The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  It also made me feel hot and rattled that this was so. This was a pretty far step removed from the impulse to join all the other posterity-craving names scratched into the varnish of the Press table. (On my second day in court I’d succumbed to this one.) It sickened me that anyone should think my wink indicated I was on his side.

  I hated how my feelings were so easily swung around. But at least now we’d made eye contact I could study him more openly. And I couldn’t get over his appearance of patient contentment or his late-in-the-day change of manner. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and his suit and shirt were creased and grubby. In the circumstances, looking so shabby could hardly help him. I guessed he must have been roused for court very early that morning because by late afternoon his black five o’clock shadow gave him that look of a minor gangster or a stubbled saloon extra in a Western.

  Now he reminded me of some movie character in particular. Who was it? Yes, Burt Lancaster’s deaf-mute sidekick in The Crimson Pirate. They had a lot in common: dark wavy hair, small but athletic physiques, shrewdness, agility, obvious disabilities. But Burt Lancaster’s offsider had to be smarter. As our eyes met I thought: Didn’t it dawn on you that while the police were praising your memory just now they were nailing you down?

  While he sat there looking calm and flattered, he was an open and shut case. He wasn’t required to plead but it didn’t really matter. You didn’t need to hear him speak. At the end of the hearing the magistrate could only decide he had a murder charge to answer.

  Even in a short time I’d come to realise that most murderers looked more like bank tellers or economics teachers or crayfishermen. But he didn’t. When he smiled and preened like that he looked like a murderer.

  The magistrate appeared to agree. He was a twinkling, bow-tied cynic who every day telegraphed his feelings on the disreputable passing parade with snorts of repressed laughter and conspiratorial glances towards the Press table. But this afternoon there were no quips and arched eyebrows. He didn’t once look at us. His eyes moved only from the prosecutor to the man in the dock and to the witnesses and exhibits before him, and his decision was never in doubt.

  ‘You are committed for trial for murder,’ he said. His voice was brisk and cold and the usually shrewd eyes were flat behind his rimless glasses. Our jovial magistrate looked more like a Nazi intelligence officer.

  As he announced his unsurprising decision, the defence lawyers were already bundling up their papers. Their faces didn’t show much expression either; only that they knew they had a job ahead of them with this one.

  When, four years after the murders began, the long-awaited announcement of the arrest finally came, the front-page photograph of the small hunched figure, a blanket thrown over his head, being led by detectives from the lockup through a handful of intensely curious onlookers to the court holding cells, was greeted by a mass exhalation of breath.

  The government, the police and the suburbs sighed with relief. Thank God! Now life could go back to normal.

  I was one of the onlookers standing in the asphalt courtyard between the lockup and the holding cells. I was just in the picture: on the edge of the newspaper photograph leaning in. I was barely in the frame. I was a left ear, a nose tip, a cheek, a piece of jaw, a jacket shoulder, a sleeve, a hand, a notebook. I was present, but only just. I was made of gradations of grey dots.

  When they opened the cell door and bustled the prisoner outside, a whiff of carbolic acid followed him from the lockup into the courtyard. A detective threw a cell blanket over his head to thwart the photographers. (They’d make sure there wouldn’t be any chance of a mistrial because of over-exuberant publicity.) As we thronged towards the small hooded figure the high carbolic stink almost knocked me over.

  Already a legendary monster, he was there, shuffling past us, and then he was gone. His shuffle across the courtyard, the bustle of captors and onlookers, the snapping of photographs, the flash of Speed-Graphics, had taken no more than twenty seconds. The photograph of course captured the tension and excitement of the moment but rendered us all – prisoner, police and press – immobile.

  I wasn’t much more than a slice of nose, chin and notebook but I couldn’t stop looking at this photo, too. It reminded me that while life seemed tumultuous to me at the moment, my existence was marginal and my inactivity was probably permanent.

  After the committal proceedings, however, with the assignment completed, the story filed (forty-five paragraphs, seven of them written by me), the news editor satisfied, the time-book signed, the next day’s assignment noted, the feeling that I’d always be standing dumbly on the periphery of things was the least of my worries.

  The ‘alleged’ murderer had been committed for trial. Without doubt, he’d be convicted. The murders had stopped. Life would go on. But it was clear that my life wouldn’t continue as normal.

  I’d not long before come to a decision of my own, with hardly any thought or discussion but with complete certainty and no consideration of alternatives. And, it now occurred to me, in the face of grief and wrath and chaos, with no consideration of repercussions.

  While life itself was swirling like a sandstorm around everyone’s heads, my decision had been clear. This was even though I could see and hear myself and my girlfriend, Ruth, as if in a dream or from afar, sounding and behaving unnervingly like Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee in A Summer Place, a corny movie drama that I scorned.

  How could I feel so vague and at the same time behave so definitely? I was a day-dreamer; thinking was what I normally seemed to do all day. So what was the matter with me that I couldn’t think any more? And why couldn’t I even keep this question in my head for more than a second before it flicked away?

  After the committal, as I drove my mother’s tiny old pale blue Renault that evening across the Narrows Bridge towards Ruth’s house in South Perth, I had no imagination or wisdom left to deal with the next few hours. I felt incapable of talking or reasoning. I’d been dreading this evening and now it had arrived and my mind was a desert. I felt sick just being inside the Renault. Halfway across the bridge, a nerve in my right eyelid started twitching. When I checked in the rear-view mirror, however, my face was unusually white but the eyelid was quite still.

  In a trance, I drove across the bridge, part of me marvelling at the miracle of the Renault pottering along in the correct lane, avoiding the oncoming headlights, not tipping over the side of the bridge into the river. I couldn’t wait to see Ruth. I couldn’t wait to make love, to forget this day and this evening and this week and lose myself. Still in a daze, I drove off the down-ramp. Without it registering, I drove down Mill Point Road, past the block of flats where the first woman had been murdered.

  In my right mind I was the sort of person who always made mental notes of macabre places like that – like reporters were supposed to, I told myself – but I only remembered the murder flat a few blocks further on when I passed the South Perth Zoo and heard the lions roaring.

  I didn’t know why I made the connection. I certainly didn’t feel the usual eerie but not unpleasant feeling the lions’ roars gave me: of being safely uneaten, therefore sharply alive. It wasn’t as if I felt safely unmurdered. The only sensation I felt, apart from my eyelid dancing like crazy, was an uneasy, false calm. Not the lull before the storm; the storm was well and truly raging. I felt like I was in the eye of the storm.

  But I pulled up. Perhaps I thought I was grabbing the reins for a moment and doing something definite. I stopped the car, turned around and drove back past the murder scene in Mill Point Road – the first of the eight murder scenes – past the ground-floor flat where the sleeping woman, Patricia Berkman, had been stabbed in her bed.

  She was the victim some of the papers – not the West Australian, of course – had referred to as the ‘naked divorcee’ to distinguish her from the ‘beautiful socialite-heiress’, the ‘shapely brunette’ and the ‘studious babysitter’, with the disapproving inference that any woman wanton enough to be both divorced and
to sleep without nightclothes was asking to be murdered. What’s more she’d sold cosmetics at David Jones’s department store and had a Greek boyfriend who was a radio announcer. This got the gossip mills humming. Like the other women, she was young and attractive. This had been another count against her.

  I turned the car around again, stopped under a street light and, with the engine still running, looked at the flat for a while. So this was where he started. Where things stepped up a notch.

  I didn’t know what I was doing there. Taking my mind off things? Trying to see something of portent in the surroundings? Soaking up the macabre atmosphere? There wasn’t any. It was just an ordinary two-storey block of flats. It didn’t seem ominously seductive or anything. It didn’t look like the sort of place an attractive divorcee who slept naked would live. Even knowing what I knew, there was nothing there to help me imagine the murder that night or the mayhem that followed.

  A light was on inside No. 1, the murder flat. I guessed a new tenant was living there now. Of course, it was more than four years since the murder; a string of tenants could have passed through the flat. I wondered what sort of people they could be. How could anyone live where someone had been murdered? Sleep in the same room? Bad vibes, I said to myself.

  A middle-aged man in a straw hat was watering the garden and at the Renault’s throaty clatter, more like the sound of a Lambretta than a car, he glanced up and glared at me – suspiciously, I thought. He gripped the hose like a weapon. He looked like he was trying to commit the licence-plate to memory. He probably took me for a crime-scene pervert, a nut case. Maybe I was. The duck-egg blue Renault wouldn’t have helped.

  I hoped it wouldn’t stall as it often did when idling in inconvenient places. I didn’t want to have to get out of the car outside the flat and crank-start it. It was always breaking down. (You couldn’t get the proper spare parts in Perth. The local Renault dealer always insisted they were on a ship arriving any moment from France.) This time it didn’t falter, however, and I took a deep breath and drove away.

  As I headed off again, the realisation struck me. I was driving to Ruth’s out of old habit, and I was going to the wrong place. Ruth didn’t live in South Perth any more. At this moment she was probably lying in a negligee in my sister’s room in Circe Circle. Around her, people were pale and grieving. Strangers were in the house performing our familiar functions. Suddenly no one was where they were supposed to be.

  I felt as if I were speaking aloud to myself, voicing a single thought: I’m only young but this is how I’ll feel forever. Dazed, randy, mentally paralysed and swept along by events.

  I turned around again and headed back along Mill Point Road towards the Narrows Bridge, towards the evening’s appointment. I was anxious about it. I suspected what would happen. Weren’t death, murder and birth enough? Now I had to deal with guilt as well. Before the thought broke up and spun away, I wondered, vaguely: What happened?

  PART TWO

  1

  BLACK BOYS

  The plane took twelve hours from Melbourne to Perth and my mother cried most of the way. She dried her eyes and bought me barley sugar when we landed to refuel at Adelaide, and when we refuelled again at Kalgoorlie she recovered for a moment when the brilliance of the desert sunset made her catch her breath. By the time we arrived in Perth, it was pitch dark and she’d put on fresh lipstick, brushed her hair and stopped crying.

  I thought it was strange she was so unhappy when she’d spent weeks telling me how wonderful this would be. But I was too excited and mystified to think about it for long.

  I was six and my little brother Billy was almost two. Before we left Melbourne she’d damped down our hair for farewell photographs with our grandparents, Nan and Pop, and our uncles Ian and Jack, her younger and older brothers. The adults took it in turns to work the camera and line up in two puffy-eyed rows in the garden adjoining the Yarraville branch of the State Savings Bank of Victoria. Pop had recently been made the manager of this inner-city branch after years of managing country and outer-suburban bank branches and we’d been staying with them in the bank ‘residence’. The adults took it in turns to cry, too. Just as one adult bucked up and began to smile bravely, another would start sniffing and soon be blubbing away.

  The bank garden itself always made me feel sad. It was tired and wintry and churchy. Even the dirt in the garden beds looked old and apologetic. It was grey and crumbly and birds shunned it. Not surprisingly, for a threadbare oasis in a grimy industrial suburb, its plants and thin lawn were dusted with soot. Sick-looking black snails clung to the creeper on the common wall on whose dusty upper bricks the faint word UTCHER and a bull’s and a sheep’s face could still be seen. The only flowers were old-ladyish blue hydrangeas and some sort of lilies that made me think of graves.

  Even though Ian worked in a bank as well (a different bank, the Commonwealth, and so did Jack), he was too young and jokey to call uncle. He still lived at home, in the Yarraville bank residence. He was only seventeen years older than I was, young enough to join in my games. After hours, when Pop was at his bowling club, Ian would sometimes unlock the connecting door from the living quarters and we’d creep, whispering, down the brown linoleum corridor, falling respectfully silent as we passed the formidable Chubb safe with its silver steering wheel, and into the echoing bank office.

  We went there to play with the typewriters. The bank had two of them. The office might have been solemn and dull, with its pious smell of inkwells and locked-up money, but the typewriters were the most impressive things I’d ever seen. I couldn’t get over their clever clatter. Ian would write ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ and ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ and I’d try to copy them. But I preferred my lines of jumbled letters, numbers and wriggly shapes. I loved the endless combinations of symbols and the way I could peck out a crisp line of these crazy black marks until a bell rang. And then do it again – unless, at the touch of a lever, I chose to miraculously change all these shapes to red.

  One evening my mother tiptoed with us into the bank. Her ease with general office equipment was impressive enough, but her confidence in the typist’s chair was the real eye-opener. Who was this brisk person? Her upright posture, the way her nimble ten-fingered typing effortlessly produced one neat line after another, made her seem a different woman. It was as if she’d suddenly revealed a talent for a rare musical instrument.

  It always gave me a peculiar feeling to catch a glimpse of my parents’ lives before I was born. She loved to spring old skills on us: suddenly putting down her cigarette to do a cartwheel, or writing perfect shorthand or casually picking up a ping-pong bat and performing a backhand smash. Then she’d go about her ordinary business with a twinkle that said: There’s more to this mother than meets the eye.

  As well as our after-hours bank raids, she and Ian and I shared another confidence – my imaginary friend, John Gordon. My mother accepted John Gordon without fuss but Ian was always asking after him, even when my friend wasn’t there. He was always offering to hold John Gordon’s hand when we crossed the road. He was sorry for spilling John Gordon’s glass of water, or eating the chocolate meant for him, or accidentally tripping him on the stairs.

  ‘Whoops, there he goes,’ said Ian. ‘All the way to the bottom. Terribly sorry, John. Let me give you a hand.’

  Ian and his girlfriends used to take John Gordon and me to the beach with them on the tram. Once, two years before, when I was four, he’d taken us to a newsreel theatrette in Collins Street where one of the short features was an episode of the series Crime Does Not Pay. I had no trouble understanding it. It was about a family from out of town – mother, father and two little kids – who moved into a city apartment and were almost gassed to death in their sleep by a leak which their crooked landlord was too mean to fix.

  The gas hissing into the children’s bedroom as they slept affected me right away. (Wake up, you kids!) Only a random phonecall from a drunk diall
ing a wrong number woke their father on the twelfth or thirteenth ring. (Wake up, mister, wake up!) Roused by the telephone in the nick of time, the father stirred, shook his groggy head, smelled the gas, threw open the windows and saved his family’s lives.

  They took a lot of waking, however; especially the smallest child. My own heart was beating fast from the suspense, and also from trying to hold my breath in the cinema against the escaping gas. The gas was so evil I could smell it. I could almost see it, too, and in the recurrent nightmares that followed, I did. It was orange.

  John Gordon didn’t survive the gassing. He just disappeared. My mother asked after him once or twice. I said, ‘He had to go away,’ and I didn’t think about him any more.

  But after that whenever I saw red-haired, teasing Ian (‘Danny Kaye’s twin’, my mother called him), I thought about the Crime Does Not Pay family. Seeing Ian the day our family was moving across the continent brought back more vividly than ever the little gassed family from out of town. As we left the bank for the airport I looked up and down the street, half-expecting to see the coughing kids in their pyjamas stumbling out of an orange cloud into the Yarraville traffic.

  It made me anxious, but somehow not enough to overcome the excitement of catching a plane all the way to Western Australia. Anyway, in the daytime, if not in my night-time dreams of orange gas, I knew the Crime Does Not Pay family was all right in the end.

  On departure day, however, my mother’s mood about our destination never wavered. In the middle of the farewell photo session, she cried out, ‘It might as well be Africa!’ This confused me. Reading to me from a brochure on Western Australia just the week before, when she was still cheerful, she’d said it was the size of India and Pakistan combined. She also read out that Perth was the world’s most isolated city.