The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  “I realise this must be a very tough time for you,” I say.

  More biro rolling. He doesn’t stop watching my hand, his eyes widening when I prepare to write something down. He likes the attention.

  “I need to inform you that, although we’ll talk about what’s been happening to you, I’m here working for the police, to write a report about men who commit the sort of crimes you’re accused of. Do you understand this?”

  Another shrug.

  “All the same, I want to understand you. That might seem unlikely. But you have to realise that I’ve worked on other criminal cases. I’ve seen people deal with the same sort of fears that you might have right now.”

  The lines are virtually scripted; I’ve spoken them before. Usually, they lend me support, comfort, distance. Yet I am at a loss; the last thing he seems is scared.

  “For instance,” I continue, “you might imagine that things will be worse for you if you tell the truth. I’m here to reassure you that this isn’t the case.”

  Finally, a proper reaction. He raises a hand to stop me right there. “Things will be better for me if I tell you I’m the Boy-Killer? Just because that’s what you want to hear? I’ll be better off being moved sooner to a jail cell with violent criminals who can’t wait to beat the shit out of me?”

  “I’m sure you’ve been informed that your protective custody arrangements will continue.” My voice sounds stiffly formal. I’m losing him. “What I mean is —”

  “Yes?” he leans back in his chair.

  “What I mean is you’ll probably feel better after you’ve spoken to me. Keeping secrets can be very stressful. Especially if the truth is likely to be uncovered anyway.”

  “It is?” He looks no more worried than before.

  I nod. “There are many investigators working on this case. Once we know the truth, we can all move on. That means you, too.”

  A weird, maladjusted mix of insecurities and bravado, he gazes at the surface of the table as if some clue to the best way of answering might be found there. I become acutely aware of the clock that ticks away the seconds over his shoulder, and lean towards him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, have you thought about answering my questions?”

  “I’m thinking. I’ve realised something.” He leans forwards too, his eyes bulging. “You’re one of them.”

  “One of who?”

  He makes stabbing gestures at me with his finger. “I know about people like you. I’ve said too much already.”

  He doesn’t stand like he wants to leave; he’s not completely delusional and still understands the meaning of a locked door. I open my folder and hold my own position, pen poised above an empty page. “There are questions I have to ask you.”

  He crosses his arm and blinks.

  “For instance, do you want to tell me about when this started happening?”

  After a long pause he says, “I don’t want to tell you anything.”

  I tap my pen on the page. “You know this is my job. I may not be able to leave unless I get some answers. Look, maybe I can help you, too. I’ve spoken to people in situations a bit like yours before, you know.”

  “People accused of killing children, you mean?”

  “Well, maybe not quite like that.”

  Again, he has won the upper hand in our conversation. I have to backtrack.

  “I’ve spoken to people — to men — accused of being too fond of children, shall we say?”

  “That’s not what you should say. I’ve read some psychology myself, you know.”

  “You have?”

  “Trying to understand psychologists. Since you’re always so interested in me. But none of you understand. There’s nothing wrong with me. I love children, that’s all.”

  “You’re suspected of more than that, you know.” I pause, but he doesn’t respond. “Do you think people who love children are capable of hurting them?”

  “No, Madame Psychologist, I do not.”

  “Yet that’s what you’re accused of doing.”

  “It’s ridiculous. I’ve never hurt anyone. I love children. They love me.”

  “Yet children have sometimes been hurt at your house.”

  The legs of his chair grate against the floor as he pushes himself to his feet. There’s a rustling sound on the other side of the mirror.

  “I never said it was what I wanted! Things get out of control. I’d never want to hurt a kid. I love kids. People who hurt kids are animals. Monsters. I won’t have you making out I’m one of them.”

  I repeat his words carefully. “Out of control?”

  He waves his hand under my nose and looks up at the mirror. “Hey, up there. You cops. I don’t want to talk any more. Is my lawyer here?” He points at me. “Can’t someone come and take her away?”

  “There are certain things we have to talk about.” I scan down a word-processed page, as if my other questions might be listed there. Is someone about to bustle in and hustle me out? There’s no way to know.

  “Will you talk to me about the children who came to your house?” I ask.

  He maintains eye contact. “I will not.”

  “What I’d like to know is what you think about children. You say you love them, that they love you?”

  His arms uncross. No one has interrupted. Perhaps he realises no one is coming and has thought of a way to use the situation. He seems to thaw. Finally: “It’s my gift,” he says. “When I’m with children, I’m one of them. One of the children. As innocent as them. Not many adults can say they really love and understand children. The world might be a better place if everyone could.”

  “If other adults were more like children?”

  “You know what I mean. Truthful. Generous. Affectionate. Broad-minded, Madame Psychologist. Unlike the police.”

  “The police have a job to do.”

  “As you do.” He begins to look cunning. “You don’t always like it, though. You don’t like being here, for instance.”

  He makes a tent of his fingers, and peers at me over top of it. The expression is reminiscent of university lecturers giving me expert advice back in my undergraduate days.

  “Be honest with yourself before you come here demanding honesty from me,” he continues. “You’d like to be a child again. To not have to deal with any of this.”

  “If I were a child,” I say, slowly, “would I like dealing with you?”

  “Of course you would. Children love me. I do the things they like to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “You said you have a gift, Mr Ferris. Why keep it to yourself?”

  “Because I can.”

  “We both know you don’t want to.”

  He takes a moment to consider. Relief relaxes my shoulders when I see him take a deep breath, about to talk.

  “You’ve been a child yourself,” he says. “Let me remind you what it was like. This is something I like to think about. You can write this down. I like to be with children. I like to talk to them about things they’re interested in. I like to watch them play soccer, or watch football and cricket on television with them.”

  “They invite you to their homes to watch television?”

  He laughs. “You don’t think that’s possible, do you? And you’re right. I mean, the boys would like to invite me home but their mothers are all nasty, suspicious women. They doubt my motives. The children are just a burden to them. They wonder why anyone wants to spend time with their kids.”

  “Yet you did watch television with these children? That would have to be at your house?”

  For a moment he looks uncomfortable. He wanted me to argue in favour of womanhood, defend the mothers he has impugned. But this is my investigation, not his. I’m the one in charge.

  “I’ve already told you that sometimes the children come to my place,” he says. “Of course we sometimes watch television. Children like te
levision. So do I.”

  I return to him later, after lunch, because I have to. He has been alone with his thoughts in the interim, and he gives me a suspicious gaze.

  “I have to be careful what I say to you, don’t I?”

  “Well, it’s important that you tell the truth. You know that you have a lawyer who represents you, because you’ll have to go to court?”

  “I don’t like court.”

  Again he seems to invite me to talk about his earlier conviction. I don’t want to go there. I demur, pen poised above my page. He begins firing questions about the legal system, questions I am barely equipped to answer. Do I think the court is likely to find an unbiased jury, given the amount of media coverage there has been? How will the court case proceed? What precise charges will he face? Is it wise to talk to me about offences he hasn’t been charged with yet?

  He looks satisfied with our conversation, although as far as I can tell I haven’t provided him with anything. “My lawyer says they’ll probably treat it like a few trials rolled into one,” he tells me. “That means they’ll have to prove every single case, which is probably best because for some of them they don’t have simple things like motive worked out. I mean, why would someone do the things they say I’ve done? You’re a psychologist. That’s probably what you’re here for. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Bob says the kid that got away can’t even remember anything, not any more. I don’t have to prove I didn’t do these things. They have to prove that I did. That’s what Bob says. Do you know Bob?”

  I flip through my folder, perplexed. His behaviour has changed completely in the short time since my last visit. “Bob?” I repeat. “No. I don’t think I do.”

  “Lawyer Bob,” he continues. “Bob was here this morning. He’s a good bloke. Impressed with the reading I’ve done. The psychology, and the other stuff. Genetics. DNA. You’d be surprised what I know about the things that run in families. You know that evidence isn’t always as foolproof as people think?”

  “Mr Ferris, I wonder if we can return to one of my earlier questions? I’d like to know what age you were when you first realised you were attracted to children?”

  “Now that’s a trick question. Bob said to watch out for those. I never said I was attracted to children.”

  “You said you love them.” I gaze down at the page of notes I’ve taken. “Can you tell me what age you were when you first realised your own relationship with children is different to those they have with other adults?”

  He pulls at a couple of whiskers on his cheek. “I’ve probably always known. I didn’t really think about it until after I got out of jail. I’d always sort of lived on my own until I was there, you know. I was used to it. When I came out, I realised that living on my own was lonely.”

  “I understand you used to live with your mother?”

  “She died a long time before then.”

  “And you lived on your own?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  He looks at me more closely. I’m sure this is the moment he’s about to say he remembers me, that we’ve met each other before. But he looks down at his fingers, and adds: “It’s in your notes.”

  “My notes tell me your mother died when you were an adult. Surely you can’t blame her death for the activities you’re accused of?”

  “I can blame anyone I like. Don’t you forget that. The police think that blame is their job. That they’re safe accusing me. But it isn’t true, you know. I never touched a boy who didn’t want to be touched, who didn’t ask for it in some way.”

  “Ask to be touched in some way, Mr Ferris?” I repeat. Lachlan, move out of my mind. I know it’s irrational, but I’m scared that he might see you there. “And what way might that be?”

  “You know. The way people ask to be touched. The clothes they wear. The way they look at you from the sides of their eyes. The things they say that they only pretend are meant to be innocent. They don’t have to throw rocks on my roof to let me know they’re interested.”

  I ignore that. I have to. “Pretend to be innocent, Mr Ferris?” I repeat. “Didn’t you tell me that you like boys because of their innocence, their lack of pretence?”

  “Madame Psychologist, you are twisting my words.” He hunches his shoulders. “The boys I’ve loved have loved me. I’m one of them. If they were hurt, it was their own fault. They were careless or broke their promises or it was an accident. It was your fault, too, you know. Your fault and the police’s. You should have stopped me sooner.”

  “You’ll be able to write a better report than anyone,” Ken tells me on the way out. His voice has a please-don’t-let-me-down tone. “I mean, with all your background knowledge and everything. You have any idea what you’re going to say?”

  “I’ll have to think about a few things before I decide.”

  “But does he fit your sort of picture — you know, repeating the act because he wants to get it right? That sort of thing?”

  I pause, flattered that he’s remembered some of my ideas. “I don’t know. Anyway, that’s just a hypothesis. Many of my colleagues would look on his crimes more as fantasy fulfilment.”

  “Ah. The sexual thrill.”

  “Something like that. Fantasy plays some sort of part in his actions. I try to look into criminals’ pasts to see if there’s some sort of trigger event — something that set them on the particular course they followed.”

  Ken nods and scrawls something in his notes. He likes this simple explanation, with cause and effect spelled out like a fairytale (even though he doesn’t give any significance to the cause, and is himself spelling out the effects), which is even more annoying than the secret he kept about the prisoner’s name.

  I want to go home. The time when a psychologist could have made a difference to this man who calls himself Bradley Ferris is long past. There’s nothing I can do here. As I leave, I tell Ken that. He is looking at my breasts and it makes me uncomfortable in a completely different way from usual. I raise my folder over them, protectively.

  “One thing that might have helped me prepare for the meeting is being told who Bradley Ferris really is,” I say. The police have always had this ability to annoy me.

  Once upon a time, there was a man who lived on his own in an old house beside the river. He was a very lonely man. Because he lived on his own, no one spoke to him, and because he was lonely, no one trusted him.

  In the past, this man had taken certain steps to stop being alone and to stop being lonely. Twice, when he was young, he had asked out girls, choosing those who seemed to be unattractive or uneducated or poor enough to be interested in him. But even the ugliest, stupidest, hungriest girl was bored or frightened or repelled by his awkward conversation and his dull, sluggish ways. This man longed for a family but it seemed it would be forever denied to him. All the children know the story with this momentous question: who can love a beast?

  Instead of people, he had magazines for company. They arrived every month, glossily dressed, reliable, ready for affection. Oh, he had loved those paper women. He remembered their upturned faces, eyes closed in ecstasy so fake it robbed him of his own chance for bliss. Dampened, they wrinkled and tore. He might have been a beast, but he hated all forms of lies and dishonesty. Over time, he forsook his surreptitious glances at lengths of thigh and dips of breast. They were all liars and thieves. Miss January was no different from Miss May. He gave up on them.

  As he grew older, the beast would sit in his house by the river and think about love, about women and families, about the women he might have loved. He would dream that they had stolen even more from him: they had stolen his hopes and dreams, they had taken something of his essence.

  Children began to hold appeal for him. He hated men who abused children, as much as he hated women who lied and stole. But he loved children and knew that he had much to offer them. Children were the members of a family he would like to have. That he should have had. He had a home to give them, after all. Who was to say he couldn�
��t share it? He yearned to be the father of a son he could bring up to live in a house by the river, to never be alone or lonely, to be different from him.

  He began to notice children — boys, in particular — who, through some tint in their hair or eyes, or some awkwardness in speech or gait, reminded him of his younger self, a self that someone ought to have looked after. And he began to think … I wonder? There were so many children, so many who were a little like him, it was unreasonable for not one of them to be his. There were boys the other kids didn’t like, boys whose parents ignored them. Some one or other of them — it was a simple process of logic — must be his.

  His sense of what had been stolen from him grew very great indeed.

  Rebecca was modelling her new uniform when I arrived at the Coleman house, two days after the funeral. They were all at home. Andrew, lying stretched out on the sofa, actually winked at me when I came in. Opposite him, Jackie flipped through one of Rebecca’s magazines, hair ruffled like windswept feathers and fingernails like bloody talons.

  “Mum, you look great!” Brigid enthused.

  Jackie glanced up, looking pointedly at Rebecca’s hips. They were not flattered by the cut of her skirt. There was a twitch at the side of Jackie’s mouth, but she said nothing before returning to the article she’d been reading. I didn’t like her.

  A strange man sat next to her. His thick brown hair was the same colour right through, the way real hair never is. A toupee. Everything else about him was fake, too. When he looked up and smiled, he displayed teeth perfectly straight and brilliantly white, like tombstones. I knew he’d have an American accent before he spoke. He could only be Jackie’s second husband, Andrew’s stepfather.

  “Hello, Madeleine,” said Rebecca, with a bright smile that looked painted on. “What do you think of this?” She did a little twirl and her ponytail swung out girlishly.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked with a grin. “Nicely accesorised, Mrs Coleman. Do they sell earrings to match that gun?”

  Andrew smiled at me too, one eyebrow raised.

  “Hello,” I said to his mother and the American.