Rocking Horse Road

by Nixon, Carl

  The men on the footpath were laughing. One of the marchers on the edge of the crowd had had enough. He shoved a guy who was still shouting abuse. We saw that it was Mr Jenson, the teacher from school, who was doing the shoving. The guy shoved him back and then they had each other by the shirt fronts. The two crowds merged around them and a couple of punches were thrown. Surprisingly (to us), it was the heckler and not the young English teacher who staggered back clutching his face. Men from both groups rushed to join in and we lost sight of Mr Jenson in the flurry of flailing arms and short vicious jabs.

  People from both groups jumped in to join the fight or to try and break apart the fighters. Old Mr Robinson was in there, trying to restrain a drinker twice his size. We saw that Robinson was in danger of getting clocked himself. There was Jenson again, fiery eyed, nose to nose with an equally worked-up rugby supporter. They were yelling into each other's faces.

  'Racist!

  'Traitor!'

  'You're pig ignorant, mate!'

  'Go back to Russia, you communist!'

  They were both still yelling abuse when they were pulled apart. Other people from both groups were dragged back into the ranks.

  For lack of any real alternative the march carried on. The pixie-faced woman with the megaphone was silent, staring straight ahead. There was flour on her hair and egg on her dress. All of the protesters looked grim and several of the younger women were crying. What the organisers must have hoped would be a show of solidarity and strength against the Springbok tour now resembled nothing more than a straggling group of refugees. Several of the men had cuts and bruises on their faces. Others limped as they brushed at the flour on their clothes. Everyone seemed to be in shock but they marched on stoically. The two holding the main banner were almost side by side so that the words sagged and were unreadable. There was no more singing. The torches were all on now and as we trailed further behind, the body of the march looked like a lit ship, damaged and listing, slipping away into the darkness to sink.

  Luckily only a few of the men from the Empire bothered to follow. The ones who felt the most aggrieved shadowed the march for a while, taunting and jeering, 'We Want Rugby!' until, getting no response, they too turned and drifted back to the Empire. No doubt they stood around the bar until closing time and recounted the role each had played, with the vigour associated with fishing stories or old rugby games.

  Some of the marchers began to drop out. People simply moved to the side without comment, singly and in pairs, so that the march moved away from them. Enough was enough. They could tell people that they'd done their bit. No doubt they would use the side streets to avoid the Empire on the way back to their cars.

  The march was supposed to finish at the mall, where there were going to be more speeches. But when the group finally arrived at the space outside Farmers, the woman in the purple dress and a few other organisers huddled together. There was very little lighting in the mall. The roar of a cruising car could still occasionally be heard in the distance. We sat on our bikes back in the shadows and watched as the woman in purple said a few words. Maybe the megaphone had been broken when she dropped it outside the Empire, because now she spoke without it. Mind you, the group was so small by that point she hardly need to be amplified. Only about twenty people stood in front of her. The remaining marchers shone their torches in the speaker's direction so that she had twenty shadows scattered around her. When she finished speaking, the people who were left quickly dispersed and went home.

  We were biking back down Rocking Horse Road when Mark Murray said, 'Mr Jenson's first name is Simon.' In the end it was as simple as that.

  We tried to discover all that we could about SJ. We quickly found out that he was twenty-three years old and unmarried. He had moved north from Dunedin at the beginning of '81 and his voice carried a hint of southern burr; the Rs in the words 'Shakespeare' and 'pentameter' rolled like a sea-swell into the end of his sentences. SJ rented a two-bedroom cottage near the middle of Rocking Horse Road, only five minutes' walk down from the Ashers' dairy. It was an old bach, barely more than four rooms and a corrugated-iron roof, with the edges of the garden plots marked by hundreds of whitewashed rocks the size of fists. The bach sat in the middle of a quarter-acre section, the back of which was only distinguishable from the dunes by two strands of sagging wire.

  Enquiry revealed that SJ was well liked by his students, the girls at least. They considered him handsome. We felt uncomfortable about judging his physical attractiveness. SJ was tallish. His eyes were brown. His hair was dark and slightly longer than was normal for a teacher. But we were reluctant to draw any conclusions from the parts of the man we could observe. Only Matt Templeton with his five older sisters was unequivocal in his assessment: 'Sure, girls would go ga-ga over him.'

  Between the girls in SJ's classes, petty rivalries and jealousies darted like lightning. Not that SJ seemed to do anything to feed the girls' interest. Nor did he show favour. Even Martha Ferguson, the plainest of the plain, had occasionally been given a smile and an encouraging word. Martha was a member of the photography club that SJ ran after school every Wednesday. All but one of the members were girls, and the only boy had an undisguised interest in theatre: he was a sixth former regularly referred to as 'the poofter'. Most boys who had been taught by SJ simply reported him to be an okay teacher.

  In our interview with Martha, she described SJ as being 'different' since the new school year had begun. 'In what way?' we asked, anticipating a revelation. Her plain, round face gazed earnestly up at us and her mouth gaped like a deep-sea fish in a rock pool. 'It's like,' she said at last, and sighed deeply, 'like he's gone away and now all that's left is his body.'

  At every opportunity we trailed through the school behind SJ, down the corridors and over the parched school grounds, like blowflies behind a shit-stained dog. Our eyes crawled all over him.

  June rolled over into July and with real winter came the first disharmony in our ranks. The afternoon meetings in Jim Turner's garage became tense as we debated what to do next. SJ had done nothing incriminating, or even unpredictable, for three weeks. Apart from his damning initials, and a plain girl's opinion that he was 'different', we had nothing. One faction, led by Roy Moynahan, wanted to make an anonymous call to the police telling them of SJ's identity. There was a special phone number still occasionally being advertised in the paper for people with information about Lucy's murder. It must also be said that Roy and Al Penny and a couple of others had wanted to hand the diary over right away but had been outvoted.

  Jase Harbidge was the most vocal against both ideas. Jase argued the best we could count on from the police was that they would interview SJ. 'If he's covered his tracks and he's a good liar he'll walk away, no worries. It happens all the time.'

  Our arguments went nowhere. We were like two tug-of-war team so evenly matched that neither side moves an inch.

  It came as a surprise when Jase and Pete Marshall took it upon themselves to end the stalemate by breaking into SJ's house. It was not a group decision. They arranged to meet near his place at a time they knew SJ would be teaching his fourth form English class. It was a Friday, July the sixth, and a few dark clouds were hanging around out to sea — a big southerly storm was predicted for that evening.

  Pete told us later that they left their bikes in the overgrown section next door to SJ's rented house. They stood in the long grass gathering up their courage. The grass was wet from an earlier light rain and it shivered and shook itself dry in the cold easterly.

  Pete and Jase entered SJ's section where broken boards in the fence had left a gap. They came out behind the garden shed with its two-stroke mower visible through the open door. The back of the house was locked but Jase broke the lower pane of glass with an old rugby sock that he'd found hanging on the line and wrapped around one of the whitewashed stones from the garden. He reached through gingerly and flicked a latch. Suddenly, against all their expectations, they were in.

  Pete told some of us
privately that Jase immediately began to pull drawers out and empty the contents on to the lino. 'He seemed really mad. He just went nuts. I didn't think it was a good idea to try and stop him.' Knives and forks and spoons monsooned down, along with whisks and corkscrews and an eggbeater. Soon the kitchen floor was flooded with cutlery.

  Jase and Pete did not know what they were looking for and Pete admitted that very soon it didn't matter. In a later interview, he confessed to personally hurling a bag of flour against the kitchen wall so that it exploded in a white cloud. All the food was pulled from the cupboards. Packets lay scattered around. Dried macaroni and cornflakes crackled beneath their shoes like shells in the silvery water. Eggs were thrown against the walls. The hot tap was left running, in imitation of the anti-tour protest.

  When they were finished in the kitchen they moved on. SJ's bedroom was quickly turned upside down. His surprisingly small collection of clothes was tossed around the room and a couple of shirts ended up ripped. The sheets on his bed were roughly stripped off and the mattress tipped from the wire base so that it lay drunkenly, half blocking the door.

  The second bedroom had been converted into a darkroom. When they opened that door a heady aroma of chemicals poured out. Pete fumbled along the wall for the light switch. When he finally found it, they saw that the windows were blacked out with sheets of black polythene, taped down at the edges. A trestle-table against the wall was covered with plastic bottles of developer and fixer. SJ even had an enlarger, tall and spidery, where images could be manipulated. The packet of photographs was sitting in plain view. It was Jase who picked it up and slipped out the prints. Jase has always been reluctant to talk about what happened that morning, possibly because of guilt about what he did to SJ's home. Maybe he still feels a lingering outrage at what he discovered there. But years later Pete still remembered hearing Jase gasp as though he had been sucker-punched in the stomach.

  Even by today's standards the pictures of Lucy were pornographic.

  Southerly storms were not unusual on the east coast. Every winter they blew up from Antarctica, blustery and laced with froth from the Southern Ocean. It was the intensity of the storm that hit on July 6 1981 that caught everyone off guard. Of course there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the weather. People forget that the Wahine was sunk in '68 by a storm that came out of nowhere. That was the roof-lifter that our parents spoke about with awe.

  By mid-afternoon the wind had risen to a howl. Although no one was down on the beach to see it, we could all hear the waves thrashing the shore. Although it wasn't raining yet, the temperature had dropped sharply. After school we walked and pedalled down the road with debris from knocked-over rubbish-bins blowing around us and sand plucked from the dunes stinging any exposed skin. We arrived in the Turners' garage raw. The photographs awaited us, fanned out on the pool table. The wind pushed through the cracks in the walls and fingered their edges. It stirred the dry piles of spilled sheep-shit in the corner and buffeted the yellowed clippings pinned to the walls so that they rustled uneasily.

  It is not an exaggeration to say that we were appalled by the photos. Our faith was shaken. We could not match the Lucy we knew with this brazen doppelgänger spread out in front of us.

  The pictures were obviously taken on several different occasions. In some, Lucy's hair was tied back with a ribbon. In others she wore unbecoming makeup. Our Lucy pouted and posed like a stranger. Most of us had seen her naked before, on the beach, in the half-hour before the forensics people screened her off, but we had subsequently convinced ourselves that it was the type of nudity we associated with children, with sisters and mothers. There was an innocence to Lucy in death that these photographs called a lie. Our treasured memories of her were defiled in front of us.

  There was absolutely no doubt in our minds that SJ had murdered Lucy. We agreed that she must have seen the huge mistake she was making by involving herself with someone capable of twisting her in this way. We quickly saw how things must have gone. After he somehow duped her into posing for these photographs, Lucy must have tried to call it off. In a fit of rage he had strangled her. It was obvious. Wasn't it also likely (more than likely, probable) that he had manipulated her (blackmailed her) into posing for these photographs in the first place? Of course it was. What other explanation could there be?

  When we couldn't stand them any more, Jase Harbidge gathered all the photographs together. There was no question of taking them to the police, even though we knew they were important evidence. It was bad enough that we had seen them. We're not ashamed to say that more than one of us was openly upset as Jase carried the photographs outside. We stood in the lee of the garage, beneath the last autumn leaves still stubbornly clinging to the pear tree. The Turners had a rusting, half-gallon drum that Jim's dad used for his bonfires. The drum had a lid, and inside, it was half full of leaves and twigs that were still dry. We all watched in silence as Jase tipped the photographs inside the drum. Roy Moynahan had a box of matches in his pocket along with his Marlboros. The wind blew out several matches before we clustered around in a circle tight enough to create some shelter. The dry leaves caught first and then the photographs. They curled up from the outside in. The chemicals made the flames flare orange and yellow.

  Even on the far side of the garage, the southerly sought us out. It swirled and eddied, snatching at the burning contents of the drum. No one had thought to put the lid back on, and flaming leaves and half photos rose up past us into the air. They were tossed wherever the wind saw fit. Some blew into our faces, causing us to scatter and swat at our heads as though we were under attack from a nest of wasps. Flaming photographs caught in the branches of the pear tree. More went up and over the roof of the Turners' house. Several blew sideways across the lawn at ground level and then caught in the hedge.

  A few months before, when the drought was at its worst, we would have set fire to the garage and the house and probably to the whole Spit. Even with the recent rain, the hedge was still dry at its centre. Several small fires caught and flared up inside it. We stamped and beat them into submission the best we could but there were more flare-ups and some threatened to grow out of control. Jim eventually thought to get his father's garden hose.

  By the time we had put out the hedge fires and checked that there were no other fires around the Turners' house, the photographs were gone. Either they had been consumed, rendered down into single layers of ash or, more likely, they had blown away into the night. We imagined them flaming upwards. Al Penny, quite recently, recalled a fleeting second where he had looked up into the low dark sky and, through the branches of the pear tree, had seen Lucy's face, cleansed by the flames, as she smiled down at him. 'She was so beautiful. And then she was gone.'

  Later we went back to our homes and had dinner with our families as though nothing were wrong. If we were more surly or distracted than usual, no one bothered to comment. Our families were used to our secrets and our sullen silences, which by then they mostly labelled 'teenage moods' and shrugged off.

  The storm proper hit as most of us were eating our dinners. The wind suddenly began to blow even harder. The rain flung itself at our homes, rattling the glass in the windows, beating on our roofs with wet fists. Everyone had to raise their voices to be heard. After dinner, the televisions were turned up until they blared. The late news led with the damage the storm had caused in Dunedin and in the other cities and towns further south than us. Roofs had been lifted, cars turned over on exposed stretches of road. There was heavy flooding nearly everywhere. Stormwater systems could not cope with the record rainfalls. Wry shopkeepers were shown wading down aisles, moving stock on to higher shelves. One old bloke, still in his pyjamas, gave the thumbs up as he was carried by a fireman from a flooded rest home. The highway south of Timaru was closed because the ocean had sent waves big enough to undermine a stretch of road, which had crumbled into the sea.

  But we did not need the television to tell us about the force of the storm. We watched the w
ay our fathers tensed with each unfamiliar noise from outside; listening for the crack of falling branches, or the scream of nails pulling free. Our mothers were either silent and serious as they served up our meals, or they put on masks of jovial good humour. Which was more painful was hard to say.

  Tug Gardiner woke in the night. He lay listening to the rain, which was still throwing itself against the roof and walls of his raised room. The room now felt to him like a boat trying to ride out the storm. The red numbers on his alarm-radio glowed 12:30. He'd been woken by a dream. It had been about Lucy. The dream had snapped him into consciousness like a slap. He was wide awake and his pyjamas were soaked with sweat, though it was cold in his room.

  'I knew for sure I had to go,' he told us later. He dressed in the dark and climbed down the steep steps from his room as quietly as he could manage. His raincoat was in the hall cupboard, where he also found his father's golf bag. Tug pulled a wedge free and felt its weight. He swung it experimentally in the narrow hall and then, satisfied, he let himself out into the night.

  At houses up and down Rocking Horse Road we were doing the same. Each of us had woken at the same time as Tug, 12:30. We woke sure of what we had to do. We are the first to admit that the whole idea is ridiculous when committed to paper. Here on the page, in black and white, it is absurd — something we would normally dismiss as the worst sort of nonsense. But the truth is that the dream was exactly the same for each of us. We all dreamt of Lucy that night. She was standing on the beach at the spot where Pete Marshall had found her body. She was clothed in a soft white light and there was a small finger-bone of driftwood in her matted hair. We could see the circling bruises around her neck. Lucy's eyes were fixed on ours. She did not speak but wore an expression of unfathomable sadness. She implored us. Even without words we knew what she was asking.