Authors: Anne Buist
‘I was right. They were too plastered to recall that the car didn’t start, until
we jogged their memory. Travis borrowed Rick’s car and gave him a ride to work the
next morning.’
If Travis had left Chloe in his car while he was watching football, he would have
needed to transfer her. Or her body.
‘Have they found anything?’
‘Nothing on Rick’s car yet. It didn’t look like it had been cleaned. A couple of
samples are with the lab.’
‘Did Travis or his mate come up with anything else?’
‘Mate still saying he didn’t see anything, just threw the keys at Travis so he could
go to bed. Travis still denying he had Chloe.’
‘Can I ask you for a favour, Damian?’
‘If I can.’
‘Can you get me a copy of an old police file, a Welbury one? Amber Hardy’s.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘No,’ said Natalie, thinking he might work it out anyway. Half-hoping he would.
Georgia’s biological mother, Lee Draper, was sixty. She had served fifteen years
of a twenty-year term. Georgia would have been in her late teens when Lee was released.
Natalie wondered if she had been informed at the time or if Lee had ever tried to
contact her. Natalie wasn’t certain what she hoped to achieve by seeing Lee, only
that she was looking for anything that would shed light on Georgia’s case. She wanted
to be able to make a clear cut assessment of Lee: either a monster or a domestic-violence
victim who had done the best she could for her baby in the circumstances.
The journey took more than an hour. Lee’s house was a compact weatherboard with a
well-kept garden and an early model Corolla in the drive.
A thin woman in jeans and T-shirt, short grey hair tucked behind her ears, looked
Natalie up and down from behind the screen door. She clicked the lock and opened
it.
‘You can come in but you’ll have to put up with me smoking. Else we can sit out the
back.’
The smell of stale smoke was strong and the weather mild, so Natalie chose the backyard
option. Lee looked older than sixty, her skin dry and taut as if she had been drained
of life. There was a suggestion of Georgia in the bones of her face. Mother and daughter
shared the same clear blue eyes but in Lee they were more focused and self-aware.
‘Does Georgia know you’re here?’ Lee asked, stubbing
her cigarette in a beer can
on the ground beside her chair.
Natalie hesitated. She had asked Georgia’s permission to see her mother. But she’d
never specified which one.
‘Didn’t think so,’ said Lee. ‘I’m an embarrassment. Certainly to Virginia. My half-sister.’
‘Have you ever spoken to Georgia?’ Natalie noted a child’s plastic bike and wondered
who it belonged to.
Lee had seen her look. ‘The screws told me it was a bad idea and I figured she’d
find me if she wanted to. I’m still her mother; I’d always help her if she asked.
The bike’s for my bloke’s grandkid when she visits.’
‘You must have…been curious,’ said Natalie, mindful that Lee had evaded the question.
Lee leaned back, head against the weatherboard wall. ‘Hard not to be. I watched her
for a whole week. Sat in the coffee shop at the hospital and watched her come off
her shifts. Never said a word to her.’
Too embarrassed? Afraid? Natalie had no idea what this woman was thinking. If she
had been mentally ill once, she wasn’t now.
Lee lit another cigarette. ‘So what do you want to know?’
‘Tell me about Georgia’s early years.’
Lee inhaled and watched the smoke as she blew out. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Yes, but it was an important time for Georgia. She lost you, then had to move in
with her aunt and uncle who were strangers.’
‘Losing me wouldn’t have fussed her. It would have been losing her father.’
Natalie watched her. This wasn’t the time for a lecture on the importance of the
primary attachment figure.
‘She wasn’t planned, you understand,’ said Lee. ‘I was a
good Catholic girl and even
if I hadn’t been I wouldn’t have thought to get the pill. Wouldn’t have an abortion;
still had hopes.’ She coughed and the mucus sounded heavy on her lungs. ‘We weren’t
married, but Cliff was older; he had a house. My parents cut me off; holier than
thou. It was all right that my mother fucked a married man, but me? I was a tart.
Virginia must’ve thought I was getting my just deserts.’
‘You knew Virginia?’
‘Met her once. Her mother dragged her to our house when I was a kid. Must have been
when my old man’s annulment came through. I was only young and the language was pretty
colourful, I can tell you.’
‘You and Cliff?’ Natalie prompted Lee to return to her own story.
Lee was on a roll. It sounded like she had been waiting a long time to tell this
story.
‘Cliff was a cunt. A bully. Weighed probably a hundred kilos and I was about the
same size then as I am now. He used to tell his mates that he’d put me on top and
give me a spin. Offered me to them as well more than once.’ Lee took another drag
and briefly seemed lost in thought. ‘He was violent, but you probably know that.
Didn’t help me in court though. Male jury, mostly. He broke my nose once.’
There was still a slight bump.
‘But fuck me dead, he loved Georgia like there was no other creature on the planet
as pretty or as smart. I swear, from the time she was three months old she knew his
voice and was always looking out for him. Her whole face lit up whenever he was around.’
‘How did you feel about this relationship with Cliff?’ Natalie wondered if Lee saw
it as another rejection. Maybe as Georgia had when Paul had loved his ‘girls’ so
openly.
‘I liked being a mother. At first, anyway. It made me feel, I dunno, like I could
do something, you know what I mean?’
Natalie nodded. She had heard the same thing often from new mothers, particularly
younger ones whose motivation for having a baby was to have someone who would love
them exclusively. Except that children need other people in their lives, and that
need could be easily misconstrued by these vulnerable young women.
‘She wasn’t a difficult baby but I wasn’t doing it easy. We were living way out of
town in the middle of nowhere and we only had Cliff’s car. He used to go to work
and leave me behind. It was a way of keeping me dependent. I had no one. He sometimes
came back with mates and they’d get wasted. Mostly beer and dope, but whatever they
could get their hands on.’
‘Did you use?’ asked Natalie, thinking it would be hard not to if drugs were the
only escape on offer.
‘No.’ There was a proud edge to Lee’s tone. ‘A bit of weed but pretty much nothing.
I wanted to stay clean to keep Georgia safe.’ She paused. ‘It’s one thing Georgia
probably should know, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.’
‘That you stayed clean for her?’
‘No,’ said Lee. ‘That I killed him for her.’
Natalie tried not to react, but it didn’t matter. Lee wasn’t looking at her.
‘Cliff had been drinking all day. He was a big man and could drink more than most
and still look okay.’ She looked at Natalie. ‘Georgia needed to go to bed; it was
hot and she was cranky. Cliff wanted her to stay up and we fought. It must have been
ten o’clock before he said he’d put her to bed.’ Lee took a longer pause, lips pursed.
‘They were there a long time. I went to find out why and Georgia was lying in
her
cot, naked. It had been a hot night and she used to pull her clothes off. Cliff thought
it was funny having her parade around nude.’
Lee lit another cigarette and they both watched the glow of the tobacco and the smoke
that whirled around her face as she spoke.
‘He wasn’t touching her. She wouldn’t have understood. But I did. I’d been played
with…
abused
…by…it doesn’t matter. I knew where it would go, what it would do to her
later, and I knew then without a doubt.’
The cigarette smoke hung in the air. Natalie wondered how much Lee’s story was a
rationalisation that she had murdered her partner for Georgia rather than for herself.
It would have made her a hero in the women’s prison. For some reason it hadn’t moved
the jury.
‘He had his dick out,’ Lee said, no emotion in her voice. ‘He was coming. Globs of
cum shooting into the air and over Georgia’s blanket. I turned and went to the kitchen.
I knew exactly what I was going to do and I knew it wasn’t wrong. I’d do it again
in an instant.’
She had sharpened the carving knife.
‘I remember how it sounded on the steel. It was like I was getting my strength from
it. I knew I had only one chance. Like I told you, he was a big man; a big, angry
man. If he got the knife I’d be dead and there would be no one to save Georgia.
‘He was turning around as I came back into Georgia’s room. He’d been drinking and
he had that mellowness you get after sex. He saw me and saw the knife but I don’t
think it ever occurred to him I was going to use it.’
She had. Five times.
‘That’s why I got a long sentence,’ Lee said without
emotion. ‘Made no difference
that he was wanking himself over his baby daughter.’
‘Why not?’
Lee looked at Natalie. ‘Because I never told anyone.’
Like Amber. Shame? Because she felt she deserved to go to gaol or because she didn’t
think she’d be believed?
‘It must be hard then to make sense of what’s happened with Georgia,’ said Natalie.
‘I’ve come to realise that women just have shit lives mostly. It’s a man’s world
and women get the short end of every deal.’
Natalie nodded, not in agreement but in empathy.
‘She was always a man’s woman,’ said Lee. ‘So she was lucky there. Found herself
a better husband than I did.’
Natalie raised an eyebrow.
‘There’s a few good uns,’ said Lee laughing. ‘Paul came to see me, you know.’
No, Natalie didn’t know.
‘Brought Olivia with him. He was curious about me, I think. I suppose he wanted to
play happy families; they’d already lost the older girl by then. Georgia didn’t know;
they were here for a holiday. He said he was gonna tell her when the time was right.’
‘Then Olivia died.’
‘Yes. Paul came to see me and cried. I never saw him again, never met the others.’
‘So how do you feel towards Georgia?’
‘Georgia is my daughter. My only child. A daughter I never wanted and who loved her
father more than me. We all make mistakes. I was able to give her a life that she
couldn’t have had with me. Cliff would never have left us alone. Never have left
her alone. Single mothers were still a
bit on the outer back then and I would have
had no support. I did the right thing.’
The self-justification didn’t really answer the question.
‘What do you think happened to her children?’
‘SIDS runs in families,’ said Lee. ‘Maybe it was in Paul’s. I read Olivia had a history
of asthma. Kids die of asthma. It’s on the increase, did you know? More than doubled
in the last few years. Looked it up on the net.’
‘So you believe Georgia is innocent?’
Georgia’s cool blue eyes looked at her out of Lee’s wrinkled face. ‘I
know
she’s
innocent. She’s my daughter. The police thought that made her a murderer. But I was
the one standing watching that cunt abuse her. A mother protects her child at any
cost.’
Natalie rang Jacqueline Barrett from the cab as it slowed into the peak hour crush.
‘Can you tell me about the knitting needles?’
‘Reporters got it wrong.’
‘So Georgia didn’t try to induce an abortion?’
‘I don’t know what she did or didn’t do, I only have the facts.’
‘So what facts did the reporters embellish?’
‘A scalpel.’
‘A
scalpel
?’
‘Yes, a scalpel. With her blood on it.’
Natalie stood in the garden drinking sparkling wine, watching the boats in the harbour.
Her head was crowded with thoughts of murder and abuse. The forensic psychiatrists
milling around her must have had similar experiences, but they were probably smart
enough not to go to cocktail
receptions when they did. She decided she couldn’t manage
small talk and started walking towards Paddington. She found a funky restaurant that
served Thai with an Australian twist, and ate alone, but with thoughts of Georgia,
Paul and Lee, as well as the three lost children and the dead Cliff keeping her company.
She didn’t notice the food.
Natalie went back to her room and flicked on the television. It was 10 p.m. and she
wondered what Liam was doing. Did she want to see him again? Annoyingly, yes. Maybe
it was stupid not to make the most of the opportunity. It wasn’t like he was this
free all that often.
She was playing with her phone when the message came up.
Fancy a fuck?
She typed
Bar in 20.
The walk took her thirty minutes and he was there waiting.
‘No drink already ordered?’ she asked in mock surprise.
‘Not sure what your post work-function drink is.’
‘Guess.’
She waited for him to joke about cocksucking cowboys but he didn’t. ‘Bourbon, neat?’
They lingered over a second drink. Liam looked more relaxed than she’d seen him before.
Back in the suite there were papers scattered over the table from Liam’s meeting.
She couldn’t resist a cursory look, but nothing related to either Tiphanie’s case
or the paedophile ring.
Liam started to undress her, stopping her doing it herself, kissing each part of
her, tongue lingering over her scars. She struggled to stand still but he insisted,
saying he wanted to take his time and enjoy her. He carried her effortlessly to the
bed then worked her over with his tongue until she was desperate for him, but he
still made her wait. Finally she couldn’t
bear the exquisite touch on her clit any
longer and she let herself come, with him still fully clothed and watching her.
‘Your turn now,’ she said, undressing him. As she sucked him he was touching her
and she came again.