by David Malouf
They stood together at the sill, her hand in his, and looked down into the garden. It murmured and was heavy with the scent of night-flowers and the tink-tink of tree-frogs and crickets.
“Will you?” he said. “Tonight?”
He was, at that moment, the more innocent of the two. The next step, beyond the intimacies of the washroom, appeared to him only in terms that were vague and unimaginable, as some going beyond a point he had not yet glimpsed and therefore dared not press for. Once they were free of the building, down there among the leaves, with earth under his boots and the night all around them, the garden itself would provide the revelation of what it was to be, would speak directly to the blood in his hands. He felt the quickening rhythm of it deep within him.
He had never had a plan. His cunning, such as it was, dealt only with immediate events, and the shape of each occasion as he stepped into it was determined by the elements of the occasion itself and his response to them: a landscape of broken surfaces—light and shadow, cloth and limbs, the black-and-white checkerboard of a bathroom floor, the softness and warmth of her belly under the nightdress, the breathing of leaves under the moon.
“Will you then?” he repeated. “Tonight?”
She looked down into the pool of nightsounds and saw that to put it off any longer would change nothing, since she had already decided. Another day or two, or twenty. She would have to go beyond this point sooner or later. That had been clear from the start.
“Tonight then,” she said, and heard the long sigh he gave, and felt his slow breath pass her. He was utterly happy. Utterly unaware of what lay before them.
For one last moment they sat together, hand in hand on the sill, and did not move.
7
Later there was to be no reasonable explanation for it. The whole affair would remain, especially to Miss Wilson, for whom they had always been her very own little girls, and models of good behaviour, an impenetrable mystery.
She regarded them now with a kind of horror as they copied from the board and embarked on one of her flights of fancy, starting, as always, from the given paragraph: they had fallen, while out walking, into a cave full of brilliant jewels. Marylyn Shore chewed the end of her biro— "Don't, dear,” she told the child automatically, "you don't know where it's been;” Gillian Bell sucked a pigtail, others gazed wide-eyed at the ceiling, or in the case of Bettina Falk, who was left-handed, turned at that odd angle to the desk; each of them already following her own idiosyncratic path, but all just children really, ordinary healthy little girls who would go on from this point (they all hoped) to normal lives. Watching them she felt it as some deficiency in herself that she could not connect them with the children who had sat there night after night with him; watching, keeping his secret, allowing Jane—
She felt a little jump of panic at letting Jane back here among the others, as if she might bring into the room, poor child, some of the terrible knowledge she must have acquired out there.
Miss Wilson put her hand over her mouth, not to cry out, it was too awful. It threatened to send the whole afternoon flying in splinters. She had to hang on.
But how could they have permitted it? She simply could not comprehend. Allowing Jane to go off like that, without a word of protest, without the least signal of alarm. And even worse perhaps, since it wasn't a single occasion but a matter of days—no, weeks—sitting night after night watching the boy, and even, since they were impenetrably united these children, inveterately secretive, touching him, allowing him to touch them …
At first they had refused to speak at all, they simply shook their heads and were dumb; even when, as gently as possible, they had been made to understand; when the awful facts were made clear to them—or as clear as was necessary: what had happened to Jane, and how close they themselves had been to ultimate harm. Even then they revealed no details, they refused to speak out. Had they failed to comprehend the horror of it? Or were they merely stubborn in the defence of their own complicity, or unfeeling, or—yes that, surely—protecting themselves from the full knowledge of what they knew. They had simply gone on, in a way that alarmed and affronted her, as if nothing had occurred at all.
They were writing now with their heads bent to the task, filling the first page with the fruits of their imagination. Later she would read what they had written and give it a mark. She comforted herself with the thought that if their imagination stopped at a certain point it was just as well. It would save them, as she could no longer save herself, from the enormity of the thing.
She glanced quickly at her watch. “Time, children,” she said briskly. “You have two more minutes. Make sure you have a concluding paragraph, label it, and see that your name is printed clearly at the top of the page.”
She stood at the window, with her arms clasped to her breast as if she were cold, though it was in fact too warm today. The garden below was approaching the full thickness of summer, every leaf separate and astir in the afternoon breeze, discovering darkness as an edge of shadow, the hungry little birds dipping and feeding on berries and squabbling disgracefully over the remains.
And in one way or another they had accepted it, the others. They allowed Jane, who had never been popular among them, and whose face soon grew dim in their minds, to walk out of their lives as she had walked out of the dormitory, and made as little as possible of her failure to come back.
The event itself remained for them a series of glowing but unreal moments when they had sat on a bed in the unlighted dormitory and watched Jane and the boy, two figures already touched by the strangeness of distance and the night; high dreamlike occasions between stretches of sleep, when they had, briefly, touched on something outside the rules of their daily existence, the rules that would govern their lives afterwards, and which they knew now was there, had always been there, and would never, even in their own case, and despite the rules, be entirely exorcised; though it did not have to be confronted—or not yet. They would recognise it again later, at a point further on, past the husbands and the children still to come. It was ten years off for one, at the bottom of twelve feet of water; twenty years for another, for others fifty sixty even. It would reappear in a different and quite unpredictable form to each one of them: as a tree trunk suddenly illuminated on a country road, every scribble in its bark clearly readable; or a lump secretly nourished in one of the soft parts of the body; or a welling up, beyond the faces of children and grandchildren, of a sea of blood. At that moment they might understand her at last, their lost schoolfellow, and in whatever part of themselves they harboured a memory of all this, without precisely recalling it, see themselves getting up out of their solid childlike bodies to follow.
Meanwhile there was Miss Wilson's essay to finish—the marvellous cavern to be got out of.
They wrote on.
The Prowler
1
There is more goes on in this suburb than meets the eye. But naturally.
Waiting at McAllister's newsagency yesterday for a magazine order I overheard a conversation between our popular newsagent and Doctor Cooper of Lancaster Road. “You know, McAllister,” the doctor remarked, "you must be about the most regular man, time-wise, in this whole city. I hear your wagon turn into Arran Avenue in the morning and I say to myself, ‘That's McAllister. It must be five thirty. Time to get back into my clothes and go home.’ ” McAllister was delighted. Three minutes later he was repeating the story to a new customer as an example of the complete reliability of his service.
There's no better place than a newsagent's for finding out what goes on in the world. And I don't mean by reading the papers.
2
Ours is one of the older suburbs, no longer fashionable as it was forty or fifty years ago but still retaining a certain desirable elegance, and still, with its expansive gardens and tree-lined avenues, a place where a mode of life can be observed that has not yet surrendered to the patios, clothes-hoists, and drive-in supermarkets of the Estates. Houses here are of painted weatherboard
in the colonial style: with gables, turrets, pepperpot domes, bull's-eye windows of emblazoned glass, verandahs, wrought-iron railings, and venetians that hum in a storm. Bougainvillea and Cardinal Creeper grow thick over outhouse roofs and the lattice- work that keeps out the westering sun. Lawns planted with old-fashioned natives like hoop-pine and bunya, along with the deodars and Douglas firs of empire, make secluded spaces, some of them close to parklike, where willy-wagtails feed and fat grasshoppers wobble in flight above the cannas. It's a quiet area. Lawn sprinklers weave elaborate loops and figures-of-eight; kids on bicycles hiss over the gravel; a station wagon driven by a young housewife rolls along under the bouhineas, delivering a kindergarten group or a riot of small footballers. Deep in a garden somewhere, a splash, then laughter as children lark about in a backyard pool. That's the nearest you might come to a disturbance of the heavy stillness. At night a tennis court, one wire wall thick with cestrum, suddenly lights up in the sub-tropical dusk and there will be, for an hour or two, the leisurely thwack thwack of a ball. So that the assaults, when they broke out, seemed especially shocking.
3
The earliest victims were disbelieved. They were written off as hysterical. Two of them were unmarried, one was a young mother of three with a history of mental illness, another a schoolgirl of sixteen. It was only after the sixth or seventh attack that one of the newspapers got on to the story, and almost overnight, it seemed, we had a prowler. From that point on, the assaults ceased to be imaginary.
Scarcely a day has passed since then without a new report. Once the prowler entered our lives, via the columns of the paper, he was everywhere. He dominated the headlines and became the obsessive subject of even the most casual conversations. He began, little by little, to change the fabric of our lives. So local schoolgirls no longer walk up from the bus-stop alone. They ring from town and are met by anxious fathers in the Holden Kingswood. Wives, returning home from a meeting, have learned to drive with the doors locked and the windows up, waiting in the garage till someone appears on a lighted verandah to see them safely inside. What did we do with ourselves before there was the prowler? What did we talk about? He is as much part of our lives now as the milkman or the newsagent. Every suburb has its prowler and we have ours. It is, the newspapers tell us, the price we pay for modern living. Prowlers come to us as part of that “way of life” that elsewhere in the papers we are urged at all times to defend.
4
Not all of the attacks follow the same pattern.
Sometimes the prowler does no more than watch a sleeping woman from the windowsill or from the foot of the bed. When she starts awake at last, suddenly aware of a real presence in her dreams, he signals with his forefinger to his lips that she should not cry out, shows the edge of a knife, and then just sits, holding her thus—captive, mesmerized—till the light begins to grow in the room and his face, a darkened blank against the sky, is in danger of becoming clear. Then, without a word, he rolls over the sill and is gone.
Often, while the woman is washing up at the sink, he slips in behind out of the darkening house; an arm goes round her waist, a hand covers her mouth, she feels his breath, his fingers, but sees nothing. On some of these occasions, startled by the sound of a step on the verandah, or a train whistle, the attacker will break and run, and the last she will hear of him is the banging of a wirescreen door—which from that moment onwards will always “assault.” Sometimes the man is naked. More often he is not. There are times when he has been sighted by a curious neighbour, but only rarely are these sightings reported till after the event. One wonders why. What, standing there at the bathroom window or behind the slats of the venetians, did the observer make of a naked figure stalking across the lawn? What area of a neighbour's secret life did he think he had stumbled on, that might be observed but not violated? There are lines, it seems, that we are conditioned not to cross. Does the prowler know this, and feel certain that in nine cases out of ten, even if sighted, he will not be betrayed? His assurance comes perhaps from the very fact that he is a prowler: that is, one for whom the lines exist to be crossed.
5
Under pressure of public opinion, and after a series of heavy editorials, the Police Department has decided to set up a special section to deal with the assaults. Called the Incident Squad, it is under the direction of Senior Detective William Pierce, who has two full-time assistants. One of them, following on a petition to the Department from local women's groups, is a woman.
Senior Inspector Pierce is a widower, aged thirty-nine, with two small boys.
6
It might be anyone.
A fresh-faced kid running round an oval after dark stands panting for a bit with his hands on his hips, then dips his head like a big wading-bird to ease the muscles of his neck. After a brief burst of running on the spot, he resumes his training, alternating stretches of steady jogging with fifty-metre sprints, a lone figure on the darkening oval, a speck of white, moving fast, moving slower, moving fast again against a field of green. Minutes later he is dropping on all fours under a lighted window.
To watch.
At last, slipping out of his gym-shoes, unzipping his track-suit, easing the elastic of his shorts, he stands for a moment in the summer dark—still, poised as if before a barrier he must clear, preparing himself inwardly for the effort it will take, raising himself lightly on the balls of his feet. Then he moves.
Or a man rolls to one side of the bed where his wife is turned heavily away and sets his footsoles on the floor; pushes himself upright, slowly, lest the bed creak; stands, creeps to the hallway. Having learned the catlike quietness of his movements, and also perhaps his need for violence, in this very house and from the woman he leaves dreaming in the bed behind him. He pauses outside the room where his children sleep and listens a moment to their breathing. Then goes on.
It might be either of these.
Or a painter's apprentice already naked under his white overalls (who sets his lunch-tin down very carefully beside a garden tap) or a grease monkey naked under his blue ones.
Or a man in shorts and singlet, slap-footed in thongs, who has been walking a muzzled Greyhound. He ties it now to a tree, flicks his lighted butt into a camellia bush, and smiling, eases up a window. Already in his imagination he is halfway in. Behind him the dog stands tense, quivering, then as the garden sounds grow familiar settles to wait.
It might be any of these.
It might be anyone.
7
The Incident Squad had issued an identikit picture, assembled from the evidence of nearly seventy victims.
Each victim is presented with the outline of a face and a booklet containing page by page a variety of features; as for example, eyes close set or far apart, small pig-eyes, gimlet slits, round eyes frank and open, eyes that bulge a little, eyes that slant upwards at the corner, eyes that slant down, eyes with heavy lids, flat lids, no lids at all; eyebrows far apart or joined at the bridge of the nose, arched, pointed, straight, tilted up or down; eyebrows thick, thin, tufted etc.; and so on for the various shapes of nose, mouth, chin, ears, the various colours and kinds of hair. When each of these features has been considered, and the chosen eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, hair, affixed to the plastic outline, a face takes shape and the prowler begins slowly to emerge out of the victim's memory, out of the fog at the back of her head. Feature by feature he comes into focus; and so vividly in some cases that the victim has immediately gone into shock at conjuring up, once more, the image of her assailant.
So then: seventy men re-created out of the dark experience of seventy different women. These seventy images are then superimposed one upon the other to discover what is common to them.
The results are puzzling.
Three separate types emerge, and have now been promulgated as possible likenesses of the prowler.
Three? Can the prowler then change his form? Is he perhaps an expert at disguising himself?
For the fact is that some of the features the women are
most insistent upon—as for example black hair closely cropped and a zapata moustache—cannot be reconciled with others, long blond hair like a surfie's, thin pale beard, etc. The various images have been further sorted and amalgamated, and so we have the prowler's three faces, one young, one middle-aged, one old, rather like that mysterious portrait attributed to Titian in which the three heads of youth, maturity, and old age rise from a single trunk and look in three different directions— a whole lifespan, as it were, telescoped into the space of a single frame. In Titian's case the triple portrait has a pendant, a reflection, in which the three human heads are replaced by those of animals: lion, fox, and dog.
But to return to the identikit pictures. What seems strangest is that when the sharply detailed memories of these women have been laid one over the other to produce a composite picture, the face that emerges is both immediately recognizable (because typical) and at the same time quite useless as a key to identification. The three faces are clichs. They look like everyone and no-one. Blondish baby-faced youth, lean, shy-looking, with the beginnings of a moustache—student, bank clerk, apprentice plumber, railway porter. Clean-cut young married with short back and sides—an architect perhaps, or a schoolteacher or swimming-pool contractor, someone in advertising or the Town Clerk's office. Older man, distinguished-looking but with a hint of looseness about the mouth; might be a travelling salesman, a green-keeper, or a professional soldier recently cashiered or the owner of a small grocery business.