Rocking Horse Road (6 page)

Roy stood in the semi-darkness. How confused
he must have been. The toothpaste and saliva taste of
Carolyn's kiss would still have been on his bruised
lips. Lucy's dolls must have seemed to stare at him
accusingly. He told us that when he finally left the
room there was no sign of Carolyn in the hallway.
Disoriented, Roy was temporarily baffled by all the
doorways but he got his bearings and found his way
back to the kitchen. As he entered the room, for one
moment, he imagined that his mother and sister and
Mrs Asher were drowning in a sea of flowers, and that
only their heads were still visible above the perfumed
waves.

During the sweltering week between Christmas
and New Year, and then on through the rest of that
summer, people took to leaving objects near where
Lucy's body had been found. At first they simply
placed their offerings on the sand but the tide and the
easterly soon carried them away and so the warning
sign became a natural shrine. It was above the high-tide
mark and protected from the wind by a dip in
the dunes. We never saw anyone coming or going.
Bunches of daffodils and lilies seemed miraculously
to spring out of the dry sand at the base of the pole
before wilting away in an afternoon. Notes and letters,
weighted down with hand-painted rocks, would
appear overnight. A small brown teddy bear, and later
a pink rabbit, lived there for most of January and half
of February before moving on.

On New Year's Eve a black-and-white photograph
was carefully tied to the pole with a yellow ribbon. It
was a picture we had not seen before. Lucy, sitting on
a couch, wearing a short summer dress that showed a
lot of her legs. She was relaxed and smiling, looking
out boldly at the photographer over the top of heart-rimmed
sunglasses. To be honest the photo made us
anxious. Lucy looked older than we recalled her, more
confident and womanly than our memories of her
allowed. We were suspicious and jealous of whoever
had taken the picture. Al Penny wondered aloud how
long would be a decent interval before we could shift
it to our files (
Exhibit 14
).

But people mostly left poems. It seemed to us that
everyone who had ever known Lucy became a poet
during that summer. They attached poems to the sign
with drawing pins and twine but they always blew
free. It was not uncommon to find a poem tumbling
along the road in the wind or crucified in the branches
of a lupin. White poems flew like seagulls against the
blue summer sky. They were to be found tossing in
the wavefoam or bobbing like small white cradles in
the reeds at the edge of the estuary. More often than
not the words had sunfaded into nothing or slipped
away into the water like fry, but sometimes they could
be read.

The consensus among us was that the poems were
written by girls. The 'i's were dotted with broken
hearts. 'Lucy' rhymed with 'mercy'. Those legible
poems we retrieved we felt obliged to take back to the
sign. We pinned them back up or weighed them down
with rocks so that they would not blow away again
too soon. A few of the better ones we took and added
to our files (
Exhibit 27 A–F
).

That first New Year's Eve after Lucy was murdered
stays with us like a strong aftertaste. Our mood was
sombre. Lucy had been dead less than two weeks. We
had no desire to mix with the large crowd that gathered
every year in the centre of the city to count down to
midnight. Although we liked the idea of being kissed
by strange women, we doubted we would be the
ones bestowed with such random feminine favours.
Instead we sought out our own company down on
the beach.

Grant Webb supplied the alcohol. It was his
father's homemade beer, fermented in the Webbs'
garden shed, stacked in rows of recycled brown bottles
on shelves from floor to ceiling. As well as lager and
stout, Mr Webb made up batches of ginger beer. It
was not unusual for the people living in the houses
down the reserve end of Rocking Horse Road to hear
a dull explosion and know that Grant's dad had got
the yeast levels too high in his latest batch.

That evening Grant carried the beer down to the
beach in a wooden crate. The sides of the bottles
clinked together. He placed the crate in the surf to keep
it cool until after dark. We assumed that Mr Webb was
not aware that a dozen of his bottles were missing.

We had several hours before one year ticked over
into the next and we found ourselves bending to pick
up dry driftwood as if a fire had been planned, when
in fact nothing had been discussed. We piled the wood
at a spot about quarter of the way down the beach.
The tide was still going out and would not bother
us. The easterly had dropped away as it sometimes
did in the evening and the heat of the day had rolled
back in over the Spit. Luckily there was still water in
the estuary and so the smell of the sea lettuce was not
bad. Small bits of driftwood were easy to find where
they lay along the high-tide mark and our pile soon
grew until it was waist high.

Jim Turner and Jase Harbidge tried to wrestle a
sun-bleached log from the sand halfway up the first
dune, but it was larger than they had thought and
buried deep. We all joined in, digging with our hands,
exposing more of the dry wood until it came free. It
was dragged over to the pile and dumped on. More
sticks were found and several more logs. The heap of
driftwood grew and became a pyre that eventually
rose above even Jim Turner's head.

When it was almost dark Roy Moynahan used
his cigarette lighter on a small pyramid of kindling
at the base, into which someone had stuffed some old
newspaper. If there had been any wind to speak of, or
if we had been less careful in choosing only dry wood,
the whole idea would not have worked. As it was, the
wood caught surprisingly quickly. The flames soon
engulfed the pyramid and, as Roy stepped back, they
licked upward. Ten minutes later we had a bonfire
that surpassed any of our expectations. It was like a
fire you'd see in a movie about castaways; huge and
glowing on the beach.

Soon after that, the sun went down behind the
long backbone of mountains to the west. Later still,
daylight's reflection off the clouds faded from red to
pink and then into white before vanishing altogether.
Our faces grew flushed with the heat until we had to
shuffle backwards to cooler spots.

Grant passed the beer around. The bottles were
still wet from the ocean. We took turns using the
bottle opener he had initially forgotten and had been
forced to go back to retrieve. Jim Turner tried to open
a bottle using only his hand. It was a trick he had seen
an uncle perform at a wedding but Jim only succeeded
in cutting his palm. We had no glasses and drank
straight from the bottles. When we put the glass to
our mouths we could taste salt. The beer itself had a
flavour that surprised us. It was dark and something
like liquorice. Whether this was intentional, we
didn't know, but we weren't complaining. At the
time, we had very little to compare it to. A beer was
a beer as far as we were concerned. It was what men
drank when they gathered in groups.

We sat on the sand, spread out in a broad crescent
with the fire between us and the ocean. There was
no wind to stroke up the waves and they were a low
murmur, and an occasional flash of white foam in the
darkness beyond the edge of the firelight. With the
brown bottles in our hands, our thoughts jumped
and flickered like the flames but always came back to
Lucy.

Mark Murray spoke. His crazy white-boy Afro was
a halo in the light from the fire. He did not turn his
head but directed his words at the flames as though
they were a new type of fuel to be burned along with
the driftwood. 'When Lucy was nine or ten . . .' was
how he began.

When she was nine or ten Lucy used to come to his
house and play with his older sister. He remembered
how the two girls had locked him out of his sister's
room, and when he persevered in trying to get inside
they had driven him away with shrill, girlish threats.
It must have been winter because he recalled that Lucy
had been wearing a pink jersey with a picture of a cat
knitted on the front.

Someone else chipped in with a memory of Lucy
Asher . . . on the children's swings, long past when
she was a young girl, swinging high, just for the joy
of it. She was wearing jeans and swinging her legs
forward and back to build up momentum. But what
was remembered most was the way she hung at the
top of each movement, legs outstretched, head flung
back. In memory she was neither moving forward nor
going back, but suspended as though undecided.

Someone remembered a day when Lucy was in the
playground at school with two or three of her friends.
Apparently she was doing nothing much.

Lucy behind the counter of the dairy. There were
so many variations on this one memory that they were
hard to sort one from another. The time she got Tug
Gardiner's change wrong so that she gave him five
dollars too much. 'Now I wish I'd told her and given
it back,' Tug admitted to no one in particular. Lucy
dropping a full bottle of milk that caught the edge
of the counter as it fell and shattered on to the lino.
Lucy accidentally brushing a sweaty palm with her
fingertips as she gave change. Lucy smiling to herself
when she thought no one was watching, as though
recalling a private joke.

Some of the memories we had heard before; others
were new. Before New Year's no one had ever brought
up the time Lucy had gone door to door selling Girl
Guide biscuits. Now we discovered that this was a
memory several of us shared. Lucy had turned up at
our doors in the twilight in her blue uniform. Matt
Templeton said his family had bought eight packets
from her and that his six sisters had scoffed the lot
that same evening.

Pete picked up a piece of wood and threw it into
the fire. 'I wonder what she would've been doing
now.'

We sat silently as, collectively, we tried to imagine.
Surely more than one of us conjured up a vision of
Lucy, dressed to go out to a New Year's party, seeing
the light of our bonfire and coming down to the
beach to investigate. She might have chosen to walk
barefoot across the sand, her shoes dangling from her
hand. It was not beyond possibility. Would she have
been alone, or with a couple of friends? Whatever the
details, in our imaginations she came forward out of
the darkness, not at all shy. After all, Lucy had seen us
often at school and we were regular customers in the
dairy. We were younger boys and not intimidating.
She would have known at least a couple of us by
name.

Yes, Lucy would have stayed and talked. Maybe
we would have been brave enough to crack a few
jokes. Someone would have passed her a beer. Lucy
would not have hesitated to sit on the sand and drink
with us (we were sorry then that we hadn't thought
to bring other, more girlish drinks or even glasses).
Matt Templeton was always good at talking to girls.
Roy Moynahan could be funny in a not too gross way
when he put his mind to it. We could have succeeded
in making her laugh.

Someone might have fetched a ghetto-blaster and
some tapes from their home so that we would have
music. Fire and music and beer. It was not beyond the
realms of imagination that we might have taken turns
to dance with Lucy Asher, right there on the beach, in
the flickering orange light of a fresh new year. And
who in our small tribe did not imagine that it was
him who succeeded in standing next to her when the
countdown to midnight ended?

The beer seemed to have a will of its own. It travelled
through us with a determination we had not previously
encountered. Matt Templeton was standing in the
darkness pissing in a high arc into the tussock for the
third time that evening, when Mr Asher surprised him
by silently cresting the dune close by. Matt must have
been pretty startled because, as he later recounted
what he had seen, we noticed that his right foot was
wet and caked with sand.

Tall and thin, Mr Asher had stood for a moment in
the moonlight. Matt did not think that Mr Asher had
seen him. Matt told us later that the light from the fire
fell short of where he stood but there was enough light
to see the deep furrows on Mr Asher's brow. He was
holding something in his hand that Matt described as
being 'as big as a chillybin but wrapped in a towel. I
didn't get a good look at it, whatever it was.'

Matt stayed perfectly still and watched, but Mr
Asher did nothing more than stand and stare across
at our fire for a long time. If Mr Asher was aware of
Matt's presence he gave no sign. They were two figures
playing stiff candle, in the dark. Eventually, Mr Asher
half-walked, half-slid down the dune's face. He began
to walk south, down the beach away from our fire.
Gulls sleeping on the sand squawked uneasily as Mr
Asher approached them in the darkness, but did not
take to the air. Curious, Matt followed.

It took Mr Asher about ten minutes to walk all the
way to the channel. He seemed to be in no hurry. Matt
stayed back close to the dunes where he would not be
seen and where the crunch of a half-shell underfoot
would not give him away. Eventually Mr Asher
stopped near the deep, fast-flowing water. The tide
was going out and the estuary was draining quickly.
There were whitecaps further out on the water at the
sandy bar where the current met the ocean.

Matt watched as Mr Asher unwrapped whatever
it was he held in his hand. He crouched down and
carefully placed it in the water. All Matt could see from
where he was hiding was a slightly darker shape like a
small boat on the water. He knew that whatever it was
Mr Asher had released would be swept far out into
the ocean within minutes on the outgoing current.

Standing and turning quickly, Mr Asher walked
away. He had lived all his life on the Spit and even in
the darkness was able to walk straight to the start of
the track that would take him through the reserve and
back to Rocking Horse Road. He passed close enough
for Matt to hear his footfalls on the sand and his
slightly laboured breath in the darkness. Matt waited
for a couple of minutes to be sure that Mr Asher was
gone and then hurried over to the water. But he could
see nothing unusual. Whatever Mr Asher had put in
the channel had been swept away by the current, aided
by the slight off-shore breeze, and was long gone.