The Wrong Hand

by Jane Jago

  His nightmares were getting worse with each day that passed. When he woke up from one he wanted to go to Dr Lepik and beg her to stop his release. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready. By the time dawn broke, he knew he wouldn’t. He couldn’t stay there. Stay inside and die. Leave and be killed.

  The dream was always the same: him barely able to breathe, running from something, crashing through the bush, over brittle ferns, fallen limbs and tinder-dry leaves, the smell of hot eucalyptus in his nostrils. Picking his way across sharp stones in his bare feet, stepping into the green ooze of a dribbling creek, then leaping up onto the bank on the other side, not daring to glance behind him. Running along a parched trail between the mottled gumtrees towards the light, and there at the end of the track a little boy, a dark-haired angel, stood staring straight at him. Just as he was drawn to the child, an older boy, with the face of a devil, stepped out of the shadows. ‘Come on, baby,’ said the older boy, holding out his hand.

  ‘Noooo!’ screamed Danny, but it was too late. The angel was already clasping the devil’s hand.

  Night and day, Danny was terrified. Terrified of living, terrified of dying. Terrified of being found out all over again, and terrified most especially of him.

  The parole officer had assured him it was unlikely their paths would ever cross. It was a condition of his parole that the two never made contact. He could live with that.

  ‘This is your new birth certificate, Geoffrey Roland Wickham.’ Danny clenched his jaw muscles. ‘Born on the eighteenth of January 1982.’

  ‘That makes me seventeen,’ said Danny, confused.

  ‘That’s right. We have to put your age back so we can place you in high school.’

  ‘High school.’ Danny thought he might vomit. ‘I’ve already finished my final exams.’

  ‘Attending a high school will give you a history, some legitimate records, a reference and school photographs.’

  ‘Who’s going to know?’

  ‘It’s okay, Danny. It’s been specially chosen because of its non-threatening environment – it’s a private school.’

  ‘A private school?’

  ‘If you’re to assimilate into life outside, you’ll need connections to survive. To anybody else you’ll be just another new kid.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘As far as the school is concerned, you’re transferring from another high school.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Don’t panic, Danny. It’s all in the profile, which you’ll have plenty of time to read.’

  ‘Who’ll know about me?’

  ‘No one, Danny – as few people as possible, but no one at the school.’

  Danny eyed him dubiously. How could he believe anything these people said?

  ‘Here’s your new Medicare card and social-security number. You’ll be entitled to a government allowance for at least two years and you’ll be boarding with a local family who run a guest house for university students . . . Less accidental crossover with students from the school.’

  What family? Where? If he didn’t slow down, Danny was sure he would explode.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to take in, but we have to start somewhere. Here’s a credit card, and a statement with your banking details.’ Danny peered at the growing pile of paper in front of him. He picked up the plastic card embossed with his new name. ‘There’s a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit. You’ll need to practise your signature and sign the back of it.’

  Danny’s mouth hung open.

  ‘Every cent will need to be accounted for by the likes of me.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a mobile phone. ‘This is yours. You must keep it charged and switched on twenty-four hours a day. You’ll be monitored for the rest of your life.’

  He scrolled through the numbers already stored in the phone’s memory until he came to ‘Code Blue’. Danny was starting to feel like a CIA agent being briefed for a special operation. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ll need to change the name to disguise it. It’s a special phone-link that will connect you with the nearest police station. Should you ever need to use it, the police will treat your call as an emergency. Don’t look so scared – it’s just a precaution in case your identity is ever discovered.’

  ‘And what do I tell them? Do the police know about me? Do they know who Geoffrey Wickham is? Because that’s a joke – they hate me.’

  ‘They don’t know who you are. Geoffrey Wickham is just one name on a list of at-risk persons who may require police protection at any time. They don’t know the reasons.’

  ‘But they know how it works. Somebody will figure it out!’

  ‘They have a list of names. Some are witnesses, some are persons under threat. Not all the people on the list are convicted criminals. The police don’t know your details.’

  ‘Who does? Who makes the list? How many people know about me?’

  ‘All of the people involved in this entire process want to give you the best possible chance to make a life for yourself. The handful who know in any detail about your new identity are on your side.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Five. I know everything, and the other four know enough to do their jobs.’

  Danny didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He would be walking around calling himself Geoffrey Roland Wickham and at least five other people would know exactly who he was. Jonathan Fisher counted them off on his fingers: ‘Your new counsellor, who’ll know your name, your case history and what you choose to tell her about your new life. A second parole officer . . .’

  Danny slumped forward in his chair and rolled his eyes.

  ‘In case something happens to me and I can no longer be assigned to you, a second officer will be kept up to date with what’s going on, which gives me someone safe to discuss the matter with.’

  Danny listened, his head in his hands. It was all beyond his control anyway. He’d probably be killed as soon as he left the Centre. In a way that might be easier. ‘That’s three,’ he observed baldly.

  ‘And someone in the Police Department will be briefed . . . someone higher up.’

  That was that then. He might as well shoot himself on national television.

  ‘And the public servant who originated these documents and put all this together – but they don’t know any specifics or who it was for. The biggest threat to your identity is from past contacts, people who could expose you . . . like resuming contact with family, friends or former inmates, who knew you in here during the past seven years. Obviously we’ve taken all that into consideration in regard to your relocation.’ Addressing the disturbed expression on Danny’s face he added, ‘There isn’t any reason to think that the cover story you were given here was exposed, is there, Danny?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I felt like they all knew . . . and there was that kid who I . . . who kept at me, he knew something . . .’

  ‘You mean the boy you choked with a towel? The one who called you a pervert?’

  Danny glared at him.

  ‘He didn’t know anything, Danny.’

  ‘No? My mother told me what that jerk supervisor said to the papers. The boy could have read that once he left here. If he didn’t know who I was then, he probably does now! And what if I run into any of the others on the outside as Geoffrey Wickham. Don’t you think they might put two and two together?’

  ‘Your release is not without risks, Danny. A lot of people have been working on it. This is your profile, the life story of Geoffrey Wickham.’ He slid a file across the desk. ‘Take it back to your room, read it, front to back, until you know it off by heart, until it becomes second nature. Okay, Geoffrey?’ Danny closed his eyes and nodded slowly. What other choice did he have?

  Clues

  ‘A time to weep . . .’

  Rachel, 2008

  Rachel McKenna positioned the cups in neat rows inside the overhead cabinet. She moved a wad of mail from the counter and dropped it into a tray beside the microwave, where her husband, David, w
ould find it when he came home. That was their agreement. She did not look at the individual envelopes: a letter addressed with her former name could trigger a panic attack. She rolled back the reinforced-glass patio doors that led to the walled courtyard of a substantial garden. ‘Time to come in, boys.’

  ‘Okay, Mum,’ said Martin, catching a wayward punt from his younger brother. ‘Come, on Thomas, inside.’ He repeated his mother’s instruction, hugging the pigskin possessively to his chest.

  Thomas dragged his feet, looking up at the afternoon sky, which was tinged with volcanic pink. He didn’t get it: there was still plenty of light to play in.

  Martin understood: he had been born under the shadow of the event, pulled into the void of his mother’s longing for the older half-brother he had never met. He had absorbed her fears and taken it upon himself to protect her from them. Martin was her rock. He knew why he had to be driven to school and picked up every day, why at thirteen he had never had a sleepover at a friend’s, why he had to play in the back yard, always in sight of his mother or father. In death Benjamin had remained three years old, but the parts of him that had been conceived in Rachel’s mind, all her hopes and dreams for him, had been transposed onto Martin. He straddled the gap between death and life, between a dangerous world and safety, occupying a strange position across the two families, one that had been suffocated by grief and one that watchfully survived. And now by some form of unnatural mathematics he was the elder brother and protector not only of Thomas but also of Benjamin.

  Martin had always been aware of her need to preserve Benjamin through him. His earliest memories were marked with traces of the little boy in the photographs above the piano – the one he had liked to ‘play’ – sitting on the red stool, kerplunk, kerplunk. His laugh was like a crystal bell: Martin was sure he’d heard it.

  Memories of Benjamin became braided into his own. The pain in his mother’s expression that accompanied every loving look or protective touch. The downward line of her mouth, even as she laughed at some heroic toddler feat he had achieved on the backyard swings. The ‘happy tears’ that dropped onto his first drawings, soaking into the paper, distorting and swelling it, the colours bleeding into one another. The panic in his mother’s voice when he got ahead of her in the driveway on the way to the car.

  Thomas, spared this neurosis, was terrifyingly normal. He’d come along much later and was fearless and uninhibited. Thomas magnified Rachel’s anxieties and apprehensions, and increased her swamping need for control. Her all-consuming anxiety ruled their lives.

  Thomas reclaimed the discarded football from a patio chair and kicked it through the doorway into the back of the couch. ‘What’s for tea?’

  ‘We’re having an omelette, then Dad will be home to take you to karate.’

  Thomas made a face.

  ‘You don’t like karate now?’

  ‘The instructor doesn’t like me.’

  Rachel wasn’t convinced.

  ‘He kicked me.’ He rolled up his trouser leg, looking for bruises.

  ‘He kicks everybody. That’s his job,’ said Martin, clipping his brother’s backside with his bare foot as he shut and locked the patio doors.

  ‘Piss off!’

  ‘Boys!’ Rachel’s face was tense: one of her headaches was brewing. ‘I’m sure the instructor didn’t mean to hurt you, Thomas.’

  Martin laughed. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘Learn to kick him back,’ she concluded.

  Thomas shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m only nine. But one day I’ll kick his arse.’

  His mother frowned at the language. Looking at Thomas’s ruddy face, she was disturbed by his vitality and wondered how much longer she would be able to contain it.

  She had good days and she still had bad days. The good days were days of forgetting, when she lived in the present. In all the intervening years the pain had not abated. Time does not heal. People should know that. All the blame and recrimination were still there, lurking under the surface. Her biggest fear was happiness. Happiness led to complacency and she’d been there before. Happiness brought with it guilt that she wasn’t mourning Benjamin. Love for her other sons was stalked by the accusation that she was forgetting him. Moving on, letting go, abandoning her baby to his fate over and over again.

  None of the hate mail, no matter how vile or insane, could ever match her inner voices. She had had to learn how to shut them out, forever blocking the ears of her soul to the nightmare words in court and printed in newspapers. Only she and Mathew, Benjamin’s father, really knew who he was before they had taken him, before he had become public property – a cypher for every parents’ nightmare. The inward death of outliving an infant child – of knowing that their baby had been tormented and discarded – had torn them apart. What love could withstand such an onslaught? The only way they had found to survive was to block the pain, to pull a curtain across each other’s faces.

  The guilt of abandoning Mathew to his grief had initially been overwhelming – watching him disintegrate, when he had wanted to draw close to her and drown out the horror with another sensation. Hatred had been an elixir. Before long she had been unable to bear the sight of him, to imagine that they could ever be close to each other again, that anyone could be close to her, or even near. They were each alone in their despair, seeing and hearing through a ten-foot wall of cracked glass, drowning behind it. The blackness solidified in her lungs with every attempted breath. The raging disbelief and the endless sobbing. The bewilderment. The first fifteen seconds of every waking day as reality swept in again, demolishing every good and sacred thing in its path.

  She had wanted to blame Mathew for being weak, for not being there when it had happened. For stopping her returning to work when the baby was six months old – because if she had been at the building society that day, counting notes into the palm of a stranger’s hand, Benjamin would have been safely tucked away at a nursery. She couldn’t quite nail it down or make it stick, but she had blamed him anyway. The deeper truth, the one that was hardest to bear, was that she knew he blamed her. He had never said so but she knew.

  She was the one who had taken Benjamin shopping, who had let go of his hand for the briefest of moments. Why had she let go? Turned her back on him, let him out of her sight. There was a perfectly good mini-market on the next corner. She should have gone there, and their life with Benjamin would still be intact. It was her fault. Hers. Who else’s? Somehow she had to believe it was Mathew’s.

  ‘How can you touch me?’ she had wailed, as he tried to pull her to him. ‘I cannot feel. Do you understand? I don’t want to.’

  Why hadn’t he gone out to kill those bastards, like any real man would? She had chosen the wrong mate, that was clear, one who couldn’t protect his young. She had pushed him further and further away: she hadn’t wanted to try to move on with him. Everything that represented moving on, every once-normal event, had been another spadeful of dirt burying all she had ever loved deeper and deeper under the cold, hard soil of a God-forsaken planet.

  When she looked in the mirror now she saw a stranger, her pretty features soured by a cancerous grief. Her once flirtatious eyes were dull and empty after years of retreating from public stares. The hardness of her expression was captured by the cameras of stalking journalists, who threw around the F-word – forgiveness – in search of a saleable soundbite. As if it were her job to forgive the little ghouls who had done it; as if there was a timetable of normal reactions.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive them?’ The obscenity of the question. It wasn’t an answer they were after but a reaction they could film or print.

  She wanted to turn on them and scream, ‘Let me rip your firstborn from your belly and hurl it under a speeding truck and ask you about forgiveness!’

  ‘Tell us how much you hate them.’ The question behind the question. She wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Her face became a hollow mask she showed to those who refused to leave her alone to
deal with her pain.

  Despite the guilt, escaping Mathew’s bottomless need for her had brought relief. Leaving him had allowed her to close herself off. They had finally parted ‘friends’ before they could maim each other further. Only then had either of them begun to mourn properly.

  Somehow, even though she had pushed him away, it was Mathew who needed to be free of her, to immerse himself obsessively in every aspect of the trial and the endless legal proceedings, doing now in Benjamin’s memory what he couldn’t do then. The further she withdrew from the public, from people, to regain a private sense of what she had lost, the more he externalized his pain and rage. He was like someone she had never met, talking about people she didn’t know, holding pictures of a baby that belonged to her.

  For nearly nine months she had lived ‘indoors’, guarded fiercely by her family as she rebuilt her memories of life with Benjamin and protected them from the horror of what had come after. The only way she could keep him safe was to separate him from the story he had become. In those first months, she envied the mothers of stillborn babies or those taken in their sleep by cot death. People wrapped their arms around those women and honoured their grief. Not like the faces that turned away from her, with a strangled half-sentence on their lips. No platitude forthcoming.

  Any bereaved mother, in her unreachable grief, has some refuge at the bottom of the well of sadness where her heartbreak and memories of her child can wash over her. A place to drown and die, where the loving words of those outside can be heard from a distance. For mothers like Rachel, parents of the murdered and defiled, the pit was full of snakes. The house of mourning was desecrated with vile graffiti, peered into by tourists and anthropologists; one woman’s agony another’s peep show.

  Instinctively Rachel constructed a wall around herself and dealt only with the loss of Benjamin, steadfastly refusing to let the details penetrate her mind. Her baby was gone and he was not coming back. She would never hold his face against her cheek, smell his hair or kiss him again. He would never call her name. He would never hesitate, and look to her for reassurance, before letting go of her hand and sitting down at his desk for his first day at school. He would never score a goal or sing in a school concert. He would never phone her from university just to say hi. She would never see him arrive home with his first car, girlfriend or broken heart. There would be no wedding; she would never hold his child in her arms and marvel at its likeness to Benjamin. All these things that she would never have – they were enough to mourn.