by Chloe Hooper
Through his tears, Kingsley realized the boy’s schoolteacher carried a knife. It glinted in the moonlight as she walked through the Marnes’ garden. “Lucien,” the kookaburra cried, “Hide! Hide!” Above, clouds were backlit by a moon-face dumb with pleasure. Cloud-lovers kissed; cloud-lovers fought; then there was the very sharpest of cloud-weapons. Kingsley Kookaburra groaned: “Why should I laugh?” he asked the worm. “And what should I laugh at? Men and their pomposity? Should I laugh at men in their wretchedness? At their limitless capacity to ignore their own callow stupidity? I am an old king! I am an old king!” He raised his feathers till they fanned behind, a mangy ceremonial cape. “If I should laugh it will be because nothing,” he cried, “nothing at all is even remotely amusing!”
IT WAS DIFFICULT judging the distance of my feet from the ground and each step was heavier than I expected. The Marnes’ house, white and modern, was immaculate but the garden overgrown. A dry branch grabbed at my ankle. I cried out, but Thomas’s music was playing. It hid any sounds of drowning. I’d asked the children once what it would be like to live underwater. What do you think you would eat? What would you wear? At first their impressions were fairly standard: We’d eat fish. We’d wear our bathing suits. But before long, warmed up, all of them were straining their arms, hands in the air, desperate to give their impressions. The teacher would be a tortoise—a “taught-us.” They would sunbathe on the waterspouts of whales. Survival only required buying gills from the kiosk, and once you’d dived down you’d see that people who live underwater walk as if they are flying. Mermen in seaweed suits hailed whale taxis. Mothers carried shopping bags made of woven fishbones. Octopus chefs sliced, diced, boiled, broiled. And old men tended their coral beds. Underwater bullets can’t hurt anyone, but, just in case, prisoners were locked in sharks’ jaws.
Henry had looked up at me, batting his lashes. “Can I write anything?”
“Of course you can write anything.”
“Can I write this?” he’d added, smirking.
I’d looked down at his page: Underwater I saw the techer with no clothes on. “Teacher has an a after the e,” I’d told him.
Walking through the Marnes’ scratching grass, I now wondered how much of this disrespect had been based on evidence. In many of the children’s opening sentences they had disposed of the school’s teachers using a trained pack of killer sharks. When they bug me I click my fingers and a great white takes chunks off them; but even the greatest revolutionaries can’t escape their bourgeois hearts. Although the underwater teachers had presumably all been fatally mauled, these fourth-graders still diligently went to school, and sat at coral desks writing on rocks with sharks’ teeth. At lunchtime they planned to eat seaweed doughnuts. In music they would play the recorder: a fish with holes in it. During sport, everyone could catch the ball, because it would come toward them so slowly, unless someone went fishing and popped it. Then, at the end of the day, they’d ride whale buses home, or be picked up in underwater Ferraris that only drove at a few kilometers an hour.
A wall steadied me: through the Marnes’ thin curtains I could count each petal springing from a vase; every detail on a chair’s leg was carefully replicated. Their furniture looked like a cast of refined shadow puppets waiting for an audience. I continued following their side fence. The house was built on a slope. The back room was elevated and glass doors opened out onto a wooden deck level with my shoulders. Through a wide gap of curtain I could see the walls were perfectly white. There was not one painting. It was as bland as a hotel room or one of the serviced apartments where businesspeople stay. In one corner sat a blond-wood kitchen table, a set of chairs. In another, a navy blue couch and matching armchair taken straight from a catalogue. This furniture wouldn’t get up to dance when the Marnes went to bed. The table and chairs clearly didn’t have souls.
Thomas walked into the room. He picked up a glass and took a sip. It was the simplest thing anyone could do: I watched transfixed. Each muscle in his face, each tiny twitch, seemed unadulterated and therefore mesmerizing. He raised the glass to his lips, then turned sharply as if being called. He straightened up, but didn’t move away. I wondered what I was seeing. He was as he really was, although he looked exactly the same. Thomas put the glass down and walked through a doorway.
I followed slowly. Trees, planted too close to the walls, scratched at my bare arms. “You have split me open,” I whispered to him. The music he’d chosen was low and gentle. I clung to the dark wall and stifled a moan: close by, through a slit of curtain, Veronica was in their kitchen. She was taking white plates out of the dishwasher. She’d bend over to pull out a plate and would then reach up putting it inside a cupboard. She wore leggings and an oversized shirt. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun. She was scowling. Thomas must have been standing there with her, for now she was saying something. She repeated the sequence, but he didn’t move to help. She scowled again, as if listening, and picked up another plate. Then turning, the plate in her hand, she interrupted him.
Each different ending to Murder at Black Swan Point, I’d imagined in the pub, was a Rorschach of Thomas’s, Veronica’s, and my separate desires. Veronica, her face furious and tired, was wishing now for her ending of choice. She had captured Black Swan Point’s crime the way the camera can steal a soul, enlarging or shrinking any detail to suit her purposes. Investigating the Suicide Cliffs, her long hair billowing in the breeze, she’d meant to conjure the desperation a once-gentle woman would feel after committing a brutal murder. Veronica walked around, strangely cheerful. When she noticed an appropriate cliff she gave herself the thumbs-up. In her secret heart she imagined her antiheroine slaying the nubile rival with relish, then disappearing: Margot would fly to a safe sunny place for a new life, Medea rescued by the sun god, and she would never again feel cold, and everyone would love her.
Veronica took another plate from the dishwasher. Then another. Then another. Voyeurism turns on the slow burn of waiting for something to happen; perhaps all perversity comes gift-wrapped, so to speak, in the banal. I stood by a large lavender bush, watching her, as I inhaled lungfuls of cool night air. I can smell your flowers, I thought. In a secret chamber of my heart I wished Veronica had written an extra chapter. I preferred thinking that after the young girl was knifed to death, the wife came home, hoping to inherit her old life, and the grief-stricken husband put his hands around her throat and, as I’ve suggested, avenged the girl’s death. While his wife was unconscious, he threw her from a cliff, so she could drown the way Ellie had drowned, when the knife blow to her chest filled her lung cavity with blood.
Veronica’s face was angry. She threw her hands in the air, shaking her head again, and again. Then she started on the cutlery. She shelved the teaspoons first, then the tablespoons. Being boring is the exhibitionist’s alibi, but the Marnes were half-expecting me. There was an inevitability to this visit and the music had been selected to reel me in. It seemed to be saying, “Come closer and you’ll know too.” I ignored each note’s little plea. I was visiting because it seemed only fair, given our entanglement, that they should learn first of my intention to leave Endport Primary School. There were endless ways the community could have found out about the affair. According to Malcolm, the pub’s toilet wall intimated I was sleeping with half the fathers in Endport. In theory it could’ve been any disgruntled citizen who had been harassing me. Although this did not mean I suddenly trusted the Marnes; in fact far from it. Now that I would no longer be around to serve as a target, I worried for their son.
Turning from the window, I shook my head. There was no area for Lucien to play, let alone a swing or a trampoline. This house was no place to raise a young boy. It was severe and cold and symptomatic of the Marnes’ parenting. Lucien gave new definition to the term “only child.” His sophistication was the way he survived living with two adults, but uncensored, his desires were just as juvenile as anyone else’s. When I’d asked him to describe life underwater he’d been leaning low, his he
ad almost on the page. This was his secret business. This was his own true-crime story.
The polar icecaps melted and all the boats sank, and all the oxygen masks sank. Underwater, 4B went on a ride called Dead People. Mummies, ghosts, and skeletons off an ancient shipwreck came alive. A ghost gave Danielle face powder and lipstick made of toxic waste—DDT—so her face fell off in bloody, revolting chunks. Then one of the boys, Darren, wet his pants, and a mummy took a swordfish and cut Darren into tiny pieces for human sushi! OH NO! Alastair was crying like a girl, so a Hammerhead bonged him on the head, and ate him in one bite. (Inside the shark, Alastair found a bicycle and a horse; and also some other kids. Soon Anaminka was swallowed and they all had a play together.)
The water was full of blood, and eyeballs, and little bits of guts. Then the shark did a giant burp. (It was like a gale-force wind.) And Billy’s body was smashed apart by sheer stinking-force! Eliza and Henry were just lying there like frozen pieces of coma. But luckily, all through this, I was holding onto the Hammerhead’s fin. He took me to buy food and toys . . . And then, the next thing I knew I was a great big shark too. And it was like I was battery-controlled, destroying everything in sight. I was eating up my teacher and even my Mum and my Dad. (It was fun.) I just kept on gulping people and destroying houses until everything was gone, even seaweed. But then I heard a sound. It was Sir Henry Shark-Killer: the greatest shark killer in history!
Instead of guns we used stingrays. He threw one at me. I threw one back. He hit me, and then I hit him, and we both fell down. I thought I was dead, but I wasn’t sure. I got up, so obviously I was not dead. Then all the water disappeared, we sprinted in the little bit of water to the human body shop . . .
A branch scratched at my face and again I felt seasick. I imagined taking my number to queue, along with Veronica and Thomas, at Lucien’s human body shop. All the people who’d most recently fallen off cliffs would also be in the reception, jostling for their appointment; a screaming tangle of broken bodies. We’d all be blind because, according to Lucien, sand wears down eyeballs. Our skin so wrinkled, tearing easily like wet paper.
It was hardly unusual for a child to fantasize about his parents being dead. Orphanhood was the great daydream of independence. All the stars of children’s literature roamed free. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn set their own agendas. Pippi Longstocking, Christopher Robin, James of Giant Peach renown—there was a stray elderly aunt lurking in the background, granted, although you never saw any parents. I wondered what had really happened to them. At the school fair, when the children stuck their hands into the horror table’s black boxes, whose severed ears and tongues did they imagine they were feeling? To the bystander all the little painted faces and pony rides might have seemed delightful, but a natural order had been inverted. Children’s desires were prioritized for the day and a chaos had emerged. The epic chaos of children touching their parents’ dead bodies.
Sir Henry Shark-Killer and I grabbed a heart each, and lungs, and a liver. Except there was just one problem: there were not enough heads at the human body shop. They had just sold the last one to him! He got a semiautomatic, and I just grabbed any gun not knowing what it was, and I pulled the trigger, and “Oh no!” It was a pop gun. He shot me and this time I was dead! I lay bleeding; “Et tu Brute!” I tried to call, but I had no mouth, just a hacked-off vocal cord!
Lucien had read out this epic tale, acting every line. The other kids had been in hysterics. It had been a huge hit, and all the while the boy had really been crying for help.
I watched Thomas: he was now standing in the large white room next to the stereo, holding his glass. Veronica was by the door, yelling at him. This seemed to be their standard pose and Lucien had been asking, “What about me? What about me in all this?” I had been so busy worrying for my own safety I had neglected his. Now I had half a mind to take him with me. When, in his strange story, he turned into a shark, killing his parents—and, yes, his teacher—could his logic have been that he would kill us before we killed him? His mother, with the crime photos pinned up around her study, acted as if the body in its most degraded, mutilated state were quite natural. After Lucien made the dream catcher to protect Veronica, I’d asked Thomas about her sleeping problem. “The only person who wakes screaming is Lucien.” No wonder if he was worried the human body shop had just run out of heads.
• • •
I knocked at the Marnes’ front door. A few moments later an outside light switched on and Thomas opened up. “Kate! Has something happened?” I shook my head, and he closed the door slightly. “Well . . .” His attempt at a smile failed, stuck in a wince, “can we go through it tomorrow?”
Behind him Veronica appeared. “Oh, Miss Byrne!” She shook her head. “Your timing is astonishing.”
“Only under extremely rare circumstances do I visit parents.”
“Is that so?”
“In this case, it would be unforgivable for me not to stop by.”
Thomas frowned. “This might have to wait.”
“Oh no!” Veronica pushed in front of him. “Please, Miss Byrne, do come in. We don’t want your conscience burdened.”
I cleared my throat and walked straight past her into their living room. There were no rugs, no books, no clutter. Rather than aesthetic, their minimalism seemed a clue that when they mobilized it would be swift. “Sit down,” Veronica ordered, pointing to the navy couch. She stamped in the opposite direction, wearing old socks. Her walk was both jerky and feline, practiced and unconscious all at once. Turning back to Thomas, she asked, “Could you entertain our guest for a moment?” She opened the door to what I assumed was their bedroom, leaving us.
“Please,” he said simply. “You have to go.”
I sat down, putting a finger to my lips. “Wait. Wait. I came to say good-bye.”
There was something in Thomas’s expression that almost made me stand and run. I’d asked Eliza once what it would be like to fall in love. “I think it would be really disgusting,” she’d guessed, “and after you’d kissed someone you’d vomit.” Thomas looked so sad. Then he shook his head and in that moment his face grew stern. He had such a regular demeanor, such perfectly even features that he could make himself completely opaque, resolutely adult.
A door slammed and Veronica reentered the room wearing a black dress. It had fine straps and showed off her pale neck and shoulders. Free from socks, her toenails were bright red. Carrying cigarettes and an ashtray, she sat down next to me, making the couch rock. She sat slightly too close and lighting up, said, “You’ve been drinking, I gather. Another?”
“No.” I straightened my skirt. “I can’t stay long.”
“Just indulge us.” She looked over at her husband, who stood by the stereo turning off the music. “Darling, could you? A Scotch for me and also for Miss Byrne.”
“No!” I raised my voice. “I’m sorry but I have something to say.” I now had a mental picture of how their house was laid out. There was a small pair of sneakers sitting outside the room closest to the front door. “The main reason for my visit is to express concern for Lucien. I think he’s showing signs of strain.” Since there were so few furnishings everything echoed. “Is he asleep?”
“Did you want to say good night?” Veronica inhaled, then blew smoke toward me. “Listen, he’d love you to, but I think he’d just get overexcited. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?” She flicked ash. “I wanted to make a toast; to thank you for all the help you’ve given our son.”
I felt for my purse. “Obviously, Mrs. Marne, this is awkward for a variety of reasons, but I’m just going to jump in and say my piece.” I glared at her. “Lucien’s drawings are quite disturbing. He seems to feel he’s in danger.” The purse was nestled between the couch’s arm and my thigh. “It’s not unusual for children to think their parents, in the form of monsters, are trying to murder them.” Veronica smirked and I opened the clasp, putting my hand inside. “I think you have possibly subjected your son to information inapprop
riate for a child. I think it is indecent of you to have left murder photographs around your house.”
She laughed.
“If you had been responsible, Mrs. Marne, you would not have allowed him access to this graphic material.” She was laughing at me. “And I blame you too.” I looked at Thomas: if I started to cry would it arouse his sympathy or libido? Veronica kept laughing, and Thomas said nothing. I put my hand around the knife’s handle. “You probably fuck all your son’s teachers! You probably fuck all his caregivers to get better service!”
“The policy,” Veronica muttered, “hardly seems to be working.”
“You don’t understand! Your child has been yelling out to anyone who’ll listen, ‘What about me!’ He feels like an orphan. He feels like you are both trying to cut his head off!”
“Enough!” Veronica moved to stand.
“No!” I took out my knife, holding it forward, and she whimpered. “He just wants to be a child! Don’t you see that? A little kid; but you are both tormenting him!” I rushed toward Lucien’s room. I almost expected him to have his bags packed—he would be better off as far as possible from here. Throwing open the door, I found the walls decorated with posters of the planets. A mural of rocket ships, hand painted, hung from the center of the ceiling. To the right, there was a red bunk bed and bookshelves full of bright spines. To the left more shelves and a table, upon which the boy’s drawing equipment was carefully organized. “Lucien!” I couldn’t see him. “Lucien!”
The door of the built-in wardrobe opened. He walked out trying to muster the dignity of, say, a judge walking from his private chambers to the courtroom. Dressed, however, in light blue pajamas and a maroon dressing gown he looked too young and, at the same time, too rakish. One expected the crack of doorway to reveal flappers dancing, a gramophone. Instead what flashed behind him were board games and socks. I covered the knife with my beaded purse. He pretended to be looking at “files,” blank paper he was holding. “Oh, hello.” Glancing up, he acted surprised. “Why are you here?”
