A Child's Book of True Crime (2 page)

I ignored him. “How is your wife’s book being received?”

“It’s selling well.”

Glossy copies of
Murder at Black Swan Point,
which detailed Ellie Siddell’s bizarre 1983 murder, lined the windows of all Tasmania’s bookstores. On the cover a row of swans swam in formation; all black but for one, which was bloodred. Then there was the title in white scrawl—after you mutilate someone, apparently, your handwriting turns to shit. It was supposed to look as if a psychopath, holding a piece of chalk in his fist, suddenly decided to scrape the title along a prison wall.

I stared out the window. In the book’s photos Ellie Siddell was a slightly awkward girl, always smiling. I’d grown up in Hobart with girls like Ellie. Girls hardwired to be sunny, even if they were cast out—at some crucial fourteen-year-old moment—for still being
so
immature. I imagined, later, when all the girls were seventeen and about to finish school, Ellie was mysteriously forgiven; and, more than that, deemed beloved by her former torturers for being so funny and dopey, for reacting to their teasing with a delayed, but full-blooming blush. Ellie, oddly drowsy, with a walk so languid, just before anyone realized a slow, sleepy walk might carry great appeal. She finished school badly and went to stay at her parents’ country house, to look after their horses. The vet offered her a part-time job, and her parents gave their approval. The vet was upstanding. They knew him and his wife; she came from
an old family. And Ellie had always loved animals. She’d brought countless baby birds home, feeding them honey with an eyedropper. She’d constructed leaf hospital wards for ill caterpillars. Her parents hoped this job would be good for her confidence. Their big girl. Their big, sweet girl—Dr. Harvey would look after her. He would stand right behind her at the end of the day, taking her pretty hands in his and washing them carefully in the sink as Ellie giggled. Then he’d unbutton her blouse one button at a time, with wet fingers, before leading her into the reception area to lay her down on the couch.

 • • • 

“Put your shoes on, will you.” The car slowed again, and we drove through a high wrought-iron gate into a circular driveway. White gravel crunched under the tires; a flurry of pebbles rose like sea spray. I caught my breath. In front of us loomed a white mansion with a wide veranda. It had been built for Tasmanian gentlefolk in the 1870s, then converted to a luxury bed-and-breakfast a century later. The building was brimming with pride: a gingerbread house, iced lovingly, bordered by candy-boughed trees. If you tried to break off a little cornice to snack on you’d be scolded.

“It’s lovely.”

“Yes, it is,” said Thomas. “This is probably the most beautiful house in southern Tasmania.” He stared into the rearview mirror, clearly agitated. “We should hurry, there isn’t much time.”

While he parked the car around the back, I walked toward the reception area. Topiary love hearts may as well have grown by the door. Management may as well have hired a fiddler.
Inside, the walls were painted a startling apricot. I cleared my throat. The receptionist, her blond hair in a neat bun, was also in her early twenties; she stood behind a sort of lectern.

“Do you have a double bed?” I asked efficiently. Of course, I hadn’t meant to ask that. I had meant to ask for a double room.

“Let me check.” She didn’t smile. “How long will you be wanting to stay?”

“We’re not absolutely . . . we’re just, just not absolutely sure.”

The Persian rug gave a slight electric shock. I glanced at the potpourri arranged in crystal dishes; the lace doily and single rose on each of the dining room’s tables. Then I turned. A three-legged cat was dragging itself sideways up the black-wood staircase. The receptionist tapped her fountain pen against the register: the cat lifted its two front legs up a step, then hauled up the third leg. I could hear Thomas cautioning, “This is just a fuck.” But as the chandelier sent confetti light across the high-gloss walls, I wondered if his warnings were directed not to me, but to himself. The cat made its turnoff. And the receptionist, tapping her pen, noted that almost every room was vacant. She looked offended as she licked her finger, with its shiny buffed nail, and counted Thomas’s cash. “If your stay is cut short, if you don’t stay the
night
,” she enunciated carefully, “please leave the key on the desk.”

 • • • 

It took me a moment adjusting to all the Victoriana. I’d been imagining a motel room: mirrors with 3
A.M.
pores, a notepad by the phone full of strangers’ doodles. Instead there
was a spinning wheel in one corner and a four-poster bed. Whoever had decorated felt they understood wallpaper very intimately. Even the light switch was bordered with a lacy pattern, even the row of gilt picture frames. The frames, suspended with pink velvet ribbon, contained sepia photographs of children, all ringlets and rose-tinted cheeks, posing next to a penny-farthing bicycle, a rocking horse.

“Darling, it’s perfect,” Thomas said, grinning. He excused himself and disappeared through the door stenciled in sweeping cursive:
Lavatory
. When I was alone, I walked over to the dried flower arrangement. Above the brittle petals was a mirror, with a short young woman inside its frame. She looked like she’d broken into her mother’s makeup case, trying to make her eyes more almond-shaped. Someone had shown her a curling wand and her dark hair was tousled expertly on one side, but the other—where she’d practiced—lay flat. Behind the flowers, like the consolation prize, hid a plastic kettle, coffee sachets, and a mini-packet of cookies. Opening up the cellophane wrapping, I stuffed both the cream-centered biscuits in my mouth. I could hear Thomas whistling. He whistled well.

When we first started trysting he played music that, he said, reminded him of me. He brought sweet things: chocolate mice and gingerbread men (waiting to see where I took the first bite). Once he gave me a box of perfect peaches. Then, handing over a knife, he requested that I let him watch. “Pretend you’re alone,” he said. And this seemed hilarious. I camped it up, eating peach straight off the knife; rubbing the fruit on my wrists like cologne. I thought this was the game itself—and that by pretending to be sexy I was
canceling out any sexiness. Another theory proved wrong. After I dissected the peach he still wanted to undress me.

The toilet flushed. I crammed the cellophane behind the kettle, and Thomas reemerged, moving impatiently to draw the lace curtains. My heart was beating fast. I stood in the room, my mouth full of vanilla cookie crumbs, watching him. I needed to brush my teeth, but my thoughts were on loop;
it’s too late to leave, to pretend to feel ill.
Downstairs I heard somebody laugh. Reticence had arrived to match the wallpaper. For a split second, my new modesty made me want to call my parents, and ask them to come and pick me up.

“Aren’t these dried flowers pretty?”

“Yes.” Wet fingers started to unbutton my shirt. “They’re pretty.”

I wished I really were a little girl. Little children can transform themselves from magic birds into flying strongmen. At play, children wear intense expressions and make a range of hero noises; common is the windy
vroom-vroom
of their invisible jet plane’s ignition, the
neeeow
or
p-queeww
of lasers shooting from soft fingertips. Running with their arms stretched straight ahead, the children become the most powerful and beautiful—the most super—people in the universe. They believe the ordinary properties of objects irrelevant; for example, this Victorian four-poster, covered in cream lace, could have been a hospital bed. Typical social roles didn’t necessarily shape the imagined world either, so Thomas could have been a doctor who was giving me a checkup; and speaking out of turn when, reaching my black-and-pink bra, he said casually, “That’s a nice print.”

The bed was huge, pneumatic. A reproduction mahogany
stepladder clung to its quilted flanks. Thomas held my hand and I walked up the steps. He then undressed himself, looking all the time so serious. He took off his business shirt; he unzipped his trousers. Before we made love he would always hang his trousers, and then I had to close my eyes. It was too much seeing him standing there in high, black business socks. “Just smile a little”—he thought he had to be stern with me; he’d told me that. Otherwise I didn’t treat things with enough gravitas. We’d get into bed and I’d start to laugh. “Just smile a little because we are both about to be naked.”

Thomas had the tanned legs and white arse of a summer person. His body was not like the boys’ bodies with their easy muscles I’d seen before; but in the blue light, the lines on his face were almost smoothed away. As we kissed I tried to taste his age. His lips were unexpectedly soft. He smelled smoky although he did not smoke.

“How do I look?” I asked, teasing.

He shook his head. “Gorgeous.”

“Do I look
lush
?” Lush seemed like a better thing to look.

“No,” he said firmly, “you’re gorgeous.” He covered my eyes, his hand scented with almond soap. “What can you see?”

“Your palm. It smells of marzipan.”

I was supposed to whisper to him. He liked this. He liked this even though my story lines were simple:
We’re in a meadow surrounded by poppies,
I used to tell him in the beginning.
Can you feel the petals against your skin?
Or:
We’re on a train and the sun is coming up, flickering through the trees.
Now the content had changed. I said things he must have wanted to hear because these things shocked me. The Puritans, all busily fornicating through a hole in a white sheet, had the right aesthetic.
If you acknowledged this enterprise was dirty and wicked from the start, no one had to try to be transgressive.

Thomas kissed my neck. “Where do you think we are?”

“I don’t know.”

He sounded impatient. “Do you think it’s
hot
 . . . where we are?”

I closed my eyes. Outside, cars were driving along the highway. There was a kind of roar every time they passed the house’s force field, so constant it was like listening to the sea. “Pretend I’m holding a shell to your ear,” I whispered. “Do you hear the static?”

“Yes,” he moaned quietly.

I rolled on top of him. “What should I do with the shell?”

“Put it down. Dance for me.”

I laughed.

“Dance, I would like that.”

We were high off the ground. It wasn’t dark enough, and the room smelled odd. I closed my eyes. Humming a line of music, I raised my hands above my head.

“Move your hips.”

I hummed the music and rocked back and forward, dancing. If I had opened my eyes I might have seen him smiling. In this room, strangely blue, I was making him happy. I always wanted to make him happy, then some part of me rebelled. “There’s a fringe of seaweed knotted round my waist.” I rose a little and, arching my back, suggested slowly, “I’m very close. Each bauble brushes your face as I swivel my hips.” I thought further; “There’s a rainbow bird on my bare shoulder.”

A moment of silence. Introducing the parrot, I realized, was the first mistake.

Thomas gazed at me with an intense, hungry look. He inhaled. “Little girl, I can smell your skirt.”

I brushed hair from my eyes. “And does it smell of sea air?”

“Yes.”

“Does it smell
salty
?”

“Aha”—he smiled—“a dusky scent.”

I ran my hands along his chest. “Pretend you’ve captured me and taken me to your island of black swans . . .” I leaned down and whispered, so close my lips touched his earlobe: “And the sun is beating down on us. And no one can see us lying here, only the animals and they’re all fucking, too!” I giggled. “It’s like a zoo of fornication!” I sat up again and raised my arms, like wings, above my head. “The black swans, their feathers are beating against the water—
beat, beat, beat
—and the girl swan is shrieking
No! No!
and the boy swan, his red eyes are so intense.” I curved my arm, hiding behind it like a cape. “And when she folds her long neck under her grand wing”—I paused—“it looks like she’s been beheaded . . .”

“That’s not funny.” He sighed and jerked slightly, forcing me to roll off him.

“It was a joke!” I clutched his arm, then lay still, annoyed. “A little joke.” Light seeped in the curtains’ edges. We lay next to each other in the half dark, listening to the cars passing by on the highway. Cicadas continued their slow drone, and I felt bad. Thomas looked like a young boy with skinny muscles on his arms and undeveloped pectorals. I was lying in bed with a little boy. In this game his age kept morphing: sometimes when he kissed me he looked ridiculously old. So old that he started to look young again; because he had the pleading expression, tinged with the beginnings of disappointment,
that a child with ridiculous faith uses on an adult. The potpourri, all the floral wallpaper, was still Romance, wasn’t it? Despite his high regard for amorality, he couldn’t help being kind. Usually we trysted in the house where I was living; my family’s old beach house. This was his attempt to make renting a room nicer for me.

“Are you angry?”

“No,” he said, quietly.

“Thomas, seriously, can you smell something?”

“It’s rising damp.” He got out of bed, slowly, as if he had a sore rib. “This place was probably built on swampy land.” He reached over for the complimentary bathrobe, a brown, terry-cloth model hanging from a hook on the lavatory door.

“You’re the man with the furry tan,” I told him as he slipped it on.

He smiled thinly and, walking into the bathroom, left me in the whirlpool of sheets. I lay completely still, listening to the water running. Had he been here with her? If I checked the guest book would Veronica have written some soppy note full of exclamation marks?
Olde worlde charm! This brought the magic back after 11 years of marriage! Thanks!
Or else something literary about rage and potpourri. Or else something completely self-serving:

Female killers are more fascinating and more repulsive—
koob ym yub
—even though you’d think women would make better killers because they’re so used to blood. They know what blood feels like on their skin or their skirts, women know how quickly it spreads everywhere and how to clean it out of clothes
—KOOB YM YUB
—always use cold water; get to the stain quickly.