by Nixon, Carl
We, on the other hand, became the Ashers' best customers. Our motivation for shopping at their dairy wasn't entirely to do with furthering what we now thought of as our investigation into Lucy's murder. We genuinely felt that we should help prop up their business. The spell of hot weather was still unbroken so, of course, we bought ice creams. We sat around in Tug's bedroom taking turns with the binoculars and eating. For a while, we each got through three or four cones a day. In addition to ice cream we spent our money on bottles of Coke, Fanta and Mello Yello. Later we moved on to twenty- and fifty-cent mixtures until we grew sick of the sight of pink and yellow Eskimo-men and chewy milk-bottles. As the weeks passed we also came to loathe coiled liquorice straps. We left them to lie around Tug's room like the charred remains of garden snails. We took to tipping bags of powdered sherbet down the Gardiners' toilet.
Our mothers were at first surprised, and then suspicious of the unexplained bottles of milk we began to bring home on a daily basis. We drank all we could but there's only so much milk you can stomach. When we didn't want to answer any more of our mothers' questions, the milk also got poured away. For weeks the Gardiners' drains ran white.
We also bought bread but there's only so much of that you can eat as well. We Frisbeed whole loaves of sliced bread, piece by piece, out Tug's window for the seagulls to catch on the wing. By the end of January the birds swarmed around the house as thick as flies. They perched on the edge of the fences and up on the spouting, just waiting, staining everything with long white streaks. Eventually Mr Gardiner stormed up the stairs and laid down the law.
When we made our purchases, it was always Mrs Asher who served us. Mrs Asher had never dressed like someone who worked in a dairy. She habitually wore fashionable black dresses and skirts and silver bracelets (what we used to call bangles). Her hair was long, like Lucy's and with the same sheen, and she wore it in a ponytail. Mrs Asher dressed as though she had just stepped out of a business meeting at Tip Top in order to scoop out our double ice creams.
We knew that our mothers often used to talk to each other about Mrs Asher and what they called 'her pretensions'. Down Rocking Horse Road, being seen to step outside the carefully pegged-out boundaries of your life was regarded as something of a sin.
But grief had diminished Mrs Asher. It had taken the flesh from her cheeks so that the bones of her face were thrust forward like scaffolding from beneath her skin. She had always been slim but Lucy's death had made coat-hangers of Mrs Asher's shoulders. Her eyes seemed to float in their sockets as she regarded us from behind the increasingly dusty glass counter, beneath which the sweets sat like something in an abandoned museum. The large front windows were covered with advertising that was sellotaped to the inside of the glass. The advertising, for things like dog roll and pies, let through virtually no sunlight. It was always a shock to move from the glare of the hot day into the cool dark shop and it was inevitably sobering. We tried to be cheery but it was an effort. More often than not Mrs Asher had forgotten to turn on the fluorescent lights. The door buzzer would sound and she would appear from the back, silent and pale in the gloom, thinner by the day. She would not speak, not even 'hello' or 'good afternoon', but would stand patiently behind the counter in the quarter-light and wait for us to tell her what we wanted. When we finally made up our minds she would hand it over without a word and we would pay and leave.
It's hard to remember exactly what we hoped to learn by going there. Perhaps we went because it was all in such stark contrast to the way the shop had been when Lucy was alive. The very differences served as reminders and moored us to the recent past. Lucy had served in the shop most days after school as well as on Saturday afternoons after she had played netball or hockey. Back then, the door was always jammed open with a small triangle of wood. There had been light and Lucy's music played quietly from a tape deck that she kept high up on a shelf behind the counter. When her parents weren't home she would turn the music up loud. Lucy was often talking to her friends on the phone as she served, cupping the receiver under her chin and still talking and laughing as she gave change. She was always friendly, even to us younger boys.
Perhaps the truth is that we went to the dairy in the weeks following the funeral because we wanted to share our grief with Mrs Asher. We had neither the courage or the vocabulary to put how we felt into words. Maybe our daily purchases of unwanted ice-cream and milk and sweets were the only form of consolation we knew how to offer.
By mid-January we had started hearing things about Carolyn Asher. They were just vague rumours at first, ripples from a distant splash. And then Matt Templeton saw her on a Friday night, standing outside the fish 'n' chip shop up on Estuary Road. According to Matt she was with an older guy, a local, who had been flanker in the first XV at school but who now played for University. 'The guy was all over her' was Matt's comment.
Tug saw her as well, a couple of weeks later. She was in the back of a car parked outside the reserve, in the pool of shadow between the street-lights. She was with a guy as well, but not the rugby player. It was a surfer this time. She was sitting up in the back seat, smoking. The surfer was back there with her. As Tug passed Carolyn turned her head and looked at him without any expression.
By the end of the month we had heard other, more specific things, told third and fourth hand. By then they were stories told with a wink and a sneer.
The guys Carolyn Asher was seeing were always older and always lived in New Brighton. Because she was Lucy's sister we tried to find out more. We thought our best bet was to approach the guys directly.
'Whatareya, her brother?' was a fairly typical comment. That from a guy who later threatened to beat up Jase Harbidge if he didn't stop hanging around his flat. Really, we couldn't blame the guy for being edgy. Carolyn Asher was underage by more than a year.
Years later we were able to strike up conversations with these old boyfriends in pubs. We would arrange a chance meeting and then simply drop her name into the conversation. 'She was up for it any time,' one guy told us. Another said with a sneer that 'She was a weird little chick, but she did love to fuck!'
Her pattern was always the same — none of the guys lasted very long. Several of them already had girlfriends but, as far as we know, once she set her sights on a guy she never got turned down. After seeing a guy for a couple of weeks she simply stopped coming around. Most seemed to shrug and accept it; they didn't take it personally. They were grateful for the easy sex while it lasted and philosophical when it dried up.
A few, though, seemed to fall for Carolyn. They made the mistake of trying to see her again once she had made it clear it was over. If they called her on the phone or stopped her on the street she acted as though she didn't know them from Adam. One of the persistent ones told us, only a couple of years ago, 'I only went out with her for like a week, but she was an addiction. Even now, seeing a girl who looks a bit like her makes me hard as a plank.'
We were so fixated on Lucy during the days that it was only natural our sleeping selves also began to focus on her. We didn't talk about it with each other that much back then (and didn't later for many years). At the time, we just acknowledged that there were dreams. Pete Marshall admitted to being freaked out by them sometimes ('freaked out' would remain one of Pete's favourite expressions right into his late twenties). It was only very recently that we discussed the dreams. As it turned out we had all had at least a few. In our dreams Lucy was never a ghost, not in any cliched way. She was no floating apparition, all see-through and blurry around the edges. In our dreams Lucy was essentially the same as she had been before she died, when she was working behind the counter of the dairy.
Ray told us that for several weeks in January of that first year he had a dream where Lucy walked into his science class. She stood next to Mr Mayer who was up the front, pointing with a ruler at a diagram of a volcano. 'I expected Mayer to ask her what she wanted but he just kept on talking. Everyone just carried on as normal. After a while I realised that I was the only
one who could see her. She wasn't scary, but in the dream she just stared at me like she was kinda sad or something. Eventually I couldn't take it any more and woke up.'
We all had dreams that went something like that. Pete Marshall probably had the dreams most often that summer, which is understandable considering he was the one who found her body. He didn't say anything much at the time but spoke about it to Mark Murray. In Pete's dream he looked out of his bedroom window and saw that Lucy was standing over the road from his house under a flowering cabbage tree. She was wearing a red dress. She was staring up at his window, and when she noticed him looking out at her, she frowned. That was it.
They weren't nightmares, but they always woke us. They left us thoughtful and uneasy, unable to slip back into sleep. We lay in our beds, wrapped in the smell of rotting sea-lettuce. We listened to the wavesound and to the occasional cry of a wading bird disturbed on the estuary. We often lay for hours. It was no wonder that by the end of January we were all sunken eyed and edgy and feeling like ghosts ourselves.
People are usually willing to talk to us. That has been true right from the beginning. In fact, the people we interview often seem relieved to be able to talk. They want to unload what they know on to our shoulders. Almost inevitably they offer us up small details, tidbits that do not appear in any police interview or newspaper report. The details they remember for us maybe did not seem relevant at the time, or were thought to be too mundane to be chiselled in to official documentation. Maybe they sense our need for anything that will connect us to Lucy; that will enable us to see her more clearly through the mist that death (and now, the intervening years) has called down over her. In that sense, the information they dig out for us is like a gift for which we are always grateful.
We find that the unexpected question is the one that often draws out the truest response. That is why we approach people in their homes and while they are on the job. Sometimes they are on their smoko, sandwich in hand, or pausing to take stock before moving on to the next task. We have spoken to a housewife as she hung out wet sheets. We once interviewed the manager of a courier company on his way to work. He sat behind the wheel in his driveway, the engine of his car idling. One interview was even conducted on the sidelines of a club rugby match (New Brighton 21, Old Boys 12 — a rare victory for the local club).
Of course, these days we almost never do interviews. They've all been done already, completed and filed down at the lock-up. Occasionally we will approach someone seeking clarification of some small point, but that can often be done over the phone. For years, though, we were the boys who appeared with pen and paper or — as we became older and more sophisticated — the young men with a chunky black tape-recorder lugged around on a shoulder strap. We have hours and hours of interviews on tape (Exhibits T1–T38).
Mrs Asher only ever agreed to one interview, and that was only a couple of years ago, when she was seventy-one. We visited her at Calbourne Courts, a group of single-bedroom, concrete-block units arranged in a circle around a lawn, like covered wagons in an old western waiting to be attacked.
Even in old age, Mrs Asher still dressed in black. Possibly some of the clothes were the same ones she had worn when we were fifteen (Al Penny later referred to her as 'our own Miss Havisham'). Silver bracelets still hung on her wrists. But Mrs Asher's taut good looks were gone, replaced by a ballooning puffiness that had transformed her face and made her almost unrecognisable as Lucy's mother. Perhaps the bloating was a side-effect of her medication. Perhaps she had just chosen to let herself go after years of keeping up appearances.
Even though we were middle-aged men we felt the same awe in her presence as when we were fifteen and used to slip into her darkened dairy. We sat awkwardly in her cramped lounge and ate the soft Girl Guide biscuits she offered. We tried not to drop crumbs on the salmon-pink carpet. Mrs Asher sat in her big chair and spoke in what often seemed to be non sequiturs. She did not respond directly to any of the questions we asked her. She would share with us a story, which would gush from her mouth and then stop suddenly, as if a tap had been turned off. More often a rambling recollection was transformed mid-sentence into another about a completely separate incident from years before or years later.
It came as no surprise when Mrs Asher was officially diagnosed as having Alzheimer's. That was about eight months after we met with her. Al Penny visited her in the hospital unit where she is still living. He told the staff that he was her son. Nobody asked for ID. Who but a relative would visit a woman like Mrs Asher? She was someone with neither a past nor a future.
Al found her sitting up in bed in the small, sparse room where she slept, wearing a shiny red house-coat with padded panels. For the whole visit Mrs Asher thought that he was her husband, even though by then Mr Asher had been dead fifteen years. Al tried to talk to her about Lucy, hoping that some small storm-tossed detail would be thrown up by her mind. But his questions only made her agitated. She kept talking over him, telling him that there was some loose iron on the roof that flapped in the wind at night and kept her awake. Her thin voice rose and fell like the probably imaginary wind that was bothering her. He would need to get up there and fix it, she said several times. Al finally promised that he would get on to it right away. Then she calmed right down and shortly after that Al made his excuses and left.
But on the day of our interview at Calbourne Courts Mrs Asher still had some of her mind left. The interview was so significant that all of us were there. Mrs Asher recognised Tug Gardiner straight away and asked how his father, her old neighbour, was. 'And is the dairy still there?'
Tug hesitated, unsure what to say, but in the end, settled for the truth. 'It closed down about eight or nine years ago. Too much competition from the supermarkets, I guess. The new people converted the shop back into bedrooms.'
Mrs Asher considered Tug through puffy eyelids. 'I always hated that shop anyway,' she said. There was a pause. 'Carrots are very hard to peel,' she added, and held up her hands to show us her swollen knuckles and twisted fingers. Whether her hands were proof or reason for the carrots' stubbornness we were not sure. We silently nibbled the edges of our soft biscuits while we thought about that.
Lucy, she told us a few minutes later, had always been a wilful child. 'Right from the very beginning she refused to bottle-feed. She knew exactly what she wanted and would howl until she got it.'
'We wish we'd known her better as a girl,' said Pete Marshall. We all nodded. It was true. Pete had come straight from work and was still wearing the white shirt from the Power Store he managed. His name badge was pinned to the pocket. Like most of us Pete had put on a bit of weight over the years. His shirt was tight over his gut where he had tucked it in to his belt and there were sweat stains under the arms.
There was another long pause. Calbourne Courts is over in the western suburbs and we listened in vain for the familiar scream of a seagull. The only noise was the hiss and rumble of the heavy trucks passing on the wet surface of the new motorway that had recently been built on the other side of the fence.
Mrs Asher seemed to find nothing unusual in recounting episodes from her life to the half-dozen middle-aged men who had squeezed themselves into her small unit. But after an hour she tired and her stories began to be broken up by longer and longer gaps. When she was not speaking her head began to nod forward before snapping back up. Each time this happened she would look around the room wide-eyed as if seeing us for the first time. Sensing that we were missing our opportunity, Jim Turner asked if she knew anything she could tell us about the circumstances of Lucy's death. We all leaned forward.
Mrs Asher became suddenly guarded. She shuffled back into her big chair and fixed Jim with a look. Her eyes went small and sharp until they were almost lost beneath those puffed bags of flesh. 'She died,' she said emphatically and shook her head as though a fly had landed on her hair. 'My little girl died. That was the end of that.'
She told a few more half stories from the days when her daughters were young,
before they went to school. It was a period that seemed lodged in her mind like a time of golden weather. But on Lucy's murder she would not be drawn. Finally she fell asleep. We stood quietly and filed out, shutting the door behind us.
We wondered if Mrs Asher would remember we had been there when she woke up. Perhaps the dented pillows and occasional biscuit crumb on the couch would be a source of confusion or intrigue to her. Would she even vaguely remember the group of inquisitive men who had appeared in her lounge, or would sleep, like an unusually high tide, wash her mind clean of memory's footsteps?
Perhaps Mrs Asher was right. Maybe there does come a time when that should be the end of that. Perhaps we should just let it go, stop digging when we have no map. It is not uncommon for one of us to promise himself that he's not going to carry on pursuing the investigation. All of us have had times in our lives when we've told ourselves we're not going to lose sleep thinking about it any more, or go through the files just one more time. We've persuaded ourselves that when we meet with the rest of the group for a beer or two, we're going to insist that we don't talk about anything to do with Lucy Asher. We've all had patches when we felt like that. Jase Harbidge went as far as suggesting that we form a support group, L.A.A. — Lucy Asher Anonymous. He was only half joking. Sometimes our abstinence lasts a few months. Mark Murray went a whole year and a half in the mid-nineties, before an article in the Herald about a case with some similarities to Lucy's brought him back into the fold.
Mostly our breaks are brought about by the feeling that there is no progress, that our lives are becalmed, although it is often wives or girlfriends who agitate enough to force a clean break. 'Creepy' is the adjective most often used by women. They resent the time we spend on the case, time they rightly feel is lost to them and to our families. But it is more than that: women sense that the Asher case is an area of our lives into which they can have no entry. It has been said many times over the years and in many different voices, and perhaps they are right; perhaps we should, 'get a life'.