Chapter 14
The black and grey van rushed across the middle lane of the Harbour Bridge. Max and Frank sat silently in the front. Their eyes were absently roaming the changing form of the north shore. Behind them Rane sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, his head down. He sought benediction from the forces in his mind as he willed his body to calm.
The road wound off the bridge and then into the swooping backs streets of Neutral Bay. They brushed through the parks and baylets, oddly idyllic in their seclusion. As the road blended into the arterial route to the north, Max ignored the stoplights and throttled the engine till it roared its fury into the traffic. They rode the road fast until they crested the headland and could see the vista of sweeping breakers rolling eternally toward the beaches of the north.
The storm had driven westward and the sun was a large orange ball across the lake as they sped into the peninsular suburb. Max allowed the engine to slow and the big van murmured heroically up the dusty track. The house was in darkness as the sun went out of view behind the cliffs. There was no splash of colour tonight, no summer mood.
There was no search. Rane went alone to the spot where she lay. He stood above his sister. In a moment he was there with her torment and her death and the large hands grew out of the darkness, taunting him to follow them back into the abyss. Rane smelled dead fish as his eyes again focussed on his dead sister. He bent and tried to bring her jeans into place, but her rigescent body was arched and it seemed her bones would fracture if he moved her. With his shirt placed carefully upon her exposed flesh, Rane began to tremble.
*
Max carried her home. He would not leave his daughter there like that. The police would see her on his terms. After her body was repaired and cleaned Dali was laid to rest on her bed and the pink sheet was tucked reverently beneath her chin. Max had tried to thumb the terror from her face but it was too late. The impressions of her final seconds had tempered the face that would go into the ground.
He asked Rane and Frank to leave him with her for a while. The playthings of her life lay sprinkled about her room. He always thought the drawing of his face was nothing but a melancholy patch on the wall, but she loved it and displayed it proudly. She had often told him that she kept it as the happiest point in her memory.
Max sank to a desperate stillness, an impercipient sufferer in his purgatory, a dullard in the furnace of grief. For an hour he stared at her face, the horrid images of her pain seemed incongruous to the sublime love he felt for her. Max bent and kissed his daughter and left the room.
*
The night had erased the last traces of twilight and a candle flickered solemnly in the lounge. The big beat of Count Basie filled a lot of the empty space. The American bandleader and pianist was Dali’s favourite. Max’s face was taut and a muscle twitched as he ground his teeth in a hopeless anger.
Rane waited on the verandah to watch the rise of the moon. He watched its pale reflection glide ever so slowly away from the chalky shores.
‘You okay?’ asked Frank softly.
Rane did not reply. He turned and looked at Frank with eyes the colour of clay.
‘I’m taking the van for a bit, mate.’ Frank continued. ‘Have to settle a few things. Be back in an hour or so. You’ll hang on, eh?’
Then the tall languid form of Frank Donleavy submerged itself beneath the verandah.
*
They sat silent and still as he told them. A warm, humid air pushed the curtains into the room. The surf could be heard as a distant relevant sound that bespoke culpability; but no one heard it.
‘Ag! My God!’ exclaimed Marit in Afrikaans. ‘Frank, you must return to them. You must take something for their grief.’
Juno and Lamont avoided each other’s eyes as their mother got up to search the flat for an appropriate gift. Frank phoned the police. He gave few details; the victim’s name and address was all he said.
‘We’re going with you, Dad.’ Lamont said gruffly.
Juno was staring through the window, half watching the images of sadness inside.
*
The police were businesslike and ever mindful of the anguish of the night. They offered comfort with their words as they accompanied Max Hollard to the bamboo grove. No one had mentioned the movement of the girl’s corpse. Police have families and tonight they understood. Sometime later they would find the weapon that caused the terrible death.
The dirt track that led to their home had become a circus, with bright lights and crowds. Voices were yelling as television crews jostled to film the Hollard house. One crew was washed down the stone steps by a torrent of garden-hose water. Once the ambulance had removed Dali’s body to the morgue the sightseers retired to their television sets to catch a glimpse of themselves at the murder scene.
A Sydney television station broadcast that the young Asian female had been a frequent visitor to the lake. Strangers appeared on screen to tell of their intimate knowledge of a girl they scarcely knew.
It was a young policeman with his mind still with the girl’s mutilated body who said it all upon his return to the station. ‘Must have been a lonely tyke, eh? Not many friends came forward.’
*
The track was quiet and eerie in the aftermath of murder. The moon was slipping behind the cliff top. Far away in the bush an owl spoke. It was answered a few moments later by another on the cliff where gums and wattle grow like curly whiskers on a craggy face. The world was asleep.
‘I’m glad Dad’s gone.’ said Rane suddenly.
Juno and Lamont shook their eyeballs and tried to concentrate, to hear and to see, to respond and to comfort. Strain had slowed them to a morose droop. No simile was potent enough to describe their mood.
‘I can’t believe it!’ croaked Lamont as he fidgeted with his fingers.
They sat outside on the verandah.
‘It’s too much to handle.’ cried Juno as Rane awkwardly sat beside her. ‘How much more can a person take?’
Rane eyed her intently with a new curiosity. He had surmised the ineffectiveness of his trying to assuage their feelings of guilt. He and everyone his sister knew were responsible for the tragedy. Just one word, this way or that, by someone or other, may
have thwarted fate from its invidious purpose.
A radio sang a song of the sixties and the three o’clock pips were heard above the final bars of the melody. A certain chill descended from the clear sky and laid a wetness on the earth, like a strange summer dew dropped from a tearful moon as it moved offstage.
Lamont yawned and Juno lifted her eyelids, only to drop them again. Venetian blinds of tiredness. Juno excused herself and went to McLuhan’s room where she crawled into a ball and slept. It was a male’s hermitage. Pendulous boobs hung from a rubber Bob Dylan on a cross above the bed. The rest of the wall was cluttered with memorabilia as a weird tale of McLuhan’s style.
‘You gotta admit Dad’s a demon with the hose.’ Rane twisted his lips into something that could have been mistaken for a smile.
‘They make me puke!’ Lamont spat his words with venom. He looked at Rane as one looks at a stranger in a busy street.
Rane’s eyes suddenly misted as if his thoughts were roaming through a fog. He began knocking his knuckles together in a broken rhythm. ‘I saw his hands, mate.’
Lamont became awake with a terrible start. The gorilla hands of the pervert in the park! The guy had been following them. Dali had said something. What the fuck was it?
‘Hands like an ape?’
‘Yeah!’ answered Rane with a sudden explosion. ‘Like an ape! That’s right! An ape!’ He sat bolt upright, statue still, as if his brain had forgotten his body, leaving it without its motor running.
‘We saw him!’ shuddered Lamont with a stab of memory. ‘We laughed at his hands. He was following us round the park. Jesus! She said he was your next-door neighbour!’
The act of savagery had been witnessed. The killer was now identified. Rane had decided that atonement called for reprisal. He found no paradox in what he schemed to do. While four men planned an execution of their own, he was executing his own plan.
