by Jane Jago
An unshaven Alex Reiser stood outside, his large frame shrouded in an oilskin coat. Geoffrey let the journalist in and searched the hallway for signs of his fellow residents before he closed the door.
Reiser was already seated on the couch with his coat off. ‘It is Danny, isn’t it? I know a few people in the Police Department. The word is that you’ve been in a spot of trouble and you’ll be moving to another town or state.’
Danny’s rattled mind began to focus. He was listening now.
‘Starting over can be tough.’
‘What do you care?’
‘Maybe we can help each other out.’ Reiser turned back the flap on his satchel and took out his notepad. ‘I’m writing a book, Danny, a novel, about what happened. I’d like you to tell me your side of the story.’
‘I’m not allowed to talk to the press. I’d go straight back to prison.’
‘Like I said, it’s a novel. It’s not about you or the Allens, it’s just a story . . . I want to get it right.’
‘And I get what?’
‘You get to set the record straight after all these years.’
Danny gave the journalist an embittered look, unable to imagine anyone interested in anything he had to say.
‘You’re right, it would be illegal for you to profit from your story, but I could pay you for your time. I think that’s only fair.’
‘How much?’ said Danny, cutting to the chase.
Alex sighed. ‘Say, one hundred and fifty an hour?’
Danny was unnerved by the proposal. It was chicken shit – and what good would money do in his predicament? On the other hand, it was a very long time since anyone had offered him anything at all. ‘What would I have to do?’
‘Just talk about what happened and about what’s happened to you since. I want to understand.’
‘No one will know you’re writing about me?’
‘You’ll be a character in a work of fiction.’
‘And you won’t tell anyone about me.’
‘You have my word on that, Danny.’
Over the next hour they struck an arrangement to meet for a series of interviews. They shook on the deal, which meant little to Danny – he had only Reiser’s word on any of it, and the man had him firmly over a barrel. During the subsequent days they met for the three five-hour sessions that would serve as an outline for Alex’s eager editor.
At the final session Danny sat facing Reiser, sizing up the journalist as he fumbled with his recorder. He set the device between them and paused it. His turn now to sit back and examine his subject.
Danny’s hair had grown back to a stubble and he was sporting the beginnings of a neat beard. He chewed the nail on his thumb.
‘Ready?’
Danny nodded.
During the previous sessions, as they had worked their way circuitously through the events of that long-ago day, Reiser had observed Danny to be, at times, cunning and calculated in the way he ordered information, sometimes leaving out key facts. Facts that were well established and already on record. The unshaven adult sitting before him held a tight rein on the flow of communication, hesitated before he spoke, betrayed little emotion, and stopped short of discussing certain details. But every now and then, when the memories took hold or when he was ambushed by an unexpected question, Reiser witnessed a shift as Danny the boy within looked out from his hiding place.
‘Why did you take the child?’
Danny broke eye contact and fiddled with the leather loop attached to the Dictaphone.
Reiser pulled the machine aside. The question had the effect of putting Danny immediately on guard. His account always began with Benjamin’s long walk away from the safety of his mother and never with the boys’ motive for taking him in the first place. Circling warily around the bigger question.
‘Graham was the one . . . It was his idea. It was kind of a joke that we’d take a kid and get him lost – and all these things we were gonna do to him, like in the movie the lawyer told us to say we never watched. I didn’t think he’d really do it ’cause he was all talk.’ Danny looked at Reiser. ‘I was the one that did things, not Graham. Graham was a wimp . . . but he had a psycho temper.’ He bit at the jagged nail again. ‘When the kid came over to him and took his hand . . . We just kept walking. We walked for hours.’ He began to recount the seemingly endless details of the meandering journey the three children had taken, away from the safety of the shopping precinct to the docklands.
The story was interrupted as the recorder stopped. Reiser slid the mini-cassette into his shirt pocket and peeled the cellophane off another. Danny rotated a glass of water on the table between his two thumbs as the fresh tape was inserted with a click.
‘All the time you were walking around, what were you thinking?’ Reiser was tiring of going over the same story without getting any closer to the truth inside Danny’s head.
‘We just wanted to get him somewhere away from people . . . where no one could see us.’ Danny fell silent, staring into the distance as though remembering.
Goosebumps appeared on Alex Reiser’s flesh as he looked at the hunted face opposite him, searching the eyes for the presence of remorse, empathy – even consciousness. The person he saw was malformed, stunted. Born of a long line of violent drunkards and malingerers stung by society’s inequalities, dropped on his head into their grubby world of drama and shame. Neglected and brutalized, what hope was there for him?
Thinking of the many injuries the defenceless victim had sustained in the attack, Reiser pushed on for an answer to the obvious question: ‘Why would you want to hurt a helpless baby?’
It was a question, even now, that Danny could not answer. How could he explain the depth of his hatred for any goodness or softness, his rage and hostility, his desire to inflict pain, the relief of doing what was done to him? The power and the thrill of taking a child from a mother, and life from the child. He did not understand it himself. How was it possible to express that, from the moment they had clapped eyes on him, Benjamin – small, vulnerable and protected – represented all that he and Graham were denied?
He shrugged his shoulders, a recalcitrant eleven-year-old again. ‘I don’t know. It was just something to do.’
Something to do. To even the score with life by taking from it. A long moment outside time to exact vengeance on an innocent baby, an unwitting family, a whole community and an indifferent world. An arbitrary death sentence handed down long before the perpetrators were even born.
Reiser’s palms were sticky with sweat; the hand with the pen had stopped writing. He contemplated the narrowing spool on the tiny recorder and hung his head, filled with revulsion and sorrow. After all his digging, what had he expected? Some detail or revelation that would make sense of atrocity? A satisfying explanation of cause and effect? It made no sense – it never would – but it was the dark and ugly truth that he had asked for.
‘Do you ever think about the parents?’
Danny shook his head unconvincingly. ‘Whatever, they have to live with it, I have to live with this.’ He looked from wall to wall of the tiny flat that represented the cage of his life.
Uncomfortable with the comparison, the journalist crossed his arms and studied Danny for a long moment.
‘I don’t let those thoughts in.’
Reiser tried again. ‘Do you think if your home life had been . . .’ He paused, searching for the right word.
‘If my father hadn’t been an arsehole drunk and my mother wasn’t a useless whore?’ Danny didn’t wait for the rhetorical question to be answered. ‘I didn’t choose to be born. You don’t have to be a head doctor to know that if I’d grown up in a normal family that kid would still be here.’
‘Do you ever wonder who you might have become if you hadn’t gone to the Regency Arcade that day?’
‘That’s easy,’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’d be in a real prison right now.’
Reiser nodded. Although the insight surprised him, it was a
n ironic twist of Fate that Danny had been lucky to escape his family at the age of eleven. He’d had a more stable upbringing and a better education in custody than he could have imagined back in the Simpson household.
‘Sooner or later I was going to do something,’ he said flatly. ‘I had it in me.’
Living
‘Valley of the shadow’
Mathew, 2009
The incline that led down from the overpass was now a bare slope. The gorse bushes had been levelled and an attempt made to plant it with native shrubs. The few that survived were low to the ground; nothing seemed to want to grow there. Well-intentioned locals had made plans to erect a humble monument but the Allens had intervened: this was not a place they wanted commemorated. People still came to see where it had happened; some left tributes anyway.
The other side of the hill overlooked a different universe, one of reclaimed docklands and open parkland. Battery Cove was now a gentrified development of factory conversions and desirable apartments.
Dead flowers crunched under his shoes as he walked steadily downhill, carrying a bunch of scarlet carnations. He had never been able to bring himself to visit this place of death. Every inch of it was known to him: a map of carnage and agony. His eyes went immediately to the exact spot where his son had been found. How many times had he steeled himself to come here? Each time feeling himself a coward not to face up to it and stand where Benjamin had stood alone and fallen. With the anniversary of his son’s murder approaching, he finally felt ready to shoulder his last responsibility as a father.
By not setting foot here he had been able to keep the awful details of Benjamin’s last hours, read in court and told to him by detectives, in separate compartments in his head. He had been forced to confront each of these facts, had needed to know exactly what had happened to his son, but without coming here he had avoided joining all the dots together. Kneeling in that place, the scene he had held down for so long came to life around him. He heard the plaintive cries of his baby son, his high voice pleading. Cries for mercy that were met with the mocking laughter of his attackers.
‘I want my daddy.’
‘I’m here, Benji!’ he cried, running along the slope, slipping on stones, scrambling to his feet.
‘Daddy?’
‘Your daddy isn’t here.’
‘Don’t listen to them, Benjamin. They can’t hurt you now. You’re safe.’
‘I knew you’d come.’ The toddler giggled in the old infectious way. ‘Daddy, you look tired.’
‘I am, son. I had to stay awake. I had to find you . . .’
‘I’m not here any more.’
He blinked back tears. ‘I know, love. You’re with the angels now.’
Benjamin smiled as his father laid the carnations carefully on the ground and let the tears roll freely down his face, able at last to forgive himself for not being there when his child had needed him most.
He sat for a long time afterwards in the open playing fields above the dockside. Two toddlers in Kelly green shirts ran about, shrieking with delight while their young father chased and tackled them, then threw them into the air, allowing them to chase him in turn, letting them slap him gleefully and pull him to the ground. They were tireless. Their father was their moon and stars, the arbiter of all justice and protection, safety and adventure in perfect measure. When one boy inevitably fell hard and burst into tears, the father lifted him up and held him. Ever so gently, he soothed the child, while playfully dragging along his sibling, who was wrapped around his ankle.
Joy, comfort and love. Mathew Allen had had all those with Benjamin, and for that he would be eternally grateful.
Rachel, 2009
A young girl sat huddled on her father’s lap observing the uniformed bus driver as he emptied the luggage hold. She wriggled down onto the cold concrete and skipped beyond the shadows of the bus to the next bay, climbing up onto the cement rockery to pick the tiny flowers off a pink baronia, crushing the petals between her fingers and bringing the scent to her nose. The girl’s father tracked her movements out of the corner of his eye.
Rachel McKenna watched her too, through the windscreen of her car. She pressed her head back into the passenger seat and closed her eyes. David reached across and touched her hand. ‘You’ll be fine.’
A small group of teenagers stood by the doors to the terminal. More arrived in a steady stream and soon the platform was full of teens toting bags and pairs of hovering parents. Boys in caps, earplugs tethered to their iPods. Coltish girls in patterned leggings, who jiggled from foot to foot in an effort to stamp out the cold.
A Greyhound bus slid into view and pulled up in the crowded bay. ‘Here it is,’ called Thomas, from the back seat of the Land Rover.
Martin threw open his door and jumped out. ‘I’ll get my bags.’
Thomas made to follow.
‘Hang on,’ said his father.
Rachel’s eyes were locked on the bus. David leant over and undid her seatbelt. ‘You can do this.’ He stepped out of the car, walked to her side and opened the door.
Martin took out his backpack and slipped it on, pulled his bag from the hatch and wheeled it across the cement.
Rachel finally stepped out and stood in front of him, taking hold of both his shoulders. ‘You’re going to have a wonderful trip, and you’re not going to worry about me. Okay?’
Martin smiled broadly. ‘Okay.’
She kissed his forehead and held him close.
‘I’ll be getting Dragon Ball Z.’ Thomas commandeered the suitcase and dragged it behind him.
‘We haven’t forgotten. Do your jacket up, Martin.’ Rachel pulled the hood from his collar.
‘This is it, then.’ David marshalled his tribe and ushered them across the car park.
Light from the early-morning sun backlit the terminal, creating the effect of a halo above the roof of the bus. Rachel reached down and took her son’s hand. The fourteen-year-old made no protest. He squeezed hers and pulled it to his side.
Beside the charter bus, a tall, athletic man held a clipboard to his chest, ticking off the names of his charges as they surrendered their luggage. ‘Hey, Martin. Good morning, folks.’ He pointed to the front of the cargo hold. ‘Pop that straight in here, buddy.’
Thomas upended the fat rectangle and hoisted it in with the other kids’ bags.
‘That’s the way.’
The teacher turned again to Martin. ‘All ready?’
‘Yep.’
‘And don’t you worry,’ he said, winking at Rachel. ‘I’ll take good care of this one.’
‘You’ve got all our numbers,’ said David.
Rachel was looking at her son. ‘I expect a phone call every single day,’ she said, smiling hard. ‘I want a picture of you standing in front of that bloody lake at sunset, okay?’
‘Sure, Mum.’
She ruffled his hair and let go of his hand.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he called over his shoulder, bounding up the steps and forging his way to the back of the bus.
Alex Reiser, 2009
Inside the air-conditioned taxi, Reiser thumbed the dog-eared pages of his Lonely Planet Guide to Indonesia.
‘Which terminal?’ The driver’s dark eyes were framed in the rear-view mirror.
‘Virgin,’ said Reiser, replacing his bookmark.
‘You go?’
‘Bali.’
The driver pouted, then nodded. These fat Australians were always headed off to Bali. Some of them never came back.
Reiser knew exactly what he was thinking but his interest in Bali had nothing to do with sweaty nights of Bintang passion. This was no holiday. He was returning to a squalid jail near Denpasar to interview the inmates, chasing down a story about the fate of foreign nationals in custody. His flight was being met by the mother of a young drug trafficker awaiting execution.
The taxi squeezed into the drop-off lane outside the teeming airport, nosing into a gap between two minibuses. A horn sounded. Reiser
heaved his bag onto the roadway, slammed the boot and waved the driver on.
After queuing at the check-in desk, he headed straight through security, keen to find his boarding gate. He held his big hands out from his sides as he walked through the metal detector, keeping pace with his bags as they got a free ride to the other side. For good measure, an inscrutable security officer beckoned him over for another pass with her scanner. In his creased white linen jacket and baggy trousers, he was an unlikely drug mule.
He quickly moved away from the crowded hub of the fast-food hall, with its stink of stale oil. Halfway along the tunnel of overpriced designer clothing outlets and day spas that led to his boarding gate, he stopped to adjust his grip on his luggage. As he heaved the heavy laptop satchel back to his shoulder, his attention was caught by a stack of paperbacks, front and centre, in the airport bookstore. His eyes locked on the cover of a facing book standing on top of the pyramid. A broken white picket fence, beneath an overcast, but breaking sky.
Across the foreboding image, in black type, loomed the title THE WRONG HAND.
Epilogue
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’
Geoffrey, 2010
A bell sounded as the doors opened onto the first-floor lobby of Bell and Pearson Software Systems. A small boy let go of his mother’s hand and rushed into the elevator. He reached up to the control panel.
‘Where to?’ asked the auburn-haired man, who was the lift’s only other occupant.
‘Fourth,’ answered the boy’s mother.
‘I wanted to push it.’
‘Never mind.’
At the third floor the lift stopped again and the man alighted. He carried a leather bag slung over his shoulder. The corridor was lined with frosted-glass panels, interrupted at intervals by heavy doors engraved with a single lotus and the slogan ‘Ideas First’.
The pretty receptionist looked up from her station opposite the lift. ‘Can I help?’
He handed her a card. ‘I’m here to see Gabriel Lowe.’
‘A Mr Anderson to see you,’ she said, into the mouthpiece of her headset. ‘I’ll send him through.’