The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

  The nurse did direct me to a friend of Tom Eden’s, Murray Burns, an elderly carpenter.

  I said, ‘Murray, I understand you were a mate of Tom’s?’

  ‘Yes, for nineteen years. Our huts were next to each other. I had to ask the boss for a move to another hut. I couldn’t stand being so close to where Tom died.’

  I said, ‘I had a mate who died here the week before Tom. I wondered if they both died from the same cause.’

  ‘Tom died in his sleep. He was laying on his bed. It was his day off. I didn’t see him around in the morning so I went next door and there he was. At least he died peacefully in his sleep. I reckon what killed him was rolling around those 44-gallon drums of garbage in this temperature.’

  ‘Did he smoke?’

  ‘No, but he was a big eater and liked his drink. He was a very big man. He wouldn’t have much for breakfast, but he’d make up for it later. Like one night he said he felt like eggs. He cooked ten eggs and sat down and ate the lot. He’d eat steak for tea and follow it up with a plate of fish.’

  ‘Did he always do his own cooking?’

  ‘Yes. Poor Tom. He was going to retire in January too.’

  Alex Stack, the manager of Sweetlip Island, is a tall suave man whose clothing and accoutrements proclaim his occupation as a resort manager. He was not pleased to see me and managed to mention the several links between P & M and the Dunbar group.

  ‘You would be better talking to the police,’ he said. ‘Look, I went down to Mr Lang’s room with the nurse and saw he was dead. He was lying on his back on the bathroom floor with his head near the toilet. He was undressed, with a wash cloth covering his thighs. He had been sick in the room. There was a mess in the bed, some vomit, a small amount of faeces. I left the nurse there and rang the police on the mainland. We got a policeman over in the helicopter and he took the body away.’

  ‘What about his belongings?’

  ‘We made a list of the valuables. The policeman rang a week later and asked if I had noticed any silver pens in the room, because the family were complaining they were missing. I said no. Who would steal pens with someone’s initials on them? It’s ridiculous.’

  Asked whether any other people were ill during the week of the fatality, Stack answered, ‘Yes, during their fishing trip one got very seasick and had to be taken to hospital.’

  Presumably it would have been devastating for business if a food poisoning story had broken just before the main holiday season?

  He became very peeved at the mention of food poisoning. ‘Any talk about us covering up an epidemic is nonsense. With hundreds of guests you’d expect a couple to get upset stomachs. The way some of them eat and drink it’s no wonder!’

  I said any epidemic would surely show up in the medical records. That would be one way of settling it. Could I see those records?

  ‘They’re confidential. Medical ethics and so on.’

  Would he be happy to give evidence at an inquest?

  ‘I have no more to tell.’ Stack shrugged. ‘Someone dies …’

  Miscellaneous points:

  There is a fish poison called ciguatera to be found in the flesh of a wide range of Barrier Reef fish, including some of the most edible species such as sweetlip, coral trout, red bass, red emperor and groper. Most doctors would be unfamiliar with the symptoms of ciguatera poisoning.

  Sweetlip Island had trouble with contaminated water supplies in 1974, 1977 and 1979.

  The island does not slaughter its own meat. This is done at Egerton and the frozen carcases are brought across to Sweetlip by boat. The resort’s food handling conditions are checked periodically by State health authorities. No prosecutions have ever ensued.

  Since the Lang episode any dead body is flown to Egerton instead of Petersen. A more obliging G.P. now signs the death certificates.

  McPhee, the Petersen Hospital patient, says he has still not recovered from the ‘seasickness’, as Stack termed it, three months later. (His sales figures for February are down 11.5 per cent.)

  Mrs Lang says she could no longer disregard foul play. (I refer directors to the third paragraph of this report.)

  Mrs Lang reports: ‘I get more suspicious of everyone the longer this drags on. I don’t know what to think. Was there some fish sting on his body? Did he choke on his vomit? Did he have a stroke? Who knows now? Would someone have benefited from his death? It’s so humiliating and depressing for me. I can’t get a death certificate so I can’t get probate granted. Society needs a cause of death.’

  (She has one point of course in that even with an open finding or death-unknown decision she can’t get life insurance and her compensation from us is affected. If she can’t get an inquest she can’t get to first base.)

  The police at least could be in a position of censure for their handling of the organ samples. Do we push this?

  Directors should be reminded that P & M has two potential and vigorous antagonists here: the Dunbar Group and the Queensland Government.

  Because of all the circumstances my feeling is that it will not be possible to obtain a definite cause of death from any coroner’s inquiry. In the meantime these are my recommendations:

  We should get statutory declarations from all P & M people mentioned in this report, including full details of their illnesses, last meal eaten, etc.

  We need full details of McPhee’s hospitalisation, treatment and diagnosis. A letter of authority from him to the hospital is necessary.

  We should have a written report from Lang’s own doctor covering his last health check, plus his opinion on the possible cause of death.

  Most importantly, we must satisfy ourselves that everything is handled at an inquiry from ‘our’ point of view. This can only be done by engaging legal counsel away from either Petersen or Egerton. These small-town networks are amazing. We should subtly seek a different town for the inquest venue.

  Max Lang has asked that our legal people press the police and the island management about the positioning of his father’s body. He seems to find it peculiar, its neatness on the bathroom floor, particularly the washcloth covering the groin area.

  I quote him without comment: ‘Dad was not a modest man, he was not prissy. If he was dying the last thing he’d worry about would be “decency”.’ He added, rather unnecessarily, ‘We were brought up to regard nudity as quite natural. We swam nude when we could. At home Dad did the gardening with just an old piece of sack tied round his waist. He was a scallywag.’

  For the record, Max also became sick on the island. He phoned me from his cabin at 9.00 a.m. after our overnight stay. He said he had been vomiting and defecating most of the night. He seemed in a bad way. I took him to the nurse, who injected him with something to quieten his stomach spasms. Though pale and weak he was recovering by the time we took off in the helicopter at 3.00 p.m., and slept in the plane all the way down the coast.

  The cause of his illness is not known. My own view, for what it is worth, is that it was precipitated by his drinking until 2.00 a.m. at ‘Randy’s’.

  The Bodysurfers

  The murders took the gloss off it. Crossing over the Hawkesbury, David began thinking of them, anticipating the bridge over Mooney Mooney Creek they would soon cross, the picnic area below where, he had read in the papers, the lovers had apparently been forced from their car two nights before, ordered to strip and then struck and run over repeatedly by the murderer’s car. When David finally drove over the bridge and the station wagon rounded the bend past the murder site, he nudged Lydia and pointed it out but said nothing because of the younger kids. He thought he could see deep savage skid marks in the gravel.

  They were heading this Friday evening for the weekend shack David had just bought at Pearl Beach; he, Lydia, and his children Paul, Helena and Tim. Having turned over the house at Mosman to his wife since their separation, David now lived nearer town in a flat with a green view of Cooper Park. He missed the water in his windows, however the dependable harbour glimpses framed by t
he voluptuous pink branches of his own plump gum tree, as well as the early morning bird calls, the barbecue, the irresistible nationalistic combination of bush and water, so he decided that at last he would buy a weekend shack on the coast.

  ‘I see no reason why we can’t get what we want,’ he had remarked to Lydia, his new lover, as romantic in these matters as himself. He knew exactly what he was looking for. It must be the genuine article. It had to put the city at a respectable distance but be close enough for comfortable weekend commuting. However, locale was only part of it. Anyone of his generation would know what he wanted. No transplanted bourgeois suburban brick-and-tile villa would do. The spirit of the shack had to be right, its character set preferably somewhere in the 1950s. It would need a properly casual, even run-down, beach air. It should have a verandah to sleep weekend guests, a working septic system, an open fireplace and somewhere to hang a dartboard. A glimpse at least of the Pacific through the trees was mandatory.

  In his head David carried a clear picture of weekends in his shack. For a start there would be no television. He and Lydia would surf and make love in the afternoon to Rolling Stones tapes and read best-sellers and play Scrabble. On the verandah he and his children would strengthen bonds with quoits and table-tennis. Under his gum trees friends would drink in their swimming costumes and eat grilled fish caught at dawn.

  On a sunny spring day with a high swell running from the ocean straight into Broken Bay he had eventually found the shack he wanted on the central coast at Pearl Beach. It was built of weatherboard and fibro-cement, painted the colour of pale clay, and it settled on the hillside sheltered from the southerly wind and facing north along the beach. Its ceiling contained a possum’s nest or two, and three mature gums, and a jacaranda in bloom filtered the gleam off the sea. The Recession was forcing the owners, a writer and her husband, to rapidly consolidate their assests and their price was reasonable. Apologetically they pointed out an old ceiling stain of possum urine. David laughed. He liked their honesty about the possum pee, the view of the surf from the wooden balcony and the lizards warming on the railing, and, in his new mood of independence and self-assertion, made them an offer. The nostalgic boom of waves had punctuated their negotiations.

  An anticipatory air had overlain this weekend. David was looking forward to showing the shack to the children. This was also their first meeting with Lydia and he hoped the shack would break the ice. Along the Newcastle Expressway things looked optimistic. They sang along with the radio and Helena chattered happily to Lydia. Just beyond the Gosford exit warm spring whiffs of eucalypt pollen and the fecund muddy combustion of subtropical undergrowth suddenly filled the car with the scents of holidays.

  ‘Not long to summer,’ he pronounced.

  ‘That’s a funny name,’ Helena said, pointing. ‘Mooney Mooney Creek.’

  ‘Mooney Mooney loony,’ Tim burbled.

  The police hadn’t caught the killer, or killers, and according to the news were completely mystified. Both victims had been married to other people, but the spouses had been unaware of the affair and were not under suspicion. Thrill Killing? the tabloids wondered. The lovers, both in their thirties, had driven all the way from Sydney’s western suburbs for their tryst by the creek. Oyster farmers on the Hawkesbury had seen their car burning at 5.00 a.m. Later people remembered hearing the high-pitched revving of an engine and perhaps some human cries.

  ‘I hope there’s some good surf,’ Paul said. His board was strapped to the roof-rack. As usual lately he was alternately amiable and taciturn, in the sixteen-year-old-fashion, but did not give the impression as he often did that this was a duty weekend.

  Lydia was anxious to please and turned back to smile at him, ‘I’m sure there will be.’

  It was dark when they reached Pearl Beach. For five minutes David fumbled about in the oleander and hibiscus bushes which scraped against the walls, searching for the fuse box where the old owners had left the key. As he stamped around the periphery lighting matches something rustled in a tree above him and a gumnut dropped with a clatter on the tin roof and rolled into the guttering. Possum, he told himself. A mosquito landed noisily on his cheek. From the black shrubbery Helena gave one of the high indignant screams she had affected since her parents separated. Lately she needed soothing and coddling for every slight and injury, real and imaginary. Meanwhile each cry and sulk, no matter how exaggerated, struck him with a hopelessness, produced a hollow despair in him which made him want to simultaneously embrace and shake her and yell, ‘I’m sorry my darling, I love you, and my wounds sting too.’

  He found the fuse box and the key and opened the front door. Helena burst inside, her sandals clopping on the wooden floor, crying, ‘Paul punched me on the arm!’

  ‘Jesus!’ Paul said, sidling in with his sleeping bag. ‘I just brushed past her. I wouldn’t touch her bloody poxy arm.’

  ‘Easy, you two,’ their father said.

  Lydia struggled in with a carton of groceries. ‘Isn’t it cute?’ she announced.

  ‘Have you seen it already?’ Helena asked suspiciously. ‘When did you see it?’

  Some mosquitoes had followed them inside and soon had Helena whining. Lydia lit a mosquito coil and hunted up a tube of Stop-Itch. The previous owners had left them a bottle of Chablis in the fridge with a note saying ‘Welcome to Marsupial Manor!’ David uncorked it immediately and they swigged wine from coffee mugs while he unloaded the car and they settled in.

  ‘What a terrific gesture,’ Lydia said.

  Making his final trip from the car carrying the Scrabble set, Lydia’s handbag and Helena’s pillow shaped like a rhinocerous, David saw the others’ faces pass across the bright uncurtained windows and he stopped on the path, surprised at how earnest they all appeared, even the younger children, how foreign and intense in their tasks. They were all frowning. He could hear their feet thudding on the bare boards. He heard a low murmur from Paul and then Lydia’s face over the sink lit up and she gave a laugh. She put a paper bag on her head like a chefs cap. Tim giggled.

  David went inside to join them. From the balcony the night sea was as slick and black as grease in the new-moon light, and fruit bats flapped against the stars.

  In the middle of the night David awoke and instantly regretted the cute rusticity of the lavatory and its position some ten metres outside in the bushes. A breezy brick cubicle, it had no electricity and a reasonable prospect of spiders in the darkness. He would have to set something up with extension cords. He took a couple of steps out the back door and pissed into the hibiscus. Back in bed, he was unable to sleep again; these nights if he woke up he always had trouble falling back to sleep. Anxieties churned in his mind until exhaustion eventually took over at dawn.

  Funny, the more numerous and wilder his wakeful thoughts, the less imaginative his dreams. Since the breakup his dreams had been uniformly mundane — of buying a loaf of Vogel’s sandwich bread, catching the 387 bus into town, reading the television guide — sexless, fact-filled visions in which each action or transaction was conducted with the utmost solemnity and realism. Perhaps, he told himself, they were subliminal exhortations to live a moderate, conservative life. Whatever, they were so boring and accurate in their triviality that he allowed his bladder to wake him.

  And then, back in bed, the sleepless turmoil began.

  Why hadn’t the lovers run away? His heart pounded in sympathy. The killers must have had a weapon to force them out of their car, to make them remove their clothes, to wound or threaten them sufficiently that they didn’t try to escape. Perhaps they did try. Were they chased all over the picnic area?

  Was she raped? He presumed so but the papers didn’t say. Did their bodies have bullet holes? No idea. Were the bodies too flattened and battered to tell? Considering these horrors, David rolled over on the doughy mattress, his hip bumping against Lydia’s warm bottom with a sudden heat and pressure that surprised them both. She murmured in her sleep and turned over.

  Their clothes ha
d been found lying unburned a distance from the gutted car, so they’d been dressed when first harassed, not nakedly fornicating such as to inflame the crazy passions of murdering yokels. The killers were likely from these parts. Maybe he had stood alongside them tonight in the hotel bottle shop buying his Dimple Haig. Sandy-haired yobbos with a big gas guzzler throbbing in the car park. He had visions of headlights bearing down on Lydia and him, of them being mesmerised like possums struck by the beam of a torch.

  Thump, brake and reverse, wheels spinning crazily in the gravel. Skin and hair on the bumpers.

  He told himself the shack was meant to be an antidote to all this.

  Amazingly on cue, screams, grunts and thuddings, eerie gurgles and whispers erupted just outside the bedroom window. His scalp prickled, Lydia sat up in terror.

  ‘Just a possum fight,’ he calmed her, his chest pounding. He got out of bed again and made them cups of warm milk. Like children they whispered in the foreign room. Her upper lip corners wore a small milky moustache. Stroking each other with an urgent solicitude, they made love aware of daily jeopardy and thin walls.

  Father and daughter rose first and early on Saturday morning, murmuring and tiptoeing conspiratorially and taking their orange juice out onto the balcony. A flock of parrots exploded from one of their gum trees. The sun rising out of the Pacific slanted obliquely over their domain and brought a new arrangement of parallel shimmers to the surface of the water below. Instantly David saw he had made one mistake — there was no surf and there would rarely be. Freak conditions had no doubt prevailed the day he inspected the shack, a strange pure easterly perhaps instead of the usual southerly or nor’easter or even westerly. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that Box Head would block the nor’easters, Lion Island the southerlies? It didn’t matter that their beach faced the open Pacific; there would be no surfing; they would have to drive several kilometres north to swim in the surf. His personal stretch of sea was quiescent, bland as bathwater, nice for fishing, sailboarding and swimming up and down. He felt vaguely sick.