by Chloe Hooper
I bet Margot sometimes came into the clinic acting as if Ellie wasn’t doing a very good job. Margot would look at her meanly, as if thinking, Soon you’ll be this old, and Ellie always wanted to answer aloud, “No, I won’t.” She had started planning to go overseas. She wanted to go backpacking with the money she’d saved working at the clinic. Ellie had come to realize she had been very naive: she could barely even read her old diary entries, because she’d drawn pages of wedding dresses with embroidered trains. She’d designed a bridesmaid’s dress and had written down flowers for a bouquet. Nearly a year after moving to Black Swan Point she realized she’d been crazy. Nothing was going to change. She’d been crazy. In the office Ellie made a show of reading postcards from her friends overseas. She ripped certain pages from her diary: it was embarrassing to have ever been so young.
Like in this house, everything in Ellie’s house was probably exactly as it was when she was growing up: the daddy longlegs doing yogic stretches on the bathroom ceiling, the tap water tasting like twigs. When she opened the closets’ sighing doors, zephyrs of melancholy blew her hair back. Each shelf was like purgatory for all things once loved. Long-punctured inflatable canoes lived next to ancient electric blankets with rusted insides. There were jigsaw puzzles, all of the most inscrutable, infuriating images; and board games missing crucial pieces. Cluedo had one murder weapon left; tooth floss was the rope; a paper clip, the lead pipe. In the evenings, when she was small, her family played parlor games, snakes and ladders, gin rummy. Once she and her cousins made their own Ouija board and held a séance with her father. “Who last farted?” they asked the spirits gleefully and the impudent glass spelled out his name.
I stood up for a moment and turned out the light. The water again became still, but for the hot tap’s slow drip. I tried not to think of Margot leaving her sleeping husband, then driving through the night. Sometimes I pictured it so clearly I couldn’t get to sleep . . .
Ellie’s father had probably called all winter to check she had enough firewood. Even though she never lit fires. Even though she didn’t know how to. He’d call up, and talk her through the lighting process. And she’d say, “Yes, I’ve arranged the kindling now, in a tepee, yes . . . Oh! There it goes. It’s really raging!” Then she’d hang up, and turn on the radiator. The house looked just the same, but she didn’t fit inside it anymore. It shouldn’t have had to witness this behavior. Everything the same and her so different. On bad days she got the sense it might blackmail her.
“I find it hard to get aroused,” her lover had complained, “surrounded by so many photos of prizewinning marlin.” And she’d felt like answering: “Is that all that bothers you? Look underneath the fish photos. Can’t you see? Right there on the couch . . . it’s my father! My father may as well be sitting very straight, watching television with the volume down, because it’s less excruciating.” Her lover was pulling off her shirt, with his back to the TV. He couldn’t see the documentary on unsolved mysteries that was playing, and when the blurry footage of the Loch Ness Monster appeared—that famous image of a long-necked creature in thick fog—he was running his fingers along her spine, and only she could hear her indignant father calling, “It was probably just a duck!”
Her lover started to whisper the crudest things. Didn’t he realize her mother was still in the kitchen? If you squinted you could see her staring into the fridge with a slightly furrowed brow, realizing there was no food. One of her paperbacks was waiting on the countertop, as she took the last orange from the fruit bowl, cut it, and gave half to her husband, offering her daughter a quarter and saving the remaining quarter for herself. Why does Dad always get half? Ellie thought as her lover undid his belt, and then his trousers. And then she was shocked. She was shocked for them as he exposed himself, slowly stroking his erection. Why don’t we just cut the orange into thirds?
He’d push her shoulders gently and she’d fall to her knees, eye level with his gut. A small, round gut from living well. He was grimacing, as if concentrating on impossible calculus, his brow wrinkled into a π symbol. These facial contortions made him the ugliest man in the world. He had the ugliest face you could ever see. He’d start moaning and she had to close her eyes in order to concentrate. Then he’d gently stroke her hair, before pushing her head closer to his crotch. She tried not to gag. “Oh Lord!” Apparently chiropractors see a lot of women who’ve stuffed up their jaws from doing this sort of thing. “Do you like this?” he would moan, although obviously it was difficult to answer. Did she like what? Did she like that her parents were, in fact, all over the house? No. No, she didn’t. Their marriage hung in the bathroom like a scratchy old towel; like a shelf of aging sunscreen bottles, the nuptial smell was overwhelming.
Afterwards when he was gone, she wanted to call up her mother, and for her mother to say, nearly in a baby voice, “How’s my little girl? How’s my sweetheart?” Busy with her own deceit, Ellie didn’t realize that in no time her lover’s wife would leave him sleeping and drive through the night to pay a visit. She heard her mother’s voice and she wished she were nine years old sitting by the fire, burning a piece of paper’s edges to make an antique treasure map. She wished she would be sent to bed before The Sound of Music’s finale, because it was almost ten o’clock. She wanted to go out into the garden when the guests arrived with a lit sparkler to do her “sparkler dance.” And for them all to clap when she came back inside, triumphant.
The push-pull of children and parents separating: a minute ago she had been walking barefoot between her mother and father, watching as their shadows took turns carrying her shoes. Nowadays she sat with them as they came inside from the beach. She watched as they took off their sandals, as they wiped the sand off their skin, and thought, I know too much about your feet. And, I suppose, you know too much about mine. I know too much about the language of your face. And you know too much about the way to say my name. We’re like castaways, you and I—families are like castaways on a makeshift raft; baling out water, plugging leaks with whatever we can find—but you’d better teach me again how to swim. I’ll kick hard, while strong arms hold me in the water. If I curl up at your feet, pretending to be a baby, perhaps you’ll never die.
• • •
Margot moved around the Siddells’ house, staring at the blank night windows. Her footsteps were heavier on the ground than she’d expected. There was a knife in her pocket for protection. She would teach that girl a lesson; she’d like to cut her pretty face to teach her a lesson. Margot kept each step steady. The wind through the leaves made its whispering and she kept each step steady. Her husband wouldn’t cope a day without her. Imagine Graeme putting his big hand into their daughters’ little pockets. Shoving in his hand to find a shell before the wash. His fingers would jam against the soft lining, the silky lining. He’d nearly rip the fine stitching, searching as if for a love note wedged into the little fold.
Following the side fence, Margot found a window with a tease of open curtain like a slit of a skirt from ankle to waist. Inside glowed a dull light. She didn’t bother with the front door. She walked further, and tried the fly-wire screen around the back. In one dream moment it wheezed open. From the hallway she made her way toward the light. Margot heard breathing. And then a lamp on the bedside table showed off the sleeping girl. The girl breathed in and out. Her dance dress was hanging on the back of the door. A little slip of velvet which would barely cover her arse. A skinny little dress she’d probably worn for him. You vain bitch, dancing round the room for my husband, stripping off your slut clothes. Cold was being injected into Margot’s veins. Cold was surging to her brain. She walked toward the bed. She hated the flutter of the sleeping girl’s breath. Everything you see belongs to me. She could feel the knife pierce the skin, the young unblemished skin. The mouth was gasping, spluttering a half scream, and Margot wanted it to stop. Every time you laugh, that’s my happiness. When he kisses you, when he puts his fingers inside you: that’s love you’ve stolen from me. As Margot brought the knife down,
she knew she was also dying. Stop spluttering. Her hands were covered in the girl’s blood, and she could already feel herself plunging, she could feel her body falling. Her hands were covered in warm blood and she thought, It’s you who’s killing me. Stop spluttering.
• • •
The bathwater had turned cold. I lifted myself out, heavy. Sand, on the floorboards, stuck to my feet. Sand was sprinkled through the sheets; it was in the rug by the bed. Brushing the grit away, I lay down—eyes closed, heart horizontal—playing at some ideal of night, while outside a dog refined its barking. Before she drifted away, the girl must have thought that nothing could happen, nothing would happen. Sleep the sleep of the just babes. In the morning, early, she planned to get up and start again. So, lie there still, she heard her mother’s voice whisper. Lie there still. Close your eyes. The window will cover you in a sheet of moonlight, while I tell you this story.
• MURDER AT BLACK SWAN POINT •
All the old concerns flooded back.
Terence Tiger paced up and down, lecturing. It was important the younger animals understood that humans have essentially four main blood groups. “Type A, B, O, and AB,” he explained slowly. “Then, to further individualize blood stains, polymorphic enzymes are analyzed. These provide pathologists with subgroups known as the PGM or phosphoglucomutase types.” The tiger paused, wondering if the smaller-brained marsupials could keep up. “It was determined that Ellie Siddell’s ABO blood type was A PGM 1, and Graeme’s was A PGM 2-1. There was no sample of Margot’s blood, but according to hospital records from when Margot was delivering her three daughters, it was ascertained that she had type O blood.”
The tiger glanced down, checking that he held the little beasts’ attention. Kitty Koala, on a nearby branch, nodded and he continued. Using a twig, Terence drew a rough sketch of the Siddells’ floor plan in the dirt. He traced a stick figure lying by her stick bed, and all the old concerns flooded back: was this fascination with true crime not slightly crass? A way of fetishizing death? Of making it as kitsch as possible? All too often, Terence worried, this supposed analysis of the criminal mind had no methodology: we’re just ghoulish Victorians “studying” a hanged man’s death mask. He drew a stick refrigerator—it was amazing how such a ubiquitous white good could look so sinister. Often murderers used their fridges and, yes, also their washing machines for such grisly purposes . . . the tiger cleared his throat.
“According to the forensic evidence gathered by the police,” he continued, “the only place Eleanor Siddell bled was in her house. Predictably, type A PGM 1 blood was found all over her bed-clothes and mattress. Her undergarments were soaked in her blood, as were a large section of the carpet and the items lying on this carpet, including her nurse’s uniform.
“There was also a series of bloody handprints on the north wall of the hallway, as if the killer had leaned in, trying to steady him- or herself. The killer proceeded to the bathroom, washed his or her hands, then flicked them dry against the white bathtub, hence these pinkish streaks.” Terence looked once again at Kitty. “Now, pathologists found type A blood on the girl’s nightgown and the knife discovered near her body. However,” Terence paused, “the PGM subgrouping on these items could not be determined.”
All the little animals squirmed, not realizing this information’s significance.
“What are you suggesting?” Kitty Koala asked knowingly.
The tiger stared at the crudely drawn map. He tapped the twig against his hind leg, stifling a howl. “Technically, it’s possible that Graeme Harvey’s blood was also on the dead girl’s nightshirt, and the knife found beside her body . . .”
WAKING FELT LIKE another car crash: I opened my eyes and the day, too bright, came screeching toward me. It seemed I had woken in someone else’s dream. Closing my eyes again, I burrowed further into the bedclothes—if I went back to sleep perhaps I would be safe. “But what if this is a dream, and when you dream it’s not a dream?” Anaminka asked calmly one day, setting off an hour of intense debate. In some ways her question was further along than Philosophy 101’s “How do I know if I am dreaming?” For the answer is: you don’t actually know. It’s not logically impossible that the whole of life is a dream, and Anaminka had asked, “If in fact we are dreaming, then what are dreams?” If life is a dream, and in that dream we go to sleep, at that moment are we dead? No one, neither scientists nor philosophers, knows why we dream. What if children’s terror of night and night monsters is just their connecting the dots between dreaming and death?
Billy: Life could be like one big dream, like everyone’s dreams put together. You’ve just gone into a never-ending sleep when you were in your mum’s tummy, then you come out, and you have a dream about your life, and then you wake up and you’re dead.
Darren: I would be dead now, because in my dreams I’ve fallen off about fifty cliffs.
Eliza: Usually you know when you’re not dreaming because you can fly in your dreams.
Lucien: But I’ve been left with the question, “Have I really flown out of my bed?” And I don’t know. Sleepflying is what I’ve thought I’ve been doing, but the thing is I’ve never been looking out of my eyes. There’s a mini helicopter watching me. I’m looking at myself without a mirror.
The light through the curtain’s edges pried me from my bed. The light was so strong it stripped everything bare. It was so bright the wallaby grass outside could look snow-capped. Our garden used to be in near-constant darkness—a huge cypress had hovered over us like a dull-green mushroom cloud, and with so little sun, no native plants could grow underneath. After my grandparents passed away, my parents had the tree cut down. When the chain saw started my mother had to draw the curtains. She couldn’t watch. The stink of wood chip seeped through every room. Later, after the sunburned logger had finished his deafening work, I walked out into the garden fearful of seeing a toppled nest. The ground was carpeted with sawdust, and logs lay about. My father stood sadly in the middle of the wreckage, sun flooding down, and he turned to me, warning, “Avoid the heart.” The logger had told him that if you cut into the heart of the wood, the tree “shits itself.” It shatters into thousands of splinters and the timber is no good to anyone.
After the tree left, a strange comedy began. My parents called in a professional house mover. He sawed the weather-board house in half, employing two forklift trucks to simultaneously move each half to a better vantage point (perhaps when the house had been built the sea was considered too wild to view from one’s window). The house was restumped and rewired, closer to the cliff, on the site of the cypress. The last tins of discounted paint were used to reanoint the exterior. For a few weeks afterward, the locals would come of an evening, standing outside our home and staring as though it were a natural wonder.
My head throbbed. I wasn’t used to drinking, and I moved around slowly, the princess of dumb. This was the moment I needed my wits about me, but as I drew the curtains each picture seemed very wrong. During the night the house had taken off again, relanding with each angle out. It would have been no less strange to discover the house had swum to the bottom of the sea, than finding, over and over, the grand, stern cypress gone. No less strange than looking out the window in the mornings, realizing each view had been swapped, and I was living alone. My mother was not standing in an enormous sun hat whispering to her new saplings: “We’re so glad you’re in our garden. What a lovely plant you are.” My father was not chopping the leftover cypress, his tall thin frame negotiating a short stump of log. While I’d had my head dunked in my own illusions, all the comforts of the past had stood up and left. Living away from home, there was no one to tell me who I was anymore. Now I was looking at myself without a mirror. I didn’t have their ideas in which to see my reflection. I had got lost in someone else’s life.
Alastair: If someone kicks you in a dream, you can’t feel it.
Henry: If someone shoots you, you can’t feel it.
Alastair: And sometimes if someone has a knife,
and they’re threatening to kill you, in a dream you can’t stop them stabbing you, but then you wake up.
Lucien: Or else you go to sleep again.
I went to the kitchen to find a knife. It seemed I should take some precautions, but the cutlery drawer only mocked me. Everything was from the 1960s, now rusting or broken. Dozens of corks had collected there for no apparent reason.
Slamming the drawer, something occurred to me. Thomas might have rejected the notion Veronica was psychotic. But Lucien had not. I thought of the morbid portrait he’d drawn of his mother: a strange psychic record of her rage. He had been trying to warn me and I’d approached the situation with perfect myopia. Riffling through my textbooks, I’d been hungry for any information on children’s art. What, I’d wondered, was he trying to say? Drawings could be symbolic expressions of a child’s perception of the world: shy and depressed children, I’d read, had the tendency more often to draw tiny figures, to omit the mouth, the nose, and the eyes, and to cut off hands; while by contrast aggressive children tended to draw long arms, big hands, teeth, and genitals. Children with psychosomatic complaints more often showed clouds; children who stole more often shaded the hands; obese children drew figures taking up an unusually large area of their page. And the children of true-crime writers? I’d hopelessly searched further.
In one book’s appendix there was a measure to test the drawings of children in distress. It had seemed complicated. You scored the drawing if the child had included fruit trees, but not if these trees were pine trees, coconut trees, or palm trees. You scored the drawing if the child had drawn an enclosed figure, even if this enclosure was a house. You scored it if the enclosed figure’s hands were cut off, even if they were only in pockets. Then, after you’d calculated your score, you were supposed to ask a series of questions. For example: “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” If the child said, “Nothing,” you were then supposed to say, breezily, “Oh, everyone has something bad that happens.”
