A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  • • •

  I was exhausted: the children were so completely alive in this dead place. They waltzed and wrestled while behind them the building’s facades looked diseased. These buildings had seen the end of the world and would keep rotting until they were just piles of bricks. This was Sir George’s mill to grind criminals into God-fearing citizens. His failed Utopia. And in our discussions the children and I had surely hit upon Sir George’s impasse: “Why in his omnipotence and benevolence does God allow evil to occur?” If God could make the perfect world why did this place even exist?

  Billy: The world would probably be something like eighty-five percent good. It’s just the murderers and robbers and all that. If they were off it, I reckon this world would be a perfect world.

  Danielle: In a perfect world you wouldn’t need to go to school or have libraries because you’d know all that. And you could do all that. And you would be perfect and you could do anything. You could fly.

  Veronica linked arms with me. “I want us to hang out. Perhaps when my husband can baby-sit we could run away for an evening, and have a little drink.” She tore a page out of her diary and wrote down her phone number. “Just call anytime if you’re lonely, or want a chat, or feel scared all alone there.” She smiled at me conspiratorially. “It’s been great getting acquainted.” She shook her head. “I think you’re wonderful.”

  Turning, she looked back to where the divers had searched for Margot. Veronica leaned in close, confiding they’d had little success. “The water was so full of silt and seaweed that the divers couldn’t see a thing. They swam in semicircles, the palms of their hands searching the sea floor for a body. The men could only be lowered down twice a day, for fifteen minutes, when the tides were the least dangerous, so fierce are these currents.”

  I stared across flat, gray Opossum Bay. Veronica added softly, “Around the eastern side, the waters are full of sharks and sea lice. Bodies disappear there constantly.” I felt myself starting to spin. She sighed: “Still, the divers claimed if Margot had been down there, they would’ve probably found some trace . . .”

  I had to excuse myself.

  People speculated that Mrs. Harvey could have been alive. After all, she was well connected, she had access to a fair amount of money. Maybe, like Veronica’s “friend,” she’d had plastic surgery and had come back to work at the bakery so as to be able to see her daughters. She gave them extra jam tarts whenever they placed an order. Maybe she took a job as their cleaner. She still cleaned their toilet, but she had the satisfaction of having destroyed Graeme’s life the way he had tried to destroy hers. She was selling apples on a chair by the side of a road. She was wearing a parachute-silk tracksuit, walking in slow motion down the main street . . . Or she was a sylph, in a low-slung silver sports car, cruising around harassing the wanton. She’d married again and had, say, one child—a boy—and maybe she’d even done something to bring attention to her previous persona’s plight. She’d written a book.

  When the school bus arrived, my name had to be called out over the center’s loudspeaker. I was in the women’s toilets on my hands and knees, retching until I’d lost the sandwich.

  FINALLY I CAME upon an inlet where the foundations of an old jetty rose like driftwood soldiers marching over undulating mud. A rotted-out rowboat lay nearby. Someone, rowing along, had suddenly realized the flood was over and silence had then calcified everything left. I’d been stumbling along this dirt road, praying for some sign of life. Now, opposite the jetty, shone the windows of a small weatherboard house. The house was painted sage, long yellowed by the sun. A utility truck with oversized headlights was parked in the drive, its front wheel chained to a nearby tree. The surrounding garden seemed full of detritus picked off the mudflats. Plastic buckets, lost from their toy spades, were planted with geraniums. Flower beds, lined with shells, hosted arrangements of petrified wood, a collection of broken paddles, the skull of a large bird. Then strangely, in the middle of this sea junk, appeared a white fountain tiered like a wedding cake.

  The effect, overall, wasn’t necessarily welcoming. Somebody had written warnings on the plastic lids of ice-cream containers before nailing them to trees. No bike riding—in awkward, strangled letters—No trespassing. Beware of Dog. There was a fence made of driftwood; and behind it, a small dog barked strangely. “Hello!” I shouted in the direction of the house. “Hello!”

  Nothing happened. Taking the apple out of my pocket, and ignoring the handwritten signs, I opened the gate. The dog ran toward me, squealing. Holding the apple away from my body, I tried to encourage it to keep its distance. I didn’t want it to touch me and I did a kind of two-step every time it approached. The dog had no tail and a shiny black coat, pointy little teeth and the fine legs of a pig. If you avoided its line of vision it became confused, forgetting about you. It snuffled around in the dirt, its hoggy arse in the air, and one felt sure this creature must have sprung from the loins of a pig. Then it looked up, all dog, and chased its phantom tail in retarded little circles. The animal started sniffing around my ankles. It leaped, leaning its front paws against my calf. I took a bite out of the apple, spitting the chunk on the ground. I jerked my leg: the hog-dog deferred to the apple.

  “You have a problem?” a deep voice asked.

  I spun around to face the dog’s owner: a very large, mustached man. He was in his early forties with swollen, gray-blue eyes. Under each lid, dark rings were carved into his face so deeply it seemed he’d forgotten how to sleep. “Your dog certainly likes apple,” I said, glancing down. The man continued staring at me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Kate Byrne, I was driving nearby, and . . .” I felt nauseous. “There was a problem with my brakes.” I looked up at his house. A woman was standing by the door, an incredibly thin woman with long hair. “I was wondering if I could use your phone.” I forced a smile. “Or, if you could make a call for me . . . to a nearby garage.”

  “There is no nearby garage.”

  “The car started whistling, this awful whistling, and then I was pumping the brakes, but . . .”

  “How far off?”

  “I’ve been walking for an hour.”

  “So, you’ll probably also be wanting a ride back?”

  He opened the gate. I paused and waved at the thin woman; she saw me and went back inside. A moment later their fountain sprayed on, but she did not return. “What’s your dog’s name?” I asked, breaking the silence. It wasn’t the kind of animal you’d just call Rover.

  “Bullet.”

  “That’s a good name.”

  He led me toward the house, then paused. On a windowsill were rows of plastic dolls; they wore ballooning crocheted skirts, the kind people use as tea cozies or toilet paper covers. He thought better of taking me inside, and I followed him behind the house to a corrugated iron shed. The shed was concrete-floored and cold, stinking of something metallic. Each of his tools had been outlined in black on the fibro-wall. But it seemed he was lax putting them back in place: silhouettes showed two handsaws on the loose, a wrench and large screwdriver also unaccounted for. I had no idea what the man would make here. Outside old farm equipment and pieces of scrap metal were lying around.

  “I’ll go and get ready,” he told me.

  “Well.” I smiled. “I’ll be here.”

  He left and I walked in tiny circles of panic. The back wall was made of fly wire, and although I could see no flies, I could hear their high-pitched howl. Part of the concrete was carpeted with kangaroo skins, but I didn’t like to stand on them. A boy I knew once told me, “When you shoot your first kangaroo you expect the world to change, bells to ring, but nothing happens.” Walking over a rug I kicked up the corner and stamped the skin back in place, feeling stupidly apologetic. The man’s workbench ran along one wall. I inspected it from end to end, then looked up and saw a picture ripped from a magazine of a woman with her legs spread wide. “Please God, help me.”

  Inside the house, the man and the woman started fighting. She raised h
er voice. It was shrill, furious. There’d be a break, then she’d start again. I’d obviously interrupted them in the middle of some dispute. A tiny piece of oxidized mirror hung on the shed’s wall: I stood in snagged panty hose and high heels, my clothes crushed and dirty from jumping out of the car. I had dressed for the hotel, but now just looked whorish. I couldn’t hear exactly what the woman was screaming, although I began to feel perhaps it involved me. Why would she want to help? Why would she want him to help? Her voice rose again, then suddenly stopped. I continued waiting.

  This space: it smelled of man. It smelled of men when they were alone. I wished suddenly that my father, or my grandfather, had better prepared me for how foreign men were. I wondered what they even thought, with those blank faces. It was like gauging the sea. In high school we sat in sex education and blew up condoms, sending them flying across the room, but no one mentioned that when men made polite conversation it would always seem like an interaction that had been dubbed.

  I stared at the ripped picture. There was no sound now in the house, which was slightly worse. I squatted next to a tap to wash my face and hands. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark. I brushed dirt off my skirt, realizing my problem wasn’t even the clothes I was wearing. It was my body, unfortunately feminine, underneath. I would never get over the shock of developing breasts: the injustice of having no say in your own body’s design. As I waited for the man to come back, I counted all the reasons I had to hate Thomas.

  When I’d first told him about the class philosophy sessions he’d suggested that I teach the children about Nietz-sche. I’d rejected the idea after checking in the World Book Encyclopedia—“There was no perfect world, no truth, no God.” “People should live their lives like works of art.” “Plato was to blame for everything.” I now groaned. Thomas didn’t really believe any of that. His bleak theories were only used to put out libidinous spot fires. All his amorality depended on his being married. When I raised with Thomas the late-night phone calls, he wore a smug look as if imagining Veronica and me mud-wrestling. If I pushed the point, he became quietly furious. The theme of his sulking: do you really think this possible of my refined wife? His adulterous side was just his dreaming. And I was a character in the dream. I could shriek on and on about Veronica’s disturbed nature, but he would drive back to his very straight life, laughing at my rants as one laughs at any crazy who abuses you in your sleep. Would it come too late, the moment in which he woke up? Later, Graeme Harvey would have remembered his own state of oblivion. “Of course this was going to happen!” he would have cried. “Of course!” one always cries, rolled by the shadow of what if?

  • • •

  The man came back into the shed wearing a guerrilla print suit. He was holding a glass of raspberry cordial. “I thought you might be thirsty,” he said. Quickly I moved away from the spreadeagled legs and took the glass, thanking him. I shouldn’t drink this, I thought, raising it to my lips. The sugary liquid ran down my throat: I imagined the paralysis starting from my feet, then working up. The man was big, powerful, but his slumped shoulders gave a lurching quality to his movements as if his arms were far too long. He collected a stretch of rope, then a plastic tarpaulin. I was frightened of offending him, but I couldn’t drink all the cordial. He’d mixed it too sweet.

  The man led me again past the row of dolls. The woman was nowhere in sight. He led me through the strange garden and started unchaining the truck’s front wheel from the tree. He fixed a rope to a cage-like structure, made from old clothing racks, that had been welded to the truck’s chassis. Bullet sniffed at my ankles. I thought of a dog and a pig together; a pig baby swelling in the dog. Bullet squealed, leaning its paws on my calf. The panty hose tore further. I wondered if this man had let the pig impregnate the dog for sport. Then, as if reading my mind, he turned, grabbing the evidence—this yelping creature—by the collar, tossing it aside. I cleared my throat. “You’ve got a great view here.” He looked out at the abandoned jetty, at all the mud, but said nothing.

  We got into the truck and drove away. Behind my head was a gun rack where two rifles were resting. “Thank you so much for doing this,” I murmured. “I really appreciate it.” All the tools missing from his shed wall rolled around on the floor under the passenger seat. I tried to hold my skirt down, level with my knees. Evening was falling; twilight to keep you punch-drunk. We drove slowly into all the little minutes where nothing happens. There was nothing to fill you up here but the casuarinas making their she sound in the wind; the side of a hill covered in razor grass looking like the hide of a giant animal.

  Along these roads you had to drive slowly. In the dusk, wallabies could suddenly bound across the road, inches from your car. If you stopped in time they disappeared into the paddocks, and the humps of razor grass all turned into dream creatures. If you hit one it could do big damage to the radiator. Poor baby was my mother’s mantra every time she passed a squashed thing. “Something should be done about this,” she once told me, and I’d snapped back: “It would be a full-time job, traveling up and down, moving the kill off the road.” “No,” she’d said, “something should be done to protect the animals. You’d think the mother wallabies, and bandicoots, and wombats would tell their babies not to go onto the white streak leading nowhere.” As if the babies would’ve listened.

  “Over there’s the Suicide Cliffs,” the man said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Mainlanders come down here all the time. They won’t do it at home, but they don’t mind coming down here and stinking up our water.” He lit a cigarette, without opening the window. “They probably think it’s their last hurrah, but who’d even notice?”

  I cleared my throat. “Were you raised around here?”

  “No, the highlands.” He smoked awhile, flicking ash in the tray. “My grandfather was a trapper.” He laughed. “It was different for him: he used the wire noose, not the bullet.”

  I skipped a breath. “What was the wire noose?”

  “Oh, well, the necker.” He exhaled slowly. “Those blokes built traps with anything they could find. Stick a bush pole up a possum tree; place a wire noose halfway along it; the lazy possum, using it as a shortcut, will get caught and jump off the pole.” He took one hand off the wheel, and tugged at an imaginary noose. “Incredible. They were canny, the snarers were then; I’ve seen a dangling loop over a game trail, it’d release with the animal’s head in it, spring up, and that’s that.” He nodded, satisfied. “They’d use old wood, hemp, any bit of wire. My grandfather had the record for the biggest haul of possum skins year after year. He was King of the Snarers.”

  “It sounds like you learned a lot from him.”

  “I did,” he said, and in a deep voice warned, “‘Respect what you take: you are taking something’s life.’” Now he sounded angry: “Everyone’s out there shooting wallaby for pet food. It’s only twenty-five dollars for a bloody license! That’s why I’d like to get into the human consumption market.”

  “Truly?” He was a hunter. I realized in a flash what he hung from the coat racks welded behind us.

  “You need to do a special course and then convert your truck. You need to be able to wash the roo down immediately, and you need a refrigerator.”

  “Like a mobile abattoir.”

  His glance was quick, expressionless. “It would be bloody expensive, but it would be worth it. Call the guy with the chilled van, and say, ‘I’m starting shooting at seven, meet me at twelve.’ I might only shoot twenty, but it’s twenty dollars each, and at least I wouldn’t have to skin them.” He turned to me. “If it’s pet food you have to have the animal skun out completely, completely dressed down. And no one now even wants the skins. Even in the eighties you could get fifteen dollars for a good possum skin, maybe six dollars for a wallaby.”

  The hunter lit another cigarette, and I noticed there was no lever to open my door. “I went out the other night,” he continued. “One whole paddock was moving. All you could see was blac
k, moving. Well, I shot forty, in three hours, off one paddock.” He flicked ash, looking pleased. Then he smiled at me: our date was going well. “The worst part about this job,” he confided, “is you predominantly become a hermit.”

  “At least you’re your own boss.”

  “Oh, you get peace and quiet.” He nodded. “And I’ve seen things no other human would ever see . . .”

  In the distance the beached Mercedes appeared. I felt a wave of relief. “There’s my car!” It was squashing a cluster of shrubs, the back wheel raised off the ground. Suddenly, I was embarrassed. Once, driving in the wind, I’d watched a butterfly slaughtered on the Mercedes insignia: a poor wing caught in the inverted peace symbol. It didn’t count for anything that this car was actually a wreck; the enormous rusted thing glimmered with false promise in the twilight.

  The man stopped the truck. After taking off his seat belt, he suddenly leaned down and pulled something from underneath the seat. I started, but it was only a photo album. “This might interest you.”

  “Did you take these?” He nodded. They were photographs of deer: a deer staring straight into the camera, a silhouette of a deer’s antlers against a sunset. I turned the page and saw photographs of two gray kangaroos fighting in the mist; another of a kangaroo tending her joey. These were the animals the man could’ve killed had he wanted to. “Taking these photos,” I said, “it must be very intimate.”

  He smiled, staring at my thighs. “It is.”

  I turned the pages and tried not to show shock. Now there was a series of him, dressed in camouflage, smiling broadly as he squatted over a deer which he’d just shot in the neck. I turned another page. He was underneath that same deer’s head in a taxidermy shop. “Yeah, I guess the worst part about this job is you lose all social life,” he told me. I kept turning the pages. I thought of the photographs included in true-crime books. I’d seen a naked woman, like a failed magic act, literally severed in two. One half of the woman’s body lay in the grass. The other, pelvis tilted upward, had been left next to it. Two fully clothed policemen, both wearing suits and hats, were each crouching over a body half, gazing into the camera.