Traces of Red, page 13
I started at school. We didn’t go when it was raining; we just turned on the television and made fudge. From time to time Mrs Ryan from down the road looked in on us. She’d stare around her and click her tongue. It’s a poor look-out for kiddies, she said.
Sometimes she brought scones but in the end she stopped coming. He came home when she was there and told her off. Interfering cow. Piss off home.
Apart from the Ryans there weren’t neighbours close enough to notice. He said we weren’t allowed to tell about him being away. Not the kids at school, not our teachers, no one.
He sat in the kitchen stuffing his mouth with eggs and bacon. If we told, we’d be taken away, he said, not that he cared any road. He had tomato sauce around the edges of his mouth. We’d be taken away and then we’d be split up. It scared me enough to keep quiet. Angela understood she had to make sure I had my face washed and my hair combed for school. She made Marmite sandwiches and put them in a plastic bag for us to take.
Every second night she’d fill the bath up near the top and we’d sit in the middle facing away from each other, bums and backs touching. My head came up just under her shoulder blades and I’d lie back against her. Angela sat at the tap end and when the water got cold she let some of it out and filled it up again. We slept in the same bed. Maybe when kids are unloved they hunch closer together.
When the wind came up the house shook and the windows rattled. When it rained, one of the down-pipes gushed water onto the ground outside the bedroom. We could always hear the ocean. I’d listen to the waves hushing onto sand, listen to Angela’s breathing. Sometimes they’d be in unison, her breathing and the slip-slop motion of waves way out there in the dark on the proper beach.
In the summer I’ll take you out past the breakers.
That was where she went. I could feel angry she left us as she did but I can’t blame her. People go to Foxton Beach for summer holidays of sun, blue sky, sand and sea. Then they leave. They don’t know about the days when the mist hangs low down over the township and it’s so raw-cold your bones hurt. At times like that the jagged tops of the pines stand out against the sky like barbed wire. There she was in that cramped, ugly house with the black hostility clinging to the walls no matter how many times they were painted.
I want it clean.
She could have got on a bus with or without us but where would she go? If she had family, I never saw them. Maybe she stood down at the beach that afternoon with the hills and the pines pressing in behind her and saw the sea opening out there way beyond the heads. Maybe it was the only place.
And maybe she thought it was fairer she did it that way because we wouldn’t fret for her to come back.
‘You mustn’t get personally involved, there’s only the very slightest chance that he’ll be cleared of this and—’
‘Has something happened? Do you know something?’ I heard my voice begin to rise.
‘No, nothing. But this is a very, very complicated process and nine times out of ten the conviction remains unchanged.’
‘But what if he didn’t do it?’
Despite Anna’s warnings the letters had begun to change things for me. Before them, Bligh was the means by which I could make my mark. I’d hoped he might be innocent because of the mileage that could get me and, though that may seem heartless, one of the first lessons you learn in journalism is you don’t get personally involved. Not ever. Because if you’re going to do a story about an axe-murderer, for example, then liking him could very well fuck things up.
But the letters made me begin to break that rule.
ON SCHOOL MORNINGS Angela poured milk over the Weet-Bix and looked me over to see if I was clean enough and dressed right. She put my lunch in my bag and we went to school. When it was over she waited for me beside the fence.
The day I started Sunshine Beach Primary I observed that I was quite a lot smaller than the kids in the room I was taken to. I discovered I was also vastly unattractive to other children. Perhaps it was my scrawny body and the weird way I’d adopted of gawping, head to the side and mouth hanging open, when I was trying to work out what was happening or what someone was saying to me. I’d feel it starting to happen – my eyes screwing up, my mouth opening – but I didn’t seem able to stop it. Perhaps it was also because I was generally bleeding somewhere on my arms or legs or face. I had patches of eczema and the itching and burning was so ferocious I couldn’t help but scratch them.
At playtime and lunchtime other kids would demonstrate to me how truly repulsive I was. They snatched my sandwiches and ground them under their feet. They made my face back at me. They shoved me over and tripped me up.
Retard. Girly. Pissy-pants.
Over the years the school had predominantly become an assortment of prefabs which had, as the roll grew, been set down near the original old buildings on an acre or so of concrete. There were another few acres of bare, parched grass called playing fields. It was impossible to hide anywhere, though I tried to keep out of sight because whenever I became visible I turned immediately into prey. I remember heart-stopping moments when I’d see them looking at me as if contemplating what injury or humiliation to inflict next. I remember them rushing at me in a pack and me running for my life, my heart kicking into my chest. I remember the pain and sound as an elbow cracked into my ribs.
I’d rather piss myself than go into the boys’ lavatories.
If you tell you’re dead.
I don’t know why they hated me so much but they hated me indeed and with increasing fervour. What happened in those first years at the school was either full-blown brutality or, what was probably more amusing, attempts to trick me. That was worse because I never knew what was coming. Like the time they gathered around me and explained there’s a special place between your thumb and finger you have to be careful never to cut because if you do you’ll get lockjaw and die. They said lockjaw is when you can’t open your mouth, it sets like concrete and you can’t eat or breathe and you starve or suffocate to death. They told me to hold out my hand and they would show me where it was. Peter Dobbs gripped my wrist and prised open my hand. Mickey Hanson stabbed into it with a sharpened pencil. It left a blue-black mark beneath my skin. It’s still there.
When attempts at invisibility didn’t work I tried to cooperate. They had come to the realisation that chasing and punching was less fun than getting me to perform. They’d tell me to do things for them; stupid things, increasingly dangerous. It’s a test, if you do it we’ll leave you alone. Chasing after girls, pulling down their pants, taking money from a teacher’s purse and distributing what I’d got, stealing pies out of the pie warmer, jumping from the roof of one classroom to another. The last thing I did involved landing inches away from a tractor which was cutting the school grass. I slipped and fell and the wheel brushed my face as it stopped. After that I wouldn’t play so they reverted to the chasing and punching.
Angela took me home, cleaned me up. She was scared of them as well but she found Mickey Hanson walking home on his own one day and punched him in the face and told him to leave her little brother alone. Outside of school we could hide. We knew every part of the beach and estuary – the clumps of flaxes and shivery grass, the tracks up into the sand-hills, each twist and turn and where they became one long, slow slide on your back. We knew the dark cool beneath the pine trees and the way they rattled even in the slight wind. We knew the tides; we swam through October until April and never minded the cold. We went out beyond the breakers and floated on our backs in endless water.
Home wasn’t much but it was where we had each other, where we were everything to each other. Something astoundingly beautiful about Foxton Beach is the sunsets. In the winter we watched from a distance but in summer the colours would flush against the walls of the house. We’d stand against them, our arms held out wide. What colour am I? What colour now? We’d found the names and we shouted them. Crimson, turquoise, aquamarine. Indigo, chartreuse, vi-olet.
How much do you love me?
Up to the sky and back again.
25.
I’d begun to read up on cases where people had been convicted for crimes they hadn’t done and there seemed startling similarities, not in the circumstances but in the traits of those involved. Arthur Allan Thomas, David Bain, Peter Ellis – all of them outsiders, all beyond what is considered the norm. If it wasn’t Peter Ellis with his weirdo clothes and attention-seeking posturing, if it wasn’t gawky Bain with his psycho jerseys, if it wasn’t Thomas with his big ears and questionable action of sending a brush-and-comb set to a girl who couldn’t care less about him, then who else could have done it?
And now here was Bligh with his uncanny intelligence, his strangely reclusive habits and inability to look a man straight in the eye. Who else could have done it if it wasn’t him?
What if it had been some horrific mistake? What if a killer had inadvertently gone into the wrong house? Some gang-related thing? Drugs, maybe?
Connor had begun to talk to me more easily now and I tried to push him. You knew them better than anyone, who else if it wasn’t you?
Everyone liked Rowan and Angela and Sam and Katy; that’s what was said in court and Connor wholeheartedly agreed. They had no enemies. They were a nice, ordinary family. I asked him repeatedly, was there anything at all, just the faintest possibility that something wasn’t right, that this family was not entirely as it seemed? He’d shake his head, his face and voice adamant.
There was nothing.
But could there have been something he hadn’t noticed or taken in? He freely admitted to his inability to monitor or understand people. It was his social dyslexia. I couldn’t help laughing out loud when he said it and he smiled ruefully back at me across the table. There was something so oddly, comically gauche about him.
How could anyone believe this sad, shy man could kill the sister he’d so much loved?
Or was the despair and hesitancy what he wanted me to see? Was it a hook, a way of getting under my skin?
What did I believe? What should I believe?
I tried to remain utterly dispassionate, critical even, as I talked him through the life he’d set out in his letters.
Take a step back. Think rationally. Yet more and more I saw the little boy holding out his arms to catch the sunset.
AS WELL AS being pathetically weak and ugly I was also a freak. When I first went to Sunshine Beach I could read fairly much anything. I don’t know how that came about but I can’t remember a time when words written on a page didn’t make complete sense to me. There was a set of encyclopaedias in the bookcase beside the front door in our house and I’d set about finding things out. I knew things other kids didn’t. I should have kept that quiet.
The new entrants’ teacher, Miss McIntyre, had downy hair and large round bosoms. She spoke to us affecting the kind of high-pitched squeaking many adults use for speaking to babies and small pets. She stopped using those particular sounds when speaking specifically to me after I began asking her questions I wanted the answers for, regarding the geologic time scale. Connor Bligh! Sit down at your desk and get on with your work! Perhaps Miss McIntyre was one of the reasons I was so heartily and widely hated since she was revered by all the children in her class as well as her past students and her dislike of me was palpable.
We began each day by sitting cross-legged on a large mat where we would hold our hands up above our heads, wriggle our fingers in a way meant to represent the rays of the sun shining and sing Good Morning Mr Sun although, of course, the sun is inanimate. Then we put on plastic aprons and drew, painted or created objects with clay or cardboard. This was referred to as developmental though I, for one, had no intention of developing into an artist or a sculptor.
In her favour, for the first few months of my time at Sunshine Beach Primary, Miss McIntyre made valiant attempts to engage me in activities, to find a reading group into which I would fit and to persuade me that coloured blocks could be equated with numbers. It is not her fault that none of these endeavours was successful. After that she sent me to the library during reading time. When I made no progress with paint, crayons or clay I went during developmental as well. I eventually stopped calling in at the classroom at all and made my way directly there.
I enjoyed the books in the library infinitely more than those Miss McIntyre had wanted me to read with few words and without discernible substance. There was a large black book. The solar system consists of the sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity.
Celestial. Celestial objects. I rolled the sounds around in my head. Molecular cloud. Ecliptic plane. Terrestrial planets. I discovered the miracle of a dictionary and then I had the meanings. I filed those words away in my head and said them over and over whenever it got hard.
There was a globe and I loved to spin it around, watching as the colours tilted, swayed and merged. I spun, closed my eyes, rested my fingers on the smooth moving surface, counted to a hundred then stopped it and read the names. Hyderabad. Kalimantan. Rostov-na-Donu. I tested myself by timing on the large clock on the wall how long it took to find countries I’d committed the day before to memory.
If it wasn’t for Mr Mitchem I would have happily and safely remained there throughout each day. Mr Mitchem was the school principal. His office was down the passage along from the library. One day he saw me through the glass in the door and burst in. I’d only ever seen him at school assemblies up until then but he spoke in hammer shots. Bla-ap. Bla-ap. Bla-ap.
‘What are you doing in here on your own? Why aren’t you in class?’
I felt my eyes and head and mouth taking me over. I couldn’t speak.
‘I asked you a question.’
I held up the book I was reading. He wrenched it out of my hands.
‘Who is your teacher and what’s your name, lad?’
I got them out in a tight, dry whisper. ‘Miss McIntyre. Connor Bligh.’
‘Sir.’
‘Sir.’
‘And why aren’t you in your classroom with Miss McIntyre, Connor Bligh?’
‘She said I could come here.’
His voice changed into a snarl. ‘Miss McIntyre teaches the Junior School. I’m sure Miss McIntyre – that is if Miss McIntyre asked you to come here – would expect you to look at books suitable for your age. This book is from the teachers’ resources shelves. What is a junior student doing with a book which is so clearly unsuitable?’
I tried to unravel his meaning. So clearly unsuitable. What did Mr Mitchem want me to say in response?
‘I asked you a question. What do you mean by taking from the teachers’ resources shelves a book which you couldn’t possibly hope to understand?’
I licked my lips. ‘I understand it.’
‘You understand it?’ He gave a scoffing snort and brandished the book at me, stabbing at a section with his finger. ‘All right, Connor Bligh, read this.’
My voice was halting. Unlike the Earth – a dynamic planet where weather has eroded the shifting surface and erased the record of early history – the Moon has barely changed. Its main features have been fossilised in time. Its gravitational force—
He stared at the book and then at me, turned on his heel and walked off. I resumed reading. I heard him go into his office and I heard talking. I recognised Miss McIntyre’s voice. I couldn’t hear at first but then the voices became quite loud.
‘Can’t have a Junior School boy languishing about there on his own. Expensive equipment. What would his parent… serious trouble… absurd… totally absurd.’
‘I have to think of the other children. Doesn’t fit in… not normal. What am I supposed to do?’
They came together into the library and sat in front of me at the table I was sitting at. They surveyed me as if I was an alien being that had somehow infiltrated Sunshine Beach Primary. Miss McIntyre’s eyes were red and watery and with her pale hair she looked like a furious rabbit. I decided that if Mr Mitchem sent me back to that hell-hole of paint and clay and coloured blocks I’d make Angela run away with me.
He fixed his eyes warningly on me. ‘Miss McIntyre tells me you are a little advanced for your class. Do you know what advanced means, Connor?’
‘Being ahead in development, knowledge, progress.’
‘Yes, well, good. I can see you’re quite a clever boy.’
I waited for him to speak again.
‘It seems working independently in the library is the most suitable arrangement for you just now, Connor. That is, until your classmates have caught up with where you are. Do you talk to your mum and dad about what you do at school?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t risk being taken away.
‘You’ve told them you come to the library?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do they think about that?’ He glared at Miss McIntyre.
‘They approve of libraries.’
His face relaxed a little and he attempted a smile. ‘Well, Connor, if your mum and dad ask you about going to the library, could you tell them that Mr Mitchem and Miss McIntyre have arranged for you to have extension work. Can you remember that, Connor?’
‘Yes.’
‘That seems to be that, then. I’ll pop into the library from time to time to see how you’re getting on. But I want to see you out in the school grounds at lunchtime and playtime. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, eh, Connor?’
I wondered who Jack was. They went outside into the corridor. ‘I’m sorry. But I have done my best.’
‘It’s all right, Marian. I can see the problem.’
Mr Mitchem, as he promised, popped into the library over the next few days and stood over me, peering down at what I was reading. Then he stopped popping in and left me alone, apart from when he passed the door on his way to the staff room for morning tea and lunch.
‘Outside, Connor,’ he’d say, gesturing towards the playing fields and pretending to smile.
