Ghost Child (24 page)

I
wasn’t surprised – not at all surprised – to hear that Lauren was having it off with an old guy. In my opinion, if you raise a kid without a father figure they’ll grow up looking for one. It was unfortunate that it ended up all over the newspapers, but still, Lauren had made something of herself and I was pleased about that. I always got the feeling that Lauren was basically a good kid.

I’d heard rumours that one of the other Cashmans, the baby, Hayley, made a real pig’s ear of her life after she left DeCastella Drive. You’d think because she was the youngest, and the least involved, she’d have the fewest problems, but I guess you never can tell how kids will turn out. People on Barrett couldn’t stop talking about Lauren after the brother was killed. There was a
lot of gossip about her, made worse by the fact that the Department let the house go to ruin. When you’ve got a house like that in town, falling down, the stories get more absurd as the years go on. I’d heard people saying, ‘The kids that lived there were raised in a cult. They all had different fathers and their mother dyed their hair so they’d all look the same.’

I told them they were being ridiculous.

I’d heard people saying, ‘There was a girl who lived there who was disturbed. She did something to her brother and the mum took the rap.’

Whenever people told me that, I’d say, ‘People who don’t know the facts should keep their big mouths shut.’

I do know the facts. I know what happened in that house. I’ve known it for years. Was Lauren involved? Yes, she was. People were right about that. She was involved, and when she was a kid it made sense to us adults – the cops, the judge, the social workers – to keep that fact to ourselves. You might think that’s wrong, but unless you’ve got all the facts, I don’t think you can really comment. It took us enough time to piece it all together. It’s not an easy story to tell. The version I’ve settled on is Lauren’s. She was the one who first coughed it up, that long afternoon after Jake died.

Remember when Lauren ran into her mother in the hall of the Barrett cop shop? I could see that something was wrong. She didn’t run into her mother’s arms. They both took a step back.

So, after Lauren got back to her room I popped in to have a quick chat with her. I knew I couldn’t ask her specific questions on the record yet, but I wanted to know what was going through her head, and why she reacted to her mother like that.

The social worker who had taken Lauren into the hall – by that time, we had what seemed like one social worker in every room – was angry and wanted to know how Lauren had been able to run into her mum like that, and why she wasn’t told that Lisa was in the same part of the cop shop. I explained to her that it was an accident, but she looked ropeable.

Lauren, on the other hand, didn’t look angry at all. When I asked her if she was okay she just nodded, yes, and then said, ‘Can I tell you something?’ I asked her if it was about Jacob and she nodded again, and I could see she was keen to get out whatever was bugging her. I mean, I’ve got kids, and I’ve seen them all churned up when they’ve got something inside, and they just can’t settle until it’s out.

The way I’ve pieced it together, from Lauren’s account and then later Lisa and Peter’s versions, the day had started much like any other. Jacob had gone off to school in the morning with Lauren. The other two – Hayley and Harley – stayed home. They weren’t old enough for school.

The boyfriend, Peter, wasn’t working. He stayed in on the couch all day pulling cones. When Jacob and
Lauren came in after school they mucked around a bit. Lisa was trying to fix dinner. Peter was still sitting around getting stoned. The kids started making a racket so Lisa sent the kids down to their rooms, where they banged around.

Then, from what I understand, it went quiet. That probably didn’t bother Peter too much, but Lisa started calling out, ‘Come and get your bloody tea!’ When she got no response she went down the hall and flung open the door to Jake’s room. There was Jake with his pants down, waving his little pecker around, and Hayley was stripped out of her nappy. From what I understand, they were having a bit of a look at each other.

Lisa said something like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ and Jake said, ‘I wasn’t doing nothing!’, but Harley pointed and said, ‘Jake got his pecker out!’

It was at that point that Peter came to see what the fuss was about. When he saw Jake with his pants down and Hayley on the floor with no pants on, he went ballistic. He said to Lisa, ‘This isn’t the first time he’s done this. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen him the other day, playing with his sister in a way that’s not right.’

Now, I don’t discount the possibility that Jake was having a good look at Hayley. It’s entirely possible. You put little kids together, from time to time they might strip down, they might have a look, it’s a one-off thing normally, and no harm done. So maybe Jake did have a bit of a squizz at his sister, a bit of: you show me
yours, I’ll show you mine. But at the end of the day, what does it matter? It’s not important. What happened next, that’s what’s important.

In his statement, Peter said he told Lisa he’d handle it. ‘You’ve got to show him it’s wrong,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to stop it now or else he’ll grow up abusing kids, and don’t ask me how I know it, but I know it. You let me take care of it.’

Jacob, remember, was five.

Peter told us he gave Jake a quick kick up the rear and Jake began to cry, so he picked him up and flung him against his bed. He shooed the other kids out and shut Jake in his bedroom. Then he went back to the lounge room, where Lisa was putting a nappy back on Hayley.

Jake kept calling out, ‘I didn’t do nothing. It weren’t me. Why do I gotta stay in here?’

This must have gone on for a while. Lisa told us she got sick of the hollering. She walked down the hall with Peter, and together, they confronted Jake in his room, telling him to shut up and what did he think he was doing, and so on. Alcohol was being consumed. Peter was going back and forward to the kitchen, getting himself beers. Lisa was on the rum and cola, and, of course, they’d been on the cones all day.

I don’t know how long the harassment went on, but after a bit Lisa and Peter gave it up and went back to the lounge room to watch TV. Lauren told us that Jake was
supposed to stay in his room, but he crept down the hall and popped his head in the lounge, wanting to know if he could come out now.

Lisa said she leapt off the couch and chased him down the hall, but Jacob beat her to the bedroom and shut himself in.

Lauren was a good kid. She put an ear to the door and heard her brother crying. She knocked on the door and said, ‘Jake, it’s me,’ and he opened up for her. He was sitting on the bed, saying, ‘It’s not fair. I didn’t do nothing.’ And then he said, ‘I hate this house. I’m gonna run away.’

Well, Lauren did what kids will do. She bolted into the lounge room, saying, ‘Jacob’s going to run away!’

We got two versions of what happened next and, I warn you, neither makes pleasant reading.

Peter told us, ‘Lisa loses it. She runs down the hall and she’s completely off her nut, just completely out of control. What you gotta remember is I don’t know this chick very well, right. I’ve been in that house, like, six weeks. I mean, shit, mate, she’s just out of control with those kids.’

He said, ‘She slammed the door. I was stuck on the outside. I couldn’t even guess what was goin’ on. All I could hear was the bloody shoutin’. I pushed the door open. Jacob was just, like, crouched on the floor.

‘Harley and Lauren were up on the bunk. They were, like, crouched together, on the top bunk.’

He said, ‘Jake was crawling around. It was like he was blind, or close to it. He was crawlin’ around in circles.

‘Lisa was near the window. The other kids were shoutin’ at Jacob from up the top bunk, just shoutin’ and hollerin’. It was like a poltergeist or whatever had got into ’em, and Lisa was eggin’ ’em on, saying,
Jump on him, jump on him, jump on him
.

‘The next thing I saw, Lauren was coming down off the top bunk, and landing on her brother’s skull.’

Now, that wasn’t quite how Lisa told it. She coughed up a slightly different story. She told us that she’d had enough of Jake. ‘He was sookin’ and complainin’ and carryin’ on, and I couldn’t stand it no more, so I went out back to have a ciggie,’ she said.

‘I come inside, and Peter, that arsehole, has gone back into Jake’s room and he’s taken the other kids in there with him and the door was shut, and I couldn’t see nothin’. I could just hear bangin’.

She was sitting opposite me at the interview table when she told me this. Her face, I’ll never forget it, was the face of somebody who felt so hard done by.

‘I got the door open and Jake was on the floor,’ she said. ‘The kids were in there, all the kids, all crowded around Jake, and he was carrying on, saying, ‘I didn’t want to look!’ Peter was growing more enraged. He reached over and stripped the nappy off Hayley – it was one of those Huggies ones – and it was all heavy and foul and stinking, and he started stripping Jake’s shorts
off and trying to shove him into the dirty nappy. He was shouting, ‘You want to act like a baby, you can dress like a baby.’

Jake was protesting, ‘I’m not a baby!’ Peter replied, ‘Then why are you always sooking and crying like a baby?’ He forced the nappy onto Jake, saying to the other kids, ‘Come and have a look at your new baby brother.’

Lisa told us that
she
ordered the other kids – not Hayley, because she was too small, but Harley and Lauren – to get up onto the top bunk, to get them out of the way. Like Peter, she said Jacob had adopted the foetal position on the floor, and was circling around on his side, like a dog trying to escape a beating.

Lisa told us, ‘Peter was out of control. I told the other kids, “Get up on the bunk, get out of the way.”’

Lauren remembered it differently. She told us that she’d climbed on to the top bunk, with Harley, of her own accord.

‘We wanted to get away,’ she said. ‘We were scared.’

She told us they’d cowered together, near the ceiling, but the mother looked up and saw them there, and said, ‘Jump, Lauren! Jump! Jump on him!’

I’ve tried to imagine what that must have been like for Lauren. She was six years old. She said she felt her eyes bulging and her head throbbing and all she could hear was the chanting, ‘
Jump on him, jump down, jump on him, jump down
.’

And she leapt.

Lauren didn’t know how long Jake lay on the floor after she leapt. She said he’d stopped moving. He’d stopped trying to find a safe place. He’d stopped crying, and everybody went quiet. Lauren told us that she was praying, ‘Come on Jake! Wake up!’ and her mum was cursing and Peter was, too. And yes, they tried to bring Jake around by putting him in the bathtub.

It was Peter who told us that. He said, ‘I wanted to call an ambulance, but Lisa was freakin’ out. She was saying, “They’ll take the kids off me!” So I helped her put him in the bath and run the water on him, but he didn’t come round.

‘I said to Lisa, you’re a dumb moll. Look at him, he’s out cold. We’ve got to get help. The kids were just carryin’ on so much. We took Jake out of the bath and put him in dry clothes on the lounge-room floor.’

And, of course, we knew that Lisa did call the ambulance. She called triple-O and said, ‘My kid’s been bashed.’

Now, I gather that Lauren has formed the opinion, in her own mind, that she caused Jake’s death by jumping off that bunk. I want to tell you: I’m not so sure about that. Yes, Jake had a dent in the head, but that could just as well have come from one of the adults shoving him in that damn bath. Maybe he took a kick in the head from Peter or even from Lisa, that they aren’t owning up to. We don’t know. Nobody knows. The point is, Jake died at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend,
and I defy anybody to say different. And that’s why it made no sense to make the whole thing about Lauren jumping off the bunk public. What would have been the point? She wasn’t to blame. The terror she felt that day, I don’t want to think about it. So yes, we told the judge the whole story, but not the press, and I’m only guessing that more than a few of the social workers knew about it, because before long, a version of what happened was doing the rounds. But the end result was, Lisa went away for fifteen years; and Peter went away, too.

I would have liked for the parents to have got a bit more punishment, because in my opinion, whichever one of them was telling the story that was closest to the truth, both were monsters, and Lauren was just a kid. Our hope for her – my hope, anyway – was that she’d either forget it or put it behind her. In any case I wanted her to get on with her life, but I see now that’s a bit hard to do, when you’re carrying stuff like that around.

If Harley had asked me that day in the Niagara what I remembered about what happened to Jake, I would have told him, ‘I don’t remember much.’ Because that’s true: I don’t remember much.

I remember that Jake had always been a good boy. It was Harley who was a handful. Harley had got into scraps and he liked to carry on. Harley fell out of trees and pulled stuff out of cupboards and drew on the walls. Jake was not like that. When he got smacked it was for no reason and even then, he wouldn’t cry out. He’d sulk a bit. He’d object to the injustice of it, but he didn’t cry out.

We were pretty close. Sometimes, at night, if we’d been whacked around the head for something or other, he’d sneak down from his bunk and come into my room
and we’d tickle each other, on the bottom of the feet. We’d try not to laugh. We knew if we got caught there’d be hell to pay.

We weren’t supposed to lie, either, except when Mum told us to, so I think that Jake was telling the truth when he said he hadn’t touched Hayley, not that it helped him.

She told me to lie that day. She told me to lie to the police and to lie to the social worker and to lie in court. I used to wonder whether she did that to protect me, but I’ve got to be realistic. When I finally broke down and told police the truth she didn’t go crazy trying to shield me from my own admissions. She went nuts about the fact that I’d dobbed on her. Never once did I hear from anyone that she’d said, ‘Look, Lauren had nothing to do with this. Okay, it wasn’t a stranger, it was me, or it was him, but it wasn’t her.’ I thought maybe, before she died, there would be a letter, a note, something, because of course we never said a word to each other after that day with the police on Barrett, but there was nothing.

I’ve asked myself why I broke down that day, why I blabbed, and I think the closest I can get to an explanation is that I wasn’t frightened of telling the truth. That came later, with people I didn’t know that well, but there comes a point when you just can’t lie any more, not to people you love, and I suppose I reached that point with myself, and in the car with Harley, that day we drove out to his mum’s place in Exford.

We were maybe an hour from her door. I took a breath. I said, ‘Harley, I’ve got to tell you something.’

He said, ‘You don’t have to say anythin’.’

I said, ‘I do. I have to tell you this. I jumped, Harley. I jumped off the bunk.’

I waited for him to steer off the road, but he didn’t. He just didn’t, and I suppose there was a minute there when I thought, ‘He hasn’t heard me. I’m going to have to say it again,’ but he’d heard me. He said, ‘I know.’

I said, ‘You do?’

He said, ‘Yeah.’

I said, ‘Do you know everything?’

He said, ‘I reckon I do. They went ballistic because Jake was supposedly touching up Hayley, yeah? But I reckon that’s not right.’

I said, ‘I don’t know whether he did or not. I don’t think it’s right, either.’

Harley said, ‘He was what, five?’

I said, ‘Five.’

He said, ‘So they went nuts and they had us going crazy, too. This isn’t news to me.’

I said, ‘How do you know?’

He said, ‘How do
you
know?’

I said, ‘I was older.’

He said, ‘Yeah, but we were both just kids.’

It was such a relief to hear those words:
We were both just kids.

We didn’t talk much after that. We smoked cigarettes.
We made small comments about the things we saw out the windows. We listened to the radio. Freeway turned into suburban road, and then into the gravel outside his mum’s place. There was a long moment of silence in the car, and then Harley said, ‘Well, we’re home.’

From my seat behind the dirty windscreen, I could see what Harley couldn’t: his mother was standing behind the screen door waiting for us to move. Harley went to open his door. Ruby came out on the porch, leaving the door swinging behind her. She had one hand on a walking stick. She was wearing some kind of robe.

Looking at her, I didn’t feel anything. I just thought, ‘So that’s the woman who raised my brother.’ I tried to conjure up some emotion about that, but there was none.

She took a few steps across the porch and said, ‘Hey, honey.’

Harley had got out of his side of the car. He said, ‘Hey, honey.’ This ‘honey’ business is a joke between them. She calls him honey; he calls her honey; they both called Tony honey.

I looked over the roof of the car.

‘You must be Lauren,’ she said.

I said, ‘Hello, Mrs Porter.’

What was she thinking, at that moment? I didn’t know how much she’d read in the newspapers. Harley had told me that she wouldn’t give ‘a rat’s arse’ about the affair with Bass but that she’d be terribly concerned
about Baby Boyce because she herself lived with a disability. She’d want to know what I thought about whether or not the child would have lived or died.

Harley was two steps ahead of me, on his way up to the porch, but Ruby wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me. I walked toward her. She dropped her cane. I went to shake her hand, but she gathered me into a bosom that smelled of tobacco. I wasn’t used to being that close to people. I didn’t like it at all. ‘Lauren,’ she said. ‘The long-lost Lauren Cashman.’

We curled like kittens into the Papysan chairs. We talked a bit. We had some kind of lentil dish for tea and we drank Bacardi. It wasn’t long before I found that I was no longer sitting upright and trying to be polite. Ruby kicked off her shoes and when Tony came in he gave me a big bear hug and undid the buttons at the centre of his shirt. Harley put his silicon arm on the coffee table, upright, and put a cigarette between the fingers.

At some point, I began to have fun. The evening wore on. I must have been tired and maybe I even nodded off for a moment, because I felt Tony tucking a quilt around my chair. Part of me wanted to feign sleep, so I could hear what they might say about me when they thought I wasn’t listening, but sleep came, and apparently it was only when Harley had enough of my snoring that he kicked my ankle and escorted me to my room.

I wanted to sleep in the room that had been his as
a child, but he told me to bugger off and put me in the spare room instead.

I woke to the sound of Ruby in the kitchen, hobbling between the wooden benches.

I said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Porter.’

She said, ‘For the love of God, Lauren. The three-years-olds at the childcare centre call me Ruby, so I don’t see why you don’t.’

She is Ruby to me now, of course, and I suppose I’d have to say that she’s also … well, not family, but one of my dear friends. Harley is my brother. He’s also my flatmate. We live together on Sydney’s northern beaches. I’m no longer an aide, I’m at nurse’s college. Harley lets me live rent-free.

We don’t see much of Hayley. There’s no animosity between us. It’s just that whenever we go to Melbourne she says she can’t fit us in, or see us for long. I went through the process of telling her what I remembered about DeCastella Drive, but I’m not sure what any of it means to her. All she said was, ‘I don’t remember Jake,’ and then, ‘I don’t want to talk about it with Jezeray around.’

As for my relationship with Jacob, well, in the week I spent at Exford I spoke to Ruby about him. She wanted me to do so from the comfort of her expansive lap, with my head buried against her soft bosom, but I kept my distance and hid myself behind a swirl of cigarette smoke. She listened and said things like,
‘Every thing happens for a reason,’ and ‘You must have been so afraid.’

I sobbed so hard that I felt I had to apologise to her the next morning, but she dismissed my concerns with a wave of the spatula and went on making pancakes.

After that, I went through a stage where I had to say Jacob’s name out loud, to hear how it sounded. I suppose it’s part of the process of owning something new, to acknowledge that there was a little boy whose name was Jacob Cashman and, however much I wish it were otherwise, the last contact I had with him was on the floor in his bedroom in DeCastella Drive, with him curled into the foetal position, desperately trying to avoid a blow from above. That’s the way it is.

Now, when people ask me whether I’ve got any siblings, I no longer say no, but nor do I say, ‘I had two brothers but one is deceased,’ the way some people do. I just say, ‘Yes, I do.’

I’m Harley’s sister. I’m Jacob’s sister too, obviously, but the difference is, Harley’s in my life and, I hope, my future; Jacob’s in my past, and in my bones.

Would it be right to say that I miss him? Yes, it would. It would also be right to say that there are some things I wish I knew.

Did I try to comfort him, as he lay curled on the floor that day? I don’t know.

Did I say anything to him, before the paramedics came to take him away? I don’t know.

Did I whisper to him, ‘Please, Jacob, don’t die?’

I don’t know.

Does he know how much I wished he’d lived? I don’t know.

I talked to Ruby about whether we should find where Jake is buried. I had this idea that maybe I could talk to him, through the soil, and perhaps ask for his forgiveness, but she said, ‘You don’t need to visit Jacob’s grave to speak to Jacob. If you want to talk to him, Lauren, you just go ahead and speak.’

So I do. Late at night, when I’m alone, I say, ‘Jacob, I’m sorry.’

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I say it with such fervour that sometimes I’m sure that he can hear me. I say it so desperately that sometimes I’m sure that I can will him back to life. But Jacob is gone. He’s long been gone. He’s also what those of us who are left behind are not, and will never be: he’s an innocent soul and he’s completely at peace.