by Candice Fox
It would be a nightmare. But it was better than nothing. My worst fear was that she would grow up without any idea of who I was. Kelly wasn’t going to keep pictures of me around the house to remind Lillian who I was as she grew older. But maybe if I saw her regularly enough, even in the strained, sterilised environment of some Family Court office playroom, she’d come to accept me as a tiny part of her life.
I should have been madder about the whole situation. I should have demanded to see her, should have abused Kelly until she put the girl on the phone so I could hear her giggling and breathing, told her that I’d get a court order, make her send me pictures. But I didn’t have much anger left in me after prison. Prison is full of slow-boiling, impotent anger, fury simmering behind the eyes of everyone – inmates, guards, specialists. Those brick-walled institutions are where anger comes to breed. I’d spent much of my first couple of weeks inside sitting on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands and my eyes squeezed shut, just hating, burning, pulsing with anger. I’d thrown myself against the locked door with it. I’d run my fingernails down my cheeks and neck with it. I’d screamed and cried with it. And like all fires, it ate itself up inside me until there was nothing left. It’s not that I wasn’t angry any more. It’s just that I was ashen on the inside. Tired. I still couldn’t sleep without worrying who the hell was going to walk Lillian down the aisle when she got married, or what she was going to do when all the other kids were making Father’s Day cards at school.
I was aware, too, that the anger would come back one day, when I wasn’t so tired and beaten. There was only so much invigorating free air I could breathe before it fuelled the little glowing embers left behind from my fall from grace. I was going to be sitting out on the back porch one day looking at the beautiful sunset over the river beyond the gates, and I was going to remember what it felt like to do something like that with my arm draped around a woman who loved me. What it was like to watch a sunset without wondering if there was someone at the front of the property now opening a can of red paint or lining up a brick.
I wasn’t sure if some of this fury wasn’t directed at Claire Bingley. Not so much for picking me off the photo line-up. I knew she was crazy from her ordeal. If there was anger inside me for Claire, it was not for anything she’d done or said. It was simply for having been there that day, by the side of the road, waiting for whoever took her. She should have caught the earlier bus. She should have had her parents pick her up. She should have fucking walked. Yes, I was really honest with myself, I hated Claire Bingley. I hated her for not being anywhere in the world than where she was that awful day, standing there, metres away from me, watching me as I got out of my car like a wary rabbit at the edge of the long grass. I hated her for what had happened to her. For what it had done to me.
But all of that was just craziness, too. I couldn’t possibly hate Claire. None of this was her fault.
It was the man who did this to her. To us.
But who the hell was he? All I’d heard since it happened was how he was me.
Just as I was beginning to reimagine some sort of relationship with my infant daughter, how and why something like that might happen, I realised my relationship with the geese had suddenly changed. The little ones had imprinted on me. I’d learned about ‘imprinting’ while googling food options for the birds when they’d first come into my life. The goslings had begun to recognise me as some sort of parental figure. The fact that we were dramatically different species didn’t matter – there were YouTube videos of goslings and ducklings imprinting on cats and dogs. The way they gathered around and followed their mother wherever she went in a line was now something they did to me. Because their mother was injured and couldn’t move around that much, it was me they followed in a perfect row as I walked from room to room, huddling around my toes whenever I stopped. They were somehow able to anticipate my movements and get out of the way, so after an hour or so of complete terror that I would step on one of them, I forgot about the phenomenon altogether and got used to my tiny parade of followers.
They followed me out to the mailbox, where I inspected the latest work of the vigilantes. They were definitely upping their intensity. All that remained of the steel letterbox on the lawn was a charred stump. Across the road, I found more of the structure, a piece of the front, the plastic number 7 melted into a black wick. Mid-range party explosives, the type people gathered together in backyard parties and blew up feral rabbits with. They hadn’t done any damage to the house at all, but this was probably an experiment. I was getting the feeling the vigilantes were young. Young enough that if I scared them they might leave me alone.
Around midday I was spurred into action, having spent hours on the back porch with my laptop trying to find anything I could on Llewellyn Bruce and being rewarded with nothing but a dead end. In the early hours of 22 January, the night Jake went missing, Bruce and two other men were pictured in a local newspaper outside the Noki Club in Cairns as it was being raided for drugs. Turns out Bruce did leave his island hideaway at least once every ten years. It happened to be on the exact night I’d hoped he might be somewhere else.
The retired bikie enforcer is part owner in Noki and other clubs across the tropical north, and refutes claims the establishments are part of a domestic drug smuggling ring. ‘I’m an old man. I have a simple life. I rarely come into the towns, so any funny business people conduct in my clubs is news to me, mate.’
I slammed the laptop closed and went for a drive to clear my head. The sky was streaked with grey cloud. Part of me hated the fact that Amanda had been right about Bruce. She was so certain about all her conclusions that it was almost as though she had one foot in the future, as though she was leading me towards solving the puzzle of Jake’s disappearance, and I felt mad that she was doing it so slowly. Finding out the truth about her crime was almost, in that moment, like an act of revenge. I’d show her she couldn’t keep the secrets of her past from me. I’d show her I was a worthy partner.
It was as I was standing on the porch of Lauren Freeman’s house that I came to my senses. Three short-legged, silky brown dogs rushed to the door as I tapped on the screen, barking and whimpering at me through the mesh. I heard someone call out from inside that the door was open, and I went in.
What are you doing, Ted? What the hell are you trying to prove?
The house was as described in Murder in the Top End. I felt as though I was walking into the book’s pages, as though someone would begin narrating my movements.
The hallway walls are cluttered with family photographs, a memorial walk of the Freeman clan. Light playing on the surface of the backyard pool through the far windows sparkles and dances on the glass before the faces of beloved grandfathers, grand mothers, uncles and aunts lost. Among their withered faces, a stranger sits, smiling. Someone who doesn’t belong. Someone too young to belong. Their eternal beauty queen.
A short, blonde woman met me at the entrance to the living room.
‘Oh! I thought you were Dynah,’ she said. ‘Hello there.’
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Ted Collins. Are you, ah …’
‘I’m Paula Freeman.’
‘Lauren’s mum.’
The sound of her daughter’s name still darkened Paula Freeman’s face. She licked her upper lip and stepped back from me, out of friendly proximity.
‘Whoa, now, I don’t talk to journalists, sonny. I’m sorry. I stopped talking to journalists a long time ago, you know.’
‘I’m not a journalist,’ I said. I didn’t disguise the relief in my voice. ‘I’m just, uh. I’m here because …’
What are you doing?
‘I work for a historical section of the police,’ I coughed. ‘A sort of historical analytical body … of the police. I, uh, my job is to look at the similarities in certain sorts of cases? Violent cases. And yours, um …’
‘Police? Oh, right! I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise! I just get so many weirdoes turning up, you know, wanting to say t
hings. Come in.’
She beckoned. I followed, my face flushing with guilt.
‘I’ve gotta be careful, you know? People come. Journalists. Strange people, too. Say they saw something or they know something or that the Pharrell girl is innocent. God, if you only knew. Come in here.’
She led me into a spotless kitchen and started making me coffee before asking me if I wanted any. I slid uncomfortably onto a stool behind the kitchen island.
‘I’m expecting my daughter home. Dynah. So when you knocked, I thought …’
‘It’s all right. Thank you for seeing me.’
‘Here.’ She thrust an instant coffee at me. She’d got it right – milk and sugar. She was frazzled, pushing back thin blonde whips from her forehead. ‘Gee whiz.’
‘It must be confronting, having people turn up. I’m so sorry.’
‘Well, the police usually call ahead,’ she laughed ruefully. ‘But yes, you’re right, it is. I don’t go around expecting it anymore. People turn up – the electrician, the plumber, a delivery man. And then whammo! It’s someone about Lauren.’
She sat down across from me, her manicured nails strumming the marble countertop.
‘Lauren was pretty, see,’ Paula said. ‘Young and pretty – that’s what gets their attention. The crime lovers. The conspiracy theorists. That JonBenét Ramsey is the perfect example. People will never let up about that kid. If she’d been a boy she’d have got half the attention.’
She sipped her coffee. I’d said almost nothing to spur her on, and now the words were tumbling out, words that had been rattling around in her mind while she was alone in the house now given cupped hands to spill into.
‘They all say they were there. The amount of people who come here or write to me and say they were there that night, the night of the murder; they can’t all be telling the truth,’ Paula said. ‘The mountain would have been crawling with people. Would have been a giant rave party rather than the small gathering of kids that it was. Just about every member of her school year claims they were there that night. That’s about a hundred people.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘And they each have their own versions and ideas. It’s hard not to grab one of the different versions sometimes. You know? Hold onto it.’
‘Why would you want to hold onto it?’ I asked.
She stared into her coffee.
‘Sometimes people say things that give me a kind of … nicer version of what happened,’ she said. ‘And it’s hard not to go along with them. Because even just a little tiny bit of relief would be so good. I’d love to believe some of them.’
‘What kind of nicer versions are there?’
Paula sighed. ‘One girl, she called me and told me she’d seen a man in the bush with Lauren and the Pharrell girl that night. She said that the man had tried to rob the two of them. She’d investigated some robberies down in Brisbane and found there was a guy who was targeting young girls in cars. Her theory was that Lauren had been trying to protect the Pharrell girl, and it was the man, the robber, who’d killed my child.’
We paused, the two of us imagining it. The steam from our drinks intermingled before us.
‘That’s a nicer story, isn’t it?’ Paula smiled. ‘Slightly. Lauren still dies. But she’s a hero. There’s some … meaning to what happened.’
‘Right.’ I nodded.
‘I’ve heard the wildest things. That my teenage daughter was a founding member of some, some secret organisation. Some cult thing, with government ties! I got a letter saying Lauren had been killed because she was going to reveal everything about this organisation, and the Pharrell girl was just the patsy.’
‘It’s always the government, isn’t it?’ I smiled.
‘Always,’ she laughed. ‘Lauren couldn’t even get her laundry sorted out. How was she supposed to be some kind of cult leader? Another anonymous caller said she had an older boyfriend. She was into drugs. She was making porn.’
The troupe of dogs rushed from where they’d settled around our feet across the living room to the front door. I heard a car door slam outside, and footsteps on the porch. My face flushed hot again as I questioned my very purpose in the house.
‘Mum?’
The girl who walked in might have been Lauren Freeman, if not for the shape of her. She was shorter and thicker than her sister, still beautiful, a curvy, sun-kissed girl in her mid-twenties. She was wearing a turquoise apron around her waist, dusty with the powder they put inside food-service gloves to keep workers’ hands from getting sweaty. She was carrying a couple of shopping bags full of vegetables.
‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me.
‘This is Tom, from the police,’ Paula said.
‘Ted.’
‘Ted! Sorry. This is Ted. From the police.’
‘Right.’ Dynah looked me up and down, set her bags against the wall. ‘Mum, can I talk to you? In private?’
The two women huddled in the hall. I looked at my coffee and picked out words.
‘… see a badge?’
‘This isn’t the movies, Dynah … go around asking people to show their badges. He’s in research, anyway … have a badge.’
The dogs around me were all pretty certain I had some goslings in my pockets. They’d made a good examination of the smell of my shoes and sat expectantly, waiting for me to produce them. I gave each a pat of consolation.
Paula disappeared into the house and Dynah came warily into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice. A heavy silence lay between us as Paula bustled around in another room.
‘My mum doesn’t get to talk about Lauren a lot,’ Dynah said eventually. Her tone was flat, almost sarcastic. She leant against the fridge and looked at me, a picture of scepticism. ‘She talks to her a lot, but not about her.’
‘She talks to her?’
‘Oh, Lauren still lives here.’ Dynah nodded, looking around the room. The sarcasm in her voice was thick now. ‘She’s always here.’
‘You don’t sound too happy about that,’ I observed.
Dynah leaned on the counter before me, setting her glass down with a loud clunk.
‘That’s because the Lauren that my mother drags around with her,’ she said, ‘the one in the pictures, and the books, and the magazines – that Lauren isn’t anything like the Lauren who died.’
I was surprised how candid Dynah was being with me, even as she’d just lectured her mother about speaking to strangers who came to the house. But I got the sense that her hurt over her sister’s ghost was always on the tip of her tongue.
I opened my mouth to ask Dynah what she meant, but Paula came back into the room and Dynah backed off, signalling the end of our conversation.
‘Ted, would you like to see Lauren’s room?’ Paula asked.
In a small, sunny bedroom at the back of the house another memorial lay, this one devoted to one person only. The curtains, drawn to prevent the sun from fading the unused coverlet on the bed, were thrust back as I entered, and I found myself standing in an early noughties time capsule. There was a large black-and-white poster of Leonardo DiCaprio in his teen idol days dominating the wall above the bed. The shelves over the desk were lined with CDs. So Fresh: Hits of Summer 2004.
Everything was as it had been at the moment Lauren left it. The desk was cluttered with colourful gel pens. There was a pile of notes in one corner, the kind high-schoolers would pass around. I picked up a paper puzzle folded into the shape of a four-petalled flower. On the surface of the petals were the words ‘Blue’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Green’ and ‘Red’.
‘They had these when I was a kid.’ I smiled, showing Paula. I spread the puzzle apart, and inside found folded flaps numbered from one to eight. ‘The girls used to make them. They called them chatterboxes, I think.’
‘We called them fortune tellers,’ she said. ‘You choose a colour, then a number, and they told your fortune.’
‘I don’t know about the fortune bit,’ I said. ‘When the girls at my scho
ol used to make them they’d just be full of insults. I’d always get “You stink” or “You’re a loser” or something.’
Paula sat on the bed and looked out the window. I carefully opened one of the inner flaps of the puzzle.
Lauren’s fortune teller was a little harsher than those Paula and I remembered.
You’re a slut.
You fucked Mr Thompson.
Your face looks like vomit.
There was one positive notation among the results inside the fortune teller puzzle. If the participant chose the number three or four, the paper told them You will marry your true love.
Someone had written under the words ‘true love’ the letters ‘LD’ in a different coloured pen, and had drawn a smiley face. I looked at the poster of Leonardo DiCaprio and felt sad for Lauren Freeman, cut down in that beautiful, naive time when someone might believe their true love is a Hollywood heart-throb. She was the fly in the web, adhered against lines that went back as far as her girlhood when ‘true love’ was real and princesses married princes, and being called a vomit-face actually hurt. The room didn’t mesh with those other lines wrapped around Lauren, however. The drinker. The girl behind the wheel. The child Lauren couldn’t possibly be as ‘hated’ as Dr Gratteur thought she’d have needed to be for someone to do what they did to her, surely. Which Lauren was real?
Dear Jake,
It must be wonderful to be a god. I don’t necessarily mean a celebrity, someone who has the masses cowering and creeping along beneath them everywhere they go, although I’m sure you get your taste of that. A husband can be his wife’s god. She can love him in the kind of way that gives him steering power over her whole life. She can put her neck in his hands and tell him that he can decide how long she breathes. I realise that I’ve made you my god, Jake. Sometimes, I can feel your fingers on my throat, pressing, taking the breath from me.