A Child's Book of True Crime (25 page)

Miss Byrne:
It sounds like you think there are white lies, as well as black lies. And maybe gray lies.

Eliza:
And pink lies.

Billy:
And yellow lies.

And they all yelled out the colors of their favorite mistruths. I sat still and let this rainbow arch over me. I admired their slapdash sense of morality. Their mix of amorality and integrity. Their innocence and sophistication—in essence, the childness and adultness of them. Their advocacy of balance seemed quite sensible: you couldn’t have too much lying, and you couldn’t have too much truth. Not too much good, nor too much evil. I thought of the last few days. You couldn’t have too much dream; and no one should have too much reality.

The bell rang but the children were slow to join the others in the playground. Perhaps they sensed that when they returned I’d be gone. Clutching her lunchbox, Eliza approached my desk. She stared down and said sadly, “You can’t make a perfect world, I don’t think.”

“You might be right, Eliza.” Leaning over to shake her hand, I tried to smile. Each child then came forward and, one by one, they put their hands in mine. I pretended we were delegates at a special conference, one that had tried to explore the nature of truth. “Plato believed that in an ideal society we would be ruled by philosophers.” There was a tremble in my throat. “If I could make a perfect world,” I promised, “you guys would get the top jobs.”

All of them were pleased by this possibility; they were already doling out its privileges as they each passed through the vandalized “door of knowledge.” In seconds they would
be screaming down the slide. They’d be bellowing from the trees, playing a game involving twigs with made-up rules. How many of them could legitimately claim
I KNOW
with any glory, I didn’t want to speculate. Some had learned things in my class; others had just felt the labor pains. To them I whispered: “May you never know.” I thought of Lucien. Thomas and Veronica might have been open with each other all along, but their son had discovered I had a sex apprenticeship with his father through his classmates. How convenient to have imagined they would not find out.
Children find out!
Children should have their own intelligence agency. They’re the greatest eavesdroppers, the greatest spies: they watch and sense what’s really going on, reading every nuance.

Removing my desk drawers I dumped any evidence into the bin. I swiftly wiped from the blackboard every trace of my hand. Then I stood in the doorway looking back at the classroom. Last Friday, during lunch, Lucien must have taken a key so as to scratch with fear, with fury, with glee his message to me, as I lay on a four-poster bed, pretending to be someone else. I had realized that I was not the girl in the book. Veronica and Thomas’s relationship may have mirrored the ill-fated Harveys, but I was not Eleanor Siddell. She could have been played by the last girl Thomas had humiliated his wife with, or perhaps the girl before that, or the girl to come. Doomed girls, all over the world, kiss good-bye the ones they love to go and practice brinkmanship. What these princesses afraid-of-nothing do not immediately realize is that they are leaving home to learn fear. Eleanor Siddell left her father’s house, “but how far have I come,” she mused, “living in his other house?” No wonder she wanted to get a
little bit killed. She wanted to kill off the part of herself that was weakest:
Close my eyes, so I won’t see this rosebud wallpaper I picked when I was seven. Kiss me and take away the china ornaments. Instill oblivion in every fornication; make me like a missing person, in your secret way, only promise to bring it all back after so many minutes.

 • • • 

Lying all around Point Puer were bricks. Every few steps I came across another orange-yellow brick made by the boys. This site would have been the perfect place for a stoning, were it not so serene. Agapanthus sprung up, purple and white; wildflowers grew all around the rubble; a pond was covered with water lilies, each petal still more exquisite.

I felt it shouldn’t be so beautiful, but it was. I felt I should imagine the boys stepping from the ship’s hulk, taking their first drunken steps, but my mind rebelled. No one now really knew how the children’s prison would have looked. On the western side of Point Puer, over the water, lay Port Arthur and, along farther, Dead Island, with its eucalyptus and gravestones. The point itself had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality. The remnants of a granite wall rose to support nothing. A stone basement was full of leaves and dank rainwater. The bay in which the convict children had washed was pure primary blue, but beside it piles of their bricks were cordoned off with wire and the yellow tape of a crime scene.

This was where bad children ended up. I walked toward Point Puer’s eastern side, along the track leading to the Suicide Cliffs. As a child, I’d heard about the convict boys linking hands and throwing themselves to the sharks. Clasping a
branch, I now took a step forward. Maybe the first stories we are told are the ones we find our way back to. “I often think of the old nursery rhymes,” my grandmother told me before she died.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
—all the men who rise so high fall down.”

Cliffs unrolled in every direction. From a distance they claimed the same easy curves as the clouds above. Close up, they were stark vertical walls of granite; ramparts the waves had battered flat. Shelves of rock, like diving boards or planks, jutted from the cliff face. I stepped forward again.
“Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle.
Well, they’ve got cats now that can play a little violin.
The little dog laughed to see such fun, and the dish ran away with the spoon.
They can train dogs to laugh, you know. And I’ve seen the dish move away, just slightly, then the spoon stirring it.”

At the very edge of the cliff, trees grew horizontally; the stone was pockmarked. Staring across the water, I turned back half expecting to catch a boy’s shadow disappearing behind a tree. There was creaking in all the high branches, but the rock-a-bye babies were long gone. This book for Lucien: a bird would have to sing it to him. He’d have to walk outside one day and hear rain drumming or see the light slanted just so. In Russia when the adults had finally awoken, the storytellers and illustrators had been punished, horribly. A famous artist was sent to Siberia, where she developed gangrene and lost both her legs. A writer, to avoid being captured, hanged herself in her apartment. Between each line in these books there must be another story, which has to be imagined, written in blood. Always true, this blood story will haunt you and keep you awake, and the grown-ups should never know of it.

Waves now rose like walls of glass, then shattered, leaving smashed shells—or the ground-up bones of suicides—by my feet. Wind stung at my face and I stood feeling faint. This was the windiest place in the whole world. Wind blew straight from Antarctica and still the horizon’s line looked flat. From miles away all the waves rocked in with their ancient come-on, that old tease:
I-might-not-break
. If the sea is a crib endlessly rocking, don’t tell me the bough won’t rot, baby won’t fall. How can you look down without some awareness of the end’s proximity, and not be slightly seduced? Close your eyes: listen to the sea. You’re so near to it—the cradle and the grave—even if you never want to die.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges Doug Dibbern, Alex Halberstadt, John Wray, Juliet O’Conor of the State Library of Victoria, Nigel Hargraves of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Historical Research, and the very inspiring teacher and brilliant fourth-grade students who shared their philosophical insights.

A C
HILD’S
B
OOK OF
T
RUE
C
RIME

S
UMMARY

A Child’s Book of True Crime
is a remarkable first novel by Australian Chloe Hooper. Set in Tasmania, the narrative centers on Kate, a young primary-school teacher who is having an affair with Thomas, the father of a precocious student. Thomas’s wife meanwhile has published a successful book of true crime about the brutal killing of a young adulteress, set in a nearby town. When Kate’s own life begins to resonate with echoes of the infamous local murder, she suspects that her rival’s account may be incorrect. Caught between the world of her young students and her very adult life outside the classroom, Kate imagines her own version of the book of true crime, this one written for children but filled with a violence that is unmistakably adult.

D
ISCUSSION
Q
UESTIONS

1. As a primary-school teacher, Kate straddles the world of adults and the world of children. How do her personality and behavior reflect this split? How does her version of the Black Swan Point murder story mix the two worlds? Do other characters in the novel have elements of both maturity and childishness?

2.
 “I liked reading children their stories. And I liked the stories: dogs and cats had magic powers; nasty people suffered slapstick doom. The world seemed manageable, its scale of anarchy to my liking”
. What does Kate’s fondness for children’s stories illustrate? How does the world within these stories differ from the world she encounters outside the classroom?

3. Compare Kate’s version of the Black Swan Point murder story to what we know of Veronica’s version. What are the key differences? What do these differences suggest about the two women? What might Kate’s description of Veronica’s book suggest about Kate?

4.
 “Everyone should have one great secret to carry around as a talisman. Then, when people look at you, thinking
she’s like this,
or
she’s only this,
they’ll always be wrong”
. The quote above is from the passage in which Kate is exploring the psychology of Ellie, the young mistress in
Murder at Black Swan Point
. How does Kate’s thinking differ from Ellie’s? How is it similar?

5.
 “Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to: atom by atom. Untainted by a hundred other learned horrors, they are haunted for the appropriate length of time. They ask a thousand unanswerable questions. The story stays with them; they dream of it”
. What does it mean to understand tragedy “atom by atom”? Why are adults unable to do so? Is there something cruel about telling children crime stories, which they will then vividly imagine? Are there elements of cruelty in Kate’s nature?

6.
 “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”
. Consider the ways in which the setting—both geographical and natural—contributes to the overall effect of the novel. How does the author use the surrounding of a particular scene to enhance the narrative?

7. Discuss the scene in which Kate drives off the road in the old Mercedes and has to seek help from a local man. What makes this scene so unsettling? How does the author achieve such tension? How does this scene relate to the rest of the novel?

8. Images and stories of sex permeate the novel, as do images and tales of death. What does the author suggest about the relationship between sex—especially illicit sex—and violence or death?