During that heatwave summer of 1992, every TV news bulletin reported the government was doing deals with the devil. Night after night the thing simmered. I watched, fascinated, as the Northern Territory Government paid compensation worth more than a million dollars, plus almost half a million in legal costs and $19,000 for a car that was dismantled for evidence and, along with the lives of all the people in that family, was never put back together.
The devil, I noted, was a woman with a bob and, more often than not, a strappy sundress.
‘What’s she getting money for if she’s guilty, Dad?’ I asked.
‘She’s not guilty, Tik. That’s the point,’ he said without turning his face from the screen. ‘Lindy Chamberlain’s not guilty, even though they locked her up. That’s why she’s being compensated now. Not that these grubs want us to think she’s innocent. Disgusting the way they’re carrying on.’
He sat watching the screen, one ankle resting on the opposing knee, making a triangle where he rested his newspaper. He liked to have the broadsheet open in front of him while he watched the headlines, as if he was playing along at home. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and long-legged shorts. He hadn’t loosened his tie since he’d finished teaching and walked out of his classroom earlier that afternoon. He had taken his shoes and socks off, though, and his legs were white where his long socks had stretched to his knees. He was tanned in a band round the top.
Mum came in then, carrying two glasses of something with ice that clinked as she walked. She crossed the lounge room, handed one to Dad and held the other against her cheek while she stood, hand on hip, and watched the screen.
‘She’s too attractive for them,’ she observed to no one in particular. ‘Too sultry-looking. They can’t handle it.’
‘Who, Mum? Lindy Chamberlain?’ I asked. ‘Is that who you mean, Mum?’
‘It’s hardly a crime,’ Dad said. ‘Not a hanging offence.’
‘Do you mean Lindy Chamberlain, Mum? Her, Mum? Is she the one that’s too attractive?’
‘Not a crime,’ Dad repeated.
‘Yeah? Well, you tell those blokes,’ Mum said. She gestured towards the TV with her glass and, on the screen, a group of men in brown ties were standing outside a courthouse. ‘They’d still have her locked up if it was their decision.’
‘She walks like Cordie,’ Laura commented. My sister lay on the couch in the corner with her legs dangling over the armrest.
‘Take your feet off there,’ Mum replied automatically, and I waited for Laura to say that it was her legs, not her feet, and why couldn’t it be a leg rest? If it was good enough for arms, why wasn’t it okay for other limbs?
But Laura was too busy watching TV. She slid her legs off the couch without shifting her eyes from the screen.
‘Hey, Mum, it’s the school Showstopper concert soon,’ I said, remembering, ‘and Miss Elith said I can do a skit. Everyone else will be doing a dance or playing an instrument or stuff like that, but I’m allowed to put on a skit.’
‘Big deal.’ Laura said it low enough that only I could hear. ‘The Showstopper happens every year.’
‘Yeah, but no one’s ever done a skit before. Miss Elith said. Miss Elith said I was the first person ever to ask.’
‘Do you know how to write a skit?’ Laura said dubiously.
‘Yes!’ I said.
Though in truth I had some doubts. (But they were the kind of doubts you kept to yourself, and not the sort you’d admit to your sister.) And anyway, I’d written a play before called ‘The Staff Meeting’, where I copied down everything I eavesdropped from the teachers’ staffroom. ‘The Staff Meeting’ was a comedy. And a good one, too, if it was even half as hilarious as the teachers seemed to find it.
Plus, I’d written the poem that got me chosen for the nativity play. (Though I couldn’t take the credit for the plot.)
All in all, I was pretty sure I could write a Showstopper skit. I just had to find something to write about.
‘Miss Elith thinks my skit will be very dramatic,’ I said. Actually, I was the one who had promised drama, but Miss Elith had said she didn’t doubt it.
We did Music and Performing Arts with Miss Elith every Thursday when we had to share one instrument between two. That worked okay if you got the castanets, because castanets come in pre-prepared pairs. But the triangle was only fun if you were the partner who got to use the dinger. Miss Elith had a hard time keeping everyone under control during Music and Performing Arts on Thursdays. ‘Eyes to the left, eyes to the right, eyes to the front and eyes on me,’ she’d say desperately, though that never seemed to make much difference. Because everyone went ahead and put their eyes wherever they felt like, and that mostly didn’t include on Miss Elith.
‘I’m going to have costumes for my skit too,’ I said, because the judge on TV had reminded me. The way he walked towards the courthouse with his black robe billowing, a white horsehair wig in his hand.
‘And I need two dollars for the bus, Mum. Mum, can I have two dollars? We’re doing a dress rehearsal in the amphitheatre on the morning of the concert.’
‘The amphitheatre?’ Mum said.
‘Yeah. At Coronation Park. You know, the amphitheatre in the valley?’
‘Why are they doing the Showstopper in the amphitheatre this year? It’s usually in the school hall.’
‘You can fit more parents in the amphitheatre,’ my sister said cynically. ‘More parents means more money for the school.’
‘Oh, is it a fundraiser?’
‘Can you lot keep it down?’ Dad said, which was funny, because the only time he ever raised his voice with us was to tell us to keep ours down during the news. He smoothed the pages of the paper in his lap.
‘Yeah, Mum, it’s a fundraiser,’ I said. ‘It’s on a Friday night, after work, so you and Dad can come and watch.’
‘At the amphitheatre?’
‘At the amphitheatre. In the valley.’
The amphitheatre was the only place you could hold an outdoor concert around here, and even then we hardly ever used it. It had a mottled-concrete stage that stared out into a set of shallow mottled-concrete steps. On one side of the stage were the public toilets, and on the other a gravel car park.
The real mystery about the amphitheatre was the Gothic archway that stretched over the footpath from the car park and served as a gateway to the stage. The arch was made of concrete and twisted metal that was rusty with age, and no one knew where the arch had come from or how long it had been there. We couldn’t remember a time without it. That arch wasn’t joined to anything, wasn’t part of any wall, it just stood among the grass and the gravel. As if it were a prop from an entirely different play.
But we left the arch there because, aside from the stage itself, it was the only thing to signify you’d left the car park and were now standing in a place of culture.
‘At the Showstopper —’ I started saying.
‘Shhh,’ Dad said, and he pointed to the screen where the image of the judge had been replaced by a shot of a baby’s dress. The dress was black cotton, puff-sleeved, dark lace frothing at the neck. Red satin ribbon dribbled the length of the yoke.
‘Gross,’ said Laura. ‘Who dresses a baby in black? That’s just creepy.’
‘Laura —’
‘Admit it, you think it’s creepy, Mum.’
But all Mum said was: ‘Laura, get your legs off that couch. I won’t ask you again.’
‘What does the dress have to do with it?’ I asked.
And Dad answered me even though he didn’t like talking during the news, because he liked misinformation even less.
‘Tikka,’ he said, ‘these clowns think that because she dressed her child like that, because her family look a certain way, and because they think a bit differently to everyone else, it automatically makes her a killer.’
‘Oh.’
‘And that the child couldn’t possibly have been taken by a dingo, even though that’s the most plausible scenario.’
‘Oh.’
They did look different, the Chamberlains, when I saw them on the news. The mum with her strappy sundresses. The dad the Seventh-day Adventist pastor with his sideburns and his tie. Those Chamberlains looked much more glamorous than anyone who lived around here. I couldn’t imagine either of the Chamberlain parents camping in the outback. Putting up tents among the spinifex and red dust. (But then I guess they could never imagine losing their daughter to a dingo either.)
‘You see, Tikka, not everyone agrees with the court’s decision —’ Mum started saying.
‘A royal commission finding is a royal commission finding, Suze. It’s not up for debate,’ Dad spoke without moving his eyes from the screen.
‘I wasn’t suggesting it was,’ Mum said. ‘I was just explaining to Tikka the other side of the story.’
‘The other side of the story is not the truth. It has bugger all to do with anything,’ Dad said emphatically.
‘Dad said “bugger”!’ Laura called out helpfully from the couch, where her legs were dangling over the ravine of the armrest again.
But Mum was too glued to the TV to notice and we watched in silence until the bulletin was finished.
* * *
The next day we detoured to the milk bar after school. Cordie was with us, her arm covered in its cast and her cast covered in Texta doodles. Ruth was there, of course. And my sister and Hannah, straight off the bus from high school and talking and laughing about names I didn’t recognise. Swishing their hair like ponies.
‘Hey, Hannah,’ I said, ‘Hannah, did Cordie tell you about the Showstopper? Cordie, did you tell her? The Showstopper is on again, Hannah, and I’m going to write a skit!’
‘Yeah?’ Hannah said.
She was watching my sister, who had one hip pressed against the chest freezer, holding the lid open, and in each hand she dangled an ice cream in its wrapper like dead fish hanging on hooks. Hannah pointed at the Bubble O’Bill and Laura nodded solemnly and dropped the reject back in the chest.
‘Because you get ice cream and a bubblegum nose,’ Laura agreed.
She picked out a Bubble O’Bill to match Hannah’s.
I’d already chosen my ice cream and I jigged about impatiently near the cash register, where the boy behind the counter looked bored.
‘Did Mum give you money?’ Laura asked me.
‘Yeah.’
‘Enough for two?’
‘Yeah.’ I sighed.
I put my hand out to receive her ice cream and Laura placed it in my palm and then she smiled winningly at me. Laura had a job now. She’d started working on the supermarket checkout on Saturday afternoons, and she had a uniform and everything, which meant she was impossibly grown-up. But not so grown-up she’d buy her Bubble O’Bill.
‘What do they call it when the summer comes early?’ Hannah asked Laura while I paid for our ice creams. ‘An Indian summer? Is that it?’
‘That’s when it stays late,’ I said authoritatively. ‘When summer lasts into autumn, that’s when they call it an Indian one.’
‘Well, what do they call it when it comes early? Like now. In spring.’
‘Just a heatwave?’ Laura suggested. ‘I don’t think there’s a special name.’
‘There should be,’ Hannah said. ‘What’s the opposite of India?’
‘Geographically?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ Hannah said.
‘Mexico,’ I said, and no one questioned my answer.
‘Then this is a “Mexican summer”,’ Hannah decided. ‘That’s what we call it from now on.’
Ruth sidled up to me once we’d all paid for our ice creams and were headed for the doorway.
‘Can I be in your skit?’ she said. She had an ice cream in one hand and a scuffed drink bottle in the other, and when she sucked on the bottle it made a long kissy sound.
‘Nope, sorry.’ I shook my head regretfully. ‘Infants aren’t allowed in the Showstopper – Miss Elith said.’
‘But you can be in it if you want,’ I offered to Cordie.
Cordie was wearing her pink fisherman-style schoolbag across her front like a pregnant belly. She had both her arms fed through the straps – the good one and the broken one – and they rested on the canvas, which was decorated with hand-drawn black hearts shot through with pointed arrows.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Cordie said noncommittally.
‘What would she have to do?’ Hannah asked suspiciously. She was always watching out for Cordie in a way she never bothered to do with Ruth, even though Ruth was the youngest.
‘I’ll let you know. I’m still putting the finishing touches to the script,’ I lied. I pictured the mountain of dot-matrix paper I had stockpiled in my bedroom. All of it blank, all of it waiting for me to get started.
The five of us shuffled out of the milk bar after that and into the afternoon sun. My eyes had trouble adjusting to the glare, and I was still seeing black blotches when a bigger, darker shadow swam by.
The shadow gave a wave without raising its arm. Its hand waggling guiltily down by its thigh.
‘Who was that?’ Hannah demanded.
‘Mr Avery,’ said Cordie.
‘That’s Mr Avery?’ Hannah said.
‘Who’s he?’ my sister wanted to know.
‘My teacher.’
‘Your teacher since when?’ Laura asked.
‘Since Mrs Harrow left and Mr Avery is our new teacher,’ Cordie said nonchalantly.
‘That was weeks ago,’ I supplied.
‘Where’d Mrs Harrow go?’ said Laura, ignoring me and asking Cordie.
‘Dunno.’
‘Why’d she leave?’
‘Dunno.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘S’okay.’
‘You’ll have lots of male teachers when you get to high school. We do,’ Laura said sniffily. The inquisition was over.
We started walking home, legionnaire hats in one hand, melting ice creams in the other. Except for Ruth, who wore her hat and held her drink bottle and her ice cream and who trudged along bringing up the rear. Then, after our ice creams were gone, we chewed on the paddle-pop sticks, holding them in our mouths and twisting them until they snapped. The ends jutted out of our mouths like broken teeth and we walked along in silence, smoking the splintered stubs, gripping them between our sticky lips.
We were down past the tennis courts when a car sidled up. It slunk along beside us, keeping pace. The late-afternoon sunshine poured into its bronze paintwork. Then the driver’s window sank into its sill.
‘Like a lift home, girls?’
‘Geez, haven’t you ever heard of stranger danger, Mrs McCausley? You nearly gave us a heart attack!’
‘Stranger danger?’ she scoffed. ‘You won’t find any strangers around here.’
Not when she kept tabs on everyone like she did.
We piled onto the bench seat in the back of her boxy car, bums burning, legs scorched where they touched the cracked leather of the seat. All five of us squished in there. Bags on laps. Hats in hands. Paddle-pop stick fangs still drooping from our mouths.
‘How was school, girls?’ Mrs McCausley said. She patted her perm with her one free hand. Admired it in the rear-view mirror as she drove.
‘Good,’ we chorused.
‘Isn’t this heat dreadful?’ she complained. ‘Just revolting. Even my zinnias can’t cope. The whole garden’s wilting, and I’m wilting too.’
She laughed at herself, and glanced at us lined up along her bench seat.
‘I might have an ice cream this evening myself,’ she told us conspiratorially.
Mrs McCausley steered the car past cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac, each one looking deceptively like ours. She paused at an empty cross-street and then released the car on through and we coasted down the slope towards our street.
‘How’s that arm of yours, Cordelia?’ Mrs McCausley asked.
‘Fine,’ Cordie said.
I pulled my stick from my mouth then and gave Mrs McCausley the whole story. About Cordie and how Dr Adiga said she’d done a good job of breaking her arm, about Mr Avery and how he was the new teacher at our school, and about how the Showstopper was being held in the valley and not in the school hall this year.
‘But I can’t be in it —’ Ruth interrupted.
‘Right, Ruth can’t be in it because she’s only in Year Two and the Showstopper is just for Year Threes to Year Sixes. If there are any Year Sixes who want to be in it . . .’ I said, looking meaningfully at Cordie.
The hot wind through the window whipped Cordie’s hair across her cheeks. She parted it and peered benevolently through the curtains.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said to me.
‘Mr Avery, did you say? Unusual name,’ Mrs McCausley said. ‘Is he married? Or single? Which school did he transfer from?’
‘Shit a brick,’ Cordie muttered, ‘she asks a lot of questions.’
But to Mrs McCausley she said nothing.
‘I dunno. Is he married, Cordie? Where did he come from? He teaches Cordie’s 6A class,’ I clarified for Mrs McCausley. ‘They used to be 6H, but since Mr Avery they’ve turned into 6A.
‘He’s very hairy,’ I added descriptively.
I guess Cordie didn’t know if Mr Avery was married or not because she never bothered tell Mrs McCausley. Just like she didn’t know the answer to any of Mrs McCausley’s other questions about Mr Avery. Such as: which school did Mr Avery transfer from? And how old was he? Well, did he look older or younger than our parents? Was Mr Avery from around here?
‘He just moved here, Mrs McCausley,’ I said pointedly. ‘How could he be from around here if he only just moved in?’
‘I mean, Tikka,’ she said, ‘does he look like someone who might come from somewhere local, or could he have been born overseas?’
‘Either,’ I paused. ‘Both, Mrs McCausley.’ Because I couldn’t tell what the difference was.
I appealed to Cordie for help, but she must have been busy thinking over the offer to be in my skit. Because she turned to me and said: ‘You know the Showstopper, would it be a tragedy if I was in it?’
And for a moment I thought she was asking: would it be a problem if she was in the cast, then I realised she was talking about the play itself.
‘A tragedy? Would my skit be a tragedy?’
‘Yeah, would it be sad and could I die, and would everyone cry after I’d gone off stage?’
‘Cordelia! What a morbid thing to say!’ Mrs McCausley admonished.
But you had to admit: the idea was a good one. Cordie dying would get an audience reaction, all right. And if I made it a tragedy, I had a ready-made plot. All I had to do was watch the TV news.
* * *
We turned the corner into Macedon Close and Mrs McCausley let the car idle in front of her drive while we clambered out. I was behind Hannah and Laura, and I had to wait for the two of them to fix their hair before they’d move and release me. Cordie came last, her feet pushing against my backpack, her plaster cast clunking against the door.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘Thanks, Mrs McCausley.’
The Van Apfel girls crossed the cul-de-sac to their house on the opposite corner, Cordie walking alone mouthing some song to herself. Meanwhile, Hannah nicked Ruth’s hat, held it just above her reach and led her sister home like a dog.
Mrs McCausley bunny-hopped her car into the carport and turned off the engine.
‘You know,’ I called to her through her open car window as the thought occurred to me. ‘He was at the milk bar just before, Mrs McCausley. You only missed him by a few minutes.’
‘Who was?’
‘Mr Avery,’ I said. ‘If you’d come a bit sooner you could have seen him for yourself.’
And Mrs McCausley looked disappointed about that.
Laura and I went home to get changed, and then we walked straight back out the door and over to the Van Apfels’ place for a swim. Afterwards the five of us arranged our towels in wide stripes crisscrossing the lawn. It was too hot to bake our legs in the sun so we lay under the peppercorn tree.
There were crows in the tree that afternoon – three crows – and their beaks flashed in the blazing sunshine, their black backs almost blue. The hackles at their throats wobbled as they cawed. Ah-ah-ahhhh, ah-ah-ahhhh.
‘You wanna watch out,’ Laura warned Cordie. Cordie had one of her pet mice on her towel, where it sniffed and ran in circles. ‘Birds eat mice, you know. You wanna be careful the crows don’t pick its eyes out.’
‘Do they really?’ I said. ‘Pick out eyeballs, I mean.’
Everyone knew that birds ate mice but I’d never heard the eyeballs part.
‘She’s got more,’ Ruth said pragmatically, thumbing towards the laundry door where Cordie had three more white mice in a tank.
‘Don’t listen to them,’ Cordie cooed to the mouse that was in her palm now. She kissed his tufted fur, kissed his tail. Licked its tip.
‘You’ll be safe in here,’ she said. Then she tipped the tiny body down the inside of her swimming costume where it made a lump the size of an apricot. The mouse panicked and struggled. Squirmed inside the shiny fabric. Cordie closed her eyes in delight.
‘Don’t tickle,’ she commanded.
‘Cordie, that’s gross,’ Hannah said. ‘Get it out.’
‘It’s a sin!’ Ruth shrilled, and she sat up straight on her towel.
‘It’s a sin to put a mouse down your cossie? Does the Bible actually say that?’ My sister looked at Ruth sceptically.
‘Do crows really pick out eyeballs?’ I wanted to know and no one had bothered to say.
‘Yeah, the Bible says it’s gross and to stop being a weirdo,’ Hannah said. ‘C’mon, Cordie, what if Dad saw?’
‘Why would I ever care what Dad said?’ Cordie spoke savagely. ‘Anyway, it won’t matter soon.’
‘Fine, don’t listen to me. You never do,’ snapped Hannah.
‘Why won’t it matter?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening soon?’
Hannah glared at Cordie, who shrugged.
‘Why won’t it, Hannah? And do crows eat eyeballs? Why won’t you tell me if you know?’
But nobody answered me, and Hannah and Laura exchanged the sort of look that said they were keeping secrets.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. ‘Laura, tell me! Cordie? Come on, why won’t you tell me?’
But Cordie smiled coyly and ducked her chin. She looked satisfied having stirred up trouble. The mouse had settled now, and it was nestled in the centre of her chest so that the fabric of her swimming costume rose in a small mountain in the middle.
‘Looks like I’ve got three boobs,’ she said, and she patted the mouse affectionately through the fabric.
Above us, a crow cawed louder this time. Ah-ah-ahhhh, ah-ah-ahhhh, it groaned. It rose above the tree where it floated for a second, catching the breeze, before it went winging away.
‘See?’ Cordie said to her chest. ‘You’re safe in there. No crow can get you, can they? Besides, you could beat an old crow any day, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you,’ she purred.
The mouse turned and started scrabbling downwards towards her stomach and Cordie wriggled to give it more room to move.
‘A crow would win against a mouse,’ I corrected Cordie scornfully. How dare those older girls keep something from me? I looked at Cordie with disdain. ‘A crow’s much bigger. And it’s omnivorous. A crow would beat a mouse, pants down.’
There was silence for a moment while everyone considered what I’d said.
‘Did you just say “pants down”?’ Hannah asked cautiously.
Then her stomach started to convulse and I could see she was struggling to hold in her laughter. Her eyes grew shiny with it, her mouth puckered and she turned her face away. Then Laura let out a whoop and I saw that she was laughing too, and the pair of them started hooting and thumping the ground.
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What are you laughing at? Stop it!’
They collapsed into each other, squeezing one another’s shoulders, wiping their eyes. They’d just about get themselves under control and then they’d catch the other’s eye and that was it, they’d set each another off again. Leaning together, shaking with laughter.
‘Jesus, where’d you get that, Tik?’ Laura said eventually.
‘Yeah, where’d you hear that?’ Hannah asked, drawing a breath.
‘Did she get that from your friend Mr Avery?’ Laura asked Cordie.
She and Hannah started laughing again.
‘What? A crow would win,’ I said huffily, and I hitched my cossie higher.
‘Pants down!’ Hannah and Laura shrieked in unison.
I turned my face away in disgust.
‘It’s hands down, Tik.’ Hannah finally took pity on me and explained, and my cheeks burned with indignation.
‘I don’t know many crows who wear pants,’ my sister said.
‘I don’t know many crows who have hands,’ I shot back.
In the tree above us the crows (without pants, without hands) were stripping off leaves with their scissoring beaks. They cawed and flung bits of stick to the ground.
‘Shoo!’ Ruth said to them. ‘Shoo, shoo! Get lost!’
And Laura was stirred, then, to put on her grown-up voice. ‘I think we should all move away from the group of crows, now. Let’s go inside and get something to eat.’
And as we stood up and gathered our towels in our hands, as Cordie scooped her hands gently under the mouse that was still hammocked inside her cossie, the crows gave up too and they rose up in one single dark flurry and then they wheeled away on the wind.
‘And anyway,’ I said, trying to claw back the older girls’ respect and, at the same time, being too incensed to care. ‘It’s not called a group. When you see crows together like that, you’re supposed to call it a murder.’