by Tim Richards
I guess other people never see themselves that way, as going through their lives as a name Bob Dylan doesn’t know, and they’d prefer to see their names listed in the big volume, People Whose Names Bob Dylan Ought to Know.
For Grace, it might be different, but for me, it’s glass half-full, glass half-empty. We know who we are and who we know, but we’ll probably never know if the people we know want to know us, or if they give a shit about the spelling of our names. So what if Dylan doesn’t know my name? Should a friend choose to take that as an insult, or treat it as a sign that he and I communicate in a very particular way? I’m not like Grace. I’m not frightened to find my name listed among the names of the people in the fat directory. Those people wouldn’t know my name either, but I’m happy to be one of them. I’m with them in spirit.
V2
We have a thin man who runs, and you can set your clock by him. He passes at 6.52 in the morning, and 9.17 at night. Most people would call that crazy, but Dane and I understand. We are the same in that respect. We hate carelessness with time. Though the solicitor had promised to meet us at one-thirty, it was now two, and Dane was edgy about whether to ask his assistant to collect Jess from school. Neither of us wanted to tell Jess that her uncle had smashed his neighbour’s skull with a hammer.
Imagining she’d missed her flight from Brisbane, Dane was dialling the solicitor’s mobile number when she appeared in the drive. From her name, and the three conversations we’d had on the phone, we had expected a mature Scandinavian woman, but Selma Roy was a slight Indian who couldn’t have been more than twenty-six. She didn’t look us in the eye when she introduced herself, or at any time afterwards, and whenever she spoke more than thirty words in a row, she paused to blink twice before continuing.
She said it would help Michael if I saw him.
Dane was dead against that. Michael had confessed. He’d told detectives that he’d killed the woman because she was evil, and now he would have to live with that. We’d done as much as we could. We’d helped set him up that house when his marriage fell through. Michael was a lost cause.
‘I’d rather help the woman’s family,’ I told her.
While shifting her glance between her papers and the Franz Marc print on the wall, Selma asked if I loved my brother.
‘That’s not the issue,’ Dane answered. ‘Michael has to take responsibility for what he’s done.’
There was no question that he’d killed Miss Mitchell. He’d admitted that. His neighbour had approached him about mail that had gone missing from her box. There was an argument. He hit her. She was lying on the door-jamb, barely conscious, when he struck her with the hammer. Four blows. ‘That much is conceded,’ Selma told us. ‘What we need to determine is whether your brother was in possession of his senses at the time he killed her.’
Dane wanted to know what difference our help would make. The woman was dead. Having disgraced the family, Michael was no longer entitled to our sympathy. One way or another, he had to be put away.
‘You might be right. But the court will have to pass judgement on his state of mind. In the meantime, we need to know all we can about your brother’s history.’
Irrespective of her nerves and lack of experience, Selma Roy was tenacious. She wasn’t going to let go till she had what she wanted.
‘Is he upset, or remorseful?’
‘He says you can’t punish a man for killing the Devil.’
I told her that Michael had never got along with neighbours. If it wasn’t dogs, it was noisy kids, or door-slamming. He’d always been odd. But he knew right from wrong.
‘If Michael was sane at the time he killed Miss Mitchell, then the court will punish him. But if he was lost in a cloud of unreason, then the court needs to be able to take that into account. No one wants you to invent excuses for your brother.’
‘What are her people saying?’
‘The police say she has no family.’
‘Everyone has family,’ I said.
Selma kept shuffling her papers, but never read from them. For all the twitches and eye-flutters, she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
‘I would like you to visit him,’ she told me, ‘but it doesn’t have to be straight away. We’ll have him assessed by psychiatrists, and, if they have doubts about his sanity, we’ll ask the court to determine his fitness to plead … In the meantime, I’d like you to write down your brother’s history, so that we can put that before the experts.’ It was less than a week since the police called to tell us what Michael had done. I didn’t think that I could deal with revisiting all I’d been through with him. Taking Selma’s card, I told her I’d think about it.
Dane asked if she was a religious woman.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Would your faith expect us to forgive Michael?’
‘My faith asks you to try to understand someone’s behaviour before you judge them.’
‘Do you think he’s mad?’
‘Maybe. He’s seriously deluded. And he’s not an easy man to warm to.’
Knowing that I wouldn’t commit to anything, she didn’t ask me to. Selma called a cab, and within five minutes she was at the door. An odd girl. She must have guessed where we stood on the phone, and worked out what was required. She’d create unease, and be careful about what she said and didn’t say. The right person for Michael to have in his corner.
After she’d left, Dane took my hand and asked what we should do. The only thing I knew was that I had to find someone to search for Yvette Mitchell’s family and friends. I needed to tell her family how sorry I was for what my brother had done. That’s what my parents would have expected.
Dane was keener to talk about it than I was. He still carried a lot of resentment. He most resented Michael’s failure to acknowledge the effort and expense we put into finding him that house. Especially when he knew that we were against him living so far away from family. But I couldn’t help thinking of all the people Michael might have killed before this woman. His anger was always going to have its day.
Dane was giving Jess a golf lesson when the urge hit me. I had to understand where I figured in my brother’s story. Was I guilty of having stood back and let him kill Yvette Mitchell? Once the need kicked in, I filled page after page, barely pausing to breathe.
My parents had been seeking to have a child for ten years when Mum became pregnant with Michael. He was born in 1959, and I was born three years later. Doctors said that he was partially autistic. Mum and Dad never accepted that definition. Though he liked animals, and was affectionate with them, he wasn’t physically affectionate with people. He couldn’t read them. Emotions were like a foreign language to Michael.
I grew up thinking that’s what brothers were. Remote, inconsiderate types who were repulsed by kissing and obsessed with trains. My first real sense of him being different came when I was five or six. He had a tooth knocked out in a fight. While we waited for Mum to come to school, Miss Houlihan told me that I’d always need to act like an older sister to Michael.
That must have been about the same time we ran into monkey boy. Michael and I had been allowed to buy an ice-cream from a shop near the beach. Before I knew where he’d gone, he’d crossed Beach Road holding the hand of an older boy. Though I wasn’t allowed to cross streets by myself, I sprinted after them. The boy had lost his pet monkey, and wanted us to help search through the thick tea-tree. When I said that we weren’t allowed to go with strangers, he tried to pull Michael into the bushes, and only let go and ran off when I screamed.
After the police asked their questions, Mum tried to explain the danger, but Michael had no sense of what the boy might have wanted from him. Years later, when I asked if he could remember the commotion with the police and monkey boy, he said I’d made the story up to make him sound stupid.
Dad worked for an insurance company. He was a neat, particular man and he wanted to cosset Michael. He was a little odd himself, good with numbers and gardening, awkward with people. And he w
as much harder on me than he was with Michael. Mum was the opposite. It hurt her that Michael couldn’t show affection, but she wanted to be sure he could look after himself. She hated people showing him disrespect. If he could learn when to fight back, he was big enough not to be bullied.
When Michael did fight back, he was just as likely to pick up the nearest rock. One time, after a bully dacked him at the sea baths, Michael smacked his head against the wooden landing. If another boy hadn’t seen the bully floating face down and dived in to save him, Michael would have been up for manslaughter. I don’t remember what trouble he got into then, but he knew he’d done the wrong thing.
He was never violent to me. The only times he hit me were before puberty, when I called him Mickey, or ridiculed his love of trains. Some of my friends were frightened of him. Their parents liked having me over to visit, but there were always excuses when I invited friends home. At school, kids said my brother was spooky.
To this day, I couldn’t tell you how Michael sees the world or his place in it. As a child, he was terrified of Moreton Bay fig trees. If he saw one, he’d scream till he wet himself. Even years later, when he was married, he’d swear that Moreton Bay figs were sinister. At school, at scouts, he was friendless. But he wasn’t stupid.
Michael’s brilliant with numbers. He’s read three times as many books as I have, everything from comics to classics. But his favourites were horror and crime. Though he’d try to scare me with the awful tales he’d read, he wasn’t a good storyteller. His favourite story was about a man who spent years sleeping beside his wife’s corpse. Something Emily.
Dad always said that Michael had two gears: restless, and possum-still. But his mind ticked over all the time. No man has ever hated sport more than he does. Sports are for people who can’t survive without someone telling them how good they are.
Although he achieved the marks to go to university, no one liked the idea. Through a friend of a friend, Dad got Michael an accounting job. I remember him with his first suit and briefcase, failing to hold still for the camera. He was good at ruining photos. But that would have been when he was happiest, working with figures, travelling to the city by train. He never went out after work. If he’d said he had a friend, we would have fainted. But those first three or four years at work were the happiest. Before Ruth.
He was twenty-two when they met, but Michael said nothing to anyone for three years. On Sundays, he’d say that he was going train-spotting, but she had him at church up in the Dandenongs. The Church of Christ Majestic was one of the evangelical offshoots you find on the outskirts of Melbourne. One day, Michael came home and said that he and Ruth were getting married, and that no one could stop him.
Naturally, we wanted to know what was in it for Ruth. Though she was a tiny, sexless thing, she was tough as nails. Her parents were old-style fear-of-God preachers from Arkansas, and the family had drifted down the east coast of Australia before founding the Church of Christ Majestic in Mooroolbark, the suburb where half the Waco people came from. Mum said it was the money. Michael drew a good wage, and, by living at home, he’d saved nearly ten thousand a year. It could hardly have been sex. Neither had an ounce of lust in them. Mum said the Holy Spirit couldn’t get into Ruth without the two of them being hitched first.
None of us believed in God, let alone Satan. If Michael ever believed in either, it was only to explain his moods. We never saw any kindness in Ruth. Later, after she’d dragged Michael to Queensland, and taken him for everything, she said she couldn’t deal with his fear of children. But you’d have to be a determined idiot not to have seen that in the first place. He only spoke when she asked him to. And when you saw Ruth with her father, the Reverend, you got a sick feeling in the gut.
Not much about that marriage was right. In thirteen years, I saw Michael no more than ten times, which included Mum’s and Dad’s funerals. Ruth dumping him to return to America was a car crash. Having made no decisions for himself in all that time, Michael vented his spleen on Dane and me. He had plenty of chance to mention the Devil then, if that’s how he thought about things, but he never did. Not God either. Where we wanted Michael to come back to Melbourne, he wanted a house so that he could have a dog, and with the money he had left, his only hope was renting a run-down place on the outskirts of Toowoomba.
Our last visit was three years ago, and Michael was impossible. He was at war with his neighbours over their pit bull. And he was a pit bull himself, consumed with fury. With Michael like that, we couldn’t let Jess stay for long.
Last Christmas, he sounded more at ease with himself. He had a new job doing the books for the farming co-op, and the pit-bull people had been evicted. If Michael had killed them, or if he’d tracked Ruth down and killed her, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He never spoke of his new neighbour.
Mum didn’t cry often, but I remember the tears in her eyes when she told Michael that it was up to him who he married. She’d never try to talk him out of something he thought would make him happy. She’d done her best by him. She’d taught him the difference between right and wrong. So long as he never forgot that, she’d be proud.
There are things you don’t see yourself doing. I’ve never seen myself abseiling, or identifying a body in the morgue, and I had never imagined flying to Queensland to visit my brother in remand. You do these things as a sleepwalker. Only the odd detail sticks. A Scottish accent over the intercom. The smell of institutional floor polish.
When sending that letter to Selma Roy, I could have said that I was coming, but she knew I would. Everything was part of her scheme. If there hadn’t been a scheme, she would have told us the truth in Melbourne.
Dane didn’t like the idea. All I’d achieve was a backlog of jobs that wouldn’t clear before the Christmas holidays. Christmas just didn’t seem possible in the tropics. The air was so thick you could have grabbed each end and wrung the water out, and the remand centre’s air-conditioning was too feeble to cope.
But for his eyes, I wouldn’t have recognised the man escorted into the visiting room. Greyer than when I last saw him, he had straggly hair and a beard, like Saddam when the Americans dragged him from the bunker. When I asked if he was all right, he shrugged, so I changed tack to ask if he was being well treated.
‘Sure.’
Even when visiting Michael at home, I didn’t expect him to be thrilled to see me, or to enquire after Dane or his niece. He isn’t like that.
‘Find out about Lucy for me. Can you do that? The landlady took her. I wrote, but haven’t heard anything. I need to know she’s being looked after.’
I told him to ask Selma to call.
‘I want you to do it. I’ll give you the number.’ Clearly, he and Selma had their differences.
‘Did Selma tell you that she saw us in Melbourne?’
‘She said she was going to phone you, and she thinks I’ll pay for that trip, but I’m sacking her.’
‘Michael, she’s doing all she can for you.’
‘She wants the court to think I’m crazy. Is that what you think?’
It was so uncommon for him to ask what I thought that I was taken aback. I said that he sounded rational now, but if he was sane when he killed Yvette Mitchell, he’d need to explain why a sane man would think his neighbour was the Devil. He answered this with the same glare he used whenever I’d said that trains were stupid. If he’d had a hammer, he might have smashed my skull.
‘Have you seen a photo of Yvette Mitchell?’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t have. The police won’t release one. I never said she was the Devil. They invented that to make me sound stupid, and to stop the truth from getting out … There’s a copper named Lawrence. Sergeant Lawrence. Find him. He’s the one who said he would’ve done the same thing. That the truth would bring the federal government down if it got out … You have to find him and make him testify.’
Was he trying to say that he’d signed a false confession? I asked him straight out if he’d hit
his neighbour with a hammer.
‘I had no choice. Not once she saw I’d guessed who she was.
I’d know those eyes anywhere. It was Myra Hindley.’
Seeing my jaw drop, he said he didn’t give a shit if I believed him.
‘Myra Hindley’s dead.’
‘She is now.’
‘No. She had a heart attack in prison four or five years ago. It was big news.’
‘Hindley was overdue for release. But unless they faked her death and gave her a new identity, they couldn’t let her out. So they sent Yvette Mitchell to Dunedin, only she couldn’t stand the cold there. Second time we met, when I told her she was Myra Hindley, she said she didn’t know who I was talking about. That made me certain. Every English woman her age knows Myra Hindley.’
When I asked him if he understood what paranoia does to a person’s thinking, he sneered. The authorities would love for him to be found unfit to plead. That way, the truth wouldn’t come out in court.
‘In all history, only one woman’s had those eyes.’
I’d heard Michael speak strange thoughts before, but he’d rarely confused fantasy with reality.
‘You’ve got to write to the British papers. Someone will ’fess up. I only did what anyone there would’ve done if they had the chance.’
Even in this current state of mind, Michael knew there was no point begging me to promise.
‘You’ll check about Lucy?’
‘I’ll call.’
‘I don’t mind if someone kind takes her in. But don’t let her be put down.’
I said I’d do everything I could. Our time was up.
‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’
‘You are if you sack your solicitor.’