A Child's Book of True Crime (22 page)

“Only my coloring?” I pouted.

“Actually, I’m surprised no one’s called late at night to tell you what it does say!”

I stood up, but felt myself sinking. I saw the sharks’ jaws mounted on the wall and felt myself falling. “Are you all right?” His voice sounded far away. Outside the mackerel sky revealed its slipperiness. But inside, blue washed over the tables, the chairs. Surrounded by pieces of boats, long wrecked, were we actually underwater? I took a slow heavy
step and heard laughter. All the rumbling sounds were close up. Everything faint now rang in my ears. A school of tiny, bright fish swam past me, following each other in a straight line; they changed direction suddenly, as if negotiating a sharp corner. But of course—I was in a box of blue water. People were hovering on the other side of the pane. I could feel the gaze of bloated strangers. It was no big deal: I was drowning while everybody watched.

• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •

“And what should I laugh at?”

T
he old kookaburra saw Miss Byrne stumbling around Lucien’s house. Kingsley’s beak no longer shone jet, and the royal blue of his plumage was fading; still, he knew trouble when he saw it. “That lad’s teacher is behaving very badly,” Kingsley spat. “If Lucien’s parents separate, the child could suffer years of reunion fantasies—believing all the time if he had behaved a little better, if he hadn’t asked so many questions or fussed over his chores, his mummy and daddy might’ve stayed together! If Mr. and Mrs. Marne divorce,” the kookaburra screamed, “their son will probably
flunk out of school, having learned too early he has no control over the world around him!”

Kingsley turned sharply. He heard it. The rutting.

In the branch above, two pygmy possums, their infinitesimal parts barely swollen, made ridiculous grunts. One branch higher were brushtail possums. These simpering creatures all had cat faces, but were centaurs below the waist. Launching themselves from drey to drey, the filthy acrobats spread their limbs, rubbing scalding secretions under the chin, the chest, around the anus to mark their territory. The kookaburra tried to concentrate on the prowling schoolteacher, but it was nigh impossible. The honey possums, with their extensile tongues, were lashing the nectar from every sweet blossom. Sexually dimorphic, their females were bigger than the menfolk, taking what they wanted from these gigolos with unsated itching lust! Echoing all around were the screeches of worlds ending. And everyone expected him to laugh it off: “Merry, merry king of the bush is he!” But his flunkies and lackeys, all of them were fornicating. Oh, this tree, his palace, was a bestiary! Each branch strained and groaned—the din would deafen him!

Kingsley wrapped his wings around his head. He felt his feathers wet with tears before he even realized he was crying. The bushland gang on the ground below: all of them were like displaced nobility. The weeping kookaburra turned, and on a nearby leaf saw a worm sitting by himself. “Come, let’s away to prison,” the old bird whispered. “When thou dost ask my blessing, I’ll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness.” His stomach slackened.
“So we’ll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh,” he told the worm, “. . . and take upon’s the mystery of things as if we were God’s spies.” Kingsley thought of Terence Tiger with his old-world dignity. The thylacine kept his coat superbly clean despite his poverty, but did he not realize that in the future there wouldn’t be detection as he’d known it? Sleuthing would be left to the scientists, rushing to the crime scene to get everyone’s DNA. “Oh,” the bird whispered, “and we’ll wear out, in a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon . . .”

Through his tears, Kingsley realized the boy’s schoolteacher carried a knife. It glinted in the moonlight as she walked through the Marnes’ garden. “Lucien,” the kookaburra cried, “Hide! Hide!” Above, clouds were backlit by a moon-face dumb with pleasure. Cloud-lovers kissed; cloud-lovers fought; then there was the very sharpest of cloud-weapons. Kingsley Kookaburra groaned: “Why should I laugh?” he asked the worm. “And what should I laugh at? Men and their pomposity? Should I laugh at men in their wretchedness? At their limitless capacity to ignore their own callow stupidity? I am an old king! I am an old king!” He raised his feathers till they fanned behind, a mangy ceremonial cape. “If I should laugh it will be because nothing,” he cried, “nothing at all is even remotely amusing!”

I
T WAS DIFFICULT
judging the distance of my feet from the ground and each step was heavier than I expected. The Marnes’ house, white and modern, was immaculate but the garden overgrown. A dry branch grabbed at my ankle. I cried out, but Thomas’s music was playing. It hid any sounds of drowning. I’d asked the children once what it would be like to live underwater.
What do you think you would eat? What would you wear?
At first their impressions were fairly standard:
We’d eat fish. We’d wear our bathing suits
. But before long, warmed up, all of them were straining their arms, hands in the air, desperate to give their impressions. The teacher would be a tortoise—a “taught-us.” They would sunbathe on the waterspouts of whales. Survival only required buying gills from the kiosk, and once you’d dived down you’d see that
people who live underwater walk as if they are flying
. Mermen in seaweed suits hailed whale taxis. Mothers carried shopping bags made of woven fishbones. Octopus chefs sliced, diced, boiled, broiled. And old men tended their coral beds.
Underwater bullets can’t hurt anyone
, but, just in case, prisoners were locked in sharks’ jaws.

Henry had looked up at me, batting his lashes. “Can I write anything?”

“Of course you can write anything.”

“Can I write this?” he’d added, smirking.

I’d looked down at his page:
Underwater I saw the techer with no clothes on
. “Teacher has an
a
after the
e
,” I’d told him.

Walking through the Marnes’ scratching grass, I now wondered how much of this disrespect had been based on evidence. In many of the children’s opening sentences they had disposed of the school’s teachers using a trained pack of killer sharks.
When they bug me I click my fingers and a great white takes chunks off them;
but even the greatest revolutionaries can’t escape their bourgeois hearts. Although the underwater teachers had presumably all been fatally mauled, these fourth-graders still diligently went to school, and sat at coral desks writing on rocks with sharks’ teeth. At lunchtime they planned to eat seaweed doughnuts. In music they would play the recorder:
a fish with holes in it
. During sport, everyone could catch the ball, because it would come toward them so slowly,
unless someone went fishing and popped it.
Then, at the end of the day, they’d ride whale buses home, or be picked up in underwater Ferraris that only drove at a few kilometers an hour.

A wall steadied me: through the Marnes’ thin curtains I could count each petal springing from a vase; every detail on a chair’s leg was carefully replicated. Their furniture looked like a cast of refined shadow puppets waiting for an audience. I continued following their side fence. The house was built on a slope. The back room was elevated and glass doors opened out onto a wooden deck level with my shoulders. Through a wide gap of curtain I could see the walls were perfectly white. There was not one painting. It was as bland as a
hotel room or one of the serviced apartments where businesspeople stay. In one corner sat a blond-wood kitchen table, a set of chairs. In another, a navy blue couch and matching armchair taken straight from a catalogue. This furniture wouldn’t get up to dance when the Marnes went to bed. The table and chairs clearly didn’t have souls.

Thomas walked into the room. He picked up a glass and took a sip. It was the simplest thing anyone could do: I watched transfixed. Each muscle in his face, each tiny twitch, seemed unadulterated and therefore mesmerizing. He raised the glass to his lips, then turned sharply as if being called. He straightened up, but didn’t move away. I wondered what I was seeing. He was as he really was, although he looked exactly the same. Thomas put the glass down and walked through a doorway.

I followed slowly. Trees, planted too close to the walls, scratched at my bare arms. “You have split me open,” I whispered to him. The music he’d chosen was low and gentle. I clung to the dark wall and stifled a moan: close by, through a slit of curtain, Veronica was in their kitchen. She was taking white plates out of the dishwasher. She’d bend over to pull out a plate and would then reach up putting it inside a cupboard. She wore leggings and an oversized shirt. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun. She was scowling. Thomas must have been standing there with her, for now she was saying something. She repeated the sequence, but he didn’t move to help. She scowled again, as if listening, and picked up another plate. Then turning, the plate in her hand, she interrupted him.

Each different ending to
Murder at Black Swan Point
, I’d
imagined in the pub, was a Rorschach of Thomas’s, Veronica’s, and my separate desires. Veronica, her face furious and tired, was wishing now for her ending of choice. She had captured Black Swan Point’s crime the way the camera can steal a soul, enlarging or shrinking any detail to suit her purposes. Investigating the Suicide Cliffs, her long hair billowing in the breeze, she’d meant to conjure the desperation a once-gentle woman would feel after committing a brutal murder. Veronica walked around, strangely cheerful. When she noticed an appropriate cliff she gave herself the thumbs-up. In her secret heart she imagined her antiheroine slaying the nubile rival with relish, then disappearing: Margot would fly to a safe sunny place for a new life, Medea rescued by the sun god, and she would never again feel cold, and everyone would love her.

Veronica took another plate from the dishwasher. Then another. Then another. Voyeurism turns on the slow burn of waiting for something to happen; perhaps all perversity comes gift-wrapped, so to speak, in the banal. I stood by a large lavender bush, watching her, as I inhaled lungfuls of cool night air. I can smell your flowers, I thought. In a secret chamber of my heart I wished Veronica had written an extra chapter. I preferred thinking that after the young girl was knifed to death, the wife came home, hoping to inherit her old life, and the grief-stricken husband put his hands around her throat and, as I’ve suggested, avenged the girl’s death. While his wife was unconscious, he threw her from a cliff, so she could drown the way Ellie had drowned, when the knife blow to her chest filled her lung cavity with blood.

Veronica’s face was angry. She threw her hands in the air,
shaking her head again, and again. Then she started on the cutlery. She shelved the teaspoons first, then the tablespoons. Being boring is the exhibitionist’s alibi, but the Marnes were half-expecting me. There was an inevitability to this visit and the music had been selected to reel me in. It seemed to be saying, “Come closer and you’ll know too.” I ignored each note’s little plea. I was visiting because it seemed only fair, given our entanglement, that they should learn first of my intention to leave Endport Primary School. There were endless ways the community could have found out about the affair. According to Malcolm, the pub’s toilet wall intimated I was sleeping with half the fathers in Endport. In theory it could’ve been any disgruntled citizen who had been harassing me. Although this did not mean I suddenly trusted the Marnes; in fact far from it. Now that I would no longer be around to serve as a target, I worried for their son.

Turning from the window, I shook my head. There was no area for Lucien to play, let alone a swing or a trampoline. This house was no place to raise a young boy. It was severe and cold and symptomatic of the Marnes’ parenting. Lucien gave new definition to the term “only child.” His sophistication was the way he survived living with two adults, but uncensored, his desires were just as juvenile as anyone else’s. When I’d asked him to describe life underwater he’d been leaning low, his head almost on the page. This was his secret business. This was his own true-crime story.

The polar icecaps melted and all the boats sank, and all the oxygen masks sank. Underwater, 4B went on a ride called Dead People. Mummies, ghosts, and skeletons off an ancient
shipwreck came alive. A ghost gave Danielle face powder and lipstick made of toxic waste—DDT—so her face fell off in bloody, revolting chunks. Then one of the boys, Darren, wet his pants, and a mummy took a swordfish and cut Darren into tiny pieces for human sushi! OH NO! Alastair was crying like a girl, so a Hammerhead bonged him on the head, and ate him in one bite. (Inside the shark, Alastair found a bicycle and a horse; and also some other kids. Soon Anaminka was swallowed and they all had a play together.)

The water was full of blood, and eyeballs, and little bits of guts. Then the shark did a giant burp. (It was like a gale-force wind.) And Billy’s body was smashed apart by sheer stinking-force! Eliza and Henry were just lying there like frozen pieces of coma. But luckily, all through this, I was holding onto the Hammerhead’s fin. He took me to buy food and toys . . . And then, the next thing I knew I was a great big shark too. And it was like I was battery-controlled, destroying everything in sight. I was eating up my teacher and even my Mum and my Dad. (It was fun.) I just kept on gulping people and destroying houses until everything was gone, even seaweed. But then I heard a sound. It was Sir Henry Shark-Killer: the greatest shark killer in history!