Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  How does that sound? Will that do?

  Nineteen Years In

  2019

  ‘EVERYONE HAS THE PAPERWORK? ALL CAME THROUGH ON the emails last week? And we’ve all read the file?’

  Nods of assent.

  ‘Great. So here we are, yet again; this will be our fourth consideration of parole for Jennifer White, and I know a couple of you have recently joined us, but Jennifer has been, as we all know, incarcerated at Wacol for nineteen years. She was eligible for parole four years ago but we have floundered on the very serious issue, or perhaps I should say issues, of her guilt awareness, remorse and empathy for the victims; Jennifer’s past refusal to even acknowledge she was the killer of the three men has been a block for us to consider releasing her back into the community. Especially considering the current climate and a very heightened public awareness of this issue given some of the terrible murders that have occurred in Melbourne by recently released offenders and the controversy in London about the so-called Black Cab rapist whose victims caused such an outcry that the government was forced to act. All of which means our public and government gaze is upon us.’

  ‘Did anyone get a phone call from Ray last night?’ asked Susan.

  A shuffling of silence as it became clear that I was not the only one to receive a phone call from Cowboy Ray last night.

  ‘Look, let me say this, and I have been president of this board for some years now: Ray, or any other permutation of Ray, in other words, a government minister, has no sway over our independence. Which is what I told him, again, last night. We will, as we must in order to preserve our corporate and individual integrity, make a decision without fear or favour. Are we in accord with that?’

  Twenty-three nods of agreement.

  ‘Good. So, look, because this has been a very long and protracted process for Jennifer and for us, I have asked that she speak to us in person today. She’s being held in a room downstairs and was transported by the prison officials earlier this morning. I know it’s old-school, but, as we have all read in the reports, it seems that this woman has made a rather significant turnaround in not only accepting her guilt but in asking for forgiveness. It’s also noted that she has found God. Now, the number of killers and rapists who suddenly find God in prison, when confronted with incarceration, is monumental. I am as cynical about this as you will be. As always, we go into this interview now with the best intentions and the understanding that a prisoner does need, at some point, to be returned to the community for his or her future and with a healthy dose of scepticism.’

  And then the phone, a speaker phone in the middle of the long and wide table, rang.

  Very few people had the number (and all cell phones had been turned off as we all filed into the boardroom). I pressed ‘Accept’.

  ‘It’s Ray here. Your boss. I know you are about to consider the parole of Jennifer White and so I am going to give you a message from not only the Office of the Attorney-General and the Office of the Premier, with whom I have just been speaking, but also the Office of the Public and it is this: Keep her inside; do not parole her. Am I clear?’

  I didn’t hesitate:

  ‘Minister, we appreciate your concern in this matter. The parole board is independent of government. We will, as we always do, take into account public concerns and government concerns. Thank you so much.’

  And hung up on him.

  Turning to an assistant, one of three in the room, I said: ‘Bring up the prisoner.’

  —

  THEY WOKE ME early. It was still dark. ‘Time to go,’ they said. I had hardly slept. I had been thinking about Rosie and wondering where she was. In the few years since her release, there had been contact. A postcard sent from the Seychelles. Two words:

  MIssing YOU

  and

  xxxxxxxxxx

  I’d had a shower the night before and the prison guard said I could wear real clothes, not my prison uniform, and they handed them to me at reception while it was still dark. Two guards stared at me and then at their phones as I changed into the suit Anthea had bought for me from Country Road: pale blue with a crisp white cotton shirt. When I was growing up, I hated clothes from Country Road. Mum used to wear Country Road. It was a symbol of being old, middle-aged, boring. I like them now.

  I climbed into the back of the van and looked out through the metal grill, as it rumbled from Wacol up into the city as the dawn played out some sketchy blue.

  My first dawn in ninteen years. In my cell, my window is angled towards the sunset. Which is great. I love the sunset. The orange. The descent. But the dawn is the ascent, and that was how I felt.

  —

  THE DOOR TO the holding cell opened and a guard, Mia, stepped in and said, ‘Time.’ I followed her up old and worn concrete stairs and then down a corridor and into a large boardroom with a lot of people sitting around a table and I smiled and nodded out of deference and Mia sat me down and handcuffed me to my chair and then stood behind me.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ I said.

  —

  NOT FOR A second have I thought this woman was a killer.

  The absolute lack of motivation for Jen – I mean, why did she do it? – the absurd circumstantial evidence about teen interest in Celtic Gods and a North Stradbroke flower at the first crime scene but not the others, the all-too-convenient discovery of the knife. If we were in America and she had OJ’s lawyers, she would have walked out of that courtroom on the first day.

  I would have gotten her off, had I been her QC. Even with the knife and the matching DNA.

  Even with a public and government baying for her to be found guilty. I would have put Nils Marnell in jail.

  But she was, in the eyes of the court, guilty, and thus I have to treat her as such.

  And here she is. Now getting close to forty, hair mostly grey, quite buffed and looking a little like Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies with muscle and those mesmerising blue-and-green-eyes, staring, for the first time, with a sense of humility.

  The stridency, that stare-me-down in anger, that’s gone.

  —

  THERE WERE TWENTY-FOUR faces staring at me but I stared back at the one that mattered. Karin Jones.

  A face, finally, to the voice. She looked nice. She looked like you’d want her to be your mum. She was about my age, a bit older. She had blonde hair, tied back and was wearing a casual light brown suit which looked like it had also come from Country Road. There was an understated diamond ring on her wedding finger and she wore a thin gold chain around her neck. She was calm and still. She looked confident and smiled at me. There wasn’t a trace of judgement about her.

  ‘Good morning, Jennifer. We understand, from your social worker, that you have prepared a statement for us.’

  ‘I have. Yes, if I may read it and then answer your questions? Would that be acceptable to the board?’

  ‘Yes. It would.’

  I took in a deep breath and looked down at the piece of typewritten paper in my shaking hands.

  ‘Dear Members of the Parole Board, firstly I would like to apologise for you having to listen to my blanket and stubborn refusals to engage in any sense of discourse over the past four years. Over the past two years I have come to an awareness of my guilt and culpability for my crimes. This was triggered by the discovery that my father was, and still is, dying of cancer.’

  I wasn’t expecting sympathy. After all, we all have someone, somewhere, dying of cancer. Or if we don’t now, we will.

  I watched them all search through their thick file on me to find the letter from the doctor confirming that yes, indeed, my father was in the later stages of terminal cancer.

  ‘My dad’s impending death made me realise that I had to take ownership of my situation and confront the evils of what I have done and then, once I had done that, to seek repentance and find true guidance into the future so that I can become a better person. I am now ready to answer all your questions.’

  ‘Thanks Jennif
er. We have read the report by your social worker, who has been committed to you for many years, and she has reiterated that were you released, there is a home for you to stay in and she would provide monthly reports to your parole officer. We note the letter from your pastor also, but I’m sure that many of us would like to talk to you about the actual crimes and why you perpetrated them, what led you to murder these three men and how. This is not to hash over the evidence but an opportunity for us to understand your state of mind and, to be frank, for us to be completely comfortable that there is no chance of recidivism.’

  I smiled.

  No chance of that, I thought.

  Drums of Thunder

  THE POLITICS OF GRANTING PAROLE ARE COMPLEX. NOT IN every case, but certainly in high profile ones like that of Jennifer White. It is neither the role nor an obligation of the parole board to inform the public – or, indeed, the families of the victims – of an impending release. Vigilantism is never far from the veneer of a cultivated society, so on my watch, when a murderer is to be paroled back into the community, it is managed as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. They have served their sentence and now it is time for them to make a new life. Condemnation stops as they walk out through the prison gates and back into the community.

  Aside from Cowboy Ray and his agenda to keep The Slayer behind bars for the rest of her natural life, I had to be mindful of the three women who lost their husbands twenty years ago.

  They have not been quiet.

  We don’t advertise it when a person comes up for parole; there is no public register of potential parolees, but the whispers are loud enough for interested parties to hear. The last couple of times that Jen was brought before the board, the whispers reached the widows and they made some loud and inflammatory statements. They are driven by emotion and revenge, I understand, but I am driven by justice. Emotion can have no place in my world of consideration.

  I did not make contact with them.

  Nor did I inform the minister of our decision.

  My husband would say I am not the best politician in the world, and he might have a point. I could hear the drums of thunder, of course I could. They were getting closer.

  Unfurling

  ANTHEA WAS WAITING FOR ME, OUT THE FRONT, IN THE CAR park, standing beside her brand-new white BMW, covered in a thick sheen of dust because washing your car, even with a garden hose, has been banned for the past three years. She is thirty-seven with two kids, and I am thirty-eight with an emptiness in my history.

  The guards slid open the gate and said good luck and I nodded and carried my purple Qantas bag with my twenty-year-old pyjamas and my Bible and my Kafka and I stood there, on the other side of the wire and as she came to me with a smile, I crumpled and fell to the baking concrete and wept, the first time I had shown emotion in twenty years. Emotions don’t exist in prison. Emotions will get you sliced.

  I wept. I was free. There was an endless sky. There was wind and maybe, because there were dark clouds to the west, maybe it would rain later today, for the first time in five years, making it the worst since the drought that lasted, down south, from 1996 to 2010. And maybe, if it did, I would feel the rain on my face and I could stand in the rain for as long as I wanted and I could have a hot shower afterwards for as long as I wanted.

  She knelt and gently pulled me up and held me and wiped my tears with a tissue, with a smile and said:

  ‘It’s okay. I’m here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry. I promised myself I would not do this.’

  ‘It’s water on your cheeks. What do you want to do? I mean, we have to get you to the parole officer to check in and we have to get you to Westaway House before this time tomorrow, but … what do you want to do? Now?’

  I was shuddering.

  Nineteen years had come to this: a baking hot concrete slab out the front of scissor wire and the clap-clap sound of guards’ boots as they walked back down to the building behind us.

  I was vibrating, I was shimmering, free.

  ‘I want –’

  What do I want? I hadn’t actually thought about this. The girl who went into prison is not the girl who stands before you now. I don’t know what I want. I would have wanted a Whopper from Hungry Jack’s in the mall, in the city where I used to hang in my danger-girl world, or I might have wanted a chocolate donut or maybe some lemon chicken from the Chinese down the road or a Meatlovers pizza covered with mozzarella, or maybe I would have wanted a trip to the beach or to Noosa where mum and dad took us when we were little.

  ‘I would like to see your kids,’ I said. ‘I would like to hold them and say hello. Do they know about me?’

  —

  THEY DO NOW, after my husband and I had that fight after the kids bounced up the staircase with the photo album –

  I’m sorry, okay? I am sorry. I thought I’d hidden it, but she is my fucking sister, okay –

  And they asked me who was the girl in the photos, so many photos, as he strode off in that passive–aggressive way he has perfected and got a glass of wine from the fridge and put his hands on the breakfast bar and glared at me as he scoffed the wine, as I sat the kids down and said: Look, your mum has a sister.

  Why haven’t we met her!? We have an aunty! Yay! Where is she? Can she come over now? Will she bring us presents?

  There was a pause. Robbie enforced it. I looked at him as he swilled the wine and turned his back on me with a You do what you need to do …

  ‘My sister’s name is Jen …’

  ‘That’s my name!’

  ‘… and she is my older sister and she’s been away for the past twenty years.’

  ‘Where?! Has she been to Hollywood? She looks so pretty and she’s got eyes like David Bowie. She must be a movie star. I bet she’s been out with Vin Diesel.’

  ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘He is not! Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I read it.’

  ‘Yeah, like John Travolta and Tom Cruise and Justin Bieber.’

  ‘He is so not gay!’

  ‘Girls! Stop. Your aunty will be visiting us soon and you can ask her about living in Hollywood, okay?’

  ‘Yay!’

  ‘Yeah. Dad?’

  ‘Whatever,’ said dad.

  Later, as we always did, we made up and I pulled back on the erasure of the man I had sworn to love and I do, but sometimes I hate him.

  —

  ‘YOU SPENT THE past nineteen years in Hollywood,’ said Anthea as we drove away from Wacol with my gaze firmly not on the rear-vision mirror. ‘You went there at the age of eighteen and sought fame and fortune but didn’t quite make it but it was a great time and now you’re back.’

  ‘How’s Robbie?’

  ‘He’s good.’

  ‘Are you okay with me staying tonight?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Because I can go straight to Westaway House.’

  ‘No. It’s fine.’

  It wasn’t. But I stayed silent. I didn’t know how to argue with her. If someone lied to you in prison, you just hit them with a claw hammer or whatever was at hand. I’d lost the skill of traversing the waves, the undulations, the hidden meanings of a conversation. I was adrift, it suddenly occurred to me as we drove towards the city. The incarceration surrounded me with walls of black and white; I knew she was lying to me, I knew she did not want me to come back to her home and I knew, I knew, I knew but I was tired and I wanted to see her kids. I don’t know any more how to embrace the conversation of the oblique battleground, if I ever did.

  Anthea told me she had just come back from a field trip to Sri Lanka where she had observed a Banded Peacock Butterfly, which was, she told me, extremely rare. I had never really responded to her quaint obsession with butterflies which has become a very successful career for her. Sometimes, when she came to visit me in prison, she would bring a newly published journal on butterflies and I’d look at the pictures of the beautiful colours on their wings and wonder if she still caught
them, let them die then pinned them onto a large board with a little historical bio under each of them, listing their Latin name. Or if, in the world of respect for all things animal, she just watched them as they flew about their natural habitat.

  —

  EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED and nothing had changed. As Anthea drove me into Brisbane city and then to Ascot, I saw new highways and buildings. What was once a huge paddock with horses, close to the airport, was now a modern block of offices, like something out of Silicon Valley with overpasses and six-lane highways, and there still was the Toombul shopping centre where I would hang out before I got Goth-cool, and as we drove through the streets of Ascot and Clayfield, but not past our old house, all the memories came rolling back. The McCubbin house, the Ord’s house, the park where I would lie on the grass and stare up at the Norfolk pines, Miss Emily’s house. I just sat there, in the passenger seat – we didn’t say much as Anthea drove – and clasped my hands in my lap and fretted about meeting Robbie and got excited about meeting the girls. As we passed the old school I slammed shut my eyes for a moment and counted to fifteen and when I opened them again we were pulling into a driveway hidden behind a tall, thick hedge of golden cane palm trees lining the footpath. We made our way past a dry, wilted garden and a massive mango tree to one side and on the other the oldest-ever frangipani tree. Along the fences, bright red bougainvillea scattered flowers on the ground. They had survived the drought but the lawn was brown and dry. The house was a large Queenslander, all wood, with wide verandas, raised up off the ground on thick wooden poles, painted white.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Anthea. ‘Wow. It’s gorgeous.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said a little awkwardly.

  Our old home was two streets away. I knew she lived on the hill, I just hadn’t realised it was so close to the past. ‘Robbie’s parents are just down the other end of the road, so he wanted a place nearby,’ she said.