A Child's Book of True Crime (24 page)

The bushland gang were watching over him.

L
yrebirds danced and the wind through their feathers played a lullaby silvery sweet. The red-throated whistler, the gray-crowned babbler, a reed warbler, rock warbler, and golden-headed fantail perched on a branch outside Lucien’s window, singing their friend to sleep. As the little boy’s eyelids fluttered, as he floated on the edge of dreams, the bushland gang watched over him. Terence Tiger, a twinkle in his eye, held Kitty Koala’s paw steady. “Wouldn’t it be lovely,” the old bear whispered, “if there were some recipe to avoid becoming an adult. If only Lucien
drank a magic potion, he could crawl inside the pages of his favorite fairy tale to receive three wishes. To eat chocolate cake for every meal. To have a team of invisible animal friends with special powers.”

“In his dreams he can, Kitty,” the tiger said wisely. Then he turned to the window and murmured to the sleeping child, “Stay with us, Lucien. We will protect you.” In all his years of detection, Terence had often found grown-ups to be the greatest mystery of all. He smiled. “Kitty, my dear, that trifle looks heavenly.”

A magpie, in tails, offered lavish dishes of dessert and kept each goblet full of lemonade. There was Wally Wombat! There was Kingsley Kookaburra! Oh, there was Percy Possum, charming all the youngest honey-possums with his rooftop adventures . . . . The lyrebirds ended their melody and curtsied with grace. But the entertainment was far from over. Nearby ran a little stream, and a band of musical frogs emerged from the water—one, two, three, four. The tallest stood on his hind legs, conducting. The next frog did a little drumroll. Another played a bright orange trumpet flower, his friend, the accordion. Oh, what a fine sound! The noisy friarbird held her tongue and the crimson chat fell silent. The moon made a smoky spotlight and every creature gasped: the black swans had arrived, in feathers and red heels, their bills painted a shocking scarlet.

“No more detective work tonight,” Terence announced. “Only merrymaking!” He turned again to Lucien’s window. “In the end, no one really knows what happened at Black Swan Point—only the god of wildebeest and butterflies. The unfortunate
truth of true crime,” he admitted, “is that, often, there is no ending.” Now the tiger faced his friends and colleagues. Raising his goblet, he called for the show to begin.

Through the dark hush the swans cast their spells with voices smooth and rich. Swans mate for life and a dashing fellow joined each lady. “When all little creatures are tucked up in bed,” cooed this gleaming chorus, “dozing the sleepy-sweet doze of the dead, the ax starts in snoring and grinding its fang. The dagger stoned on lullabies quits his harangue.” The males’ long necks wavered in the breeze. Then all the ladies kicked up their high heels, revealing a shock of soft white under-feathers. The beat became jaunty. “When you hear the noose yawning it’s time for nigh-nigh! Why, the gun’s in its holster, shooting dreams through the sky!” Oh, such a swan song had never before been heard!

Now all the animals joined in: feathers fluttered in every wild rainbow color. A line of wallabies joined tails, raising their paws. “Goodnight little convicts in lands near and far; spread out your hands to form a star! Wave twinkle-twinkle from side to side, you run from sweet slumber but cannot hide!” A spangled drongo and a shining starling flew through the night sky. “Sleep tight, stately tiger.
Bon nuit,
blind old bear. Mad kookaburra, return to your lair. Lie down little possums, and dream if you dare.
Gute Nacht
to adulteresses everywhere!”

I
T WAS
M
ONDAY
lunchtime before I drove past Port Arthur along the road leading to Point Puer. To reach the cliffs I parked before the point, then walked down a fern-lined track. I inhaled deeply, and on each out-breath braced myself. First thing that morning I had been invited into Lillian Hurnell’s office: Lillian sat at her handsome cedar desk, blushing. In front of me she placed a handwritten petition calling for my dismissal. All the parents had signed, except for the Marnes; but Lillian promptly provided another letter, typewritten on stationery from Thomas’s legal firm. “Lucien will not be in school today nor tomorrow. The Marnes are returning to Hobart.” She hesitated knowingly. “I gather they’ll put their son back into his old school.” Behind her were sepia photographs of her thin-lipped ancestors looking disappointed. “The Endport Primary community would obviously like you to leave as soon as possible, but I’ve told them I can’t get an emergency teacher down here for at least a week,” Lillian complained. “If not two.”

I assured her I would be gone by the end of the day. All I needed was a few more hours with the children. My grandparents’ house had been vacated. I’d drawn the curtains. I’d turned off the power. And I’d decided, in another life, to
write a book-length explanation for Lucien: a child’s book of true crime. Apparently in Stalinist Russia, blacklisted writers and artists had embedded secret messages in children’s literature. Beautiful books were created, full of allegory, and the adults would read them before bedtime and remain fast asleep; disguised as the naive, subversive content was unrecognizable. Children, hearing snoring, would gently take the books from their parents’ hands. They’d turn out the lights and shut the doors, then tiptoe off to read the real story.

“If you wrote a book for children,” I’d once asked Lucien, “what would it be about?” His eyes had become bright. “I’d do a story with a twist in the end.”

I walked into my classroom as nervous as I had been for my first class. Monday morning with all its new-leaf status: clean clothes, shining shoes, the marks of the comb dragged through wet hair. As was their ritual, the children sat in a circle on the floor. Usually first thing, we held Show and Tell. Now I thought their chatter would be too much to bear. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to listen to them speak. Even children’s lies carry an uncanny clarity. Children understand intuitively the interconnectedness of unlikely narrative strands. Their stream of consciousness monologues meander right into what everyone else is thinking: a closer and more painful approximation of the truth. It should just be Show, experience had taught me. No Tell: otherwise the kids have too much sovereignty. Go around the circle with button-lipped children, get them to hold up their new money box, the scarf they’re knitting, the insects they’ve suffocated in a jam jar—make up your own story.

“Guys, we might skip Show and Tell this morning . . .” I
waited for the kids to groan. “To have a debate!” My voice cracked. Only the faithful had made it to my class. The epithet still scratched on the door—
I KNOW
—I now claimed as my own. It was clear the children were aware of my dismissal: they were perfectly polite. They’d decided there was no longer a point in saving their civility for a rainy day. I was given respect, like a condemned man receives his favorite meal. At the end of the afternoon I’ll be gone, I thought, and you will never see me again, but you’ll hear stories. Most of which will involve my being on good terms with lying. Before I left I wanted to make a deal with them. I had asked them to think closely about their lives. In exchange they had to explain to me what had just happened. I needed to hear, one last time, all the things they thought. I needed to hear what they still believed in.

According to my watch there were two hours before lunch for a high-speed metaphysical experience. “If people told the truth all the time,” I asked, “would that be a perfect world?”

Henry:
It wouldn’t be perfect, because just say you murdered someone, then you’d say, “Oh, I murdered someone today,” and you’d just go straight to jail.

Billy:
But you’d normally only say that if someone asked. [Indignant] Your mum’s not going to come up to you and say, “Oh, did you kill somebody today?”

Anaminka:
But she might say, “What did you do today?” and you’d have to tell the truth.

Billy:
You can’t really make a perfect world, because there are robbers. And the perfect world for a robber would
be to steal everything and to take all the money in the world. But everyone else would have different opinions . . . You couldn’t create a perfect world that everybody likes.

Henry:
And another thing, we can’t just make ourselves be perfect, because we don’t have the genes of perfect people.

The boys and girls sat on opposite sides of the room. I had the feeling that time had skipped too far ahead of us. These children who’d known each other since birth, who’d been in the same class since kindergarten, had suddenly developed a gender allergy. Eliza with her bowl-cut hair wore a ring, “so no one will think I’m a boy.” Henry had had his curls shaved, “so no one thinks I’m a girl.” Every Monday I noticed that the children had grown further over the weekend. “Stop!” I now felt like pleading. “Just wait another moment.” Alastair, whose face was becoming longer, had suddenly given up sucking his thumb. Billy, having taken an interest in music, apparently listened to the Top 40 by himself in his mother’s car. Danielle, with baby fat, wore cherry-flavored lipstick. But Anaminka, who was beginning to develop breasts, clung tighter to her favorite doll; she still believed absolutely in the tooth fairy.

Anaminka:
If everyone told the truth there’d be no surprises. It would be pretty bad with everyone walking around saying the truth and nothing else.

Henry:
It’s just fun sometimes to lie, to make jokes, just for tricks.

The children discussed when and where it was appropriate to lie. They spoke of the qualities of lies. They spoke of the comforts of lying. This should have been a balm, and yet I sat back, pained slightly by their newfound maturity. An extraordinary calm seemed to have settled—with Lucien gone, the unwaged war was over. I stared around the classroom wondering why I’d returned. They were trying to console me, but what could they have possibly said to make things better? “You did the right thing.” “You are no better and no worse than any of us.” “We’ll still be your friends.”

The self-portrait wing now made me wince. The bookshelves lining the walls felt like padding in a cell. As soon as one started talking honestly to children, it became clear their literature was the true opiate of the masses. See the sun, blue-eyed and smiling; step inside a music box to hear the old melody of goo-goo, gaa-gaa. I had seen the scribble kids added to their fairy tales; I’d noted where they tore the pages. Who wanted to hear about hungry caterpillars when they were worrying whether God existed? The conversation rolled on and I looked out the window. “This book I’ll write,” I promised Lucien, “it will be as honest as the bushranger’s diary of dreams. It will be the good-bye-to-childhood book; a book with pictures that is only meant for you.”

The play equipment, without its cover of wriggling bodies, seemed severe. I studied a climbing frame made from giant tires, staring until finally I noticed something terrible. Like some macabre collage, this structure had been positioned next to a huge red fire hose. This fashion for children to climb all over enormous tires, to wrap themselves in the tires so they hung limp from the knees as if burning—was I the only one
who found it in slightly poor taste? Children should secede. Their teachers were trying to induct them into an airbrushed prison. A world where people with walled imaginations lived walled lives. Children should take their packed lunches and run far away. The idea that they needed to be protected from the truth was surely a way for adults to protect themselves. The unseemly things which children said when left alone, when the brakes were taken off their aggression, were perfectly natural. They were the shadow-feelings of adults.

Shouting broke out: our rapprochement had proved too much for the less sophisticated kids; Darren had called Alastair a girl, and he had started to cry. We discussed that it was not a statement of truth that Alastair was a girl. And Darren apologized with mock sincerity. Everyone then sat waiting, expecting me to speak. It seemed I should leave them with something. I took a deep breath, and tried to advise that the most important thing was to always remain true to oneself.

Billy:
But sometimes when people tell a joke you have to lie because if everyone’s laughing and you have no idea what they’re laughing about, you just have to laugh with them.

Miss Byrne:
If everyone else threw rocks, would you throw a rock as well?

Henry:
That’s not lying. Throwing a rock isn’t lying.

Miss Byrne:
But if you laughed, were you being true to yourself?

Billy:
You feel a bit embarrassed though if you’ve no idea what everyone’s laughing about and you just sit there.