met his end. At lunchtime on Saturday 8 September 1990, on the Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne, she drove to collect her other son from his grandparents, leaving Daniel in bed sleeping off the remains of a three-day wog. Aiton had been out in the yard all morning running a garage sale. When Butcher returned half an hour later, Daniel had been rushed to hospital by a family friend. By the time Butcher got there, the boy was dead. The doctor at casualty refused to sign a death certificate. He took a proper look at Daniel and called the police.