by Chloe Hooper
I dragged a chair toward a higher kitchen cupboard, looking for something sharp. If I were more resourceful I could have booby-trapped this whole house. There were candles, and old rubber gloves; scraps of chicken wire, sandpaper, nails, and a hacksaw. Foreign objects, relating to the natural world, made their way into all the house’s corners. At one stage I’d found the ceiling stained, and had supposed the roof to be leaking. A local handyman came over and looked up thoughtfully. “Not to worry,” he’d reassured me, “it’s just possum piss.” I now leaned forward. The cupboard smelled dank. I leaned forward again, and felt my face covered in cobwebs. I had found my father’s fishing basket; and after wiping free the cobwebs, inside it, I found the knife.
Anaminka: You know how I said, “What are dreams made of?” I’ve found a solution. There’s a little factory in heaven that’s making dreams. And this dream is about a lion and it eats you, do you want it? Okay, then this is a dream about chocolate . . . But you have to pay. You pay in nightmares.
Lucien: In all my dreams it’s mute, in every dream I haven’t spoken.
Lucien: In all my dreams I can’t see anyone’s face. I can’t see any details. I see color. But I don’t see who they are. I know someone’s there, but I don’t see their faces.
I too had known someone was there. And last night, driving in the dark, I had finally seen their face. Veronica’s malice was hardly a surprise. But Thomas could no longer claim innocence. I stepped down from the chair, examining the knife.
At first I’d felt uncomfortable talking to the children about death, even though for them it was an area of intense interest. Younger children recognized the fact of physical death, but could not separate it from life: they’d take off their doll’s limbs, and realign them in mutant poses; they’d lie on the floor, playing extinct, and scream for a Life injection. These young ones couldn’t conceive that death was a permanent condition, ironically, because it seemed too great a force. Death could eat and it could drink. So surely Death could be outtricked and outrun. “Do you think of Death often?” a famous psychologist once asked a smart four-year-old. “Yes, I think of when I hit it on the head, and yet it doesn’t go away.” Around my children’s age, some difficult lessons were about to be learned. The day before they’d had to face the fact that the animals, with which they’d identified, had been unable to outwit mortality.
Lucien’s parents had probably drilled this message in early. I thought of something I’d witnessed at the school fair. Children bearded with chocolate icing had surrounded the cupcake-decorating table. Balloons were being twisted: “Choose between a sausage dog or a saber!” From a distance I’d noticed Thomas and Lucien by the horror table. In a row were a series of black cardboard boxes. The eyeballs box contained peeled grapes; the guts box, red jelly. Cheese sticks were the corpse’s waxy fingers, spaghetti the hair. I’d watched Lucien grimacing as he put his hands in with the severed ears—dried apricots—and had felt chaos at work. Thomas was encouraging his son’s familiarity with the butchered body. “How does it feel?” he would have asked the little boy. “Describe the texture to me: do you find it soft? too soft? Concentrate. Does it give to the touch?” I now wondered whom he had been imagining was lying there dissected.
Carrying the knife, I walked to my bedroom and opened the wardrobe. I knew I had to approach Thomas directly. At midday Lucien had Junior League cricket. I would take the car to the garage, then give Thomas an ultimatum: “Stop this!” I would yell, “or I’ll leave town! I’ll finish teaching your child, and all the others!” I opened the wardrobe and looked through my clothes. Everything seemed so dowdy. Thomas said he liked the way I dressed: it was probably the antithesis of his wife’s style, but I wanted to confront him with more sophistication. I held up a shirt with a low neckline, posing.
The great irony, I realized, was that all the locals fervently believed Graeme Harvey killed Eleanor Siddell. I had not believed it. In a small town people tell stories for every other reason than communicating truth. I didn’t think Ellie was with another man that night; nor in the end that Graeme waited for the man to leave, then killed her in a jealous rage. I didn’t think Margot’s shoes were found on the edge of the cliff; nor that Graeme had planted them there, hoping to suggest she’d jumped straight out of her slippers into the waves below. In a small town people will tell stories they don’t believe themselves. The school receptionist had explained to me: “If you have a horrible, violent psychopath who kills a body, and slashes it up, and smears blood everywhere, well, if he comes home and he has a little budgerigar in a cage, and he puts his big bloody mitt in the cage, and strokes the bird, oh-so-gently, well that makes what he’s done so much more awful. It doesn’t have to be a bird, though,” she’d said sincerely. “It can be a cat or a dog he pets, any animal! And after all, this man was a vet!”
There had been an obituary notice for Graeme Harvey in the local newspaper a few weeks ago. He’d died of throat cancer, which is apparently a vicious way to die. It starts with a terrible cough, one’s neck becomes swollen, one finds it hard to eat and so starves. The notice was very simple. It didn’t mention Margot. It didn’t mention Ellie. It didn’t mention how strange people initially found his decision to stay in Black Swan Point. The hidden meaning of “he served the community with great dedication” was that, after his wife’s disappearance, he’d continued working at the veterinary clinic where he’d met his young mistress and conducted the affair. Maybe if you stayed in the same place, all the toxicity, eventually, was neutralized: the road she was murdered on became just another road; the day she went missing, just another day. Perhaps staying in Black Swan Point was his only choice. It was the way to prove he’d not been dreaming a bad dream, the way to avoid having to explain why he was a widower. Imagine moving away, still knowing there was this place, like a blood clot always marring your vision. Here, life was as it always had been and never was.
I picked out a long floral dress, thinking of Graeme Harvey. That poor man. Measuring guilt on an island settled foremost as a prison was bound to be sensitive. By blaming Ellie’s death on Graeme, Margot got to be just a nice lady who possibly disappeared. Perhaps our fantasy about her innocence was a fantasy about our own innocence. I’d once watched a bride and groom posing, with a horse-drawn carriage, outside the convict-built prison for their wedding photographs; they weren’t being ironic about marriage, it was just the jail was our most scenic location. The walls of the prison, made of old sandstone, were beautiful. And this was the way we reinvented ourselves. We sweetened history by making fudge on the site of the brutal Female Factory; we painted a gravestone white to hide its convict stain.
I slipped on the dress. It was green cotton, nearly sheer, with a rose-sprig print and buttons running all the way up the front. I should have worn a petticoat underneath, but I’d be careful not to stand in direct sunlight. In the bathroom mirror I applied lipstick, quite a deep red lipstick, then eye makeup. Affecting my startled look, I put on the eyeliner and shadow and mascara. Through the looking glass, this was what was on the other side: more looking glasses. A million tiny pieces of mirror.
Darren: If you were in a dream, and you got in a fight and had your head kicked off, you could pick it up and screw it back on again.
Henry: You could play head soccer.
Lucien: If you played football with your head you’d actually be at an advantage, because your eyes would be like a camera and you could tell if it hit the post or not.
Alastair: The only bad thing about that is, you wouldn’t look so good after everyone had been kicking you around.
Danielle: You’d look better.
I finished making up my face and sighed. There was a blind spot in Murder at Black Swan Point. The locals’ gossip was not totally without basis. The forensic evidence had been confusing, and perhaps could not completely exonerate Dr. Harvey. Pathologists didn’t analyze any of the items gathered from the crime scene until almost a month after Ellie Siddell’s death. Then they took the
collected matter out of the plastic bags, and tried to determine which blood belonged to the three people believed to have bled at the time surrounding the murder. Not surprisingly, Ellie’s blood type was found all over her house. The bloodstains on her underpants and nightgown, however, were too difficult to subgroup. Pathologists could only confirm the blood to be type A: both Ellie’s and Graeme’s blood type. In Dr. Harvey’s defense, proteins in biological matter can deteriorate quickly, leaving further categorization impossible.
What was significant, Thomas had explained to me, was that blood type O, most probably Margot’s blood, had been found on a blue hand towel in the Siddells’ bathroom, and on paper tissues in the abandoned station wagon. This suggested that in all probability she had bled at the Siddells’, and had then driven away still bleeding in the car. But even Thomas would agree, off the record, that given the scale of brute violence, if Margot was the murderer, she’d left remarkably few traces. There was a famous theory in criminal detection, the exchange theory: just as a criminal leaves traces at a site, so they take them when they go. Experts would have expected that whoever killed Eleanor Siddell so savagely would have been covered in her blood. None of Ellie’s blood was found on the car’s upholstery. Criminologists were also puzzled by the way this crime of passion—the vandalized room, slashed clothes, and frenzied knife blows—seemed to have been so cleanly and methodically dealt with. No finger-prints were found at the site, not even on the bloodied knife, nor on the taps in the kitchen and bathroom.
You might conclude that, even in moments of homicidal rage, Margot was a stickler for cleanliness, were it not for the forensics inside the Harveys’ house. Blood type O, again possibly Margot’s blood, was inexplicably found on the bedroom carpet and on a rug in the bathroom. Investigators had initially assumed these stains were due to Dr. Harvey bleeding after the bottle blow. It was not until the investigation was all but over that pathologists established some of these stains also matched Margot’s blood type. Graeme claimed to have no idea how his wife had come to bleed in the exact same place. Had she visited him after Ellie’s murder? Had she tried to take her own life in the house where her children were sleeping? Graeme was first questioned while badly concussed, but in the weeks that followed he remembered nothing new. Apparently he was suffering great shock. Overnight he had lost his wife and his lover, and was left on his own to raise three young daughters.
I closed my eyes to stop the spinning. I vowed to cut Thomas from my heart, although apparently desire would not go away immediately, in fact the reverse. I was glad the outfit I’d chosen was so flattering. Wearing such a delicate dress, I didn’t want to haul around my usual handbag. In my parents’ bedroom was the tea chest that I’d once raided for dressing up. Opening it, I found a hundred beautiful things. I pulled out a beaded evening purse: a kingfisher was sewn on one side.
People always tell you, over and over, in the most stern, boring way, “you have to pay.” How unfortunate that they are right, and how surprising to have no influence over the price. “Yes, yes, I will pay, I will, but I’ll pay later; and I’ll pay in some way that’s still a wee bit fun for me.” I needed to be careful with Thomas. I could no longer trust him. All his sweetness meant nothing when held up to this great negligence.
Jamming the knife into the evening purse I thought of Dr. Harvey. That poor man. Later, he never talked to journalists about his first marriage, or its dramatic conclusion. In some ways he should’ve spoken; his silence was taken as a sign of haughtiness, which, in Tasmania, was taken as a sign of guilt. Perhaps people were quick to point the finger at him, because they felt his wife had not; she had punished the young girl for the affair, whereas he was far from innocent. Even if he hadn’t lifted a finger, they said, he’d contributed to Ellie’s death.
• • •
Graeme Harvey on the day he went back to work: he turned the key in the lock and entered the reception area Ellie had tended like their living room. The office seemed cleaner than he had remembered it, the carpet a lighter shade of blue. Her cardigan was on the back of her work chair. There was a list on her desk in a shorthand she must have invented; half the time, he couldn’t understand what she’d been planning to do. He opened her desk drawer, saw a wad of coupons, and closed it again. Magazines were fanned out on the coffee table: they would be missing all the competition entry forms. He imagined Ellie cutting out every coupon thinking, Something’s going to happen. Something’s going to happen to me.
The couch in the reception area was old and it was leather. It needed to be replaced. The last time he’d come back to work, after two weeks off for school holidays, before he’d done anything, before even opening one letter, he had locked the clinic’s door, then he’d undressed her from the waist down, placing her on the couch. Ellie thought it was dirty. She didn’t like her skin touching this dirty thing everyone had brushed up against. As he fucked her she barely even moved. He’d spent two weeks away. The less she moved the rougher he became. He hurt her like he had the first time, when she’d barely even known how to move underneath him: her arse and thighs like splayed butterfly wings. Off and on, for the rest of the afternoon, she’d cried. She said she was upset because her skin had touched this dirty thing, the couch. Later, he realized she was angry at his leaving; staying still to test whether he’d even noticed.
By the time Graeme Harvey got home from work the baby-sitter had fed his daughters, but he still had to put them to bed. He read three books every night. Each girl chose one book. They were about dogs with supernatural powers, or princesses who are kissed and come back to life. The girls took turns turning the pages. After he read to them, they had to brush their teeth. The elder girls were okay. But the youngest, the four-year-old, wanted to turn the taps on and off by herself. She’d stand by the sink on the yellow plastic stool, holding a cartoon toothbrush covered in strawberry-flavored toothpaste. She’d dip the toothbrush in and out of her mouth, to little effect. Then, sitting on the toilet, she would advise him on how it was best to wipe.
He tried to put the littlest girl to bed. She claimed that her toys couldn’t get to sleep. So he sang, a talk-singing, to the animals lining her bed. He wondered who could see him trying to pacify a battered old lamb, singing: Go to sleee-p, go to sleee-p, go to sleeep little shee-eep; holding his daughter in his arms, keeping her head and neck safe in the crook of his arm, safe rocking back and forward, trying to put her to sleep. “You’re my cradle,” she said. Her body was tiny in the pajamas. When it seemed she was tiring, he put her head on the pillow and covered her with the sheet. “Lie next to me,” the little girl said. But he lay on the carpet next to her bed; a corner of light covering his feet. He’d been leaving lights on around the house. Leaving doors open so that the lights could be seen. Remembering each night which lights and which doors correlated: the delicate mathematics of fear control.
Lying on the floor he remembered his dead lover’s body: her skin; her taste; the blemishes only he knew. Ellie would leave the back door open so he could visit whenever he chose. Sometimes he would visit early in the morning, finding her desperate not to leave her bed. She would moan, pained by the effort of bringing herself to consciousness—it was such hard work having to open those eyes. “Oh yes,” he’d say, when finally she looked at him. “Oh yes, I love the way you suffer in the morning.”
The little girl, lying in bed, told him she was hungry. He brought her a slice of apple. She said she was thirsty. She got water in a sippy cup. And finally he was annoyed. “I’m going to get angry in a minute. I want you to lie still, and close your eyes, and go to sleep.” He coaxed her to lie down once more, to put her head on the pillow, but she was still all wriggling energy. He spread out the blue cotton sheet above her and let the air catch underneath so as it fell lightly on top of her, the blue sheet rippled. “Look, I’m underwater!” the girl squealed. She was laughing, enjoying the breeze of the soft sheet. “Do it again! Do it again!” And so he lifted the sheet up into the air and suddenly he
noticed his youngest daughter shared her mother’s smile; an ungainly smile that took over her whole face. What would happen when she bled through her nightgown and learned about blood the way her mother had? “Do it again,” she squealed, throwing up her little arms and legs. She was laugh-smiling, and he drowned her again. Rock me the sea, rock me and send me to the deep depths of sleep.
THESE APPARITIONS were on suburban ovals everywhere. They wore white T-shirts, white trousers, and white canvas hats as protection from the sun. They had just advanced from plastic bats and balls to the real thing. Some of them held the wooden cricket bat, and when the hard ball approached ducked out of sight. Others stood poised to make a hit, but—as if the bat was a propeller—missed, and spun around 360 degrees. If the bat made contact with the ball it was quite an achievement. The kids cheered and the batsman was encouraged to run; there was the tangle of skinny limbs as he hobbled, all protective pads, down the wicket and back again. The boys’ bowling, similarly unorthodox, then drew focus. The bowler, as he was running, might suddenly remember to hitch up his trousers. He’d then raise his arm, without having yet learned to release the ball on the apex, and it would be a lollipop: a slow throw up, up, then down, down, in a moping parabola. Rarely did anyone catch the hard ball, especially not the fielders. The fielders raised their hands in shrinking prayer. They genuflected as the ball hurtled toward them; squinting, or even closing their eyes, as if facing an approaching eclipse.
Panning out there was a crew of fathers umpiring, or sitting on foldout chairs keeping score. Other fathers stood, arms crossed, watching the game. What would be the appropriate term for this group? A frown of fathers. A spanking of daddies. A nymph’s dozen. They’d worked all week, and now gave the little boys their undivided attention.