A Child's Book of True Crime

by Chloe Hooper

  Even in the dream his own calm surprised him. His wife’s body felt heavy as he carried her to the car. One arm under her neck, the other under her knees: he was carrying her back over the threshold because things hadn’t quite worked out. He was holding her closer than he had in a long time, still not believing she was dead. He laid her down in the backseat. The broken bottle, wrapped in newspaper, was in her coat pocket. As he drove to the cliff, he kept expecting she’d wake up and scream at him. He even thought this as he carried her to the edge. Afterward, he turned immediately and walked back up the track, past the car. He left the door unlocked with her handbag on the passenger seat. Walking home, he tried to think of nothing. He walked along the back roads. At dawn, the trees would keep their mouths shut; each leaf turning its blind eye.

  From out of nowhere a car approached. It slowed and the driver wound down the window. It was an old friend. Someone they’d known in London and hadn’t seen in years. Graeme was delighted. The friend asked after Margot. He asked after the children, then drove away. Graeme started sweating. No one ever used this road, but now there was another car. He kept walking. The car rolled up to him. “Would you like a lift?” It was another old friend. They smiled at each other, but then Graeme remembered why he was walking. “No. Thank you.” The man drove away. Graeme was sweating, trying to get home. It seemed everyone now used this road. He was offered more rides, until finally he reached his house, exhausted, and crawled into bed. Just as he lay down, the dream became worse: Margot would always come out of the bathroom. With her clean hands she’d pull back the blanket to get into bed beside him. Suddenly he would remember a time when she made him smile with everything she did. He would feel a rush of love for her: his young wife—she had come home. She had come back to him.

  • • •

  Now I wavered on the bar stool, confused. The Harveys were unmasked and I had just imagined my parents killing me. First the murderer had been my father, then my mother. “This is disgusting!” Thomas and Veronica were my enemies. And they were doing this, making me think these things, to make me insecure. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Marnes had put ideas into my head, to make me doubt the one thing in which I could believe: “My parents love me!” I tried to sit still, but the drunkenness was in my spine; the lowest vertebrae were the worst affected. The room sounded of thudding hooves and the commentator’s steady hum. My makeup felt stale; my hair stringy. This experiment—of being a woman—had failed; I had the sense I’d dressed up for a party to which no one was coming.

  Once Thomas looked at me, and said, “You have a face that is terrific, and plain, and ugly all at once.” I wished it would settle into being just terrific: beauty seemed an insurance policy you only paid for much later. People with plain faces aren’t meant for interesting lives. If fate is a hunter you can’t be the lion cub and jump up singing, “Take me!” Fate has to want you. A quiet truth floated before me: there’s a psychosis unleashed by the fear of a boring life. Then, aloud, I thought, “No, that’s wrong.” I remembered driving around curve after curve being unable to stop. The Marnes wanted me gone, but there was no point guessing their next move. Each time I imagined the story’s true ending, I was confronted by the same stark fact—the girl dies whichever way you play it. Knowing who the murderer had been wouldn’t keep me safe.

  Groaning, I thought of my parents alone in that house: my mother would come back from the supermarket and find my father up a ladder sweeping leaves from the guttering. She’d find him doing the things that should’ve been done years ago. She’d sit down and suddenly, from outside, hear the grunt as he raised his ax, and then the wood’s inconsolable cry. He only wants to keep his baby warm, she’d think. He’s the daddy. He has the whole world in his hands, and every time the ax strikes the wood he says a prayer she will be safe. She might get cold, he’d worry. He’d raise the ax and strike. This wood is good burning wood. Hard wood burns hotter and longer than soft wood, does she know that? He tried to remember if he’d explained that you get a better flame if it’s a smaller piece . . .

  “What if, after you died,” I imagined Thomas asking, “your parents got a foster daughter?”

  I glared, lowering my glass. Sometimes, by mistake, my father would call this girl Kate. She’d move into my bedroom, which my mother had been keeping as a sort of a shrine. Little by little, things would change. The walls of my room would be repainted; my clothes given to charity. Before long, all the neighbors would realize my parents were fully recovered. This new, improved family would have a garage sale, dispensing with boxes of my knickknacks. And that’s when I’d become a ghost and haunt the living-fuck out of all of them! I raised my beer glass into the air. First someone had to do the killing: Come and get me! I’m right here! The glass trembled slightly as I swallowed. Take a knife from your kitchen; take scissors from your sewing basket: all you women with your fallen bodies. In certain lights I look as unblemished as a twelve-year-old. Through my drink the world was golden. Come and get me, all you men with your fat guts, with your long-armed monkey walks. Open the bonnet and cut my fan belt clean in two! I slammed the glass down on the bar. I am still young! I am still young!

  SUDDENLY, AT THE next bar stool, perched Malcolm, the guide from the penal settlement. He asked if he could buy me a drink, and I sat smiling at him stupidly. “Sure.” The barmaid had just refilled my glass. “I’d love a drink.” He was oddly handsome, baby-faced, with whisker-free skin. He used props to gain gravitas: a cigarette hung from his plump lips; the sleeves of his purple cowboy shirt were rolled up, and his soft arms bore pen markings or practice tattoos. One arm said Pow! like a cartoon speech bubble. On the other was scrawled Bad Fun. Malcolm was nervous. You can tell when a man is attracted to you. His fingers, tapping against the bar, were long and delicate. You can just tell.

  “I’d like a martini,” I told the barmaid confidently.

  She looked blank. “What do you want in it?”

  I hesitated. “The usual things.”

  “What are they?”

  “If the lady wants a martini,” Malcolm said, all chivalry, “she should have it.”

  “Geoff, how do you make a martini?” the barmaid asked the drunkest of the drunks. He and the others all claimed to know, but she walked into the backroom swearing. Malcolm and I smiled at each other awkwardly. I thought of a picture Danielle had once drawn of a mermaid drying her curls with a fish hair dryer. The mermaid had a wardrobe of shell brassieres and a chest of drawers full of boyfriends. One drawer was open, lined with men. A second drawer, closed, was marked simply Chad, Tim, John, and Andy. Perhaps I could be a mermaid by making believe. Before I’d met Thomas I was the least experienced person in the world. Through our role-playing I’d since spent time inside the skin of every slithery girl I’d ever met. I smiled again at Malcolm. “Say something,” a voice told me, “make conversation.”

  “I guess you never really know anyone.”

  “No,” Malcolm answered.

  “You stand throwing wishes at another person!” My voice caught. “Wishes like old coins piling up at their feet, and they don’t even bother picking them up!” I shook my head, to lose the image of Thomas’s face. “Tell me what you do to kill time?”

  He exhaled slowly. “I write a lot of poetry.”

  I crossed my legs. “What do you write poetry about?”

  “The girls I fall in love with.” He glanced at me. “No. I’m being flippant. I’ve just finished a suite about the girls found in Belanglo.”

  “Oh. Doomed girls.”

  “Yes. Doomed girls.”

  In May last year, a road worker had been arrested outside Sydney for serially killing backpackers. He had taken pictures of himself, which the newpapers later printed, dressed as a sheriff with his huge handlebar mustache, holding a gun the size of a water pipe. People, disgusted, went on and on, once again, about how Australia had forever lost its innocence. The man would pick up backpackers from near a Sydney youth hostel, and drive th
em to the middle of the Belanglo State Forest. Setting his victims free, he’d then hunt them down, severing their spinal cords so they’d be incapacitated while he was torturing them—one backpacker’s head he used as a target practice; he shot at it from different directions within the forest. The police finally pinned the crimes on him by raiding his house, and finding he had the sleeping bags of two English girls, the cooking equipment of a German girl; his lover was wearing all the girls’ clothes.

  “Have you ever thought of going overseas, backpacking?” I asked.

  “No,” Malcolm said. “I have a sense, I guess it’s superstitious, but—” He paused. “I feel that I will never leave Tasmania.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will.”

  “I hate it, but I’m tied to it.” He laughed bitterly. “I can’t leave.”

  “What if you saved up very seriously?”

  “Perhaps.” He started lighting matches and dropping them into an ashtray.

  “Not that I think backpacking is all it’s cracked up to be.” I was trying to brighten the mood. “My cousin went away last year, and came home completely depressed. Wherever she went she only met other Australians. All they talked about was their sore feet, and the girls kept bitching about her for packing a hair dryer.” Malcolm continued lighting matches. It was a form of punctuation: he’d listen in a slightly morose way, then strike for the sulphuric pause. I shuddered. “It sounded awful. Washing out your underwear, hanging it up in little rooms . . .” I was about to die, yet I was counseling him on seeing the world.

  Around us the men were growing restless, calling out for the barmaid. Eventually she reappeared, holding a recipe book, and filled each glass swiftly like a nurse on a casualty ward. Some spirits in dusty bottles had turned up, condensed like old cough syrup. In a plastic jug, she paddled the ingredients with a wooden spoon. All the drunks made wisecracks about wanting to be spanked. The barmaid poured her concoction into a wineglass, then added a tiny pink umbrella. “Sorry, love. No olives today.”

  I took a sip. I’d seen people with martinis in the films, and had not remembered the drink being green. “It’s delicious!” I pronounced giddily. Malcolm smiled, and I closed my eyes. All around was a dull rumble. It sounded so familiar. There was a clinking of glasses; coins in someone’s palm; the low, throaty hum of old smokers talking. “The noise sounds very close.”

  “It is very close,” Malcolm replied.

  I dissolved into giggles. Each action had become its cartoon. I leaned forward too close to hear him. I slammed down my glass as if trying to convince it to follow instructions. Malcolm lit another match and I grabbed him by the shirt. “Kiss me!” He burned himself. Shaking his hand he winced, then slowly a smile spread. With his good hand he took my wrist and kissed it gently on the inside. Behind us I heard laughter. “Kiss my mouth!”

  “Not here.” He was staring at the horse race as if suddenly worried. He watched intently, but his responses did not accord with the others’ whoops and curses. A crazy old drunk, with long hair and a long beard, followed the action, his expressions those of someone in the pulpit. One finger was raised to the screen, like God pointing to Adam. His clothes were falling off him. Rubber bands held his trousers tight at his ankles. The man turned to me, winking, and mimed sitting on top of a horse in the rude way. Malcolm caught this routine. “That guy must have worked down a mine,” he said softly, nodding to the anklets. “They’d do that to stop the rats running up their legs.”

  I leaned close to him, sipping the martini, twirling the little pink umbrella. “Drinking this makes me feel all funny. When I finish it, will you take me home with you?”

  He looked over his shoulder. “Could we go to your place?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  He paused. “Well, it’s just I live with my folks . . .”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded impressed. “Yeah, I could take you for a drive.”

  I put my hand inside his pocket. “If you take me for a drive, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll be your private slut.”

  He spluttered beer all over the bar. “That’s what you tell half the blokes in town.”

  I giggled. He wiped the spill with a napkin and then looked around the room. I saw him catching the eyes of the other men. I stopped laughing. Malcolm had the softest Adam’s apple and the dustiest clothes. I didn’t know if he was too young for me or too old. And the more I thought of it, the more I imagined him, with his sweet face, modeling for the dark angel series one finds in true-crime novels: the murderer on the day of his first communion, standing with short pants lighting a candle; a dark-eyed misfit, in his wide-collared tuxedo, about to be rejected by the prom queen and all her ladies-in-waiting. My hand was stroking his thigh. “Tell me a line from one of your poems,” I whispered. I could picture him in his bedroom with a photograph of the prettiest of the slain backpackers; the one he really wrote poetry for. “Tell me a line and I’ll pretend to be your doomed girl.” He was silent. “In the backseat I’ll black out,” I said. “Or, you can tie me up. We could fuck in the boot of your car.”

  Malcolm removed my hand. He scowled, but his forehead barely creased. “Listen, I think you’re a nice girl.” His throat trembled. “I saw you with the children in your class, and I know you’re a nice girl.”

  Humming, I twirled the pink umbrella.

  “Look, it’s not a problem. It doesn’t bother me you’re”—he swallowed—“into that kind of stuff. It’s just not my thing.” Behind us a man walked out of the restroom. Malcolm turned to greet him enthusiastically, then he looked back into his beer, sheepish. “Your phone number is in there on the wall.”

  I paused a moment too long. “Does it say I’m a nice girl?”

  “I’m serious,” he whispered. “It describes you. It gives”—he cleared his throat—“your coloring.”

  “Only my coloring?” I pouted.

  “Actually, I’m surprised no one’s called late at night to tell you what it does say!”

  I stood up, but felt myself sinking. I saw the sharks’ jaws mounted on the wall and felt myself falling. “Are you all right?” His voice sounded far away. Outside the mackerel sky revealed its slipperiness. But inside, blue washed over the tables, the chairs. Surrounded by pieces of boats, long wrecked, were we actually underwater? I took a slow heavy step and heard laughter. All the rumbling sounds were close up. Everything faint now rang in my ears. A school of tiny, bright fish swam past me, following each other in a straight line; they changed direction suddenly, as if negotiating a sharp corner. But of course—I was in a box of blue water. People were hovering on the other side of the pane. I could feel the gaze of bloated strangers. It was no big deal: I was drowning while everybody watched.

  • MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

  “And what should I laugh at?”

  The old kookaburra saw Miss Byrne stumbling around Lucien’s house. Kingsley’s beak no longer shone jet, and the royal blue of his plumage was fading; still, he knew trouble when he saw it. “That lad’s teacher is behaving very badly,” Kingsley spat. “If Lucien’s parents separate, the child could suffer years of reunion fantasies—believing all the time if he had behaved a little better, if he hadn’t asked so many questions or fussed over his chores, his mummy and daddy might’ve stayed together! If Mr. and Mrs. Marne divorce,” the kookaburra screamed, “their son will probably flunk out of school, having learned too early he has no control over the world around him!”

  Kingsley turned sharply. He heard it. The rutting.

  In the branch above, two pygmy possums, their infinitesimal parts barely swollen, made ridiculous grunts. One branch higher were brushtail possums. These simpering creatures all had cat faces, but were centaurs below the waist. Launching themselves from drey to drey, the filthy acrobats spread their limbs, rubbing scalding secretions under the chin, the chest, around the anus to mark their territory. The kookaburra tried to concentrate on the prowling schoolteacher, but it was n
igh impossible. The honey possums, with their extensile tongues, were lashing the nectar from every sweet blossom. Sexually dimorphic, their females were bigger than the menfolk, taking what they wanted from these gigolos with unsated itching lust! Echoing all around were the screeches of worlds ending. And everyone expected him to laugh it off: “Merry, merry king of the bush is he!” But his flunkies and lackeys, all of them were fornicating. Oh, this tree, his palace, was a bestiary! Each branch strained and groaned—the din would deafen him!

  Kingsley wrapped his wings around his head. He felt his feathers wet with tears before he even realized he was crying. The bushland gang on the ground below: all of them were like displaced nobility. The weeping kookaburra turned, and on a nearby leaf saw a worm sitting by himself. “Come, let’s away to prison,” the old bird whispered. “When thou dost ask my blessing, I’ll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness.” His stomach slackened. “So we’ll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh,” he told the worm, “. . . and take upon’s the mystery of things as if we were God’s spies.” Kingsley thought of Terence Tiger with his old-world dignity. The thylacine kept his coat superbly clean despite his poverty, but did he not realize that in the future there wouldn’t be detection as he’d known it? Sleuthing would be left to the scientists, rushing to the crime scene to get everyone’s DNA. “Oh,” the bird whispered, “and we’ll wear out, in a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon . . .”