Rocking Horse Road (11 page)

Always move around in groups. Don't get caught
out after dark. Don't go too far from an adult. Always
tell someone where you're going and when you're
due back and don't be late or we'll be worried sick.
Avoid playing near the bushes or in the trees. Mum
will be waiting for you at the school gates.

Overnight, the boundaries of childhood had
shrunk.

But of course kids have questions. Why? was
asked in a hundred different ways. What did the
man want with Jenny Jones? What's wrong with the
sweets? Are they poisoned like the apple in
Snow
White
? What would the stranger do to me if he got
me in his car?

The stories that parents told; the lies and half
lies, the white lies and the grey lies and the black
black truth. They told their kids everything from
the generic 'hurt you', which was open to the most
benign interpretation, right through to anatomically
detailed descriptions of the act of rape.

For many girls these were the first conversations
they'd ever had with their parents on the subject of
sex. It was the birds and the bees. Except the way it
was told down the Spit in late February of '81, the
bird is an insatiable black crow and the bee will sting
you again and again and again, and then leave you in
a ditch for dead.

Through an informal network of neighbours, old
team-mates and drinking buddies, the local men set
up a community patrol. There were about thirty guys
involved, including most of our fathers. There was a
roster; four men each evening — there were enough
volunteers that each name came up only once every
couple of weeks. At the end of their working day, the
men found themselves in groups of four, cruising the
streets in a car, looking for anything suspicious. They
often didn't have time to eat dinner so their wives
packed food on plates covered with tinfoil. There was
always a Thermos of coffee that was shared around.
Normally there was beer as well. Everyone put in a
small sum of money so that whoever supplied the car
for the evening could have his petrol costs reimbursed.
You can eat through a surprisingly large amount of
petrol cruising slowly up and down the road.

We'd see them drive past as we went about our
business. Their territory covered all of New Brighton,
right from the bottom of the Spit all the way up
past Thompson Park and into North New Brighton.
Sometimes the driver would pull the car over and
someone's dad would lean out the window to talk to
us. The patrols were always good-natured. The guys
would joke around and the smell from the plates
of food would waft out through the rolled-down
windows. More often than not the guy doing the
talking had beer on his breath. He'd ask us if we'd
seen anyone unusual hanging around. Sometimes we
had — a surfer we didn't recognise, or a guy with his
dog, down in the dunes. The patrol always took what
we had to say seriously, which we liked. They'd thank
us and ask us to keep our eyes peeled and then drive
off to check out what we'd reported.

They were looking for someone lurking in the
shadows of the school grounds or a furtive peeper
crouching outside a girl's bedroom window. They'd
often pull over to talk to a stranger or a foreigner
walking down the street. A couple of the guys would
get out and have a chat. Officially, the plan was to call
the police from the nearest house if the patrol spotted
anything unusual. That was officially. But as we sat
on our bikes with our feet on the footpath, or stood
skateboard in hand and watched the car as it pulled
away from us, we could hear the rattle of softball bats
and golf clubs coming from the boot. None of us was
naïve enough to think that the men were planning on
fitting in a round of golf before they went home.

Our fathers and their friends cruised the streets
until midnight and then returned home to get some
sleep before work the next day. As we lay in our beds
we would sometimes hear our fathers coming home;
the creak from the front door and then footsteps,
stumbly and slightly drunk, moving around the house.
Our fathers would inevitably be drawn to the kitchen
where they would muck around with bread and
jam and whatever else they could find. Our mothers
would often still be up and we would listen through
the walls to their voices muttering together.

It was good to know that our dads were out there
keeping everyone safe. We would roll over in our beds
and try to get back to sleep.

The main organiser of the community patrol was,
surprisingly, Bill Harbidge. Perhaps the attack on
Jenny Jones had shocked him out of his downward
spiral. Almost overnight Bill stopped drinking during
the day and even his evening consumption seemed
to have tailed off. He was still officially on sick leave
but Jase would come home and find his father out in
the garage pounding away on the stained punching
bag that hung in the corner. Bill Harbidge had been an
amateur boxer in his younger days. Jase would watch
him shuffle around the bag with his guard up, jabbing
away with his left and then letting loose with his right;
what he called his 'cannonball'. The bag would swing
a fair way when Bill Harbidge hit it with his right. The
only thing that Jase reckoned let his dad down was his
footwork. Bill Harbidge didn't dance like a butterfly
any more. He didn't even dance like an old bear. He
pretty much just stayed in the one spot jabbing away
with his left and then unleashing that big right. Just a
couple of minutes of jabbing and punching saw him
breathing hard and his old sweatshirt from police
training soaked with sweat.

When he wasn't hitting the bag or going for walks
along the beach Bill Harbidge was on the phone to
the local men organising who was going to provide
the car that evening and who was going along for
the ride. Bill drew up the roster for each week but on
any given day guys were pulling out because of some
emergency or other, or ringing Bill wanting to swap a
shift with someone else.

Another one of our fathers who reacted strongly to
the second attack was Mr Templeton, understandably,
considering his youngest daughter was involved. Matt
reported that after the attack his six sisters were under
virtual house arrest. We'd all been taught history or
social studies by Mr Templeton and knew that he was
not someone you messed with. This was back in the
days of corporal punishment and he was pretty handy
with both ruler and strap, not hesitating to strap his
pupils for talking in class or repeated lateness.

Matt's father had never been able to stand boys
showing any interest in his daughters. Even before
the attacks he'd actively discouraged those who came
'sniffing around'. He had once so badly beaten a boy
he had found outside his eldest daughter's open
window that the police had become involved. In the
end no charges had been laid, but this incident had
created an understandable caution among boys vying
for the Templeton girls' affections.

It was a situation that Matt had been able to
capitalise on. A short verbal message from a boy,
delivered to one of his sisters verbatim earned Matt
twenty cents. The reply cost the boy the same —
C.O.D. Fifty cents was the going price for a written
note. When boys tried to argue against the additional
cost of putting pen to paper, Matt always told them
the same thing: a note was more dangerous than a
spoken message. 'With a note there's hard evidence.
What if my father found it and forced me to say who
it was from?'

No one argued after they heard that, not if they
had any imagination. Matt Templeton had boys twice
his size by the balls and they knew it. If you wanted
to communicate with any of the Templeton girls the
safest way was to go through Matt and then you
paid the going rate. As we had learned in form three
economics, it was basic supply and demand.

With five older sisters, all of whom were considered
attractive and at least two of whom were widely
rumoured to do much more than just kiss by the third
date, Matt made a killing. He was by far the richest
of our group. But he was generous with his money.
When funds were needed for photocopying, or any
of the other numerous expenses associated with our
investigation, it was inevitably Matt who coughed
up. A lot of the food we bought from the Ashers'
dairy that summer was paid for by Matt's messenger
business.

Matt also did a good line in alibis when one or
other of the Templeton girls managed to sneak away
to meet a boy. It was an additional service that he
threw in at no extra charge. Matt could casually lie
to his parents about Mary-Rose being at the movies
or Annie staying over at a friend's house, without so
much as blinking. After that his sisters were on their
own. However, following the attack on Jenny Jones
the Templeton girls found themselves locked down.
Their father was moody and vigilant. He prowled the
house like a hanging judge.

Of all the local girls only Carolyn Asher seemed
to move about the neighbourhood at will. Tug would
see her coming and going from the dairy at all hours.
Sometimes she was picked up by a guy in a car. Often
she wheeled her girl's bike with its low frame out the
front gate and cycled off down the road, her long, pale
legs often visible beneath her short skirts.

There were only rumours about where she went
and what she did, but the stories we heard were
becoming worse and reaching us more frequently.
Even our mothers began to hear things. More than one
of them warned us to stay well away from Carolyn
Asher. Only a few months after her sister's funeral
she was a girl with a reputation.

The only one of us who, at fifteen, claimed to
have had sex was Grant Webb. He told a story that he
repeated in slightly varying forms, about an exchange
student at a party his older brother had taken him to
the winter before. Grant claimed that she found him
irresistible and was all over him like a rash. We had
heard from other sources though that the girl had drunk
most of a bottle of tequila in the space of an hour. Grant
was one of at least three guys who claimed to have
had sex with her in an upstairs bedroom that night.
The girl's name was Maria but pronounced strangely.
Shortly after that party she stopped coming to school,
abandoned her host family, and returned to the small
French town where she'd grown up. What she made of
her life after her visit here we do not know.

On a daily basis the closest we came to sex was
Amy Trousedale. Amy was a solo mum who lived
up past the intersection of Rocking Horse Road and
Marine Parade. She was twenty-three and had twin
boys called Jake and Zach. Back in the early eighties
there was still some shame associated with being an
unmarried mother. Girls who found themselves 'in
trouble' were packed off to stay with aunts in other
cities until the baby could be delivered and adopted
out. Or more often, the girls were bundled along to
special doctors where everything was sorted out, nice
and tidy, in a couple of hours.

It was an open secret that Amy supplemented
her meagre DPB with sex work. We had heard that a
handjob cost thirty dollars. Word came to us through
guys who had older brothers, who had friends, who
claimed to have had been to Amy's house. For another
twenty she would use her mouth as well and for a
hundred bucks Amy would let you go all the way as
long as you wore a rubber.

Our reason for wanting to interview her was
simple. As Grant Webb said, 'If there's a sex pervert
living in the area, then Amy's the one who's going to
know who he is.' It was a logic we all understood.

Obviously we didn't want to simply turn up
at her door. We had no idea of the hours that men
visited her. We settled for talking to her at the
playground where she took Jake and Zach most fine
days. When Pete Marshall and Al Penny approached
her, she was sitting on a bench watching her boys
play on the seesaw. The truth was that Amy was not
obviously sexy, even to fifteen-year-old boys. Amy
was short and well on the way to being plump, with
peroxide-blonde hair — what our mothers called a
bombshell blonde. She always had bare feet in the
summer. As she sat on the park bench her short legs
did not allow her swinging feet to touch the ground
and it was sometimes possible for Pete and Al to see
that her soles were stained dark with the type of dirt
that did not wash off from a single bath. She smoked
constantly and, even at twenty-three, was beginning
to get those thin lines at the corners of her mouth
like collapsed under-runners. But despite Amy's
lack of obvious allure she regularly featured in our
fantasies. The knowledge that, with cash and a dollop
of courage, we could find ourselves at the receiving
end of Amy's favours was like an aphrodisiac poured
into the local water supply.

Amy seemed amused when Pete and Al walked
right up to her. Al had the tape recorder hidden in his
school bag. He had put in a fresh tape and turned it
on before they entered the park (the sound quality is
poor but you can still make out what was said).

AL: We'd like to talk to you.

AMY: How old are yous?

AL: Fifteen.

AMY: Come back when you're sixteen.

PETE: About Lucy Asher.

AMY: Who?

PETE: The girl who was killed.

AMY: Hang on.

It is noted on the transcript that at that point Amy went
over to break up a fight between her boys and another
kid. You can just hear muffled shouts and some distant
crying on the tape. Jake and Zach were four, and big
for their age. They dominated any playground they
were at, like miniature mob enforcers. Right from when
they could first walk they had pushed and gouged and
bashed kids twice their age. They threw bark and sand
in the faces of other kids and, if challenged, in the faces
of the other kids' mothers. They bit like pit-bulls. Girls
and boys alike lived in fear of the Trousedale twins —
they were equal opportunity bullies. And when they
weren't fighting other kids, they were bashing each
other. These days most of us have got kids of our own
and, looking back, we now realise how those boys must
have made Amy's life hell.