Rocking Horse Road (7 page)

In the months that followed there were several
sightings of Mr Asher in the dunes, always after dark,
and nearly always down at the southern end of the
Spit by the channel, or moving in that direction. He
was often carrying something wrapped in a towel.
But that New Year's Eve, in the first hours of 1981, all
we knew was what Matt told us he had seen. By the
time he returned the fire had died down. We stirred
the embers with long sticks and listened to Matt's
story. We remembered Mr Asher staring out across the
heads of the funeral crowd, seemingly so unmoved.
But it was hard to marshal our thoughts. By then it
was almost two in the morning and our heads were
woolly from the beer and from lack of sleep.

Before we called it a night, Jase Harbidge told us
that the vast majority of murder victims knew their
attackers. The police, he said, inevitably started their
enquiries with the husband or the boyfriend. Or the
father. They were, he told us over the embers of the
old year, seldom on the wrong track.

So who killed Lucy Asher? That was the six-million-dollar
question. That question was like a blowfly
in our ears all that summer. It annoyed us with its
incessant buzz throughout our waking hours. Like
some research essay for English we went over the Ws.
Who
?
What
?
Why
? And really, the police didn't even
know
Where
? Pete had been right when he said Lucy
was not murdered on the beach, not where he found
her, anyway. According to Jase Harbidge's father
the police still hadn't discovered where Lucy was
attacked, or where she entered the water, although
they suspected both events occurred somewhere near
the channel.

Al Penny was champion of the lone-wolf theory.
According to Al, Lucy had probably gone for a
walk along the beach and simply been attacked by
a complete stranger; an opportunist who seized his
moment. 'Someone strong enough to keep her quiet,'
he reasoned.

We could not discount Al's theory, but most of us
believed that the murderer was someone who lived in
the area. We imagined a man, or older boy, who had
seen Lucy regularly as she worked behind the counter
of the dairy. Someone whose attraction had secretly
spawned darker feelings. Her killer was probably
someone who she knew by name.

If we are being totally honest, the certainty that the
murderer knew Lucy really came because we were
able to look into ourselves. We saw the darker side
of what it meant to be a man. At fifteen we were full
to bursting with frustrated lust. We joke about it now
and, after a beer or three, wryly confess to relieving
our tension up to twice, or even three times a day back
then. It is a stamina we wish we had now. We had also
known our share of violence, most of it on the rugby
field, but nearly all of us had been in a fight or two off
the field as well. Roy Moynahan once took a softball
bat to the head of a guy he thought was picking on
Emma, his younger sister. It was just good luck he
didn't kill the guy.

So really it was not impossible for us to conjure
up an image of some man, with feelings similar to
those we had experienced ourselves, going out of his
way to see Lucy in the dairy. Maybe he followed her
home from school a couple of times. Surely not much
harm in that. It also wasn't so hard for us to imagine
those same feelings eventually swamping a man and
driving him to terrible deeds. It's not that we could
imagine ourselves raping or killing a woman. The
action was fundamentally abhorrent. But let's just say,
in the name of truth, that at fifteen we could stand at
the beginning of the path that Lucy's murderer must
surely have walked down. We could loiter at the start
of that shadowy way and see as far as the first bend
among the trees. We had an idea what it would feel
like to walk down that path ourselves for at least a
while.

We looked at the faces of the men and older
boys we saw on the street and on the beach. No
one was innocent in our imaginations. Was it him?
we wondered. Or him? Him? Or him? But because
we didn't have any plausible alternative Mr Asher
remained our prime suspect. Jase Harbidge had done
some research and could trot out the names of fathers
(and even a few mothers) who had murdered their
kids in all sorts of gruesome ways. Admittedly the
cases, like our favourite TV shows, were mostly from
the States, but that wasn't to say it hadn't happened
closer to home. Sitting around our dinner tables in the
evenings with our families, we examined the faces of
our own fathers and mothers in a new and disturbing
light.

Mr Asher was the only person we knew on whose
behaviour we could pin the tag 'suspicious'. We
speculated endlessly about what it was that Matt had
seen him throwing into the channel in the middle of
the night. Possibly some object or piece of clothing
that would incriminate him in Lucy's murder? That's
the direction our talk swung around to. Mr Asher's
habitual silence now seemed to us to be a form of
camouflage, allowing him to move unnoticed and
unsuspected.

When the idea first surfaced Al Penny had tried
to argue. 'But what about the sex? Lucy was raped,
right? Fathers don't do that to their daughters.'

It was another hot afternoon and we were
meeting in the Turners' garage with its bench-press
and wonky pool table. Jase Harbidge was lining up
his shot. He paused and looked across the green felt
at Al and raised his eyebrows in a way that showed
that he couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'Wanna
bet?' was all he said. And then he took his shot. The
weights hovered in the air and the balls bounced off
the cushion and eventually came to rest while we all
thought about the unthinkable.

We received our School Certificate results in the mail
on the Monday of the third week of 1981. Our marks
were average, which is exactly what we had expected.
We scraped through into sixth form and avoided
the shame of having to repeat the fifth form. Only
Al Penny's marks were outstanding. They were so
good that he became uncharacteristically cagey when
asked how he had done and would not show anyone
the official form. On the same day the Asher's dairy
opened again. We felt that opening up for business
was somehow disloyal to Lucy's memory, but as Roy
Moynahan, who was always the pragmatist of the
group, said, 'The Ashers have gotta make a living,
don't they? Just like everyone else.'

But by then it wasn't much of a living. Business was
noticeably slow. People suddenly seemed to prefer to
go the extra distance to the dairy up on Bridge Street.
It had recently changed hands and smelt of incense
and curry (what dairy doesn't these days? But back
then it was an alien scent and off-putting for many
people). A lot of our mothers started doing the whole
week's shopping at the supermarket in New Brighton
Mall so that there was no need to top up at the Ashers'
shop.

We, on the other hand, became the Ashers' best
customers. Our motivation for shopping at their dairy
wasn't entirely to do with furthering what we now
thought of as our investigation into Lucy's murder.
We genuinely felt that we should help prop up their
business. The spell of hot weather was still unbroken
so, of course, we bought ice creams. We sat around
in Tug's bedroom taking turns with the binoculars
and eating. For a while, we each got through three or
four cones a day. In addition to ice cream we spent
our money on bottles of Coke, Fanta and Mello Yello.
Later we moved on to twenty- and fifty-cent mixtures
until we grew sick of the sight of pink and yellow
Eskimo-men and chewy milk-bottles. As the weeks
passed we also came to loathe coiled liquorice straps.
We left them to lie around Tug's room like the charred
remains of garden snails. We took to tipping bags of
powdered sherbet down the Gardiners' toilet.

Our mothers were at first surprised, and then
suspicious of the unexplained bottles of milk we began
to bring home on a daily basis. We drank all we could
but there's only so much milk you can stomach. When
we didn't want to answer any more of our mothers'
questions, the milk also got poured away. For weeks
the Gardiners' drains ran white.

We also bought bread but there's only so much of
that you can eat as well. We Frisbeed whole loaves of
sliced bread, piece by piece, out Tug's window for the
seagulls to catch on the wing. By the end of January
the birds swarmed around the house as thick as flies.
They perched on the edge of the fences and up on the
spouting, just waiting, staining everything with long
white streaks. Eventually Mr Gardiner stormed up
the stairs and laid down the law.

When we made our purchases, it was always Mrs
Asher who served us. Mrs Asher had never dressed
like someone who worked in a dairy. She habitually
wore fashionable black dresses and skirts and silver
bracelets (what we used to call bangles). Her hair was
long, like Lucy's and with the same sheen, and she
wore it in a ponytail. Mrs Asher dressed as though she
had just stepped out of a business meeting at Tip Top
in order to scoop out our double ice creams.

We knew that our mothers often used to talk to
each other about Mrs Asher and what they called 'her
pretensions'. Down Rocking Horse Road, being seen
to step outside the carefully pegged-out boundaries of
your life was regarded as something of a sin.

But grief had diminished Mrs Asher. It had taken
the flesh from her cheeks so that the bones of her face
were thrust forward like scaffolding from beneath her
skin. She had always been slim but Lucy's death had
made coat-hangers of Mrs Asher's shoulders. Her
eyes seemed to float in their sockets as she regarded
us from behind the increasingly dusty glass counter,
beneath which the sweets sat like something in an
abandoned museum. The large front windows were
covered with advertising that was sellotaped to the
inside of the glass. The advertising, for things like
dog roll and pies, let through virtually no sunlight.
It was always a shock to move from the glare of the
hot day into the cool dark shop and it was inevitably
sobering. We tried to be cheery but it was an effort.
More often than not Mrs Asher had forgotten to turn
on the fluorescent lights. The door buzzer would
sound and she would appear from the back, silent and
pale in the gloom, thinner by the day. She would not
speak, not even 'hello' or 'good afternoon', but would
stand patiently behind the counter in the quarter-light
and wait for us to tell her what we wanted. When we
finally made up our minds she would hand it over
without a word and we would pay and leave.

It's hard to remember exactly what we hoped to
learn by going there. Perhaps we went because it was
all in such stark contrast to the way the shop had been
when Lucy was alive. The very differences served as
reminders and moored us to the recent past. Lucy had
served in the shop most days after school as well as on
Saturday afternoons after she had played netball or
hockey. Back then, the door was always jammed open
with a small triangle of wood. There had been light
and Lucy's music played quietly from a tape deck that
she kept high up on a shelf behind the counter. When
her parents weren't home she would turn the music
up loud. Lucy was often talking to her friends on the
phone as she served, cupping the receiver under her
chin and still talking and laughing as she gave change.
She was always friendly, even to us younger boys.

Perhaps the truth is that we went to the dairy in
the weeks following the funeral because we wanted
to share our grief with Mrs Asher. We had neither the
courage or the vocabulary to put how we felt into
words. Maybe our daily purchases of unwanted ice-cream
and milk and sweets were the only form of
consolation we knew how to offer.

By mid-January we had started hearing things about
Carolyn Asher. They were just vague rumours at
first, ripples from a distant splash. And then Matt
Templeton saw her on a Friday night, standing outside
the fish 'n' chip shop up on Estuary Road. According
to Matt she was with an older guy, a local, who had
been flanker in the first XV at school but who now
played for University. 'The guy was all over her' was
Matt's comment.

Tug saw her as well, a couple of weeks later. She
was in the back of a car parked outside the reserve, in
the pool of shadow between the street-lights. She was
with a guy as well, but not the rugby player. It was a
surfer this time. She was sitting up in the back seat,
smoking. The surfer was back there with her. As Tug
passed Carolyn turned her head and looked at him
without any expression.

By the end of the month we had heard other, more
specific things, told third and fourth hand. By then
they were stories told with a wink and a sneer.

The guys Carolyn Asher was seeing were always
older and always lived in New Brighton. Because she
was Lucy's sister we tried to find out more. We thought
our best bet was to approach the guys directly.

'Whatareya, her brother?' was a fairly typical
comment. That from a guy who later threatened to beat
up Jase Harbidge if he didn't stop hanging around his
flat. Really, we couldn't blame the guy for being edgy.
Carolyn Asher was underage by more than a year.

Years later we were able to strike up conversations
with these old boyfriends in pubs. We would arrange
a chance meeting and then simply drop her name into
the conversation. 'She was up for it any time,' one
guy told us. Another said with a sneer that 'She was a
weird little chick, but she did love to fuck!'

Her pattern was always the same — none of the
guys lasted very long. Several of them already had
girlfriends but, as far as we know, once she set her
sights on a guy she never got turned down. After
seeing a guy for a couple of weeks she simply stopped
coming around. Most seemed to shrug and accept it;
they didn't take it personally. They were grateful for
the easy sex while it lasted and philosophical when it
dried up.