Rocking Horse Road

by Nixon, Carl

  It was Pete Marshall who predicted that the police would not find anything. Pete had drifted across to join us, but he still wore his serious expression. Lucy, he said, was not murdered here — she had only washed up at this spot on the beach. He pointed out to us the position of the body amid the frill of driftwood at the high-tide mark. 'Did you see,' he said, 'the way her arm was buried in the sand?' What the police should be looking for, Pete claimed, was the spot where Lucy had been attacked. We listened to him with a new respect and nodded thoughtfully. Possibly for the first time in his life Pete Marshall found himself cast as an expert.

  As it turned out, his analysis was spot on. The police carried away numerous samples in plastic bags. But their forensic work unearthed nothing more incriminating than rubbish that had drifted to shore on the currents from Korean squid boats, and part of a tartan picnic blanket, rotted by the salt water. They also found the partial remains of a previously unidentified species of jellyfish.

  We were all interviewed by the police but had nothing to add to the investigation. We were as new to the scene as they were. Only Roy Moynahan's sighting of Lucy late the previous afternoon seemed in any way relevant. A young policeman with scrubbed cheeks, and a moustache that was still thin and patchy, recorded what Roy had to say and then took his phone number and address. But Roy's information must have been deemed unimportant in the bigger picture because no one ever followed up on that first interview.

  The police had to work fast because all the tape in the world wouldn't stop the ocean from jostling up the beach. As it was, the waves were only a couple of metres away from reclaiming the body when the two St John's guys (useful again at last) carefully transferred Lucy's body into a black plastic body-bag and then on to a stretcher, on which Lucy Asher eventually left the beach.

  We watched them carry her away. Even with two policemen at each end of the stretcher they struggled to keep her level going up the first dune. We said to each other that they were going to drop her. Somehow, though, they didn't. When they got to the start of the boardwalk, the track was easier to navigate and they soon disappeared from view.

  We found ourselves alone on the beach. Everything looked the same as it had done all our lives, the beach was as familiar to us as our homes, but we were aware that something had altered, like an only half-sensed swing in the direction of the wind. We gazed uneasily at the cloudless blue sky. We looked up and down the beach, hoping to identify what was different. The air shimmered in the heat.

  Suddenly, we didn't know what to say or do. We wandered aimlessly for a while, scanning the ground in imitation of the police. We fantasised about finding some vital clue, freshly washed up, but of course we found nothing of interest. We kicked at the sand, and threw lengths of driftwood into the waves where they were battered in the white foam. But none of our usual distractions or topics of conversation held any interest.

  Eventually we drifted back to the road and down to Jim Turner's house. We went there for no reason other than it was the closest. For a while we hung about listlessly on the footpath outside, keeping to the shade of the hedge. On the road the tar-seal was melting. The passing cars made a sound as though they were Velcroed to the road. Small stones rained upwards into their chassis. No one had told Jim's mother about Lucy Asher yet, although by that time word had spread to most of the people living on the Spit. Eventually she came out and fussed us away.

  One by one we broke free from the group and returned to our own homes. Daylight-saving meant that it would not be dark for hours. Unusually, we were not hungry, but we knew our mothers would by then have dinner on the stove as they did every night. The uneasy feeling had followed us up from the beach. Now it dogged us, hard on our heels, slipping in behind us through the almost-closed doors of our homes. It trailed around after us all that evening. No matter what we did to distract ourselves we found it there afterwards, waiting patiently.

  Finally we grew frustrated. 'Piss off!' we thought, in unconscious imitation of our fathers. 'Getoutahere!'

  But it was no good. The feeling was here to stay.

  The papers immediately started calling the murderer 'The Christmas Killer'. The stories the reporters wrote in the first few days only confirmed what we already knew. Lucy had been strangled and her body dumped into the water at a different spot from where Pete found her. On Christmas Eve a police spokesman said in veiled terms, at a press conference shown on the Six O'Clock News, that the motive for the attack was being treated as sexual. That caused the story to surge back to the front of the next edition of the papers, on the twenty sixth. But as Grant Webb bluntly put it, 'She was naked, wasn't she? Of course it was sexual! He fucked her, then he killed her.' His words made us uneasy, but really you didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out. We all knew it right from the start. Lucy's murder oozed sex.

  There were nine detectives assigned to the case originally but that number had swelled to twelve by New Year's Eve. There was pressure on the police to catch whoever had killed Lucy. Murders were still unusual back in the early eighties and the killing of an attractive young woman had quickened the national pulse. Of course there was the fact that, like Marilyn Monroe, she was found naked; that didn't hurt public interest or newspaper sales either. Lucy certainly got more coverage than she would have if she'd been a dumpy fifty-five-year-old and fully clothed.

  It helped us that Jase Harbidge's dad was a cop. We got first-hand information we wouldn't otherwise have been privy to. Mrs Harbidge had run off with the local butcher six months before so there was just Jase and his eleven-year-old sister and their dad at home that summer. Christmas dinner at the Harbidges' was macaroni cheese, which the three of them ate sitting in front of the television. Bill Harbidge reclined on his La-Z-Boy and downed beers with a steady rhythm. We knew through Jase that he had been drinking a lot since his wife had left. Jase told us that the drinking made him talk about his work, and not just the Asher case. Murders, rapes, gang shootings, the music teacher who interfered with the boy saxophonists, cases dating back through twenty years in the force. The whole works was trotted out by Bill Harbidge. Jase and his little sister sat and ate their macaroni and listened to their father talk. Afterwards they pulled the Christmas crackers Jase had bought to try and make things more festive. Even from the inward-looking world of fifteen we realised that the Christmas of 1980 must have been a pretty strange time for Jase Harbidge.

  For the rest of us, our families' holiday rituals started up like well-oiled machines. People seemed to want to put what had happened to 'the poor Asher girl' behind them. On Christmas morning we woke early and unwrapped presents. Later, grandparents were collected from their small units or retirement homes. Then there were more presents, this time of the socks and underpants variety. Then we ate the lunches our mothers had been planning for days. The roast turkey and pork with new spuds by the bucketful was too heavy for such a hot day. We quickly became bloated and slow even as we put away another serving of our mothers' homemade pavlova or trifle. We ate Christmas pudding or Tip Top scooped straight from the tub. On Christmas Day we could get away with stuff like that.

  But through all of that, our thoughts drifted towards the body we had seen on the beach. It was disjointing to cast our minds back to that scene while wearing paper party-hats, with mouths full of plum sauce and stuffing. While we were unwrapping our new rugby balls or cricket bats we remembered the way Lucy's head had been pillowed on the sand. And then our thoughts couldn't help twisting sideways to the Ashers. We wondered how they were spending Christmas Day. We could not even imagine. None of our parents said anything about Lucy or the Ashers — not in front of us, anyway. Talk of Lucy's murder was conspicuous in most of our homes by its absence.

  Only Bill Harbidge raised the subject. The Queen was giving her Christmas message when Jase's dad told him that whoever killed Lucy was smart to dump her body in the ocean. The water flushed away all traces of the killer; no bodily fluids (by which he meant cum) and no fingerprints. Jase's
dad also told him, and Jase told us, that Lucy wasn't dead when she went into the water, although the person who strangled her probably thought that she was. Lucy Asher was just unconscious. There was water in her lungs. Technically she had drowned.

  We gathered in big Jim Turner's garage in the afternoon of Christmas Day to hear these details. Christmas lunch still sat heavy as a medicine ball in our stomachs. The Turners didn't own a car and they kept an uneven pool table out there. The garage was also used for storing bags of sheep manure, which Jim's dad made him dig into the sandy vegetable garden every autumn. It always carried the musky odour of sheep shit and wool; a smell we eventually came to like. There was a dart board hanging behind the side door and a bench-press with heavy metal plates, which we used to test our manliness while we were waiting for our turn on the table.

  That Christmas afternoon the talk was not just of how Lucy died. That day and right up to New Year, the manner of her death became a minor part of our conversations. It was in the Turners' garage that we began to construct our memories of Lucy's life. Roy Moynahan recalled seeing Lucy cut her lip, two years before. We would have been in our first year at high school, form three. Lucy had been drinking from the tap in front of the school library. Some boys had been pushing in the queue and Lucy's face was shunted forward on to the steel tap. Roy told us that he had seen blood flowing freely down Lucy's chin but that she had not cried. For a day or two there was dry blood smeared on the edge of the tap, and then someone washed it away.

  Another of us offered up the story of how he had dropped some carefully drawn maps from his social studies folder in the playground. The easterly wind had snatched them away. It had been Lucy Asher and a friend who had helped him get them back.

  Lucy Asher riding her bike to school on a rainy day beneath a sky as low as a parking building's concrete ceiling. In memory, the hem of her dress was soaked dark by the water coming up off the road in a hissing arc. The wet material clung to her thighs.

  Lucy raising her hand to tell the teacher she had 'women's trouble' and would have to go to see the school nurse. The way the boys in her class had sniggered behind their hands (this was a received memory; one that came to us through Pete's brother, Tony Marshall, who had been in Lucy's class. It was not as authentic or trustworthy as our own memories but was added to our store nonetheless).

  Lucy Asher coming second in the intermediate girls' beach racing three years before. We recalled also the feelings, new at the time, that had stirred in us when we witnessed the way the lifesaving girls had begun to fill out their red togs. Over the long winter months, while cocooned inside the heavy layers of their school uniforms, they had metamorphosed into seemingly different creatures.

  Lucy, glimpsed from a car window, standing among a group of friends at the bus stop on a Friday afternoon. We speculated that she was on her way into town to see a movie.

  Lucy putting up posters of her lost cat, Marmalade, on lampposts up and down Rocking Horse Road. A reward of five dollars was offered.

  Lucy and her sister, Carolyn, sunbathing on the wide top step at the school pool. Lucy was lying on her back with her wet hair fanned out around her head to dry on the almost-too-hot concrete.

  Lucy Asher playing hockey on a Saturday morning in the sea mist that sometimes covers the whole of New Brighton during spring and autumn. Lucy ghosting up the right wing with the ball. Now seen. Now lost in the shifting walls of mist. Eventually the game had been called off because the mist showed no sign of clearing and it was considered dangerous to carry on.

  From that day on the Turners' garage became our meeting place. Most days a few of us would drift in during the late mornings and play doubles and talk about Lucy. Amongst the cicada-click of pool balls and the clang of the metal weights being slid home, with the smell of sheep manure in our nostrils, we gifted memories and half-memories to each other.

  Al Penny took to cutting articles out of the paper and sticking them on the unclad wall with drawing pins, next to the photo of Lucy from The Press. We read them over and over until our talk became smattered with reporters' phrases. It was not uncommon to hear Pete or Jim or Roy Moynahan refer to the 'profoundly shocked community' or to the police's 'growing frustration'. Perversely, the weather outside was the hottest it had been all summer. The sky was blue and cloudless. The temperatures soared up into the thirties.

  Lucy, like all of us, had lived on the Spit her whole life and there was a rich store of small encounters and sightings on which we could draw. It was true that individually none of us could recall that much of her.

  Because she had been two years older than us she moved outside our sphere. But collectively we had enough grasp on her life to truthfully answer, yes, we had known Lucy Asher.

  Lucy's funeral was held in the afternoon on Boxing Day, in the Presbyterian church in South Brighton, only a couple of streets away from our school. The church is a concrete-block building in the shape of a squat cross, with a tower on the front housing a bell that we could all hear from our homes on a Sunday morning. It's a relatively large building dating back to the fifties when attendance at church was all but compulsory. Even so, there wasn't room inside for half the people who turned up to pay their last respects to Lucy Asher. Everyone who lived in New Brighton seemed to be there.

  The funeral director must have known his stuff because he'd erected two large cone-shaped speakers above the front door of the church. In the end, about two hundred people had to stand outside and listen to the service through the speakers. The only people allowed inside were relatives and proven friends of either Lucy or her parents. We were just younger boys who lived in the neighbourhood and so we stayed outside in the sun.

  A stand of cabbage trees grew in the middle of a yellowed patch of lawn outside the church. Because it was another hot, cloudless day, people tried to position themselves in the narrow bands of shade the trees offered. It was a long service and those who had managed to secure some shade surreptitiously shuffled sideways as the sun moved in the sky, reluctant to give up their slice of cool to the person standing next to them.

  We were all there, apart from Al Penny. His parents made a ritual out of setting off before dawn every Boxing Day on their camping holiday to Kaiteriteri. Al had been disappointed that he was going to miss the funeral and had asked us to save him a copy of the order of service to add to our collection of clippings.

  The minister's voice came out tinny through the speakers. It sounded as though he was making announcements at the A&P Show. He listed the facts of Lucy's life as though he was talking about a prize calf, but only once mentioned how she had died. Even then he referred only to 'the tragic manner of Lucy's death', and called for a 'prayer for justice but also forgiveness for the undoubtedly tortured soul who is responsible'. That didn't go down well with the people standing outside with us. Dark mutterings rippled through the crowd. Anger shimmered in the air above our heads.

  When the minister was through, other people went up to the microphone and spoke, including her uncle, (her mother's brother) and two school friends. Neither girl managed to finish reading out what she had prepared. We shuffled from foot to foot as we listened to their sobs. Through the speakers they sounded like the cries of exotic birds trapped inside the church. Later there were hymns but it felt strange to be standing in the open air singing for something other than a rugby international.

  Near the end of the service Pete Marshall did manage to slip into the church, but he soon came back. He told us that he had only made it as far as the rear of the nave where people were standing four deep behind the last pew. From there he had not even been able to see the coffin, and had only glimpsed the minister. Pete's only reliable view had been the back of dark jackets, and the hats of sobbing women, which trembled as though in a strong draught.

  Our only sighting of the surviving Ashers was when the coffin was carried out. At the end of the service the people outside divided. We had an idea of how it would have looked seeing Moses part the Red Sea. The pe
ople formed a broad avenue from the door of the church to where the hearse had been reversed through the gates. By pure chance we found ourselves on the inner edge of the crowd, with an unobstructed view.

  The pallbearers were two uncles and four older male cousins of Lucy's. They all stared straight ahead as they appeared in the doorway. They walked slowly, carrying the coffin at waist height. The Ashers trailed behind: Mr and Mrs Asher in front; Lucy's sister, Carolyn, immediately behind her mother like a shadow.

  Mrs Asher looked immaculately groomed, as always. Everyone stared as she appeared at the door of the church. She paused, blinking, at the top of the three concrete steps that led down from the door, and then held up her hands, cupping her face as though trying to stop her features from tumbling down on to the ground. Although she was normally pale, at Lucy's funeral her skin seemed to be actually bloodless. Unless you knew better you would swear Mrs Asher had never in her life left the family dairy, had never before exposed her face to the sun.

  In contrast to his pale wife, Mr Asher was tanned a deep brown. While Mrs Asher ran the dairy, he supplemented the family's income with building work — renovations and repairs mostly — much of it done outside. He was a tall, quiet man whose forehead was habitually furrowed. On the rare occasion when we had seen him smile, a slow transformation, like a retreating tide, took place. The high expanse of skin above his eyebrows flattened out and we saw pale lines where the sun had not reached. That day, standing beside his wife, he raised a large hand to shield his eyes from the glare.

  As the coffin forged slowly on, Mr and Mrs Asher followed down the steps. They walked between the walls of silent people. Mrs Asher kept staring at the ground, her hands still held up to her face. Mr Asher frowned even deeper than usual. He kept looking above the heads of the crowd as though he had seen something of interest on the horizon; a flock of agitated gulls, or an unusually shaped cloud. Some people in the crowd even turned their heads to follow his gaze. If anything, Mr Asher appeared to be embarrassed by the situation he found himself in.