Rocking Horse Road (5 page)

At fifteen we did not know that there are before and
after moments in every life; events people look back
on as being gateways into new ways of living, new
phases of their lives, sometimes better, but often not
as good.

We've all experienced similar moments during the
almost thirty years since Lucy's funeral: the ringing
phone in the night that signals the death of a parent;
the hurled lamp or slammed door that marks the end
of a marriage; even something as mundane as an
argument with one of our own teenage kids, where
things have been said that can never be fully scoured
away. Increasingly, the milestones are likely to be
medical in origin. A torn hamstring. A ruptured disk
that never fully comes right, or the blood test that
results in a hurried meeting with a grim GP, and a
diagnosis that lands like a slap.

Neither we nor, we now suspect, the Ashers,
wanted to acknowledge it at the time, but that short
walk from the church to the waiting hearse was a
gateway through into a more barren land — and not
just for the Ashers, although they were undeniably
the worst affected. It was a turning point for all of
us living down the Spit. At that moment we moved
through to a landscape from which, events would
later prove, there was no going back.

There was a lot of activity at the Ashers' dairy in the days
after the funeral. The shop had a closed sign hanging on
the door but people came and went from the back of
the building in a steady flow from mid-morning right
up until after dark. Police detectives were the most
frequent visitors, as they had been since the morning
when Pete discovered Lucy's body. The detectives were
usually tall, blocky men in crumpled suits, with an air
of purpose about them. There were also relatives who
visited, and neighbours. The minister who had taken
the funeral dropped by several times during that week,
as did the undertaker.

Almost without fail, the visitors would pause
with one hand on the latch of the side gate, as though
giving themselves a moment to rehearse what they
were going to say before they went inside. And then
they would push the gate open and go through. Apart
from the police and the undertaker, most people
arrived with a basket or a plate of food. There was so
much food carried inside that we reckoned the Ashers
could've lived on muffins and pikelets for a month.

We observed these things from Tug Gardiner's
bedroom. His parents' house was almost directly
across the road from the dairy. Tug's room was
an addition to the house, a boxy weatherboard
emplacement grafted on above the lounge. It looked
like something that might have been built during the
war when people seriously believed that the Japanese
were going to land on the beach any day. From Tug's
room you could see the ocean to the east and in the
other direction we had an unobstructed view of the
Ashers' dairy. We reached Tug's room by climbing a
set of narrow steps so steep they were almost a ladder.
We clambered up like apes, using our hands on the
steps above. The room itself was littered with socks
and sweatshirts and random clothes that lay where
they fell among the tapes, forgotten school-books and
scrap paper, the half-eaten sandwiches and wadded
tissues — the detritus of Tug's life. We passed no
judgement; in fact, we hardly noticed. Tug's room
was pretty much interchangeable with any of ours.
That included the posters on the walls. Tug's walls
were covered with All Blacks. There were the flying
wingers, Stu Wilson and Bernie Fraser, and the hard
men of the scrum, Haden and Dalton. And of course
there were photographs and clippings of the local
hero, full-back Robbie Deans.

Watched by our heroes, we looked across at the
Ashers' dairy. It was a pretty standard Summerhill
stone house but Mr Asher had built an extension right
out to the footpath, with large glass windows covered
in advertising, and a shop door with a harsh buzzer.
The whole front of the place — what must originally
have been the lounge and a bedroom — had been
turned into the shop. That didn't leave much for
the Ashers to live in, just a kitchen and two small
bedrooms out the back. We came to realise that as a
home the Ashers' dairy was too small for a family of
four. Before Lucy died, the Ashers must have been
knocking around inside there like pinballs. Most
people in the area used the dairy, but even at fifteen
we knew that there wasn't a lot of profit to be made
selling ten-cent mixtures, newspapers, bottles of milk
and bread. Even the popular ice-cream cones were
seasonal.

In the slow hot days between Christmas and
New Year, and then on into January, we spent our
time staring through binoculars across the tar-seal of
Rocking Horse Road. The closed sign stayed up and
the initial rush of visitors slowed to a trickle and by
the second week of January it dried up altogether. By
the middle of the month even the police didn't call in
on the Ashers any more.

The only person to come and go with any
regularity in those days was Mr Asher. He drove off
every morning at nine and returned at five-thirty. We
didn't know where he went. We wanted to follow him
but did not have the means; none of us had a driver's
licence. His old ute carried him outside our realm,
which extended only as far as our legs or our bicycles
could carry us. We assumed, incorrectly as it turned
out, that he was leaving to go to whatever job he was
working on.

Mrs Asher and Carolyn seldom emerged. They
seemed to us to have become like fish in a murky tank,
glimpsed only occasionally as they moved in slow sad
circles within the gloom. At the time, we thought this
was fitting behaviour for people in mourning.

We were not the only people to keep an eye on
the Ashers. Rocking Horse Road was a community
of curtain twitchers. Lucy's unnatural death was
an exotic brush that had painted the whole family.
Whenever one of the Ashers appeared, certain people
would hover in their front windows and watch. Phone
calls were immediately made from house to house,
reporting any visible change or anything that could
be labelled in the least out of the ordinary.

The only first-hand report we have from inside
the Ashers' home in those days following the funeral
is from Roy Moynahan (
Transcript: Exhibit 8F
). Roy's
mother and Mrs Asher had belonged to the same
Plunket group. Mrs Moynahan insisted that Roy and
his eight-year-old sister accompany her, two days after
the funeral, to pay their respects to the Ashers.

Roy's mother had to lift the police tape to get to
the back door. The yellow tape was wrapped around
the whole of the back porch, which gave Roy the
impression that the house was a giant present that had
been overlooked on Christmas Day. Policemen had
been moving around the house since Lucy's body had
been found. When the Moynahans arrived, though, the
police were on their lunch break. Only one remained; a
big man in his early twenties who hovered outside the
door and, according to Roy, seemed uncomfortable in
his stiff blue shirt and tie. He asked them the purpose
of their visit and recorded Mrs Moynahan's name in a
black notebook.

Roy admitted that it was hard for him to get an
accurate impression of the inside of the Ashers' house
because of all the flowers. They covered every flat
surface. In fact there were so many flowers that Mrs
Asher had given up putting them in vases. Huge
bunches lay on their sides on the kitchen table and on
the arms of chairs, across the kitchen bench, and even
on the floor in some places. All of them were withering
in the heat and giving off their smells in thick waves.
Mrs Asher had the windows closed and Roy said the
smell and the heat were enough to make him feel sick.
Roy and his sister and his mother had to help move
flowers to the side so that they could sit down at the
kitchen table.

Mrs Asher sat opposite them, stiff-backed, and
passed muffins. She wore the same long black skirt
and white shirt buttoned at the collar that she had
worn at the funeral. Roy said that her long hair was
pulled back so tightly from her face that she had a
permanent expression of open-eyed amazement. 'She
was like one of those people in that movie about the
alien body-snatchers. All still and scary.' We knew
exactly what he meant.

No one had air conditioning in those days and
Roy was wearing his Sunday jacket. The sweat was
running in rivulets down his back. His younger sister
sat next to him and sniffed. Emma Moynahan had a
summer cold but Roy suspected Mrs Asher thought
the little girl was sniffling out of sadness, grieving the
loss of Lucy.

As his mother talked Roy looked around, trying
not to be too obvious. He noticed patches of light grey
dust on the edge of the table and over the windowsills
as though a large moth had blundered down and
flapped around in agitated circles before taking to the
air again. It took Roy a while to realise that he was
looking at the dust which the police had used to look
for fingerprints.

The only showing Lucy's father made was in the
photographs hung on the wall behind where Mrs
Asher sat. Portraits mostly, the head-and-shoulders
type they take at schools every year at the same time as
they take the class photos. There were also snapshots
deemed good enough to be blown up and put in a
frame.

Lucy and Carolyn on a seesaw when Lucy was
aged about four and Carolyn just a toddler.

Lucy, down on the beach, grinning at the camera,
minus one of her front teeth.

Lucy with one or other of her parents: with her
dad and a small black-and-white dog on the beach;
her mum and Lucy on the footpath outside the dairy.

There were all sorts of combinations of parents
and daughters but Roy could see only one photograph
where all four Ashers were together — a formal
portrait taken in a park greener than anything the
Spit could provide. He guessed that it had been taken
quite recently, probably last spring. All the Ashers
were posed beneath a large tree. Mr Asher, tall and
thin, looked stiff and unlike himself in a suit and tie.
Pale Mrs Asher stood on his right, in her usual dark
colours. In front of them the two girls sat on a bench.
Lucy sat on the left of the picture with her ankles
crossed and her arms folded in her lap. Mr Asher
draped one protective hand over her shoulder. All of
the Ashers were staring earnestly into the camera.

Apart from the dying flowers and the photographs,
the other thing that Roy mentioned was the Ashers'
Christmas tree. It took up one whole corner of the
kitchen, the top pressing hard against the stucco
ceiling so that there was no room for an angel or even
a Christmas star. As if to make up for this lapse, every
other branch was sagging under the weight of the
decorations. It was clear to Roy that all the family's
presents, including Lucy's, were still sitting beneath
it, unopened. By surreptitiously turning his head
sideways Roy could read Lucy's name on at least
two of the small cards, which still sat on the top of
the presents like unbroken pipi shells, mouths partly
open.

Roy sat at the table for as long as he could stand
it, sweating in the heat, listening to his sister sniffing,
and his mother and Mrs Asher talking about things
apart from Lucy. At last he asked to use the bathroom.
Mrs Asher directed him through a door into a narrow
hallway. The toilet was at the far end but Roy nosed
around until he found the partly open doorway to
what, he guessed, was the room Lucy and her sister
shared. Police tape was strung across the doorway.
Ducking low, Roy passed inside.

The curtains were drawn and the room was half
dark. We can only imagine how Roy must have felt
standing there in Lucy's room. Roy had no older
sisters and the room must have been a foreign world
to him, as exotic and steamy as the jungles of Borneo.
He stood inside the doorway, still as a burglar. There
were posters on the walls: Sting, Adam and the
Ants. A dresser was littered with mysterious tubes
and bottles. Roy told us that the smell of soap hung
in the air almost thick enough to see. When pressed
for further details, he remembered a bunch of dried
roses hanging upside down from the ceiling above
the dresser. There were also, he claimed, other darker
smells he could not identify.

There were dolls, as well. He estimated maybe
twenty or so sat piled up on a wooden chest at the
foot of one of the two single beds. The dolls made him
feel uneasy, as though he were performing to a small,
unblinking audience.

Through the walls he could hear the brittle voice
of Mrs Asher talking to his mother. Roy walked over
and opened Lucy's wardrobe. He imagined Lucy
standing where he now stood, selecting the dress she
would later be murdered in, holding it up in front of
the full-length mirror hung on the inside of the door
(would she have chosen a different one if she had
known? A stupid question in many ways but the type
of thing we used to debate for hours). Roy later said
it made him feel privileged to be there, looking at her
clothes, breathing in the same scented air as Lucy once
breathed.

He was just reaching out a hand to touch Lucy's
clothes when there was a cough and Roy realised
that he was not alone. Of course, at first, he thought it
was Lucy. Who wouldn't? He had invaded her room
and now she was there to reprimand him. He spun
around and saw a figure lying on the bed beneath the
window, on top of the sheets. She was lying perfectly
still, staring at the ceiling and with her arms folded
across her chest and her toes pointed towards the
ceiling. She spoke without looking at him.

'So you found what you're looking for, or what?'

Carolyn Asher was wearing a summer dress
that was too big for her. She rose up from the bed
and calmly crossed to where Roy was standing. He
stood paralysed, wondering how he could explain his
invasion to Mrs Asher and his mother. Then, in the
semi-darkness of Lucy's room, Carolyn kissed him
full on the mouth.

As far as we were aware Roy had never been kissed
by a girl, outside of a game of spin-the-bottle at Mark
Murray's twelfth birthday party. But if Carolyn Asher
was playing a game, she was playing to win. She
kissed Roy with an intensity he had only imagined
before, mashing her mouth against his. He could
feel her teeth push against his lips and then she was
forcing her tongue inside his mouth. It was wet and,
he told us, surprisingly powerful. Roy was tall and
Carolyn was a year younger but even so she was the
same height as him. Roy remembered that she held
her body away from his, balancing on the balls of her
feet like a ballet dancer. The only thing she touched
him with was her mouth.

He didn't know how long she kissed him like
that. Suddenly she broke off and stood back, calmly
appraising his face. Roy said that her look was
definitely questioning, like an artist standing back
from an almost-finished painting. Apparently Carolyn
Asher was happy with what she saw. He was just
about to speak when she slipped past him. She stood
in the doorway. 'You shouldn't be in here.' And then
she ducked under the police tape and was gone.