At 10 am she was escorted to the visitor’s room to meet the doctor, Christine something, a gynaecologist who had qualified last year and joined a busy practice at Darwin Private Hospital. This doctors’ formal role was unclear as she normally saw private patients not prisoners and had only made these arrangements as a favour to Sandy.
As Susan came in a pleasant lady in her early thirties rose to greet her. Susan liked her instantly, the no nonsense professional competence, and a ready smile.
She had a portable ultrasound machine which she plugged into the power in the visitors room. She asked Susan to liey down on a towel on the table and checked her carefully by palpation and ultrasound. She soon had a picture of her baby on a laptop screen attached to the ultrasound. Then she asked Susan if she wanted to know the sex?
Susan nodded.
“As best I can tell it is a girl, you will have a beautiful daughter.”
Susan was thrown; she was so sure it would be a boy. She asked, “Are you sure? I was certain it was a boy.”
Christine reworked the image, zooming in on the child again and going to the lower body. “Well it is hard to be 100% at this stage, between five and six months, but it is pretty clear. You can see the place and there is nothing there where the penis and testicles should be. It seems a bit small for your date and how big your tummy is. I think we should run a few tests just to confirm everything is OK, bring you in to hospital for a day next week to check it out more thoroughly.”
Susan nodded, not wanting to take a chance with the health of her child. They discussed the tests for next week. Christine left the ultrasound head resting on Susan’s belly, the laptop screen facing her.
There was a movement. Something that looked like a leg zoomed into view, showing a tiny foot with five toes. It seemed to come from a different place than from the baby they had been looking at. Susan pointed, open mouthed. Christine’s eyes followed her finger.
“Oh my God, that leg does not belong to the child we have been looking at. There is a second baby.”
After five minutes of further checking it was clear, there were twins, a boy and girl. Now the sizes were right.
Christine finished a few minutes later. Susan said she had some cash to pay her for today, but would need to work out how to pay for future treatment. Christine waved her aside. “Plenty of time to sort that out later and Sandy told me she would pay if needed.
“First things first! With two babies there are extra risks. I need to have you come in to hospital next week for more tests. I will arrange it with the prison authorities.”
The hospital visit was booked for the next Monday. A prison van would take her and she would be escorted by a warder for the day. Not that she was considered a significant risk, having returned to Australia voluntarily, but appearances must be maintained.
Susan woke early on the Monday, feeling an eager anticipation to leave her cell and walk in the open air. It was the first time she had left this place since her court appearance over six weeks ago. That seemed like an eternity ago. She walked outside in handcuffs acutely aware of the shame of being treated like a wild animal.
Someone must have tipped off the press. Several journalists and camera men were gathered in the car park, long telephoto lenses pointing her way, trying to get her picture. Her protruding stomach was there for all to see as she walked the few steps from the prison door to the waiting van. She was whisked away, glad to be hidden inside the van’s windowless sides.
It was a day of waiting between different tests and procedures, enclosed in a locked room on a high floor. At least there was a TV she could watch, her first real taste of the happenings in the outside world since her arrest in England.
In between procedures she sat with her eyes glued to the TV. The morning passed slowly, a rolling rotation of chat shows and soap operas. The midday news came on. She felt disconnected from it all and was inclined to flick back to a soap opera. There was too much pain and longing as she watched normal people go about their real everyday business.
She was about to flick the channel button when she saw a headline.
“Remnants of missing helicopter found.” Now the TV had her full attention. The report was to the point. A fishing trawler picked up some refuse floating in the water about 100 kilometres west of Darwin yesterday and brought it to port last night. This morning experts from the Department of Aviation confirmed that it appeared to be an extensively damaged fuel tank of a Bell 47 helicopter.
The reporter stated, “It is likely to have come from missing helicopter of Vikram Campbell, whereabouts unknown since 30th December. It is considered most likely to have been washed out to sea from the rivers of the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf following the cyclone in that area in the days after Mr Campbell’s disappearance. A new search of this area for any other crash evidence will commence tomorrow.”
Susan felt profoundly depressed. She had had a little hope before, despite Buck’s optimistic unwillingness to concede the likely; but now her hope was extinguished. The helicopter really had crashed and with this damage which had broken the machine apart, the outcome was obvious. She knew they must go through the formalities of the search but there would be no happy ending, even if further wreckage was found. It just reinforced her determination to keep on the path she was following. She sat there musing on the way her life was going, drifting further and further into darkness.
Suddenly her own image on the TV pulled her attention back. It was her, at least a telephoto image of her taken this morning; a woman with a bloated belly walking the few steps to the prison van. Now she turned her attention in to the sound.
“Breaking News, Crocodile Man’s lover and alleged murderer was taken to Darwin Hospital this morning for medical tests to confirm her pregnancy. Is Crocodile Man the father of her child?”
She remembered the grainy images seen of Lindy Chamberlain’s pregnancy, replayed from when Lindy was in prison and the awful speculation that had gone with it, all the Devil child rubbish. Was that to be her fate – mother of another devil child? Susan wished she had just stayed in prison and let the prison doctor deal with her.
She just wanted to return from this hostile place to her cage again; it kept the outside away. It was better to be alone than to have to watch this feeding frenzy as the public took delight in the news of one tragedy after another.
She realised her mind was slowly being refilled with the missing crocodile spirit, she had left the crocodile stone in her cell, and with it her defence was gone. So now, as the day wore on, she could feel it pushing and insinuating its way back into her mind.
She realised she did not care anymore. It was easier this way, lost in a mindless oblivion. As she let the crocodile spirit take her she again felt Mark’s presence, he seemed real again inside her mind. She had missed him so much and here he still was. In her search for freedom all she had found was an empty place where nothing and no one lived. Here, in her mind, she had a companion again, and it had less power to hurt her than what lay outside.
Suddenly she was glad she was carrying two children. They could continue her life, and Mark’s, in the outside world. They would be company for one another and grow up strong and healthy, with no taint from this past. Her parents would take good care of them.
And when they left her she would say goodbye. Not just goodbye to them until she saw them next, but a final goodbye to them and her parents, and all that this awful life had dealt her.
It was simple, she would leave this world. She would write a simple will and ask that they put her body in the ground next to what was left of Mark’s, she would return to him and, as two crocodile spirits together, they would watch from afar. That was as close to heaven as either of them could get and it would have to be enough.
Chapter 13 - Return to London
Anne found the return flight to London to be like a poignant time warp. She was leaving a place of heat, humidity and relentless anxiety, the watching of her best friend’s life as it disintegrated, the
trying not to get drawn into another relationship, the anxiety about keeping her job and how to deal with her increasing pile of undone work in London. Now she was leaving all that behind and returning to her home, her flat, her network of friends, her family, and the ability to rescue her job and make sense of that undone work.
She should be feeling relief and excitement at her return. Instead she felt strangely let down and empty, as if she had moved her centre of existence to the other side of the world; that London was the unreal artefact and the Darwin hotel room was permanency.
It was not that she was not looking forward to seeing her family and friends again, or having her own things in her own place, or even creating order from the chaos she knew would await her at work. She was, and yet. And yet it was as if the centre of gravity in her world had shifted to a previously unknown and unimagined place.
It was not just David and Susan and their lives there, though that was definitely a part of it. It was that a part of her, a part that she did not know existed before, had been captured by the spirit of the place. It was about identification. She, the quintessentially English girl now felt that part of her soul lived across the sea in that other strange harsh land. It was a far less pleasant place to live than her home, but it was there, and it was in her now.
However she must park this nostalgia for now and knuckle down to do all the things that her life in London demanded of her. She had promised to ring David at least once each week and she suspected it may be even more often.
It was midday Sunday before she cleared the airport, then came back to her flat for a couple hours of creating order before dinner with her family out in Reading. They were not quite neighbours to Susan’s family, but near enough; that was where the friendship at school had begun. She did not stay late after dinner but headed back to town, knowing she must be up early for work in the morning. Her jet lag was not too bad thanks to the business class seat that David had bought her.
A week flew by; it was so full on that she barely knew where time went. The second week she started to catch up with social friends, all anxious for the news, both of her and Susan. It was hard to tell them much but she soon realised that their interest and understanding were pretty superficial, they were busy with their own lives here.
She and David had taken to calling each other in alternate turns, mostly every second or third day. It was wonderful to hear his voice and she always felt like she was walking on air after she put down the phone; they both had plenty and nothing in particular to talk about, but what both most wanted was to hear the other’s voice.
While neither quite said it, since Sydney they had transitioned into something more than friends. One day, in the second week after she was back, she had expected him to call and he did not. She slept fitfully that night and finally next morning, early, she rang, knowing it was evening now in Australia. He picked up immediately and she asked if he was okay; she could feel something in his voice that said otherwise.
He told her about his visit to see Susan the previous day, and how she had broken off the engagement. He told her the full story, including Susan forcing his agreement, that it be a joint decision to end it. He said, “It is funny, I have known since before Christmas it was inevitable, I even told my Mum that and she agreed. And yet, when she said it and made me agree, I felt so gutted.
“It was as if I was finally forced to confront what I should have always known, that despite my dream of perfection with her, it would never be, perhaps could never have been. It is like we are souls who at one level were pulled together, but at another level were never quite fashioned to fit together. That does not mean that I did not love her, a part of me will always be a bit captured by something in her, but yet I have had to face the fact that it could never be, and it was somehow bad for us both to try and make it so.
“So today I can look at it with something approaching equanimity, but yesterday it was far too raw even to say it to you. I just needed time to grieve alone; today I can talk of it.”
Anne replied, “When I saw her that week in Darwin Susan told me something similar. She said that deep inside she knew from the outset that it was not meant to work, but yet there was a pull of attraction that drew you together, at least for a time. With her, too, she said it seemed like an idea of perfection, but it was a dream of perfection that was not real. But it still hurt a lot to break it for her too.
“So I am glad you have both reached a similar place. She is still my best friend. I hope you and she can stay friends too.”
David said, “Of course, we will always be more than best friends; far too much has passed between us to ever be less. But now I can see clearly that the other is over and we can both move on with separate lives. That is a good thing for us both.
“Speaking of which, how soon can you come back out to Australia, I can’t wait to see you again.”
She replied, “David I am not yet back in London for a fortnight, I have almost caught up on my work by working until ten most nights. I have just broached the need to be back in Australia in just over a month for Susan’s trial, and my work has reluctantly agreed to give me a fortnight for that. So that is the best I can do. But, like you, I find myself impatient even though that fortnight is hardly likely to be a bundle of joy.”
He said, “OK, tell me your dates, I will book your flights and be there to meet you as you step off the plane.”
Chapter 14 - Finding Vincent Marco Bassingham
Sandy pushed on with her work of locating the real Mark.
First she double checked the two other names. Neither was obviously false, they had a trail of sorts but after following both back a few years they rapidly descended into mush, and in both cases they were common names with far too many people to trace. So, without a known birth location, it was hard to run them to ground quickly.
So she began work on tracing a Vincent Bassingham. Unfortunately the registries of earlier births, deaths and marriages in each state were not fully computerised. So she would need to do some manual leg work. Each state had its own system along with the Northern Territory, so that meant potentially up to seven state administrations and systems to deal with, and in her experience requests coming from the Northern Territory did not get top billing.
That would mean phone calls to clerks and registries to seek cooperation and stress the priority. If she had a real age for Mark that would help but the two licenses gave ages almost three years apart. So she suspected that she needed to cover a fair range to ensure she did not miss out. She also was not fully sure of name spellings, it was a verbal construct from Susan, though Buck had glimpsed a written name, but was not completely certain. The best help was that the surname, including a range of variants, was reasonably uncommon.
She decided to start in Brisbane with the Queensland register, based on Susan’s story of an uncle there. That drew a blank, in both the regular name version and the likely variants. NSW drew another blank, as did Victoria. She was feeling perplexed, she had been fairly certain it would be one of these three most populous states that would provide some clues to Mark’s identity and background.
She worked her way fully around the country, everywhere except the NT; somehow the idea of him being born here never occurred to her. Two of her precious weeks had passed and she was feeling frustrated.
She went to visit Susan each week and told her of her progress or lack thereof. She was worried about Susan. She had read about her visit to the hospital in the NT papers and seen it on the news. They had even found out somehow she was expecting twins. She got a taste of the vile speculation that was doing the rounds, particularly from internet trolls – kill the bitch, feed her to the crocodiles, cut out her babies and watch the crocodiles jump.
Sandy felt ashamed at what some people could do with all this stuff and was glad that most had passed Susan by. She, herself, would have preferred not to know, but she was using all the tools at her disposal, including her own internet searches. It was surprising how much of thi
s rubbish came up in her searches.
The warders had now taken to bringing Sandy direct to Susan’s cell to visit and this gave her an insight into just how desolate Susan’s life was. Her sense of Susan as an actress who turned on and off performances had grown much stronger; the Susan she found here was a much diminished person, a much better fit to her former mental image of her. There was a worrying lethargy and fatalism about Susan, as if she had resigned herself to what was coming and had given up trying.
As Sandy came in she would see Susan pick up that flattened oval crocodile stone, the one that Charlie had told her about, to keep the evil crocodile spirit out of her mind. If it worked she wondered why Susan did not keep it with her all the time, put it in her pocket or something like that. That seemed to be the way she used it when she first met her, and Susan had been a lot sharper then.
Now, when she first arrived, Susan seemed to be completely spaced out, her mind lost in another place. It would take a few minutes before any glimpse of that other person, the original Susan, was visible. Her answers were often vague and woolly, “Yes if you think so”, or “Whatever you think, I don’t know”. So different from the person with the razor sharp mind that Sandy had first met. Sometimes flashes of the old Susan returned, sometimes they would laugh together till their sides hurt at the silliest things, and Susan was always much better after this.
She tried to get Susan to tell her about her feelings and got occasional insights. On the last visit Susan had told her about that day in hospital, at first feeling excited to discover she had twins, and leaving the prison.
Then how it all collapsed on seeing the lunch time TV news, the first TV she had seen in months.
She told her how the first news item was about the wreckage of the helicopter crash which meant that Vic was really dead. Susan said it with such a flat, despairing finality that it broke Sandy’s heart, such a palpable feeling of emptiness and desolation flowed out of her. Sandy wondered why it upset her so much when she barely knew this man. But then he was a real friend of Mark’s; perhaps that was it.
Crocodile Spirit Dreaming - Possession - Books 1 - 3 Page 54
