Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Is Ballard a baldy?’ I asked.

  ‘You just keep your lads quiet and out of sight,’ said Hoskin, ‘I’m on my way.’ So I guessed the answer. I left Adrian to gather the rest of the platoon and move them back down to the vehicles, and followed Albie to link up with two section. Hoskin was a good deal further away, and I suppose it was tension, rather than a wish to arrive before him, that made us cover ground so rapidly.

  Dave Saunderson had pulled his section back from the gully in which they’d sighted Ballard. He and I went back to the ridgeline, and I kept my camouflage floppy hat low on my forehead as I used the police binoculars. Dave said he’d glimpsed the guy in a scrubby bit by an overhang, but I couldn’t see anyone. Both of us were keen to get closer, but I knew the right thing to do was to wait for Hoskin, and besides, if it was Ballard then most likely he still had the shotgun.

  Sergeant Hoskin seemed a long time coming, and when he and one other cop arrived, he had a rifle that I hadn’t seen anywhere earlier in the day. Hoskin wasn’t in any hurry. He had a careful look with the glasses. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you two stay here, and we’ll go and have a gander.’ He meant Dave and me to stay behind.

  ‘I’d like to come too,’ I said. ‘It was army guys spotted him.’ I expected Hoskin to be opposed to that, but he didn’t seem much bothered.

  ‘Okay, bright eyes,’ he said after a brief pause, ‘but you stop when I say so, do what I tell you, right?’

  The three of us moved down the ridge, taking advantage of any scrub cover. I was tail-end Charlie, and not wanting to draw attention to myself. The bush was a bit thicker in the gully, and the creek, barely running, was pooled among the rocks. We worked our way up quietly until a bare knob with a view of the rock overhang and the scattered scrub there. Ballard was sitting well back in the shade, but was clearly visible. He had his hands on his knees and his face down.

  I suppose I thought the three of us would sneak up on him, that there’d be a rush and we’d overpower him, or Hoskin would shout out that he’d have to come walking to meet us without the shotgun. It wasn’t like that. Hoskin took a light plastic, sleeveless vest from his small pack and put it on. It was bright yellow and had POLICE in blue on both back and front. He left the rifle with the other cop, and walked up to the bare knob in full view. It wasn’t all that foolhardy because a shotgun’s range isn’t great, but I wondered why he showed himself so openly. He gave a musterer’s whistle in fact, to get Ballard’s attention, and when he had it, just stood there for a time. We were too far to see the expression on Ballard’s face without the binoculars, but after looking steadily at Hoskin without movement, he got up and moved further round the rock and out of sight.

  The sergeant wasn’t in a hurry to close the few hundred metres. ‘Let’s give the poor bastard a chance,’ he said, and when I heard the shotgun blast I knew what he meant. Hoskin and his offsider didn’t quicken their pace: just went on calmly and with caution. It was possible, I guess, that Ballard was foxing.

  There wasn’t much to see in the overhang where Tony Ballard had spent two nights: a blue tartan Swannie crumpled in the stones and dirt, a tin of beans that looked as if it had been hacked open with a sheath knife, a supermarket bag with odds and ends. Hoskin had been wrong about him having no food at all. The guy himself was in the open further round, lying on the scree amid the sparse yet tenacious scrub. The shotgun had slithered down the slope a bit with the recoil, and Ballard looked small and bloody, with what remained of his head cast back unnaturally. He looked very alone, which might be an odd thing to say about a corpse.

  Hoskin put the Swannie over him, but touched nothing else. ‘You could do a good thing for us,’ he told me. ‘You’re fit as a buck rat, and I’m about buggered. Could you get a radio set brought up here, and then see where’s the nearest place we can get a chopper in? We can’t be lugging him all the way down.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I was keen to get away. Unlike Hoskin, I wasn’t familiar with death, and he’d been right when he said you never want to see someone who’s been killed at close range with a shotgun.

  Hoskin came to me as I was about to go. ‘You okay?’ he asked. And then, ‘Think what he had in front of him, the poor bastard.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And behind him too, come to that. What you’ve got to do, I reckon, is show some discretion. You never get used to this sort of thing, but you start to get a sense of the choices.’ Hoskin took off his beret and his yellow vest. His shirt was mottled with sweat, and his face glistening with it. His features seemed to sag as the tension left him. He opened his shirt and flapped the edges to cool his hairy chest. ‘Ah well,’ he said drily, ‘I guess we’ve kept all the good people safe from another desperate criminal. All over, and nobody hurt.’

  BUNSEN VERSUS THE REPUBLIC

  As a defence lawyer it’s my job to do the best for a client irrespective of my own views, or the personality of the accused. Professionalism becomes a form of emotional insulation, as it must for a surgeon, say, who does his utmost to save the life of a murderer shot by the police. Yet there are people who are difficult to treat objectively, and Liddell Bunsen was one of those.

  I saw him first at the main helipad after he had been brought from the Wellington police station to the remand centre. He was tall, blond, gangly, almost boyish, with the inoffensive stoop that some tall, thin guys have, almost as apology for the superior height nature has given them. His pale ears poked through his straight hair like pig snouts through straw. He didn’t look an incorrigible person, didn’t seem that bad.

  Bunsen was charged under the Death, Damage or Detriment to Living Organisms Act of 2062. It was an act the judiciary were applying with increasing severity because of rising public indignation. For a while botanical killings had been treated rather differently from those involving animals, but there was more and more opposition to any distinction. I was prepared to do my best for Bunsen, but privately I thought that if he was sentenced to anything less than five years supervised virtual reality then I would have done a pretty good job. He was a serial killer, a recidivist offender, and there were several witnesses to more than one of his rampages.

  We met in a third-storey interview room that looked out over the uncut grass, then the small harbour, towards Eastbourne. Lawyers and their clients are legally entitled to privacy, but I suspected the authorities often didn’t bother to turn off the sophisticated recording devices that cover the entire remand centre. ‘Don’t say anything in these interviews that might advantage the police,’ I told Bunsen at the outset. ‘This place is full of bugs.’

  He threw back his head in an exaggerated way and shouted to the ceiling, ‘Hey, snoopy bastards. Haven’t you heard of citizen’s rights? Fascism is alive and proliferating in the twenty-first century.’

  ‘Just something to bear in mind. No need to antagonise them.’

  ‘What else is there for the pricks to find out?’ Bunsen said. ‘There’s just me eating vegetables for Christ’s sake.’

  Two or three hundred years ago, cannibals may have said something much the same, and fifty years ago people were still slaughtering lambs and hormone-treated chickens to eat, and gaffing magnificent tuna from the ocean. You could slit the throat of a pig on your own land, haul the carcass up to dress, and neighbours didn’t do a thing. Incredible. My own father was accustomed to seeing mussels and lobsters being tossed alive into boiling water in top-class restaurants, and no one batted an eyelid. Cruelty is defined by social fashion as much as anything else, he said.

  At the beginning of the new millennium there were still whole shops devoted to sushi: people who considered themselves quite civilised openly ate the uncooked flesh of fish. Even recently, caterers would twist the heart out of a living lettuce and stand talking of Hollywood, or rugby, while the white blood dripped from their fingers. Despite the abundance of food that plants provided naturally — fruits, nuts, nectar, gourds, berries and grains — it wasn’t enough to dissuade people from
killing plants in a sort of orgiastic greed. For years there was a concerted propaganda attack on Professor Muzzovich’s evidence through tissue contraction research, that plants were susceptible to pain. Change, particularly against established tastes, is bitterly and instinctively opposed by most of society, and yet when we look back after the accomplishment, it seems so manifestly right. Until thirty years ago whole forests had been planted for the sole purpose of slaughter for building materials, and now they’ve been heritage embargoed, and people picnic and tramp in their oxygen-regenerated shade. Chemically constituted material these days can provide all the foods and material we need.

  What’s the use of talking about sanctity of life to someone like Bunsen, though? He’s one of those young intellectuals who make a cult of the idealised past. I looked at his slouched figure on the vinyl chair, his long legs tucked untidily underneath. I don’t think he realised what serious trouble he was in; what a stiff sentence he was facing. To tell the truth, as I went through the trial procedures with him, I couldn’t work up a great deal of sympathy.

  ‘It’s important in the courtroom to project a sense of remorse,’ I told him. ‘Some sensitivity towards the victims.’

  ‘We refuse to recognise any victims,’ he said. ‘I’m standing up for a way of life that has existed for thousands of years.’ He had faded blue, prairie eyes in an unlined face. I was aware of a chilling, china doll viciousness in the guy.

  Bunsen and a few other throwbacks had no respect for life, and even the law hadn’t been deterrent enough to stop him from raiding the wild leek and asparagus beds, the firm, bright beetroot in abandoned market gardens, the mushrooms growing around the protein feedlots for dairy cows and sheep, or in the grassed macadamia farms.

  Commentators consider it a form of lust, and likely to remain a problem in the depraved minority who lack self-control and respect for others. After all, rape still occasionally occurs despite hundreds of years of condemnation and the most severe of penalties.

  ‘Didn’t you feel any pity at all for the plants you systematically maimed, or killed — all the living stuff you ate?’ I asked him.

  ‘Hey, look, they’re not like us,’ said Bunsen. I think he really believed it, just as the slave owners had two hundred years before.

  ‘The police claim that you had onions knotted together and suspended from racks in your garage, that your house stank of cooked cabbage to such an extent that hardened officers went outside and vomited. One report claimed you admitted to breaking off living stalks of celery, plunging them while still weeping into salt, and then eating them. It said that you had baby carrots in the cellar that you’d scrubbed raw, and the widow lady next door saw you tearing handfuls of parsley and mint like an animal and taking it indoors at mealtimes.’

  ‘It’s natural, okay?’ said Bunsen. ‘It’s the way things were meant to be: the way life evolved. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed, okay?’ Bunsen became animated, evangelical rather than distressed or defensive. I wondered briefly whether I should plead of unsound mind, but aberrant beliefs probably aren’t enough to substantiate that course. ‘I bet even now there’s people somewhere in the Amazon, or Papua New Guinea, who are eating birds of paradise, scooping out shellfish and uprooting and cooking plants,’ he said vehemently. ‘Natural, unspoiled communities in tune with nature.’

  I could have slapped him, but professional discipline held me back. In tune with nature, eh. That’s a great line to use for a race that has succeeded by killing, laying waste, exterminating and genetically modifying. I just said, ‘But we’re not in the Amazon, or Papua New Guinea, Mr Bunsen, and you’ll be tried under international environmental law.’

  He didn’t say much more; gave one quick look at the ceiling with sneering exasperation, then seemed to draw back into himself in a fatalistic sort of way. His fair lashes drooped over his prairie eyes, and his long, pale fingers lay spread on the table. Perhaps he realised that I wasn’t some simpleton to be taken in by self-serving rhetoric. It came to me, regarding his lanky awkwardness, his straight, fair hair, that despite his perversity he didn’t look a hardened criminal, and that was surely the way to pitch his case — present him as misguided, pitiable, rather than psychopathic. A man captivated by false theory, rather than an unscrupulous killer. A young guy who could have been a top basketball player perhaps, but who’d lost his way and followed the most base of his appetites. If I could hide my natural repugnance sufficiently, maybe I could pull it off, and he’d receive a sentence of only two or three years. After all, I was paid to find mitigation for Bunsen, not judge him.

  THROW DOWN YOUR GUNS

  They lay on their backs in the dark, looking up to a ceiling they knew was there. They talked about their son’s seventh birthday, about how they would put aside their own issues for a time and make sure he had good memories of the day to go forward with. ‘Let’s give him a birthday and a half,’ she said, ‘before we have to dump other stuff on him.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could take the whole bunch of them to a movie and give you time to get all the party bits and pieces ready,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  The counsellor had surprised them by saying that the grief and guilt of breaking up a family can lead to a good deal of false sentimentality. She said that kids were a lot tougher than most people realised, and that having the continued, reliable affection of both parents was the main thing. Some kids didn’t have any parents at all, for Christ’s sake: some were beaten to within an inch of their lives. Some children grew up despising their parents for the loveless partnership they’d persisted in. And what about those kids chained in wash-houses, fed cat food and forced to sleep with Uncle Neddy?

  So the birthday party for Dylan became the watershed. Both Gavin and Freya recognised the subterfuge, but were emotionally drained enough to welcome it. The party was an event in itself of family significance, but also a tacit marker for their separation.

  In the dark Freya recalled the holiday they had in Fiji not long before Dylan turned five. They went then partly because it was a last chance to have an extended holiday in school term time, and so avoid a lot of families. The size of the people surprised her, and the passivity of many of them. The sun and moon were much bigger there too, and the sea full of light and colour. Like swimming in an aquarium, Gavin said. Fiji was a beautiful setting for the first serious difference between them. Before that she had always loved the smell of the ocean, but after Fiji, to experience it was to feel her heart constrict. Gavin’s firm had offered him the top position in its Sydney branch. He’d been saving the news to tell her on their holiday, and he did so with little Dylan at the margin of the colourful ocean, with theatrical palms behind them, with a vast and naked sun swelling in the sky.

  She told him she didn’t want to go. There was her family she was close to: her mother was marvellous with Dylan and that gave her opportunities she wouldn’t give up. There was her own part-time work for Mickleburg Hooper that she much enjoyed. There were her friends, and there were her fears of being a nobody in a new place.

  ‘It’s the best opportunity I’ve had,’ he said. ‘You turn down something like this and that’s it. You’ve put your hand up as a stick in the mud. Jesus, and I thought you’d be so pleased, after talking about how shit-hot Phil was at his job and that he and Anna were likely to get a posting to Europe.’

  ‘The timing’s off,’ she said. ‘All that we’ve spent on the place to get it nice. And just when Dylan’s got a group of kindy friends to begin school with. It’s just the timing, isn’t it, otherwise it would be great.’

  Their talk continued in the hot sun. You couldn’t call it an argument: no shouting or abuse, rather a sort of reasoned disappointment and mutual, unexpressed, but powerful feelings that each should be willing to sacrifice something for the other. Freya noticed nearby the faintest line of detritus at the high-tide mark. No plastic containers, wrappers or jandals, just small, pale pyramid shells, foam flecks like horses’
sweat, and filigrees of fine seaweed already pressed quite flat. ‘It doesn’t mean I don’t think you’ve done bloody well to be offered the job. You have,’ she said. ‘You should be proud of that.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, not quite the celebration I expected, eh.’ He put his hands behind his head, lay back on the towel and covered his face with a floppy, yellow hat he’d bought especially for the holiday.

  ‘Well I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel,’ Freya said. That was the beginning, really, of the end.

  They cleared the kitchen table on an evening of summer twilight, and encouraged Dylan to make his own invitation card. The lettering in his own oversize hand and the drawing of him riding what looked most like a bulldog. They’d suggested using a photograph of Dylan as a wizard in the school play, but he wanted himself riding the bulldog. ‘That’s fine,’ Freya said. ‘Whatever you like.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said his father.

  They were grouped at the table, and the garden outside was gradually erased by the night, but there was a dry, autumn wind and the leaves bustled before it on the paved barbecue area with a sound like a water fountain. ‘You can help get it through the computer,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll use the colour printer.’ Dylan smiled. For an almost seven-year-old he was pretty savvy about computers.

  ‘I want to put the names and stamps on the envelopes too,’ the boy said.

  ‘Well, okay,’ said Gavin. ‘Putting the names on is fine, but most of them won’t need stamps. You can take them to school and give them to your friends there.’

  ‘Maybe some of his class might feel left out that way, though,’ said Freya. They explained it to Dylan and decided to mail all the invitations.