Rocking Horse Road
Read Rocking Horse Road Online
Authors: Carl Nixon
Carl Nixon is a full-time writer of fiction and plays. His first book,
Fish 'n' Chip Shop Song and Other Stories
(Vintage, 2006) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book, South East Asia and South Pacific category. Recent works for the stage include adaptations of Lloyd Jones' Deutz Medal winner
The Book of Fame
and J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize winner
Disgrace
. In 2006 Carl held the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury (supported by Creative New Zealand). He lives in Christchurch with his young family.
Carl Nixon
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 9781869790936
Version 1.0
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Nixon, Carl, 1967-
Rocking Horse Road / Carl Nixon.
I. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
A VINTAGE BOOK
published by
Random House New Zealand
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
www.randomhouse.co.nz
Random House International
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London, SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd
20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,
New South Wales 2061, Australia
Random House South Africa Pty Ltd
Isle of Houghton
Corner Boundary Road and Carse O'Gowrie
Houghton 2198, South Africa
Random House Publishers India Private Ltd
301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex,
Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India
First published 2007. Reprinted 2007
© 2007 Carl Nixon
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN: 9781869790936
Version 1.0
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
For Rebecca, Alice and Fenton
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
While New Brighton and the Spit are real places, their
existence in my novel owes as much to my impressions
and memories of the area as it does to that suburb's
actual geography or history. The people, though —
schoolboys, schoolgirls, teachers, parents, Springbok
tour supporters and anti-tour marchers — are products
of my imagination. They are not based on any real
people either living or dead.
This novel was written while I was the Ursula Bethell
Creative New Zealand writer in residence at
Canterbury University. Without the residency it would
not have been completed. Parts of the novel have
appeared in
The Press
, January 2007, and in
The Best
New Zealand Fiction Volume 3,
edited by Fiona Kidman
(Vintage, 2006). My thanks to the following for their
support and advice: Professor Patrick Evans, Dr
Caroline Foster, Paul Duignan, Gillian Newman of
UBS, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. And thanks also to
my editor Claire Gummer, and my always enthusiastic
publisher Harriet Allan.
. . . you have searched me out and
known me:
you know when I sit down and when
I stand up,
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You mark my path, and the places where
I rest;
You are acquainted with all my ways.
If I take the wings of the dawn
and alight at the uttermost parts
of the sea,
even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand will hold me fast.
Psalm 139
It was Pete Marshall who found Lucy's naked body
down on the beach, near the end of Rocking Horse
Road. Almost three decades have passed since then,
and a whole century has come to a close, but we can
still tell you exactly where Lucy was lying. Her body
was at the foot of the sand dunes where the high tide
had discarded her, close to the sign warning people
about tidal rips and swimming near the deep channel
that connects the estuary to the ocean and marks the
end of the Spit. Right from the very beginning, it was
obvious that neither of these mundane dangers had
killed Lucy Asher.
It was December the twenty-first, 1980, a Sunday
and four days before Christmas. It was half past seven
in the morning. The summer was already shaping up
to be one of the hottest anyone could remember. The
sky was clear and the sand already warm to the touch.
That day was always going to be a scorcher.
The dunes were (and still are) criss-crossed with
paths both official and improvised, but Pete ignored
them all and ran the most direct way back to the road.
He stuck to the sandy ridges, leaping hollows and
crashing though lupins until, panting like a dog, he
arrived at Jase Harbidge's door. Jase's dad was Senior
Sergeant Bill Harbidge, who in a few minutes would
himself be running behind Pete over the dunes,
wearing faded shorts, his shoelaces lashing his ankles
and a white shirt, snatched from the clothesline,
flapping open around him.
'Like a big white albatross' was how Pete described
him, years later. 'I remember him bounding down
the face of the last dune and it seemed to me that he
might take off into the sky. I guess I was pretty freaked
out.'
We have often discussed how there had been an
unusually high tide the night before. Not a storm, just
a very high tide with larger-than-normal waves. Big
swells had barrelled across the southern Pacific in
the darkness before rising up and breaking one after
another after another against the beach. Each one was
ushered in by a stiff easterly wind. In retrospect, it's
easy to give events a significance they didn't have at
the time but, in the days immediately following the
discovery of Lucy's body, several of us recalled lying
in our beds and listening to the waves rolling into
the beach that night. We had imagined them eating
away at the dunes that were the only defence our
homes had against the ocean. The wavesound was
a dull background roar we had grown up with but,
nevertheless, could not entirely shut out. We could
hear it over our teachers' voices as we sat in class,
and as we ate our lunches in the sandy grounds of
South Brighton High School. The sound rose above
the chatter of our brothers and sisters as we ate at our
kitchen tables. It was the soundtrack to our awkward
adolescence. But to more than one of us, as we lay in
our rooms on the night Lucy Asher was murdered,
the sound of the waves seemed to have deepened and
become mournful. An endless train going by in the
darkness, cursed to be always passing, never gone.
Standing in the Harbidges' doorway, Pete told Bill
Harbidge that he'd been down on the beach at half
past seven that morning walking his dog. It wasn't
a very convincing story — for a start, Pete's family
didn't own a dog. Later that day, during the official
police interview, Pete changed his story. Not that
anybody noticed. Pete was not being treated as a
suspect. We have a copy of the police report (
Exhibit
2
). Pete claimed, for the record, that he was down on
the beach jogging to get fit for the rugby season. At
least his revised version of events bore
some
scrutiny.
Pete did play for our school's under-sixteen team,
although nobody began training that late in the year.
It is doubtful whether even an All Black would have
been out pounding the sand at half past seven in the
morning four days before Christmas.
Pete confessed to us, several days later, that he'd
actually been in the dunes retrieving a copy of
Penthouse
he'd pilfered from his older brother (Tony Marshall
who would, in a few months' time, join the navy and
vanish from the Spit and from our lives). Pete had
hidden the magazine — along with half a block of milk
chocolate shoplifted from Lucy's parents' dairy, and
some suntan oil — in a metal tackle-box he'd buried
in a natural amphitheatre in the dunes. The place was
surrounded by tall lupins and was almost impossible
for the uninitiated to find unless they stumbled across
it. Some of us used it as a meeting place, though that
morning Pete had been alone.
So why had he gone up to the top of the dunes?
When we asked, Pete said he didn't know. He just
wanted to look. At the waves? At the risen sun? At the
first surfers who, like dark seals, were paddling out
to sea up the beach by the surf club? A shrug. Just to
look, apparently.
So there's Pete, fifteen, his head full of airbrushed
fantasy, walking to the top of the dunes, pushing
through the tussock and lupin, and looking out over
the deserted beach. The high tide had shifted the
sand around, as it always did, so that Pete looked at
a landscape subtly changed from the last time he had
seen it.
'What did you think she was doing?' (This is from
the official police interview now.)
'I thought she was sunbathing.'
'At seven thirty in the morning?'
And then Pete had said something to the
interviewing officer that showed more insight than
most people gave him credit for. 'When you're fifteen
and you see a naked girl lying on the beach you stop
thinking that clearly. I thought she was sunbathing.'
Lucy lay slightly on her side, her head turned
away from him. He could not see her face. He did
not recognise her. Her right arm and shoulder were
partially buried in the sand, but Pete couldn't see
that at first. Her head rested just below the high-tide
mark where the darker, waterlogged sand met the
dunes with their covering of tussocks and scraggling
lupins. Her arms and legs were slightly out from her
body — 'splayed like a starfish' was how one reporter
(inaccurately) described her on the front page of
the following morning's
Press
. One leg was slightly
further down the beach than the other, extended, as
though she had frozen in the act of dipping her toes in
to the ocean to test the temperature.
From his vantage point Pete could see her tanned
legs, the swell of her hips, and then the rollercoaster
dip down to her waist. And, yes, the split and roll of
her buttocks which, until that time, Pete had never seen
on a real live woman (and still hadn't — technically).
And her back. Lucy was a swimmer and a lifesaver
and had a broad, lightly freckled back, but Pete had
not recognised Lucy's back. Pete still didn't know
who he was looking at.
And here we might depart from all the interview
notes and official reports to speculate. To Pete Marshall
the woman on the beach must have looked like his
dreams come true. Anonymous and naked in the
stark morning light; a page from one of his brother's
magazines brought to life for his own gratification.
That idea cannot have been far from his mind (Pete
was fifteen, remember). Or, just possibly, he imagined
something even more exotic. If, in those first heady
moments, Pete Marshall thought of mermaids, or
banished daughters of Atlantis, he never let on.
Certainly not to the police, and never even to us.
It was only when Pete cautiously moved closer
that he saw the naked woman's left arm was
strangely mottled. Closer still and he could see that
her skin seemed flabby and ill-fitting across her broad
swimmer's shoulders. Her hair was matted and there
was a bleached finger-bone of driftwood tangled up in
it. Lucy Asher had been in the water about five hours
before she was washed up, according to the coroner's
report (
Exhibit 5
). The body showed evidence of being
held down by the waves and banged repeatedly
against the bed of the ocean. Pete told the police that
when he got even closer he could also see there was
something 'weird' about the angle of her head against
the sand.
There is one photograph taken by the police
photographer (
Exhibit 7
) where you can see a footprint
in the sand almost in contact with Lucy's outstretched
hand. The hand is lying palm upwards, the fingers
slightly curled as though she had been cupping a
ball that, sometime during the night, the ocean had
prised from her grasp. The footprint is slightly below
the body, on the water side, almost touching her little
finger. It is from a Converse shoe, the basketball-boot
type with a canvas upper that used to come in blue or
red with a star on the side over the ankle. We all wore
them in those days. All Pete ever said, though, was
that he got close enough to see that the woman was
Lucy Asher. She was wearing a necklace of bruises, a
parting gift from whoever had raped and strangled
her in the night, and then tossed her body into the
deep water of the channel.
That's when Pete 'freaked out, man' and turned
and ran back through the dunes to get Jase Harbidge's
dad, who was soon to come flying over the sand like
a great white bird.
The Spit is as far south as you can go in the beach suburb
of New Brighton without getting your feet wet. It is a
long finger of bone-dry sand, only about a kilometre
across at its widest point. Down the middle, like a
single dark vein, runs Rocking Horse Road. The Spit
is the only thing separating thousands of kilometres of
cold southern Pacific from the swollen estuary formed
by the meeting of the Avon and Heathcote rivers. It
is a place with water on three sides, where the tide
comes and goes twice a day, and where the sand is
always shifting.
In fact the whole of New Brighton is cut off from
the rest of the city by water. The Avon River follows
the coast before it empties into the estuary and acts
as a kind of moat. New Brighton feels separate, like a
whole different town. Why bother living down there?
That was the general consensus. The city had more
accessible and scenic parts than the Spit in which to
live. There were plenty of areas that didn't ignore the
biblical injunction against building your house on
sand. There were always people who muttered darkly
about the inevitable tsunami that was only a Chilean
earthquake away. The same people talked about how
beach erosion could, on a whim, claim back the dunes
in less than six months. It was only a matter of time,
they said, before all our homes would be washed into
the ocean.
It was true that down our way, soil was only a
veneer. Tussock and cabbage trees and hardy flaxes
were a poor excuse for a garden, but they were all that
would grow in sand. And then there was the easterly.
That was another reason why most people didn't like
the Spit. Most days the easterly wind started up midmorning
and blew in cold off the ocean. The easterly
drifted salt spray across our homes so that even new
cars rusted in a few years. Windows were permanently
frosted. When it picked up, the wind blew the sand on
the beach at ankle height in a rustling sheet that stung
our legs and sandblasted the dunes into soft shapes.
It was what the locals called 'the lazy wind'. The joke
went that the easterly was too lazy to go around — so
it just went straight through you.
New Brighton was a working-class area where
people left car bodies and half-built boats out in front
of the house for years, as works in progress. Our dads
were mechanics and builders, butchers and council
workers, and stevedores who worked over at the port.
They were the guys who drove the rubbish trucks
or built the roads. The practical men who worked
with their radios up loud, tuned to the cricket in the
summer. Rugby was their winter religion.
Most of our fathers had grown up in New Brighton
themselves, and like us thought nothing of the way
sand built up in the carpet inside our homes, clogging
vacuum cleaners and collecting in the tracks of the
aluminium doors. They didn't seem to hear the angry
squawk of seagulls perched outside on the washing
line, shitting in long white streaks down their wives'
sheets. They married either Brighton girls or women
who were willing to make allowances.
These days the Spit has turned into desirable real-estate
and there's been a lot of infill housing. Most of
the big sections have had a drive put down the side,
and a townhouse or two built on the back. In 1980,
though, there was pretty much just a single row of
older houses along both sides of the road, each one
with a decent-sized section. The properties on the sea
side mostly didn't have fences at the back so that the
boundary between the dunes and the sections was
purely arbitrary. There were a lot of empty sections
too, where weeds and the occasional pine tree grew
unchecked and where the rabbit population was kept
down by the half-stray cats.
Lucy Asher went to South Brighton High School
along with the rest of us, although she was older,
seventeen, and had technically finished school three
weeks before she died. Her parents' dairy was about
three-quarters of the way up Rocking Horse Road, and
the Ashers lived in the rooms out the back of the shop.
Lucy was the older of two daughters. Her younger
sister, Carolyn, was in the year below us at school, in
what used to be called the fourth form, but because
she was neither attractive nor sporty, Carolyn Asher
was all but invisible to us.
Lucy often worked behind the counter at the dairy
after school and during weekends. We often went there
to get milk and bread and newspapers for our parents.
For ourselves we bought small white bags stuffed
with chewy milk bottles, Jaffas, aniseed wheels and
Eskimo-men. We sucked powdered sherbet through
straws and in the summer ordered ice-cream cones,
choosing from the eight flavours Mrs Asher stocked.
We washed everything down with Coke from glass
bottles or, if we were feeling healthy, flavoured milk.
We had seen Lucy Asher almost daily, although we
had paid her no more attention than the deepening
lines on our parents' faces or the colour of the houses
we had grown up in. As we came to realise, it is often
not until something is gone that you begin to see it.