Rocking Horse Road

by Nixon, Carl

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Chapter ONE

  Chapter TWO

  Chapter THREE

  Chapter FOUR

  Chapter FIVE

  Chapter SIX

  Chapter SEVEN

  Carl Nixon is a full-time writer of fiction and plays. His first book, Fish 'n' Chip Shop Song and Other Stories (Vintage, 2006) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book, South East Asia and South Pacific category. Recent works for the stage include adaptations of Lloyd Jones' Deutz Medal winner The Book of Fame and J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize winner Disgrace. In 2006 Carl held the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury (supported by Creative New Zealand). He lives in Christchurch with his young family.

  Rocking Horse Road

  Carl Nixon

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781869790936

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Nixon, Carl, 1967-

  Rocking Horse Road / Carl Nixon.

  I. Title.

  NZ823.2—dc 22

  A VINTAGE BOOK

  published by

  Random House New Zealand

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

  www.randomhouse.co.nz

  Random House International

  Random House

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London, SW1V 2SA

  United Kingdom

  Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House South Africa Pty Ltd

  Isle of Houghton

  Corner Boundary Road and Carse O'Gowrie

  Houghton 2198, South Africa

  Random House Publishers India Private Ltd

  301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex,

  Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India

  First published 2007. Reprinted 2007

  © 2007 Carl Nixon

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN: 9781869790936

  Version 1.0

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  For Rebecca, Alice and Fenton

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  While New Brighton and the Spit are real places, their existence in my novel owes as much to my impressions and memories of the area as it does to that suburb's actual geography or history. The people, though — schoolboys, schoolgirls, teachers, parents, Springbok tour supporters and anti-tour marchers — are products of my imagination. They are not based on any real people either living or dead.

  This novel was written while I was the Ursula Bethell Creative New Zealand writer in residence at Canterbury University. Without the residency it would not have been completed. Parts of the novel have appeared in The Press, January 2007, and in The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 3, edited by Fiona Kidman (Vintage, 2006). My thanks to the following for their support and advice: Professor Patrick Evans, Dr Caroline Foster, Paul Duignan, Gillian Newman of UBS, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. And thanks also to my editor Claire Gummer, and my always enthusiastic publisher Harriet Allan.

  . . . you have searched me out and known me:

  you know when I sit down and when I stand up,

  you discern my thoughts from afar.

  You mark my path, and the places where I rest;

  You are acquainted with all my ways.

  If I take the wings of the dawn

  and alight at the uttermost parts

  of the sea,

  even there your hand will lead me

  and your right hand will hold me fast.

  Psalm 139

  ONE

  It was Pete Marshall who found Lucy's naked body down on the beach, near the end of Rocking Horse Road. Almost three decades have passed since then, and a whole century has come to a close, but we can still tell you exactly where Lucy was lying. Her body was at the foot of the sand dunes where the high tide had discarded her, close to the sign warning people about tidal rips and swimming near the deep channel that connects the estuary to the ocean and marks the end of the Spit. Right from the very beginning, it was obvious that neither of these mundane dangers had killed Lucy Asher.

  It was December the twenty-first, 1980, a Sunday and four days before Christmas. It was half past seven in the morning. The summer was already shaping up to be one of the hottest anyone could remember. The sky was clear and the sand already warm to the touch. That day was always going to be a scorcher.

  The dunes were (and still are) criss-crossed with paths both official and improvised, but Pete ignored them all and ran the most direct way back to the road. He stuck to the sandy ridges, leaping hollows and crashing though lupins until, panting like a dog, he arrived at Jase Harbidge's door. Jase's dad was Senior Sergeant Bill Harbidge, who in a few minutes would himself be running behind Pete over the dunes, wearing faded shorts, his shoelaces lashing his ankles and a white shirt, snatched from the clothesline, flapping open around him.

  'Like a big white albatross' was how Pete described him, years later. 'I remember him bounding down the face of the last dune and it seemed to me that he might take off into the sky. I guess I was pretty freaked out.'

  We have often discussed how there had been an unusually high tide the night before. Not a storm, just a very high tide with larger-than-normal waves. Big swells had barrelled across the southern Pacific in the darkness before rising up and breaking one after another after another against the beach. Each one was ushered in by a stiff easterly wind. In retrospect, it's easy to give events a significance they didn't have at the time but, in the days immediately following the discovery of Lucy's body, several of us recalled lying in our beds and listening to the waves rolling into the beach that night. We had imagined them eating away at the dunes that were the only defence our homes had against the ocean. The wavesound was a dull background roar we had grown up with but, nevertheless, could not entirely shut out. We could hear it over our teachers' voices as we sat in class, and as we ate our lunches in the sandy grounds of South Brighton High School. The sound rose above the chatter of our brothers and sisters as we ate at our kitchen tables. It was the soundtrack to our awkward adolescence. But to more than one of us, as we lay in our rooms on the night Lucy Asher was murdered, the sound of the waves seemed to have deepened and become mournful. An endless train going by in the darkness, cursed to be always passing, never gone.

  Standing in the Harbidges' doorway, Pete told Bill Harbidge that he'd been down on the beach at half past seven that morning walking his dog. It wasn't a very convincing story — for a start, Pete's family didn't own a dog. Later that day, during the official police interview, Pete changed his story. Not that anybody noticed. Pete was not being treated as
a suspect. We have a copy of the police report (Exhibit 2). Pete claimed, for the record, that he was down on the beach jogging to get fit for the rugby season. At least his revised version of events bore some scrutiny. Pete did play for our school's under-sixteen team, although nobody began training that late in the year. It is doubtful whether even an All Black would have been out pounding the sand at half past seven in the morning four days before Christmas.

  Pete confessed to us, several days later, that he'd actually been in the dunes retrieving a copy of Penthouse he'd pilfered from his older brother (Tony Marshall who would, in a few months' time, join the navy and vanish from the Spit and from our lives). Pete had hidden the magazine — along with half a block of milk chocolate shoplifted from Lucy's parents' dairy, and some suntan oil — in a metal tackle-box he'd buried in a natural amphitheatre in the dunes. The place was surrounded by tall lupins and was almost impossible for the uninitiated to find unless they stumbled across it. Some of us used it as a meeting place, though that morning Pete had been alone.

  So why had he gone up to the top of the dunes? When we asked, Pete said he didn't know. He just wanted to look. At the waves? At the risen sun? At the first surfers who, like dark seals, were paddling out to sea up the beach by the surf club? A shrug. Just to look, apparently.

  So there's Pete, fifteen, his head full of airbrushed fantasy, walking to the top of the dunes, pushing through the tussock and lupin, and looking out over the deserted beach. The high tide had shifted the sand around, as it always did, so that Pete looked at a landscape subtly changed from the last time he had seen it.

  'What did you think she was doing?' (This is from the official police interview now.)

  'I thought she was sunbathing.'

  'At seven thirty in the morning?'

  And then Pete had said something to the interviewing officer that showed more insight than most people gave him credit for. 'When you're fifteen and you see a naked girl lying on the beach you stop thinking that clearly. I thought she was sunbathing.'

  Lucy lay slightly on her side, her head turned away from him. He could not see her face. He did not recognise her. Her right arm and shoulder were partially buried in the sand, but Pete couldn't see that at first. Her head rested just below the high-tide mark where the darker, waterlogged sand met the dunes with their covering of tussocks and scraggling lupins. Her arms and legs were slightly out from her body — 'splayed like a starfish' was how one reporter (inaccurately) described her on the front page of the following morning's Press. One leg was slightly further down the beach than the other, extended, as though she had frozen in the act of dipping her toes in to the ocean to test the temperature.

  From his vantage point Pete could see her tanned legs, the swell of her hips, and then the rollercoaster dip down to her waist. And, yes, the split and roll of her buttocks which, until that time, Pete had never seen on a real live woman (and still hadn't — technically). And her back. Lucy was a swimmer and a lifesaver and had a broad, lightly freckled back, but Pete had not recognised Lucy's back. Pete still didn't know who he was looking at.

  And here we might depart from all the interview notes and official reports to speculate. To Pete Marshall the woman on the beach must have looked like his dreams come true. Anonymous and naked in the stark morning light; a page from one of his brother's magazines brought to life for his own gratification. That idea cannot have been far from his mind (Pete was fifteen, remember). Or, just possibly, he imagined something even more exotic. If, in those first heady moments, Pete Marshall thought of mermaids, or banished daughters of Atlantis, he never let on. Certainly not to the police, and never even to us.

  It was only when Pete cautiously moved closer that he saw the naked woman's left arm was strangely mottled. Closer still and he could see that her skin seemed flabby and ill-fitting across her broad swimmer's shoulders. Her hair was matted and there was a bleached finger-bone of driftwood tangled up in it. Lucy Asher had been in the water about five hours before she was washed up, according to the coroner's report (Exhibit 5). The body showed evidence of being held down by the waves and banged repeatedly against the bed of the ocean. Pete told the police that when he got even closer he could also see there was something 'weird' about the angle of her head against the sand.

  There is one photograph taken by the police photographer (Exhibit 7) where you can see a footprint in the sand almost in contact with Lucy's outstretched hand. The hand is lying palm upwards, the fingers slightly curled as though she had been cupping a ball that, sometime during the night, the ocean had prised from her grasp. The footprint is slightly below the body, on the water side, almost touching her little finger. It is from a Converse shoe, the basketball-boot type with a canvas upper that used to come in blue or red with a star on the side over the ankle. We all wore them in those days. All Pete ever said, though, was that he got close enough to see that the woman was Lucy Asher. She was wearing a necklace of bruises, a parting gift from whoever had raped and strangled her in the night, and then tossed her body into the deep water of the channel.

  That's when Pete 'freaked out, man' and turned and ran back through the dunes to get Jase Harbidge's dad, who was soon to come flying over the sand like a great white bird.

  The Spit is as far south as you can go in the beach suburb of New Brighton without getting your feet wet. It is a long finger of bone-dry sand, only about a kilometre across at its widest point. Down the middle, like a single dark vein, runs Rocking Horse Road. The Spit is the only thing separating thousands of kilometres of cold southern Pacific from the swollen estuary formed by the meeting of the Avon and Heathcote rivers. It is a place with water on three sides, where the tide comes and goes twice a day, and where the sand is always shifting.

  In fact the whole of New Brighton is cut off from the rest of the city by water. The Avon River follows the coast before it empties into the estuary and acts as a kind of moat. New Brighton feels separate, like a whole different town. Why bother living down there? That was the general consensus. The city had more accessible and scenic parts than the Spit in which to live. There were plenty of areas that didn't ignore the biblical injunction against building your house on sand. There were always people who muttered darkly about the inevitable tsunami that was only a Chilean earthquake away. The same people talked about how beach erosion could, on a whim, claim back the dunes in less than six months. It was only a matter of time, they said, before all our homes would be washed into the ocean.

  It was true that down our way, soil was only a veneer. Tussock and cabbage trees and hardy flaxes were a poor excuse for a garden, but they were all that would grow in sand. And then there was the easterly. That was another reason why most people didn't like the Spit. Most days the easterly wind started up midmorning and blew in cold off the ocean. The easterly drifted salt spray across our homes so that even new cars rusted in a few years. Windows were permanently frosted. When it picked up, the wind blew the sand on the beach at ankle height in a rustling sheet that stung our legs and sandblasted the dunes into soft shapes. It was what the locals called 'the lazy wind'. The joke went that the easterly was too lazy to go around — so it just went straight through you.

  New Brighton was a working-class area where people left car bodies and half-built boats out in front of the house for years, as works in progress. Our dads were mechanics and builders, butchers and council workers, and stevedores who worked over at the port. They were the guys who drove the rubbish trucks or built the roads. The practical men who worked with their radios up loud, tuned to the cricket in the summer. Rugby was their winter religion.

  Most of our fathers had grown up in New Brighton themselves, and like us thought nothing of the way sand built up in the carpet inside our homes, clogging vacuum cleaners and collecting in the tracks of the aluminium doors. They didn't seem to hear the angry squawk of seagulls perched outside on the washing line, shitting in long white streaks down their wives' sheets. They married either Brighton girls or women who were wi
lling to make allowances.

  These days the Spit has turned into desirable real-estate and there's been a lot of infill housing. Most of the big sections have had a drive put down the side, and a townhouse or two built on the back. In 1980, though, there was pretty much just a single row of older houses along both sides of the road, each one with a decent-sized section. The properties on the sea side mostly didn't have fences at the back so that the boundary between the dunes and the sections was purely arbitrary. There were a lot of empty sections too, where weeds and the occasional pine tree grew unchecked and where the rabbit population was kept down by the half-stray cats.

  Lucy Asher went to South Brighton High School along with the rest of us, although she was older, seventeen, and had technically finished school three weeks before she died. Her parents' dairy was about three-quarters of the way up Rocking Horse Road, and the Ashers lived in the rooms out the back of the shop. Lucy was the older of two daughters. Her younger sister, Carolyn, was in the year below us at school, in what used to be called the fourth form, but because she was neither attractive nor sporty, Carolyn Asher was all but invisible to us.

  Lucy often worked behind the counter at the dairy after school and during weekends. We often went there to get milk and bread and newspapers for our parents. For ourselves we bought small white bags stuffed with chewy milk bottles, Jaffas, aniseed wheels and Eskimo-men. We sucked powdered sherbet through straws and in the summer ordered ice-cream cones, choosing from the eight flavours Mrs Asher stocked. We washed everything down with Coke from glass bottles or, if we were feeling healthy, flavoured milk. We had seen Lucy Asher almost daily, although we had paid her no more attention than the deepening lines on our parents' faces or the colour of the houses we had grown up in. As we came to realise, it is often not until something is gone that you begin to see it.

  In the days after Lucy's body was found, the papers were full of the story. Reporters roamed up and down the beach like stray dogs. They stopped us on the road to ask if we had known Lucy and what type of girl she was. Occasionally we would see our own words in the paper attributed to 'a close friend' or 'long-time school-mate of the murdered girl'. Words uttered in passing looked awkward in black and white. They seldom matched what we thought we had said. Certainly the words never came close to describing the Lucy we had seen every day at school and in the dairy.