A Child's Book of True Crime (10 page)

“Malcolm’s nervous,” Veronica told me. “I think he likes you.”

“
Nooo
,” I said blushing.

She giggled.
“Ye-es.”

“Well, it’s great he’s not mollycoddling the kids,” I conceded. “He’s talking to them like to short adults.” I sighed. In art the day before, the children had each made a “silver tray” by gluing string onto a piece of cardboard, and covering it with aluminum foil. The art teacher had gotten this idea from an American book on pioneers—you could also make a rag rug or homemade cough drops. I thought this sent out mixed messages. The convict children learned trades, but not silversmithing. And how many Tasmanian pioneers had the gentility to make themselves cough drops? It was enough just to be consumptive; they didn’t need to accessorize.

Malcolm explained to us that at Point Puer there was Sir George’s set of rules, obviously, but there were also the boys’ shadow rules. A terrifying natural order emerged. Malcolm turned on a torch, despite the now plentiful sunlight, and shone it in the children’s faces. “There was a black economy, and the boys would try to steal from the colonial officials’ houses to gain advantage. John Pollard!”—he pointed the
torch at Alastair—“was charged with being
absent from Divine Service without authority, the Catechist’s house having been broken into
. William Bowles!”—he targeted Henry—“was charged with
having buttons improperly in his possession and being suspected of gambling.
William Cummins! He must have benefited from an illicit exchange, only to spend four days in solitary confinement on bread and water for
having a pipe and tobacco in his possession improperly and smoking near the Superintendent’s Quarters
.” Malcolm’s voice grew low with suspense. “As Sir George’s system became underfunded and overfull, even the pettiest misdemeanor invited punishment.” He paused. “The boys lied to anyone in any position of authority, they sang hymns like banshees. At night, they would turn out the lights and attack their convict watchmen, pouring the contents of the chamber pots over their heads. In one scuffle, a guard was hospitalized for three months.” Malcolm shone the torch under his own chin. “Another time, a man died.”

Pleased by this, the children strolled around filling in their worksheets. Veronica stood looking in the display cases, tilting her head different ways as if each sorry item needed to be considered from all perspectives. I followed her example: what struck me as the museum’s strangest exhibit was a re-creation of what a cell for the insane would have been like. There was a door and you bent down and opened a little flap to see a wax dummy, dressed up as a convict, standing—there was only room to stand—wearing a ball and chain. “Convicts were only taken out of the dumb-cells, in hoods, to go to church.”

I turned. Malcolm was standing behind me. I blushed as he pointed to a leather mask. “Flies crawled over their faces.
Officers stood up the front of the chapel making sure the convicts’ lips moved only in prayer.”

I bent to look again, flattered by this attention. Now people had started throwing coins into the mock cell. The whole of the floor was covered with twenty-cent pieces. “Do you think they were thrown in out of sympathy?” I asked. “Or to make a wish?” There was something awful about the silver lying there, shining its promise before a mannequin, which stood in for someone who had been mute.

Malcolm cleared his throat. “It’s money standing in for shit.”

I looked at him surprised, but thought of one of the children’s running conversations.

Lucien:
My dad believes, and I think it’s a very sensible idea, that not God, but a being that is bigger than God, created us for his amusement. Umm, that guy might invite one of his friends around just for a brief play with us, and one of their days could be like several million years for us.

Eliza:
The world began when God made a big bang!

Lucien:
How could a bang do anything? I think of a giant holding an ant farm and he’s looking down; any second that giant could go, “Ah no, that’s a big no-no.” Pqueew! “Bye-bye!” And then it’s suddenly like your back’s broken in two by some unknown force.

Eliza:
We can believe what we want!

Lucien:
A bang would do nothing!

Billy:
Wait! I think they should see how many countries believe in God and have an election.

We broke for lunch and I ushered the kids outside. Veronica strolled next to her son, but neither of them spoke. For Lucien there was clearly a mix of pleasure and humiliation in having his beautiful mother present. He was proud of her, but it was embarrassing the other children should see her trying to feed
him
—the class gothic—a salmon and avocado sandwich. It was also embarrassing that she should witness his lack of popularity. I had begun to suspect the class mailbox had evolved into nothing more than a mechanism for spreading malice toward him. The little girls opened up notes and dissolved into mean giggles; the same giggles as when he walked through the door each morning. They all had crushes on him. He was Byronic; at nine years, with his curled lip and knowledge of Hell, he appreciated the tropes of the greatest romantics, and even
I
wanted to meet up with him again, when he was twenty-one, to talk about the cosmos.

I had imagined Lucien’s parents were very supportive of his intellectual precocity, although Lucien gave the impression things at home were fiery. The children often complained about their parents—“They don’t know what fun is.” “They think you’re silly.” “They don’t understand what you like to eat”—but one time Lucien had been quite upset. He wouldn’t venture into the playground all lunchtime, and, after skirting around the question, I finally asked, “Is everything okay with Mum and Dad?” “Well,” he said softly, “they don’t really understand how it feels. You can be having a friendly dispute, because there’s no relationship without a few bumps in it, and they’ll say, ‘That’s it! Go to your room! No pocket money for a year! No TV!’ And it was just a little dispute.” He shook his head, looking sad. “I don’t understand
how they can go ballistic when they’ve been perfectly calm for the last half hour.” “Kids do that too,” I’d rallied. Lucien had sighed. “We naturally have short fuses,” he’d explained, “but they should have longer ones. They’ve been alive a lot longer, and they’ve taken more insults and stuff.”

Veronica gave her son a moist-wipe, encouraging him to clean his face. Lucien took it and dabbed himself without conviction. He didn’t know whether to sit with Veronica or to play with the other kids. A group of boys were hobbling around the picnic tables trying to pick each other’s pockets. Then, without even being locked up, they time-traveled to the point at which they were breaking out of jail. They’d heard escapees survived on whale blubber scraped off the rocks; seaweed; wallaby; the odd black swan’s rancid carcass. The children all reeled around, delighting in their nausea. The convicts might not have known how to swim, but they did. They mimed freestyle around the lawn with only Darren stopping to force Alastair’s drowning. In their faux rags they looked like a children’s theater troupe performing the off-cuts of
Oliver!
Lucien ran into the fray and the kids stopped to renegotiate. They had heard of one convict who, trying to escape overland, found a dead kangaroo and wrapped himself in the animal’s fur. Lucien was allowed to be the kangaroo man, and Darren and Henry were suddenly the officers out hunting the ingredient for kangaroo tail soup.

“Boys!” I called out in warning. They ignored me.

Miss Byrne:
What is a law?

Alastair:
A law says kids can’t drink beer.

Miss Byrne:
What would happen if there were no laws?

Eliza:
People would steal a lot more and cars would run into each other and there would be murder all over the place and we would have an awful, cruel, fighting country.

“Boys!” Behind them rose the half-buildings, made amber by the sun. The penitentiary looked like a child’s unfinished sketch of a house with many windows. It was hardly as if living in a civil society was natural to us, I thought, annoyed. We obviously didn’t have to go back many generations to find a state of utter lawlessness, coexisting alongside the Draconian. In the museum, while Veronica had been admiring herself in the reflective glass, I’d read of one of Australia’s first contributions to the true-crime genre. It was the diary of the escaped convict turned bushranger Michael Howe. In 1818, Howe’s knapsack was found containing a book he’d made from kangaroo skin. Inside, with the blood of the animals he’d slaughtered, he’d written down his dreams. He’d written of his victims seeking retribution. He’d written of the other bushrangers he’d betrayed, and of Aborigines killing him. He’d written of his sister, whom he loved, back in England. And of wanting to live in a nice house with a little garden. In blood, he’d listed the fruit, flowers, and vegetables he hoped one day to grow.

I watched the boys playing, and it occurred to me you could do a fabulous re-creation of Howe’s diary for young readers. Children would love the kangaroo-fur cover and scarlet print. The story had the gore; it had the mystery; it had the pathos. It was so subtle you could
only
read between the lines to understand that in Chapter One boatloads of
British riffraff spilled out. Runaway convicts, like the blood diarist himself, learned bushcraft from the Aborigines and disappeared into the bush. Meanwhile the Aborigines, terrified of the colonists’ guns
vomiting forth thunder,
had their land cleared. Dispossessed, they formed raiding parties, lighting decoy fires to steal settlers’ guns and food. Settlers were speared, but during the seven-year Black War the whites that died did not surpass the number that arrived monthly on each new convict ship. And by 1839 most of the indigenous population had died or been driven away. Our local history is the
Ur
-true-crime story, and in volume after volume the bodies pile up. The government placed a bounty on Michael Howe, and the bushranger was discovered living like a wildman, wearing kangaroo skins in a tiny hut covered with flowers. His killers decapitated him and his head was placed on display in Hobart.

“Henry and Darren!” I yelled. “Stop that immediately!”

I turned. Veronica was watching me. She became sleepy again, stretching. She touched at a thin string of seed pearls around her neck like at a rosary. I cleared my throat. The pearls looked like puffed rice. “It must be incredibly hard in your profession,” I said, “having to concentrate day in, day out on such brutality.”

“Incredibly,” she answered lightly. “It was incredibly hard. I was so squeamish; even terrified of blood when I started. But still, like everyone else, I’d rather read about a crime of passion.” Veronica smiled. “Of course, they’re the most romantic crimes; the ones we respond to most vehemently. Who gets worked up about white-collar crime? Who really cares about money laundering or embezzling?”

“No one does.”

“Exactly.” We both laughed, and this laughter made us intimate. We turned to watch the children as they continued escaping. “Lucien does think you’re lovely,” Veronica said again. “When I was little we always had such sadists as teachers.” She touched my arm, adding, “You really got the feeling they despised children; all soaking their whips in brine.”

“You’ve got to love children in this profession,” I told her quickly, “just to do the job.”

Veronica raised an eyebrow. “I can imagine.”

“And your son is such a terrific smart kid.”

“Thank you.”

Lucien was tearing Darren from a shark’s jaws, then whittling a spear. I chuckled, expecting Veronica to join me. She smiled slightly sadly; “I don’t think he’s got any of my genes at all. In photos of him and his father around the same age, it’s uncanny.” She shook her head. “You can’t pick them apart.” For a moment she looked wistful, then she turned to me, holding out a sandwich. “Lucien won’t eat this. Would you like it?”

“Oh, thank you.”

At that moment, I wanted more than anything for Veronica to like me. I had no problem suspending belief that I was her husband’s lover. In fact, perhaps I never had been: I was her friend. Being able to say, “Yes, Veronica is a great woman” seemed very mature. It struck me there was something so pure about her. I guessed that was the irony. You probably needed that purity to embark on such a brave, gory project—if you were already exhausted and cynical, it would all be too much. I took another bite, savoring the salmon. Since Veronica had
brought it to my attention, I now thought perhaps Malcolm was catching my eye and giving me meaningful glances. While we ate lunch he stood staring out at the bay. He’d skip a pebble, then look back to make sure we were watching. It was impressive that he felt so passionately about all this history. Only just obscured, over the water, were the Suicide Cliffs which marked the eastern side of Point Puer. I saw Malcolm skip another pebble. “Oh, this sandwich is good!”

“Lucien even runs like his father.”

I held the bread, staring at the water.

“He runs and his arms barely move.”

“Really?”

She gestured over the bay, shaking her head. “My husband finds my connection to the Black Swan Point crime slightly . . . repellent,” Veronica confided. “He’s very old-fashioned. But while writing the book I walked with him around the cliffs and I had to acknowledge there’s a struggle within all of us . . . An eye for an eye.”

I didn’t speak.

“You know, Kate, you get to an age and your whole body starts to fall apart,” Veronica said. “A lot of the women I know are having their eyes done. My best friend just fixed her breasts.” She saw my expression and added, “I understand it—she’s thinking of getting a divorce—and I’ve felt them.” Veronica laughed briefly. “Lou told me about it while we were shopping. Very funny, us in a changing room; she lifting up her shirt for me to have a squeeze.” She paused. “They weren’t rocklike. Listen, all I’m saying is I understand it, but I’m not doing it. If I did it I’d still look like a forty-year-old woman. Why try to look like a
neat
forty-year-old woman?”