by Jane Jago
She had refused to attend the victim support groups recommended to her – to sit and trade horror stories, to identify with other broken women, whose mundane lives had intersected with evil. She wasn’t like them: there was something wrong with those people. They had somehow taken their hands off the wheel – lived in the wrong area, turned down the wrong road . . . allowed the wrong people access to their children.
Eventually she had met David, a friend of a friend, the first person since time had stopped who hadn’t asked how she was ‘holding up’ or looked at her as if she were terminally ill. He steered her away from her thoughts and walked her slowly back into life – or, at least, to its edges. He had given her Martin, then Thomas. He knew what it cost her to risk children again, and he put himself between her and the world. That he would give his life to protect her and their sons she was certain. No man could offer her more.
‘Martin won’t let me play on the computer.’
‘Let him have some time to himself, Thomas.’
The nine-year-old threw himself onto the couch behind his brother. ‘Can’t play football, can’t go to the park, can’t play video games.’
‘Switch the television on and shut up, Thomas. Anyone would think you’d got ADD.’
‘I wish I did. Then I could take drugs and do whatever I want without getting into trouble.’ He pointed the remote at the little red light under the black screen.
Rachel chopped onions on a board and threw them into a pan. She took five eggs from a carton and began breaking them over a bowl. Thomas flicked through the news channels.
‘With speculation about their locations mounting, following a suspected leak from inside the Corrective Services Department, the killers of Benjamin Allen may have to be relocated again. The victim’s father, Mathew Allen, said in a statement tonight that he was sickened. ‘Once again Australian taxpayers are footing the bill to protect the perpetrators. Meanwhile the public should be asking, “Who will protect us from them?”’
The newsreader’s voice was abruptly cut off as Martin pulled the cable from the wall. A bowl toppled in the kitchen, sending the remaining whole eggs onto the tiles, where they shattered, sending out gelatinous tentacles.
Habits
‘By their fruits you will know them.’
Liam, 2008
As his colleagues from the Creighton and Davis real-estate agency talked around him, Liam took another drag on his cigarette, then drew the second-hand smoke back into his nostrils as it left his mouth. It ate up a considerable amount of money to smoke, and cigarettes were filthy, let’s face it. Smoking was a crap habit. He knew it. He could feel it choking his lungs, dulling his senses. He welcomed it.
When it came down to it, Liam Douglass needed all the habits he could get. He needed habits like other people need appointment diaries. Habits like getting up in the morning and remembering to shave and wash. Habits like eating, going to work and keeping appointments in a diary. Without his habits he might have evaporated into the air around him.
‘Bullshit!’ shouted Colin, cutting through his private thoughts.
Liam ground his unfinished cigarette into the aluminium ashtray, and tuned them all back in.
‘Ask Liam. He was there,’ said Paul.
‘The Bartos woman, did she toss a coin to decide between two houses?’
‘She did,’ Liam confirmed. ‘And then she said, “To hell with it, I like this one better,” and did the best out of three.’
‘That woman’s a nutcase. I showed her fourteen houses in April and you get the commission,’ complained Paul.
‘Well, I sold it to her.’
‘No, you didn’t. You just stood there and let her walk round. You made yourself invisible, like you always do, and she bought it.’
‘Like they always do,’ said Catherine, linking her arm proprietorially through Liam’s. He gave her a weak smile.
Across the room, a young barman deftly filled a glass with beer. The granite clack of pool balls at the nearby table drew Liam’s eye: a red ball oscillated aimlessly across the balding green felt.
‘Well, it just proves what I’ve always thought,’ began Colin, downing the last of his beer. ‘If they’re gonna buy the fucker they’re gonna buy it, if you’re lucky they’ll buy it off you.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with luck. Liam is a quiet genius. Just because he doesn’t walk around gushing or doing the hard sell –’
‘We leave the gushing to you, Cath.’
‘I don’t gush.’
‘I give them the same spiel as you do,’ said Liam.
‘You’re not that bloody good. The genius of it is that you sell anything at all.’
Colin was getting on Liam’s nerves. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘No, you don’t,’ goaded Colin. ‘It’s just like with Cath here. She thinks you’re unreadable and mysterious, the strong, silent type, and that she’s lured you out of your cave, roused the man in you –’
‘Here we go!’ Catherine rolled her eyes. ‘Fuck off, Colin. How many times do you need to be told?’
‘– that you’ve fallen for her when she just happens to have crossed your path and stopped you in your tracks. It’s all her own doing, and you’ve got no more idea of how you ended up with her than you have about how you sold that house today.’ Colin tore open a packet of crisps and turned to Paul. ‘He’s like one of those little toy cars that keeps going in a straight line, banging up against the wall.’ Colin mimed banging his head against an imaginary wall. ‘If you could move the wall he’d just keep on going.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said Liam, reddening slightly. ‘I’ll remember that next time you ask me for a favour.’
‘It’s your shout, Liam,’ said Colin, closing the subject.
Go and fuck yourself, Colin, you fat prick, thought Liam, smiling (out of habit) as he headed for the bar. He ordered three beers and a Coke for himself. Drink was one habit he was not about to cultivate, no matter how many jibes he had to endure about it from the likes of Colin. He needed habits and routines that were fixed and secure, even if, like cigarettes, they happened to kill you a little at a time. He needed habits he could rely on, habits he could set his clock by. And, yes, he sometimes needed drugs that kept the mind alert, like caffeine and nicotine, and drugs that subdued and sedated. Drugs like Aropax, Valium and the Tryptanol he took to sleep.
Drugs like alcohol, which relaxed inhibitions and loosened the tongue, or drugs that let down the barriers of the mind, that stirred up the silt at the bottom of the pond, he needed like a hole in the head. Did he need a hole in the head? he wondered dispassionately. If all his harmless habits were to desert him at once, there were worse things than a hole in the head. His habits were all that stood between him and the unthinkable, all that identified him as one of those who might walk among men.
Apparently it took twenty-eight days to develop a habit and twenty-eight days to break it. Liam had been married to Catherine a whole month and, as yet, there was no absolute single pattern to this thing called marriage that he could readily discern; instead he observed a bundle of concurrent threads, a multitude of separate habits and tiny nuances that he must master or at which he must acquit himself adequately. It didn’t matter all that much if he affected the likeness of a good husband or an indifferent one, as long as the likeness was credible.
Liam watched Catherine’s impassive face as she slept, her dark hair tangled on the pillow beside him. He was still amazed to see her there when he woke each morning. She pulled the sheet up around her smooth white shoulders, mumbled something and turned over in the bed. He draped an arm across her hip. Catherine shifted her pelvis, pushing her buttocks against his lower abdomen. She moved her thigh to admit his leg between hers, dragging the sheet down to expose a small ripe breast. He ran his hand slowly down her shoulder, across her breasts, and lightly massaged her belly. Her breathing became louder and deeper as she moved under his touch.
Sex, for him, was something new and it
bound him to her. The mute physicality of the act gave him a sense of relief that made him feel as real as any other man, and she was ardent about him. Every closed door, every ounce of reserve in him, only fuelled her interest.
Without opening her eyes Catherine raised her knees and arched her back against him until he slid easily inside her. He clasped her hips and drew her body towards him, filling her more deeply. Her quiet moans became louder and more urgent, then quieter still as she gave way to sensation.
Afterwards, as they lay folded together, she loved to talk soothingly about her feelings, her past and her un-extraordinary hopes for the future.
Alone, closed off from the world, he would enjoy these moments until he found himself unable to respond with the same intimacies. He sensed that Catherine sometimes felt he was holding out on her emotionally, keeping some part of himself to himself. He knew she would never be able to understand the nature of his reserve, or the fears that drove him, and was glad to find she had mistaken it for strength.
Catherine had chosen the terrace house in Avondale Street. He had seen it the week before their wedding, and after Catherine had been through it with another couple she had pulled him aside at work. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about that flat? It’s perfect for us.’
‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘You know how hard it is to get a good flat downtown.’
‘No one’s rented it yet?’
‘No, I told the woman I took through that the wiring was being redone and that it wouldn’t be available for two weeks. Luckily for us she needed something today. I’m going to run it past John, and if it’s okay with him we’re taking it, yes?’
‘If you really like it.’
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘Sure. I guess it’ll do.’
A month later she had almost finished repainting it. Despite his indifference to his surroundings, even he had to admit that, for a few hundred dollars, she had transformed the place. The once dead, cold and starkly painted rooms were now filled with her warmth and life.
Catherine held a cigarette to the flames of the open fire, then to her lips. Her fingers were covered with wine-coloured paint. She looked up at Liam from her cushion on the floor. ‘Here,’ she said, handing him the cigarette, then lighting another.
‘Is it really cold enough for a fire?’ he asked.
‘I like looking at it. It’s one of the reasons I chose this flat in the first place. What do you think of the colour?’ she said, admiring a velvety expanse of purple wall.
‘Good. I told you already.’
‘Wait till I do the trims.’ She stood up and moved over to the tall windows. ‘I love this room. I like the way it overlooks the street, and I really like this area. When I first came here, that little park down there was full of children from the pre-school next door, did you notice?’
‘No,’ he said absently, but he had.
‘Anyway, I love it, and I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ he said automatically, for he thought that he did, and after twenty-eight days it was becoming a habit.
*
Mathew, 2008
In the living room of his cluttered flat, Mathew Allen was surrounded by plastic boxes, full of files; the long table was buried under layers of clippings, letters and email printouts. Through the window he could see the darkness settling in above the red-tiled roofs of the city.
In front of him, beside a half-eaten sandwich, there was a small pile of mail. He ripped open the first envelope: a letter from Dunedin, in New Zealand. After an incoherent preamble – not usually one to write unsolicited . . . can only imagine your pain . . . outraged by such an appalling miscarriage of justice – the correspondent went on to say that she was certain that that mongrel, Simpson, was a student teacher at her granddaughter’s primary school, something about him . . . could never forget that face . . .
He took a white-headed pin-tack from a plastic cup and stuck it into a map of Australasia above his desk. The top was labelled with a large A. The map was peppered with coloured pins, some in clusters. A lone white one now marked Dunedin. After all these years the letters and emails still came from strangers all over the world. He’d learnt not to take too much notice of them but he couldn’t just discard them either. White pins were for unsupported suspicions or tips, founded on nothing more than a writer’s makeshift identification, based on their memory of grainy pictures published fifteen years ago. Green pins were for more detailed information, suspicions grounded on ‘something’. Red pins were for tip-offs or supposed inside information, which often turned out to be false or invented. Red pins were often downgraded to white, but none was ever taken down.
Some of the mail was hate-mail, letters about what lousy parents he and Rachel must have been to allow Benjamin out of their sight, gloating over the details of the affair and laughing at their suffering.
‘How can you read them?’ Rachel had once cried, but he took particular note of them, recording their postcodes and pinning a black pin in the corresponding towns.
He turned to a large, more substantial envelope printed with the logo of the Louisiana State University’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services: FACES. He opened it hastily, tearing the edge of the glossy white sheet inside. When he took it out he saw it was a photograph of an auburn-haired young man. There was something unusual about the image: it was a headshot only, with no background. The round, unsmiling face transmitted no real expression. The picture appeared pixelated in places, computer-generated. He scanned the attached covering letter.
Dear Mr Allen,
The age-progression computer-enhancement of the photographs you forwarded to my colleagues at the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has produced the enclosed images, which represent possible adult likenesses of the individuals in question.
The image in his hand was labelled A. He looked inside the envelope and withdrew a second image, B. Another young man stared out at him. This time the face sent a jolt right through him. It was the eyes, the coal-black, unreadable irises. He’d recognize them anywhere.
He laid the images side by side on top of the papers on his desk. A wave of fatigue engulfed him. How long could he keep doing this? Rachel had been right to move on, to remarry and have more children . . . right to live. But someone had to fight on for Benjamin. Someone had to stand up for him.
He knew he wasn’t well. Doctors couldn’t help – he didn’t even consult them now. The last had given him Prozac. He’d taken it long enough to find out that it was dangerous. He learnt that a Prozac state was not unlike a manic state, with flights of impulse, wild enthusiasms and hastily made plans. (He’d nearly driven Rachel mad with his late-night calls. Slow down . . . What are you talking about, Mathew? I can’t do this any more.) The artificial highs were followed by sudden deep troughs and pessimisms, suicidal fantasies and murderous rages. He’d even bought a gun.
The drug amplified his feelings of regret, but left him unable to cry a single tear. The nightmares were horrendous. And Prozac had done nothing to numb the soul-destroying hatred, hatred so strong that he sometimes thought of himself as the predator. If only they had kept those boys in prison.
The parole hearing had been a joke. As far as he was concerned the board had been taken in by two cunning criminals. He’d been sickened to hear about their ‘great remorse’, their ‘aspirations’. What about his and Rachel’s aspirations for Benjamin? Their opinions hadn’t mattered. They represented a dead child. Only the living had ‘rights’. It had been the last straw for Rachel.
Detective Kendall alone had spoken out on Benjamin’s behalf. Outside the hearing he had told the waiting press, ‘Simpson and Harris should complete their sentences in an adult prison.’ He was retired now and didn’t care what the ‘official’ police position was. He hugged Rachel tightly and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ The same words he had uttered after the original trial, as if the insanity of the legal system was his fault.
‘
Doli incapax,’ they had argued – incapable of malice.
As the vultures of the press picked over their open entrails once again, Mathew Allen had given them something – something he wanted printed on the front page of every newspaper across the country: They may think they are safe, they may think they are hidden, but no matter where they are I will find them, even if I have to track them to the ends of the earth.
The Herald had run the entire quote.
I will track them to the ends of the earth! made its way around the world. Within hours every soothsaying civil libertarian with access to a word processor or telephone line was up in arms, screaming their bloody heads off.
These unfortunate boys were a product of the society they were born into, they made a terrible mistake and have served half their lives in custody. We must all now take stock and allow them the chance to make a future for themselves.
Mistake? Future? The public response on hearing of their impending release had been even more rabid: Let the bastards find out what real jail is all about. And: The parents are serving life sentences, why shouldn’t they?
On the first day of the original trial, when he had laid eyes on the two eleven-year-olds in the dock, he had had visions of manually strangling each boy until the life drained from his eyes. What had he become? How had he travelled from a loving father with kindness for all children to this? He hated them and he hated himself. But he would try not to let Benjamin down. It was up to him alone to represent him.
