by Nixon, Carl
Thump. Thump. Thump. Interspersed with the twanging of the strings.
Matt waited for a long time but Sarah didn't say anything else. It was clear to him that she could go on hitting the ball all day.
He was outside the tall wire fence and walking away when Sarah called out to him. 'Hey, shit-head!' He turned back and saw that she was standing by the fence, her racket hanging loose in one hand. Even from a distance he could see Sarah's cavernous eyes and they made him shiver.
'She was seeing some guy but she wouldn't tell me who.' And then she turned away, leaving Matt feeling as shaken as he would have if Sarah had hit him after all.
The news that Lucy Asher had been seeing someone, and all that implied, caused a wave of consternation to wash through Jim Turner's garage. It tarnished those memories of Lucy we had assembled and now jealously guarded. Other images came, unbidden and unwelcome. Grant Webb openly asked about the possibility of Lucy having 'done it' but was hissed down. He retreated into sullen silence. The idea was an insult to the Lucy we had breathed life into during the hot pungent summer.
At fifteen, we saw sex everywhere. It hovered near Amy Trousedale, of course, but also near every halfway attractive girl passing on the street. We watched all the girls and women in togs down on the beach, and gazed at every scantily-clad model on a billboard, magazine cover or TV ad. Every off-colour joke we heard our fathers make in passing, every flick and pout, every giggle and bare-legged step seemed designed to turn us on. The whole world was like one big subliminal message. But Lucy Asher was different. Lucy was exempt from our hormonal obsessions. We could not believe that Lucy was part of the guilty world of our fantasies. Lucy's name did not belong in the same sentence with that of Amy or any of those other women. They were like different species. They swam in the same ocean, but at different depths. By consensus, we decided that if Lucy had a boyfriend then it must have been someone who took her to the movies a couple of times, maybe held her hand — certainly nothing more.
We were inclined to want to push this new information to the back of our minds but Pete Marshall said, 'It's our first real clue. We've got to follow it up. We owe it to Lucy.' It was after school on the day Matt had spoken to Sarah Fogarty. We were back in the garage, not having met there as a group for several weeks. By then Mark Murray had found an old picture-frame in a storage box and brought it along to the garage. Al Penny, who had become the unofficial custodian of all the news reports and interview notes, had transferred the photo of Lucy printed in The Press into the frame. We covered the work bench at the back of the garage with a tasselled table cloth that hung down to the concrete floor. The frame was painted gold and still had its glass and Lucy smiled out at us. The silver trophy sat next to the photo. Above the bench, pinned to the unlined walls of the garage, were the carefully trimmed articles from the newspapers.
Pete Marshall's words made us feel guilty and our eyes dropped. 'We owe it to Lucy,' he said again. He was right. So, together, we compiled a list of possible suspects. Boys Lucy could have been seeing who, we assumed, could have gone on to be her killer. Unlike the police, we were not constrained by lack of evidence or even the need for objectivity. The slimmest connection to Lucy, the whisper of a rumour, a hunch or old prejudice, saw boys named. They were secretly photographed and their faces hung in the Turners' garage on what became known as 'the boyfriend wall'.
All the photographs were taken by Al Penny with the second-hand camera he got for his birthday that year, a Pentax ME Super. Al got very good at taking pictures to do with the case. The camera didn't have a great zoom on the lens but he had an instinct for the impending moment when all the variables would slip into place. He had a shy boy's knowledge of how to get in close without being seen.
By the end of March we had nine photographs pinned to the wall. All the boys were from New Brighton, all were roughly Lucy's age and, with the exception of one, all had recently attended our school. Luckily, all of them still lived at home so we were able to spy on them. They were photographed through bus windows or as they got out of cars. Al caught them on street corners or through the windows of their homes as they ate dinner with their families. Several were photographed on the beach, surfing or swimming; one as he dozed in the sleep-out behind his parents' house.
Looking back, it is clear that we displayed little imagination in our choice of suspects. Without exception they were good-looking young men. More often than not they were respected rugby or cricket players. Our reasoning was that if Lucy had been going out with anyone, why wouldn't it have been with one of these guys? Only Matt Templeton argued that our choices were flawed. Girls — all girls — he argued, went for the outsider, the maverick, the Han Solo type. To back up his claim he brought along a poster belonging to one of his older sisters, Mary- Rose. The poster showed James Dean walking along a footpath in the rain. He was looking cool and tough, yet a bit dishevelled like he'd been awake all night. He also looked slightly lonely. 'That's the type of thing girls really go for,' Matt said. We were interested. Because of his sisters he was by far the most qualified among us. Here was information, if not straight from the horse's mouth, then certainly from the donkey who lived in the next-door paddock.
On the strength of Matt's recommendation we included Steve Weldon on our list. Steve had been in Lucy's year at school but had left at the beginning of the sixth form in a torrent of controversy and speculation. The school never came out and said why Steve was 'asked to leave' and there were a lot of myths that grew up around the episode. Whether he really had used his locker key to scratch a jagged FUCK into the side of the headmaster's orange Datsun is uncertain. It may have been Steve who released the twenty doomed frogs from the biology room into the space above the hung ceilings. (Their gentle croaks could be heard coming from above our heads for weeks, in classrooms as far away as the English department.) Whether it was for one of these acts of minor rebellion, or for something else entirely, all anybody knew for sure was that in the July of his University Entrance year, Steve Weldon's arse was grass.
One fairly typical photograph we have of Steve shows him wearing tight black jeans and a black AC/DC T-shirt with a skull on the front. As far as fashion statements went, we all agreed it was pretty cool. In the photo he is standing outside his mother's house, where he lived at the time of the murder, waiting for the mailman to arrive (Photo Exhibit P36 SW). He's been photographed slightly in profile. His mouth is partly open as though he is tasting the salt air. If you look carefully you can see his chipped front tooth. Steve had never attended another school after leaving ours and, as far as we knew, never got a job. How he spent his time was a subject of frequent speculation.
No one could collaborate a definite sighting of Steve Weldon and Lucy together but we agreed that didn't exclude them from having been in a secret relationship. Roy Moynahan went so far as to argue that no one ever having seen Lucy and Steve together was in itself suspicious, and possibly proof that they were seeing each other. But that was a bit philosophical for most of us. That Steve was the coolest boy down the Spit was enough to get him on our list.
We still kept track of the other boys on the boyfriend wall but as the weeks went by we came to focus on Steve Weldon more and more. Not because his behaviour was that of a murderer — he was no more suspicious in his day to day behaviour than anyone else — but because we quickly became fascinated by him. Steve turned out to be living a life that was almost totally different from our own.
Towards the end of March and the beginning of April we took close to sixty photographs of Steve Weldon. Most of them are mundane. He is shown standing out the back of his house, under the eaves, smoking a cigarette (he had a pack-a-day habit); eating an ice cream; sitting on the seesaw in the deserted playground; peeing against a lupin in the dunes during one of his rambling walks. We came to realise that his days were largely empty spaces waiting to be filled. Life without school was a series of linked meanderings and minor chores.
There were only two things that s
eemed to animate Steve. The first was his motorbike. He rode an old Triumph, which he maintained himself. The Weldons' garage door was almost always open, the floor littered with the greasy entrails of Steve's bike. We came to suspect that he took his bike apart even when it was running smoothly, just to fill his long, unfocused days. Most evenings when the bike wasn't in pieces he would take it out for a run. He would roar out of the gate and the sound would recede until it mixed with the sound of the waves. We were never around late enough to see him return.
Surprisingly, the other thing Steve enjoyed doing was cooking. His father had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two (around the age we are now). His mother was a pug-faced woman who seemed to have been constructed out of heavy lumps of white dough. She worked long hours as a cleaner but when she came home each night Steve would have a meal on the table. And not just the meat and three veg that was the meal-du-jour everyday down the Spit. Steve Weldon regularly served his mother up fettuccine, lasagne, crêpes Suzette and chicken breast stuffed with apricot. He made her exotic dishes in the days when most men couldn't boil an egg, and when even our own mothers thought chow mein was a town in China.
'Sure, I knew you guys were watching me but I didn't care.' Our interview with Steve was held in April 1989, after he returned from a stint working in London. We asked him where he used to go on his bike in the evenings. 'I liked to get out on the open road. Sometimes I'd drive south to Ashburton or go inland to Hanmer. Once, I remember, I drove all the way to Nelson and then just turned around in front of the cathedral and came back in the dark. It was something to do.'
We were watching the Weldon house on the evening Carolyn Asher first rode up on her bicycle. She laid the bike against the scrappy macrocarpa hedge and walked up the drive as though she'd visited there every day of her life. 'I was in the garage and she just walked right up to me and asked to go for a ride. Yeah, I knew who she was. I knew what had happened to her sister.'
We wondered if he knew more than that, if he had heard the stories about Carolyn. But we were willing to give Steve the benefit of the doubt. We imagined her clinging to him, her long, bony body pressing into his back, looking ahead over his shoulder, leaning into the corners with the night air buffeting her face. Where did they go? What did they do when they got there? Even years later, Steve Weldon wouldn't tell us. All he would say was that they talked a lot and that it was private.
Carolyn Asher started to appear at the Weldons' house almost daily, always when Mrs Weldon was at her cleaning job and Carolyn herself should have been at school. She had been missing a lot of school that year, something that neither the system nor her family appeared to be doing anything about (and okay, we were missing some ourselves). Steve told us that they were 'friends, during a difficult phase in both our lives'.
One of the most interesting things Steve would tell us was that he had once caught Carolyn in his room going through his stuff. He asked her what she was looking for, but she wouldn't say. Of course, by the time we interviewed Steve we knew. Even when she first turned up at his house we were beginning to get an idea. Carolyn was looking for clues. She was searching for that letter or the stolen ring or a lock of snatched hair. Anything that would link Steve to her dead sister.
It was clear that Carolyn Asher had her own list that she was working her way down. Her list and ours overlapped in places. We envied her direct access, the laissez-faire way she strolled into guys' lives and took what information she wanted. In contrast, we were forced to hover on the peripheries with our binoculars and camera, speculating and drawing inferences, snapping blurry photographs and sorting through rubbish bins by the light of torches.
But Carolyn Asher's investigation was taking its toll on her. By the beginning of April she was looking permanently tired, the skin on her forehead had become almost transparent and the thin blue veins beneath were clearly visible. We wondered if she was eating. The hours she was keeping seemed to suggest she wasn't sleeping that much. She had begun to move with a leaden grace to her own slow music. By the time she had worked her way down her list to Steve Weldon, Carolyn no longer had the intensity we had seen at Lucy's funeral. She had become dreamy and detached.
'Caro was kinda screwed up,' Steve commented, 'but I really fell for her, you know.' That was the end of the interview 'Good luck. I hope you find what you're looking for.'
By the beginning of May Carolyn no longer came to visit Steve. We understood her pattern by then. Just like us, Carolyn Asher had crossed Steve Weldon off her list of suspects. Steve tried to see her again but she made it clear it was over.
By May we had almost a dozen recorded sightings of Mr Asher at night down on the beach or in the dunes. The hammering and sawing went on night after night in his garage so apparently he too wasn't bothering with sleep any more. Sometimes he would appear in car headlights as he walked down the middle of the road, like an animal seen on night safari, face turned towards the approaching car, eyes bright, before moving away into the darkness. If he was heading towards the beach he was almost always carrying a large bundle. We still had no idea where the baby fitted in to the whole jigsaw.
Mrs Asher was still working in the dairy. By then it was habitual for people to avoid the place and it was a matter of public speculation how long the Ashers would be able to keep it open. Mrs Asher's thinness had moved beyond surprising. She now shocked everyone who saw her, although that wasn't many people in those days because of the lack of customers and because as far as anyone knew she never ventured beyond the front door. We were now only sporadic customers ourselves: there were whole weeks when we couldn't bring ourselves to go inside. Mrs Asher now seemed to haunt the place. Occasionally Tug would see her pass, floating like an apparition, in front of the dark windows. We wondered if it were possible for a person to grow so thin that they simply disappeared, blown away perhaps on the easterly.
Mr Asher no longer bothered with maintenance. Tiles began to slip from the roof, catching in the guttering before eventually falling into the long weeds at the side of the house. The back lawn was never mown. The windows were dim with blown sea salt and sand, so they let in even less light. The paint on the outside walls blistered and popped in the corrosive air.
All things considered, the Ashers were not coping well.
We had also stopped going to Tug's room much. Apart from the slow fall into disrepair there was nothing new to see at the Ashers', and what we could see was depressing. However, we sometimes still gathered in the Turners' garage after school and in the evenings to play pool and muck around with the weights. We were there one Sunday early in May when Pete Marshall came bursting in. He had made another discovery on the beach. This time he was out for a training run. Pete played at centre for the third XV and had been running on the beach two or three times a week as well as training after school on a Wednesday.
Pete carried in what he had found, wrapped in a towel. We all stopped what we were doing and crowded around to see. It was a raft or, rather, a scale model of a raft made of driftwood and lashed together. There was a mast and intricate rigging made out of string and a canvas sail that at some point had been ripped almost free. The thing that we all noticed was that the raft was very well made. It hadn't been thrown together but rather crafted by someone who had chosen the wood carefully and then assembled it with care. The driftwood was smooth and it had been evened off with a saw at each end so that the raft was rectangular. The pieces were lashed together with intricate knots. The mast was straight and the rigging quite complex. There was even a deep centreplate that poked down through a slot in the middle: it would make the raft more stable in the water and help it travel in a straight line.
Sitting on the raft was a doll. It had been tied to the mast with wire that was wrapped around its body, under the arms. It was one of those dolls that guys with sisters knew well; the type with a plastic head and a soft, floppy body. Its eyes closed when you laid it back and opened when it sat up. There were clothes you could get to dress them but th
is doll had nothing on. It was just the blue cloth body and the hard head with the long blonde hair matted together.
'I saw it being rolled over in the surf,' said Pete.
This explained Mrs Murray's sighting of Mr Asher with a baby. Recalling the heap of dolls Roy Moynahan had seen in Lucy's bedroom, we wondered how many of these her father had launched out into the waves. We speculated that Mr Asher waited for a calm night with an offshore breeze so that the sail would carry his rafts beyond the waves. The current in the channel when the water was flowing out of the estuary would help push them into the ocean. Even so we knew enough to doubt that any of them had made it far. Most of them had probably only travelled out a few kilometres before being pushed back to shore by the current or when the wind inevitably changed back to the east. They would mostly have ended up like this one, swamped on the beach and pounded by the surf, or broken against the rocks somewhere down south.
Even so, over the years it has always been tempting to imagine one of Mr Asher's rafts beating the odds. We like to think of one of Lucy's dolls, her favourite perhaps from a happy time in her childhood, surviving all the perils: the big waves; the rockbound currents; the bow waves of passing tankers. It is pleasing to imagine one of them riding the ocean for weeks, months, even years, on the small but sturdy vessel that Mr Asher had lovingly made in his garage.
'But what's the point?' asked Grant Webb on the day Pete found the raft. He turned it over in his hands and inspected the underside. 'Why does he make these things?'
Nobody bothered trying to explain it to him. If you didn't get it when you saw it, you probably never would.
We weren't treating Mr Asher as a suspect any more so it was only luck that we discovered where he went every day. Mrs Murray took Mark shopping one Saturday morning. She had asked her son along to help carry the bags, which was just a red herring. Really it was another of those attempts by our mothers to spend time with us. There was a phase when they all asked us to help them with jobs around the house, or to go with them in the car somewhere. Anything so they'd be alone with us. 'How are things going?' they would ask, when the time seemed right. They were desperate for some of the old intimacy. They must have remembered clearly the days when they had been our whole world and we had talked to them about every scratch and every shiny stone. Even at the age of eleven most of us were still being read to and giving our mums a goodnight kiss. Just a few years later our mothers were hanging out for a bad knock-knock joke. Of course we had nothing to say to them in those days. We were as closed as prodded shellfish.