The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  This eerie feeling hung over the coastal suburbs and over the beaches at Cottesloe and North Cottesloe, and also over Swanbourne Beach, where Brian Weir had been a member of the surf club. (It was only discovered he’d been shot when he didn’t turn up for surfboat training on Sunday morning and his Swanbourne boat crew mates, thinking he’d overslept, went to his flat to wake him.)

  The same ominous sensation loitered in the beer gardens and bars of the Captain Stirling and Nedlands Park and Highway hotels. It was intensified in the bar of the Ocean Beach Hotel – the OBH, as it was known to generations of coastal drinkers – overlooking North Cottesloe Beach. The feeling was a combination of bewilderment, fear and suspicion. Everyone had the wind up.

  It was easy to think of the OBH as an important link in the murders. Rowena Reeves, the woman shot in the wrist in the parked car nearby, was a barmaid there. The man in the car with her, Nicholas August, a poultry supplier, was a regular customer. George Walmsley, a talented musician, occasionally played the piano there at wedding receptions. John Sturkey sometimes drank there, too – illegally, because the official drinking age was twenty-one. But then so did hundreds of university undergraduates, most of them under-age, and lifesavers, and Daily News and West Australian reporters, and general beachgoers. So did Brian Weir. So did my father. For that matter (though of course at different times to him), so did I.

  Now John Sturkey’s friends talked constantly and excitedly of him. I supposed Brian Weir’s and George Walmsley’s friends did the same of them. When we talked of John we were always in awe of fate and luck. Our discussions never forgot how he and Scott MacWilliam, the other student lodging at Mrs Connie Allen’s boarding house, had tossed a coin to see who got the bed on the open back veranda for the hot summer nights. John won the toss.

  We told and retold Scott’s tale of how he’d wandered out onto the back veranda at one a.m. to escape the heat and to drink a bottle of milk from the fridge. (Coincidentally, he, too, had been drinking at the OBH earlier that night.) John had woken and they’d chatted while Scott sat on the end of his bed and drank the milk before going back inside.

  It was an anecdote told because of its ordinary beginning, and its horrible end. Three hours later Scott was woken by Mrs Allen’s niece, Pauline. There was something wrong with John. Scott went out to the veranda. Strange gurgling sounds were coming from John’s throat. Scott lifted John’s head from the pillow, thinking he was choking. His head fell back, and Scott saw the bruising, the powder burns, the point-blank bullet wound through the top of his forehead. There was blood on the bed and on the floor.

  You didn’t need an overheated imagination to realise this could have been any of us boys. It could have been me. It was easy to identify. I knew John Sturkey; I knew Scott MacWilliam; I knew the house. There was a terrible conflicted, guilty thrill in this familiarity if you were a boy with a taste for the macabre, snuggling down with your girlfriend inside her old house with no adults on the premises. Ruth’s parents both lived away: her father farmed in the south-west; her mother was housekeeping for an old woman in Nedlands. Released from the confines of Santa Maria, Ruth lived with her younger sister in South Perth – two attractive girls living by themselves. I kept her company whenever I could.

  It wasn’t only wanting to be with my girlfriend. Young women were being murdered again. On a Saturday night two weeks after the Cottesloe–Nedlands murders, Rosemary Anderson, only seventeen, was deliberately run down by a car in Shenton Park. A week after, Lucy Madrill, a social worker of twenty-four, was strangled with a lamp cord and raped in her bed in West Perth. Her naked body was dragged from her house and left spreadeagled on a neighbour’s back lawn. The empty whisky bottle which had also violated her was cradled in her right arm.

  The police came up with a theory about Lucy Madrill’s killer. Because she’d worked for the Native Welfare Department as a psychological adviser to Aboriginal women and children they suggested an Aborigine might have murdered her. There were no grounds for this theory and it went nowhere, except to display their prejudice. They finally admitted they were looking for a prowler. Police Commissioner O’Brien again stressed, however, that there were no links with any other killings. He said the modus operandi was too different. Meanwhile, in the Rosemary Anderson case they had charged her boyfriend, John Button, with her murder.

  Again the murders had occurred in the sedate suburbs of my beat. And once more, alas, they were front-page crimes, not supplement material. At night I drove past the latest crime scenes on my way to cover one or other of the bickering sessions of the Subiaco or Nedlands or Cottesloe local councils. Insensitive tree-lopping was on one agenda, and beach erosion on another, and quite a bitter fight about whether or not to restore historic Gallop House on the Dalkeith foreshore, where last century a young woman had been chopped to death with an axe by a person unknown.

  Ruth had two important things to say to me and it was the second one which seemed to cause her more anguish. ‘I have to tell you this,’ she said. She was actually a year older than she’d claimed when we first met on Rottnest. She was a year older than I was. And – she was weeping now – she’d lied because she’d been scared that her being older would put me off. She was really nineteen, she sobbed, and would I ever forgive her?

  She was my first steady girlfriend, we’d known each other a year and I loved her. Of course, I said. I thought, eighteen, nineteen, whatever. I was still numbed by the first important thing she’d told me. She was pregnant.

  It was winter. We were sitting on the grass in the middle of the windy Esplanade, the wide stretch of lawn between the river and the city’s business district, and in my daze at her news I found myself stroking the big fake-fur collar on her corduroy coat. It was an attractive and efficient coat, mustardy brown, of the sort favoured by stylish students, equally suitable for the coffee shop or sports-watching or the movies, and I sat there soothing the collar as if it were a nervous cat, patting and kneading its fur for ten minutes or so before I realised my distracted attempt at calming pressure was falling totally on fluffy fabric rather than on any part of her body.

  ‘We have to make sure,’ I croaked. But I knew she was right. The wind from the grey river estuary gusted into my face. Seagulls and pigeons blew randomly about. Even though it was cold, this felt like it could lead to a scene from A Summer Place. As if from a distance I could already see myself and Ruth acting out dutiful movie roles while the world around us gathered momentum. I said things to her from films, the words sounding familiar in my mouth. At the same time I felt far from worldly and knowledgeable. I felt simultaneously much older and younger than my age.

  I stroked Ruth’s actual wrist. I made a point of finding skin this time. I was stroking her wrist and watching the clouds thickening and blowing north over King’s Park, and the late afternoon traffic streaming south over the Narrows Bridge, when it dawned on me why film directors used a sky of scudding clouds to signify a dramatic emotional shift, and that the world and my place in it had altered forever.

  At the instant by the evening stove when she heard the news something happened to the way my mother looked and sounded. One moment she was her smiling and upright self, the next she seemed slowed down and compacted by extra gravity. But her thoughts and tongue were loosened and wildly speeded up.

  She took it hard, much worse even than I’d feared. ‘This is too much for me!’ she said, and began to rage and weep at once. ‘This is more than I can handle!’ The lamb cutlets were sizzling and spitting but she didn’t take them off the grill. I would have leaned into the smoke to move them but I thought she might strike me with her waving spatula. ‘I knew this would happen!’ She stirred the peas so vigorously some swirled out of the saucepan and rolled along the stove-top. ‘This is more than I can bear!’

  Ruth and I were hovering in the cramped space between the fridge and the stove. Ruth’s face was almost as white as the fridge door. Her fine pale hair was tightly bundled up. She was rugged up in her cord
uroy coat. For once she looked like a Protestant’s image of a convent girl. She’d used a lot of powder but she still looked like a nun, like two of her four sisters. She smiled a wan, churchy smile but couldn’t speak.

  My mother stared into the spitting and bubbling food and drew deep breaths for a whole minute and then turned off the grill and the gas burners under the saucepans. Ruth was so white I thought she might faint. I steered her to a chair at the kitchen table. I put my hand on her shoulder and patted her. Furious vibrations from the stove area told me I shouldn’t be too ostentatiously attentive, or tastelessly draw attention to Ruth’s condition and a martyrdom so ill-deserved. So I sat down myself. But sitting felt wrong, too, and it disadvantaged me. It wasn’t my usual seat – it was my brother’s chair – and all the kitchen angles, even the marbled blue swirls of the Formica tabletop, looked unfamiliar from there.

  I stood up again and backed up against the fridge door. I placed myself between the women. It seemed important that I stand halfway between them.

  This wasn’t like A Summer Place now. I felt more pathetic and even dumber than Troy Donahue. Troy handled this sort of thing better; he always looked low-key and sulky but he never looked shamed. I didn’t feel low-key. I felt base and somehow abnormal. I was a stranger in our own kitchen. My mother had remained close to the stove but now she turned from it and said to me, ‘You know you have ruined your lives. You have wrecked this family.’

  ‘I’m sorry you think so,’ I muttered. I felt so wretched I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I reached over to touch her arm but she brushed my hand away.

  She asked us scornfully what we thought we were going to do.

  Ruth looked at me. We hadn’t actually discussed it but assumptions had been made that windy afternoon on the Esplanade. Made but not voiced. Alternatives had never been discussed or considered. When the pregnancy was confirmed (by a South Perth doctor who didn’t know us), assumptions had somehow solidified. But still not been voiced.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ I said.

  ‘Hah!’ my mother scoffed. ‘Not at eighteen you won’t.’

  She didn’t seem the same person. Her usual quiet emphasis on taking responsibility for your actions, facing the music, doing the right thing, the disciplined approach, seemed to have flown out the window. My friends all liked her for her friendly, sympathetic personality. She understood the young. Now she was exactly like a mother from A Summer Place – and not Dorothy McGuire, Troy’s warm, flawed and understanding mother, but Constance Ford, Sandra Dee’s grim mother straight from bitter myth.

  I was shocked at how shocked she was. ‘You can’t go through with this,’ she insisted. ‘You need our permission. We’ll stop it.’

  Eighteen was legally old enough to be married, especially if the girl was pregnant. And, anyway, Ruth was nineteen. I felt suddenly much older. I realised that in my life I’d never defied my mother before.

  ‘Well, that’s what we’re doing,’ I announced to her, to Ruth and to myself.

  My mother, this sudden stranger to me, said she would be the one to break the news to my father. She told him in the car on their way to a Dunlop function that night. He reacted quite differently. He was fiercely embarrassed. When she told him, he hissed at her not to tell anybody.

  She seemed to take a grim pleasure next day in relaying his reaction to me. I was working the night shift on police rounds and sleeping late, or trying to. This enabled my father and me to avoid each other for thirty-six hours. But I couldn’t avoid her. I had to get up eventually. Anyway, she woke me in order to continue the agony.

  She was still in a spin and spiralling away. As soon as my brother and sister left for school, she started noisily vacuuming and moving furniture around. When I got up she followed me from room to room. There was no let-up while I was in the house, and when I left the house her bitter remarks and mortifying accusations swam in my head.

  ‘I thought something fishy was happening,’ she declared. ‘Suddenly I didn’t have to change your sheets as often as I used to.’ I could have curled up and died.

  Then she asked, with an eyebrow arched, whether Ruth had been a virgin. And what about the Catholic angle? Wasn’t Ruth’s mother a fierce Catholic? With two daughters nuns? She’d never agree to Ruth marrying a Protestant.

  ‘Let me warn you,’ she went on, and it was more like a malediction. ‘You’ll never recover from this. You’ll be living in a one-room slum full of screaming kids for the rest of your life.’ And, grimacing with disgust, she suddenly thought of something else and called out across the house, ‘You’d better not have been doing it in my car!’

  I couldn’t speak. The ordinary loving son and boyfriend could say nothing; neither could the country’s most loathsome sex-pig. I was silent with self-hatred and embarrassment, and furious at being so misunderstood.

  At last she seemed to have run out of steam, too. I didn’t know this woman any more and I didn’t have the words to deal with her. I’d never been in disgrace before. The truth was I was also curious about my behaviour and asking myself questions. I didn’t understand myself either.

  I’d known the risk involved, yet at a certain point I’d let fate take over. Why had I decided to defy the odds and my own intelligence and be swept away? I was young and naive but I knew better than that. It wasn’t just the old uneven battle between balls and brain. For this to happen, I suspected, I must have willed it. How could this be? Why had I lost my reason? Was it just love?

  And then the whole sorry state of affairs seemed to abruptly strike my mother once more. She moaned loudly to no one in particular, and it was a sort of angry keening, a deeply female note I’d never heard before. It rolled through the house. ‘This is worse than adultery!’

  This was too much. I was guilty of making love to my girlfriend, but this was over the top. ‘No, it’s not!’ I snapped. ‘We’re single!’

  I left the house then. I had to get out of there. But her adultery remark kept plaguing me. It was sorrow on an entirely different level. It was kinky. Only much later did I wonder whether I’d got it wrong. It dawned on me that perhaps she was comparing the way she felt now to how she’d felt on another occasion.

  I hoped I’d misunderstood her. The look she gave me after my retort about being single was more scornful than scorn. It was more complex than anger. Furious grief only began to describe it.

  Of course I was also dreading the discussion with my father about the ‘situation’, as my mother called it. This would be our first ever conversation about life – or sex. I recalled the Father and Son booklet, with its emphasis on scouting, hygiene, swimming in icy creeks, masculine fellowship, abstaining from cigarettes and avoiding ‘bad habits’, which had mysteriously appeared on my pillow when I first inquired how babies were really made.

  I was ten and I wanted the full story. Nothing I’d heard up till then made any sense. And the booklet certainly didn’t. I didn’t get the cigarette/baby connection, or the hiking and hygiene and cold-water connection, or the bad-habits connection. (Biting your fingernails? Chewing with your mouth open?) Or, for that matter, the photographs of square-jawed, bare-chested boys towelling themselves dry and smiling into the middle distance. Father and Son had a distinctly armpits-and-Brylcreem whiff to it.

  There wasn’t a female to be seen. I thought this was a bad slip-up by the Father and Son people. I still didn’t understand the male input, but even in my Tarzan kissing period the year before, I’d known women were central to the process.

  Our discussion now didn’t turn out like a scene from a movie either. It was eight-thirty in the morning; I was still in bed after working the late shift on police rounds. The night before I’d made my first visit to the city morgue with the night police reporter, a debonair gent with the memorable by-line of Donald Dyke. Gary, the cocky little morgue attendant on duty, had revelled in my initiation by suddenly throwing open a refrigerated drawer to reveal a carbon-monoxide suicide.

  While I recovered he
smoothly pulled out another drawer containing a long-deceased and moulting Muscovy duck: Exhibit A in a bestiality charge. ‘A farmer gets lonely down at Manjimup these cold nights,’ he said, pursing his lips.

  Opening a third drawer with a practised comic flourish, he announced, ‘And in this one we have … (he paused for effect as I reeled back) … ham and cheese sandwiches, Mum’s fruit cake and a bottle of Pepsi!’ His supper.

  When my father’s heavy footsteps came down the hall, the visit to the morgue and the stress of the ‘situation’ were all mixed up in skittish dozing dreams of people chasing me. Even before he reached the bedroom, I woke with my heart beating fast. I lay on the narrow bed of my childhood and pretended to be still asleep.

  When we were younger, at a certain late stage of their parties, some tipsy guests would be brought into our bedrooms, amid elaborate tiptoeing and appreciative whispery chuckling, to admire our small sleeping forms. It always woke me but I always feigned sleep.

  Now I played possum like a child again while he stood over the bed, breathing impatiently. I could smell the mingled scents of the Johnson’s baby powder he dusted himself with after his shower, and the Palmolive shaving cream, and the Vaseline hair tonic he used on the side-wings of his hair and even the Pepsodent on his breath.

  It was unusual enough him just being in the bedroom. It was five years since this particular conjunction of him and me: when I lay rigid and elongated with meningitis. He’d stood by the bed weighing up whether I had flu or not. I smelled his bathroom fragrances but I couldn’t raise or turn my head to look at him. Now he cleared his throat after a while and rocked on his soles and said, ‘I hear you’ve got yourself into some serious trouble.’