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.She was lying perfectly still, staring at the ceiling and with her arms folded across her chest and her toes pointed towards the ceiling.She spoke without looking at him.'So you found what you're looking for, or what?'Carolyn Asher was wearing a summer dress that was too big for her.She rose up from the bed and calmly crossed to where Roy was standing.He stood paralysed, wondering how he could explain his invasion to Mrs Asher and his mother.Then, in the semi-darkness of Lucy's room, Carolyn kissed him full on the mouth.As far as we were aware Roy had never been kissed by a girl, outside of a game of spin-the-bottle at Mark Murray's twelfth birthday party.But if Carolyn Asher was playing a game, she was playing to win.She kissed Roy with an intensity he had only imagined before, mashing her mouth against his.He could feel her teeth push against his lips and then she was forcing her tongue inside his mouth.It was wet and, he told us, surprisingly powerful.Roy was tall and Carolyn was a year younger but even so she was the same height as him.Roy remembered that she held her body away from his, balancing on the balls of her feet like a ballet dancer.The only thing she touched him with was her mouth.He didn't know how long she kissed him like that.Suddenly she broke off and stood back, calmly appraising his face.Roy said that her look was definitely questioning, like an artist standing back from an almost-finished painting.Apparently Carolyn Asher was happy with what she saw.He was just about to speak when she slipped past him.She stood in the doorway.'You shouldn't be in here.' And then she ducked under the police tape and was gone.Roy stood in the semi-darkness.How confused he must have been.The toothpaste and saliva taste of Carolyn's kiss would still have been on his bruised lips.Lucy's dolls must have seemed to stare at him accusingly.He told us that when he finally left the room there was no sign of Carolyn in the hallway.Disoriented, Roy was temporarily baffled by all the doorways but he got his bearings and found his way back to the kitchen.As he entered the room, for one moment, he imagined that his mother and sister and Mrs Asher were drowning in a sea of flowers, and that only their heads were still visible above the perfumed waves.During the sweltering week between Christmas and New Year, and then on through the rest of that summer, people took to leaving objects near where Lucy's body had been found.At first they simply placed their offerings on the sand but the tide and the easterly soon carried them away and so the warning sign became a natural shrine.It was above the high-tide mark and protected from the wind by a dip in the dunes.We never saw anyone coming or going.Bunches of daffodils and lilies seemed miraculously to spring out of the dry sand at the base of the pole before wilting away in an afternoon.Notes and letters, weighted down with hand-painted rocks, would appear overnight.A small brown teddy bear, and later a pink rabbit, lived there for most of January and half of February before moving on.On New Year's Eve a black-and-white photograph was carefully tied to the pole with a yellow ribbon.It was a picture we had not seen before.Lucy, sitting on a couch, wearing a short summer dress that showed a lot of her legs.She was relaxed and smiling, looking out boldly at the photographer over the top of heart-rimmed sunglasses.To be honest the photo made us anxious.Lucy looked older than we recalled her, more confident and womanly than our memories of her allowed.We were suspicious and jealous of whoever had taken the picture.Al Penny wondered aloud how long would be a decent interval before we could shift it to our files (Exhibit 14).But people mostly left poems.It seemed to us that everyone who had ever known Lucy became a poet during that summer.They attached poems to the sign with drawing pins and twine but they always blew free.It was not uncommon to find a poem tumbling along the road in the wind or crucified in the branches of a lupin.White poems flew like seagulls against the blue summer sky.They were to be found tossing in the wavefoam or bobbing like small white cradles in the reeds at the edge of the estuary.More often than not the words had sunfaded into nothing or slipped away into the water like fry, but sometimes they could be read.The consensus among us was that the poems were written by girls.The 'i's were dotted with broken hearts.'Lucy' rhymed with 'mercy'.Those legible poems we retrieved we felt obliged to take back to the sign.We pinned them back up or weighed them down with rocks so that they would not blow away again too soon.A few of the better ones we took and added to our files (Exhibit 27 A–F).That first New Year's Eve after Lucy was murdered stays with us like a strong aftertaste.Our mood was sombre.Lucy had been dead less than two weeks.We had no desire to mix with the large crowd that gathered every year in the centre of the city to count down to midnight.Although we liked the idea of being kissed by strange women, we doubted we would be the ones bestowed with such random feminine favours.Instead we sought out our own company down on the beach.Grant Webb supplied the alcohol.It was his father's homemade beer, fermented in the Webbs' garden shed, stacked in rows of recycled brown bottles on shelves from floor to ceiling.As well as lager and stout, Mr Webb made up batches of ginger beer.It was not unusual for the people living in the houses down the reserve end of Rocking Horse Road to hear a dull explosion and know that Grant's dad had got the yeast levels too high in his latest batch.That evening Grant carried the beer down to the beach in a wooden crate.The sides of the bottles clinked together.He placed the crate in the surf to keep it cool until after dark.We assumed that Mr Webb was not aware that a dozen of his bottles were missing.We had several hours before one year ticked over into the next and we found ourselves bending to pick up dry driftwood as if a fire had been planned, when in fact nothing had been discussed.We piled the wood at a spot about quarter of the way down the beach.The tide was still going out and would not bother us.The easterly had dropped away as it sometimes did in the evening and the heat of the day had rolled back in over the Spit.Luckily there was still water in the estuary and so the smell of the sea lettuce was not bad.Small bits of driftwood were easy to find where they lay along the high-tide mark and our pile soon grew until it was waist high.Jim Turner and Jase Harbidge tried to wrestle a sun-bleached log from the sand halfway up the first dune, but it was larger than they had thought and buried deep.We all joined in, digging with our hands, exposing more of the dry wood until it came free.It was dragged over to the pile and dumped on.More sticks were found and several more logs.The heap of driftwood grew and became a pyre that eventually rose above even Jim Turner's head.When it was almost dark Roy Moynahan used his cigarette lighter on a small pyramid of kindling at the base, into which someone had stuffed some old newspaper [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]