by Nixon, Carl
The supermarket in New Brighton where Mark's mother took him was next door to the Empire Hotel. The Empire was, and still is, one of those massive, boxy buildings on two levels. It had a pub downstairs with a restaurant, and cheap rooms upstairs. It was at the public bar of the Empire that our fathers drank after work on a Friday. And it was from there that they returned home for a late dinner, smelling of beer and slapping our irritated mothers on the backside, right in front of us.
As he was loading his mother's shopping into the boot of their car Mark caught sight of Mr Asher's ute. It was parked over in the car park of the Empire, but near the back next to the fence where other cars would normally stop you seeing it from the road. But from the supermarket car park Mark had a clear view: it was quite early in the morning (Mark's mum liked to beat the crowds) and Mr Asher's was one of the only vehicles. Seeing the ute there got him to thinking.
On Monday morning Mark and Jase Harbidge set off for school as usual but soon veered off and pedalled north on their bikes the half-hour it took them to get to the Empire. Jase reported that they waited, and sure enough Mr Asher pulled into the car park at nine thirty. He parked his ute in exactly the same space where Mark had seen it on the Saturday. They watched as Mr Asher sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. He just sat in the car park waiting until the Empire's manager unlocked the door. Then he got out and walked straight in.
Mark and Jase could see the bar through one of the big sash windows. They crouched down and watched as Mr Asher sat at a table in the far corner. He was drinking something from the top shelf, which he went up to the bar to get. There was no one else in the place until eleven o'clock and then only a couple of sad old alkies. Mark and Jase were still there at lunchtime when a group of office workers came in for lunch but they stayed in the other room, which had a sign over the door reading Restaurant.
Mark and Jase camped out over the road under the awning of a rock shop. There were quartz crystals, two for three dollars, advertised in the window. According to Mark they kept a close eye on the Empire in case Mr Asher decided to leave. Occasionally one of them would wander across and look in the window. 'But we needn't have bothered. Apart from getting refills, Mr Asher didn't move from his table.' From what they said he didn't even bother looking around the room.
By early afternoon they were bored and went into the rock shop, where they sifted through the boxes of loose crystals and polished stones. They were the only people in the shop. Mark asked the lady behind the counter to unlock a display case and she took out a fossilised shark's tooth the size of his hand. When it became clear that they weren't going to buy anything the woman got snippy and told them to leave. They went back to sitting on the footpath, staring across at the Empire.
Mr Asher finally left at four thirty. Beyond a slight fluidity to his walk, he didn't appear to be drunk. 'But he must have been totally sloshed,' Jase commented (and because of his dad, Jase would have known). Mark and Jase watched Mr Asher get into his ute and drive away in the direction of the Spit.
To most of the men living down New Brighton the organisers of the anti-tour march were nothing more than a group of stirrers. Our fathers and their friends had a deep-seated distrust of any sort of organised protest. On principle they didn't like speeches and rallies. They were suspicious of boat rockers. Tug Gardiner's dad said over a plate of mashed potato and lamb chop that they were 'Commie dyke stirrers, to boot. What good will a bunch of lefties marching up and down Marine Parade do? They aren't going to change what's going on in South Africa one little bit. They're just going to piss people off.'
Some people even seemed to support the South African system. Jim Turner's dad told several of us that 'we might have come up with a similar system here if we'd had to live with twenty million Maoris.' Our mothers seemed to agree with most of what their husbands were saying. Or if they didn't, they kept their opinions to themselves.
Not everyone down the Spit was against the march that was planned for the eighth of June. Matt Templeton's sisters were all for it. Matt reported to us that all five of the older ones had announced their intention to go, even though their father had strictly forbidden it. Matt said there had been several blazing rows and two of his sisters were now living in the sleep-out at the back of the section, coming inside to eat only when their father was out of the house.
Another person who made it clear that she was against the tour was Mrs Montgomery. She was a widow who lived only a few doors down from the Ashers' dairy. For reasons beyond us, she had sellotaped a copy of the poster advertising the rally up in her front window so that it was visible from the road. Widow makes her sound old but actually she was only in her early forties. Mr Montgomery had died of a sniping stroke that hit him at the age of thirty-seven. He had been out on the street staining his front fence. When he was found he had lain in the pool of spilt timber-stain long enough for his left hand and half his face to be stained a deep brown. They kept the casket closed at the funeral. The joke that quickly did the rounds was that Mr Montgomery had looked like he was a Maori. 'Or at least half Maori!'
Right up until the tour ended Mrs Montgomery wore one of those HART badges. We knew for a fact that on one occasion the local post-master had refused to serve her while she had the badge on. Mrs Montgomery had told him that in that case she would get her stamps elsewhere. But along with the Templeton girls, she was in the minority. Most people in New Brighton regarded the planned march as being outside the boundaries of what was acceptable. We had even heard it talked about as being the act of traitors.
In early May Mr Templeton was still giving Jim Turner a hard time during rugby training. Apart from lacking the requisite killer instinct, Jim didn't have good enough fitness levels, said his coach. In fairness, it wasn't just Jim he was picking on. The first XV had lost the first three games of the season and Mr Templeton was ratcheting up the pressure on all his players. The upcoming tour made performing well seem even more important than in a normal season. Jim responded by running in the sand hills six days a week. He also started eating a lot of eggs and bananas. He had read somewhere that they were good for athletes who wanted to lift their performance. And running through sand hills is about the best exercise there is for building up stamina. The soft sand is murder on the legs and after a few minutes of that, guys who think they are fit find that their thighs are on fire and they're breathing like steam trains. It's no exaggeration that after a month of regular running on the dunes, Jim Turner found running around the rugby field for eighty minutes to be a piece of piss.
It was a Saturday morning and the sea fog had laid itself down over the Spit again. It didn't bother Jim, though. He only needed to see as far as his next footfall. He had run through the dunes from his parents' place up to the playground with the swimming pool that's close to the shopping centre. The pool still has a concrete whale sitting in the middle. The whale is painted blue at the start of each summer and when there's water in the pool the blowhole is a fountain. We all have memories of climbing the whale as kids, and sliding down its back into the water. These days there is a new pier close to the playground and a flash library with two cafés and outdoor seating. But back then there was just a slide and the whale pool and swings over concrete.
Jim had stopped to stretch before turning back. He was leaning against the wall of the changing rooms, pushing against it with one leg straight behind him, when he heard a weird sound, 'like someone drowning and crying at the same time'. The fog was drifting in banks that shifted and then melted back together, creating small rooms that gave way to bigger spaces and then closed in again.
Jim stood near the edge of the swimming pool. With summer over, the big concrete whale was chipped and faded. The pool had been drained but had filled up again with rainwater that had turned green and been fouled by the seagulls that gathered around its edges to drink. Curious, Jim walked up the steps to the car park. There were a few surfers' cars, parked mostly at the front where, on a clear day, you c
ould check out the waves. Some people will surf in any weather as long as the waves are good. To Jim they sounded big as they broke but he couldn't see them through the fog. The surfers must have all been out because he could see no one sitting in any of the cars. It was a large car park and the vehicles down the other end drifted in and out of view.
And then he heard the noise again. 'The second time it sounded to me like a hurt animal, a dog or something. It was coming from an old dunger; a surfer's car but with the board still strapped to the roof-rack.'
Jim approached cautiously and peered into the rear window. A second later he was pulling the back door open and ripping a guy out backwards by his hair. The guy's jeans were around his ankles and his cock stirred the foggy air in front of him. Jim may have lacked the killer instinct but he was still a big guy. He was used to the push and shove, the gouge and jab of the scrum and the maul, the sharp toe of the ruck. Plus he had the element of surprise. The guy he was holding by the hair was a surfer who lived up North New Brighton. His family was Catholic and he went to the school next to the basilica in the city, where he was in his final year. He was not on our list. Jim let go of the guy's hair. While he was still trying to find his footing Jim put both hands on the guy's chest and shoved as hard as he could, which was pretty hard. The guy's pants were still around his ankles and he tumbled backwards on to the concrete.
Jim told us that the surfer started to roll away, at the same time pulling at his pants, which were prevented from coming off by his shoes. He was yelling, pretty generic abuse, but Jim distinctly heard him say, 'She wanted me to. She said she liked it.'
Jim dropped his hands to his side. The guy had time to stagger to his feet where he swayed like a Weeble. 'Fuck off,' Jim said.
'What about my car?'
'Fuck off,' Jim said again and took a couple of steps forward. Apparently, the guy didn't argue. He simply pulled up his jeans and sloped off into the fog where he could be seen sitting sullenly by the changing rooms.
Of course the girl in the car was Carolyn Asher. By then she was sitting up in the back seat, her feet dangling out the open door. She was naked except for a white bra. 'What did you do that for?' she asked. Jim said that she didn't seem angry, or even surprised. She was just asking.
'I thought he was hurting you.'
One of Carolyn's long, pale hands went to her neck, where fresh bruises were already rising to the surface of her skin.
'Help me find my clothes.'
In the end Jim settled for standing awkwardly near the car while Carolyn dressed. When he finally looked at her, she was wearing a white dress with a frilled hem, and a pale pink sweater. They looked to Jim like the clothes she would have worn to go out the night before. She asked him to help her tie her shoe and put her leg up on the bumper of the car. 'Come on,' she said when he had finished.
'What about him?' asked Jim. The Catholic surfer was still standing by the changing room, staring in their direction.
'He'll live,' was all Carolyn said. She took Jim by the hand and walked with him towards the road.
They continued hand in hand through the fog. Occasionally cars came by, driving slowly with their headlights on. To the drivers Jim and Carolyn must have looked like a young couple who, bored with being cooped up inside, had gone for a walk in the fog. Jim said that he didn't know what to say so he kept quiet. He could see where the sun was supposed to be, a yellowing in a patch of sky, but no warmth broke through the ceiling of fog. They walked as far as Bridge Street before Carolyn spoke. Jim had to lean close to hear her.
'So what have you guys found out?'
'About what?'
'You're one of those guys trying to find out who killed my sister. Come on, I'm not stupid.'
He didn't bother denying it on our behalf. 'Nothing much.'
She shook her head. 'I don't think they're ever going to catch him.'
There was, he said, a sadness to her; what in later years we could have labelled as fatalism. No more was said. They walked on through the fog until they came to the Ashers' dairy. The closed sign was still in the window even though it was almost mid-morning.
Carolyn was still holding Jim's hand when she asked him his name. He told her and she repeated it, and smiled for the first time.
'Looks like the fog might clear soon,' was all he could find to say.
'Sure,' she said. Jim was disappointed when she gave his hand a gentle squeeze and finally let it go. Carolyn turned and walked through the gate.
It would be nice to say that big Jim Turner's friendship saved Carolyn Asher, but by that time Carolyn was probably beyond saving, by one of us anyway.
Over the following months she continued diligently working her way through her list, although often we failed to see what light she hoped to throw on the case with some of her choices. The guys seemed to be getting older and not all of them even lived down New Brighton. Carolyn took to wearing shirts with high collars all the time.
Jim sat and passed his driver's licence. He would drive Carolyn around to wherever she wanted to go. She would call him at all hours of the night and he would borrow his older brother's little red Suzuki and meet her outside the dairy. Often she asked him to take her to the flat of some guy she was seeing, though she often didn't stay for long. Jim didn't mind waiting in the car. There was a tape deck and he would sit and listen to Duran Duran or Bowie over and over again. He told us that Carolyn had started smoking, and not just cigarettes: a guy who lived over in Linwood had got her into it.
Carolyn apparently liked being high. She kept seeing that guy for longer than any of the others, possibly because he grew his own in a glasshouse out the back of his flat and had a seemingly endless supply. When she did stop seeing him she would ask Jim to drive her to different places just to buy dope. Some of them had concrete-block fences out the front and barbed wire running around the top. Carolyn would ring the bell and go inside. Jim waited in the car and tried not to ask himself how she was paying.
As they drove around they would talk. Sometimes she was high and her ideas circled slowly around the car like the poems we were still finding blowing on the wind. Jim told us that she liked to talk about Lucy. 'Lots of little things that she remembered from when they were young and stuff.'
Of course the rest of us couldn't help wondering if Jim and Carolyn were sleeping together. It was hard for us to imagine just talking about stuff with a girl like Carolyn Asher had become. But we knew better than to ask Jim for details. All he ever told us about what they talked about, and about what they did when they were alone, was that it was private and that they were good friends.
A couple of other things happened around that time that are worth mentioning. The first has to do with the dead dog.
There is a colony of godwits that arrives at the Spit every spring. Some people make a pretty big deal about it. Apparently the birds fly all the way from Siberia non-stop before gliding in low over the roofs of the houses on Rocking Horse Road and touching down in the reserve at the end of the Spit. They spend the summer feeding in the estuary and then in April or May fly all the way back to Siberia. If you were into birds, flying all that way is a pretty amazing accomplishment, but frankly, at fifteen we couldn't have cared less. To us the godwits were just little speckled birds with long legs, not all that different from the other wading birds who lived in the estuary year-round.
We only got interested because that year something started killing them. One morning in April a research student from the university found about a dozen of the birds dead on the beach. Mark Murray first heard it from his dad, who had heard it on the radio over breakfast. Of course we went down after school to have a look. When we arrived there were a few Bird Society types with beards, hanging around discussing the possibility of putting up a temporary fence around where the godwits nested. We were disappointed that the bodies had been cleaned up. Apart from a few feathers there was nothing to see.
One of the bearded guys came over to us. 'Are you kids local?' We didn
't like being called kids but we nodded. He asked if any of us had seen a strange dog hanging around in the last couple of days. We said that we hadn't, which was the truth. Grant told him that people were always walking their dogs up and down the beach.
'No, I mean a dog with no owner, especially in the evening.' As the guy spoke, he looked up and down the beach as though the dog he was talking about might appear at any moment and begin ripping apart more birds. But we'd seen nothing like that. We didn't tell him but we knew that with all the dunes and lupins a dog could move around in the reserve for days pretty much unseen.
Two days later, The Press reported on page two that the killer had struck again. This time three birds were dead. Another two godwits were being treated by a local vet for serious injuries and were not expected to survive. We were looking for a distraction from school and from the Asher case, so when Tug Gardiner suggested we build a trap for the killer dog, everyone was keen.
We raided our fathers' garages and sheds and that afternoon carried a selection of spades and shovels down to the reserve. We chose a spot in the dip behind the first dune, about a hundred metres from where the godwits roosted. There was a thin track used by rabbits where we had previously had some luck laying makeshift snares. A dog, however, is a lot bigger than a rabbit and we knew that catching one would require more than a snare made out of string.