by Chloe Hooper
I had imagined Lucien’s parents were very supportive of his intellectual precocity, although Lucien gave the impression things at home were fiery. The children often complained about their parents—“They don’t know what fun is.” “They think you’re silly.” “They don’t understand what you like to eat”—but one time Lucien had been quite upset. He wouldn’t venture into the playground all lunchtime, and, after skirting around the question, I finally asked, “Is everything okay with Mum and Dad?” “Well,” he said softly, “they don’t really understand how it feels. You can be having a friendly dispute, because there’s no relationship without a few bumps in it, and they’ll say, ‘That’s it! Go to your room! No pocket money for a year! No TV!’ And it was just a little dispute.” He shook his head, looking sad. “I don’t understand how they can go ballistic when they’ve been perfectly calm for the last half hour.” “Kids do that too,” I’d rallied. Lucien had sighed. “We naturally have short fuses,” he’d explained, “but they should have longer ones. They’ve been alive a lot longer, and they’ve taken more insults and stuff.”
Veronica gave her son a moist-wipe, encouraging him to clean his face. Lucien took it and dabbed himself without conviction. He didn’t know whether to sit with Veronica or to play with the other kids. A group of boys were hobbling around the picnic tables trying to pick each other’s pockets. Then, without even being locked up, they time-traveled to the point at which they were breaking out of jail. They’d heard escapees survived on whale blubber scraped off the rocks; seaweed; wallaby; the odd black swan’s rancid carcass. The children all reeled around, delighting in their nausea. The convicts might not have known how to swim, but they did. They mimed freestyle around the lawn with only Darren stopping to force Alastair’s drowning. In their faux rags they looked like a children’s theater troupe performing the off-cuts of Oliver! Lucien ran into the fray and the kids stopped to renegotiate. They had heard of one convict who, trying to escape overland, found a dead kangaroo and wrapped himself in the animal’s fur. Lucien was allowed to be the kangaroo man, and Darren and Henry were suddenly the officers out hunting the ingredient for kangaroo tail soup.
“Boys!” I called out in warning. They ignored me.
Miss Byrne: What is a law?
Alastair: A law says kids can’t drink beer.
Miss Byrne: What would happen if there were no laws?
Eliza: People would steal a lot more and cars would run into each other and there would be murder all over the place and we would have an awful, cruel, fighting country.
“Boys!” Behind them rose the half-buildings, made amber by the sun. The penitentiary looked like a child’s unfinished sketch of a house with many windows. It was hardly as if living in a civil society was natural to us, I thought, annoyed. We obviously didn’t have to go back many generations to find a state of utter lawlessness, coexisting alongside the Draconian. In the museum, while Veronica had been admiring herself in the reflective glass, I’d read of one of Australia’s first contributions to the true-crime genre. It was the diary of the escaped convict turned bushranger Michael Howe. In 1818, Howe’s knapsack was found containing a book he’d made from kangaroo skin. Inside, with the blood of the animals he’d slaughtered, he’d written down his dreams. He’d written of his victims seeking retribution. He’d written of the other bushrangers he’d betrayed, and of Aborigines killing him. He’d written of his sister, whom he loved, back in England. And of wanting to live in a nice house with a little garden. In blood, he’d listed the fruit, flowers, and vegetables he hoped one day to grow.
I watched the boys playing, and it occurred to me you could do a fabulous re-creation of Howe’s diary for young readers. Children would love the kangaroo-fur cover and scarlet print. The story had the gore; it had the mystery; it had the pathos. It was so subtle you could only read between the lines to understand that in Chapter One boatloads of British riffraff spilled out. Runaway convicts, like the blood diarist himself, learned bushcraft from the Aborigines and disappeared into the bush. Meanwhile the Aborigines, terrified of the colonists’ guns vomiting forth thunder, had their land cleared. Dispossessed, they formed raiding parties, lighting decoy fires to steal settlers’ guns and food. Settlers were speared, but during the seven-year Black War the whites that died did not surpass the number that arrived monthly on each new convict ship. And by 1839 most of the indigenous population had died or been driven away. Our local history is the Ur-true-crime story, and in volume after volume the bodies pile up. The government placed a bounty on Michael Howe, and the bushranger was discovered living like a wildman, wearing kangaroo skins in a tiny hut covered with flowers. His killers decapitated him and his head was placed on display in Hobart.
“Henry and Darren!” I yelled. “Stop that immediately!”
I turned. Veronica was watching me. She became sleepy again, stretching. She touched at a thin string of seed pearls around her neck like at a rosary. I cleared my throat. The pearls looked like puffed rice. “It must be incredibly hard in your profession,” I said, “having to concentrate day in, day out on such brutality.”
“Incredibly,” she answered lightly. “It was incredibly hard. I was so squeamish; even terrified of blood when I started. But still, like everyone else, I’d rather read about a crime of passion.” Veronica smiled. “Of course, they’re the most romantic crimes; the ones we respond to most vehemently. Who gets worked up about white-collar crime? Who really cares about money laundering or embezzling?”
“No one does.”
“Exactly.” We both laughed, and this laughter made us intimate. We turned to watch the children as they continued escaping. “Lucien does think you’re lovely,” Veronica said again. “When I was little we always had such sadists as teachers.” She touched my arm, adding, “You really got the feeling they despised children; all soaking their whips in brine.”
“You’ve got to love children in this profession,” I told her quickly, “just to do the job.”
Veronica raised an eyebrow. “I can imagine.”
“And your son is such a terrific smart kid.”
“Thank you.”
Lucien was tearing Darren from a shark’s jaws, then whittling a spear. I chuckled, expecting Veronica to join me. She smiled slightly sadly; “I don’t think he’s got any of my genes at all. In photos of him and his father around the same age, it’s uncanny.” She shook her head. “You can’t pick them apart.” For a moment she looked wistful, then she turned to me, holding out a sandwich. “Lucien won’t eat this. Would you like it?”
“Oh, thank you.”
At that moment, I wanted more than anything for Veronica to like me. I had no problem suspending belief that I was her husband’s lover. In fact, perhaps I never had been: I was her friend. Being able to say, “Yes, Veronica is a great woman” seemed very mature. It struck me there was something so pure about her. I guessed that was the irony. You probably needed that purity to embark on such a brave, gory project—if you were already exhausted and cynical, it would all be too much. I took another bite, savoring the salmon. Since Veronica had brought it to my attention, I now thought perhaps Malcolm was catching my eye and giving me meaningful glances. While we ate lunch he stood staring out at the bay. He’d skip a pebble, then look back to make sure we were watching. It was impressive that he felt so passionately about all this history. Only just obscured, over the water, were the Suicide Cliffs which marked the eastern side of Point Puer. I saw Malcolm skip another pebble. “Oh, this sandwich is good!”
“Lucien even runs like his father.”
I held the bread, staring at the water.
“He runs and his arms barely move.”
“Really?”
She gestured over the bay, shaking her head. “My husband finds my connection to the Black Swan Point crime slightly . . . repellent,” Veronica confided. “He’s very old-fashioned. But while writing the book I walked with him around the cliffs and I had to acknowledge there’s a struggle within all of u
s . . . An eye for an eye.”
I didn’t speak.
“You know, Kate, you get to an age and your whole body starts to fall apart,” Veronica said. “A lot of the women I know are having their eyes done. My best friend just fixed her breasts.” She saw my expression and added, “I understand it—she’s thinking of getting a divorce—and I’ve felt them.” Veronica laughed briefly. “Lou told me about it while we were shopping. Very funny, us in a changing room; she lifting up her shirt for me to have a squeeze.” She paused. “They weren’t rocklike. Listen, all I’m saying is I understand it, but I’m not doing it. If I did it I’d still look like a forty-year-old woman. Why try to look like a neat forty-year-old woman?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well . . . the thing is, for every wrinkle there’s more wisdom.”
“No, there’s just another wrinkle.” Her voice grew businesslike; she was finally waking. “My friend found out the hard way that men reach a certain age, and they want to fuck around, because they only can for about five more minutes, and they want young flesh. ‘So, fine,’ I say to her. ‘Let them fuck.’ You know? You don’t have to take a knife to yourself.”
“You can take a knife,” I began, before I could stop myself, “to the young flesh.”
She laughed. “That’s good, that’s quite good.”
• • •
After lunch, Malcolm stared out to where the convict ships would have dropped anchor. The children followed his gaze, disappointment clouding their faces. There was now a luxury cruise ship parked in Opossum Bay, but what had they expected? A chain of skulls strung together? Pickpockets’ loot hidden under loose rock? I could hear my heart beating.
Malcolm pointed toward a small island, covered with eucalyptus, in the middle of the bay: “In between Port Arthur and Point Puer is L’Isle des Morts,” he announced dramatically, before admitting the convicts referred to their burial site as Dead Island. “The officers had headstones facing toward England; the convicts’ mass graves faced in the opposite direction. The gravedigger was a giant man who walked with a cane in each hand,” he continued. “The authorities were relieved when he volunteered to live by himself on the island, because he had a diabolical temper and often broke the other convicts’ legs with one swipe of a cane.” Malcolm paused for the cartoon to register. “Gravedigging was a permanent position: partly because he couldn’t swim, and everyone thought the bay was so infested you could walk to Dead Island, and back, on the heads of sharks.” He paused again—half historian, half stand-up comedian. “The gravedigger stayed on the island, having dug his own grave in the nicest spot, until he began to be haunted.” The children all laughed. “He had to light a bonfire so someone would row over to save him.”
Malcolm started to recite a convict ballad that no one, now, knew the music to.
Isle of the dead! well might
Thy verdant bosom be,
The last retreat of honor fair
The death home of the free
But moldering there, the slave of crime
And wretch of blighted name
Sink in the dread repose of guilt
To rest in graves of shame.
I breathed deeply, trying to remain calm. Malcolm, with his medallion profile, definitely invested a lot of emotion in all this. The children stood listening to his powerful voice, a crew of Artful Dodgers arrested by boredom. I wished they would pay more attention. It wouldn’t be long until no one in our culture could be bothered to memorize these ballads. And it was not as though the children were thinking of their country’s history. Of course they weren’t. They were thinking: “Those bus seats smelled of banana peel and sweat.” The bus seats had smelled bad—they’d been upholstered in a thick synthetic material with a colorful pattern which brought to mind vomiting tropical fish. The children were hoping: “Please don’t make me sit next to Darren on the bus ride back.” Darren had made Alastair count roadkill all along the highway: “That was an old sock!” “No, it was a squashed cat, I swear!” An older teacher once confided that when he heard of children being badly beaten, he now thought, Yeah, and what had the kid done? I listened to the ballad, wondering if there were any reliable statistics as to how many of my students were descended from degenerates transported in the nineteenth century.
Isle of the homeless dead!
Within thy rock-bound breast,
Full many a heart that throbb’d for home
Now find untroubl’d rest;
For home, alas! they throbb’d in vain;
A mother’s fond caress,
A father’s care, a sister’s smile,
Has ceas’d their hearts to bless.
After a few more verses, I found myself thinking of the Marnes sleeping together. My face flushed. Early on, Thomas had gripped me by the arm, demanding, “So, what have you done?” I hadn’t known what he was talking about. “Have you ever slept with a woman?” he’d asked hopefully. “No.” He tried again: “Have you ever slept with two men?” “No,” I’d answered, “have you?” He shook his head. “Have you ever slept with three men?” I’d asked. “Four?”
Had Veronica done these things? How many perversions could she check off?
More recently Thomas had told me about a case he’d come across, a Tasmanian bestiality trial: a husband had come home, found his wife with their rottweiler, and had shot the dog. Apparently the husband had filmed various videos of this happening before, so he shouldn’t have been completely surprised. And perhaps as a result, the wife had decided to sue him. “She could be suing him for infringement of property,” Thomas had explained, his face calm, handsome. “If someone shoots your dog it’s trespass on your dog. The cost of replacing the animal she could certainly recover, provided it was her dog.” He made a steeple with his fingers on which to rest his chin. “But unless this was a ‘working dog,’ as it were, a breeding dog, it would be difficult to recover further damages.” For a moment he was silent. “This is how I’d handle the case: it strikes me that if the woman was in a loving relationship with the dog, and her old man came home and shot the dog, she could bring an action against the husband for negligence resulting in nervous shock.” “What’s nervous shock?” I’d asked. “Well, one of the symptoms is loss of sexual function.” Later, I’d wondered what he’d really been trying to tell me.
Initially with Thomas I had been willfully innocent. It was convenient to play the obstinate naïf rather than confront the consequences of his sexual urbanity. “Was this the way people really behaved?” I would ask myself in mock affront. “Not the woman and the man, nor their dog. I mean the people who told these stories—Thomas and Veronica at their kitchen table, so worldly they don’t give two hoots in hell about an abused puppy!” Then I’d shake my head, like any normal person, at how bizarre, at how terrifying, people managed to make sex.
• • •
On and on the thing went: isle of the exil’d dead! isle of the fetter’d dead! isle of the unwep’t dead! After the ballad’s ninth verse, Veronica leaned toward me. “I’ve decided that I hate Malcolm,” she whispered. I turned to her. “Sociopath,” she mouthed, as he continued reciting this tedious convict ballad no one even had the music to. I studied him more closely. “You’re right,” I whispered back. Perhaps, after all was said and done, younger men were a waste of time. Yes, he was cute. But didn’t people with weird proclivities get attracted to these dark, sadistically charged places? Then again, if I felt some deviant vibe off him, was I just recognizing a part of myself? Veronica’s book had neglected to acknowledge that these horrific crimes were not just the things other people did. These deeds were with us; they were in our nervous systems. We read true-crime books to learn about ourselves.
Danielle: In a perfect world things would get all crowded because there wouldn’t be killers to kill people. And no one would get sick, and it would get all crowded.
Henry: But just say there were killers, and say there’s reincarnation—well, you’d choose which animal you’d reinc
arnate into, you’d just go, “A lion!” and kill the person who killed you.
Anaminka: I think in a perfect world maybe we’d be something else, other than a person. Scientists say we’ve been fish before, and they say we’ve had gills before.
Billy: That’s something you can’t prove. Like you can’t prove if we were, but you can’t prove that we’re not.
The ballad finished and I nudged Anaminka. She stared at the ground, blushing, as she thanked Malcolm on behalf of Endport Primary. I looked over the water, with rising anxiety. It was small consolation realizing Veronica knew so much about rage and humiliation because she was married to a chronic adulterer. No wonder she’d chosen to write Murder at Black Swan Point. No wonder there’d been such satisfaction in making all a life’s tributaries flow irresistibly toward doom. Do you think Margot enjoyed the murder? I asked myself. Do you think she enjoyed cutting the girl up? Of course she did. You have to take your pleasure where you find it.
We headed back to the cultural center, Veronica walking next to her son. I’d realized that I understood her book much better when I gave Margot her face. When I thought of the things I did with Thomas, it was no leap at all to imagine her beautiful reserve and cool asides hiding someone out of control. But of course there was another intimacy for which Margot must have hated Ellie.
I watched Veronica looking over Lucien’s worksheet. Margot must have hated Ellie for touching her children: for putting her face next to the little girls’ faces; for stroking the girls’ soft hair. Ellie probably touched Margot’s children tenderly, engineering it so that if the girls’ daddy walked into the reception room he’d see the kids draped all over his lover, fawning all over her; and he’d smile, so proud of this happy little family. Margot probably walked into the clinic and she had to fight with her daughters just to put their shoes on. She had to fight with them just to put their socks on, and the sock had to be lined up perfectly on the little foot. Then her daughter would pull her foot away, readjusting the sock so many times that Margot wanted to snap her ankle, and shove the foot into the shoe. And Ellie—“that bitch,” Margot thought—watched all of this like she was the good mummy. And Margot would drive home barely able to breathe, thinking of how she’d teach that girl a lesson.