I had my head in my hands, listening to all that. I was thinking, ‘All you needed to do, Roger, was say to Mitchell, “Okay, buddy, good job. Gently now; let’s get this thing gently down onto the floor.”
‘All you needed to do was hold your part steady, maybe take the bulk of the weight of it, until it was safely down on the ground.’
Mitchell, who was just twelve, could not take the weight of the box on his own. It slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor . . . and it exploded.
The shop windows blew out. Glass fragments were flying in all directions, shredding the nighties on hangars. The mannequins in the windows came apart. I saw one head rolling, the blonde wig at a rakish angle. The hems of the pyjamas flew up and the bras, still on the clear plastic hangers, came exploding off the racks.
Mitchell, who had been closest to the box when it hit the hard floor, was thrown backward, past the register, toward the changing rooms.
‘I didn’t have time to run to him,’ Mouse would tell Hanrahan. ‘I was in, like, shock. Then all these guys from like a SWAT team came swarming through the door. Kimmi K was cowering. She had her whole head in her hands. She was covered with what looked like white soot. Later on, I figured out it was fluff from a big Easter Bunny we had in the window. The pyjamas I’d been wearing were shredded. But it was Mitchell who took most of it.’
Paramedics found Mitchell sitting on his bottom, legs straight out in front of him, back against the wall, the earpiece for the iPod Touch somehow in his right hand.
He might have been resting, maybe even dozing, except that his eyes were wide open. He had one hand resting on his right thigh. His school blazer had been blown open, exposing the front of a freshly ironed shirt. It wasn’t torn but was flecked with blood and the colour was spreading.
Paramedics tore his shirt open with hands and scissors. There was no gaping wound, but his small boy’s chest had been cut to ribbons by the screws and nails and bits of glass that had been packed inside the pipe bomb.
‘I still don’t understand how it exploded,’ Hanrahan had said, shaking his head.
The explosives expert explained: there had been no timer, no detonator, but when the box hit the floor, flints from the ends of the steel pipe sparked against the petrol. Under pressure, those screws and nails were like little samurai swords, carving into Mitchell’s skin more than a thousand times.
‘And the cause of death?’ Hanrahan asked the doctor who later did the autopsy.
‘He was dying not from the entry wounds but from the bleeding on the inside, from the damage done as the sharp little pieces lodged into his internal organs,’ he said. It was the saddest testimony I ever heard.
‘Bits of shrapnel had torn into his liver, his lungs and his kidneys. The paramedics did a good job, folding cloths and bandages to press against the wounds, but this wasn’t the kind of bleeding that could be stopped with gauze, or maybe at all.’
Mitchell didn’t ask for much, just his mum.
Like everyone’s ‘next of kin’ Mrs Cousins had waited out the siege in a special, open pen, behind orange barriers, close to the command centre, able to see inside the shop, while not being seen, but there was no holding her back any longer. She burst through the barricade, skidded and fell, and ended up doing an agonising half-run, half-crawl across the floor as she tried to get to her son.
The first thing she reached was his feet, stuck out in front of him. She took them in her hands and brought her hands up over his ankles to his knees. The paramedics were trying to keep her back, not to protect her from seeing him, but so they could keep pressing down on his wounds, but she kept coming, crawling almost, up and over his legs, until her head was on his chest.
From the distance I was at, it looked to me like she was praying but let’s be honest: she wasn’t praying, she was begging.
She was bargaining with God, offering her own life in exchange for the life of her boy; she was pleading for intervention, for some sign, from somewhere, that there’s justice in this world . . . and of course it did not come.
Chapter Thirty-two
One of the things that occurred to me, when I first started doing funerals, was how there is no word for people who have lost a child.
They aren’t orphans. That’s children who have lost their parents. They aren’t widows. That’s people who have lost their husbands.
Maybe there’s no word in English big enough to express what it feels like to lose a child?
I’ve met plenty of parents in that situation. They are the walking wounded, the living dead, people who would die themselves, if they could.
I remember the first time I had to sit with a couple whose baby had died of SIDS. I can’t have been much more than twenty-eight years old. The first thing I noticed when I went into the house was the plastic baby bottles – clear ones, with rubber teats – stacked up in the kitchen.
The baby’s dad told me, ‘I can’t bring myself to bag up all his things and just put them out for collection. But who’s going to want them if we offer to give them away?’
I asked him about his baby’s funeral. He wanted to carry the coffin in his arms, he said. He’d put it in the ground himself. I told him there were certain things we must say, ‘May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.’
The dad said, ‘Rest in peace.’
The child’s mother was sitting opposite us, on the other couch. She had one of their son’s toys in her hands. It was a limp, chewed, tan-coloured rabbit. She was close to twisting the ears off.
I didn’t have to conduct Mitchell’s funeral. His mum’s brother – Mitchell’s uncle – organised it, and he’s not religious. He had one of those civil funerals in a funeral hall, with tea and soggy sandwiches. I went along and sat in the back row. I wore my collar, mainly because I know that some people want to see a priest at a funeral, even if it’s not a religious service.
I arrived early because I knew there’d be a lot of people there. Mitchell went to a good school. They – the other kids from year seven – gave him a guard of honour, standing tall in their striped ties and blazers, all pimples, and big shoes.
There were a few people there I recognised: Mouse, for one, and Wolf, who turned up with his team from the Bondi Local Area Command, all in uniform, buttons polished, ramrod straight, silent, respectful, standing well back.
There was the young doctor I’d seen sprinting forth from the ranks of paramedics, the one who got down on his knees to try and find a way to stop Mitchell from bleeding and to somehow save his life.
I saw Mitchell’s mum, his sister and his uncle, who did the eulogy. It was fairly short. Mitchell had been a good boy. He had loved his sister and his mum. He had been addicted to those bloody video games. He liked to read. He’d been working on a science experiment, attaching foam balls to wire, to show how the earth moves around the sun.
He hadn’t yet had the chance to grow into a man. He hadn’t started to shave; had only just begun to show a bit of shy interest in girls.
I approached Mitchell’s mum after the service. I knew she wasn’t religious but I asked her if she wanted to talk. She was holding a cup by its handle, balancing it on a saucer. She said, ‘Oh, no, Father. He was the loveliest boy. It’s just so unfair. The why? I can’t explain it. I just don’t know what to say.’
I said, ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t either.’
Mrs Cousins put her cup down on the saucer.
‘Actually, there is one thing,’ she said. ‘Would you mind if we went and sat down somewhere? There’s something I need to tell someone.’
How many times had I heard something like that? In ordinary circumstances I dreaded it: ‘There’s a guilty secret I’m carrying that I’d like to unload on you, Father. Then you can forgive me and I’ll skip off, and you can stay behind, carrying the awfulness of it.’
Other times, it was something so trivial, I was tempted to say, ‘Don’t be crazy! You’re tying yourself i
n knots over such a little thing! I’ve seen people do bad things. I’ve seen evil. You’re a good person. Forget about it. Laugh and enjoy your life.’
We found a quiet room. It had a strange smell. I suspect that it was one of the rooms they used to keep the open coffins in. Not everybody wants that these days. Mitchell’s mum certainly hadn’t. Families used to ask me: do you think it will help, to see the body? I was never sure how to answer. Anyone who has seen a body will know there’s nothing of the person there. It’s them, but it’s not them, if that makes sense. By the time the corpse lands in the coffin, the person’s long gone.
Don’t ask me where. I’m no longer sure.
It took a while to get the story out of Mitchell’s mum. It was exactly as I’d feared: she’d said something to Mitchell that she felt ashamed about. The memory of it was tearing her to pieces.
What basically happened was this: Mitchell liked to make things for her. From the earliest age, he’d bring his creations home: a frame made of icy-pole sticks, for example, that she’d kept by her bed.
He also liked to pick things up from the street: junk, basically, that other people had thrown away on what’s known as the Hard Rubbish Day, and he’d try to turn it into something marvellous.
He once found a set of big, white rubber wheels, probably from a 1970s golf cart, and hooked them to a piece of timber, and got rope to use as a steering wheel, and made a go-kart; he’d found an old pencil case filled with somebody else’s first-, second- and third-place ribbons, and stickers from radio stations that didn’t even exist anymore, and he turned them into decorations for a tree house on the nature strip, nailing them to the flagpole so they fluttered in the wind.
It sounded magnificent to me, but much of the stuff he dragged home was real junk, putrid stuff, with mould growing on it, or chairs with broken legs and the seat stuffing coming out; and old, clear, scuffed bowls from kitchen mixers, but without the mixer; and bowling bags with the lining torn; and on and on, and it would drive his mum crazy.
One day, he rang the doorbell and his mum looked at the video monitor and saw him standing on the street, holding something in both hands, an enormous thing; she wasn’t really sure what it was, only that it was made of wood and it took two hands to hold it, and he was grinning with pride at having found it, and wanted her to open the door so he could bring it inside.
She sighed and pressed the buzzer to let him in, and he came up to the apartment, carrying the thing, and he was grinning. And before he could say anything, she put up her hand like a police officer and closed her eyes and said, ‘Oh, Mitchell, please no more. You can’t bring that in. It’s junk.’
He looked completely confused and she immediately understood: he hadn’t found it, he’d made it. It was some kind of project he’d been working on during woodworking class, in secret, to bring home to her, a surprise.
She tried to take the moment back, bluff her way out, saying, ‘Yes, yes, I’m only kidding; of course, it’s fantastic!’ But she thought he knew. Now that he was gone, she could not shake the memory of his shocked face.
‘He made it, he brought it to me; I told him it looked like junk,’ she said.
I knew what I was supposed to say: ‘He’s in God’s care now, Mrs Cousins; he’s at peace; he knows you didn’t mean it.’
What I wanted to say was: ‘Like you, Mrs Cousins, I can’t get over this. This is absolutely outrageous. How can I possibly believe that God has taken your child from you, and that you are sitting here in agony, tormenting yourself over something you said to him, and really, that’s okay? Because he’s in a good place and we’ll all see each other again one day. Like you, I’m thinking, this is bullshit. Mitchell should be here! Bugger being in paradise. Mitchell should be here with his mother. He should be bringing more things home to drive her crazy with! He should have been allowed to go home.’
Chapter Thirty-three
It took Hanrahan about six months to consider, write and hand down his report after taking everybody’s testimony at the inquest. As reports go, it didn’t amount to much: nobody was to blame for Mitchell Cousins’ death other than Ali Khan, who had in turn been a pawn in Harding’s game, with Safi as his accomplice. Harding had already been charged with a range of offences – conspiracy to kill being one of them – and Safi had been put back in detention to await deportation. Not a word was said about Roger Callaghan’s conduct. That was to be expected: it’s not illegal to be a self-centred, self-serving, cowardly jerk – and, as Hanrahan told me, the coroner can’t be seen to be concerning himself with the morality of the situation by commenting on what Callaghan did or didn’t do.
The timing isn’t necessarily relevant but exactly four weeks after the report was handed down, I went to see the bishop to tell him I’d decided that I couldn’t be police chaplain anymore. Not just that: I was leaving the priesthood altogether. It’s not as uncommon as people think; priests leave all the time, although it’s usually to get married. I suppose the bishop thought I might have a woman in the wings. He hinted at it, saying temptation was difficult and that if I’d been seduced – that tends to be the way they see it – I could confess to him, and he’d give me absolution.
I said, ‘It isn’t that. I don’t believe the things I have to tell people anymore.’
He wasn’t shocked. Priests are forever confessing to each other moments of crisis in their faith. The laity may not believe it, but we struggle with the church and its hierarchy; the rules on who can or can’t do this or that (be priests, get married, have sex); and we’re as hurt as anyone by the scandals that befall the church.
‘You need to pray,’ the bishop said.
‘I’ve prayed.’
‘Is there something specific that’s been troubling you?’
‘The boy at Surf City – Mitchell Cousins. I can’t make sense of it.’
‘We’re not meant to understand everything.’
I wasn’t going to say something like, ‘I know. There’s more to God’s plan than we can ever understand. I’ve been telling shocked and grieving people that for more than twenty years.’
I will never have to say it again.
I won’t go into more of what the bishop and I said to each other, except to say that I could not be persuaded to stay.
Leaving the church has meant that I’ve had to find a new job. I thought there might be a role for me as a school counsellor, or a Red Cross or Lifeline counsellor, or something of that nature. It turns out I’m not qualified. So I’ve gone to work as a nightclub bouncer. I have the physique – all those weights. I’m used to doing night shifts. I still go by the soup kitchen and lend a hand after 3 am, which is when I knock off. I’m seeing more female flesh than I’ve ever seen – sprayed, plucked, hoisted up on skyscraper heels – and one curious thing is that I’m not particularly interested, but that’s human, isn’t it: what you can’t have, you want.
I’m lucky in that I’ve got a place to live – the flat that Ruth gave me – and it won’t take me long to upgrade my qualifications to do some kind of social work, although I have to say, I’ve enjoyed being a bouncer.
Working nights means there have been a number of days where I’ve found myself at a bit of a loose end. That’s probably too simplistic an explanation for how I’ve found myself, more than once, sitting not quite outside Cups and Saucy.
Loose-end hours I could spend anywhere, yet I spend them there.
I don’t usually go inside – actually, I’d never been inside until last week, when I finally plucked up the courage. I approached fairly cautiously. The two mannequins were gone. In their place were two larger-than-life posters of women, laughing and enjoying their ‘Bust ’Em Out’ bras.
There was a lady behind the counter. She looked nothing like Mouse. She was older – forty-two? Forty-five? – and dressed simply.
‘Looking for something special?’ she said. Her smile was thin.
I backed out, tripping as I went. She probably thought I was a pervert.
&
nbsp; I decided to head back to my car and I was halfway there, with my keys in my hand, when I saw Mitchell’s mum. She was pushing a trolley out of Coles, not 500 metres from where her son’s life had come to an end. Why that should have shocked me, I don’t know. It’s not as if I don’t understand that life goes on. How many times had people come to me and said something like, ‘I’m shopping for groceries, Father. I’m talking to people, I’m eating, I’m doing things – and all I want to do is die.’
Still, at first I thought, ‘No, it can’t be,’ – the odds against it seemed so high – and yet isn’t it true that the most unlikely things happen all the time? We bump into people when we’ve been thinking about them. We go to Europe and run into people who live around the corner.
I watched without saying anything. There was a girl riding on the front end of the trolley, facing her mum: it was Mitchell’s little sister, Eloise.
She was much more grown up than I remembered. The last time I’d seen her – admittedly, only from a distance, at Mitchell’s funeral – she’d seemed to me to be a child. Now here she was, an almost adolescent, getting a free ride on the trolley, grinning at the loot within: Coco Pops and Juice Pops and Coles-brand bread and a five-fingered bunch of bananas and, hooked over the edge of the trolley, still on plastic hangers, two Bonds training bras in gelato colours.
Eloise was growing up. In the process, she was also catching up: she was nine years old when Mitchell died; she’s now eleven. Sometime soon, she’ll overtake him: Eloise will be thirteen, and Mitchell will be twelve years old forever. How must that feel, to have your position in the family unnaturally, irrevocably reversed?
I guess I can understand it: Ruth was much younger than I am now when she died – but she was not a child. She had lived something of her life before it ended; Mitchell had barely gotten started.
Not for the first time, I found myself screaming inside: ‘Why does God do this? Take not just the child, but the good man he would have become?’
And I knew the answer, which is that there isn’t one.
No Place Like Home Page 24
