Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  Police rounds weren’t based at the paper. They were down at Russell Street, where they had the scanners, so he would have called me up and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a kid – a five-year-old – and the official story is he was grabbed by a man at the local school and left on the ground and his kid brother ran home to Mum and she had to carry him home.’

  I would have thought, ‘That’s a good yarn.’ I told the editor, ‘We’ve got an ambulance on the way to a kid, and it looks like a bashing.’ Probably he said, ‘Beauty,’ because that’s what we would have felt. It’s not callous, it’s just, like I say, we’ve got a paper to put out and we need stories to fill it. The editor would have wanted to know where the kid lived and I would have said, ‘Barrett Estate,’ and he would have rolled his eyes because Barrett … look, I’m sure the people who live there will tell you it’s a good neighbourhood, but it’s got something of a reputation.

  The editor would have wanted to know: ‘You got anyone to send?’ That was part of my job, to find a reporter to get to the scene, but I didn’t have anyone, or maybe I did but I just felt like doing it myself. Sitting in the office all day, it used to get me down, so I would have rounded up a snapper – a photographer, an old hand – we’d have made sure we had a pack of smokes between us, and driven out to Barrett. We’d have had to step on it because if we left it too long, the ambos and the coppers would be gone and we’d have nothing.

  I remember we had a bit of trouble finding the place because DeCastella Drive was not actually in the Mel-ways. We had to ask a guy at the servo where it was, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, coupla weeks ago the council decided to create some chaos by renaming all the streets.’ Apparently, they had a Main Road West, and a Main Road East and an Old Main Road or something and they reckoned that was confusing, so they were having a competition to rename the roads, and people could put forward suggestions. This was just, like, weeks after the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, and everybody was all excited about all these gold medals that the Aussies had won in the pool, and the weightlifting, and the marathon with Deeks in it, so all the councillors went down there in their robes and put up new signs that said ‘Lisa Curry Court’ and ‘Dean Lukin Close’ and ‘DeCastella Drive’, which was where the Cashmans now lived, and the road we had to find.

  Anyway, we needn’t have freaked out because we were first on the scene. First reporters, I mean. When a kid gets in strife, it’s not really a story for The Age. They’ll cover it, but usually from some wanky social-justice angle, and two days after everyone else has picked it to pieces. Not like The Sun. We’d get it on the front page and make the most of it.

  There were no TVs there – no TV reporters, I mean – because the call to the ambulance had come in late, so they wouldn’t have bothered. No point going out there if you can’t get it to air for the 6 p.m. bulletin, right? In those days, a story was only a story if Brian Naylor told you so. On the papers, we had a bit more time. It was actually better if something happened a bit late, because we knew we’d have it on our own, and if it turned out to be a good story the TVs would be onto it the next day.

  The ambulance was still there when we arrived, thank God. The snapper jumped out of the car and got a shot of the kid getting loaded in. The coppers were there, too, so there was no point knocking on the door. There’s no way they’d let us in, so we hung around the front of the house for a while, talking to the neighbours. I ascertained pretty quickly that a fair number of kids lived in the house, that the mother was on welfare, and that it was a Commission house. I would have been thinking, ‘This isn’t ideal’ – not from a news point of view, because it’s always a bit better when the family aren’t bogans, but how often do kids in the good neighbourhoods get bashed? Not often, mate, let me tell you, not often. But then again, we always made a point at The Sun that half our readers were probably on minimum wage and just because people were poor didn’t mean they were up to no good. We didn’t look down on them like The Age.

  I thought to myself, ‘Hang around, Frank, and just see what happens,’ but it was getting late and I didn’t have much copy to fill out a story, so we spoke to the media guy – the police media guy – and he said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got at least half an hour before there’ll be any action here, so if you want to go for a quick lap around the block that’ll probably be okay.’ So we did that. We tracked down the kind of guys you can rely on to give you a couple of quick quotes – the priest we found at Barrett Anglican, for example, and the mayor – so that we’d have some kind of story whether the cops came out to talk to us or not. The cops were pretty helpful in those days, though, and we knew they’d give us a few quotes if we hung about long enough, so we went back and, yep, they were good to us.

  First, they invited our guy in to copy the portrait of the kid, which saved us from tracking one down ourselves. It can be a real pain in the arse: you have to find classmates, you have to find grandparents, you have to try to talk them into giving you a snap, and it’s not always easy. So it was good when the cops handed over a pic, and I remember when I finally saw it back at the darkroom, I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s all right,’ because the kid, from a news point of view, was pretty much perfect: very Aussie-looking, pale and freckly, and not Aboriginal, which was good, because it’s much harder to work up sympathy when the kid’s Aboriginal.

  After we got the pic copied, the cop came out and told us the story about the kid being bashed, which I took down verbatim despite thinking it was bullshit. What else can you do? You can’t really write, ‘Oh, the cops say this and this, but we reckon they’re full of it.’ That’s not what a newspaper does.

  I wouldn’t have had a mobile phone with me. It was before mobiles, really. Some people had them but they were big, blocky things that you carried around in a suitcase, so I’d have had to find a phone box – preferably one that wasn’t all smashed up, preferably one where the kids hadn’t cut the cord, before they got the idea of making them out of that stretchy steel stuff – to let the editor know that we had the story and it was a goodie, and would run for a few days. Otherwise, he’d be sitting in the office, wondering what the hell was going on. Filing copy was a pain, too – no laptops in those days, only copy-takers back at the office, amazing old chicks who would sit on the phone with you, and take it down in shorthand, and then enter it into the system, which means you had to compose the yarn as you went, trying to remember what you’d already said, and trying to think where the comma ought to go. So, yeah, I would have got into a phone box, I would have balanced the handset on my shoulder – it would have been one of those black bastards that weighed a tonne – and I’d have dialled with my pen and gone through my notebook, writing the piece on the hoof, and reading it out, and then reading the graffiti on the walls while I was waiting on the line for the editor to tell me it was all good, and all received.

  The editor told me that if I got back by nine, he’d hold the press and get it on the front page, so that’s what we did, me driving and the photographer stressing out, because it was his pictures of the kid that everybody was waiting on.

  I have to say, I’m still pretty pleased with what we achieved that day. I’ve got the clipping in my scrapbook, so I must have been pretty proud of myself at the time, too.

  ‘MAN BASHES BOY.’ That was the headline. It ran across the top of the front page. I tried to get a touch of outrage into the copy. ‘A five-year-old boy was savagely bashed by a man as he walked through his own schoolyard near his home,’ I wrote.

  ‘Police say Jacob Cashman was sent by his mother to the shops to get cigarettes.’

  Now, you see, most parents could relate to that. Send the kids to the shop, you assume it’s all safe, you live in the neighbourhood, you know all the neighbours, and look what happens.

  ‘The boy’s brother, Harley, who witnessed the beating, said Jacob was knocked to the ground, kicked in the head and the stomach,’ I wrote.

  ‘Little Jake is now fighting for his life in the Children’s Hospital.’

&nb
sp; The rest of it was pretty standard: police were appealing for witnesses. Neighbours were all upset and wondering whether to keep the doors locked. Inside the paper, we had the commentary from the mayor and the priest, both of them blaming television.

  ‘There’s too much violence on the box,’ the mayor said. ‘People see a murder every other day and they don’t realise it’s not real.’

  We ran the picture of the kid right across the front, six columns (the seventh was always reserved for sport, like a footballer with a groin injury or something). Even though the picture was black and white, you could still see that the kids were pretty surreal-looking, and I wasn’t the first to notice. One of the neighbours told me that the Cashman kids were known around the Barrett Estate as the ‘Ghost Children’.

  When I’d asked some of the other neighbours who were standing around whether they were good kids, they mostly said yes, but then one guy, he spun me out a bit. He said, ‘Actually, mate, I’ve always found them a bit weird. You know, with that white hair scraped back. When you see them all together it’s like the Village of the Damned.’

  And that was actually dead on. That’s exactly how they looked, and it must have stuck in my mind because I can’t find it in the paper. Obviously I left it out of the story. Whether that was because of space, or because in the circumstances that would have been pretty inappropriate, I don’t recall.

  Mrs Margaret Cooper, Portrait Maker

  The moment I saw the photograph of the young Cashman children on the front of The Sun, I recognised it as one of my own. I’d better explain: my name is Margaret Cooper – everybody calls me Marg – and from the years 1980 until 1987, I worked as a portrait photographer at the Barrett Regional Shopping Centre, on the Barrett Estate. It was a late-blooming career for me. I was already in my fifties when I took it up. You see, I was born in 1923 and educated at a Catholic girls’ school in Kew in Melbourne’s east at a time when photography wasn’t really something that a young woman would consider a suitable profession. It wasn’t quite right, somehow. Photographers were mostly men. Perhaps that was because the equipment was heavy, but more likely it was because portrait photography was something, like medicine, that a man would do.

  Like most girls in my day, I intended to matriculate and then to teach, at least until I was married. So, after high school I went to the Melbourne Teacher’s College, fully intending to graduate. It didn’t quite work out that way because, of course, the Second World War came and it was all hands on deck, never mind about any dreams we might have had of teaching and what have you. I was assigned a position at the munitions factory in Melbourne’s west and I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. There was camaraderie – a sense that we were supporting the men overseas – and I had a little money in my pocket, which is something my own mother hadn’t had.

  In any case, after the war the men took over the factory jobs and that’s when I finally took a job as a primary teacher. In those days, all you needed was one year’s study, which I had. The hoops they now make you jump through … well, I suppose it’s a good thing, but it seemed so much easier for people then. Soon after that I was married, and Ken and I had children. I made it my business to raise our four girls. That wasn’t a question then: you had children, you raised them. There was no childcare, except for the church hall, and that really wasn’t considered ideal.

  Ken was a good husband and, I must say, we had an exciting life together, we really did. Before the war, Ken had trained as an electrical engineer. Afterwards, he became involved in some of the big water projects: the Snowy Mountains scheme was one, and then we moved onto other things, eventually bringing water to people in other countries.

  Anyway, by the late 1970s, Ken had retired and we’d moved to the Barrett Estate. It was Ken who suggested we move there, I suppose because we both wanted to be closer to the girls. They’d left the nest and were pursuing careers – two of them were in Melbourne – so it made sense to be nearby instead of out whoop-whoop where I couldn’t help them with the grandchildren. Ken saw an ad for Barrett and said, ‘Oh, they’re building a new estate,’ but it wasn’t new to me: they built it on the land where we tested the munitions during the war. There wasn’t a house to be seen in those days, only some concrete buildings we called the ‘bomb shelters’, although they had no actual purpose that we could see. Anyway, all that was taken down and it was remarkable how quickly the houses went up. I was quite impressed. We decided to build our new home on the part of the estate they called ‘Barrett Riverview’, which was a little quieter than the rest of the estate, but you still had the benefit of having the young families around. People were quite friendly – you could rely on the neighbours to keep an eye on things if you had to pop out for a while.

  By the time we moved out there, of course, we were getting on. I had my interests – I had my roses, for example – but yes, I was looking for something else to occupy my time. I didn’t want to go back to teaching. Although there were Catholic and Anglican schools on the estate I’m sure they would have regarded my skills as antiquated. In any case, Ken had had his first stroke, and I don’t suppose I wanted to be away from the house all day. Before he had the stroke, Ken and I had taken a few courses together: dancing, theology and a short photography course. The photography instructor had told me I was quite talented and I’d enjoyed it, especially taking photos of the grandchildren. It was my daughters who said to me, ‘You should go into business, start your own little empire.’ They thought I might be the next Anne Geddes, taking photographs of children sitting on pumpkins and that kind of thing, and it did tickle my fancy.

  My son-in-law – he’s a solicitor, got quite a good little practice – he was the one who went with me to the Barrett Regional Shopping Centre. We talked about leasing some space in the forecourt. They wanted people to come on the weekends, and offer some different services. The banks and the Post Office and even the butchers were closed on the weekends in those days, but the department stores like Venture were open, and I suppose they thought some novelty stands would be interesting.

  It was quite a thrill to be in business. I got a certificate of registration from the Department of Small Business, which said, ‘Proprietor: Marg Cooper.’ That was something! Ken put it in a frame and it’s still there, in the lounge room. My idea was to take portraits of local children and present them in a nice way, so that parents could display them in the home. I can imagine the rigmarole you’d need to go through to do something like that these days: a ‘working with children’ check, a police check, you’d need liability insurance. In those days, I had a sturdy table and a nice backdrop of blue sky and clouds. Ken helped me choose a camera, and off we went. I wasn’t interested in becoming a millionaire. I’ve got my Lotto tickets for that! I charged what I thought was fair: $5 for one portrait and $10 for a package. If they wanted a plastic key ring with a small picture inside I would charge $7 extra for that.

  Barrett wasn’t a rough place. I will say that things have changed: I’ve moved out of our original house and I’m in a unit now, and you do get more Asians. I saw some young men the other day, as black as the ace of spades. I know what Ken would say, ‘We’re the white dots on the domino,’ but they are perfectly nice people. A family of Somalis has actually moved into the unit next door and I have no problem with that. They’re not Muslim. It might be different if they were, but these are Christians just like you and me, except they cook their food in the garage, and the smell is often quite strong.

  Back then, when the thing with the Cashman boy happened, it was mostly young Australian families and people like Ken and me, retirees. You had your bad elements, but you get that everywhere. There was Housing Commission on the estate but not the old kind, not those ugly towers, just a house here, and a house there, designed to blend in. Unless you knew, you would never have realised it was Housing Commission, although I’d say everybody did know.

  I read about the incident with the Cashman boy in the newspaper. I remember it, the same as I remember the
day the mill burnt down and we all came into the street to watch. Perhaps it’s because we weren’t used to that kind of excitement.

  Anyway, I was at home when I heard about it. I used to get The Sun home delivered. Kids would go out before dawn on a bike with a milk cart lashed to the handlebars, and deliver the paper. I suppose none would be bothered now. I’m told they have too much else to do already, what with the sports and the studies and the time they have to spend on Facebook. On that day, I remember, I picked up the paper from the lawn and turned to put the jug on, and when I turned back, The Sun had unfurled and there, on the front, was one of my photographs. I only had to look at it to know it was mine. I immediately remembered little Jacob. First, there was the hair. People today say, ‘Oh, they were called the Ghost Kids,’ but I never heard that, and anyway, against my blue-and-cloudy backdrop, they didn’t look like ghosts. They looked like angels, really quite heavenly angels. Then, too, I remembered, the man who came with them, the one who went to prison. Maybe I’m embellishing it a bit now, but I seem to recall that he didn’t have proper shoes, he had rubber thongs, and he had that way of walking where they’d slap across the floor. I just hate that noise. I feel like saying, ‘Pick up your feet,’ and maybe I did say that to him. I’ve said it to enough people, I know that.

  I do remember that he was wearing football shorts – shorts, with bare legs, no socks, it’s all okay now apparently. He said to me, ‘How much for a pitcher?’ No: ‘How do you do?’ and no: ‘Excuse me.’ Just: ‘How much for a pitcher?’ He wanted a photograph to give to the children’s mother. He said, ‘They’re not mine,’ and I thought, ‘No need to brag about it.’