We ordered steak and eggs, too. A waitress brought some coffee.
Harley said, ‘You want me to get a newspaper?’
Did I want him to get a newspaper? He and I both knew they’d be filled with stories from the inquest. Did I want to read whatever was now being said about me – the ‘Love Aide’ – in the newspaper?
No.
But then, Yes.
I couldn’t decide, so I didn’t say anything. Harley said, ‘Okay, look, I’ll get one, and if it’s real bad, I won’t tell you what it says.’ The minute he was gone, I found myself thinking, ‘Come back.’ And then he was back, and sliding into the seat, saying, ‘I guess you’re not important enough to make the front page any more.’ He turned a few pages, then said, ‘Here we are.’
There was a photograph of me – upside down from where I was sitting, coming down the steps of the court. There was a photograph of Stephen, too, the one from the hospital’s website. The headline said ‘Bass Admits Affair’.
Harley said, ‘You want me to read it?’
I said. ‘Just give me the short version.’
He cleared his throat and began to read. ‘Top obstetrician Stephen Bass last night released a statement acknowledging a sexual relationship with the so-called Love Aide, Lauren Cameron.
Mr Bass, who is married with adult children, said his relationship with Lauren Cameron, also known as Lauren Cashman, was a private matter and he would not comment further.’
To myself, I thought, ‘Did he say “relationship”, I hope he said “relationship”.’
Harley went on, ‘Ms Cameron – that would be you, mate – has this week been giving evidence at the inquest into the death of Baby Boyce. And that’s it. That’s all it says. The rest is just blah, blah, blah, stuff we already know.’
I wanted to ask, ‘Do you think it means anything that he says we have a relationship,’ but I knew it would sound pathetic. Harley said, ‘What a shithead your bloke turned out to be. There’s not even an apology to the lady who lost her baby.’
Harley stirred his coffee and studied the picture of Stephen. He said, ‘What I really don’t get is why you’d want to go with such an old man.’
I said, ‘Fifty-one is not old.’
He said, ‘It’s ancient, mate. Seriously, look at this geezer. He’s a pensioner. What did you see in him?’
What did I see in him? Solidity. Maturity. Respectability. I wanted him to marry me, and transfer to me some of the stability with which he lived his life. But when I told Harley this, he spluttered into his coffee. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘if you were looking for a husband, probably would have been best to find one that didn’t already have a wife. All this time you’re thinking he’s Sir Galahad, does it occur to you that he’s married? Can you imagine the conversation they’re having right now?’
I could imagine it. In Stephen’s version of events, I’d be the whore and he’d be the one who’d been seduced.
I wanted to think about something else. I asked Harley, ‘Have you ever done it with a married woman?’
Harley said, ‘Oh yes.’
‘Yes?’
Harley said, ‘I may seem perfect, but it ain’t so, Lauren.’
I said, ‘Did you feel guilty?’
Harley said, ‘No. I felt afraid, especially when one of them told me her old man kept guns.
‘But seriously,’ he said. ‘What’s the deal with this guy? I just don’t get why you’d be hung up on this dude. He’s, like, old, married and an arsehole, and you’re my sister, but, hell, you’re a hottie. I don’t mind telling you that. And you’re hangin’ out with a dude who was born, like, the same year as, I don’t know, our dad.’
I said, ‘Well, maybe I just liked the fact that he seemed to like me.’
Harley said, ‘Oh, man, he liked you. I bet he jerked off nine nights in ten, liking you. What I want to know is, can this bloke even do it, at fifty?’
I was excused from answering because the waitress came and cleared our plates. She said, ‘Would you like more coffee?’ I looked at her apron, and at the Jiffies on her feet, and thought of myself waiting tables not so many years ago. I said, ‘Yes please.’
Waiting for her to return with the coffee pot, I folded one of the napkins into a paper version of the Sydney Opera House, a trick I learnt from Pop. Harley went back to the newspaper.
‘There’s another story,’ he said. ‘You want me to read it?’
I shrugged.
He read aloud. ‘Love Aide in Family Tragedy.’
I must admit, it didn’t immediately occur to me what those words meant. I was thinking about Stephen, not about Jake. Harley was quiet for a moment, then he said, ‘It’s actually about Jake,’ and he started to read out the main points. ‘Lauren Cameron is Lauren Cashman, whose brother, Jacob Cashman, died in a house on DeCastella Drive on the Barrett Estate in November 1982.’
He glanced up at me and must have seen my expression. ‘That’s all it really says,’ he said. ‘It’s like somebody has joined the dots, and the rest is blah, blah, from the inquest.’
I remembered how close I’d been to talking to Stephen about DeCastella Drive. Had things gone better in the hotel room, had his pager not gone off, had the baby not died, I might have raised it with him. It would have been a mistake. Probably he wouldn’t have cared less. But Harley would care. I said, ‘How much do you remember about that house, Harley?’
He said, ‘Not much. Nothing, actually.’
I said, ‘Do you know what happened that night, with Jake?’
He said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I know.’
I said, ‘Do you know for sure, or do you just know what people told you?’
The way Harley looked at me then, I’ll never forget it. He looked right into my eyes and said, ‘Is there a difference?’
He went out to the car. I fixed up the bill. Outside, I found him standing with his backside to the ute, grinding a cigarette into the dirt. I said, ‘That’ll go into the river system, you know.’ He said, ‘Are you a hippy? You might think you’re a hippy, but wait until you meet Mum.’
Not for the first time, I thought, ‘Your mum.’
We got back into the car, and rode in silence for a while. I pulled a cap down over my eyes and dozed in the morning sunshine that was pouring through the windscreen. When I woke, Harley told me that I’d just missed a horse that had the ‘biggest donger ever’.
‘I should have taken a photograph,’ he said.
I said, ‘Right. And if you sent something like that to get processed, do you think you might get yourself arrested?’
‘Mate,’ he said. ‘It’s a digital camera. I’d email it around. In fact, mate, give me the email address of your boyfriend and I’ll send it to him. Tell him you’ve got a new bloke.’
Was this, I wondered, how siblings spoke to each other? Did they wind each other up like this and then laugh it off? Harley behaved like nothing he ever said could cause me any offence – I wouldn’t get angry, or upset – and he was right. But I wasn’t so sure I could do the same.
Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge
I wasn’t surprised – not at all surprised – to hear that Lauren was having it off with an old guy. In my opinion, if you raise a kid without a father figure they’ll grow up looking for one. It was unfortunate that it ended up all over the newspapers, but still, Lauren had made something of herself and I was pleased about that. I always got the feeling that Lauren was basically a good kid.
I’d heard rumours that one of the other Cashmans, the baby, Hayley, made a real pig’s ear of her life after she left DeCastella Drive. You’d think because she was the youngest, and the least involved, she’d have the fewest problems, but I guess you never can tell how kids will turn out. People on Barrett couldn’t stop talking about Lauren after the brother was killed. There was a lot of gossip about her, made worse by the fact that the Department let the house go to ruin. When you’ve got a house like that in town, falling down, the stories ge
t more absurd as the years go on. I’d heard people saying, ‘The kids that lived there were raised in a cult. They all had different fathers and their mother dyed their hair so they’d all look the same.’
I told them they were being ridiculous.
I’d heard people saying, ‘There was a girl who lived there who was disturbed. She did something to her brother and the mum took the rap.’
Whenever people told me that, I’d say, ‘People who don’t know the facts should keep their big mouths shut.’
I do know the facts. I know what happened in that house. I’ve known it for years. Was Lauren involved? Yes, she was. People were right about that. She was involved, and when she was a kid it made sense to us adults – the cops, the judge, the social workers – to keep that fact to ourselves. You might think that’s wrong, but unless you’ve got all the facts, I don’t think you can really comment. It took us enough time to piece it all together. It’s not an easy story to tell. The version I’ve settled on is Lauren’s. She was the one who first coughed it up, that long afternoon after Jake died.
Remember when Lauren ran into her mother in the hall of the Barrett cop shop? I could see that something was wrong. She didn’t run into her mother’s arms. They both took a step back.
So, after Lauren got back to her room I popped in to have a quick chat with her. I knew I couldn’t ask her specific questions on the record yet, but I wanted to know what was going through her head, and why she reacted to her mother like that.
The social worker who had taken Lauren into the hall – by that time, we had what seemed like one social worker in every room – was angry and wanted to know how Lauren had been able to run into her mum like that, and why she wasn’t told that Lisa was in the same part of the cop shop. I explained to her that it was an accident, but she looked ropeable.
Lauren, on the other hand, didn’t look angry at all. When I asked her if she was okay she just nodded, yes, and then said, ‘Can I tell you something?’ I asked her if it was about Jacob and she nodded again, and I could see she was keen to get out whatever was bugging her. I mean, I’ve got kids, and I’ve seen them all churned up when they’ve got something inside, and they just can’t settle until it’s out.
The way I’ve pieced it together, from Lauren’s account and then later Lisa and Peter’s versions, the day had started much like any other. Jacob had gone off to school in the morning with Lauren. The other two – Hayley and Harley – stayed home. They weren’t old enough for school.
The boyfriend, Peter, wasn’t working. He stayed in on the couch all day pulling cones. When Jacob and Lauren came in after school they mucked around a bit. Lisa was trying to fix dinner. Peter was still sitting around getting stoned. The kids started making a racket so Lisa sent the kids down to their rooms, where they banged around.
Then, from what I understand, it went quiet. That probably didn’t bother Peter too much, but Lisa started calling out, ‘Come and get your bloody tea!’ When she got no response she went down the hall and flung open the door to Jake’s room. There was Jake with his pants down, waving his little pecker around, and Hayley was stripped out of her nappy. From what I understand, they were having a bit of a look at each other.
Lisa said something like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ and Jake said, ‘I wasn’t doing nothing!’, but Harley pointed and said, ‘Jake got his pecker out!’
It was at that point that Peter came to see what the fuss was about. When he saw Jake with his pants down and Hayley on the floor with no pants on, he went ballistic. He said to Lisa, ‘This isn’t the first time he’s done this. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen him the other day, playing with his sister in a way that’s not right.’
Now, I don’t discount the possibility that Jake was having a good look at Hayley. It’s entirely possible. You put little kids together, from time to time they might strip down, they might have a look, it’s a one-off thing normally, and no harm done. So maybe Jake did have a bit of a squizz at his sister, a bit of: you show me yours, I’ll show you mine. But at the end of the day, what does it matter? It’s not important. What happened next, that’s what’s important.
In his statement, Peter said he told Lisa he’d handle it. ‘You’ve got to show him it’s wrong,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to stop it now or else he’ll grow up abusing kids, and don’t ask me how I know it, but I know it. You let me take care of it.’
Jacob, remember, was five.
Peter told us he gave Jake a quick kick up the rear and Jake began to cry, so he picked him up and flung him against his bed. He shooed the other kids out and shut Jake in his bedroom. Then he went back to the lounge room, where Lisa was putting a nappy back on Hayley.
Jake kept calling out, ‘I didn’t do nothing. It weren’t me. Why do I gotta stay in here?’
This must have gone on for a while. Lisa told us she got sick of the hollering. She walked down the hall with Peter, and together, they confronted Jake in his room, telling him to shut up and what did he think he was doing, and so on. Alcohol was being consumed. Peter was going back and forward to the kitchen, getting himself beers. Lisa was on the rum and cola, and, of course, they’d been on the cones all day.
I don’t know how long the harassment went on, but after a bit Lisa and Peter gave it up and went back to the lounge room to watch TV. Lauren told us that Jake was supposed to stay in his room, but he crept down the hall and popped his head in the lounge, wanting to know if he could come out now.
Lisa said she leapt off the couch and chased him down the hall, but Jacob beat her to the bedroom and shut himself in.
Lauren was a good kid. She put an ear to the door and heard her brother crying. She knocked on the door and said, ‘Jake, it’s me,’ and he opened up for her. He was sitting on the bed, saying, ‘It’s not fair. I didn’t do nothing.’ And then he said, ‘I hate this house. I’m gonna run away.’
Well, Lauren did what kids will do. She bolted into the lounge room, saying, ‘Jacob’s going to run away!’
We got two versions of what happened next and, I warn you, neither makes pleasant reading.
Peter told us, ‘Lisa loses it. She runs down the hall and she’s completely off her nut, just completely out of control. What you gotta remember is I don’t know this chick very well, right. I’ve been in that house, like, six weeks. I mean, shit, mate, she’s just out of control with those kids.’
He said, ‘She slammed the door. I was stuck on the outside. I couldn’t even guess what was goin’ on. All I could hear was the bloody shoutin’. I pushed the door open. Jacob was just, like, crouched on the floor.
‘Harley and Lauren were up on the bunk. They were, like, crouched together, on the top bunk.’
He said, ‘Jake was crawling around. It was like he was blind, or close to it. He was crawlin’ around in circles.
‘Lisa was near the window. The other kids were shoutin’ at Jacob from up the top bunk, just shoutin’ and hollerin’. It was like a poltergeist or whatever had got into ’em, and Lisa was eggin’ ’em on, saying, Jump on him, jump on him, jump on him.
‘The next thing I saw, Lauren was coming down off the top bunk, and landing on her brother’s skull.’
Now, that wasn’t quite how Lisa told it. She coughed up a slightly different story. She told us that she’d had enough of Jake. ‘He was sookin’ and complainin’ and carryin’ on, and I couldn’t stand it no more, so I went out back to have a ciggie,’ she said.
‘I come inside, and Peter, that arsehole, has gone back into Jake’s room and he’s taken the other kids in there with him and the door was shut, and I couldn’t see nothin’. I could just hear bangin’.
She was sitting opposite me at the interview table when she told me this. Her face, I’ll never forget it, was the face of somebody who felt so hard done by.
‘I got the door open and Jake was on the floor,’ she said. ‘The kids were in there, all the kids, all crowded around Jake, and he was carrying on, saying, ‘I didn’t want to look!’ Pete
r was growing more enraged. He reached over and stripped the nappy off Hayley – it was one of those Huggies ones – and it was all heavy and foul and stinking, and he started stripping Jake’s shorts off and trying to shove him into the dirty nappy. He was shouting, ‘You want to act like a baby, you can dress like a baby.’
Jake was protesting, ‘I’m not a baby!’ Peter replied, ‘Then why are you always sooking and crying like a baby?’ He forced the nappy onto Jake, saying to the other kids, ‘Come and have a look at your new baby brother.’
Lisa told us that she ordered the other kids – not Hayley, because she was too small, but Harley and Lauren – to get up onto the top bunk, to get them out of the way. Like Peter, she said Jacob had adopted the foetal position on the floor, and was circling around on his side, like a dog trying to escape a beating.
Lisa told us, ‘Peter was out of control. I told the other kids, “Get up on the bunk, get out of the way.”’
Lauren remembered it differently. She told us that she’d climbed on to the top bunk, with Harley, of her own accord.
‘We wanted to get away,’ she said. ‘We were scared.’
She told us they’d cowered together, near the ceiling, but the mother looked up and saw them there, and said, ‘Jump, Lauren! Jump! Jump on him!’
I’ve tried to imagine what that must have been like for Lauren. She was six years old. She said she felt her eyes bulging and her head throbbing and all she could hear was the chanting, ‘Jump on him, jump down, jump on him, jump down.’
And she leapt.
Lauren didn’t know how long Jake lay on the floor after she leapt. She said he’d stopped moving. He’d stopped trying to find a safe place. He’d stopped crying, and everybody went quiet. Lauren told us that she was praying, ‘Come on Jake! Wake up!’ and her mum was cursing and Peter was, too. And yes, they tried to bring Jake around by putting him in the bathtub.
It was Peter who told us that. He said, ‘I wanted to call an ambulance, but Lisa was freakin’ out. She was saying, “They’ll take the kids off me!” So I helped her put him in the bath and run the water on him, but he didn’t come round.
Ghost Child Page 24
