The Wrong Hand

by Jane Jago

  ‘What about his hands?’

  ‘They were sort of out of proportion, short heavy fingers, and the little finger was barely long enough to reach past the knuckle of the third finger.’

  Phillip Kendall sat down on the edge of the mattress. Unconsciously he trailed his fingers along the shallow depression that had formed, over time, on his side of the double bed. ‘Sometimes we just have to trust the system.’ He picked up the pen and paper and slowly wrote a few more notes. He thanked Oliver for the information and restored the phone handset to its base, where it gave a series of beeps to show it was connected. Another of Lauren’s ‘improvements’.

  He looked down at his upturned palms, remembering the hands of Danny Simpson, the small fat hands of a childish brute, hands that had obeyed their owner’s command to inflict pain and kill. He remembered them all right.

  Rachel, Friday, 3 September 1993

  Rachel Allen slid across the sheets to make way for the little bundle of tawny brown arms and legs that had crawled under the quilt beside her. Benjamin squirmed into position, snuggling into his mother, bumping his head under her chin.

  ‘Careful,’ she whispered, stroking his sleep-matted hair and planting a soft kiss on his forehead. The smell of his head was always irresistible to her. Like a caramel-scented bird’s nest, was the only way she could describe it. Mathew tugged at the quilt in an attempt to reclaim some. Rachel tucked her corner under her son; he was already fast asleep and softly snoring.

  He did this every morning at five a.m., like clockwork. Mathew’s mother said they should set limits but Rachel wasn’t ready to give up the ritual. She enjoyed holding him close, feeling the warmth of his little body. She rested her cheek against his and drifted back to sleep.

  An hour later the light touch of a finger tracing the contours of her face broke through the fog of her dreams. She opened her eyes to meet Benjamin’s, big, wide and vivid blue. He deliberately fluttered his long black lashes against her cheek. She tickled his cheek with hers. He giggled and threw himself back onto the pillows.

  ‘Daddy gone,’ he said.

  ‘Daddy’s gone to work.’ She tickled his ribs and little belly.

  ‘Uh-oh!’ His padded training pants felt damp. ‘Did you wet your bed before you came in to Mummy?’

  He stared innocently up at the ceiling.

  ‘Never mind. Time to get up anyway.’

  ‘No!’ he squealed, crawling up the bed away from her.

  His mother pulled on the patchwork quilt, slowly dragging him towards her. ‘Got you now.’ She scooped him up and carried him off to the bathroom.

  Later, in the kitchen, Rachel made toast and tea. A shaft of sunlight cut through the amber liquid as she poured herself a cup. It was still only September. The nights had been cold, but mild days had stimulated the jasmine creeper outside the kitchen window into bloom. Perfume from a sprig of the tiny blue-pink and white flowers filled the room. When Rachel closed her eyes and took it in, she was reminded of long walks to school past the suburban gardens of this very street.

  Benjamin appeared at the kitchen doorway in his singlet and underpants. He held out a pair of rust-brown corduroy trousers in one hand and a thick, apple-green roll-neck in the other. ‘Cuppa tea,’ he said, dropping the clothes onto a chair and climbing on top of them. He was fascinated by the tea-cosy his nana had made: yellow and black were the colours of his father’s favourite football team, the Richmond Tigers. Benjamin liked to pat the fluffy pom-pom at the cosy’s peak and to feel the warmth of the pot beneath.

  ‘Be careful.’ Rachel poured a small amount of tea into her son’s little mug and filled it up with milk.

  Benjamin knelt on the chair and rested his elbows on the table, holding the mug with both hands to drink his tea. ‘Oooh, hot!’ He pulled a face, then rubbed his hands up and down his exposed arms and shivered. ‘Cold.’

  Rachel laughed. ‘Make up your mind.’

  He was still shivering. ‘Come here.’ She opened the front of her fleecy dressing-gown. Benjamin scrambled across the chair beside him and climbed on board, hunkering down in her lap. She closed the robe around him and fastened it to his neck, so that only his little face protruded. He slipped his hands through the gap between the first and second buttons and reached for his mug.

  He was such an easy child, Rachel thought, nearly always happy. She and Mathew had waited until she was twenty-eight to start the large family she had always planned. Mathew wanted to own their home so that Rachel could give up work for a few years at least. It had taken them more than five years to save the deposit for the cute cottage at the heart of the Terrace, a small warren of hilly streets lined with Victorian and Federation homes. The house was modest but it was a start. Mathew had completely renovated the kitchen, installing a dark green Aga he had bought from a demolition site. It had previously been used for storing old newspapers and magazines but was fully functional. Together they had done the place up, dedicating most of their weekends to stripping, sanding and painting. Mathew’s house-painting partner Keith had helped him to build a third bedroom and a small deck at the back behind the kitchen.

  Rachel had miscarried their first child after three months: a blighted ovum, the doctor had called it. She had been disappointed but not completely shattered. Her mother had given birth to four healthy children and her GP had told her there was nothing to prevent them from trying again.

  Then Benjamin had come along, a perfect baby boy, after a wholly uneventful pregnancy. He would be three next month.

  He took a bite from a slice of Vegemite toast, then wiped his hand on the front of his mother’s dressing-gown.

  ‘Okay, mister.’ Rachel undid the buttons and her joey hopped out. ‘Time to get dressed, Benji.’ She stood behind him and held his trousers open for him to put them on, then stretched the skivvy over his head. ‘Hands up.’ She rolled the sleeves down over his extended arms.

  Rachel Allen took Benjamin with her everywhere. Even though her mother, Barbara, lived in the next street and was quite willing to baby-sit, Rachel found it hard to leave him. All Benjamin had to do was slip an arm around her leg, look up with his enormous eyes and say, ‘Mummy.’

  Today they were going shopping in town with her sister Julia and her eighteen-month-old daughter, Lily. They had arranged to meet at the coffee shop near the fountain on the mezzanine level of the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre.

  By the time Rachel Allen had found a convenient spot in the underground parking area, beneath the shopping centre, it was already eleven fifteen. She unclipped her seatbelt and got out, then opened the door to the back seat and reached in to release Benjamin. He swung his legs back and forth; one foot wore a sturdy shoe, the other only a blue sock, which had slipped down below the heel. ‘Benjamin! What happened to your shoe?’

  Benjamin strained his neck to look down between the seats of the compact station-wagon as his mother stooped to find the shoe. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. We’re already late.’ She leant further in and ran her hand under the rear of the front seat, stretching as far as she could to grasp hold of an object she could feel with her fingertips.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Rude, Mummy.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Once the shoe was on, she released him from the seat and stood him beside the car. As she pointed the remote at the car and locked it with a piercing beep, the toddler began to trot across the concrete landing towards the nearest entrance.

  ‘Wait for Mummy!’ She caught up to him and grabbed his hand. ‘Put this on.’ She draped a blue anorak around his shoulders and fed his arms into its sleeves. He set off again before she could take hold of the silver toggle and zip it.

  His head was on a swivel as they rode the escalator to the upper floor, taking in the endless variety of shops, crammed with bicycles, toys, sports caps like Daddy’s, the smell of doughnuts and hot chips, the lights reflected in the shining floor tiles, the brightly coloured words painted on windows and above doors, and the st
reams of people. Big fat mothers with prams and babies that cried, a little boy like him about to take the first lick of a blue ice cream. Could ice cream be blue? Pretty ladies reading magazines and drinking tea. Teenagers sitting on the benches outside the music shop smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Ice cream, Mummy.’

  ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream, “Ice cream!” Maybe later. Quick jump,’ she said, lifting him up by the arm as they stepped off the vanishing escalator track.

  She was anxious about being late: usually she would have picked up her sister, Julia, and they’d have come together in the one car, but Julia had to be home early to prepare for a lingerie party she was throwing that evening. Rachel might go along if Mathew wasn’t too tired and felt up to bathing Benjamin and putting him to bed. Well, that was the fantasy. More likely she would come home to find Benjamin sleeping in his day clothes and an exhausted Mathew flaked out on the couch.

  Julia and Lily weren’t at the tables outside the coffee shop, or inside. Rachel was about to ask at the counter when Benjamin spotted them browsing in the discount clothing store opposite. ‘Look . . . Uli!’ He pointed in the direction of his favourite aunt. Across the busy mall, in the doorway of Best and Lest, Julia saw her sister and waved.

  Lily was installed in a luxurious padded pushchair, a row of plump fairies strung in front of her. When she saw Benjamin she gurgled an approximation of his name.

  Benjamin pushed Lily round the clothes racks while Julia and Rachel rummaged through a sale table of baby clothes: Julia was expecting her second child in six months.

  In Ladies Wear the women attempted to try on some dresses but it was hopeless: Lily cried every time her mother disappeared behind the changing-room curtain and Benjamin rushed in and out of the cubicles, bursting in on strangers.

  The children played well together in the toy corner of Marty’s Hairbiz while the sisters had their long dark hair streaked – 4 foils, any colour, 12 dollars.

  As Rachel and Julia said goodbye to each other at the top of the escalators, Benjamin’s attention was captured by the rhythmic bouncing of a large multi-coloured super ball. The dense acrylic sphere sprang high into the air as its downward momentum was checked by the hard terrazzo floor. He watched, mesmerized, as a boy in a yellow hooded jacket caught the ball on its upward trajectory, then sent it slamming back to the floor. Another boy sat on the bench beside the first, eating a burger and watching Benjamin intently as he chewed. Boing, boing . . . Up and down went the ball.

  ‘Benjamin,’ called his mother. He turned as she took his hand.

  ‘Say goodbye to Lily.’

  ‘Bye.’ He opened and shut the fingers of one hand. He looked over his shoulder for the boys with the ball, but they had vanished.

  Benjamin began to grow restless as they waited in line at the Medicare office. He played with the rope railings until two fell over. He was tired and bored now. He wanted to go home. Rachel didn’t get angry with him: she could remember her frustration as a little girl on the long walk home from town with her mother. How desolate she was when her mother’s hands were full of groceries and couldn’t hold hers. ‘Not long now,’ her mother would say.

  ‘Not long now,’ she said stroking his head.

  ‘Pusscat,’ he said, referring to the cover of a picture book on a stand outside the newsagent’s.

  ‘Would you like that?’ said his mother. She lifted it out of the slot and put it into his hands. He gripped it tightly and nodded. ‘Just let me pay for it.’ She took the book back from him and put it on the counter.

  Benjamin watched the book disappear into adult hands. It was still a mystery to him how Mummy could pay for things and make them his. He didn’t fully understand why, but he was beginning to realize that you had to be ‘good’ to get what you wanted.

  ‘You can read it with Daddy tonight.’

  In the fish shop Benjamin stood corralled behind his mother, carrying his new book. Between the legs of the customers around her, he saw the boy in the yellow jacket through the window, making funny faces with his nose pressed against the glass.

  ‘Thirteen ninety,’ said the fishmonger, wrapping some ice with the order.

  Rachel Allen let go of her son’s hand for just long enough to open her purse and collect the parcel from the countertop. The feel of Benjamin’s little fingers slipping from hers would be her last memory of her son.

  When she turned around he was gone. Only the picture book remained, discarded on the cold marble floor.

  Danny and Graham, Friday, 3 September 1993, 6.30 p.m.

  They were in a hurry now to get home, to place themselves elsewhere, away from the deed. To paint the lie. Suddenly Graham was an eleven-year-old boy again, acting like a six- or seven-year-old, tearful, panicked and anxious, blaming it all on Danny, as if Danny had lured him into yet another misdemeanour that might get him into trouble.

  ‘What if somebody saw us in town with the baby?’

  ‘Shut up! We never went to town.’

  The deed was done and, unlike Graham, Danny was not about to give himself away by wetting his pants.

  ‘What if they find out we were at the Regency?’

  ‘Listen, you fuckhead,’ said Danny, gripping Graham’s arm. ‘We never went to town. We bought some lollies at the shop near school, remember? And we hung around the football fields and smoked some cigarettes and went back to your house. Then we walked over to Westside to get a takeaway.’

  ‘You won’t tell them I did it, will you?’ pleaded Graham.

  Danny wanted to kill him, wished he had killed him instead of the boy.

  Graham began to cry.

  Danny stared him down. In Danny’s universe, if you got copped for something, you didn’t go crying like a baby, you toughed it out, no matter how scared you were, no matter what ‘they’ did to you. He stopped outside the takeaway next door to the Westside bowling alley and emptied his pockets of coins. ‘Four bucks. Give me what you got.’

  Graham felt in his pockets and found another three dollars. Together they went inside and ordered two large portions of chips. The unsmiling proprietor watched impatiently as Danny counted out the change. The shop was getting busy and several people pushed past the two boys as they waited for their order. Graham sat nervously jiggling one leg up and down, while Danny made faces and played peekaboo with a little girl as she sat on the counter. She buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, then peeked out again. The woman turned to see the boy in the red windcheater pulling funny faces.

  Back outside, under a streetlight, Danny shoved a parcel of warm chips into Graham’s chest. ‘Take these and go home. Your mum’ll be out lookin’ for you if you don’t hurry up.’ Graham held the chips and stared mutely at Danny. ‘Just keep your mouth shut. Don’t say nothin’ about nothin’.’ He reached over and tore open the end of Graham’s parcel. ‘And fucken eat some on the way or she’ll be wondering why you bought them.’ He ripped open the other package, pulled out a steaming chip and put it into his mouth.

  ‘She hates it when I ruin my dinner,’ said Graham.

  Danny studied him while he chewed cautiously – the chip was still hot. ‘It’ll give her something to go on about then, won’t it?’

  The two boys held each other’s gaze briefly, then walked away in opposite directions.

  Mathew, Friday, 3 September 1993, 10 p.m.

  Oblivious to the sting of the frigid air on his skin, Mathew Allen walked steadily through the dark ahead of a team of searchers, who began to fan out along the grid of lanes that bordered the shopping precinct. He turned up an unlit alley, moving the beam of his torch along the perimeter, over the mildewed brickwork. The light travelled upwards crawling into recesses and crevices, bouncing off broken glass and spilling through cracked panes into the forbidding blackness of a fathomless warehouse.

  ‘Benjamin!’ called a chorus of voices behind him. He shone the torch down at the heavy grille of a storm drain and tested the size of the opening with the toe of his shoe be
fore he was satisfied. Others created a beacon of light while he scaled the side of a skip, flooding its interior with illumination as he looked down, petrified, at the refuse bags and empty cartons.

  On and on they trudged through the bitter night, across soccer fields, industrial parks and subdivisions, along riverbanks and railway lines, scouring bins, bus shelters, water tanks, toilet blocks and schoolyards, anywhere a toddler might be trapped or hidden.

  ‘Hello!’ he called, picking his way through a group of sleeping derelicts at the rear of the Salvation Army depot. ‘Has anyone seen a small boy, a three-year-old?’

  A man grunted and rolled over.

  ‘No kids here this time of night,’ said another, sitting up and watching the activity with interest.

  ‘How long’s he been missing?’

  ‘Several hours,’ offered a volunteer.

  A taxi entered the depot to execute a U-turn. Hailed by one of the group, it came towards them. ‘Can you get on your radio and ask around about a missing boy, three years old?’

  ‘We heard, mate. Cabbies are on the lookout.’

  ‘Someone should get a ride to the police station and come back to us with an update,’ said Mathew.

  ‘And coffee,’ called Mathew’s brother, Ewan.

  ‘And more batteries,’ added a voice.

  The brothers separated from the others, covering the territory behind the enormous car park adjoining the City Stadium. Eerily lit by rows of overhead lights, the empty car park held few hiding places but every shadow needed to be eliminated. Mathew’s torch was flickering – he loaded it with fresh batteries from his overall pocket, while he walked slowly towards the automated ticket dispenser. The stronger beam revealing nothing but asphalt and cement. He turned and looked back at the distant lights of the Regency Arcade Shopping Centre. Inside, Rachel would be searching with security guards and detectives in the desperate hope that Benjamin might still be found there, hiding in one of the closed stores or perhaps returned by someone who had found him wandering nearby. It was two a.m. He had been missing for nearly nine hours.