A Child's Book of True Crime (15 page)

All the old concerns flooded back.

T
erence Tiger paced up and down, lecturing. It was important the younger animals understood that humans have essentially four main blood groups. “Type A, B, O, and AB,” he explained slowly. “Then, to further individualize blood stains, polymorphic enzymes are analyzed. These provide pathologists with subgroups known as the PGM or phosphoglucomutase types.” The tiger paused, wondering if the smaller-brained marsupials could keep up. “It was determined that Ellie Siddell’s ABO blood type was A PGM 1, and Graeme’s was A PGM 2-1. There was no sample of Margot’s blood, but according to hospital records from when Margot was delivering her three daughters, it was ascertained that she had type O blood.”

The tiger glanced down, checking that he held the little beasts’ attention. Kitty Koala, on a nearby branch, nodded and he continued. Using a twig, Terence drew a rough sketch of the Siddells’ floor plan in the dirt. He traced a stick figure lying by her stick bed, and all the old concerns flooded back: was this fascination with true crime not slightly crass? A way of fetishizing death? Of making it as kitsch as possible? All too often, Terence worried, this supposed analysis of the criminal mind had no methodology: we’re just ghoulish Victorians “studying” a hanged man’s death mask. He drew a stick refrigerator—it was amazing how such a ubiquitous white good could look so sinister. Often murderers used their fridges and, yes, also their washing machines for such grisly purposes . . . the tiger cleared his throat.

“According to the forensic evidence gathered by the police,” he continued, “the only place Eleanor Siddell bled was in her house. Predictably, type A PGM 1 blood was found all over her bed-clothes and mattress. Her undergarments were soaked in her blood, as were a large section of the carpet and the items lying on this carpet, including her nurse’s uniform.

“There was also a series of bloody handprints on the north wall of the hallway, as if the killer had leaned in, trying to steady him- or herself. The killer proceeded to the bathroom, washed his or her hands, then flicked them dry against the white bathtub, hence these pinkish streaks.” Terence looked once again at Kitty. “Now, pathologists found type A blood on the girl’s nightgown and the knife discovered near her body. However,”
Terence paused, “the PGM subgrouping on these items could not be determined.”

All the little animals squirmed, not realizing this information’s significance.

“What are you suggesting?” Kitty Koala asked knowingly.

The tiger stared at the crudely drawn map. He tapped the twig against his hind leg, stifling a howl. “Technically, it’s possible that Graeme Harvey’s blood was also on the dead girl’s nightshirt, and the knife found beside her body . . .”

W
AKING FELT LIKE
another car crash: I opened my eyes and the day, too bright, came screeching toward me. It seemed I had woken in someone else’s dream. Closing my eyes again, I burrowed further into the bedclothes—if I went back to sleep perhaps I would be safe. “But what if this is a dream, and when you dream it’s not a dream?” Anaminka asked calmly one day, setting off an hour of intense debate. In some ways her question was further along than Philosophy 101’s “How do I know if I am dreaming?” For the answer is: you don’t actually know. It’s not logically impossible that the whole of life is a dream, and Anaminka had asked, “If in fact we are dreaming, then what are dreams?” If life is a dream, and in that dream we go to sleep, at that moment are we dead? No one, neither scientists nor philosophers, knows why we dream. What if children’s terror of night and night monsters is just their connecting the dots between dreaming and death?

Billy:
Life could be like one big dream, like everyone’s dreams put together. You’ve just gone into a never-ending sleep when you were in your mum’s tummy, then you come out, and you have a dream about your life, and then you wake up and you’re dead.

Darren:
I would be dead now, because in my dreams I’ve fallen off about fifty cliffs.

Eliza:
Usually you know when you’re not dreaming because you can fly in your dreams.

Lucien:
But I’ve been left with the question, “Have I really flown out of my bed?” And I don’t know. Sleepflying is what I’ve thought I’ve been doing, but the thing is I’ve never been looking out of my eyes. There’s a mini helicopter watching me. I’m looking at myself without a mirror.

The light through the curtain’s edges pried me from my bed. The light was so strong it stripped everything bare. It was so bright the wallaby grass outside could look snow-capped. Our garden used to be in near-constant darkness—a huge cypress had hovered over us like a dull-green mushroom cloud, and with so little sun, no native plants could grow underneath. After my grandparents passed away, my parents had the tree cut down. When the chain saw started my mother had to draw the curtains. She couldn’t watch. The stink of wood chip seeped through every room. Later, after the sunburned logger had finished his deafening work, I walked out into the garden fearful of seeing a toppled nest. The ground was carpeted with sawdust, and logs lay about. My father stood sadly in the middle of the wreckage, sun flooding down, and he turned to me, warning, “Avoid the heart.” The logger had told him that if you cut into the heart of the wood, the tree “shits itself.” It shatters into thousands of splinters and the timber is no good to anyone.

After the tree left, a strange comedy began. My parents
called in a professional house mover. He sawed the weather-board house in half, employing two forklift trucks to simultaneously move each half to a better vantage point (perhaps when the house had been built the sea was considered too wild to view from one’s window). The house was restumped and rewired, closer to the cliff, on the site of the cypress. The last tins of discounted paint were used to reanoint the exterior. For a few weeks afterward, the locals would come of an evening, standing outside our home and staring as though it were a natural wonder.

My head throbbed. I wasn’t used to drinking, and I moved around slowly, the princess of dumb. This was the moment I needed my wits about me, but as I drew the curtains each picture seemed very wrong. During the night the house had taken off again, relanding with each angle out. It would have been no less strange to discover the house had swum to the bottom of the sea, than finding, over and over, the grand, stern cypress gone. No less strange than looking out the window in the mornings, realizing each view had been swapped, and I was living alone. My mother was not standing in an enormous sun hat whispering to her new saplings: “We’re so glad you’re in our garden. What a lovely plant you are.” My father was not chopping the leftover cypress, his tall thin frame negotiating a short stump of log. While I’d had my head dunked in my own illusions, all the comforts of the past had stood up and left. Living away from home, there was no one to tell me who I was anymore. Now I was
looking at myself without a mirror
. I didn’t have their ideas in which to see my reflection. I had got lost in someone else’s life.

Alastair:
If someone kicks you in a dream, you can’t feel it.

Henry:
If someone shoots you, you can’t feel it.

Alastair:
And sometimes if someone has a knife, and they’re threatening to kill you, in a dream you can’t stop them stabbing you, but then you wake up.

Lucien:
Or else you go to sleep again.

I went to the kitchen to find a knife. It seemed I should take some precautions, but the cutlery drawer only mocked me. Everything was from the 1960s, now rusting or broken. Dozens of corks had collected there for no apparent reason.

Slamming the drawer, something occurred to me. Thomas might have rejected the notion Veronica was psychotic. But Lucien had not. I thought of the morbid portrait he’d drawn of his mother: a strange psychic record of her rage. He had been trying to warn me and I’d approached the situation with perfect myopia. Riffling through my textbooks, I’d been hungry for any information on children’s art. What, I’d wondered, was he trying to say? Drawings could be symbolic expressions of a child’s perception of the world: shy and depressed children, I’d read, had the tendency more often to draw tiny figures, to omit the mouth, the nose, and the eyes, and to cut off hands; while by contrast aggressive children tended to draw long arms, big hands, teeth, and genitals. Children with psychosomatic complaints more often showed clouds; children who stole more often shaded the hands; obese children drew figures taking up an unusually large area of their page. And the children of true-crime writers? I’d hopelessly searched further.

In one book’s appendix there was a measure to test the drawings of children in distress. It had seemed complicated. You scored the drawing if the child had included fruit trees, but not if these trees were pine trees, coconut trees, or palm trees. You scored the drawing if the child had drawn an enclosed figure, even if this enclosure was a house. You scored it if the enclosed figure’s hands were cut off, even if they were only in pockets. Then, after you’d calculated your score, you were supposed to ask a series of questions. For example: “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” If the child said, “Nothing,” you were then supposed to say, breezily, “Oh, everyone has something bad that happens.”

I dragged a chair toward a higher kitchen cupboard, looking for something sharp. If I were more resourceful I could have booby-trapped this whole house. There were candles, and old rubber gloves; scraps of chicken wire, sandpaper, nails, and a hacksaw. Foreign objects, relating to the natural world, made their way into all the house’s corners. At one stage I’d found the ceiling stained, and had supposed the roof to be leaking. A local handyman came over and looked up thoughtfully. “Not to worry,” he’d reassured me, “it’s just possum piss.” I now leaned forward. The cupboard smelled dank. I leaned forward again, and felt my face covered in cobwebs. I had found my father’s fishing basket; and after wiping free the cobwebs, inside it, I found the knife.

Anaminka:
You know how I said, “What are dreams made of?” I’ve found a solution. There’s a little factory in heaven that’s making dreams. And this
dream is about a lion and it eats you, do you want it? Okay, then this is a dream about chocolate . . . But you have to pay. You pay in nightmares.

Lucien:
In all my dreams it’s mute, in every dream I haven’t spoken.

Lucien:
In all my dreams I can’t see anyone’s face. I can’t see any details. I see color. But I don’t see who they are. I know someone’s there, but I don’t see their faces.

I too had known someone was there. And last night, driving in the dark, I had finally seen their face. Veronica’s malice was hardly a surprise. But Thomas could no longer claim innocence. I stepped down from the chair, examining the knife.

At first I’d felt uncomfortable talking to the children about death, even though for them it was an area of intense interest. Younger children recognized the fact of physical death, but could not separate it from life: they’d take off their doll’s limbs, and realign them in mutant poses; they’d lie on the floor, playing extinct, and scream for a Life injection. These young ones couldn’t conceive that death was a permanent condition, ironically, because it seemed too great a force. Death could eat and it could drink. So surely Death could be outtricked and outrun. “Do you think of Death often?” a famous psychologist once asked a smart four-year-old. “Yes, I think of when I hit it on the head, and yet it doesn’t go away.” Around my children’s age, some difficult lessons were about to be learned. The day before they’d had to face the fact that the animals, with which they’d identified, had been unable to outwit mortality.

Lucien’s parents had probably drilled this message in early. I thought of something I’d witnessed at the school fair. Children bearded with chocolate icing had surrounded the cupcake-decorating table. Balloons were being twisted: “Choose between a sausage dog or a saber!” From a distance I’d noticed Thomas and Lucien by the horror table. In a row were a series of black cardboard boxes. The eyeballs box contained peeled grapes; the guts box, red jelly. Cheese sticks were the corpse’s waxy fingers, spaghetti the hair. I’d watched Lucien grimacing as he put his hands in with the severed ears—dried apricots—and had felt chaos at work. Thomas was encouraging his son’s familiarity with the butchered body. “How does it feel?” he would have asked the little boy. “Describe the texture to me: do you find it soft? too soft? Concentrate. Does it give to the touch?” I now wondered whom he had been imagining was lying there dissected.

Carrying the knife, I walked to my bedroom and opened the wardrobe. I knew I had to approach Thomas directly. At midday Lucien had Junior League cricket. I would take the car to the garage, then give Thomas an ultimatum: “Stop this!” I would yell, “or I’ll leave town! I’ll finish teaching your child, and all the others!” I opened the wardrobe and looked through my clothes. Everything seemed so dowdy. Thomas said he liked the way I dressed: it was probably the antithesis of his wife’s style, but I wanted to confront him with more sophistication. I held up a shirt with a low neckline, posing.