“No—not yet.” “Our visit does not elicit surprise at our presence?”
What does not what? Detective Hogarth was doing the talking.
“Well . . .”
Only Cindy could have told the police. Charles wouldn’t have. Who else?
She must have given my name at the auditorium yesterday when they interviewed her. But had she again reversed her position? Did she now want the aboriginals punished? Had her way of coping with it taken another twist?
“You say an aboriginal is in custody—from this conference?” I asked.
How did they get on to Cindy? Did I now tell them what I knew? Should I protect Cindy—from what and how?—and/or should I shield the aboriginals, and why? Did I look after myself by avoiding complications, and how?
“Yes,” said Hogarth, “yes, we have him in custody. He’s made a statement, come clean.”
“And where do I come into this?”
Were my responses already telling them more than I thought?
“Your name has come up in the course of the investigation.”
That could only have been from Cindy.
It was a game of Master Mind. Or was that just paranoia, maybe there was nothing skilful about their questioning.
How could I avoid becoming entangled in court proceedings?
“Don’t you wish to assist in this matter, Doctor?” Hogarth said with pretended incredulity.
To my chagrin I felt sweat on my brow.
Could I be prosecuted for obstruction?
“You’re perspiring,” the constable said.
“We felt sure you would want to assist in this matter, given that it involves your young lady friend.”
A shift in their tactics. At least it meant that they were talking tactically and not straightforwardly.
“But I’m not sure what’s being investigated—what are the charges?”
I showed some impatience.
“Charges will be laid following the completion of our investigation.”
How were they holding the aboriginal then?
“Look, really, I have no statement to make.”
I felt firmer.
“You will not assist then in our inquiries?”
Hogarth pronounced it as m-queeries.
“I can’t make a statement at this point—is Dr Broughton making a complaint, laying charges?”
They regurgitated some jargon about “pending the outcome of the investigations”.
Maybe Cindy had yielded to stress, to police pressure.
“I’m afraid there is nothing that I could say that would help.”
“Your woman friend gets herself raped and you won’t help us clear the matter up?” Hogarth said, dropping the false tone of respect but still with exaggerated incredulity. “Is that how I understand it?”
They stood their ground, their last ploy.
“Well, is that all?” I said, moving myself, and them, out into the hallway.
They said good afternoon and within earshot the constable said to the sergeant, “Choice sort of boyfriend for a girl to have.”
“Very choice, constable,” Hogarth said.
I had a sense of insecurity. Were they now waiting for me to do something? Was I making life hard for Cindy without knowing it? Had I pushed the matter into deeper water?
Something had obviously happened that I didn’t know about.
I went immediately to the public telephones of the college. One of the two booths was occupied by a student singing a wine commercial from television over the telephone to a friend. God is never ponderous.
I rang Cindy at the motel.
“I’m not speaking to you,” she said abruptly.
“But listen,” I said, “the police have been at me—what’s going on, what have you done?’’
“I thought you’d been spilling yourself to the police already,’’ she said.
“Don’t talk nonsense—why would I do that? How would I do that?”
“How did the police get on to Jack then? How did they come to arrest him?”
“How the fuck would I know! Who the hell is Jack?” We held a burning, hostile silence which changed to mutual confusion—I could almost feel the change.
“You didn’t talk to them?” she said, her voice quietening.
“No, of course not.”
“Before they came to the auditorium?”
“Why would I?”
I said that I would come to the motel and we’d talk about it.
“Yes,” she said, “you’d better come over. There’s something gone dreadfully wrong.”
At the motel Cindy opened the door, she took my hands as I came in.
I was privately thankful that there were no aboriginal rapists lurking, lounging around.
“I see now,” she said worriedly, “or, at least, I think I see now what has happened.”
The brandy bottle was almost empty. I’d paid a hundred percent mark-up on that. I guessed they’d drunk it during their “dialogue”.
Somehow, she said, the police must have gotten on to Jack, one of the aboriginals involved, the one the other two hadn’t been able to find. She thought now that he must have surrendered to the police.
“What did you tell them at the auditorium?” I asked. “I don’t really know, I was still in some shock,” she said, disturbed. “I asked them if you’d contacted them. I really don’t know what I said.”
I sat down, she remained standing.
“Jack must have thought the police were after him,” she said. “Maybe they got him on some other charge like drunkenness and he confessed to the rape—something like that might have happened.”
“But they can’t do anything without you laying charges.”
“Maybe they’re just using it to harass him, and us—a chance to get at a few university types and to kick around an aboriginal boy.”
“God, if we feel paranoid and confused—how must he feel?”
“Don’t say you’re finding a radical consciousness?” she said with a brief smile. “But what do we do next?”
“I’m sure they can’t touch him without you laying charges.”
“Ho ho.”
“What about the other two?”
“They’ve left, or at least they haven’t been turning up at the sessions.” She gave a small laugh. “They left me to handle the afternoon sessions.”
“I thought they were all supposed to stick together—tribal brothers. Why haven’t they got him out?” “It’s not the time for that sort of joking.”
“We don’t know that he is still in custody.”
“We could get a lawyer to find out.”
“That might complicate life for everyone. If we get formal, they might get nasty. Start shuttling him about. Putting us through hoops.”
It seemed to me that we were in for police unpleasantness anyhow—covert interrogation, the police runaround.
“Shit,” Cindy said, moving about like a wound-up toy. “Oh shit.”
“All right,” I said, “let’s go down and bail him out, or whatever we have to do. If they don’t release him, we’ll get a lawyer.”
She hesitated and then said, “Yes, you’ll have to come. But what will we do with him when we get him out? I can’t bring him back here. But I suppose I’ll have to. I suppose I can book him in here.”
“He can look after himself!”
“Will you stay the night if I get him a room here?” “I don’t think you have to bring him back here.”
“Will you?”
“Yes, of course. But I’m against it.”
“Have you much money?”
I looked in my wallet and told her what I had.
We had no idea what bail, if any, would be needed.
Cindy booked another room at reception on our way out.
“I’ve been bailed out twice, but I’ve never had to bail anyone out,” I said, surprising myself as I remembered this.
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve been bailed out twic
e but never done it for anyone. A sign of something. And we were together on one of those occasions.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
At the police station our first problem was that we didn’t know the aboriginal’s surname. But Hogarth came out eventually after the police at the desk had feigned busyness and shown indifference.
“You’ve come to clear this matter up?” Hogarth asked, coming around to our side of the counter, no coat, gun holster showing, almost warm to us.
“No,” Cindy said, “we’ve come to bail him out. Or to secure his release.”
“You what!”
“If you tell us what bail he’s on, we’ll bail him out.”
“And what charge is he on?” I asked.
He looked at me and changed his demeanour. “And what’s your role in this?”
“Friend.”
“Well friends stay in the front office.” He turned to Cindy. “If you have anything to say, Miss Broughton, you come inside.”
She looked at me and then went with him into a room marked “Detectives”, leaving me in the front office. The desk constable gave me a glance of dull curiosity.
I watched him slowly peck out some typing.
I waited twenty minutes.
An arrested drunk was taken through.
I then went to the door of the detectives’ room and opened it.
The desk constable said, “Hey—if you want to see someone, ask me. You can’t go in there.”
I went in, ignoring him, and saw two other detectives, shoulder holsters showing, and Cindy sitting at a desk with Hogarth, who was typing.
He looked up.
The constable came in behind me.
Cindy appeared to be reading a page of typing.
I heard one of the detectives say, in the background, “And then, of course, the car wouldn’t start . . .” Hogarth said, “What do you want?”
“What’s the problem?” I said to Cindy.
She was distrait. “I’m just giving them a statement and then they’ll let him go.”
“A statement?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Get him out,” Hogarth said to the constable.
“Do you need a lawyer—should I get one?”
“Get him out of here,” Hogarth said.
“No,” she said, “it’s not like that.”
The constable’s hand came down on my arm and I went out with him.
I sat down again in the front office.
I wished I’d brought a book along.
Cindy appeared in about another fifteen minutes looking tired, biting her little fingernail, and with her was Jack.
Together the three of us left the station.
Outside I introduced myself to Jack.
“I’m sorry,” Cindy said, carelessly, “I should’ve introduced you.”
Cindy turned to Jack and said, “Here,” and gave him about fifty dollars. “Find somewhere to stay and go back home.”
He muttered thanks and took the money, looked at me cautiously and then went off down the street into the city night.
“I was going to talk to him,” I said brightly, “I was prepared to make an effort.”
We walked in the other direction and came to a small comer grass area. “But it was probably the best idea to let him go his own way. But you didn’t have to give him my fifty bucks.”
We sat on a park seat.
She was trembling. “It’s all too much,” she said. “What was their game?” I said. “What was all that about a statement?”
“They wanted to charge him—came on very heavy—in the end I had to make a statement saying I had sex with him voluntarily.”
“They can’t do that!”
“Oh come on—” she said, “in this state they can do anything.”
“But why did you go along with it? They really can’t do it.”
“I made the statement and I actually enjoyed throwing it in their faces. I even gave them some prurient details.” “We could take action against them for harassment.” “You haven’t heard the worst yet.”
“But we could take some action—file a complaint with the Attorney-General. And what about Jack—false arrest?”
“Shut up,” she cried, “just shut up—you don’t know.” “Well tell me.”
“In a final effort to get me to lay charges—because he had admitted to the rape—they came up with his record. He had a record including a sex crime with a child. He was released six months ago.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I see. Well. That kind of blows it.” We sat in crushed silence.
“Did you see the record?”
“I don’t think they actually have a ‘record’ there in a station—they get it from a central place by telephone, unless it was all some act. But I had to play it through, I just took a deep breath and prayed they were lying. I decided to put my trust in the aboriginal—for no good reason.”
“Shit.”
I put my arm around her.
“Their parting remark was that they hoped I’d watch the newspapers for news of his next rape.”
“Nice.”
“When you have a child you think simultaneously of their interests.”
“Did you ask him—Jack?”
She gave a pained smile of resignation. “No, I didn’t want to know.”
We sat there.
“It’s the hard cases, aren’t they supposed to be the best for us?”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“Lawyers say something about hard cases make good law.”
“No,” she said, “they say the opposite.”
She burst out in self-anger. “Oh shit, we’re impossible-—here we are talking like this and there’s been all this tragic, sordid, historical drama.”
She wiped away her tears as they formed.
A CAT CALLED TELEOSIS
A word had strayed into the conference from some lecture given well before the conference, from one of the thousand lectures given in that room there at the university. The word was “teleosis”. It had at some time gone from the mouth of a lecturer on to the greenboard where the lecturer, probably because the board was full, had written it on the frame where it had stayed, escaping the subsequent cleanings, to stray now into our marginal consciousness.
Teleology, I knew, was the study of final causes. I was later to read that Zollman in 1740 said that teleology was one of the parts of philosophy in which there had been little progress made. No progress in 1740 into final causes and into the design and purpose of nature—I liked that.
Teleophobia was an aversion to, or unwillingness to admit to, the existence of design and purpose in nature. Teleologic proof is the reasoning that says because there is a world there must be a supreme designer who made it.
The word survived on the greenboard during the conference because the board was little used and anyhow people inevitably cleaned only the board and not the frame.
I was sitting with Crawford waiting for the session to begin and I asked him if he knew what the word meant.
“Does the part ‘tele’ have to do with messages?” he guessed. “No—I don’t know.”
“But you’ve read the word up there.”
“Yes, and I meant to look it up before some smart-arse like you asked me what it meant.”
Now, on the final day, Markham, broad black hat on the table, with his hispanic handle-bar moustache, went to the board, cleaned off some writing and with a gesture of—what? thoroughness?—he cleaned the frame and wiped away the word “teleosis”.
“No!!” an involuntary shout broke from my mouth. “What?” Markham looked back to the board, duster in hand. The chairperson looked at me and then to the board.
“You rubbed off our word,” I said, thinking as I said it that it was an absurd thing to shout.
“The word—?” He looked back to the frame; “This word?” He touched the frame where the word “teleosis” had been.
“Yes,” s
aid Crawford, joining in, “yes, that word.” “It was nothing to do with me.”
“That’s not the point, it was like killing the mascot, killing the ship’s cat,” Crawford said.
Crawford’s taking up of the game relieved me of my sense of foolishness.
“Yes, precisely,” Charles said, also joining in.
I realised that we were all speaking out of a restlessness, an over-exposure to organised thought, out of a crying need for play. We were mucking up.
“I don’t believe it, you’re joking, ha-ha,” said Markham, trying to close it. “I’ll get on with my paper.” “No,” Crawford said, “you killed the ship’s cat.”
“It was totemic,” Bisi called out with satisfaction. “It was totemic.”
Some of the others were laughing. It was a small group. A six-day conference overtaxes diligence. A few of the islanders, I knew, were using the time to get specialist medical and dental work done. Others were shopping. And of course, there’d been other kinds of casualties.
“That’s right,” said a poet from Queensland.
I sensed we were all enjoying pushing Markham off balance.
“I’ll write the word back up if that’s all you want,” Markham said, trying to smile, trying in a queasy way to be with the joke, and he began to print the word “teleosis” back up on the board.
“Ah—you knew the word’we meant,” said Crawford, “you knew it all along—evidence of guilt.”
“This is ridiculous,” Markham said testily.
The person chairing the session said she thought we should get on with it.
Markham turned to her and said, with a small bow, “Thank you, madam chair.” He began, “Pierrot is the butt, the woebegone, and thus we can see him as the defeated psyche of the proletariat and thus, of all oppressed . . .”
Charles gave a snort and there were chuckles.
“. . . Harlequin, on the other hand, is the insolent clown, the mocking, the undefeated psyche . . .” Crawford, probably in reaction to this beginning, broke in again, persisting with the joke almost aggressively. “Remove the false cat,” he said, pointing at the word Markham had impersonally printed on the board. “Get rid of that before you start—it’s distracting. It’s painful.” Markham’s accommodation of the joke expired. “I will not,” he said. “I will continue—if I may?”
He turned his head to the chairperson who, uncomfortable, tried for good humour, saying, “Yes, I declare the game is over.”
The Everlasting Secret Family Page 13
