It was a week before I saw my parishioner again. I told her I’d gone to her salon to see her, and she blushed and said she’d quit. She looked embarrassed but I said, ‘Actually, I didn’t like the place at all.’ Over time, she confided that the salon was one of a chain owned by the same family. All were bad. They hired only girls who spoke very little English and couldn’t get work elsewhere. They were all supposed to meet on a particular street corner in Auburn, where most of them lived, at 5 am, which in winter is a frozen hour, for a white mini-van to pick them up and take them to work. The driver was the husband or the brother of one of the female owners. Anyone who was not there when he trundled by did not get paid. Anyone not there twice in a row would lose their job, no exceptions.
‘The work hard, the work boring,’ my parishioner told me.
I could understand that.
When she’d started, her English had been limited to a few simple phrases:
Square shape?
Round shape?
Pick a colour?
She had been learning English at TAFE and wanted a job where she could practise the new language, but the salon boss discouraged the girls from talking too much: it would lengthen the process of doing somebody’s nails, and the price was set, not charged by the hour. My parishioner told me that the salon boss was unpleasant: she once kicked her low stool hard, for not sweeping the floor properly, and my parishioner skidded a short distance across the polished floor and bumped her head against the porcelain sink. The other girls looked up over their face masks – they were holding the hands of their female customers in their own small hands – but they did not intervene.
It wasn’t all bad, of course: my parishioner liked the old ladies with the papery skin and yellow nails who came in only after they’d had their hair set, religiously, every week. She didn’t like having to deal with fungal infections, ringworm and dermatitis. Some women bit their cuticles, and came in with dried blood around the nails, and who knew what infections it carried? She was never allowed weekends, evenings or lunchtimes off – they were the busiest times. She was supposed to always wear a face mask but the ones the salon supplied were cheap and did not keep the smells out. She didn’t really like touching other people’s feet, even with silicon gloves on. Some days, she felt like she was going to gag, sloughing the dead skin off somebody’s heels, until it was piled up on the floor.
She got headaches from the glue and other chemicals. She made $7.50 an hour. Her own hands and feet were dainty and smelled sweet. There were times when she’d marvel, and maybe gossip, about the size and smell and shape of the feet of the women who came to be pampered. There were rumours about what the solvents and glues could do to you. One of the ladies who had worked in the salon had had a deformed baby, and everybody was sure that it must have been the chemicals.
The salon boss said don’t be stupid and clapped her hands and stamped her right foot and sent them back to work.
They weren’t paid overtime and the routine was the same every day: she would meet the bus on the street corner at 5 am, the same bus would be waiting to take them home at 6.30 pm or even 7 pm. That’s a long day crouched over fingers and feet. Bathroom breaks were deducted from the hours worked. There wasn’t space in the fridge for the girls to store food, and my parishioner told me she couldn’t afford to pay for food from the food hall. She would bring a clear soup with vegetables from home, and keep it in a plastic takeaway box in the waxing room out the back – it’s not just their nails that people want done these days; you’ve got to have all your body hair under control, too – but if there was no time for a lunchbreak, she basically didn’t get one; she’d eat from the container on the bus on the way home.
It was probably a stupid question but I asked why so many girls went to work at the nail salons if the work was so awful. My parishioner said, ‘What else can they do, Father? Their English not good enough.’ Most had little in the way of formal education and no real hope of landing a job outside the service industries. Some quite liked the nail salons because, while the work might not have been pleasant, there were other young girls doing it who could speak their language. The money was terrible but was often paid in cash. A number of salons were quite happy to take illegal immigrants; indeed, they quite liked to, since the girls without visas couldn’t argue for paid holidays, super, Medicare or set working hours.
Happily for police, Kimmi K wasn’t an illegal immigrant. A check of the Surf City log showed that she was one of the registered employees of Cute Nails. The centre had her photograph on file, and she had a tax file number. More is known about her now than was known at the time: that she rode the mini-van to Surf City that morning, for example, just as she did every morning, probably playing music on her iPhone, or giggling with her friends, or maybe even sleeping against the darkened window. The van arrived at Surf City shortly after 7 am. Some of the girls went straight into the complex to order chai lattes and croissants; Kimmi K must have been a pious girl because she took a quick detour up the hill to St Francis by the Sea, which in turn means that there’s little doubt that she started her day with prayer – although for what she prayed, I can’t tell you. I’ve never been able to ask.
Chapter Eight
When people find out I used to be a priest but that I’m no longer a priest, the first thing they usually want to know is: ‘Were you sacked?’ When, I say, ‘No, I quit,’ the blokes, especially, might ask me if I’m making up for lost time. I know what they’re getting at: I must now be chasing tail, if that’s still a term. It was when I was young. I suppose it’s a fair enough question but, the truth is, I miss some of the work I did as police chaplain and there are times when I find myself feeling guilty about the fact that I’ve let people down, having been unable to stick to the promises I made, but sex isn’t something I’ve felt like gorging on.
One thing I do feel happy about is that I no longer have to answer the type of questions that priests get asked every day.
‘Tell us, Father, why do bad things happen to good people?’
‘Why do children die?’
I had been given answers in the seminary that I, in turn, was supposed to give but they never struck me as entirely plausible. On one hand, I was supposed to say that God has a plan; we mere mortals aren’t privy to it. I wasn’t to say it quite like that but that was certainly the idea.
On the other hand, human beings have free will, so bad behaviour has its consequences. Eat too much, you’ll get fat; smoke and you’ll increase your chance of getting lung cancer.
They’re competing ideas: on one hand, you’re the captain of your own ship. On the other, God will wipe out whomever he chooses. I’m thinking now about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The media, quite rightly in my opinion, got in touch with religious leaders to say, ‘If there’s a god, why would he wipe out whole villages, including infant children? What’s the plan there?’ A couple of clowns actually tried to answer; they wound up looking appalling.
I’m off track again. The third SIM card to be identified inside Cups and Saucy belonged to a forty-six-year-old single mother of two whose name was Toni Cousins. According to her Telstra account, she was self-employed as a cleaner. Given that nobody that the police could see in the shop matched that description, it made sense that whoever Toni Cousins was, she wasn’t in the shop. She had either purchased the SIM card – or at least the phone – for somebody else, or else her phone had been stolen and was being used by somebody in the shop.
The mystery was answered in minutes: Medicare records, and data from Centrelink, all of which is available to police, showed that Mrs Cousins had a son, Mitchell, who had just turned twelve. He was a student of St Patrick’s College. It’s what they call one of the ‘elite’ private school for boys; it’s not far from Surf City. The St Pat’s uniform is a dark blazer with stripes near the wrists and grey pants. The boy that Mouse had dragged into Cups and Saucy was wearing such a uniform, and he looked to be about twelve. In all likelihood, he was Mitchell Cousin
s.
‘Could somebody get me the principal of St Pat’s?’ Wolf said. ‘Find out if Mitchell Cousins is absent from school.’
He was absent from school. The bursar who answered the phone when police called confirmed it with Mitchell’s house master. Wolf then spoke with the principal and explained about the siege at Surf City. Almost everybody in Sydney had already heard about it. The kids at St Pat’s certainly had. It was all over Facebook. Wolf asked if the principal would look at some stills from the CCTV. He immediately agreed.
‘Stand by and I’ll email them,’ Wolf said.
‘Yes, that’s Mitchell,’ the principal said, when the images came through. ‘Is he okay? Does his mum know? How did he get caught up in that? He’s a really great kid. A scholarship kid. Really kind.’
That’s how it looked to me, too. Mitchell had quickly pulled himself together after being dragged into Cups and Saucy. He’d noticed Kimmi K crouched up under the nighties, and he’d slid on his bottom across the floor to be next to her and draped an arm loosely around her shoulders. From time to time, he’d dip his blond head – his hair was spiked up; he was obviously at that age where he’d started experimenting with a bit of product, seeing how he looked – and whisper into her ear in what looked to be a reassuring way.
He was acting like the exceptional young man the school was training him to be, in other words.
Most of this I wouldn’t find out until later, but Mitchell had been a student at St Pat’s for only a few months. St Pat’s is a prep to year twelve establishment and it costs a fortune to go there – $30,000 a year – and since Mitchell’s mum was a cleaner, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Mitchell had gone to the local State primary school, and he had been happy there, mixing it with all the other Bondi grommets, but one teacher was certain that Mitchell was gifted. ‘He finds the work incredibly easy,’ she’d told his mum, during a parent–teacher interview. ‘His hand goes up for every question. He never needs assistance. He’ll be sharpening his pencils, quietly, long before the bell goes.’ The teacher had started giving Mitchell high school maths problems when he was still in year four.
‘More than anything, it’s to stop him from getting bored,’ she’d said. ‘No matter how much work I give him, he’s like a machine. He goes through page after page. Sometimes I think, he’s going to have to stop. No kid can work that fast. But other times I think, I’m not sure I could ever give him too much. He’s like a sponge.’ She was hinting at Mrs Cousins to let Mitchell sit for a scholarship exam. She’d already given him a few practice tests – discreetly, without telling him what they were – and he’d done extraordinarily well.
Mitchell’s mum wasn’t sure about it. For one thing, she didn’t have the money to send Mitchell to coaching, and it’s taken as given in Sydney that, besides being bright, the kids who get scholarships are also coached.
She was also worried about how well Mitchell would fit in to a private school, where everyone else went on skiing holidays during the Australian summer.
‘It is your decision,’ the teacher had told her, ‘but in my opinion, it wouldn’t be fair to deny him the chance.’
The test for St Pat’s had been held in March of 2010, for entry into the school in February 2011. Mitchell’s mum wanted to drive him to the exam hall but at the last minute she felt too anxious, so he had to get the bus. Mitchell had been happy about that because his mum got nervous in traffic, especially if she didn’t know where she was going. The exam hall wasn’t anywhere she’d been before. She’d panic and the car would stall and other cars would honk and her voice would go into a higher pitch and she’d say, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ and frown and fuss and go for all the controls at once, so the blinkers would be on and the windscreen-wipers, too, and the radio would start blaring and cold air would rush out of the vents.
Mitchell arrived on time, alone, found the right exam hall, sat the paper and, when his mum asked him, ‘How was it? Was it difficult?’ he shrugged and said, ‘I think they gave me the easy one.’
A little over a month later, his results arrived in a long envelope. His mum opened it with a knife, for some reason wanting to preserve the envelope. Mitchell had received a close to perfect score. He was invited to a personal interview with the principal. He sat upright in his chair, talked in ways that suggested he was devoted to his mum (and to his little sister, Eloise), that he had a good work ethic, and a fine sense of humour, and yet he was humble about what he’d achieved.
The primary school teacher who had encouraged and supported him was as pleased as punch.
‘Do you think you’ll take the scholarship?’ she said. ‘There’s probably going to be other schools that want you!’
Mitchell was always going to choose St Pat’s. He’d been given a tour by one of the boarders – the school has day boys and boarders – a short kid whose blazer was so big on him that the sleeves went down to his third knuckle and his head seemed lost between the two giant shoulders. He explained that the main building – a sandstone mansion overlooking Sydney’s harbour – had once been a private home and that the ghost of a man who had been hanged there, back in convict days, still walked the halls at night, his head limp on a broken neck.
Ghosts in the halls? Mitchell was smitten.
His mum wasn’t sure. She went to the morning tea to welcome new students, stood in the shafts of light coming through the French windows, her teacup shaking in its saucer. The spread alone was unlike anything she’d seen: there were lamingtons, cupcakes, brownies, chunks of rockmelon, tiny pineapple pizzas, and twelve types of tea laid out in a fancy, wooden box.
‘We won’t fit in,’ she told Mitchell on their way home that afternoon. Mitchell, his mum and Eloise lived in a one-bedroom flat. Mitchell’s mum shared the bedroom with his little sister; Mitchell slept in the sunroom, on what would have been a window seat. It was comfy – his mum had a cushion cut for the seat at Foams R Us – but it was also tiny. There was no storage: Mitchell kept his clothes in plastic bins on wheels from the two-dollar shop.
‘Where will you hang your blazer?’ his mum said.
It wasn’t a real question. It was a question that hinted at all the other problems Mitchell’s mum could foresee: how will we afford to send you to the camps? What will happen when go to your new friends’ houses and they have swimming pools and tennis courts and you realise how poor we are, by comparison?
Mitchell understood that. His way of saying, ‘It will be okay,’ was to walk over to the broom cupboard, open the door, push the buckets and mops aside and say, ‘I can put a hook for my blazer in here.’
Mitchell was not impressed by wealth – or, to be more precise, he understood that no matter how hard his mum worked – how diligent she was, how punctual and reliable – she’d never earn much more than thirty dollars an hour, and there were only so many hours in the week she could work. Once she’d deducted tax, rent, groceries and the cost of running the car – she needed a car to carry the portable vacuum cleaner and the bucket stuffed with cleaning rags – there wasn’t much left.
Mitchell was also responsible: he’d practically raised his sister, Eloise. His mum often went to work in the early hours. Eloise was a few years behind Mitchell at the local primary school. From the time she was five, he’d walk her to school, her little hand in his bigger one, her little bag over his shoulder. Mitchell taught Eloise how to wait for the lights and to look both ways. He didn’t mind that she came looking for him at little lunch. He’d let her sit beside him, and he’d help her open her lunch box. He made sure she didn’t leave her jumper behind when school was finished for the day, and he went tunnelling through the old washing basket of lost property when she couldn’t find it.
When Mitchell finished dux of the primary school – the same teacher who had recommended him for the scholarship to St Pat’s gave the speech, saying never in twenty-seven years in education had she seen a child so gifted – Eloise cried. It was dawning on her that Mitchell was moving on and she did
n’t want him to leave her behind.
Mitchell started at St Pat’s in February 2011. He knew precisely nobody. The school took care of that, sending all the new boys on a camp together in the third week of the first term. Mitchell leapt straight into that adventure. He survived seven nights of sleeping under tarps, called ‘bivvies’. It had been his birthday while he was away – he’d turned twelve – and the other boys had presented him with a cake made from Sao biscuits and strawberry jam from the supplies they’d taken with them. Mitchell had come home dirty, exhausted, thrilled. His mum had to soak his socks for twenty-four hours in Napisan to get out the ground-in dirt.
It would be a mistake to think Mitchell was the perfect child. There isn’t such a thing. It’s the mistakes that kids make as they hurtle toward adulthood that shape them. Those who don’t ever step off the right path never learn to grow.
It was a mistake, a little misbehaviour, that put Mitchell at Surf City on the day of the siege.
He’d left home shortly after 8 am to catch the bus to school. That already made him late. He was due at school at 8.30 am. On any other day, he’d have left by 7.30. Yet he didn’t seem rushed or bothered. He was wearing the St Pat’s summer uniform – pale grey slacks; a pale blue shirt; his blazer and striped tie – and his backpack was stuffed to bursting with Latin texts and history books, an old banana, and forgotten notes from teachers.
Mitchell took the route he normally took: he walked up Francis Street to Bondi’s Old South Head Road. A lady he knew as ‘Old Mrs Grace’ was outside her corner flat, tipping cold tea leaves onto the pot plants. She mostly did that early in the morning because she lived alone and was lonely, and she knew that there would be people out early in the morning, walking their dogs or heading to the bus stop, and many would stop and say hello.
No Place Like Home Page 6
