by Nixon, Carl
On New Year's Eve a black-and-white photograph was carefully tied to the pole with a yellow ribbon. It was a picture we had not seen before. Lucy, sitting on a couch, wearing a short summer dress that showed a lot of her legs. She was relaxed and smiling, looking out boldly at the photographer over the top of heart-rimmed sunglasses. To be honest the photo made us anxious. Lucy looked older than we recalled her, more confident and womanly than our memories of her allowed. We were suspicious and jealous of whoever had taken the picture. Al Penny wondered aloud how long would be a decent interval before we could shift it to our files (Exhibit 14).
But people mostly left poems. It seemed to us that everyone who had ever known Lucy became a poet during that summer. They attached poems to the sign with drawing pins and twine but they always blew free. It was not uncommon to find a poem tumbling along the road in the wind or crucified in the branches of a lupin. White poems flew like seagulls against the blue summer sky. They were to be found tossing in the wavefoam or bobbing like small white cradles in the reeds at the edge of the estuary. More often than not the words had sunfaded into nothing or slipped away into the water like fry, but sometimes they could be read.
The consensus among us was that the poems were written by girls. The 'i's were dotted with broken hearts. 'Lucy' rhymed with 'mercy'. Those legible poems we retrieved we felt obliged to take back to the sign. We pinned them back up or weighed them down with rocks so that they would not blow away again too soon. A few of the better ones we took and added to our files (Exhibit 27 A–F).
That first New Year's Eve after Lucy was murdered stays with us like a strong aftertaste. Our mood was sombre. Lucy had been dead less than two weeks. We had no desire to mix with the large crowd that gathered every year in the centre of the city to count down to midnight. Although we liked the idea of being kissed by strange women, we doubted we would be the ones bestowed with such random feminine favours. Instead we sought out our own company down on the beach.
Grant Webb supplied the alcohol. It was his father's homemade beer, fermented in the Webbs' garden shed, stacked in rows of recycled brown bottles on shelves from floor to ceiling. As well as lager and stout, Mr Webb made up batches of ginger beer. It was not unusual for the people living in the houses down the reserve end of Rocking Horse Road to hear a dull explosion and know that Grant's dad had got the yeast levels too high in his latest batch.
That evening Grant carried the beer down to the beach in a wooden crate. The sides of the bottles clinked together. He placed the crate in the surf to keep it cool until after dark. We assumed that Mr Webb was not aware that a dozen of his bottles were missing.
We had several hours before one year ticked over into the next and we found ourselves bending to pick up dry driftwood as if a fire had been planned, when in fact nothing had been discussed. We piled the wood at a spot about quarter of the way down the beach. The tide was still going out and would not bother us. The easterly had dropped away as it sometimes did in the evening and the heat of the day had rolled back in over the Spit. Luckily there was still water in the estuary and so the smell of the sea lettuce was not bad. Small bits of driftwood were easy to find where they lay along the high-tide mark and our pile soon grew until it was waist high.
Jim Turner and Jase Harbidge tried to wrestle a sun-bleached log from the sand halfway up the first dune, but it was larger than they had thought and buried deep. We all joined in, digging with our hands, exposing more of the dry wood until it came free. It was dragged over to the pile and dumped on. More sticks were found and several more logs. The heap of driftwood grew and became a pyre that eventually rose above even Jim Turner's head.
When it was almost dark Roy Moynahan used his cigarette lighter on a small pyramid of kindling at the base, into which someone had stuffed some old newspaper. If there had been any wind to speak of, or if we had been less careful in choosing only dry wood, the whole idea would not have worked. As it was, the wood caught surprisingly quickly. The flames soon engulfed the pyramid and, as Roy stepped back, they licked upward. Ten minutes later we had a bonfire that surpassed any of our expectations. It was like a fire you'd see in a movie about castaways; huge and glowing on the beach.
Soon after that, the sun went down behind the long backbone of mountains to the west. Later still, daylight's reflection off the clouds faded from red to pink and then into white before vanishing altogether. Our faces grew flushed with the heat until we had to shuffle backwards to cooler spots.
Grant passed the beer around. The bottles were still wet from the ocean. We took turns using the bottle opener he had initially forgotten and had been forced to go back to retrieve. Jim Turner tried to open a bottle using only his hand. It was a trick he had seen an uncle perform at a wedding but Jim only succeeded in cutting his palm. We had no glasses and drank straight from the bottles. When we put the glass to our mouths we could taste salt. The beer itself had a flavour that surprised us. It was dark and something like liquorice. Whether this was intentional, we didn't know, but we weren't complaining. At the time, we had very little to compare it to. A beer was a beer as far as we were concerned. It was what men drank when they gathered in groups.
We sat on the sand, spread out in a broad crescent with the fire between us and the ocean. There was no wind to stroke up the waves and they were a low murmur, and an occasional flash of white foam in the darkness beyond the edge of the firelight. With the brown bottles in our hands, our thoughts jumped and flickered like the flames but always came back to Lucy.
Mark Murray spoke. His crazy white-boy Afro was a halo in the light from the fire. He did not turn his head but directed his words at the flames as though they were a new type of fuel to be burned along with the driftwood. 'When Lucy was nine or ten . . .' was how he began.
When she was nine or ten Lucy used to come to his house and play with his older sister. He remembered how the two girls had locked him out of his sister's room, and when he persevered in trying to get inside they had driven him away with shrill, girlish threats. It must have been winter because he recalled that Lucy had been wearing a pink jersey with a picture of a cat knitted on the front.
Someone else chipped in with a memory of Lucy Asher . . . on the children's swings, long past when she was a young girl, swinging high, just for the joy of it. She was wearing jeans and swinging her legs forward and back to build up momentum. But what was remembered most was the way she hung at the top of each movement, legs outstretched, head flung back. In memory she was neither moving forward nor going back, but suspended as though undecided.
Someone remembered a day when Lucy was in the playground at school with two or three of her friends. Apparently she was doing nothing much.
Lucy behind the counter of the dairy. There were so many variations on this one memory that they were hard to sort one from another. The time she got Tug Gardiner's change wrong so that she gave him five dollars too much. 'Now I wish I'd told her and given it back,' Tug admitted to no one in particular. Lucy dropping a full bottle of milk that caught the edge of the counter as it fell and shattered on to the lino. Lucy accidentally brushing a sweaty palm with her fingertips as she gave change. Lucy smiling to herself when she thought no one was watching, as though recalling a private joke.
Some of the memories we had heard before; others were new. Before New Year's no one had ever brought up the time Lucy had gone door to door selling Girl Guide biscuits. Now we discovered that this was a memory several of us shared. Lucy had turned up at our doors in the twilight in her blue uniform. Matt Templeton said his family had bought eight packets from her and that his six sisters had scoffed the lot that same evening.
Pete picked up a piece of wood and threw it into the fire. 'I wonder what she would've been doing now.'
We sat silently as, collectively, we tried to imagine. Surely more than one of us conjured up a vision of Lucy, dressed to go out to a New Year's party, seeing the light of our bonfire and coming down to the beach to investigate. She might have chosen
to walk barefoot across the sand, her shoes dangling from her hand. It was not beyond possibility. Would she have been alone, or with a couple of friends? Whatever the details, in our imaginations she came forward out of the darkness, not at all shy. After all, Lucy had seen us often at school and we were regular customers in the dairy. We were younger boys and not intimidating. She would have known at least a couple of us by name.
Yes, Lucy would have stayed and talked. Maybe we would have been brave enough to crack a few jokes. Someone would have passed her a beer. Lucy would not have hesitated to sit on the sand and drink with us (we were sorry then that we hadn't thought to bring other, more girlish drinks or even glasses). Matt Templeton was always good at talking to girls. Roy Moynahan could be funny in a not too gross way when he put his mind to it. We could have succeeded in making her laugh.
Someone might have fetched a ghetto-blaster and some tapes from their home so that we would have music. Fire and music and beer. It was not beyond the realms of imagination that we might have taken turns to dance with Lucy Asher, right there on the beach, in the flickering orange light of a fresh new year. And who in our small tribe did not imagine that it was him who succeeded in standing next to her when the countdown to midnight ended?
The beer seemed to have a will of its own. It travelled through us with a determination we had not previously encountered. Matt Templeton was standing in the darkness pissing in a high arc into the tussock for the third time that evening, when Mr Asher surprised him by silently cresting the dune close by. Matt must have been pretty startled because, as he later recounted what he had seen, we noticed that his right foot was wet and caked with sand.
Tall and thin, Mr Asher had stood for a moment in the moonlight. Matt did not think that Mr Asher had seen him. Matt told us later that the light from the fire fell short of where he stood but there was enough light to see the deep furrows on Mr Asher's brow. He was holding something in his hand that Matt described as being 'as big as a chillybin but wrapped in a towel. I didn't get a good look at it, whatever it was.'
Matt stayed perfectly still and watched, but Mr Asher did nothing more than stand and stare across at our fire for a long time. If Mr Asher was aware of Matt's presence he gave no sign. They were two figures playing stiff candle, in the dark. Eventually, Mr Asher half-walked, half-slid down the dune's face. He began to walk south, down the beach away from our fire. Gulls sleeping on the sand squawked uneasily as Mr Asher approached them in the darkness, but did not take to the air. Curious, Matt followed.
It took Mr Asher about ten minutes to walk all the way to the channel. He seemed to be in no hurry. Matt stayed back close to the dunes where he would not be seen and where the crunch of a half-shell underfoot would not give him away. Eventually Mr Asher stopped near the deep, fast-flowing water. The tide was going out and the estuary was draining quickly. There were whitecaps further out on the water at the sandy bar where the current met the ocean.
Matt watched as Mr Asher unwrapped whatever it was he held in his hand. He crouched down and carefully placed it in the water. All Matt could see from where he was hiding was a slightly darker shape like a small boat on the water. He knew that whatever it was Mr Asher had released would be swept far out into the ocean within minutes on the outgoing current.
Standing and turning quickly, Mr Asher walked away. He had lived all his life on the Spit and even in the darkness was able to walk straight to the start of the track that would take him through the reserve and back to Rocking Horse Road. He passed close enough for Matt to hear his footfalls on the sand and his slightly laboured breath in the darkness. Matt waited for a couple of minutes to be sure that Mr Asher was gone and then hurried over to the water. But he could see nothing unusual. Whatever Mr Asher had put in the channel had been swept away by the current, aided by the slight off-shore breeze, and was long gone.
In the months that followed there were several sightings of Mr Asher in the dunes, always after dark, and nearly always down at the southern end of the Spit by the channel, or moving in that direction. He was often carrying something wrapped in a towel. But that New Year's Eve, in the first hours of 1981, all we knew was what Matt told us he had seen. By the time he returned the fire had died down. We stirred the embers with long sticks and listened to Matt's story. We remembered Mr Asher staring out across the heads of the funeral crowd, seemingly so unmoved. But it was hard to marshal our thoughts. By then it was almost two in the morning and our heads were woolly from the beer and from lack of sleep.
Before we called it a night, Jase Harbidge told us that the vast majority of murder victims knew their attackers. The police, he said, inevitably started their enquiries with the husband or the boyfriend. Or the father. They were, he told us over the embers of the old year, seldom on the wrong track.
So who killed Lucy Asher? That was the six-million-dollar question. That question was like a blowfly in our ears all that summer. It annoyed us with its incessant buzz throughout our waking hours. Like some research essay for English we went over the Ws. Who? What? Why? And really, the police didn't even know Where? Pete had been right when he said Lucy was not murdered on the beach, not where he found her, anyway. According to Jase Harbidge's father the police still hadn't discovered where Lucy was attacked, or where she entered the water, although they suspected both events occurred somewhere near the channel.
Al Penny was champion of the lone-wolf theory. According to Al, Lucy had probably gone for a walk along the beach and simply been attacked by a complete stranger; an opportunist who seized his moment. 'Someone strong enough to keep her quiet,' he reasoned.
We could not discount Al's theory, but most of us believed that the murderer was someone who lived in the area. We imagined a man, or older boy, who had seen Lucy regularly as she worked behind the counter of the dairy. Someone whose attraction had secretly spawned darker feelings. Her killer was probably someone who she knew by name.
If we are being totally honest, the certainty that the murderer knew Lucy really came because we were able to look into ourselves. We saw the darker side of what it meant to be a man. At fifteen we were full to bursting with frustrated lust. We joke about it now and, after a beer or three, wryly confess to relieving our tension up to twice, or even three times a day back then. It is a stamina we wish we had now. We had also known our share of violence, most of it on the rugby field, but nearly all of us had been in a fight or two off the field as well. Roy Moynahan once took a softball bat to the head of a guy he thought was picking on Emma, his younger sister. It was just good luck he didn't kill the guy.
So really it was not impossible for us to conjure up an image of some man, with feelings similar to those we had experienced ourselves, going out of his way to see Lucy in the dairy. Maybe he followed her home from school a couple of times. Surely not much harm in that. It also wasn't so hard for us to imagine those same feelings eventually swamping a man and driving him to terrible deeds. It's not that we could imagine ourselves raping or killing a woman. The action was fundamentally abhorrent. But let's just say, in the name of truth, that at fifteen we could stand at the beginning of the path that Lucy's murderer must surely have walked down. We could loiter at the start of that shadowy way and see as far as the first bend among the trees. We had an idea what it would feel like to walk down that path ourselves for at least a while.
We looked at the faces of the men and older boys we saw on the street and on the beach. No one was innocent in our imaginations. Was it him? we wondered. Or him? Him? Or him? But because we didn't have any plausible alternative Mr Asher remained our prime suspect. Jase Harbidge had done some research and could trot out the names of fathers (and even a few mothers) who had murdered their kids in all sorts of gruesome ways. Admittedly the cases, like our favourite TV shows, were mostly from the States, but that wasn't to say it hadn't happened closer to home. Sitting around our dinner tables in the evenings with our families, we examined the faces of our own fathers and mothers in a new and disturbing light.<
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Mr Asher was the only person we knew on whose behaviour we could pin the tag 'suspicious'. We speculated endlessly about what it was that Matt had seen him throwing into the channel in the middle of the night. Possibly some object or piece of clothing that would incriminate him in Lucy's murder? That's the direction our talk swung around to. Mr Asher's habitual silence now seemed to us to be a form of camouflage, allowing him to move unnoticed and unsuspected.
When the idea first surfaced Al Penny had tried to argue. 'But what about the sex? Lucy was raped, right? Fathers don't do that to their daughters.'
It was another hot afternoon and we were meeting in the Turners' garage with its bench-press and wonky pool table. Jase Harbidge was lining up his shot. He paused and looked across the green felt at Al and raised his eyebrows in a way that showed that he couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'Wanna bet?' was all he said. And then he took his shot. The weights hovered in the air and the balls bounced off the cushion and eventually came to rest while we all thought about the unthinkable.
We received our School Certificate results in the mail on the Monday of the third week of 1981. Our marks were average, which is exactly what we had expected. We scraped through into sixth form and avoided the shame of having to repeat the fifth form. Only Al Penny's marks were outstanding. They were so good that he became uncharacteristically cagey when asked how he had done and would not show anyone the official form. On the same day the Asher's dairy opened again. We felt that opening up for business was somehow disloyal to Lucy's memory, but as Roy Moynahan, who was always the pragmatist of the group, said, 'The Ashers have gotta make a living, don't they? Just like everyone else.'
But by then it wasn't much of a living. Business was noticeably slow. People suddenly seemed to prefer to go the extra distance to the dairy up on Bridge Street. It had recently changed hands and smelt of incense and curry (what dairy doesn't these days? But back then it was an alien scent and off-putting for many people). A lot of our mothers started doing the whole week's shopping at the supermarket in New Brighton Mall so that there was no need to top up at the Ashers' shop.