by Nixon, Carl
Matt's father had never been able to stand boys showing any interest in his daughters. Even before the attacks he'd actively discouraged those who came 'sniffing around'. He had once so badly beaten a boy he had found outside his eldest daughter's open window that the police had become involved. In the end no charges had been laid, but this incident had created an understandable caution among boys vying for the Templeton girls' affections.
It was a situation that Matt had been able to capitalise on. A short verbal message from a boy, delivered to one of his sisters verbatim earned Matt twenty cents. The reply cost the boy the same — C.O.D. Fifty cents was the going price for a written note. When boys tried to argue against the additional cost of putting pen to paper, Matt always told them the same thing: a note was more dangerous than a spoken message. 'With a note there's hard evidence. What if my father found it and forced me to say who it was from?'
No one argued after they heard that, not if they had any imagination. Matt Templeton had boys twice his size by the balls and they knew it. If you wanted to communicate with any of the Templeton girls the safest way was to go through Matt and then you paid the going rate. As we had learned in form three economics, it was basic supply and demand.
With five older sisters, all of whom were considered attractive and at least two of whom were widely rumoured to do much more than just kiss by the third date, Matt made a killing. He was by far the richest of our group. But he was generous with his money. When funds were needed for photocopying, or any of the other numerous expenses associated with our investigation, it was inevitably Matt who coughed up. A lot of the food we bought from the Ashers' dairy that summer was paid for by Matt's messenger business.
Matt also did a good line in alibis when one or other of the Templeton girls managed to sneak away to meet a boy. It was an additional service that he threw in at no extra charge. Matt could casually lie to his parents about Mary-Rose being at the movies or Annie staying over at a friend's house, without so much as blinking. After that his sisters were on their own. However, following the attack on Jenny Jones the Templeton girls found themselves locked down. Their father was moody and vigilant. He prowled the house like a hanging judge.
Of all the local girls only Carolyn Asher seemed to move about the neighbourhood at will. Tug would see her coming and going from the dairy at all hours. Sometimes she was picked up by a guy in a car. Often she wheeled her girl's bike with its low frame out the front gate and cycled off down the road, her long, pale legs often visible beneath her short skirts.
There were only rumours about where she went and what she did, but the stories we heard were becoming worse and reaching us more frequently. Even our mothers began to hear things. More than one of them warned us to stay well away from Carolyn Asher. Only a few months after her sister's funeral she was a girl with a reputation.
The only one of us who, at fifteen, claimed to have had sex was Grant Webb. He told a story that he repeated in slightly varying forms, about an exchange student at a party his older brother had taken him to the winter before. Grant claimed that she found him irresistible and was all over him like a rash. We had heard from other sources though that the girl had drunk most of a bottle of tequila in the space of an hour. Grant was one of at least three guys who claimed to have had sex with her in an upstairs bedroom that night. The girl's name was Maria but pronounced strangely. Shortly after that party she stopped coming to school, abandoned her host family, and returned to the small French town where she'd grown up. What she made of her life after her visit here we do not know.
On a daily basis the closest we came to sex was Amy Trousedale. Amy was a solo mum who lived up past the intersection of Rocking Horse Road and Marine Parade. She was twenty-three and had twin boys called Jake and Zach. Back in the early eighties there was still some shame associated with being an unmarried mother. Girls who found themselves 'in trouble' were packed off to stay with aunts in other cities until the baby could be delivered and adopted out. Or more often, the girls were bundled along to special doctors where everything was sorted out, nice and tidy, in a couple of hours.
It was an open secret that Amy supplemented her meagre DPB with sex work. We had heard that a handjob cost thirty dollars. Word came to us through guys who had older brothers, who had friends, who claimed to have had been to Amy's house. For another twenty she would use her mouth as well and for a hundred bucks Amy would let you go all the way as long as you wore a rubber.
Our reason for wanting to interview her was simple. As Grant Webb said, 'If there's a sex pervert living in the area, then Amy's the one who's going to know who he is.' It was a logic we all understood.
Obviously we didn't want to simply turn up at her door. We had no idea of the hours that men visited her. We settled for talking to her at the playground where she took Jake and Zach most fine days. When Pete Marshall and Al Penny approached her, she was sitting on a bench watching her boys play on the seesaw. The truth was that Amy was not obviously sexy, even to fifteen-year-old boys. Amy was short and well on the way to being plump, with peroxide-blonde hair — what our mothers called a bombshell blonde. She always had bare feet in the summer. As she sat on the park bench her short legs did not allow her swinging feet to touch the ground and it was sometimes possible for Pete and Al to see that her soles were stained dark with the type of dirt that did not wash off from a single bath. She smoked constantly and, even at twenty-three, was beginning to get those thin lines at the corners of her mouth like collapsed under-runners. But despite Amy's lack of obvious allure she regularly featured in our fantasies. The knowledge that, with cash and a dollop of courage, we could find ourselves at the receiving end of Amy's favours was like an aphrodisiac poured into the local water supply.
Amy seemed amused when Pete and Al walked right up to her. Al had the tape recorder hidden in his school bag. He had put in a fresh tape and turned it on before they entered the park (the sound quality is poor but you can still make out what was said).
AL: We'd like to talk to you.
AMY: How old are yous?
AL: Fifteen.
AMY: Come back when you're sixteen.
PETE: About Lucy Asher.
AMY: Who?
PETE: The girl who was killed.
AMY: Hang on.
It is noted on the transcript that at that point Amy went over to break up a fight between her boys and another kid. You can just hear muffled shouts and some distant crying on the tape. Jake and Zach were four, and big for their age. They dominated any playground they were at, like miniature mob enforcers. Right from when they could first walk they had pushed and gouged and bashed kids twice their age. They threw bark and sand in the faces of other kids and, if challenged, in the faces of the other kids' mothers. They bit like pit-bulls. Girls and boys alike lived in fear of the Trousedale twins — they were equal opportunity bullies. And when they weren't fighting other kids, they were bashing each other. These days most of us have got kids of our own and, looking back, we now realise how those boys must have made Amy's life hell.
AMY: So what did you guys want?
AL: We thought you might have some information.
AMY: I didn't know her.
AL: [Unintelligible] younger.
AMY: She wasn't a friend of mine or anything.
PETE: She was raped.
AMY: So?
PETE: We thought you might know something.
According to Pete she just stood up and walked away. He said later that he knew they had offended her but he wasn't sure how. On the tape you can hear her shouting something at her boys in the background. The words '. . . you'll brain-damage him' rise clearly out of the static. Pete and Al left the park as the twins began rolling pinecones down the slide with a sound like an approaching stampede.
When they got to the road, Al reached into his pack and turned off the tape recorder. He told us he looked back and saw Amy standing by the swings staring in their direction. 'She looked tired and sad. I kinda felt sorry for
her.'
However, we were not going to be put off that easily. We reasoned that Amy wasn't going to simply hand over details of her clients. As with lawyers there was probably some agreement about confidentiality, 'or like doctors have with the Hypocrite's Oath,' was how Mark Murray put it (the 'Hypocrite's Oath' is still something we like to bring up every now and then when Mark gets a bit cocky).
We took to watching Amy's house. It was just a small Summerhill stone place, which she rented. There was a vacant section right next door so we loosened boards and enlarged knotholes in the fence and took shifts sitting in the long dry grass after school. Her clients were not as regular as we had expected. In the first three days there was only one guy who might have been visiting for sex. He arrived at 9.30 in the evening, close to the time when we were about to give up for the day. He parked his car up the road and entered Amy's place on foot, walking so quietly that we almost missed him. He knocked gently and slipped inside. The blinds were already pulled and we couldn't see a thing.
He left an hour later and although we got a better look at his face none of us recognised him. He looked surprisingly normal. Just in case it came in useful, we recorded the details of his car: make, model and number plate. But we never saw him again. After he had left, Amy came out in her dressing gown. Her hair was wet as though she'd been in the shower. She put her rubbish bag down on the footpath and without looking around went back inside.
We were beginning to learn that investigative work is mostly boring. It's all about accumulating small details over long periods of time. The facts gather like dust on a windowsill until there are enough to see. Every day after school for two weeks we sat in the flattened grass, doing shifts of two hours each. Sometimes we were alone; sometimes one or more of the others came down because they had nothing better to do. We read comic books or played backgammon. Pete had been sent a backgammon board for Christmas by his brother Tony, who was in the navy by then. Tony had picked it up in Sydney when his ship had visited there on some Australia–New Zealand joint training manoeuvres.
Eventually we came to see a pattern in Amy's days. She saw clients from Monday to Friday. Amy started work at around eight o'clock in the evening. Presumably Jake and Zach went to bed early, exhausted by a hard day terrorising the neighbourhood. They probably never met the men who visited their mother. There were one or maybe two guys most evenings. Sometimes there would be none and Amy's bedroom light would be switched off early.
By the end of the second week we were bored and ready to give up. The only conclusive thing we had was a list of car licence plates. The guys who visited her were mostly middle-aged and completely normal-looking. There were no obvious murderers, no screams in the night. As Mark Murray asked, 'What the hell does a sex pervert look like anyway?' We began to feel foolish for even thinking that we would discover anything by watching Amy.
It was a Friday and, we had all agreed, the last evening before we'd give up watching her for good. Tug Gardiner and Jase Harbidge were watching the house. Tug thought at first that Bill Harbidge must have been there on police business. But Jase's dad was not in uniform and there was no sign of a police car. In fact, he seemed to have arrived on foot, emerging out of the dunes.
'His hair was combed,' Tug said, 'and you could smell the Old Spice from where we were.'
Jase went quiet, Tug added, and left on his bike soon after his father had gone inside. There was no real betrayal involved. It didn't look like Jase's mum was coming back. Nonetheless we knew that it was a humiliation for Jase. Actually, it disturbed us all. If Jase's father, a policeman, could feel that inner tension that moved him to knock quietly on Amy Trousedale's door, then couldn't those same feelings be stirring in our own fathers? Who was to say that our dads didn't, from time to time, pop out on some errand and then find themselves parking the family car down the road and walking back to Amy's house?
That was the last time we ever watched Amy. Without discussing it, we knew that it was better not to know for sure. We even started avoiding passing by her house in the evenings in case we should see something we didn't want to. We never spoke of seeing Bill Harbidge there, and not just because it would embarrass Jase. There was more than our friend's feelings at stake. We had started to see that there were shadowy places all around us that were better left undisturbed.
FOUR
March brought the first real rains of the year. For four days, Wednesday to Saturday of the first week of that month, the rain fell almost continuously. It varied between sheets of windblown mist and heavy drops that pockmarked the sand. By the end of that week the dunes had changed from summer's tired yellow. They now wore a shade of green we could barely remember from last spring. The tussocks stood tall and the ice plant was no longer soft and limp but pointed plump fingers at the sky. Moisture clung to everything so that as we moved around the dunes our school socks got soaked.
March also brought the sea fogs rolling in off the Pacific. Sometimes the fog covered the whole coast, sometimes just New Brighton and occasionally only the Spit. It could linger for a few hours in the morning, or for a whole day. Once or twice that year it draped itself over the coast for several days on end so that we lived our lives in a twilight world.
The goal posts had only been up for few days when someone attacked the local rugby club under cover of the fog. By then even we were aware that there were some people who felt strongly that the Springboks should not be touring at all. We had no time for this point of view. As Pete Marshall's father said, 'Sport is sport and politics is politics.' But apparently some people didn't agree. On the first Monday in March we went down to the rugby grounds to see the damage for ourselves. Someone had written the word APARTHEID in bright red paint across the front of the clubrooms. The down stroke of the T cut right through the middle of the door. Even worse though was what they had done to the grounds. They must have used a pretty strong weedkiller. The grass from one twenty-two-metre mark right up to the halfway line was dead in patches. Standing close it was hard to see what the oversized letters spelt but when we stood up on the top of the natural embankment we could read two words. STOP TOUR.
Nearly everyone down the Spit was outraged. It felt like a random act of terrorism. What type of people came in the night and defiled such an important part of the community? But more and more we were seeing signs of anti-tour behaviour. Occasionally on the bus we would see someone wearing a red, white and black Halt All Racist Tours badge. We looked at the wearers curiously but there was no discernable type that we could see. There were badges on both men and women, on people who were well off, and on university lefty types. They were even being worn by some retired people who we believed should have known better. We wondered which one of them had been responsible for vandalising the rugby field but found it hard to visualise people so normal-looking out on the grass in the night spraying weedkiller. We believed that we would know a fanatic when we saw one.
Shortly after that posters started going up in New Brighton. At first they were only put up at the shopping centre and then they crept south on the lampposts.
STOP THE TOUR!
RALLY AND MARCH
THOMPSON PARK SOUTH BRIGHTON
8 June 6.30pm
Because of the attack on the rugby grounds we felt that these posters belonged to an unseen enemy. We pulled them down and stuffed them into rubbish bins whenever we could. We even ripped them up into small pieces so that they could not be taken out of the bins and recycled. Within a few days fresh signs would go up and we tore those down too. But it seemed that whoever was putting up the posters had an endless supply.
It was Al's idea to talk to Sarah Fogarty about Lucy's murder. 'If anyone's going to know something, it's her.' It was an obvious idea and we wondered why we hadn't thought of it earlier. All the boys at South Brighton High School were habitually wary of Sarah. She had an aura of disdain for all things masculine and had been known to hit boys who annoyed her, hard enough to deaden arms. We all agreed that she had been an unl
ikely best friend for Lucy Asher.
Matt was our emissary to Sarah solely because of his six sisters: he was well versed in the high rituals of young women. Matt found Sarah Fogarty at the school tennis courts. Unusually for a girl in those days she was alone. She was busy hitting a ball against the concrete practice wall. When Sarah first came to our school in the fourth form, after her family had moved up from Geraldine, she had been a champion tennis player. She had regularly beaten girls three years older. Gradually, however — and for reasons known only to herself — Sarah had given the competitive side of the sport away and now played only for fun.
When Matt approached her, Sarah was hitting the ball forehand with all the ferocity of her previous match-winning form. He told us later that the ball slammed into the wall at almost the same spot every time. He waited.
'Well?' she said, when it was at last clear that Matt was not going away. She spoke without looking over at him.
'I wanted to talk to you about Lucy.'
'No fucking shit.' Another reason boys were wary of her was Sarah's disconcerting ability to out-swear even the toughest boys. 'Can't you see I'm busy here?'
'We were wondering if you knew who killed her?'
As investigative work goes it was pretty crude stuff, but at least the question made Sarah stop hitting the tennis ball. It bounced back off the wall and rolled across the ground past Matt's feet, coming to rest at the foot of the umpire's chair in a puddle left over from the recent rain. Sarah looked at Matt for the first time. He told us that she had the sunken bruised eyes of Ali losing to Holmes. According to Matt Templeton, Sarah looked as though she had hadn't slept for a year.
'If I knew who fucking killed her I'd tell the police.'
Matt didn't comment. His place at the bottom of an entirely feminine pecking order had taught him when to stay silent. Sarah walked over to retrieve her ball. She had to pass close to where Matt was standing and he tensed up, waiting for her to plant her knuckles in his arm. But Sarah simply picked up the wet ball and went back to hitting it against the wall.