by Chloe Hooper
When we first started trysting he played music that, he said, reminded him of me. He brought sweet things: chocolate mice and gingerbread men (waiting to see where I took the first bite). Once he gave me a box of perfect peaches. Then, handing over a knife, he requested that I let him watch. “Pretend you’re alone,” he said. And this seemed hilarious. I camped it up, eating peach straight off the knife; rubbing the fruit on my wrists like cologne. I thought this was the game itself—and that by pretending to be sexy I was canceling out any sexiness. Another theory proved wrong. After I dissected the peach he still wanted to undress me.
The toilet flushed. I crammed the cellophane behind the kettle, and Thomas reemerged, moving impatiently to draw the lace curtains. My heart was beating fast. I stood in the room, my mouth full of vanilla cookie crumbs, watching him. I needed to brush my teeth, but my thoughts were on loop; it’s too late to leave, to pretend to feel ill. Downstairs I heard somebody laugh. Reticence had arrived to match the wallpaper. For a split second, my new modesty made me want to call my parents, and ask them to come and pick me up.
“Aren’t these dried flowers pretty?”
“Yes.” Wet fingers started to unbutton my shirt. “They’re pretty.”
I wished I really were a little girl. Little children can transform themselves from magic birds into flying strongmen. At play, children wear intense expressions and make a range of hero noises; common is the windy vroom-vroom of their invisible jet plane’s ignition, the neeeow or p-queeww of lasers shooting from soft fingertips. Running with their arms stretched straight ahead, the children become the most powerful and beautiful—the most super—people in the universe. They believe the ordinary properties of objects irrelevant; for example, this Victorian four-poster, covered in cream lace, could have been a hospital bed. Typical social roles didn’t necessarily shape the imagined world either, so Thomas could have been a doctor who was giving me a checkup; and speaking out of turn when, reaching my black-and-pink bra, he said casually, “That’s a nice print.”
The bed was huge, pneumatic. A reproduction mahogany stepladder clung to its quilted flanks. Thomas held my hand and I walked up the steps. He then undressed himself, looking all the time so serious. He took off his business shirt; he unzipped his trousers. Before we made love he would always hang his trousers, and then I had to close my eyes. It was too much seeing him standing there in high, black business socks. “Just smile a little”—he thought he had to be stern with me; he’d told me that. Otherwise I didn’t treat things with enough gravitas. We’d get into bed and I’d start to laugh. “Just smile a little because we are both about to be naked.”
Thomas had the tanned legs and white arse of a summer person. His body was not like the boys’ bodies with their easy muscles I’d seen before; but in the blue light, the lines on his face were almost smoothed away. As we kissed I tried to taste his age. His lips were unexpectedly soft. He smelled smoky although he did not smoke.
“How do I look?” I asked, teasing.
He shook his head. “Gorgeous.”
“Do I look lush?” Lush seemed like a better thing to look.
“No,” he said firmly, “you’re gorgeous.” He covered my eyes, his hand scented with almond soap. “What can you see?”
“Your palm. It smells of marzipan.”
I was supposed to whisper to him. He liked this. He liked this even though my story lines were simple: We’re in a meadow surrounded by poppies, I used to tell him in the beginning. Can you feel the petals against your skin? Or: We’re on a train and the sun is coming up, flickering through the trees. Now the content had changed. I said things he must have wanted to hear because these things shocked me. The Puritans, all busily fornicating through a hole in a white sheet, had the right aesthetic. If you acknowledged this enterprise was dirty and wicked from the start, no one had to try to be transgressive.
Thomas kissed my neck. “Where do you think we are?”
“I don’t know.”
He sounded impatient. “Do you think it’s hot . . . where we are?”
I closed my eyes. Outside, cars were driving along the highway. There was a kind of roar every time they passed the house’s force field, so constant it was like listening to the sea. “Pretend I’m holding a shell to your ear,” I whispered. “Do you hear the static?”
“Yes,” he moaned quietly.
I rolled on top of him. “What should I do with the shell?”
“Put it down. Dance for me.”
I laughed.
“Dance, I would like that.”
We were high off the ground. It wasn’t dark enough, and the room smelled odd. I closed my eyes. Humming a line of music, I raised my hands above my head.
“Move your hips.”
I hummed the music and rocked back and forward, dancing. If I had opened my eyes I might have seen him smiling. In this room, strangely blue, I was making him happy. I always wanted to make him happy, then some part of me rebelled. “There’s a fringe of seaweed knotted round my waist.” I rose a little and, arching my back, suggested slowly, “I’m very close. Each bauble brushes your face as I swivel my hips.” I thought further; “There’s a rainbow bird on my bare shoulder.”
A moment of silence. Introducing the parrot, I realized, was the first mistake.
Thomas gazed at me with an intense, hungry look. He inhaled. “Little girl, I can smell your skirt.”
I brushed hair from my eyes. “And does it smell of sea air?”
“Yes.”
“Does it smell salty?”
“Aha”—he smiled—“a dusky scent.”
I ran my hands along his chest. “Pretend you’ve captured me and taken me to your island of black swans . . .” I leaned down and whispered, so close my lips touched his earlobe: “And the sun is beating down on us. And no one can see us lying here, only the animals and they’re all fucking, too!” I giggled. “It’s like a zoo of fornication!” I sat up again and raised my arms, like wings, above my head. “The black swans, their feathers are beating against the water—beat, beat, beat—and the girl swan is shrieking No! No! and the boy swan, his red eyes are so intense.” I curved my arm, hiding behind it like a cape. “And when she folds her long neck under her grand wing”—I paused—“it looks like she’s been beheaded . . .”
“That’s not funny.” He sighed and jerked slightly, forcing me to roll off him.
“It was a joke!” I clutched his arm, then lay still, annoyed. “A little joke.” Light seeped in the curtains’ edges. We lay next to each other in the half dark, listening to the cars passing by on the highway. Cicadas continued their slow drone, and I felt bad. Thomas looked like a young boy with skinny muscles on his arms and undeveloped pectorals. I was lying in bed with a little boy. In this game his age kept morphing: sometimes when he kissed me he looked ridiculously old. So old that he started to look young again; because he had the pleading expression, tinged with the beginnings of disappointment, that a child with ridiculous faith uses on an adult. The potpourri, all the floral wallpaper, was still Romance, wasn’t it? Despite his high regard for amorality, he couldn’t help being kind. Usually we trysted in the house where I was living; my family’s old beach house. This was his attempt to make renting a room nicer for me.
“Are you angry?”
“No,” he said, quietly.
“Thomas, seriously, can you smell something?”
“It’s rising damp.” He got out of bed, slowly, as if he had a sore rib. “This place was probably built on swampy land.” He reached over for the complimentary bathrobe, a brown, terry-cloth model hanging from a hook on the lavatory door.
“You’re the man with the furry tan,” I told him as he slipped it on.
He smiled thinly and, walking into the bathroom, left me in the whirlpool of sheets. I lay completely still, listening to the water running. Had he been here with her? If I checked the guest book would Veronica have written some soppy note full of exclamation marks? Olde worlde charm! This brought
the magic back after 11 years of marriage! Thanks! Or else something literary about rage and potpourri. Or else something completely self-serving:
Female killers are more fascinating and more repulsive—koob ym yub—even though you’d think women would make better killers because they’re so used to blood. They know what blood feels like on their skin or their skirts, women know how quickly it spreads everywhere and how to clean it out of clothes—KOOB YM YUB—always use cold water; get to the stain quickly.
A series of cracks, like tiny lightning, streaked across the ceiling from the plasterwork rose. What about a little drink? Why wasn’t there a heritage bar-fridge stocked with absinthe and gruel? The water was turned off abruptly. “I’d better check my messages,” a still-dry Thomas announced. His clothes were hanging neatly over the armchair, whereas mine had been bombed around the room. He knew exactly where his phone was, and picked it up to dial some numbers. I loved when he did his lawyer-talk, all stern, in a very nuts-and-bolts way. I loved this, when he called into the office and spoke to everyone like they were imbeciles.
His brow furrowed. “There’s a message from Veronica.”
I made a face at him.
“Listen, I’m sorry, Kate, but it sounds like there’s been an emergency.” He went into the bathroom to speak with his wife. The door was open a few inches. “Sweetheart,” he whispered loudly. “Sweetheart, what’s happened?” A pause. “Hey? Is Lucien okay?”
I stretched. I arched my back and it was then I really noticed the sepia photograph above the bed. A small boy with a bowl haircut stood by a penny-farthing bicycle. The boy suddenly looked exactly as Lucien would, if he were wearing a lace collar and knickers. Lucien was Thomas and Veronica’s nine-year-old son, a sweet, complicated child. It was probably true he’d been my favorite before I’d even met his father. Listening to Thomas, I realized I was still slightly upset. That morning Lucien had come to school and all the other fourth-graders had laughed at him. He’d just had a growth spurt and, wearing short shorts and a blazer over his T-shirt, he’d looked like a visiting dignitary with very white thighs. “I like being different!” he’d called out theatrically. “Wearing clothes that don’t match.” It was staggering how clearly his character, including eccentricities, had been etched. I worried for him. He was very sensitive, and the sensitivity was intelligent: he had an excellent radar.
“Oh no!” Thomas groaned. “Oh no! They had no right. No right! . . . But you’re in the hotel now? . . . Hey, hey, stop crying.”
I tried to piece the conversation together: Veronica must have also been in a hotel room somewhere. And hopefully Lucien was safe; sitting, reading science fiction, in the half hour before class.
“Why don’t you try to rest?” There was a pause. “All right, sweetheart, I’ll call you later.” Another pause. “Me too,” he murmured.
Thomas waited a moment before walking back into the room. He sat roughly on the edge of the bed. “Veronica was speaking on a panel about her book. Someone stood up during question time and abused her.”
“How awful.”
“Some vigilante,” Thomas spat. “On about journalistic truth!”
Buoyed, I got out of bed. My clothes were in a flurry of rude postures all over the floor. Inside-out sleeves strangled each other; a skirt was hitched up, in flagrante delicto. I found my panty hose, and wriggled one straight leg in, then, rocking, the other straight leg.
Thomas watched me, sighing. “You look like Charlie Chaplin.” He reignited. “I don’t know what these arseholes want! The book is published with a disclaimer!” He put his head in his hands. “It is so damn controversial. Just yesterday journalists were around the peninsula muckraking, asking any old fuck for their opinion.”
“And what do the old fucks say?”
“They say: we hate this!” He waited a beat. “Et cetera.”
I knew how they felt. Thomas was sitting on the edge of the bed in the brown dressing gown, waiting for some response. I stayed silent, wondering how he’d feel if something happened to me. According to Murder at Black Swan Point, the morning after the girl was killed, Dr. Graeme Harvey woke slowly and realized his wife was missing. His head ached. He’d arrived home the previous night, late, and they’d fought badly. Margot had pushed him into admitting the truth; then, rageful, she’d struck at him with a bottle. “Not everything has to be so momentous,” he’d told her stupidly, the blood streaming down his cheek. And she’d stood there weeping, harder, for seeing him bleed. The next morning, Dr. Harvey, unaware of what he’d slept through, probably lay in bed angry. When his wife decided what was bad, when she decided he was bad, she claimed every inch of moral ground, and there was now not a balding shrub to cling to, not a single slapstick face-saver. He lay still, listening for his daughters, then listening for Margot in the kitchen. The television was on. His daughters were not supposed to watch television first thing, but as the cartoon’s tune rang through his bedroom, he realized they must have been sitting there, spooning sugared cereal into their mouths: impressions of the brain-dead. He heard the stupid music and lay there for one more minute, not yet ready—I bet part of him was too tired, already. In the act of getting vertical, it was settled: he was a prick.
I watched Thomas, his head in his hands, but imagined Dr. Harvey. Loping to the bathroom, the man must have groaned. There was a trail of blood on the bedroom carpet. Blood, far more than he’d remembered, was also on the bath mat and on the tiled floor. It was on the taps; and the basin; and flecked on the mirror. “Margot!” He strode out into the playroom, and his daughters rushed to turn off the television. “Where’s your mother?” The girls saw his face, all cut. They whimpered. He looked out the window: the car was gone. The girls were whimpering. He walked back to the bedroom and called the police.
• • •
Eventually Thomas glanced at his watch and sighing, stood up. Taking my skirt from my hands, he knelt before me. In his act of special prayer, he eased down my panty hose.
“We don’t have time.”
Thomas pressed his mouth against my thigh. I was trembling. His kisses began to escalate. My legs buckled and I lay down on the prickling rug. I could see the sturdy slats of the bed; I could see under the frill of the chair. Now we were both concentrating. But I’m like an old record—Be my guest is the signature song; Please go away, always on side B. Dumbness arrived in a series of shudders. I lay moaning and inside my head felt the spinning of a reel. The grainy black-and-whites of Ellie Siddell’s body slid behind my eyes. I winced. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face; some of her teeth were found scattered round her on the blood-soaked carpet. And the nauseating detail that’s always mentioned in tones completely hushed, an inverse fanfare: her throat was cut so viciously she had been beheaded.
• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •
Scouring every hidey-hole!
Kingsley Kookaburra flew high over Black Swan Point. He saw the beach clotted with piles of leathery seaweed; he saw the yellow dunes rising to meet the cliffs. In the search for Margot Harvey, Terence Tiger had requested the bushland gang scour every hidey-hole for a bread crumb of a trace. There was Wally Wombat analyzing tire prints. Higher! There was Percy Possum questioning a witness. Higher! Higher! There were the swans, black specks on the shimmering horizon, still singing their dirges . . . Could Kingsley fly high enough to avoid Graeme Harvey’s grief? It lurked like a mushroom cloud over the peninsula. Oh, it was jolly awful losing someone for whom one felt love.
“I did this,” the girl’s paramour must have been thinking. “I did this to you.” He probably wished he were the one who’d been killed, Kingsley imagined. He would wonder, “Were you sleeping? Were you awake? Did Margot steal up on you? Did you fight? Was it dark? Did your eyes have time to adjust?” When studying a crime, the kookaburra was not shy in peeling back the surface to uncover a protagonist’s most basic emotions; psychiatric profiling provided rich ore indeed—“I should have known this would happen,” Graeme Harvey would thin
k as his children cried for their mother. He’d want to hate his wife, oh certainly, but silently that man would scream: “Why couldn’t she have taken the knife to me!”
Kingsley began his graceful descent. With his keen eyes he noticed the mise-en-scène of a silverbark leaf far below. A male phosphorescent insect offered a female of his species food, then took it back after copulation so as to gain energy for another sex partner . . . . All through nature there were such stories of deceit and betrayal. Watching animals at their best and worst had taught the kookaburra a great deal. It was difficult to admit our core desires were hammered out long, long ago in the ancestral environment, and Kingsley could not easefully align himself with evolutionary psychology. Still, he’d recently read a study of working-class Germans, which found that 72 percent of the men expressed a desire for extramarital sex, compared to 27 percent of the women. Kingsley laughed slyly. “Bloody Huns!” Could one conquer one’s instincts? Perhaps it was innate to men’s sexual psychology to be so disposed toward seeking variety. Women’s desires and fantasies simply didn’t seem as intense.
But wait, down, far below, there was a snake! Kingsley was hungry. It was getting ever harder to eat well round here—his relatives had even taken to raiding suburban goldfish ponds. In a grand flutter of wings, the kookaburra swooped and grabbed the snake from behind, smacking its poisonous head again and again against a rock. He laughed his maniacal laugh. “Merry, merry king of the bush is he!” Kingsley, his belly now full, flew over the cliffs, past rock—bruised purple, bruised red—swollen with history. Through the mad blue of sky, he soared. “Oh, why can’t we just love each other!” the kookaburra cried.
THOMAS RETURNED the key to the receptionist while I waited in the low silver car. Without the air-conditioner in operation, there was a sauna feel, and I sat in the hotel’s staff parking area sweating out my sin. Thomas had parked next to a rust-eaten Dumpster. Soon enough a young guy with a long shock of fringe and a loping walk came out to throw away some cardboard boxes. He stared at the expensive car quizzically, and I ducked down as if I’d lost something. Opening up the glove box, I rifled through Thomas’s stash of postcoital products—a comb, some cologne, a hip flask—until I found a packet of mint breath fresheners. Three for me, and when Thomas finally opened the door, I leaned forward and placed one on his tongue.