Cape Grimm

by Carmel Bird

  I heard of one time when he appeared at the Eisteddfod at Devonport, competing in a bagpipe-playing contest. He was thirteen. His performance was outstanding, the best playing of ‘Amazing Grace’ the judge said he had ever heard. And he requested the boy to return to the stage to play again for the audience. Caleb took up his position, raised the pipes, the tartan bag beneath his skinny arm, and then, slowly and deliberately he bent down and placed the bagpipes on the floor. He straightened up, flicked back his hair with his left hand, and fixed the audience with his outer-space stare. Then he started. It was a more childish version of the sermon on the cliff at Cape Grimm, delivered in the just-breaking voice of an adolescent. On and on he went, his voice soaring and falling and railing, his message full of angels and devils and the light of understanding to be delivered to the faithful and the chosen. Those who heard him say that he was totally magical, persuasive, convincing, mesmerising. They wished he would never stop. But he did stop. Quite suddenly, as if he had not said a word, he picked up his bagpipes and again he played ‘Amazing Grace’. The audience applause was like a giant waterfall crashing around the Devonport Town Hall on a sullen Tuesday afternoon.

  A turn of fortune’s wheel brought me to Van Diemen’s Land where I would find, at the very heart of the dark and evil narrative of that same Caleb, the woman I would love. I returned from my visit to the convent in Hobart and to the house in Transylvania with the certain knowledge that one day I would make Virginia my own. I did not know how this would be accomplished, but I had a perfect sense that it was going to happen, and a kind of serenity came upon me. I had never experienced anything like this before, such calm certainty. But still I had to tread most carefully. Virginia was not in the legal sense married to Caleb, but how to proceed with her in hiding, with her new identity—the whole thing was beyond action. I am capable of great patience. I decided to wait, to wait and see, to trust destiny, fate, whatever power it is that might be thought to control the lives we lead. I did not conceal my feelings from her. She did not conceal hers from me. It was a love affair conducted by infrequent letters, postcards, email, and the occasional phone call. I suppose it was old-fashioned. It was as if we were on different continents, months apart by sea, in the nineteenth century. It was painful and difficult, but it was romantic. And it was real. And yes, I forgot for the time being all about her mystic powers and her visions of the history of early Van Diemen’s Land.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Letters to the Dead

  ‘The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.’

  ALEXANDER POPE

  And so, while I conducted my love affair with Virginia at a remove, life at BRPDF went on. Dr Sophie Goddard was the first Director here, and with her hand-picked team the facility was gaining considerable recognition overseas for its work with the rehabilitation of the inmates. Among the thirty-odd patients housed here when I arrived was a man called Declan Dequidt, known as Dee Dee, a professor of art who had strangled his wife and three other women as well and fed smallish frozen segments of their bodies into the sewer system over a period of years, keeping the parts in large freezers at the back of the convenience store that he ran with his brother. He admitted that he also kept in the freezers surplus boxes of ice-creams and frozen vegetables that he would later sell in the store. He also admitted that there were times when he had taken portions of the frozen women to local neighbourhood barbecues where they were enjoyed as cuts of choice pork. It is possible that he sold some of the portions to customers, but he would never clarify this one way or the other. His brother was apparently innocent of all these goings-on. Pieces of Dee Dee’s women’s remains would surface from time to time in a swamp or a billabong or somebody’s vegetable patch, having travelled through the sewers of Hobart. The damage Dee Dee caused to at least four families beggars belief, and this is an area, the aftermath of severe trauma of this kind, that interests me greatly. I have made a considerable study of the psychology of criminal homicide which includes the effects that reach far far into the future of the friends and families of victims. Imagine if you were Dee Dee’s wife’s sister, or her father, if you were the husband or child of one of the other women. You would never know when another part of the dead woman was going to come up to the surface somewhere, bring with it all the suffering, all the pain, all over again. In the case of Caleb, everyone in the closed community was killed, leaving only Virginia and her child to carry the burden of long-lasting trauma.

  Dee Dee was the only member of the Black River cohort to rival Caleb in the shocking details of his case. He spent most of his time studying art, anatomy and music. He was by temperament a rather sweet quiet man who never could be brought to see the problem that other people found with what he had done to his wife and the other women. These four had disappointed him, had fallen short of his standards of devotion to him, but more particularly they had fallen short of his standards of beauty which were fixated on Botticelli’s Venus. I would have thought that this fact put at risk ninety-nine point nine per cent of the female population, but he had chosen to concentrate on the four selected victims as part of some larger project that was never clear to me.

  Obsessed with the Botticelli Venus, Dee Dee has the remarkable gift of being able to reproduce small linocut prints or oil reproductions of this image of the goddess of love which bear a startling likeness to the original. Uncanny, people say. There is a certain proportion of the oil paint that is mixed with his own blood and semen and urine and excrement and, naturally, his room reeks of linseed and blood and shit and piss and turps. Another of Dee Dee’s gifts is the ability to cause his own nose to bleed to order. When he wishes to get some blood for mixing he will simply lean over a fresh or half-finished canvas and command his nose to gush shiny scarlet lacquer onto the surface. It is a kind of party trick he will perform to the delight of fellow inmates. ‘Turn on the tap Dee Dee,’ they say, and if he is in the mood, he will. He gave me a picture which hangs on my office wall, and it really is quite, quite beautiful. Otherwise he sells them outside the facility through a dealer, the money coming back to us, and he always has at least one on his own wall. While he paints he listens over and over to the music of the harp, a CD titled The Birth of Venus by an Australian harpist called Marshall McGuire. People deliberately go past his door so they can listen to the music of Bach, Handel or Purcell, which is like crystal and dreams floating along the curved and gleaming walls of the spooky Norwegian corridor. The sounds also travel through the plumbing into Caleb’s room. Caleb and Dee Dee exchange, as prisoners often do, anecdotes and information of various kinds via their toilet bowls. Dee Dee naturally has a special interest in sewer systems.

  Caleb and this man are the only members of our community whose files are stamped ‘never to be released’, however it is in fact unlikely that many of the other people enclosed here will ever leave. Caleb’s walls are densely papered with images cut from magazines, all of them pictures of Marilyn Monroe. There is a strange purity to this repetitive and obsessive form of decoration, but it is, when you first see it, a shock. Caleb Mean, the Christ Child, surrounded by this exquisite banality? The reproduction of the image of the same beautiful woman over and over again seems somehow to rob her of her magic, I have found. There were just so many pictures of Diana I could look at before she lost her charms for me, and the same goes for Marilyn. Andy Warhol was definitely onto something, I think. With Caleb I might have expected to see pictures of the Christ Child, or of Caleb himself—but then who knows what to expect—perhaps Marilyn is entirely predictable. Caleb is after all, when all’s said and done, a man like any other—which is a horrible thing in itself to contemplate. If he is like me, am I like him?

  In any case, his cell is certainly most striking, being a box lined entirely—walls, ceiling, door—with images of the goddess Marilyn. The only comment I know Caleb has made about all this is found above the door in his inscription: Where there is Beauty there is God. He does not seem to have given much thought to the woman and
the child he took with him to the clifftop. I suppose one of the advantages of having individual religious beliefs is that nobody can really argue with you. You believe what you believe, and that’s that. I often wonder just what those other one hundred and forty-seven people believed. Virginia has quickly modified her thinking to come into line more or less with something like the humanism of the people around her. I wondered for a time if she would ever follow Gilia and Michael and Father Fox and convert to Catholicism. I doubted it, but then, one never can tell. Father Fox himself has a certain amount of charisma.

  Caleb spends much of his time, when he is not working out, particularly on the rowing machine, writing letters. There are four people to whom he writes. One is Marilyn herself, and the others are his ancestors Minerva and Magnus Mean and the Belgian philosopher and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. All these people are dead and so can not reply to his letters, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Caleb. I have no idea what to make of the coincidence of the double M in all the initials. Caleb refuses to discuss any of this. I realise that one of the keys to the beliefs of the people of Skye was the power of the imagination, the reality, if you like, of the imagination. Caleb cartainly has a wild imagination that he follows as he pleases. He appears to believe that these people are receiving his letters which are charming, friendly, intimate, and that follow sequences suggesting a kind of conversation. Although he now has a computer in his room, Caleb chooses to write the letters by hand on blue airmail paper. He has asked for email but has been refused. I thought it would be interesting to see what messages would come back from Marilyn and the others out of cyberspace, but it is too risky. The letters are all officially filed and one can get access to them only by special application. Caleb seals them in airmail envelopes and then hands them over to be posted. I do not know how much he believes in the truth of this charade. He is mad, after all.

  The facility is largely Sophie’s brainchild. It was designed by her lover and so this makes Sophie very much a central figure here, it is almost as if the building itself were part of her, rather than she part of it. Sophie Goddard is a force to be reckoned with at Black River, whichever way you look at it. The lover, Thor Gulbransen, is no longer in the picture, having returned to his wife in Norway where he died in a hotel fire. The irony of that is never mentioned, but it occurs to me that there is a sort of nasty symmetry with Skye and a hellfire coincidence. I am too imaginative. For quite a few years, some short time ago, Sophie and Thor were a big item in Sydney, and it was one of those arts-political scandals that he got the commission to design the facility at Black River. That kind of thing happens all the time, and is the way the world goes round. There is very little that is new under the sun.

  Like calls to like, and people find the people they will need for good or ill. Sophie had been dreaming of building and directing this particular type of modern facility for years. Then she had it designed by Thor, saw it approved, built, and then she found herself appointed Director. And then who should arrive within its walls but Sophie’s perfect patient, Caleb Mean. Caleb became effectively Sophie’s prisoner, and also her pet project. Sophie and Caleb were made for each other, and the facility was made to be their—their private palace, their playground where each can play out the fantasies of the other. Rapunzel’s tower in the story was interesting not because it was safe, but because it was not, in the end, inviolate. You can’t really keep human beings in if their desire for freedom is strong enough. For that matter you can’t keep them out either, if they really want to get in. If there is one thing I have learnt about human beings in my years of study and work in this field, it is that they are devious, and they are incredibly clever. That’s how we got where we got. Devious is the one word that really covers Caleb and Sophie, a wonderful, horrible word. Devious. Is this strange language to choose when I speak of a mad inmate and his doctor? If readers can detect a certain bitterness running in my tone here, then they are right. My work with Caleb who had for so long been a figure in my dreams, my heart, my imagination, was now held at a remove, the way being partly barred, the object of my interest obscured by the interference of Sophie Goddard.

  I believe that all the Caleb material belongs by rights to me, that there is no real argument to be had about that. Caleb has been my object of fascination, my obsession since that day long ago when he shouted the Psalm at us at the picnic at Duck River. ‘He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.’ For so long now I have hesitated to compose all this into a narrative, to write it down for other people to read. I held back for many reasons—mainly for fear of transgressing professional and ethical boundaries. All—or at least much of the information concerning the facility and the patients is public knowledge—what’s different here is the way I have interpreted it, and the way I have put it together, the way I have reported things, strange things, putting them into their context, which is, some of the time, my own context. I have tried to set aside my professional language, and to speak openly, using words such as ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’ whenever they seem to me to be the honest words. So much language in all professions is specialised and hedged about by a razor wire of prohibitions. There are terms and categories into which Caleb is classified by his doctors, but I can’t see any point in using them here. He is mad, crazy, evil. I am not exactly his doctor either, I am his—I search for the word—nemesis. I was shocked when I found that word on my lips, but on reflection I think that it is accurate. And I rebuke myself for all the years that I paid him so little attention, when I could have been making close observation of a remarkable phenomenon right under my nose, when I was aware he was running a bizarre and potentially dangerous commune out at Skye, but like everyone else I used to laugh about it, although in my heart of hearts I knew, I knew! I’m not simply saying that in hindsight I believe I was aware, even before he made his visit to our picnic, that there was something of strange and terrible significance about the little boy they called El Niño.

  The people who could tell me things now, or even give me other access to information about Caleb before the fire, are the tragic people who were lost in the fire. There are relatives at Woodpecker Point, but they have generally no desire to discuss anything that will bring up memories of the tragedy. It is in fact the most sensitive material ever to be buried in the minds and hearts of the people of the far northwest coast of the island. The folks at Woodpecker Point have long since cut themselves off from the people at Skye. Talking to Caleb himself is always interesting and to a certain extent revealing, but you can never be sure he is telling the truth, since he gives in often to the flights of his phoenix imagination—which are interesting enough in themselves, but not especially useful if you are looking for the truth. He is an artist. The main hope of anyone researching Caleb’s life was to talk to Virginia, but for a long time she was legally out of reach. Sophie has shown no interest in Virginia at all, and I find this quite significant. She places all her emphasis on Caleb himself, ignoring the young woman and the child who are surely a vital clue to the madness that fuels his purpose.

  There is a terrible irony in the fact that Virginia and I are in love.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Butter Dream

  ‘The soul of Matthew Flinders lives in every boy who points the prow of his little skiff to sea.’

  ERNESTINE HILL, My Love Must Wait

  ‘Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is butter dream.’

  It was late at night as I sat typing. I was in a house in the remote southwest wilderness of Van Diemen’s Land and the television was on in the corner of the room. The fourth item in the news bulletin, read of course by the charming smiling clone-woman in the pink suit, told of the escape of ‘life-term patient Caleb Mean from the maximum security detention facility for the criminally insane at Black River in the state’s far northwest. Mean,’ she says, smiling and steady, ‘is the man responsible for the deaths by fire of one hundred and forty-seve
n people in the village of Skye in 1992.’ I have such a weakness for pretty women in pink dresses.

  Years ago this story would have been the material for an exciting newsflash, but it is now nearly ten years since the fire, and Caleb is lucky to make it to item number four. I wondered for a while what Sophie had been doing, how it was that she would let this happen, and I entertained wild thoughts that she had conspired with Caleb in his escape. I rang through to the facility only to be reminded that Sophie was at a conference on the mainland.

  The story is that Caleb escaped through a skylight and lowered himself to the ground on a thick woollen rope he had manufactured himself in the spinning and weaving workshop at the facility. Guards reported no sign of the patient in the grounds, nor was he sighted at the main gates. The walls of the facility are fully protected electronically with security back-up. Personally, I doubt that thing about sliding down the rope James Bond-Musketeer-style. I doubt that very much. I imagine he might have hung the rope from the skylight as a decoy. No, I think he simply stole Sophie’s passkey, and let himself out through the complicated staff exits dressed as—what—maybe a driver. I must never lose sight of the fact that this is a consummate con-artist, capable of talking and acting his way past anyone who might have challenged him. And he was also possessed of a kind of super-human strength that had its origins in his belief that he was divinely inspired, and always right. He had also been working out for years in the gym at the facility.