by Nixon, Carl
He was in his early thirties, a Maori named Wiremu Jones. He confessed with tears pouring down his face. He still wore the dirty hat that Tracy remembered, as he told the police that he had been raised 'a good Christian boy' but that 'the devil has me by the throat'.
There was no need for Tracy or Jenny to sit through a long trial. The guy had confessed and was eventually sentenced to three years in prison. At fifteen we thought three years was fair, a lifetime.
Since then we've kept track as Wiremu Jones has been in and out of prison like a yo-yo. He got out in late '83 and had only been out for six months when he molested an eleven-year-old in Wellington and ended up going back inside for another seven years. In '97 he was arrested for exposing himself to a busload of school kids on their way back from a trip to Te Papa. In 2000 he tried to entice seven-year-old twin girls into his car in Dunedin. Apparently being locked up together in a chocolate box of murderers, thieves and other perverts has failed to show Wiremu the error of his ways. Or maybe it is just that the devil still has a firm grip on his throat.
Although, God knows, he is guilty of a lot, the police were sure that Wiremu Jones did not murder Lucy Asher. He travelled around a fair bit and in late December of 1980 when Lucy was killed Wiremu was living with a cousin up on the east coast, near Gisborne. He didn't travel down south until almost a month later. As is often the case, our imaginations had taken two similar events and assumed a common cause. One of the things that our investigation has taught us over the years is that life is almost never that simple.
FIVE
Two months after his diagnosis Pete had lost weight. But the truth is that all of us could benefit by losing a bit of weight. Twenty years' worth of beer and easy food have washed up around our middles. By late August last year the flesh had melted away from Pete's belly and from the sag below his jaw. He actually started to look younger, even healthier. To those of us who had known him almost all his life he seemed to be aging backwards. Pete began to look more as he had done in his early thirties and then as the weeks shifted underfoot he regained the taut looks he had possessed during his twenties. By October he again had the wiry frame of the teenage boy who had discovered Lucy Asher's body on the beach.
He was often tired, but the full force of the cancer hadn't yet hit him. That would come soon and when it did it would be unremitting. Pete had taken to rising with the sun as it cracked through the watery curve of the eastern horizon, and going for slow walks that took him all over the Spit. He often stopped and just sat. Pete lived down by the reserve in the single-bedroom unit he'd bought about ten years earlier, with the money left over from his divorce. He and his wife had no kids but between work and us he never seemed to be short of company when he wanted it. When he woke early there was no one to disturb except the ginger tom he had adopted.
On one particular morning — it was the first week in October — he was walking out on the mud-flats of the estuary behind the Spit. 'Mud-flats' is actually not a very accurate description although that's what everyone's always called them. At low tide a lot of the estuary is more sand than mud, coarse and black and pitted with infinite numbers of small crab holes, and graffitied by the swirling trails of cat's-eye shells. It is only truly muddy in patches and it's easy to watch out for those and walk around them. In all the kilometres and kilometres of space the only real obstacles are the braided channels, which are never the same from one day to the next. Even the two or three main channels winding down from the two river-mouths to the end of the Spit where the estuary discharges into the sea, even they shift from season to season. At low tide it's easy to walk around for hours out there. All you really have to remember is to wear a good pair of shoes and to keep one eye on the tide, which can flood back in quickly.
Later, when we were visiting him in the hospital, Pete told us that the pain hit him suddenly. One second he was feeling fine, lost in his thoughts (we didn't have the nerve to ask him what those might have been); the next he was engulfed — 'like hot shrapnel had been shot into my gut'. It was as though all the pain he had avoided since his diagnosis had been stored up and then unleashed. As he spoke to us, he moved his legs around under the heavy white hospital sheets.
'The ambulance guy asked me how the pain was on a scale of one to ten. I told him to stop asking me stupid maths questions and to hurry up with the painkillers.'
Some old woman who lived on the estuary side of the Spit had apparently been watching, through binoculars, Pete's progress across the mud-flats. When she saw him clutch his stomach and go down she had immediately called an ambulance. She had declined to give her name. It just goes to show that sometimes even nosy neighbours have their uses.
The ambulance guys had to come across the mudflats on foot. It's a good thing they hurried because the tide was coming in by the time they got to Pete. He was lying in the foetal position and they lifted him out of water that was lapping at his body. They hauled him up moaning and dripping, on to the stretcher. He couldn't move without pain erupting from his guts. He hung between them curled like an ammonite, listening to their voices grumble about their shoes getting wet.
Despite the dramatic nature of his collapse, that first time Pete was admitted to hospital he only stayed in two nights; for observation. They gave him morphine in the ambulance but after about twelve hours the pain subsided of its own accord, although after that it never completely went away and had to be managed continually. Neither the doctors nor Pete (nor even we) were fooled into thinking Pete would go back to the way he had been before.
During his stay in the hospital we all came to visit, although not all together at once; the room was too small. It seemed wrong to turn up empty-handed. Chocolates didn't seem right as a gift. Pete had never had much of a sweet tooth, and he had been off his food for weeks. Flowers were girly. In the end Pete got enough grapes to have his own vintage. He ended up giving most of them away to the three old blokes he shared a room with.
On the evening of that first day in hospital Jase Harbidge found himself alone with Pete. It was long after visiting hours had finished, and dark outside. The three other guys in the room had their curtains pulled around their beds and seemed to be asleep, although you could never really tell. All day we had observed them doze for a while and then their eyelids would suddenly flutter open and they would start forward from their pillows. They would look around as if to reassure themselves that they were still alive. After a few seconds they would lie back with ambivalence — a mixture of relief at being alive and disappointment at the circumstances in which they rediscovered themselves.
The oncology ward is on the top floor of the hospital with views out over the botanical gardens, which at night are just a dark pool surrounded by the city lights. Jase said that the chemical smell of the place seemed to have collected over the day and risen up to where he and Pete were. Pete was still on the morphine then, his voice blurring around the edges of his words. Jase had just got up off his seat to open the window, when Pete spoke.
'I thought I saw her. Out on the flats.'
Jase didn't have to ask who. There was a pause filled only by the sound of the air conditioning and the rattling breath of the dying man in the far corner.
'I thought I saw her walking towards me with the incoming tide. She was walking on the water. But she couldn't get to me before the ambulance guys.' Pete laughed quietly. 'When they picked me up I was so pissed off. I wanted to tell them to leave me for her.'
That was all he said before he fell asleep. Jase sat and watched him sleep for a while and when he was sure that Pete was not going to wake up again he stood, careful not to scrape the foot of his chair on the lino, and left quietly.
During visiting hours the next morning the old man who had slept in the corner bed was gone and Pete had no memory of most of the day before. When we talked about it later we all agreed that it was probably just the morphine talking. It was best not to mention it to Pete again.
In 1981 South Brighton High School ran a system w
here senior students were given responsibility for various duties around the school. In the second term we sometimes found ourselves rostered to police the queue of refractory third and fourth formers at the canteen. Twice a month, we were expected to stand by the iron gates in front of the school for ten minutes before the first bell and ten minutes after and to write down the names of all latecomers. We enforced silence in the library, and patrolled distant corners of the school grounds where occasionally we would see puffs of white smoke rising up from behind the clumps of ragged hebes like Indian signals.
Another of the duties we had was working in Lost and Found. Stray jackets and bags, books and pencil cases — named and unnamed — were all deposited in a room little bigger than a large wardrobe between the boys' lockers and the library. For everyone who had lost something over the week, Lost and Found was their first port of call. Every Wednesday, whoever was on duty was excused from the last morning lesson five minutes early so that they could get the key from its hook inside the door of the staff room. We were supposed to have Lost and Found open by the time the lunch bell rang.
It wasn't quite as mindless as it sounds because the job involved handling money. To reclaim an item cost twenty cents. Whoever was rostered on had to collect the float from the teacher on duty and record how much was paid in (some kids reclaimed more than one item), who it came from, and what it was they had collected. The small float was so you could give change. The theory was that having to pay to get your stuff back (and only being able to get it back once a week) would discourage carelessness. In practice, losing stuff was habitual. The same kids turned up each week looking for their things. Often the same bag or pencil case moved between its owner and Lost and Found with the instincts of a homing pigeon. Some items had been known to be retrieved by their owner at lunchtime, and go back to Lost and Found before school finished that same day.
Mark Murray didn't mind when it was his turn in Lost and Found. It was the second Wednesday in May. He had collected two dollars and forty cents by a quarter to one, and was thinking of closing up early so that he could get a pie from the canteen, when a fourth form girl turned up. We don't have a record of her name but Mark described her as being pale and scrawny with long black hair parted down the middle. 'She was like that girl from The Munsters,' he said (although that was a bit rich coming from a guy whose own hair had earned him the nickname Afro Man). The girl informed Mark that she was looking for a jacket lost around October the previous year. When he asked her why she hadn't come to look for it earlier, she eyed him like he was an idiot. 'It was summer and I didn't need it, did I? Now it's cold.'
Items were tossed into Lost and Found without reference to any system. The most recent finds tended to be at the front. Looking further back turned you into an archaeologist: you had to dig back through layers laid down over weeks and months. The only clean-out was done when Lost and Found provided stock for the school fair's white elephant stall, last held in '78. Mark didn't know where to start. Some jackets and umbrellas hung from a hook behind the door but some had fallen on the floor. The girl had described her jacket as being black. With her peering over his shoulder, Mark picked up the top jacket on the floor and then another and another. There were three unclaimed bags under there as well; these he pushed aside. Lying next to them, half covered by a fallen raincoat, was a canvas duffel bag that Mark recognised straight away. It was army-green with two strings through which Lucy used to hook her arm so that the bag dangled from her shoulder. Lucy had scribbled over the canvas in pen and there was a large red peace symbol sewn on the front.
Mark told the girl to wait outside and when she sullenly moved away he opened the bag. Inside was a can of Coke, a small box of tampons (which made Mark uncomfortable), two French textbooks and a book on photography long overdue from the public library, with a naked black woman on the front. At the very bottom of the bag was a small blue notebook with a cardboard cover. It was held together by a yellow ribbon. On the cover it said, LUCY A. PRIVATE! The letters had been so deeply overwritten in black pen that you could read the words with just your fingertips.
'So is it there or not?'
'What?'
'My jacket.'
'No. Sorry.'
The girl gave him a curious look. 'You okay?'
'Sure. Yeah. Fine.'
She shook her head. 'Mum's going to bloody kill me.' Mark didn't bother replying and she turned and walked away.
Lucy Asher's diary lay on the pool table, lit only by the beam of Jim Turner's torch. The circle of light surrounding it shook slightly. Whether Jim's hand was unsteady from excitement or from the strain of keeping the torch still was impossible to tell. It was nine o'clock at night and dark outside. A gentle rain began to fall on the tar-seal of Rocking Horse Road. As we stood in the garage we could hear the low waves mutter against the beach on the other side of the Spit. Aslan, the black Alsatian across at number sixty-seven, had barked himself hoarse earlier than usual that night and was sending rasping coughs into the world outside his gate.
We had waited until everyone could get there. Several of us were wearing our pyjamas under our clothes. Al Penny wore tartan slippers belonging to his father. Tug Gardiner had on a sweatshirt with a hood that, for some reason, he had pulled up over his head, but we were in too serious a mood to question him. The news of Mark's find had travelled from one of us to another; from house to house like a moth in the night. Jim had had to wait until after rugby training and then a late dinner, during which his mother had tried to talk to him. We had feigned sleepiness and gone to our rooms early, only to slip away through back doors and open windows. The moon was unaccounted for as we slipped through the darkness. We were the furtive noises in the night.
It was Pete Marshall who broke the spell. He carefully lifted the book off the green felt. Perhaps, because he had been the one who found Lucy's body, Pete felt he had a special right, or possibly an obligation. The ribbon resisted him but at last succumbed to his fumbling and he opened the cover to view the first page of the diary of Lucy Asher. Jim held the torch higher so that the narrow beam of light spilled over Pete's shoulder and on to the first page.
Although we have all handled the book and read its contents more than once in the years since then, only Pete has ever read it aloud. By being the first to intone Lucy's words he became, in a sense, her voice. He read well, right from that first night. Pete instinctively knew not to try to imitate a young woman's voice nor to attempt dramatic emphasis. He kept his voice neutral, clear and slow, which allowed us to hear within it Lucy's own. All the drama we needed was there in the words.
The diary starts on Lucy's seventeenth birthday, May the twenty-ninth, seven months before she died. There is an inscription on the inside cover — To Lucyloo from Dad. To the uninitiated the details might seem mundane, even trivial, but we were teenagers and in the grip of something huge and powerful that held us tightly, even jealously. All that year it had shaken us awake in the morning and had laid us down in our beds at night. It muttered from the dark corners of our rooms as we tossed and turned. It is enough to say that we hung on every word Pete read.
May 29: Mum won't let me go out with Sarah and Megan tonight!!! She says I have to stay here for a FAMILY DINNER. Sarah says Mum still treats me like a baby because I'm the eldest and I only have a sister. She's allowed out because she has four older brothers and her parents are too tired to care. If only my parents were Catholics too and not boring old Presbyterians who are allowed to use a rubber. Worse luck me.
June 2: Bought the latest Bowie album. It's great. David's hair looks great on the cover. Still too cold to swim. Can't wait for weather to get warmer. Read in the Woman's Weekly that lemon juice in your hair makes it lighter. Have been doing it every night but not sure if it's working. Mum wanted to know where all the lemons from the shop were going. Have to be more careful about what I pinch.
Lucy did not write in her diary every day. Many pages were tantalisingly blank or contained nothing but absent-mi
nded scrawls; swirling labyrinths from which there was no way in or out. Pete held these out in the gloom for us to peer at. Some days she wrote only a couple of words. 'Weather crap' is a typical entry (August 21). The first reference to SJ is on June the thirteenth.
Met SJ in town today. He was shopping for a shirt by himself. Really weird to see him doing something so normal. I saw him before he saw me. I almost kept on walking but soooo glad I didn't. He asked if I'd like to have tea with him at the Ballantynes' tea room. Almost said no but he's really easy to talk to. Keep thinking about him. He has really nice teeth.
June 20: SJ smiled at me today but didn't stop to talk because he was walking with some of the others.
July 16: Some little twerp spilled chocolate milk in the shop the other day and most of it must have gone under the fridge. Now it smells DISGUSTING! Mum blames me for not cleaning it up properly.
August 7: School holidays. Haven't seen SJ for days and days. Feeling sad and lonely which is silly because we hardly ever talk anyway. Think he might have gone away with his family. Mum really being a pain. Might kill myself. [Then in differently coloured pen] THAT WAS A JOKE! HA HA
The batteries in Jim's torch were fading fast. As Pete read, the light dimmed until the book was almost indistinguishable from the darkness in the garage. Pete's voice stayed clear and steady but he leaned further and further forward so that by the last few pages he seemed to be about to devour the diary.
September 14: Played tennis with Sarah today. She thrashed me — as usual. Feel bad about not telling her what's been going on but SJ has made me promise not to say a word. He's right that people wouldn't understand about our friendship. Taking the bus into town to meet him again today. Think Mum might be getting suspicious about all the time I'm taking off from the shop. Had a big fight about it. Think she's been nosing around in my room. Will take this diary with me to school from now on. Too dangerous here.