Rocking Horse Road (13 page)

We still kept track of the other boys on the
boyfriend wall but as the weeks went by we came to
focus on Steve Weldon more and more. Not because his
behaviour was that of a murderer — he was no more
suspicious in his day to day behaviour than anyone
else — but because we quickly became fascinated
by him. Steve turned out to be living a life that was
almost totally different from our own.

Towards the end of March and the beginning of
April we took close to sixty photographs of Steve
Weldon. Most of them are mundane. He is shown
standing out the back of his house, under the eaves,
smoking a cigarette (he had a pack-a-day habit); eating
an ice cream; sitting on the seesaw in the deserted
playground; peeing against a lupin in the dunes
during one of his rambling walks. We came to realise
that his days were largely empty spaces waiting to
be filled. Life without school was a series of linked
meanderings and minor chores.

There were only two things that seemed to
animate Steve. The first was his motorbike. He rode
an old Triumph, which he maintained himself. The
Weldons' garage door was almost always open, the
floor littered with the greasy entrails of Steve's bike.
We came to suspect that he took his bike apart even
when it was running smoothly, just to fill his long,
unfocused days. Most evenings when the bike wasn't
in pieces he would take it out for a run. He would
roar out of the gate and the sound would recede until
it mixed with the sound of the waves. We were never
around late enough to see him return.

Surprisingly, the other thing Steve enjoyed doing
was cooking. His father had died of a heart attack at
the age of forty-two (around the age we are now). His
mother was a pug-faced woman who seemed to have
been constructed out of heavy lumps of white dough.
She worked long hours as a cleaner but when she
came home each night Steve would have a meal on the
table. And not just the meat and three veg that was the
meal-du-jour everyday down the Spit. Steve Weldon
regularly served his mother up fettuccine, lasagne,
crêpes Suzette and chicken breast stuffed with apricot.
He made her exotic dishes in the days when most men
couldn't boil an egg, and when even our own mothers
thought chow mein was a town in China.

'Sure, I knew you guys were watching me but I
didn't care.' Our interview with Steve was held in
April 1989, after he returned from a stint working in
London. We asked him where he used to go on his
bike in the evenings. 'I liked to get out on the open
road. Sometimes I'd drive south to Ashburton or go
inland to Hanmer. Once, I remember, I drove all the
way to Nelson and then just turned around in front
of the cathedral and came back in the dark. It was
something to do.'

We were watching the Weldon house on the
evening Carolyn Asher first rode up on her bicycle.
She laid the bike against the scrappy macrocarpa
hedge and walked up the drive as though she'd
visited there every day of her life. 'I was in the garage
and she just walked right up to me and asked to go
for a ride. Yeah, I knew who she was. I knew what had
happened to her sister.'

We wondered if he knew more than that, if he
had heard the stories about Carolyn. But we were
willing to give Steve the benefit of the doubt. We
imagined her clinging to him, her long, bony body
pressing into his back, looking ahead over his
shoulder, leaning into the corners with the night
air buffeting her face. Where did they go? What did
they do when they got there? Even years later, Steve
Weldon wouldn't tell us. All he would say was that
they talked a lot and that it was private.

Carolyn Asher started to appear at the Weldons'
house almost daily, always when Mrs Weldon was at
her cleaning job and Carolyn herself should have been
at school. She had been missing a lot of school that
year, something that neither the system nor her family
appeared to be doing anything about (and okay, we
were missing some ourselves). Steve told us that they
were 'friends, during a difficult phase in both our
lives'.

One of the most interesting things Steve would tell
us was that he had once caught Carolyn in his room
going through his stuff. He asked her what she was
looking for, but she wouldn't say. Of course, by the
time we interviewed Steve we knew. Even when she
first turned up at his house we were beginning to
get an idea. Carolyn was looking for clues. She was
searching for that letter or the stolen ring or a lock of
snatched hair. Anything that would link Steve to her
dead sister.

It was clear that Carolyn Asher had her own list
that she was working her way down. Her list and ours
overlapped in places. We envied her direct access, the
laissez-faire way she strolled into guys' lives and took
what information she wanted. In contrast, we were
forced to hover on the peripheries with our binoculars
and camera, speculating and drawing inferences,
snapping blurry photographs and sorting through
rubbish bins by the light of torches.

But Carolyn Asher's investigation was taking its
toll on her. By the beginning of April she was looking
permanently tired, the skin on her forehead had
become almost transparent and the thin blue veins
beneath were clearly visible. We wondered if she was
eating. The hours she was keeping seemed to suggest
she wasn't sleeping that much. She had begun to move
with a leaden grace to her own slow music. By the
time she had worked her way down her list to Steve
Weldon, Carolyn no longer had the intensity we had
seen at Lucy's funeral. She had become dreamy and
detached.

'Caro was kinda screwed up,' Steve commented,
'but I really fell for her, you know.' That was the end
of the interview 'Good luck. I hope you find what
you're looking for.'

By the beginning of May Carolyn no longer came
to visit Steve. We understood her pattern by then. Just
like us, Carolyn Asher had crossed Steve Weldon off
her list of suspects. Steve tried to see her again but she
made it clear it was over.

By May we had almost a dozen recorded sightings of
Mr Asher at night down on the beach or in the dunes.
The hammering and sawing went on night after night
in his garage so apparently he too wasn't bothering
with sleep any more. Sometimes he would appear in
car headlights as he walked down the middle of the
road, like an animal seen on night safari, face turned
towards the approaching car, eyes bright, before
moving away into the darkness. If he was heading
towards the beach he was almost always carrying
a large bundle. We still had no idea where the baby
fitted in to the whole jigsaw.

Mrs Asher was still working in the dairy. By then it
was habitual for people to avoid the place and it was
a matter of public speculation how long the Ashers
would be able to keep it open. Mrs Asher's thinness
had moved beyond surprising. She now shocked
everyone who saw her, although that wasn't many
people in those days because of the lack of customers
and because as far as anyone knew she never ventured
beyond the front door. We were now only sporadic
customers ourselves: there were whole weeks when
we couldn't bring ourselves to go inside. Mrs Asher
now seemed to haunt the place. Occasionally Tug
would see her pass, floating like an apparition, in
front of the dark windows. We wondered if it were
possible for a person to grow so thin that they simply
disappeared, blown away perhaps on the easterly.

Mr Asher no longer bothered with maintenance.
Tiles began to slip from the roof, catching in the
guttering before eventually falling into the long
weeds at the side of the house. The back lawn was
never mown. The windows were dim with blown
sea salt and sand, so they let in even less light. The
paint on the outside walls blistered and popped in the
corrosive air.

All things considered, the Ashers were not coping
well.

We had also stopped going to Tug's room much. Apart
from the slow fall into disrepair there was nothing
new to see at the Ashers', and what we could see was
depressing. However, we sometimes still gathered in
the Turners' garage after school and in the evenings to
play pool and muck around with the weights. We were
there one Sunday early in May when Pete Marshall
came bursting in. He had made another discovery
on the beach. This time he
was
out for a training run.
Pete played at centre for the third XV and had been
running on the beach two or three times a week as
well as training after school on a Wednesday.

Pete carried in what he had found, wrapped in
a towel. We all stopped what we were doing and
crowded around to see. It was a raft or, rather, a
scale model of a raft made of driftwood and lashed
together. There was a mast and intricate rigging made
out of string and a canvas sail that at some point had
been ripped almost free. The thing that we all noticed
was that the raft was very well made. It hadn't been
thrown together but rather crafted by someone who
had chosen the wood carefully and then assembled
it with care. The driftwood was smooth and it had
been evened off with a saw at each end so that the raft
was rectangular. The pieces were lashed together with
intricate knots. The mast was straight and the rigging
quite complex. There was even a deep centreplate that
poked down through a slot in the middle: it would
make the raft more stable in the water and help it
travel in a straight line.

Sitting on the raft was a doll. It had been tied to
the mast with wire that was wrapped around its body,
under the arms. It was one of those dolls that guys
with sisters knew well; the type with a plastic head
and a soft, floppy body. Its eyes closed when you laid
it back and opened when it sat up. There were clothes
you could get to dress them but this doll had nothing
on. It was just the blue cloth body and the hard head
with the long blonde hair matted together.

'I saw it being rolled over in the surf,' said Pete.

This explained Mrs Murray's sighting of Mr Asher
with a baby. Recalling the heap of dolls Roy Moynahan
had seen in Lucy's bedroom, we wondered how many
of these her father had launched out into the waves.
We speculated that Mr Asher waited for a calm night
with an offshore breeze so that the sail would carry
his rafts beyond the waves. The current in the channel
when the water was flowing out of the estuary would
help push them into the ocean. Even so we knew
enough to doubt that any of them had made it far.
Most of them had probably only travelled out a few
kilometres before being pushed back to shore by the
current or when the wind inevitably changed back to
the east. They would mostly have ended up like this
one, swamped on the beach and pounded by the surf,
or broken against the rocks somewhere down south.

Even so, over the years it has always been tempting
to imagine one of Mr Asher's rafts beating the odds.
We like to think of one of Lucy's dolls, her favourite
perhaps from a happy time in her childhood, surviving
all the perils: the big waves; the rockbound currents;
the bow waves of passing tankers. It is pleasing
to imagine one of them riding the ocean for weeks,
months, even years, on the small but sturdy vessel
that Mr Asher had lovingly made in his garage.

'But what's the point?' asked Grant Webb on the
day Pete found the raft. He turned it over in his hands
and inspected the underside. 'Why does he make
these things?'

Nobody bothered trying to explain it to him. If
you didn't get it when you saw it, you probably never
would.

We weren't treating Mr Asher as a suspect any more
so it was only luck that we discovered where he
went every day. Mrs Murray took Mark shopping
one Saturday morning. She had asked her son along
to help carry the bags, which was just a red herring.
Really it was another of those attempts by our mothers
to spend time with us. There was a phase when they
all asked us to help them with jobs around the house,
or to go with them in the car somewhere. Anything
so they'd be alone with us. 'How are things going?'
they would ask, when the time seemed right. They
were desperate for some of the old intimacy. They
must have remembered clearly the days when they
had been our whole world and we had talked to them
about every scratch and every shiny stone. Even at
the age of eleven most of us were still being read to
and giving our mums a goodnight kiss. Just a few
years later our mothers were hanging out for a bad
knock-knock joke. Of course we had nothing to say
to them in those days. We were as closed as prodded
shellfish.

The supermarket in New Brighton where Mark's
mother took him was next door to the Empire Hotel.
The Empire was, and still is, one of those massive,
boxy buildings on two levels. It had a pub downstairs
with a restaurant, and cheap rooms upstairs. It was
at the public bar of the Empire that our fathers drank
after work on a Friday. And it was from there that they
returned home for a late dinner, smelling of beer and
slapping our irritated mothers on the backside, right
in front of us.

As he was loading his mother's shopping into the
boot of their car Mark caught sight of Mr Asher's ute.
It was parked over in the car park of the Empire, but
near the back next to the fence where other cars would
normally stop you seeing it from the road. But from
the supermarket car park Mark had a clear view: it
was quite early in the morning (Mark's mum liked to
beat the crowds) and Mr Asher's was one of the only
vehicles. Seeing the ute there got him to thinking.

On Monday morning Mark and Jase Harbidge
set off for school as usual but soon veered off and
pedalled north on their bikes the half-hour it took
them to get to the Empire. Jase reported that they
waited, and sure enough Mr Asher pulled into the car
park at nine thirty. He parked his ute in exactly the
same space where Mark had seen it on the Saturday.
They watched as Mr Asher sat behind the wheel
staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. He just
sat in the car park waiting until the Empire's manager
unlocked the door. Then he got out and walked
straight in.