A Child's Book of True Crime (11 page)

I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well . . . the thing is, for every wrinkle there’s more wisdom.”

“No, there’s just another wrinkle.” Her voice grew businesslike; she was finally waking. “My friend found out the hard way that men reach a certain age, and they want to fuck around, because they only can for about five more minutes, and they want young flesh. ‘So, fine,’ I say to her. ‘Let them fuck.’ You know? You don’t have to take a knife to yourself.”

“You can take a knife,” I began, before I could stop myself, “to the young flesh.”

She laughed. “That’s good, that’s quite good.”

 • • • 

After lunch, Malcolm stared out to where the convict ships would have dropped anchor. The children followed his gaze, disappointment clouding their faces. There was now a luxury cruise ship parked in Opossum Bay, but what had they expected? A chain of skulls strung together? Pickpockets’ loot hidden under loose rock? I could hear my heart beating.

Malcolm pointed toward a small island, covered with eucalyptus, in the middle of the bay: “In between Port Arthur and Point Puer is
L’Isle des Morts,”
he announced dramatically, before admitting the convicts referred to their burial site as Dead Island. “The officers had headstones facing toward England; the convicts’ mass graves faced in the opposite direction. The gravedigger was a giant man who walked with a cane in each hand,” he continued. “The authorities were relieved when he volunteered to live by himself on the island, because he had a diabolical temper and often broke the other convicts’ legs with one swipe of a cane.” Malcolm paused for
the cartoon to register. “Gravedigging was a permanent position: partly because he couldn’t swim, and everyone thought the bay was so infested you could walk to Dead Island, and back, on the heads of sharks.” He paused again—half historian, half stand-up comedian. “The gravedigger stayed on the island, having dug his own grave in the nicest spot, until he began to be haunted.” The children all laughed. “He had to light a bonfire so someone would row over to save him.”

Malcolm started to recite a convict ballad that no one, now, knew the music to.

Isle of the dead! well might

Thy verdant bosom be,

The last retreat of honor fair

The death home of the free

But moldering there, the slave of crime

And wretch of blighted name

Sink in the dread repose of guilt

To rest in graves of shame.

I breathed deeply, trying to remain calm. Malcolm, with his medallion profile, definitely invested a lot of emotion in all this. The children stood listening to his powerful voice, a crew of Artful Dodgers arrested by boredom. I wished they would pay more attention. It wouldn’t be long until no one in our culture could be bothered to memorize these ballads. And it was not as though the children were thinking of their country’s history. Of course they weren’t. They were thinking: “Those bus seats smelled of banana peel and sweat.” The bus seats had smelled bad—they’d been upholstered in a thick synthetic
material with a colorful pattern which brought to mind vomiting tropical fish. The children were hoping: “Please don’t make me sit next to Darren on the bus ride back.” Darren had made Alastair count roadkill all along the highway: “That was an old sock!” “No, it was a squashed cat, I swear!” An older teacher once confided that when he heard of children being badly beaten, he now thought, Yeah, and what had the kid done? I listened to the ballad, wondering if there were any reliable statistics as to how many of my students were descended from degenerates transported in the nineteenth century.

Isle of the homeless dead!

Within thy rock-bound breast,

Full many a heart that throbb’d for home

Now find untroubl’d rest;

For home, alas! they throbb’d in vain;

A mother’s fond caress,

A father’s care, a sister’s smile,

Has ceas’d their hearts to bless.

After a few more verses, I found myself thinking of the Marnes sleeping together. My face flushed. Early on, Thomas had gripped me by the arm, demanding, “So, what have you done?” I hadn’t known what he was talking about. “Have you ever slept with a woman?” he’d asked hopefully. “No.” He tried again: “Have you ever slept with two men?” “No,” I’d answered, “have you?” He shook his head. “Have you ever slept with three men?” I’d asked. “Four?”

Had Veronica done these things? How many perversions could she check off?

More recently Thomas had told me about a case he’d come across, a Tasmanian bestiality trial: a husband had come home, found his wife with their rottweiler, and had shot the dog. Apparently the husband had filmed various videos of this happening before, so he shouldn’t have been completely surprised. And perhaps as a result, the wife had decided to sue him. “She could be suing him for infringement of property,” Thomas had explained, his face calm, handsome. “If someone shoots your dog it’s trespass on your dog. The cost of replacing the animal she could certainly recover, provided it was
her
dog.” He made a steeple with his fingers on which to rest his chin. “But unless this was a ‘working dog,’ as it were, a breeding dog, it would be difficult to recover further damages.” For a moment he was silent. “This is how I’d handle the case: it strikes me that if the woman was in a loving relationship with the dog, and her old man came home and shot the dog, she could bring an action against the husband for negligence resulting in nervous shock.” “What’s nervous shock?” I’d asked. “Well, one of the symptoms is loss of sexual function.” Later, I’d wondered what he’d really been trying to tell me.

Initially with Thomas I had been willfully innocent. It was convenient to play the obstinate naïf rather than confront the consequences of his sexual urbanity. “Was this the way people really behaved?” I would ask myself in mock affront. “Not the woman and the man, nor their dog. I mean the people who told these stories—Thomas and Veronica at their kitchen table, so worldly they don’t give two hoots in hell about an abused puppy!” Then I’d shake my head, like any normal person, at how bizarre, at how terrifying, people managed to make sex.

 • • • 

On and on the thing went:
isle of the exil’d dead! isle of the fetter’d dead! isle of the unwep’t dead!
After the ballad’s ninth verse, Veronica leaned toward me. “I’ve decided that I hate Malcolm,” she whispered. I turned to her. “Sociopath,” she mouthed, as he continued reciting this tedious convict ballad no one even had the music to. I studied him more closely. “You’re right,” I whispered back. Perhaps, after all was said and done, younger men were a waste of time. Yes, he was cute. But didn’t people with weird proclivities get attracted to these dark, sadistically charged places? Then again, if I felt some deviant vibe off him, was I just recognizing a part of myself? Veronica’s book had neglected to acknowledge that these horrific crimes were not just the things other people did. These deeds were with us; they were in our nervous systems. We read true-crime books to learn about ourselves.

Danielle:
In a perfect world things would get all crowded because there wouldn’t be killers to kill people. And no one would get sick, and it would get all crowded.

Henry:
But just say there were killers, and say there’s reincarnation—well, you’d choose which animal you’d reincarnate into, you’d just go, “A lion!” and kill the person who killed you.

Anaminka:
I think in a perfect world maybe we’d be something else, other than a person. Scientists say we’ve been fish before, and they say we’ve had gills before.

Billy:
That’s something you can’t prove. Like you can’t prove if we were, but you can’t prove that we’re not.

The ballad finished and I nudged Anaminka. She stared at the ground, blushing, as she thanked Malcolm on behalf of Endport Primary. I looked over the water, with rising anxiety. It was small consolation realizing Veronica knew so much about rage and humiliation because she was married to a chronic adulterer. No wonder she’d chosen to write
Murder at Black Swan Point
. No wonder there’d been such satisfaction in making all a life’s tributaries flow irresistibly toward doom. Do you think Margot enjoyed the murder? I asked myself. Do you think she enjoyed cutting the girl up? Of course she did. You have to take your pleasure where you find it.

We headed back to the cultural center, Veronica walking next to her son. I’d realized that I understood her book much better when I gave Margot her face. When I thought of the things I did with Thomas, it was no leap at all to imagine her beautiful reserve and cool asides hiding someone out of control. But of course there was another intimacy for which Margot must have hated Ellie.

I watched Veronica looking over Lucien’s worksheet. Margot must have hated Ellie for touching her children: for putting her face next to the little girls’ faces; for stroking the girls’ soft hair. Ellie probably touched Margot’s children tenderly, engineering it so that if the girls’ daddy walked into the reception room he’d see the kids draped all over his lover, fawning all over her; and he’d smile, so proud of this happy little family. Margot probably walked into the clinic and she
had to fight with her daughters just to put their shoes on. She had to fight with them just to put their socks on, and the sock had to be lined up perfectly on the little foot. Then her daughter would pull her foot away, readjusting the sock so many times that Margot wanted to snap her ankle, and shove the foot into the shoe. And Ellie—“that bitch,” Margot thought—watched all of this like she was the good mummy. And Margot would drive home barely able to breathe, thinking of how she’d teach that girl a lesson.

 • • • 

I was exhausted: the children were so completely alive in this dead place. They waltzed and wrestled while behind them the building’s facades looked diseased. These buildings had seen the end of the world and would keep rotting until they were just piles of bricks. This was Sir George’s mill to grind criminals into God-fearing citizens. His failed Utopia. And in our discussions the children and I had surely hit upon Sir George’s impasse: “Why in his omnipotence and benevolence does God allow evil to occur?” If God could make the perfect world why did this place even exist?

Billy:
The world would probably be something like eighty-five percent good. It’s just the murderers and robbers and all that. If they were off it, I reckon this world would be a perfect world.

Danielle:
In a perfect world you wouldn’t need to go to school or have libraries because you’d know all that. And you could do all that. And you would be perfect and you could do anything. You could fly.

Veronica linked arms with me. “I want us to hang out. Perhaps when my husband can baby-sit we could run away for an evening, and have a little drink.” She tore a page out of her diary and wrote down her phone number. “Just call anytime if you’re lonely, or want a chat, or feel scared all alone there.” She smiled at me conspiratorially. “It’s been great getting acquainted.” She shook her head. “I think you’re wonderful.”

Turning, she looked back to where the divers had searched for Margot. Veronica leaned in close, confiding they’d had little success. “The water was so full of silt and seaweed that the divers couldn’t see a thing. They swam in semicircles, the palms of their hands searching the sea floor for a body. The men could only be lowered down twice a day, for fifteen minutes, when the tides were the least dangerous, so fierce are these currents.”

I stared across flat, gray Opossum Bay. Veronica added softly, “Around the eastern side, the waters are full of sharks and sea lice. Bodies disappear there constantly.” I felt myself starting to spin. She sighed: “Still, the divers claimed if Margot had been down there, they would’ve probably found some trace . . .”

I had to excuse myself.

People speculated that Mrs. Harvey could have been alive. After all, she was well connected, she had access to a fair amount of money. Maybe, like Veronica’s “friend,” she’d had plastic surgery and had come back to work at the bakery so as to be able to see her daughters. She gave them extra jam tarts whenever they placed an order. Maybe she took a job as
their cleaner. She still cleaned their toilet, but she had the satisfaction of having destroyed Graeme’s life the way he had tried to destroy hers. She was selling apples on a chair by the side of a road. She was wearing a parachute-silk tracksuit, walking in slow motion down the main street . . . Or she was a sylph, in a low-slung silver sports car, cruising around harassing the wanton. She’d married again and had, say, one child—a boy—and maybe she’d even done something to bring attention to her previous persona’s plight. She’d
written a book
.

When the school bus arrived, my name had to be called out over the center’s loudspeaker. I was in the women’s toilets on my hands and knees, retching until I’d lost the sandwich.

F
INALLY
I
CAME
upon an inlet where the foundations of an old jetty rose like driftwood soldiers marching over undulating mud. A rotted-out rowboat lay nearby. Someone, rowing along, had suddenly realized the flood was over and silence had then calcified everything left. I’d been stumbling along this dirt road, praying for some sign of life. Now, opposite the jetty, shone the windows of a small weatherboard house. The house was painted sage, long yellowed by the sun. A utility truck with oversized headlights was parked in the drive, its front wheel chained to a nearby tree. The surrounding garden seemed full of detritus picked off the mudflats. Plastic buckets, lost from their toy spades, were planted with geraniums. Flower beds, lined with shells, hosted arrangements of petrified wood, a collection of broken paddles, the skull of a large bird. Then strangely, in the middle of this sea junk, appeared a white fountain tiered like a wedding cake.