by David Malouf
But these images will get us nowhere. Half the male population of the suburb, of the city even, might move without difficulty into these familiar outlines.
What does it mean?
Are there, quite simply, three prowlers of different ages? Or are the women's memories in some way inaccurate—or not so much inaccurate as so creative, so deeply stimulated, that they have added to their experience and remade it, so that what they reproduce is not what they saw at the moment of the attack (some of them can have seen very little) but what sprang into their minds as a visual equivalent of what their hands encountered in darkness, rough cloth, metal, the coarseness of hair, of what forced itself into their nostrils as an unforgettable but unidentifiable odour, and into their ears as a series of obscene monosyllables or grunts or beery endearments. These details do not interest the police; they can do nothing with them.
“His breath on my neck"—what use is that?
“His body was so hot—like an oven.”
“There was a smell of mice.”
“Salt. His hand tasted of salt.”
The visual features of the identity-kit picture are attempts to render, in another language, what the women did not see but sensed, or heard, or smelled, and the translations are clichs, they derive from the common pool of their reading or from the movies. What the identikit pictures provide us with is not the composite picture of a prowler— some citizen engaged at this moment in delivering bread or sealing envelopes in an office or teaching his kids to box with a bag under the house—but a picture of the man these women fear most, or know best, or most long for, or have dreamed of once on some remote occasion and forgotten.
It is no coincidence that if we treat these pictures as caricatures, the man who most resembles the victim's assailant is often a member of her own family: a father, an uncle, a brother-in-law, a son.
8
A burglary takes place. Nothing much is stolen. But a man, turning afterwards to the drawer where his handkerchiefs are kept, discovers that one of them has been used. He stares at the patch of quite ordinary wetness and feels panic. Not disgust but panic. As if his house could never be his own again; as if it stood roofless and could never again offer him refuge or protection because there is no such thing in the world; as if he himself stood naked. Whimpering with shame he tumbles the handkerchiefs out on to the floor and removes them with a stick.
What unnerves him is not the patch of wetness itself, but what it forces upon him—the fact of the burglar's ordinariness and at the same time his utter strangeness. He has before him the man's bodily juices, but no face, no name, and it comes home to him that he lives among strangers, more than half a million of them, who might at any moment break the unwritten contract and force their way into his bedroom, open his tallboy, put to use one of his initialled handkerchiefs.
Later he comes to think of his reaction as excessive and finds it difficult to isolate the precise cause of his panic. It seems irrational. But it is precisely this irrationality that continues to exert an influence on him. When he thinks of the incident he burns with shame.
So it is that many of the attacks—perhaps even the majority—go unreported.
9
Each morning nearly a dozen women appear at the office of the Incidents Squad with information they will impart only to Senior Detective Pierce in person.
Senior Detective Pierce has become a popular figure in our little world. Smilingly reassuring when he appears on television, grim and determined when he is snapped at press conferences, he is a sort of prowler in reverse who has caught the imagination of the public in much the same way as the prowler himself. What did we do, we ask ourselves, before we had Senior Detective Pierce?
Even the genial detective's two small boys have entered the pantheon. They are called Sam and Harry, aged ten and seven.
They bear no clear resemblance to Senior Detective Pierce but are said to be the living picture of his dead wife, whose absence lends a touch of pathos to the policeman's rugged assurance and brings to an image that is otherwise all assertiveness and power an engaging ambiguity. It allows him to be a family man, very solid and reliable, but also turns him loose.
The two boys, tough-looking blonds, keep the mother's figure clearly in view (did she really look like that?) but in their cocky imitation maleness it is disturbingly redefined. When Senior Detective Pierce and his boys are photographed together at a swimming carnival or at one of our local rugby matches, this simultaneous absence and presence of the wife and mother constitutes a mystery that women respond to (and some men as well) without at all knowing what is in play. Around the rough edges of the two boys, all grazed elbows and knees, glows the aura of the missing wife, and the hard outline of Senior Detective Pierce, ex-lifesaver and League forward, is softened as he stoops to see that Sam's windcheater is buttoned, or with the corner of a handkerchief wet with spit, cleans ice-cream from Harry's shirt-front, by the lineaments of the tender, all solicitous mother.
“How are Samnharry?” women tend to enquire as a way of easing themselves into their story, slipping thus, as they might see it, into the role of family friend or next-door neighbour.
Then immediately, breathlessly, before the proud father can answer: "I have seen the prowler!”
10
The information provided by many of the victims has no basis in fact. That is quite clear. But it is not therefore false. They have seen the prowler, but in one of those dreams that nightly crowd the streets of our suburb with a life as intense, as busy, as any it knows by day. Here is just one of them.
The dreamer is a woman of forty, a pharmacist. She is walking at dusk along the grassy footpath of a street planted with poincianas, so thick (it is early summer) that they meet above the roadway, making a tunnel that the light of the street lamps barely penetrates. In the woman's dream the darkness in which she is walking is thickened by an unseasonable fog. It swirls so densely about her that she cannot see her feet. She wades in it. (This is dream weather. No such conditions occur in our damp sub-tropical city at the hour at which the woman is walking, though they are not infrequent, in another part of the year, in the hour before dawn—that is, at the time of her dream.) It is in a state of great weariness, as she drags her body through the warm fog, that she hears behind her, or in front, for she cannot tell which, a soft thudding, the footsteps as she quickly perceives of an approaching jogger.
She stops, flattens herself against the trunk of a tree; hoping that the runner, whoever he may be, will not see her.
The footsteps get closer.
She presses her body closer to the tree trunk, trying to pass through the rough bark into it, to become part of its life, and seems for a moment to have succeeded. She is not there. Only the roughness of the bark, its pressure round her thighs, gives her some sense of her own separate being as the runner (it is the blond boy in the tracksuit we have previously imagined) materializes out of the fog.
And at that moment a woman she recognises, with horror, as her perfect double steps right into his path. The runner has to pull up with a jerk to avoid colliding with her. They stand face to face. The youth steps to the left in order to pass her, and her reflection steps to the right. Again they are face to face. She tries to scream but cannot, her voice belongs to the double. She wakes with her face contorted in a silent shriek, and the boy's features are so clearly before her that she can describe them in detail: colour of eyes blue; a scar under the right eye high up on the cheekbone, which gives him a slight squint; hair heavy with sweat, hanging in bangs over his brow; a day's growth of stubble; a film of spittle that makes his teeth gleam, when recovering his breath at last, he opens his mouth to defend himself. She shakes her head. No! No! No defence! No defence possible!
It is the boy in the tracksuit, no doubt of it. She gives his picture to the life. For a whole week, each night of fog, he pads softly through her sleep and confronts her, always at the same point; comes so close she can smell his sweat, feel his breath on her face.
He is too breathless to speak and she too terrified to cry out. They do their strange dance on the grass in utter silence.
After the seventh night of this silent intimidation she goes to the police. The boy enters their files. He contributes his features to one of the three identikit pictures, but is never sighted.
11
It is easy of course to get things out of proportion, to forget that on a night when one, maybe two attacks take place, hundreds of innocent girls sit at their dressing table mirrors with the window open, rubbing coldcream into their face and neck, smoothing it gently upwards, then lower themselves into untroubled sleep; that schoolboys, tired after late football practise and an hour of television, roll gently over the touchline into absolute oblivion before they have even resolved the question, with fingers round their cock: "Will I tonight or won't I? Did I do it last night?;" that young lovers in cars angle-parked towards the drop on Bartley's Hill are softly rediscovering one another, moving into a lifetime together as they uncover the familiar unfamiliarity of one another's bodies in the hot darkness; as their parents, in a space of dark between the streetlights below, are also moving through one another (having graduated from here more than twenty years ago) like palpable ghosts, towards the mystery of sleep and the odd messages, important, uncatchable, that come to them in flashes before dawn.
The suburb sleeps. Most of its dreams are dull, bursting like bubbles in the light, and as clear as bubbles. Entirely guiltless. The sleepers drift, go under, climbing back into the shallows every hour in phase after phase, feeding on stillness; pulse slow, breath regular, renewing themselves with huge draughts of space in which there are no objects to catch the eye or engage the body's idling senses; free for a time of the body's demands as it goes its own way through the dark. Cats are abroad. Their eyes redden under a culvert. Flying-foxes row in to raid a patch of Moreton Bay figs at the edge of a golf course or a backyard mango tree; they hang there, upside down under the boughs, like the souls of a suburb of sleepers, ranked in the dark. Just before first light the newsagent, McAllister, from a car with one whole side cut away, tosses the morning papers rolled into a cylinder on to dew-damp lawns, and Dr. Cooper, hearing him turn into Arran Avenue, will know that it is time to get back into his clothes and go home. The papers lie there in the growing light. They carry the news. But the night's real occurrences will not be in them. One or two extraordinary moments, yes: a car-smash on Ipswich Road, a fight in a roadside caf on Petrie Terrace, another assault. But not the familiar couplings, the exchanges, the busy life the suburb pursues in its sleep. This is anti-news, and from this point of view the papers are unreliable. Too much that happens here is of no interest to them. A hundred and fifty thousand potential victims un-attacked in a single night. What sort of news is that?
12
The CIB has just announced that according to their experts the Nun-dah prowler and our prowler, who were thought to be one and the same, are indisputably different.
How, one wonders, do they know?
Nundah is the next suburb from here, the boundaries being the suburban railway line, a park, and the winding course of a creek that is quite visible in old photographs of the area but has long since been filled in to make an equally winding street; both sides of the street are planted with bouhinia, which all flower in the same exuberant pink and at the same season, but one side is Nundah and the other is not.
Does the Nundah prowler never cross the street? And if not why not?
I can understand that he might hesitate at the railway line, which does after all represent a real obstacle and where the character of the two suburbs is distinct, our side being older and better established, with big parklike gardens and, as the real-estate agents put it, a better class of resident. One can imagine that the Nundah prowler, used to small houses on sixteen-perch allotments, mostly treeless and unsewered, might feel intimidated before the big verandahed mansions on our side, might find the gardens, with their clumps of dark shrubbery and shade-trees, off-putting in some way, being unused to their odd pattern of moonlight and shadow or the sound of creatures rustling and breathing in the boughs. Insufficiently urbanized is what he might find them, and threatening to his sense of space. And the same would be true of the old-fashioned interiors. Too many rooms, too many corridors and stairways. Or it might be the unfamiliarity of the life that is lived here that makes him insecure. Or the kind of woman. One understands well enough that there may be social frontiers, and with them a whole set of sexual associations, that a prowler is unwilling to cross. At the railway line anyway.
But what about further down, where the boundary between the two suburbs is little more than a bureaucratic convenience? Does the Nun-dah prowler really stick to one side of the street, leaving the other to our prowler? Is some sort of territorial instinct in operation? Do prowlers lay down a scent that keeps off rivals, creating a magic fence around the borders of their fantasy world that a stranger recognises and is repelled by or finds himself unable to penetrate? And if this is so, how extraordinary that these private boundaries should follow exactly the line laid down on a map in the Surveyor's Office and recognised by most citizens only when their water rates arrive in a different post from their neighbour's opposite—should follow, that is, all the twists and turns of an underground creek filled in nearly sixty years ago and chosen then, quite arbitrarily (we can imagine the debate that was to determine so much in the lives of future prowlers and their victims) as a surburban dividing-line by a committee of respectable aldermen.
No doubt these considerations have occurred to the Incident Squad and been properly dealt with. But they have not published their reasons. When they do so, a great deal may be revealed that at the moment remains inexplicable, and valuable light shed on the secret life of suburbs—not to mention the anthropology of prowlers.
13
DESPITEthe warnings that are published almost daily in our papers, and the growing number of assaults, women continue to make themselves vulnerable.
Driving slowly round the suburb in the gathering dusk I see window after window in the dark gardens ablaze with light, open to the cool summer breeze and all the scents, sub-tropical, overpowering, of the night: jasmine, honeysuckle, cestrum—that heavy night-walker.
The scenes that appear in these brightly lit squares constitute a series of frames between spaces of dark, a living peepshow. Here a girl in a half-slip is ironing, her thin shoulders moving to the music behind her, which as I drive on, bounces a moment and is gone. Another woman at a kitchen bench is decorating a birthday cake in the shape of an open book; my kids will be at the party where it is to be eaten, among party-hats, whistles, bowls of jelly and ice-cream (two dozen moulds of raspberry jelly are cooling on the laminex bench), and off-key renderings “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” Yet another woman stands in half-thought at a washing machine, holding an armful of overalls and waiting for the cycle to begin.
They are all unaware, these women, in their ease of movement or in their dreamy repose, that they are not only clearly visible as they hang aloft there in the dark, but have been endowed, in their detachment within the single frame, with a special quality of significance, so that the smallest of their gestures strikes the senses, is incised on the memory, is given, in all its ordinariness, an aura of the exotic that suggests a pose, as if what we were really watching were a set of professionals acting out a series of domestic scenes in such a way as to emphasize what is specifically erotic in them.
Even later, towards midnight, when the bluish-silver of the television screens has drained away down a pinhole and the suburb sleeps—all its citizens still present but communally engaged now in reassembling the facts of their daily life into the other language of dreams—even then, I notice, there are casements ajar, obliquely taking the moonlight, a curtain's drift and fall shows where a sash window has been raised a little to let in the breeze.
Not me is what is being proclaimed. Others may fall victim, but not me.
Some of these
windows are open invitations. But which? That is the point. Obviously the prowler cannot judge or his attacks would not be reported. Do the reported attacks, then, represent only the tip of an iceberg, the prowler's errors, his misreading of what a window left unlatched or a woman moving half-clad across a stage-lit space might innocently suggest? Are there rooms where women wait night after night for the sound of a footfall, the creak of a board on the verandah, or a doorhandle being tried, only to suffer, night after night, the entry of nothing more than moonlight, thin, disembodied, that in the morning leaves no mark on the flesh?
The signs are not clear enough. What we need is a more specific means of communication. If only so that some women may discover the signals they should avoid.
14
I WONDER,since so much of the objective evidence has led nowhere, if the Incident Squad shouldn't try something quite different; as a way, I mean, of releasing the crimes for a moment from the world of fact into the world of fantasy where they properly belong. Since fantasy and its irrational associations are the language the prowler speaks, mightn't we try thinking in that language as a way of anticipating his moves? At the very least the sort of games I am proposing would loosen things up, get rid of preconceptions that may be standing in the investigators’ way, would send them back to the evidence with a more open and intuitive understanding of that pattern of analogies that lies often enough under the confusions of mere event. Several “Letters to the Editor” have suggested the employment of a clairvoyant. But this is so much simpler. And there is something liberating in the very idea of a group of policemen and women, under the direction of Senior Detective Pierce, abandoning their files for a morning to play party-games.
