by Ross Watkins
Noel looked about the dinky hire car at his girls. Riley had her headphones on, watching the streets fly by. Grace was on her phone. Wendy was tuning the radio to taste.
His wife didn’t know the depth of his self-reproach. No one knew. Not even that dickhead service counsellor could get it out of him – the one who didn’t last long, and after he got the sack was picked up for possession. Noel was there when the bloke was brought in, all scruffy in filthy jeans and thongs and a bloodied T-shirt. Coked out of his brain, with a baggy in his pocket which a couple of kids had tried to thieve from him at a shopping mall; they’d ended up in a scuffle. Trolley-pushing old ladies were terrified. Clerks watched in awe. Teenagers filmed it with their phones and someone called the cops. The kids got away, leaving the counsellor on the polished floor holding his mouth, teeth busted through a lip. So the arresting officers said.
Noel first met the counsellor as protocol after a colleague was bashed during a pub call-out. Noel never trusted the prying bastard. He kept pressing Noel to spill his guts but Noel reckoned the joker had done some spilling himself – he could tell an alcoholic a mile off, a special ability his dad had blessed him with. Exposure becomes knowledge, eventually. Noel had wondered if the counsellor might’ve occasionally chucked in a little something extra with the drink, because when you’re loose you might as well let it all go and get fucken frayed, right? That kind of thing. Noel had seen it plenty. He knew the kind. The counsellor’s eyes blurted out the only thing worse than disinterest, and that was self-interest.
Wendy had found her radio station and now put her hand on Noel’s thigh, but her face was turned to the window. Casual affection, not the full commitment. He got it, because Noel found it difficult to fully trust anyone, which gave Simmo the shits, and probably Wendy too. He recognised something seething in her lately but wasn’t interested enough to goad the issue out into daylight.
Noel was like that: reliable yet guarded, there but not really there. He never let anyone get closer than arm’s length, and truly thought that this was the best way to be, because less input equated to less output. Less investment meant less to lose.
Wendy seemed to be playing that way now too. She wouldn’t win, though, Noel knew, because he had perfected the art to the point he now believed he had nothing left to lose.
*
They pulled up at the Merrylands house. They got out of the car and Noel walked around it to open the boot.
‘We’ll get the suitcases later,’ Wendy said. ‘Say hello first.’ She put her arms around Grace and Riley and walked up the driveway.
Noel hadn’t moved.
‘I said just leave the bags, darling.’
‘It’s okay,’ he replied. ‘You head in with the girls.’
Riley mumbled something but he ignored her.
‘Why aren’t you coming in?’ Wendy asked.
‘I need a smoke, don’t I?’
There were ‘No smoking’ stickers on the dash and glove box in the hire car, and the clerk had specifically pointed out the clause in the contract.
Wendy shook her head and embraced Glenda, who’d come out to the driveway. Glenda hugged the girls and touched Grace’s hair, saying nice things to them all. She looked over at Noel and smiled.
‘I’ll be there in a minute, Mum.’
She nodded. ‘Love you,’ she said.
‘Love you too.’
‘I’m so glad you made it.’
Noel nodded, though he wasn’t so sure.
ADRIAN
One tap. That meant teeth.
‘Stop using your teeth. More lip and tongue. Remember?’
The instructions were simple and never changed, yet he got it wrong most times. He was just a boy, after all. Adrian often fails to comprehend this fact, but regardless of how complex the issue of what they were doing could become, the boy’s age was the simplest and most essential truth.
Adrian appreciates this more now than he could at the time, and with that appreciation comes the hurt. At that age, the boy was not to blame. But how can Adrian tell him that? There is no way he can go back and tell the boy those things now. If there was guilt, and he wondered why there had to be so much guilt, then he would tell the boy it was not his to keep. That any guilt should be outed, replaced by another emotion. The only problem is that Adrian has no conception of what that other emotion should be.
‘Open your mouth wider. Make it bigger. Yeah, that’s it. That’s good.’
In retrospect, each action appears inevitable. That’s how Adrian sees it now. One action led to another, and to another, and so on until the final act. And of course there was desire. What began as a set of specific instructions had quickly turned into a want. A craving, perhaps, by the end, by the time he took the boy in his mouth for the final time.
How did it end? It ended because it had to. There was nothing more to it, really.
Two taps – that was how it ended. Two taps. That meant someone was coming.
‘Oh, shit. Move away. Someone’s coming!’
*
The interview wore on. Fielder managed to maintain a bored tone, slouching in his seat like some cocky kid at school. Like he was enjoying the process now, tapping the side of his coffee cup with a pen. The sound was beginning to grate on Adrian, who wondered if this was the bad cop routine.
‘Mr Pomeroy, do you believe an alleged victim places himself at risk by reporting an incidence of sexual misconduct by his teacher?’
‘Yes, of course he does.’
‘And what do you suppose those risks are?’
‘Victimisation from his peers, perhaps. Embarrassment, ridicule. He’d be the subject of jokes and pranks and gossip, stuff like that. I know the teachers would be wary. He’d probably have to go to a new school.’
‘So would you agree that the costs are high?’
Adrian nodded.
‘And yet you claim that the only contact you shared outside of the professional relationship involved some emails and suggestive stories. That’s not a strong basis for such an allegation, which the student would’ve known would activate a police investigation and affect his social interactions and schoolwork.’
Adrian said nothing.
‘Do you see why I’m struggling to understand the nature of this case, Mr Pomeroy?’
Still nothing.
‘You should bear in mind that I have witness accounts and a detailed statement from the alleged victim, which contradict some of the claims you’ve made so far in this interview. Students claim that you favoured him in class, that you made eyes at him and other subtle sexual advances. That you asked him to stay back after class.’
Adrian took his water and tried to sip but his hands were shaking. He put the glass back on the table.
Fielder watched closely, made a note in his notebook. ‘This must be distressing for you too, Mr Pomeroy.’
‘Course it is.’ His nose throbbed beneath the bandage.
‘I can only imagine what’s going through your head right now. Would you care to enlighten me? Or would you prefer that I keep using my imagination?’
They were entering the guts of the interview process now, Adrian could see. Things were about to get mucky. He had to fight or flee.
‘You know, my brother’s a cop,’ he began.
‘Is that right.’
‘Want to know why he became a cop?’
Fielder’s moustache said he didn’t want to play.
‘He didn’t have the imagination to be anything else.’
A smile came out from behind Fielder’s moustache. He turned to the senior constable and she smiled as well. Touché. The tension broke. Fielder picked up his pen again and waited until his smile receded. ‘Okay, then, let’s revisit the email correspondence. Would you say you encouraged or discouraged this activity?’
Adrian knew it could b
e said he’d encouraged the boy, but he believed no evidence existed – he had never replied to Akker’s emails. He wasn’t that imprudent.
‘Neither,’ he said, but he was guilty of both.
Fielder tapped his cup again. ‘Of course, you know that hard evidence isn’t required if there are sufficient statements discounting the credibility of your claim at trial.’
‘I understand.’
‘So are you claiming you did nothing at all in response to Alex Bowman’s written provocations?’
‘I’m not saying I did nothing at all. All I’m saying is that I believe I didn’t actively encourage or discourage him.’
‘But you did respond in some way.’
‘Obviously. Wouldn’t you? If I’m guilty of anything, then I’m guilty of responding.’
Fielder leant forward, raised one eyebrow. ‘And what was your response, exactly?’
*
Following the first email, a coy game of hide-and-seek began.
The change in Akker’s classroom behaviour was subtle – a looseness in the way he sat in his chair, an upturn along the line of his mouth, an intensity of eye contact. Characteristics only Adrian would notice from the front of the room. At first he was confident of his deduction, but over the course of several lessons, when he should have been thinking about a William Golding novel, he became distracted by the thought that perhaps these subtleties were not of Akker’s making but his own – that what he found was the result of what he sought.
After a week, this thought became a belief that godhand wasn’t Akker at all, that the timing of Akker touching him in the convenience store and then receiving the email was pure coincidence. That the description of the man stacking the pyre was not him. He wondered too if the email could have been written by another student, someone blindsiding him, so he began to scrutinise not only Akker’s behaviour but that of all his pupils. Each gesture became a sign. Each whispered word on a boy’s lips was his name, and a wish for what that boy would like to do with him. Over two weeks, each lesson became a portent.
Then came the second email, and with it the second story.
This story was less abstract than its predecessor, though nonetheless remarkable. It described what could be seen through a window at night: a teacher sits at his desk in his study, marking papers. The light is low. There is no sound. Somewhere else in the house are a woman and a child, but they are so far off in the teacher’s mind that they almost do not exist – their presence bleeds into soft furnishings; the woman’s body hangs in a cupboard, no more than an empty dress; the child’s play becomes a drawing on a sheet of paper, left on the carpet in another room. The teacher finishes his marking and puts his pen aside. He rubs his eyes, stretches, massages his neck with palms and fingertips. He moves the pile of marked papers to the end of the desk and turns to his keyboard and computer screen.
When Adrian read this description he couldn’t help but look out his window; the description was so accurate to his own study that he felt a tremor of vulnerability. He felt exposed, not just physically, but emotionally.
The teacher opens his emails and sees an email from someone called godhand. There is a story attached. One about a boy and a depiction of the teacher stacking a pyre. The teacher reads the story, and is described as having his eyes opened to a truth about himself he would rather ignore. But that is difficult. He knows who godhand is, and as he sits at his desk he imagines the boy writing the story and thinking of him, and in this exchange a connection is formed. The teacher’s thoughts are full with the boy. Sitting in his study chair, he imagines that he and the boy are in the classroom, and there is no one else. The school day has ended and they can now begin what they both want. And as the teacher imagines this scene he grows hard, coaxed by his fingertips. Even though he would prefer to deny it, he can’t help it. The knowledge is written in his skin. It surges in his blood, and his blood is full with the boy. So full he could choke.
*
The next day Adrian asked Akker to hang back after class.
‘Sir?’ he said as he approached. Adrian was rubbing the last hour’s work from the whiteboard.
‘When’s your next shift at the store?’
‘Tomorrow night. Why?’
‘What time do you finish?’
‘Nine. But why?’
‘Good. I’ll see you then,’ Adrian said, and put the whiteboard eraser on his desk. He refused eye contact.
Akker nodded, then shifted his bag on his shoulder.
Adrian looked up only as the boy left the room.
*
‘Mr Pomeroy, when was the last time you smoked marijuana?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘But you do smoke, or have smoked, marijuana?’
‘I don’t see how this relates to the allegations.’
‘Okay, then. Where were you on the night of Thursday the eleventh of August?’
‘I don’t recall specifically. I imagine I was at home with my wife and child.’
‘Would it assist your memory if you looked at your work diary?’
‘Probably not. It’s just got work stuff in it.’
‘So you have no recollection of your possible movements or activities that night?’
‘No. None. Why?’
‘I have a statement putting you in the back car park of the convenience store at which the alleged victim was working on the night of Thursday the eleventh of August. It was here that the alleged sexual incident took place in your vehicle. You were reported to be wearing black jeans and a grey jacket, and were possibly under the influence of illicit drugs. We’ve obtained clothing matching these descriptions from your premises. We’ve also obtained your vehicle from the wrecking yard. It’s been impounded for evidence collection. You should also be aware that we’re currently in the process of securing CCTV footage from the convenience store, so if you were there on that night then it’s reasonable to assume we will have evidence to prove it.’
‘He’s saying it happened in the car park?’ Had he seen a security camera at the rear of the building?
‘Correct. Does that surprise you, Mr Pomeroy?’
This had gone far enough. ‘Nothing happened when we were at the car park.’
Fielder looked at the senior constable. Like Adrian had just fucked up.
‘But you were in the car park that night?’
‘Yes.’
‘In your vehicle?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you invited the alleged victim into your vehicle?’
Stupidly … ‘Yes.’
*
It was a couple of minutes to nine when Adrian pulled up in the car park behind the store. He went around to the front of the building but didn’t enter, just watched Akker through the window. He was tidying his till, bagging excess coins and neatening eftpos receipts. When he closed the till he saw Adrian through the glass. The kid pulled his signature smirk.
A guy in his fifties then walked past Adrian to enter the store. He and Akker said something to each other, and both glanced at Adrian. Akker shook his head, laughed. It’s all good, he seemed to be saying. The older guy removed his jacket and put it on the counter, then swapped with Akker at the register, hitting keys on the screen. Akker then came out of the store with his school backpack, and he and Adrian began walking.
‘In my car,’ Adrian said. ‘Out the back.’
There was a dull street lamp at the corner of the car park driveway, but still plenty of shadow play as they opened the front doors and got into the car. Adrian knew the risk of what he was doing, but he was deaf to his own alarm bells, the warning sirens, his body alerting him of imminent danger. Akker sitting in the passenger seat – where his wife always sat – was sufficient proof. The boy’s legs disappearing into the footwell, his chest across the width of the backrest, his right hand on the black of his w
ork trousers. For a moment Adrian felt remorseful that he’d brought the two of them to this scenario, but then reminded himself that it was Akker who had triggered this sequence of events. Adrian was here to rectify this ridiculous situation. He had to shut it down before it went any further – and he knew they could both easily take it further. He wanted to protect Akker as much as himself.
‘What’s happening, sir? Is there something we need to talk about?’
‘Cut the sir crap, Akker. We both know what’s going on here.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Who’s coming to pick you up?’
‘My mum, but only when I text her that I’m ready. I haven’t texted yet.’
‘Good. Gives us time.’
‘Time to do what, sir?’
‘Talk. Just talk.’
‘Is that all?’
Akker relaxed back into the seat now, but Adrian didn’t want him to get too comfortable.
‘Akker, I know you’ve been to my house.’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you do.’