by Nixon, Carl
It was, however, Carolyn Asher who interested us the most. Our eyes were drawn to her. She was certainly never going to be as pretty as Lucy. Later we all agreed on that. Carolyn was pale like her mother, but with large freckles that sat across the bridge of her nose. Looking at her we could tell that Carolyn and the sun didn't get along. She was tall (which she got from her father), too tall really for a girl, if she was going to be considered attractive by boys. Carolyn was flat-chested, with long, skinny legs. 'Lanky' was a word people often used to describe Lucy's little sister.
But as she walked through the crowd that day, following along behind her dead sister and her parents, we couldn't help noticing Carolyn. It was as though we were seeing her for the first time. For one thing she had chosen to wear a black dress too short for mourning. Her thighs were barely larger than her calves but they were clearly visible. She moved like a newborn giraffe coming to terms with height. But mainly we noticed the way she held her chin high and looked boldly at the people around her. It took us a while to realise that she was singling out men for special scrutiny. Men of all ages met her gaze and quickly looked away. Everywhere she looked there was a similar response; it moved from man to man like a ripple through the crowd.
As she passed us, Carolyn met Jim Turner's eyes. Maybe because he was big, she thought he was older than fifteen. Jim managed to hold her gaze for a second and then he too shuffled his feet and looked down. When he looked back, Carolyn's eyes had moved on.
Jim told us, immediately after the funeral, that the look Carolyn had given him had scared him.
'In what way?' we demanded to know.
'It was like electric,' he said, 'like reaching out and grabbing an electric fence.' He paused, sensing our scepticism, and then tried a different tack. 'Or at the zoo, looking at a wild animal, a lion or something in a cage.' He shook his head, aware that as an explanation it was unsatisfying.
'Electric' or not, one thing we all understood about watching Carolyn Asher walking behind her sister's coffin, with her head high and her long pale legs showing beneath her dress, was that it was compelling.
Lucy's coffin was carried to the hearse. The back doors were already open. The three remaining Ashers stood back and watched as the pallbearers placed one end of the coffin gently on to the rollers. There was only the scream of a lone gull circling nearby for accompaniment. The crowd was totally silent. With her uncles and cousins pushing, Lucy's coffin slid smoothly and silently inside the hearse. The undertaker waited for a short while, a few beats that only he could hear, and then closed the doors with a heavy thud.
At fifteen we did not know that there are before and after moments in every life; events people look back on as being gateways into new ways of living, new phases of their lives, sometimes better, but often not as good.
We've all experienced similar moments during the almost thirty years since Lucy's funeral: the ringing phone in the night that signals the death of a parent; the hurled lamp or slammed door that marks the end of a marriage; even something as mundane as an argument with one of our own teenage kids, where things have been said that can never be fully scoured away. Increasingly, the milestones are likely to be medical in origin. A torn hamstring. A ruptured disk that never fully comes right, or the blood test that results in a hurried meeting with a grim GP, and a diagnosis that lands like a slap.
Neither we nor, we now suspect, the Ashers, wanted to acknowledge it at the time, but that short walk from the church to the waiting hearse was a gateway through into a more barren land — and not just for the Ashers, although they were undeniably the worst affected. It was a turning point for all of us living down the Spit. At that moment we moved through to a landscape from which, events would later prove, there was no going back.
TWO
There was a lot of activity at the Ashers' dairy in the days after the funeral. The shop had a closed sign hanging on the door but people came and went from the back of the building in a steady flow from mid-morning right up until after dark. Police detectives were the most frequent visitors, as they had been since the morning when Pete discovered Lucy's body. The detectives were usually tall, blocky men in crumpled suits, with an air of purpose about them. There were also relatives who visited, and neighbours. The minister who had taken the funeral dropped by several times during that week, as did the undertaker.
Almost without fail, the visitors would pause with one hand on the latch of the side gate, as though giving themselves a moment to rehearse what they were going to say before they went inside. And then they would push the gate open and go through. Apart from the police and the undertaker, most people arrived with a basket or a plate of food. There was so much food carried inside that we reckoned the Ashers could've lived on muffins and pikelets for a month.
We observed these things from Tug Gardiner's bedroom. His parents' house was almost directly across the road from the dairy. Tug's room was an addition to the house, a boxy weatherboard emplacement grafted on above the lounge. It looked like something that might have been built during the war when people seriously believed that the Japanese were going to land on the beach any day. From Tug's room you could see the ocean to the east and in the other direction we had an unobstructed view of the Ashers' dairy. We reached Tug's room by climbing a set of narrow steps so steep they were almost a ladder. We clambered up like apes, using our hands on the steps above. The room itself was littered with socks and sweatshirts and random clothes that lay where they fell among the tapes, forgotten school-books and scrap paper, the half-eaten sandwiches and wadded tissues — the detritus of Tug's life. We passed no judgement; in fact, we hardly noticed. Tug's room was pretty much interchangeable with any of ours. That included the posters on the walls. Tug's walls were covered with All Blacks. There were the flying wingers, Stu Wilson and Bernie Fraser, and the hard men of the scrum, Haden and Dalton. And of course there were photographs and clippings of the local hero, full-back Robbie Deans.
Watched by our heroes, we looked across at the Ashers' dairy. It was a pretty standard Summerhill stone house but Mr Asher had built an extension right out to the footpath, with large glass windows covered in advertising, and a shop door with a harsh buzzer. The whole front of the place — what must originally have been the lounge and a bedroom — had been turned into the shop. That didn't leave much for the Ashers to live in, just a kitchen and two small bedrooms out the back. We came to realise that as a home the Ashers' dairy was too small for a family of four. Before Lucy died, the Ashers must have been knocking around inside there like pinballs. Most people in the area used the dairy, but even at fifteen we knew that there wasn't a lot of profit to be made selling ten-cent mixtures, newspapers, bottles of milk and bread. Even the popular ice-cream cones were seasonal.
In the slow hot days between Christmas and New Year, and then on into January, we spent our time staring through binoculars across the tar-seal of Rocking Horse Road. The closed sign stayed up and the initial rush of visitors slowed to a trickle and by the second week of January it dried up altogether. By the middle of the month even the police didn't call in on the Ashers any more.
The only person to come and go with any regularity in those days was Mr Asher. He drove off every morning at nine and returned at five-thirty. We didn't know where he went. We wanted to follow him but did not have the means; none of us had a driver's licence. His old ute carried him outside our realm, which extended only as far as our legs or our bicycles could carry us. We assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that he was leaving to go to whatever job he was working on.
Mrs Asher and Carolyn seldom emerged. They seemed to us to have become like fish in a murky tank, glimpsed only occasionally as they moved in slow sad circles within the gloom. At the time, we thought this was fitting behaviour for people in mourning.
We were not the only people to keep an eye on the Ashers. Rocking Horse Road was a community of curtain twitchers. Lucy's unnatural death was an exotic brush that had painted the whole family. Whenever one of
the Ashers appeared, certain people would hover in their front windows and watch. Phone calls were immediately made from house to house, reporting any visible change or anything that could be labelled in the least out of the ordinary.
The only first-hand report we have from inside the Ashers' home in those days following the funeral is from Roy Moynahan (Transcript: Exhibit 8F). Roy's mother and Mrs Asher had belonged to the same Plunket group. Mrs Moynahan insisted that Roy and his eight-year-old sister accompany her, two days after the funeral, to pay their respects to the Ashers.
Roy's mother had to lift the police tape to get to the back door. The yellow tape was wrapped around the whole of the back porch, which gave Roy the impression that the house was a giant present that had been overlooked on Christmas Day. Policemen had been moving around the house since Lucy's body had been found. When the Moynahans arrived, though, the police were on their lunch break. Only one remained; a big man in his early twenties who hovered outside the door and, according to Roy, seemed uncomfortable in his stiff blue shirt and tie. He asked them the purpose of their visit and recorded Mrs Moynahan's name in a black notebook.
Roy admitted that it was hard for him to get an accurate impression of the inside of the Ashers' house because of all the flowers. They covered every flat surface. In fact there were so many flowers that Mrs Asher had given up putting them in vases. Huge bunches lay on their sides on the kitchen table and on the arms of chairs, across the kitchen bench, and even on the floor in some places. All of them were withering in the heat and giving off their smells in thick waves. Mrs Asher had the windows closed and Roy said the smell and the heat were enough to make him feel sick. Roy and his sister and his mother had to help move flowers to the side so that they could sit down at the kitchen table.
Mrs Asher sat opposite them, stiff-backed, and passed muffins. She wore the same long black skirt and white shirt buttoned at the collar that she had worn at the funeral. Roy said that her long hair was pulled back so tightly from her face that she had a permanent expression of open-eyed amazement. 'She was like one of those people in that movie about the alien body-snatchers. All still and scary.' We knew exactly what he meant.
No one had air conditioning in those days and Roy was wearing his Sunday jacket. The sweat was running in rivulets down his back. His younger sister sat next to him and sniffed. Emma Moynahan had a summer cold but Roy suspected Mrs Asher thought the little girl was sniffling out of sadness, grieving the loss of Lucy.
As his mother talked Roy looked around, trying not to be too obvious. He noticed patches of light grey dust on the edge of the table and over the windowsills as though a large moth had blundered down and flapped around in agitated circles before taking to the air again. It took Roy a while to realise that he was looking at the dust which the police had used to look for fingerprints.
The only showing Lucy's father made was in the photographs hung on the wall behind where Mrs Asher sat. Portraits mostly, the head-and-shoulders type they take at schools every year at the same time as they take the class photos. There were also snapshots deemed good enough to be blown up and put in a frame.
Lucy and Carolyn on a seesaw when Lucy was aged about four and Carolyn just a toddler.
Lucy, down on the beach, grinning at the camera, minus one of her front teeth.
Lucy with one or other of her parents: with her dad and a small black-and-white dog on the beach; her mum and Lucy on the footpath outside the dairy.
There were all sorts of combinations of parents and daughters but Roy could see only one photograph where all four Ashers were together — a formal portrait taken in a park greener than anything the Spit could provide. He guessed that it had been taken quite recently, probably last spring. All the Ashers were posed beneath a large tree. Mr Asher, tall and thin, looked stiff and unlike himself in a suit and tie. Pale Mrs Asher stood on his right, in her usual dark colours. In front of them the two girls sat on a bench. Lucy sat on the left of the picture with her ankles crossed and her arms folded in her lap. Mr Asher draped one protective hand over her shoulder. All of the Ashers were staring earnestly into the camera.
Apart from the dying flowers and the photographs, the other thing that Roy mentioned was the Ashers' Christmas tree. It took up one whole corner of the kitchen, the top pressing hard against the stucco ceiling so that there was no room for an angel or even a Christmas star. As if to make up for this lapse, every other branch was sagging under the weight of the decorations. It was clear to Roy that all the family's presents, including Lucy's, were still sitting beneath it, unopened. By surreptitiously turning his head sideways Roy could read Lucy's name on at least two of the small cards, which still sat on the top of the presents like unbroken pipi shells, mouths partly open.
Roy sat at the table for as long as he could stand it, sweating in the heat, listening to his sister sniffing, and his mother and Mrs Asher talking about things apart from Lucy. At last he asked to use the bathroom. Mrs Asher directed him through a door into a narrow hallway. The toilet was at the far end but Roy nosed around until he found the partly open doorway to what, he guessed, was the room Lucy and her sister shared. Police tape was strung across the doorway. Ducking low, Roy passed inside.
The curtains were drawn and the room was half dark. We can only imagine how Roy must have felt standing there in Lucy's room. Roy had no older sisters and the room must have been a foreign world to him, as exotic and steamy as the jungles of Borneo. He stood inside the doorway, still as a burglar. There were posters on the walls: Sting, Adam and the Ants. A dresser was littered with mysterious tubes and bottles. Roy told us that the smell of soap hung in the air almost thick enough to see. When pressed for further details, he remembered a bunch of dried roses hanging upside down from the ceiling above the dresser. There were also, he claimed, other darker smells he could not identify.
There were dolls, as well. He estimated maybe twenty or so sat piled up on a wooden chest at the foot of one of the two single beds. The dolls made him feel uneasy, as though he were performing to a small, unblinking audience.
Through the walls he could hear the brittle voice of Mrs Asher talking to his mother. Roy walked over and opened Lucy's wardrobe. He imagined Lucy standing where he now stood, selecting the dress she would later be murdered in, holding it up in front of the full-length mirror hung on the inside of the door (would she have chosen a different one if she had known? A stupid question in many ways but the type of thing we used to debate for hours). Roy later said it made him feel privileged to be there, looking at her clothes, breathing in the same scented air as Lucy once breathed.
He was just reaching out a hand to touch Lucy's clothes when there was a cough and Roy realised that he was not alone. Of course, at first, he thought it was Lucy. Who wouldn't? He had invaded her room and now she was there to reprimand him. He spun around and saw a figure lying on the bed beneath the window, on top of the sheets. She was lying perfectly still, staring at the ceiling and with her arms folded across her chest and her toes pointed towards the ceiling. She spoke without looking at him.
'So you found what you're looking for, or what?'
Carolyn Asher was wearing a summer dress that was too big for her. She rose up from the bed and calmly crossed to where Roy was standing. He stood paralysed, wondering how he could explain his invasion to Mrs Asher and his mother. Then, in the semi-darkness of Lucy's room, Carolyn kissed him full on the mouth.
As far as we were aware Roy had never been kissed by a girl, outside of a game of spin-the-bottle at Mark Murray's twelfth birthday party. But if Carolyn Asher was playing a game, she was playing to win. She kissed Roy with an intensity he had only imagined before, mashing her mouth against his. He could feel her teeth push against his lips and then she was forcing her tongue inside his mouth. It was wet and, he told us, surprisingly powerful. Roy was tall and Carolyn was a year younger but even so she was the same height as him. Roy remembered that she held her body away from his, balancing on the balls of her feet like a
ballet dancer. The only thing she touched him with was her mouth.
He didn't know how long she kissed him like that. Suddenly she broke off and stood back, calmly appraising his face. Roy said that her look was definitely questioning, like an artist standing back from an almost-finished painting. Apparently Carolyn Asher was happy with what she saw. He was just about to speak when she slipped past him. She stood in the doorway. 'You shouldn't be in here.' And then she ducked under the police tape and was gone.
Roy stood in the semi-darkness. How confused he must have been. The toothpaste and saliva taste of Carolyn's kiss would still have been on his bruised lips. Lucy's dolls must have seemed to stare at him accusingly. He told us that when he finally left the room there was no sign of Carolyn in the hallway. Disoriented, Roy was temporarily baffled by all the doorways but he got his bearings and found his way back to the kitchen. As he entered the room, for one moment, he imagined that his mother and sister and Mrs Asher were drowning in a sea of flowers, and that only their heads were still visible above the perfumed waves.
During the sweltering week between Christmas and New Year, and then on through the rest of that summer, people took to leaving objects near where Lucy's body had been found. At first they simply placed their offerings on the sand but the tide and the easterly soon carried them away and so the warning sign became a natural shrine. It was above the high-tide mark and protected from the wind by a dip in the dunes. We never saw anyone coming or going. Bunches of daffodils and lilies seemed miraculously to spring out of the dry sand at the base of the pole before wilting away in an afternoon. Notes and letters, weighted down with hand-painted rocks, would appear overnight. A small brown teddy bear, and later a pink rabbit, lived there for most of January and half of February before moving on.